RSS“random” quotation#2
Sep 12
epistemology, language and culture genes, interaction, knowledge 7 Comments
determining who is the writer of the following should be a little more difficult than for the previous excerpt… obviously the ‘random’ is in the finding, not the posting. i’d kept this quotation on file since i read the book at the end of last century.
for those who enjoy playing, the book from which it is taken was published in 1997. recognise the writer?
The odd balancing act of belief and knowledge that is diagnostic of fetishism, along with the related cascade of mimetic copying practices that accompany fascination with images, is evident in many of the biotechnological artifacts that pepper [this book] — including textbooks, advertisements, editorials, research reports, conference titles, and more. Belief in the self-sufficiency of genes as ‘master molecules’, or as the material basis of life itself, or as the code of codes, not only persists but dominates in libidinal, instrumental-experimental, explanatory, literary, economic, and political behaviour in the face of the knowledge that genes are never alone, are always part of an interactional system. That system at a minimum includes the proteinaceous architecture and enzymes of the cell as the unit of structure and function, and in fact also includes the whole apparatus of knowledge production that concretizes (objectifies) interactions in the historically specific forms of ‘genes’ and ‘genomes’. There is no such thing as disarticulated information – in organisms, computers, phone lines, equations or anywhere else. As the biologist Richard Lewontin put it, ‘First, DNA is not self-reproducing, second, it makes nothing, and third, organisms are not determined by it” (1992:33). This knowledge is entirely orthodox in biology, a fact that makes ‘selfish gene’ or ‘master molecule’ discourse symptomatic of something amiss at a level that might as well be called ‘unconscious.’
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