II


Law-code and executive power - architect's plan and builder's craft
Gene action is the prime mover, the great absolver
Mining green gold to spill black ink, to drink it from the troft and cut in on the sugar
Surrender the commons to the bootmarch of biotech, served by back-pocket ivory towers and pump-priming federal courtesies
With science comes rhetoric
Couched in terms of life-maps and holy grails, cybernetics and feedback transducers: the language of sociobiology
All handmaidens for dangerous crossings and hand-wringing policies
Safe guards to thrash the parliament of defects and disposed workers to the scrap heap of oblivion
Give us perfection on polymer scaffolding
Give us ghetto walls bricked word by word
Give us eugenics in seasonal colours
Give us new life over telegraph wires

The body of modern biology, like the DNA molecule -
And also like the modern corporation or political body -
Has become just another part of the informational network,
Now machine, now message, always ready for exchange, each for the other

[Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life]







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