海外名家系列讲座 第66讲
Abducted by Information: DNA and the Digital Lens of Alien Abduction
主持人：王 岚教授
主办单位：英语学院
讲座时间：2019年4月30日（周二）10:05-11:35
讲座地点：松江校区第五教学楼5361会议室
讲座内容：
William S. Burroughs worked with sound and word as discrete, digital units of information, creating recombinant effects on a reader’s consciousness through the operation of chance operations that momentarily empty the semantic register and allow pure sound to occur, as in mantra. In novels such as Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, Burroughs sought, through a sequence of recombined information, to reprogram consciousness into a cacophonous, silent register beyond the verbal.
Cutting texts into slices and rearranging them towards a reprogramming on the scale of consciousness anticipates the recombinant DNA technologies, if not the concepts, that would transform the evolutionary scale of life all the way up to today’s CRISPR. Assured by molecular biology that DNA is a kind of “word”, Burroughs seeks, like CRISPR, to rewrite it by cutting it up. As a “virus from outer space”, Burroughs’ imaginative meta-description of language is itself shaped by the discourse of both Francis Crick’s discourse of panspermia - where nucleic acids are ubiquitous galactic hitch hikers hosted by appropriate planetary petri dishes such as our own - and alien abduction, where abductee accounts have continual recourse to the language and practices of DNA manipulation - the informatic vision of nascent genomics. This talk will ponder the parallel fashion in which both discourse of the alien and of biotechnology itself can be seen through this digital lens to have been “abducted” by the idea of recombinant information, itself at play in Burroughs work. Modeling alien phenomena as themselves artificial life forms caught up in the sexual selective frameworks of human consciousness hosting them will be further explored.
讲座人简介：
Richard M. Doyle是宾夕法尼亚大学教授，加利福尼亚大学博士，研究兴趣主要是巴罗斯研究、修辞学、以及科幻文学，尤其擅长将信息技术、生命科学等科技领域与文学研究结合进行跨界研究。目前已经出版10余本专著：The Genesis of Now (Metanoia Press, 2019), Into the Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought (Non Duality Press, 2015), Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noophere (University of Washington Press, 2011) 等，编辑3部文集，并发表重要学术论文30余篇，近年来在美国国内和世界多所知名高等学府受邀讲座近百场。
