Files and links (2)
Published (Version of record)CC BY-NC-ND V3.0, Open Access
Published (Version of record)CC BY-NC-ND V3.0, Open
Journal article
Biological Processes as Writerly? An Ecological Critique of DNA-based Poetry
Environmental Humanities, Vol.9(1), pp.129-148
01/05/2017
Metrics
49 File views/ downloads
7 Record Views
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
This output has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:
Source: InCites
Abstract
This article examines the DNA-based biopoetry of Christian Bök in relation to its antecedents in the art-science experiments of Joe Davis, Pak Chung Wong, and Eduardo Kac. In particular, I develop an ecocritical analysis of the process of encipherment at the center of their works. Wong encoded lyrics from the song “It’s a Small World After All” within the DNA of a bacterium. Similarly, Kac employs encipherment in Genesis, a project aiming to demonstrate that “biological processes are now writerly.” In the same way, Bök’s The Xenotext: Book 1, published in 2015, involved enciphering poetry into the genome of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. The organism’s cellular mechanisms “read” the encoded poem and produced a protein, the structure of which was then deciphered, resulting in another poem in response. In relation to these works, I ask the following: are biopoetry and the encipherment process merely conceptual and methodological experimentations, or do they reflect ecological consciousness and ethical imperative for life? Building on Foucault’s idea of the discourse of nature and Benjamin’s notion of a language of things, I explore how The Xenotext—and biopoetry more generally—reinscribe the power/knowledge relations implicit in the long-standing tropes of nature as a book, code, or cipher to be unraveled. Constructed as an inherently mute subject, nature is willed to speak purportedly on its own terms but through conspicuously human media and in inescapably androgenic terms. An ecologically directed evaluation of biopoetry ultimately affirms the indebtedness of all literary production, including biopoetry, to other-than-human lives and bodies.
Details
- Title
- Biological Processes as Writerly? An Ecological Critique of DNA-based Poetry
- Creators
- John Charles Ryan - University of New England
- Publication Details
- Environmental Humanities, Vol.9(1), pp.129-148
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Identifiers
- 991013024976602368
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2017 John Charles Ryan This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article