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

But surely beyond this? I do resist ethics because I think they are a palliative and very much beside the point, so tangled in values and ideologies and good intentions. Maybe resistance is ethics. Others suggest that analysis is already ethics or that critique without ethics is meaningless. My question (instead of resistance) is why this leap to the "ethical." I think such a leap made in the name of ethics often forecloses all sorts of relations, anomalies, infelicities, interesting and operative details. Ethics itself can and probably should be examined, not as a naturally occurring pious category, but as a kind of evasion that thinks it is on point. Maybe it is, but its method is different, it presumes pre-existing values of some sort. This is not an either/or analysis/ethics, but a sense that ethics without deep suspicion is as empty as analysis without paranoia. Of course maybe ethics is a species of deep suspicion, but isn't it some kind of ethics that damns Watson? Why damn? Why not see him for the theme park he has become?

Cheers from the Rabelaisian
On Oct 18, 2007, at 10:27 PM, dean wilson wrote:

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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