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

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

If Watson were sitting in front of me right now, I might not ask him
"what is it that determines the banality of your banality or the
terribleness of your science?" Oh dear, how delusional and ethical of
me to presume that bodies exist, that they age and have orafices. Down
with the tyranny of lips and tongues, to hell with sensory opiates.
Long live climate control and abstraction.

The BBC reports that in the Independent on Friday, Watson tried to
clarify his position.

"We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different
environments in the world have selected over time the genes which
determine our capacity to do different things," he is quoted as
saying. "The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that
equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity.

"It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough.
This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism.
This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about
seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great
musicians and others great engineers."

Down with the tyranny of weather and photosynthesis. Long live
cerebral heterodoxy. Always in all ontologies, long live the
resistance.

>From Wikipedia:

"Bourdieu's sociological work was dominated by an analysis of the
mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. In opposition to
Marxist analyses, Bourdieu criticized the primacy given to the
economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to
actively impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic
systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of social
structures of domination. What Bourdieu called symbolic violence (the
capacity to ensure that the arbitrariness of the social order is
ignored—-or misrecognized as natural—-and thus to ensure the
legitimacy of social structures) plays an essential part in his
sociological analysis."

Down with good taste. Long live open infected wounds. Long live the resistance.

Dean





On 10/19/07, Judith Roof <roof12@comcast.net> wrote:
> Steve,
>
> Actually, I've always wondered why the ethical turn is so central (if
> it is and which postmodernity?).  What is it that pushes this ethical
> turn anyway?  The ethical turn needs to be examined--beyond Badiou
> who is the ethical turn par excellence.  And conceptions of
> resistance (which are always appended to the thing which is resisted)
> cannot envision an apposition to ethics where ethics is not relevant
> or itself seen as a disingenuous practice linked to oedipalism.  Who,
> after all, gets to enjoy ethics?  Or wield it?  Is that an ethical
> question?
>
> As for Watson, what is it that determines the banality of his
> banality or the terribleness of his science?  In what way are these
> declarations not ethical?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Judith
>
>
> On Oct 19, 2007, at 9:26 AM, sdv@krokodile.co.uk wrote:
>
> > Judith,
> >
> > I think you are being disengenuous here, you know very well that
> > the ethical turn is a central aspect of post-modernity. Ethics
> > became deeply problematic because within the postmodern it clearly
> > substituted (ethics) for politics.  Badiou is exceptionally good on
> > critiquing this substitution of ethics and relations for politics,
> > for example: "The objective foundation of contemporary ethics is
> > culturalism, in truth a tourists fascination for the diversity of
> > morals, customs and beliefs..." Resistance in other words is not
> > ethics, indeed quite the opposite for resistance requires more
> > universals which ethics always denies...
> >
> > I raise this because ethics does not condemn Watson. What condemns
> > Watson is not the banal stupidity of his racism. but the terrible
> > science he condones(not a psuedo-science) which derives from the
> > strange idea that one human may have greater value than another
> > human.  These two things are not ethical issues but are scientific
> > and ontological.
> >
> > ah the sufferings of a bourgoius transcendentalist like Watson !
> >
> > best
> > steve
> >
> > Judith Roof wrote:
> >
> >> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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