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

[Nicholas Ruiz III <editor@intertheory.org>]

Genetic research is remarkable, hence the
sustainability of discussion revolving around a
concept such as DNA poetics...but I remain unconvinced
that it is a commodity 'fetish' of some sort, a modern
labor by-product or effect of some kind, a Marxist
problematic...how so?

A discovery has been made regarding life's
reproducibility.  The fact that parties seek to
capitalize upon (make useful) such a discovery for the
purpose of life's 'extension', medical treatment,
agricultural technology and so on, only continues the
human conditional trend of the ancients: religion,
astrology, alchemy, animism, shamanism, sacrifice,
etc...old tools of the same trade, no?  

The patenting of the Code, its privatization, seems to
cross a species sovereignty of some kind,
bioethically...but if one is unwilling to give the
Code its liberal universal due, how can one argue for
a sovereignty of the Code?



Nick


--- Jasper Bernes <bernes@berkeley.edu> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org