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

["dean wilson" <deanwilson9@gmail.com>]

Judith wrote in a previous post:

"... maybe all critique is ethics, but it is precisely this
collapse that I resist at least by pointing it out."

We could start with that and then add to it, perhaps. Dean


On 10/19/07, Judith Roof <roof12@comcast.net> wrote:
> 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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