Moss - What genes cant do - 2003 (522929), страница 19
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This marshalingtogether of background assumptions Doyle, borrowing from Deleuzeand Guatarri, attributes to “order-words.” He targets translation as apivotal move, an “order-word” in the rhetorical transformation of thelife sciences he seeks to characterize. Doyle calls on the assistance ofthe philosophers Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin to “think theunthought” of translation as an organizing theme. From Heidegger’sessay on the “The Age of the World Picture,” (1977) Doyle borrows theidea that a scientific research program opens up a space for investigationby “sketching out in advance” the nature of the terrain, the basic groundplan, upon which anything that can count as an object of interest canshow up. Doyle refers to this as “an extrascientific, ontological gambit.”Just what is the nature of the ground plan that Doyle alleges molecularbiology came to lay out in advance? He takes his cues in this regard fromWalter Benjamin’s critique of the idea of translation as it is expressed inan essay entitled “The Task of the Translator” (1969) (which Benjaminwrote as an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire).
Benjaminstrives to supplant the understanding of translation as an exercise in pro-The Rhetoric of Life and the Life of Rhetoric69viding a bridge between two stagnant bodies with the idea that translation becomes part of the ongoing life history of both languages—orperhaps of “languaging”:Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission ofwatching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangsof its own (Benjamin 1969, p. 73).Translation for Benjamin is a testament to the fundamental kinship ofall languages which spring from a common source and mature and ageand risk senility and yet which may, by the hand of the translator, refreshand renew one another:Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages .
. . As for the posited central kinship of languages, it is marked by a distinctive convergence. Languages are not strangersto one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express (p.
72).What Benjamin is gesturing toward is a primordiality that underlies theintentions of each and every particular language and becomes transientlyexposed during moments when historical languages are being juxtaposed. To probe deeply enough into the nature of translation forBenjamin is to embark on the path to “pure” language, the ground ofall languages, inaccessible to mortals yet the ontological substratumwhose light is revealed in successful translation:Rather, all suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlyingeach language as a whole—an intention, however, which no single language canattain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language (p. 74).In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were.It cannot live there permanently, to be sure, and it certainly does not reach it inits entirety.
Yet, in a singularly impressive manner, at least it points the way tothis region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages (p. 75).A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not blockits light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium,to shine upon the original all the more fully (p. 79).It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure languagewhich is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a workin his re-creation of that work (p.
80).70Chapter 2Melding Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s contributions together, the ontological gambit which Doyle imputes to Gamow’s molecular translationresearch program is one in which the presumption of an underlying purelanguage, a kind of Pythagorean “positivist mysticism,” the unthoughtguarantor of translatability, is that which is sketched out in advance. Inthis sense the trope of translation, while an expression of an interest inexplaining the basis of the transmission of heritable traits, is also anexplanation for the very interest in breaking genetic codes.Talking BackIf the primordial substratum, that which is ontologically laid out inadvance, is that of hidden geometrical-cryptographic relationships, thenpuzzle-code solving follows as the way to go in attacking it.
Of coursejust what it is that is laid out in advance is neither uniquely determinednor secured once and for all. Doyle’s hermeneutics of translation is (orshould be) offered in a speculative and suggestive vein. It provides analternative to the concept of simple reductionism for elucidating the pathby which life becomes increasingly assimilated into textual metaphors.Doyle’s rhetorical analysis offers a much richer purview of how life“shows up” in the light of some new rhetorical regime which then colorsthe intuitions that are drawn on for grappling with the next set of problems.
But the projected ground plans are themselves subject to destabilization and transmutation.Perhaps if Gamow’s diamond code had met with empirical support,then some form of Pythagorean positivism would have become stabilizedas the ground of translatability. But the diamond code did not carrythe day, and the ground of translatability became increasingly linguisticin character. Translation is variably seen as a movement from digitalto analog (von Neumann), from DNA digits to protein words, and fromwords (DNA) to deeds (enzymes and, thus, metabolism).
EvenDoyle acknowledges that each rhetorical stand opens up new explanatory gaps; evidently the force of life’s empirical being cannot just betalked away:The gap and border between DNA and protein, numbers and words, codes andorganisms is both the site of imprecision and the site of metaphorical interven-The Rhetoric of Life and the Life of Rhetoric71tion. The problem of “translating” life is one possible way of deciding on andeffacing the border between textuality and vitality, a translation that appearswithin an épisteme in which “Life becomes one object of knowledge amongothers,” an object in and of language. It is a solution made possible by the simultaneous rhetorical displacement of the question of the organism and its return,a haunting trace of life that stalks the borders between codes and bodies.
Thisimprecision of life seems to provoke a rhetorical crisis; each trope we deploy—code-script, translation, program—seems to provoke different conceptual blindspots, oversights that then render any account of living systems inadequate,imprecise (Doyle, p. 59).Doyle’s objective has been to analyze the role of “rhetorical software,”with its concomitant restructuring of our ambient background presuppositions, in transforming the meaning of life. The “linguistification” oflife bears for Doyle an unsettling resemblance to the decentering moveof post-structuralism which announced that it was not man who speakslanguage but rather language which speaks man.
Doyle finds in the totalizing language of the language-of-the-gene an ironic (but perhaps not)echo of the deconstructionist project with which he identifies his ownintellectual patrimony:The conflation of what life “is” with the “action” of a configuration of molecules conventionally represented by an alphabet of “ATCG” produced an almostvulgarly literal translation of Jacques Derrida’s famous remark, “Il n’y pas horsdu texte.” Literally, the rhetoric of molecular biology implied, there is no outsideof the genetic text.
No body, no environment, no outside that could threaten thesovereignty of DNA (p. 109).But what is Doyle’s own standpoint as an apparent critic of the rhetoricof the gene? What is the tenor of his criticism? Is he primed to hear onlythe most totalizing intonations by having already presupposed theuncontested agency of the language of the language-of-life and thushaving relegated himself to the status of a cynical Cassandra? DoesDoyle’s methodological standpoint obviate the very possibility of conducting criticism with an emancipatory intent? One wonders.The trope of language as a medium for modeling or allegorizing lifemay well bring with it a penumbra of meaning and association, but itdoes not fix or easily circumscribe what those meanings and associationscan be. Construed as language, DNA could just as well (and I wouldsuggest better) be analyzed as context-dependent “utterance” than assome form of primordial Holy Writ.
Now even if, as Doyle has intimated,72Chapter 2it is the latter image that has tacitly tended to hold sway, what is it, ifanything, that would insulate it from criticism? A dialogical philosophyof language could help itself to the code-alphabet metaphors and yet“discover” biological meaning, i.e., an adapted phenotype, to be alwaysan achievement reached via dynamic, developmental interactions andthus inevitably realized at the end of the day and never before the breakof dawn. Biological agency, from this angle, is rediscovered in processand at many levels of context, linguistic metaphors notwithstanding.A source of theoretical-rhetorical resources for reconstructing themetaphorics of life, in the idiom of dialogue, can be found in Bahktin(and his circle) as well as in other quarters.
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