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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