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

["Jasper Bernes" <bernes@berkeley.edu>]

Steve, Judith et al,

As I see it, the very isolation of "genes" and "genomes," and the tendencies 
to fetishize these as miraculous actors, so well demonstrated by Judith's 
book, is consonant with the logic of the commodity that undergirds 
capitalism. I think that, for instance, people like Lukacs are pretty 
convincing about the ways in which some of the basic philosophical positions 
of scientists are, actually, class positions--bourgeois, reified, passive, 
brimming with antinomies. That's not to say that science isn't productive of 
knowledge or technics, or can't work against capitalism (which capitalism 
itself always does). It's only that science presupposes and depends upon an 
enormous division of labor, one that often gets projected onto its material.

I'd like to hear more about this ontological equivalence between genes. I 
don't at all understand it.  But I'd like to! There's a rather frightening 
version of genetically-engineered ontological equality at the end of 
Houllebecq's The Elementary Particles. It would be interesting to 
distinguish the neo-fascist brand from the communist one. Do you know the 
book?

Jasper









----- Original Message ----- 
From: <sdv@krokodile.co.uk>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 5:51 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] a book, dna and code


> Jasper/Judith/all
>
> Yes it is. nicely put.
>
> both: "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." and the larger Badiou quote is 
> exceptionally interesting  because it displays some of the profound 
> limitations in Badiou's work. The use of the word 'apolitical' implies a 
> concept of the political which is to limited. And yet the centrality of 
> emancipation precisely mirrors my/our ontological work, philosophy is 
> always ontological and as such precedes ethics and cultural work. One of 
> my reasons for my interest in this specific topic is the convergance 
> between the ontological work focused on difference, equivalence, and 
> equality. One of the events that began the current trajectory was a 
> meeting with a particularly anti-humanist, communist, geneticist from 
> India who made the rather important proposition that there is an absolute 
> equality, an equivalence between all genes, genes as singularities.
>
> It's this which requires that we are cautious in the adoption of 
> meaningful phrases like 'late capitalism' which in its reference to 
> Mandel's rather lovely book, runs into my scientist who demands that we 
> think rather differently and recognize that science is not capital.
>
>
> best
> steve
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