9 de Dezembro de 2016

Graça Capinha e Ming Qian Ma

My dissertation will, in the first place, attempt to contextualize Kac's work. I will try to ascertain how the artist's ouevre relates to the experiments that numerous poets set in motion during the 20th Century, with the intent of bringing the physicality of life into the domain of the art object. I will mainly explore the connections between Kac's art and the disciples of Charles Olson, an American poet who, in essays like "Proprioception" or "Projective Verse", explored the idea that bodily processes ought to be the object (and not just the subject) of poetic production. His anti-metaphysical perspective was later adopted by the so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, who modulated it into a critique of the referentiality of mainstream uses of language (i.e. the idea that language tends to lead the reader outside of its material texture), or, more recently, by Kenneth Goldsmith, a conceptual poet who foregrounds the physicality of language by confronting his audience with the linguistic leftovers that correspond to every act of reading and listening (i.e. the graphic marks and the sounds we skip over when we read a text or when we listen to someone speak).
I will subsequently examine the ethical implications of Kac's transgenic pieces. In "The Animal that Therefore I Am", Derrida tells us that it is because human language is part of a linguistic continuum (that of difference) in which the languages of all living organisms concatenate that we just have to look into ourselves to recognize the Other. Kac's work revolves around a similar insight. But how can this idea be useful in the construction of different bonds with other creatures? Are we to see it merely as the center of a non-utilitarian frame of mind? And how far can one's subjectivity reach into the world constructed by the Other's language?


The questions raised by Kac's transgenic art are, first of all, methodological. What does science look for when it does science? What are the expectations and how do those expectations condition the results of research? In The Poetics of DNA, Judith Roof tells us that, since the beginning, science has tried to parse down the real to its infinitesimal elements:

"how we arrived at the idea of the particle as elemental . . . is . . . an effect of the ways we think about phenomena, ways that haven't really changed for 2,500 years. . . . Reductionism is an inherent assumption of a mechanistic or analytic view of the world. Begun by the Greeks, analysis understands large phenomena as effects of many smaller, interconnected elements. This reductionist way of thinking pushes toward finding the smallest, most basic, primary, and indivisible element as the end (and beginning) point for all processes". (33)

Roof goes on to add that the fallout of this type of procedures is the disparagement and obfuscation of the way organic parts intermingle and interact when the bodies in question are alive. That is precisely the question raised by Michel Serres in The Troubador of Knowledge. By locking on the lowest common denominator of life, scientists efface the latter's presence from the experiment at hand:

"Science speaks of organs, functions, cells, and molecules, to admit finally that it's been a long time since life has been spoken of in laboratories, but it never says flesh, which, very precisely, designates the mixture of muscles and blood, skin and hairs, bones, nerves, and diverse functions". (xvi)

In the second installment of his Genesis project, Kac tried to make his audience aware of the intricacy that Serres alludes to by extricating a gene, the golden element of contemporary scientific discourse, from its context in the body. Ironically encased in a gilded genie bottle, the so-called elixir of life appears before us as an impotent trifle:
Instead of a "genie" inside the bottle, one finds the new panacea, the new gene. No wishes of immortality, beauty, or intelligence are granted by the inert and isolated gene sealed inside the miniature bottle. As a result, the irony gains a critical and humorous twist by the fact that the "precious commodity" is devoid of any real, practical application in biology. (Kac "Life Transformation" 172/173)

The idea that one can pin down a particular individual by capturing the secret encrypted in the latter's genetic code comes crumbling down. Kac says that "we must continue to consider life to be a complex system at the crossroads between belief systems, economic principles, legal parameters, political directives, scientific laws and cultural constructs" (Kac "Life Transformation" 173).
Elsewhere, though, it is the very idea that genes correspond to a particular individual (or species) that is put to the test. According to Jens Reich, one of Kac's sources, "our own genome (which, incidentally, looks like a garbage bin anyway)" includes in its composition many viral inserts which "were acquired into germ cells by retrovius infection and subsequent dispersion over the genome some 10 to 40 million years ago" (qtd. in Kac "Life Transformations" 184). This is the idea that Kac tried to dramatize via his GFP Bunny. By inserting the gene of a medusa (which gives the organism a fluorescent glow) into the genetic code of an albino rabbit, he brought to life a living chimera.
As Kac points out, the objective of this conceptual piece is to make the viewer question the employment of the term "grotesque" to describe the living creature in question: "The grotesque as an epistemological category can only be operative in opposition to an assumed typicality. An extreme constrast would posit it against the vague property known as 'beauty'" (Kac "Introduction" 9). As we have previously emphasized, that longed-for typicality simply does not exist: orgnanisms are always a composite of parts of other organisms; species do not exist as timeless islands that remain separate from other species but as assemblages in motion. In The Five Senses, Michel Serres explores a very similar argument. This is what he has to say about the unicorn, a mythical figure which nevertheless acts as a proxy for organisms in general:
The horse variety joined together with the goat variety and mixed with it produces a very ordinary monster that juxtaposes and mingles places. . . . There is protest about genetic manipulation. But any genesis is party to such manipulation, any individual, any organism can call itself a sphinx or unicorn. Who, after all, would dare affirm that they were not of mixed blood? . . . The unicorn is, and is not, at the same time, in the same place and in the same relationship, a horse, a goat and walrus. Again that can be said of the goat, the walrus and horse. (62)
Thus, one can say that Kac wanted his audience to question the "common perception that transgenics are not 'natural'". "It is important to understand", he says, "that the process of moving genes from one species to another is part of wild life (without human participation)" (Kac "Life Transformation" 180).
We can claim that these thoughts lead us to a crossroads in which the local meets the global: difference dovetails with unity and invariance. Alba (the transgenic rabbit) carries in herself the mark of alterity: she is fluorescent green and in that regard she signals a step aside from normativity, the harbinger of whiteness - the subsuption of plural identities under clear-cut and sterilized models. On the other hand, she is indeed white: the mark of potentiality; of all colors and hence, according to Serres, of the changeless (yet everchanging) global.
How, then, are we to understand an otherness that is incarnated in our own bodies? How can we act towards it in an ethical way? How can "we" act altogether?