Re: [-empyre-] a book, dna and code: in the penal colony


On Oct 18, 2007, at 9:03 AM, Jasper Bernes wrote:

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.

Hi Jasper, can you please post the url for the poem excerpt?

Also, I think Badiou's remarks on genetics and ethics are appropriate here:

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. . .

Yet 'genetics' is not profoundly apolitical the moment it is under discussion, in the polis. Foucault speaks of the public space as a place created/actuated by the political discussion, the give and take. (not predicated by form). As here in -empyre-. This is the polis. I can't see how a purported economic appropriation of technics overwhelms what is most subjective and voluntary in politics (even if the polis now or soon involves many alternatives of the so called human).

Kafka writes the deadly disciplinary inscription on the body of the prisoner in the penal colony.

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm

If I know 'how' to 'engineer' another kind of human, some other superceding, sublating whatever 'us' is--- does that make 'me' or 'we scientists' the executioners/ executors of code/inscription upon either ourselves or others? Does the prisoner 'learn' his lesson through his death? Do I ? When many read "In the Penal Colony" over time we constitute a 'polis' outside regimes of control, or 'problems that allow for solutions". Aren't all of us prisoners, all of us executioners? We who are or will be android may reread and respeak Kafka. If our polis is the penal colony, we are not outside 'no project' -- our literature (aka this hypertext) itself assures that there is something we are able to do. From the condition of our relating to one another, even as perpetual murderers of ourselves and others! How can profit tell us new 'wo/men' what to do?


Jasper, Judith, Eddie,  can you help me out here?

Christina





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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