The Poetics of DNA

by Judith Roof
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2007
248 pp. Trade, $67.50; paper, $23.50
ISBN: 0-8166-4997-9; ISBN: 978-0-8166-4998-3.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

jzilberg@illinois.edu

"With DNA, abracdabra's triangle is reduced to three letters." (note 7, pp. 232)

Genes act like we think we do." (p. 119).

The Poetics of DNA , an elegant intellectual adventure, could have been more accurately titled The Politics of the DNA Discourse . It proposes that the process of identifying and describing the "DNA gene" has served as a means for allaying fear of change and for rewriting "the truth of humanity in safe and conservative terms" (p. 27). An important book for science and social science, being one that provides fascinating critical thinking on singularly important issues of our time, it might well invoke consternation from scientists. Why? Judith Roof argues throughout that the idea of DNA and the gene are ideological constructions rather than scientific facts and that they serve as vectors for promoting homophobic, sexist and racist discourses.

Roof writes that the humanities can show science "how the relation between science and representation produces a paradox that is self-contained in the figure of DNA's double helix (p. 22). In arguing against the use of linguistic and structuralist models and analogies in science, the following sentences are paradigmatic of the whole, synecdoche if you will:

"The gene is the imaginary embodiment of a binary principle never detached from ideas of gender, the logic of heterosexual reproduction, or the structure of kinship . . . . The DNA gene is the perfect synthesis . . . the signifier par excellence, whose significance reflects all other significance and whose imagined operation enacts the structuralist principle by which it is situated as a reduction of all." (p. 48)

In all this, DNA and genes are imagined as surreptitious narrative double agents that serve to reproduce dominant misogynistic ideologies.

As a consequence of the seriousness of Roof's post-modernist political critiques of one of the most important areas of scientific research of the 20 th Century, this is a study which should perhaps be debated first and foremost by scientists who might be interested in reflecting on the consequences this study could have for their own work conceptually speaking. While that is relatively unlikely, this book will certainly provide for lively debate in graduate seminars on the history of science. Ideally it will impel students to return to Watson's epiphany and the importance Erwin Schrodinger's text What Is Life? (1946) played in eventually invoking that epic discovery.

Though the author is careful to state that the book is not ultimately about the "truth"- value of DNA or the complexities of molecular biology, my reaction as a reader with an undergraduate degree in molecular biology and a doctorate in symbolic anthropology is that ultimately that is exactly what is at stake here.   Herein the value of a study such as this goes far beyond a better public understanding of the debate over the nature of DNA and the gene and the implications. Its value should finally be judged in terms of what all of this means in the end to the field of molecular biology itself. It is no doubt fascinating to read how DNA serves as a cultural form as a vehicle for chauvinist patriarchal hegemony but in the end, deoxyribonucleic acid exists and its structure and basic biochemical function is certainly not a figment of the imagination. That is the fact of the matter, and as science advances, we progressively learn more and more about the complexities of the system and especially of the role mRNA plays and therein lies the poetry of it all. As I see it then, the most important question to ask must remain how this study might or might not inform the thinking of molecular biologists with a broad enough interest in the humanities to seriously consider the arguments made here. If so, will The Poetics of DNA have any influence on future scientific investigation and insight into the nature and function of DNA itself?

While Roof is careful to note that she is referring to the use of figurative speech referring to genes and DNA, of the consequences of imagining them in terms of texts, codes, ciphers, metaphors and metonyms, the discussion consistently refers back directly to DNA or the gene, or the DNA gene, such that it can be argued that contrary to the argument that the subject is how DNA has been imagined and how that knowledge has been used, in the end we are still struggling to better understand and describe molecular chemistry and if it is even possible do to so without figurative language and dynamic structuralist models. To reiterate the essence of this review, we must simply ask: If the arguments made here are significant enough to give scientists case for concern, then how might this book allow us to both better understand and advance molecular biology, the indisputable progress in understanding the structure and operation of DNA and mRNA and the awe-inspiring complexity of biochemical processes relating to genetics specifically and biological systems in general?

As regards the underlying logic in The Poetics of Genes , Roof understands DNA as a metaphor and the structure of DNA as metonymic. From this conceptual template she develops the very interesting notions of the metaphorical and synecdochal gene and narrative "gene DNA". In this, according to Roof, DNA "stands for the gene as its synecdoche" (pp.6), meaning simply that it encompasses a general causal explanation for heredity and everything connected to inheritance. From there, she advances an argument for the role of the analogical figure in sustaining dominant Western patriarchal cultural hierarchies.   Keeping such brief detail in mind, and the following synopsis in her conclusion, one can imagine the significant challenge this study will present to scientists not well enough versed in social science to be able to challenge the logic of her arguments on their own terms.

