Re: [-empyre-] Re: Poetics of DNA II

["dean wilson" <deanwilson9@gmail.com>]

Cultural Object or Displaced Site, whatever you want to call it is
fine with me. The question I'm asking is Why Poetics? and not
Representation? The book seems to make big leaps across rhetorical
channels and prove misinterpretations of Code, the non-status of
ethics, the fakery of Neoplatonism. That's interesting, but is it
Poetics?

My guess is that the book equates conventional usage with a highly
generalized process of naming something and rejects the name, the
process and the illusory cultural object because it is a useful form
of resistance for a larger thematic and rhetorical project. But I
don't see how this would be a Poetics and would really like to better
understand the title of this book.

There was, come to think of it, a band in New York named DNA, led by
Arto Lindsey, in the early 1980s. Is this a tribute to Arto? Dean



On 10/17/07, Judith Roof <roof12@comcast.net> wrote:
> Actually that was the original title--how did you know?
>
> But more to the point.  Two things:
>
> First, DNA as it exists as a cultural object, is a code only in so
> far as it operates as a displaced site for other signifiers.
> Whatever the signifier DNA refers to, it is not whatever processes
> scramble on the level of the molecular.  So any time one wants to dub
> DNA a code, no matter how that signifier is defined, it still drags
> in all the other baggage. In so far as any signifier would do this,
> the impasse is how to use language, since the ideology-free is, I
> would submit, impossible.  But so what?
>
> Second, I am intrigued by the shift (which occurs systematically in
> many academic sites) from discussions of representation as if that
> practice is somehow not material, immaterial, idealistic, or some
> other frou frou thing into the ballsy, gutsy environment of "Ethics,"
> an equally ideological realm whose delusory occupation at the top of
> the intellectual food chain (at least in current practice) represents
> in some ways the driving need to make such conversations useful in an
> ideology that understands material as those things which may have
> material effects on the world.  Are we really talking about ethics?
> because if we were, the first question would be the should's and
> should nots of representing at all, which if answered in the negative
> would forestall the rest of ethical conversations before they
> started.  My question is what the connection is between
> representation which must be misunderstood, discarded, and
> minimalized on a regular basis and the drive towards making policy,
> considering policy, deciding what is right and wrong.  It is as if
> this ethical imperative wants to secure the slippery unstableness of
> the still-platonic fakery of the word through some gesture of
> philosophy.
>
> Ah--and the cover whose discourse, is, as is always the case with
> publishers--marketing, marketing, marketing.  I wanted my name to go
> on top of the monkey.
>
> Judith
> On Oct 17, 2007, at 9:14 AM, dean wilson wrote:
>
> > Observing this thread and hoping it doesn't go away soon I can really
> > appreciate the many directions Judith's ideas have taken the posts.
> > Sadly, I won't be able to get her book for a while since I'm in
> > Vietnam. Oh, I'm sorry, that would be an obsolete empirical
> > hypothesis, forgive me. In terms of the discussion process and the
> > topic at hand, however, Eugene is clearly the heaviest of the hitters
> > for my dosh, and I think that's because he seems ironically less
> > inclined to the resistance literature mode, which is not an easy thing
> > to do with this topic, it's so rife with quandaries. Did you notice
> > how I just avoided some untenable euphemisms? With all the talk of
> > Aristotle and the like, though, why not take up the cover of Judith's
> > book on its face value. If the straw men were put to rest for a while
> > and the unmusical manipulative functions of acronym usage were the
> > subject of discussion, I would say that the book and the analysis of
> > the book, along with reflections on the sorry lot of beings subjected
> > to extravagant alterations of life on earth without their informed
> > consent fall under the category of Rhetoric. But who am I to suppose
> > that a difference between the poetic arts and the persuasive arts
> > might be interesting when thinking about scientific instruments? What
> > is a particle accelerator if not a song and dance? I would be most
> > grateful for a brief explanation of this word choice. Since along with
> > empiricism, humanism, habeas corpus, hypothesis, ideology, and pretty
> > much the kitchen sink, homonyms and synonyms are also toast, why not
> > just call the book "The toe cheese of everything you cherished about
> > guns?" I get the feeling that what is being resisted is a
> > consciousness that names things, but when it tries to name itself it
> > devolves into a kind of tabula rasa or what Eugene might call
> > noumenon. Dean
> >
> >
