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영어

This essay illustrates how Richard Powers' Gold Bug Variations (1991) recreates the discourse of the “genome,” and connects this to other fragmentary objects to create new ideas through circulation and variation of the “language of life.” While others have examined the novel's relationship to aesthetics, I focus on the author's use of “information theory and scientific systems” to explain the development of genomic research as an interdisciplinary phenomenon. I address how scientific theories and their modes of articulation have evolved so that one scientist's theory or hypothesis will be decoded by the next generation. This causes a consistent movement at the center of scientific focus when each new discovery is made. Powers wants to explore the genome and history of the genomic study from the archaeological standpoint of knowledge, and more importantly, the current historical moment, in which the infinity of the genome is articulated through the cybernetic metaphor. By weaving multiple discourses on linguistic and non-linguistic fields with Bach's Goldberg Variations, Herri's art, biology, and computer science, he shows the development of biology from modern to post-modern through cybernetic metaphors and advanced technologies.