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

Judith Roof <roof12@comcast.net> · Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:58:05 -0400

I am curious, Dean, about your use of the term "resistance."   
resistance in relation to what?  caveat, perhaps, especially in so  
far as pointing out any infelicity has some element of warning.   
Totalizing rhetoric.  But of course.  Such things are often a matter  
of scale.  What seems total in one scale is merely a term in  
another.  But--judging (or sensing) a book by its cover repeats the  
same dynamic--and that's the dynamic in a crude form at issue here.   
DNa is only an example, a cover doomed from the start to be a meta- 
example, the performative example-- the code failure of the code on  
so many levels.  . or as Jasper Bernes put it so elegantly--"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."  But as for the negative ethics--the book  
is  only a way in.  No single book can undertake the larger task and  
it needed to be said, not only in relation to cultural carelessness  
(or not), but to get precisely this conversation started.

On Oct 18, 2007, at 11:22 AM, dean wilson wrote:
Well now, there you have it. It's a miracle humans don't all
spontaneously combust. Judith's comment from an earlier post stays
with me:
"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."
Judith's brave explanation of Poetics (in the context the book) as
"the use of metaphor and narrative both as compensatory and
strategic," and "the large sense that ... analyzes the deployment of
such figures as persistent mythologies," will no doubt be added to
Flaubert's famous dictionary.
I find myself curiouser and intrigued. I sense functions of caveat,
resistance and totalizing rhetoric in your ideas. It still seems that
you're protesting word or acronym usage in social contexts like
genetics research that are defined according to convention and field,
capital too, something your saint Roland was fond of writing about,
although not often on same sex themes. Thanks for your bold responses.
Dean
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