> > On 10/10/07, Eugene Thacker <eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> >> Well, what I had in mind w/ the idealism-empiricism reference was
> >> the way that
> >> the concept of a genetic code seems to suture together two
> >> different, though not
> >> incommensurate, ideas:
> >>
> >> - On the one hand, the discourse of information seems to imply
> >> immaterial form.
> >> I think this is demonstrable historically (e.g. Crick et al.'s
> >> appropriation of
> >> 'information' from Shannon's information theory definition), but I
> >> think it
> >> still, even today, pervades colloquial language about code.
> >> - On the other hand, what is being talked about is not just
> >> abstract code, but
> >> the notion of a biological-material entity *as a code in itself*.
> >> Yes, there are
> >> instances in which DNA is 'represented' as code (for instance, the
> >> genome as a
> >> string of bits in a database), but this itself is made possible by
> >> what I would
> >> argue is actually a non-representational concept of a genetic
> >> code. Or, at
> >> least, there's a great deal of fuzziness in the 1950s/60s when
> >> 'the coding
> >> problem' was being sorted out. Protein codes are a good example,
> >> since it is
> >> their hypercomplex surface structure that enables them to 'stick.'
> >>
> >> So in a certain sense - and I think this is a bit reductive, but
> >> oh well... -
> >> the concept of a genetic code raises the old split between form
> >> and matter. If
> >> DNA is the wet, gooey, 'stuff of life' then how can it be a dry,
> >> abstract,
> >> immaterial number? On the one hand there is the code as a string
> >> of units (A, T,
> >> C, G...), but the sequence and seriality of this code is indelibly
> >> linked to
> >> material and physical processes in the cell (replication of DNA,
> >> transcription/
> >> translation of RNA, cellular metabolism). Jacob points this out in
> >> 'The Logic of
> >> Life.' DNA is quite Aristotelian. What the life principle or
> >> 'psukhe' as form is
> >> for Aristotle, DNA as in-form-ation is for molecular biology. The
> >> hylomorphism
> >> of the genetic code is less about what the code 'says' than what
> >> it does.
> >>
> >> Now, there are, of course, plenty of counter-discourses which
> >> resist the notion
> >> of information-as-immaterial (e.g. media ecology, phenomenology-
> >> based media
> >> studies, 'the materiality of the medium'). But when we talk about
> >> the genetic
> >> code, to me the specificity of this is different from generally
> >> talking about
> >> 'bodies in code' or any cyber-stuff... If one wanted to think
> >> about an
> >> informatic materialism, or a physical code, this seems like an
> >> interesting area
> >> in which to look. A researcher can look up a particular DNA
> >> sequence via an
> >> online database. Using an oligonucleotide synthesizer, that person
> >> can
> >> materialize that sequence in a test tube. That same sequence can
> >> then be
> >> inserted into a bacterium (a plasmid  'library') for further
> >> research.
> >> Hypothetically the reverse direction is possible too (e.g. the
> >> process of
> >> extracting code). So there's the 'code' as a string of bits that
> >> appears to
> >> exist across material substrates (database, test tube, organism).
> >> But, of
> >> course, it isn't the same in each instance, for each of the media
> >> - or biomedia
> >> - bring with them different sets of constraints (e.g. data mining
> >> in the
> >> database, PCR for the test tube DNA, genetic recombination or
> >> mutation in the
> >> bacterium). It's this 'same/not-same' ambiguity that's interesting
> >> to me, and I
> >> think it's also related, even if distantly, to the Aristotelian
> >> problem of form/
> >> matter. And it gets even more complicated with emerging fields
> >> like DNA
> >> computing....
> >>
> >> -Eugene
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Quoting "sdv@krokodile.co.uk" <sdv@krokodile.co.uk>:
> >>
> >>  eugene,
> >>
> >>  Could you explain why the concept of DNA-as-code forecloses
> >> idealism or
> >>  empiricism ? It  may be that you are assuming that the following
> >>  sentences referring to the noetic and the noumenal are precisely
> >> why you
> >>  believe this... but still I would like to be sure that these
> >> comments
> >>  preceded as they are by DNA-as-code threatening to liquidate the
> >> thing
> >>  itself, are more explainable.
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>> One option is to think about what the overall representational
> >>> notion of
> >>  DNA-as-
> >>> code doesn't allow; what does it foreclose to thought? Well, it
> >>> certainly
> >>  seems
> >>> to foreclose either straight-up idealism or empiricism. These
> >>> options seem
> >>> absurd, ridiculous. And maybe, for this reason, interesting. DNA-
> >>> as-code is
> >>> purely noetic (and thus, in a way, equal to thought) or DNA-as-
> >>> code is
> >>  purely
> >>> material (and thus part of a noumenal, inaccessible world "out
> >>> there")...
> >>>
> >>> -Eugene
> >>>
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