Towards hoping that some such scientist might do so, take for instance the following five all-important claims about DNA in the final chapter "Rewriting History": 1. DNA embodies a "collapse of signification into direct meaning where the word or signifier is in fact also the signified (performativity)"; 2. DNA's performative character involves an "epiphanic leap over means to an end", a short circuited (re)productive narrative which excises the struggle between gendered opposites; 3. it involves an illusory "agenic potency" that preempts "the subtending, structural binaries" of a causal narrative; 4. it serves to mask "nonoppositional positions" so as to make binary categories irrelevant; and finally, 5. it deploys a performative mechanism so as to perpetuate "the cultural binaries of gender and essentialized versions of ethnicity as the stable truth and founding conditions of biology" (pp.203). I think it safe to say that except for a very few of the most unusual scientists, except for those with an acute interest in the history of science, they will in all likelihood consider themselves better off back in the lab splicing genes instead of debating whether this study is in itself a form of ideological inter-sexual ontogenetic conflict no less the tautological claim as to whether DNA is actually a "synecdoche for genes that are already themselves a synecdoche . . ." (pp. 213).

What The Poetics of DNA does do is to very effectively bring together an intriguing range of the popular, scientific and philosophical literature on DNA to bear on the evolution of analogies, of the shifting metaphoric imperatives describing DNA first so grandly as the "secret of life" and then the "book of life" and finally to the less magnificent "parts list" as hybrid metaphor. In doing so, Roof is able to explore fascinating and important issues concerning genetics, language, ideology and gender politics, as well as those of copyright and commodification and the implications all this has for the future. Apparently the crux of the matter is a clash of Enlightenment values in which scientists seek explanatory factors, structures and mechanisms that humanistic social scientists necessarily reject as mere metaphoric vehicles for symbolic domination. Therein representations are always language and culture bound such that science is in effect ultimately a form of social science and not a separate realm with any specific claims to "truth" value.

It goes without saying that this book is avowedly political, that it has a very specific post-modernist agenda. Such arguments about the political uses of science and the misuse of science by pseudo-science are of immense importance in this age of the commodification of the gene. And yet all this critical insight also needs to be assessed in the tragic or stark comic light of the remarkable fact that almost half of the population in the United States does not even believe in evolution. In this I believe that the idea that any representation of science being dependent on analogy is necessarily a misrepresentation with compromising ideological baggage is in itself deeply problematic as it allows for science to be seen as merely one form of truth and thus intelligent design and creationism as merely another species of the truth, albeit it to some pseudo-truth. The challenge must be then to return to do intellectual and scientific justice to the reality of DNA. Instead of doing so, this book's contribution will more likely be to advance the creative application of concepts of metaphor, metonym, metalepsis, metathesis and allegory, synecdoche and such while significantly enhancing debate over what constitutes pseudoscientific versus scientific discourse. And there, as The Poetics of DNA concludes, the implications are of the outmost significance in the realms of technology, economics, politics and religion.

Writing as a social scientist with a scientific background, I would maintain that in the end, the process and epiphany of coming to the realization of the structure of the double helix and its related structural reproductive logic is part mystery and part deductive progress of the greatest value in and of itself. It is in itself prime evidence of the necessary power of the use of metaphor to advance science. Moreover, in assessing Roof's critique of hyperbolized notions of DNA, one might ask whether her own hyperbolic ideological position has not served as pseudoscientific synecdoche.

Are we then simply not better off in the humanities in developing instead a much greater appreciation of the remarkable discovery of DNA and mRNA and the intricacies of these fields of investigation within molecular biology and biochemistry? And there, recognizing the majestic power of epiphany and the creative urge to determine structures, processes and principles of relations that drive science is of the essence. Thus take for instance the "uncanny description of the status of DNA at the identification of its structure" (note 7, pp. 223) as Roof herself quotes from James Joyce:

"This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is the thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul is the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany" (ibid.)

And in this indeed, the discovery of DNA was as much art as science in terms of the style and suddenness in which it finally revealed itself (was revealed) through the workings of the engaged individual and collective scientific mind.