리차드 파워스의 탈구조주의—생명과학의 패러다임의 변화

Abstract

This essay illustrates how Richard Powers' novels like Gold Bug Variations (1991), Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), Prisoner's Dilemma (1988), Operation Wandering Soul (1993), Galatea 2.2 (1995), and Gain (1998) recreate the discourse of the “life science,” and connects this to other fragmentary objects to create new forms of the “metaphor of human genome.” While others have examined the novel's relationship to aesthetics, I focus on Richard Powers' poststructural writing techniques and a paradigm shift in the science of life to explain the development of the human genome as an interdisciplinary study. I explain how scientific theories and their modes of articulation have evolved so that one scientist's theory or hypothesis will be solved and decoded by the next generation. This causes a consistent movement of the center of scientific focus as each new discovery is made. Powers wants to explore the genome and the history of genomic study within 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 biology, genetics, computer science, medical science, neurophysiology, and neuro-linguistics, he shows the development of biology from modern to postmodern through cybernetic metaphors and advanced technologies. Consequently, in the unstoppable advances of the art of decoding the genome, GBV interrelates the inter-disciplinary approaches through the rhetorical tropes that unfold the complex discursive world of the genome. Powers shows that the complex mechanisms of the genome in the microworld of every cell can be designed and written as the plot of the “text of life,” using DNA language. At the same time, his genomic reading and writing demonstrate the historical processes of the shifting center of new genomic development and inter-pretation.