Re: [-empyre-] a book, dna and code

"Jasper Bernes" <bernes@berkeley.edu> · Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:03:00 -0700

Hello all. I joined this list about a week ago, as I was very fortuitously 
told about it by a friend. I'm currently working on a paper on the ideology 
of genomics and Deleuze's biophilosophy as they are thought through in a 
long poem I wrote, Desequencer", which uses the nucleotide sequence of DNA 
as its structuring principle. There's an excerpt from the poem in the 
current issue of Seneca Review, but if someone wants to read it, I can 
backchannel a pdf.
The falseness of scriptural and informatic metaphors is a big part of what 
I've been pondering and working through, so everything here is very helpful, 
as I'm going to present it at the Society for Literature Science and the 
Arts at the beginning of November and I've been reading Judith's and 
Eugene's stimulating books.
Perhaps "ethics" is only truly useful here in its Spinozan sense, as 
ethology or ethos, not as the legislation or adjudication of action. Much of 
the talk here has concerned the way that the structuralist or scriptural 
metaphors that scientists and their epigones use distorts the actual working 
of the genome and the surrounding cell body. No doubt this is true, and no 
doubt systems theory provides a better set of concepts (although prone to a 
particular kind of postmodern reification, the reification of process., aka 
Myspace). But as Judith's book indicates, and as Evelyn Fox Keller makes 
clear, these metaphors are not just representations or misrepresentations, 
not metaphors, but particular kinds of sign-behavior which make certain 
things possible. In this sense, ideology as screen or distortion is the 
wrong way to look at things here. Rather what we have is a positive, 
affirmative kind of ideology, one that catalyzes (and distorts) certain 
kinds of science and financial speculation in concord with capitalism and 
its will to value extraction. Watson's idiotic and disgusting remarks are a 
perfect example.
For me (and perhaps this is what Judith was getting at in her prefatory 
remarks) genomics represents a general tendency in late capitalism for the 
sphere of representation/culture to collapse into and become co-extensive 
with the social or economic. Ideology finds in genetic modification and 
engineering a way to reify, fix and capitalize its own guiding presumptions, 
its need for division of labor, the provisioning of false comfort, the 
creation of pseudo-needs, etc. In this sense, like other developments, it 
provides a real challenge to ideology critique. Judith's book, it seems, 
critiques not only representation but the linguistic optic in general. But 
aside from the appeal to systems theory--dealt with elsewhere--this doesn't 
actually provide us with much in the way of a positive critical cartography. 
If we're left with a kind of negative ethics--um, theology-- of 
representation, I think this will prove inadequate.
I think that the approach that Eugene takes, which is to apply the economic 
analysis of Marxism and Italian post-Marxism, is a good one. I'm not 
ultimately convinced, though, that the Negrian version of production is the 
right one, as it seems to conflate fixed and variable capital, and 
underestimate the ways in which genetics (as a seizure of the means of 
production by political force alone) motivates whole networks of labor 
exploitation that work in the good, old-fashioned ways of industrial 
capitalism: the production of gasoline, and labs, the feeding of pigs, 
growing of grasses, &c. To the extent that the body seems to miraculously 
produce value it's because finance capital has used the body as a hedge to 
predict the exploitation of labor in the labs of the future. But that has 
everything to do with diminishment of opportunities for the investment of 
accumulation.
Also, I think Badiou's remarks on genetics and ethics are appropriate here:
"What is intriguing is that today these categories are dead and buried, that 
no one gets involved any more with the political creation of a new man. On 
the contrary, what we hear from all sides is the demand for the conservation 
of the old humanity and of all endangered species to boot (our ancient wheat 
included)--when it is precisely today, with the advent of genetic 
engineering, that preparationns are under way for a real transformation of 
man, for the modification of the species. What makes all the difference is 
that genetics is profoundly apolitical. I think I could even say that it is 
stupid, or at least that it doesn't represent a form of thought, but, at 
best, a tehcnique. Thus, it is perfectly coherent for the condemnation of 
the Promethean political project (the new man of the emancipated society) to 
coincide with the technical (and ultimately financial) possibility of 
transforming the specificity of man. This is because such a change does not 
correspond to any kind of project. We learn of its possibility from 
newspapers; that we could have five limbs, or be immortal. And all this will 
come to pass precisely because it is not a project. It will happen in 
accordance with the automatism of things.
In short, we are living through the revenge of what is most blind and 
objective in the economic appropriation of technics over what is most 
subjective and voluntary in politics. And even, in a certain sense, the 
revenge of thhe scientific problem over the political project. 
Science--therein lies its grandeur--possesses problems; it does not have a 
project. "To change what is deepest in man" was a revolutionary project, 
doubtless a bad one; it has now becomes a scientific problem, or perhahps 
merely a technical problem, in any case a problem that allows for solutions. 
We know how, or at least we will know.
Of course, we could ask: What is to be done about the fact thhat we know 
how'? But to reply to this questionn we require a project. A political 
project: grandiose, epic, violent. Believe me, inane ethical committees will 
never provide use with an answer to the following question: 'What is to be 
done about this fact: that science knows how to make a new man?' And since 
there is no project, or as long as there is no project, everyone knows there 
is only one answer: profit will tell us what to do." (The Century, 9)
This is what you were getting at, Steve. Right? And this occurs regardless 
of whether we choose systems theory or structuralism as our optic. . .
Jasper

