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



Hi. I joined the list just after the discussion about the book began. Could
someone tell me the title of the book so I can read it?

Thanks,
Peter.


On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:29:37 -0400 empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote:
> it is a poetics in so far as it shows the use of metaphor and  
> narrative both as compensatory and strategic.  And, believe it or	
> not,	the word "representation" has absolutely no currency and in	
> fact is widely misunderstood and often rejected as useless.	 And	
> finally, presses are notorious about catchy titles.  I have had to	
> change every book title I have ever proposed.  The original title for  
> this book was "Encoding the Code,."  So yes, in a way, this book	
> enacts the same careless disregard for meaning as everything else,	
> though part of its point is that representation is usually a shot in	
> the dark anyway which usually doesn't make any difference, but which	
> does reflect anxieties, and compensates and does some other cultural	
> work that has little to do with the science except in so far as	
> scientists start looking for "gay" genes, for example, which is	
> incredibly silly, since in the first place, they are not defining	
> that phenomenon before they start and it is complex and different	
> from individual to individual and apparently lesbians don't count at	
> all, etc.  Ruth Hubbard poo-poo'ed that long ago and no one	
> listened.  Why? Because the social anxiety around gayness (which	
> isn't about gayness at all or even DNA or genes) defines the silly	
> direction of this "research", not any scientific logic that would	
> suggest that finding genes for complex behaviors is imperative.
> 
> Finally, it is probably better not to guess about a book and its	
> method until you read it. It doesn't equate conventional usage with	
> naming at all.  Instead it shows the ways any metaphor imports ways	
> of thinking linked to more complex processes.  How, for example,	
> using the figure of the homunculous imports entire narratives of	
> willful agency into genetic "behavior" as an alternative account for	
> how genes work.   This is a poetics in the large sense that it	
> analyzes the deployment of such figures as persistent mythologies in	
> the Barthesian sense of the word..
> 
> But, gee, read the book, then worry about poetics.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Judith
> On Oct 17, 2007, at 9:51 PM, dean wilson wrote:
> 
> > 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
> >>>>>
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>> empyre forum
> >>>>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >>>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>	_______________________________________________
> >>>>	empyre forum
> >>>>	empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >>>>	http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> empyre forum
> >>>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >>>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> empyre forum
> >>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> empyre forum
> >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 



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