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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