Jasper

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Judith Roof" <roof12@comcast.net>

To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>

Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 7:24 AM

Subject: Re: [-empyre-] a book, dna and code
Sorry, that comment was based on my earlier missive about the odd  shift 
to ethics that enacts an avoidance of analysis of the  problematic 
inter-relation of language to language.  I do not think  that the book 
necessarily endorses the truth value of any discourse,  only the 
incommensurability of particular ways of thinking (based  loosely on the 
habits of structuralism and narrative in contrast to  systemics broadly 
understood).  I see these as frameworks of  possibility, neither more true 
than the other, but each which  produces certain predictable results--and 
the one--systems--still  overwhelmed by the attractions and pay-off of the 
other- structuralism.  Structuralism, as Foucault has shown, always 
returns  to its own terms, appearing to secure in place that which is 
obviously not observable--such as, for example, binary gender as a 
biological fact (which it is not).  Systems is not a godsend, but at  this 
point in history more productive perhaps of something not  binarist--of 
course, it will have its own habits.
It may be vaguely ethical to try and show how these ways of thinking 
appended to metaphors and narrative affect the ways phenomena are 
operated and suffuse discourses on a grander scale.  Obviously in  them I 
locate certain means of reproducing fictional distinctions  that enable 
certain kinds of disadvantageous relations--patriarchy,  capitalism, 
erroneous conceptions of scientific practice that  perpetuate some sort of 
research which may or may not be wrong-headed  (such a attempts to find a 
"gay" gene or a "fat" gene, or to locate  membership in population groups 
as if that brought along an entire  ensemble of capabilities, social 
prejudices and a wardrobe).
This is the cultural work and in some ways it seems quite obvious.   But 
it is also simultaneously a caveat about the operant presence of  this 
complex set of discourses by which concepts are rendered, i.e. 
representation.  This is the humanists' gig, I think, and we haven't  done 
a very good job of insisting that thinkers pay as much attention  to how 
they say things as to what they think they are saying, or at  least the 
the mode of representation is always up for analysis and  that things 
usually mean quite a bit more and often also the opposite  of what they 
seem to say..  This ignorance is what enables some  social scientists, for 
example, to think that they can distill  statistical data from subject 
interviews--they think they mean what  they say and their subjects mean 
what they say and there is not  slippage or ambiguity and it is all 
countable according to certain  protocols they have developed.  But more 
important, somehow the  practice of ethics seems to outstrip all over 
again any consciousness  of the ambiguity of language, especially in so 
far as those who  indulge in such exercises try to be so careful about 
what they think  they mean.  Suddenly, again, they become the knowing 
subject (or the  subject-supposed-to-know) who, even if their insistence 
is that we do  not know, can, as I do now, assert such a claim by 
occupying the site  of knowledge, a Pythagorean fifth so to speak. Ethics 
tries never to  betray the unconscious that drives its will to mastery, 
which occurs  under the guise of a humble drive of correction.
In this sense maybe all critique is ethics, but it is precisely this 
collapse that I resist at least by pointing it out.  Ethics shifts  the 
site of activity from analysis to conclusion, from quest to  knowledge. 
It is a difference in attitude, where attitude refers to  an aeronautical 
concept.
And, the statement is not nonsensical given the the tricky relation 
between analysis, critique, and the ethical that has happened  repeatedly 
in this site.  But that is also the subject for a  protracted 
analysis--the next book.
Judith
On Oct 18, 2007, at 9:42 AM, sdv@krokodile.co.uk wrote:
judith,
That is a nonsensical statement. Your reluctance to comment is  becoming 
understandable, I asked because I was interested in seeing  the 
analytical tools in operation. It seems that given the  relationship to 
truth, value and fact that you maintain in the  text, all that remains is 
an appeal to ethics and judgement.
But that's not what was asked - i'm not reading a text by an  ethicist, a 
philosopher and so on, rather I'm reading a  'posthumanities' text which 
argues for 'certain kinds  of cultural  work to be done'.
best
steve

Judith Roof wrote:

Well, there goes that instant shift to ethics and judgment again.
On Oct 18, 2007, at 4:21 AM, sdv@krokodile.co.uk wrote:

How then would you understand the current condemnation of  Watson ?  On 
the one side condemned for racism and on the other  for being a  bad 
scientist.  Where is the ambiguity here ?
Curiously it reminds me of a statement of Chomsky's which argued 
that: even if it's proven that one group of people are more 
intelligent than another, this is of no more importance than if  one 
person has green eyes and another brown eyes.
steve
Judith Roof wrote:
Probably not.  In this view the real, whatever that is, is  always 
intricated with language and image.  Culture is no more  "true"  than 
empiricism, but my point is even more introductory  than  that--  
language has a sneaky way of being ambiguous no  matter what  its 
referent is.

Judith

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