EJMLab Private Media Laboratory

The two DNA strands are held together by weak bonds between the bases on each strand, forming base pairs (bp). Genome size is usually stated as the total number of base pairs; the human genome contains roughly 3 billion bp.

Each time a cell divides into two daughter cells, its full genome is duplicated; for humans and other complex organisms, this duplication occurs in the nucleus. During cell division the DNA molecule unwinds and the weak bonds between the base pairs break, allowing the strands to separate. Each strand directs the synthesis of a complementary new strand, with free nucleotides matching up with their complementary bases on each of the separated strands. Strict base-pairing rules are adhered to; adenine will pair only with thymine (an A-T pair) and cytosine with guanine (a C-G pair). Each daughter cell receives one old and one new DNA strand. The cells' adherence to these base-pairing rules ensures that the new strand is an exact copy of the old one. This minimizes the incidence of errors (mutations) that may greatly affect the resulting organism or its offspring.

Genes
Each DNA molecule contains many genes--the basic physical and functional units of heredity. A gene is a specific sequence of nucleotide bases whose sequences carry the information required for constructing proteins, which provide the structural components of cells and tissues as well as enzymes for essential biochemical reactions. The human genome is estimated to comprise approximately 30,000 genes.

From, mis(dis)placed progeny

a.      The proliferation of critical, biographical and theoretical texts surrounding James Joyce’s Ulysses proves that it is an engaging target of interpretation.  The large body of work concerning the interpretation of Ulysses defines the novel as a seminal work in Twentieth Century literature.  My thesis questions the “why” and “how” of the Ulysses industry by viewing the novel as a dynamic system that can be categorized as a transitional system in the movement from representational novel to natural language programming.  Although Joyce’s writing predates much of the technology that allows for advanced artificial intelligence research, his use of a simulacrum to give structure to the novel and the role of communication and media technologies shows a direct connection with contemporary developments in the field.  My thesis rejects Joyce’s celebrated claim that Ulysses contains enough mysteries and riddles to keep scholars busy for a century opting instead for an explanation of the text as a system that encourages alternate, and often conflicting, interpretations.  It does so by presenting a world-defining database from which relationships are drawn throughout the text.  In effect Joyce’s Ulysses can be seen as a text that unifies an entirely new body of understanding about ideas and the perception of our environments by presenting a database of a modern consciousness within a model of the emerging modern world.  A model in which it is possible for time to exist both physically (within the constraints of bodily functions) and within the interior space of consciousness; nullifying the distinction between past, present and future.

b.        While the urge to create, to delineate and represent human experience is an accepted, if not necessary, component of contemporary cultural and intellectual life it cannot have always been that way.  In The Republic, Plato identified the urge to imitate life as mimesis.  What followed was a tradition of Western philosophy, thought, religion and literature created by the written word (first in manuscript form and then, following the Gutenberg revolution, in printed text) and expounded through the spoken word.  In the twentieth century Jacques Derrida posited that “the Western philosophical tradition privileges voice (the sonic) over written language (the graphic)” and that “within this tradition the speaker is assumed to be self-authenticating and in control of meaning of language” (Taylor xiv).  This position is supported by Marshall McLuhan who contends that although the western philosophical tradition is a visual/textual tradition rather than an auditory/tactile tradition, it has been changes in communication technology that have shifted the sensory environment from graphic to sonic.  The graphic to sonic shift is important primarily because of the implications it has had on mimetic impulse (generally) and the more recent phenomenon of simulacra specifically.  It is my contention that the creation of simulacra  is directly linked to “our primal urge to replicate our consciousness and physical beings (into images, words, machine replicants, computer symbols)” and that this mimetic urge “is not leading us closer to the dream of immortality, but is creating merely a pathetic parody, a metaexistence or simulacra of our essences that is supplanting us, literally taking over our physical space and our roles with admirable proficiency and without the drawbacks of human error and waste, without the human emotions of love, anger, ambition, and jealousy that jeopardize the efficiency and predictability of the capitalistic exchange.” (McCaffery 16-7).  Rather than being  a defense mechanism aimed at deferring the painful effects of “new technologies (self-amputations of our own being) on the order of our sensory lives” (McLuhan 6) simulacra have in fact consumed our very existence.

c.      We cannot apply the same standards of evaluation to the motivation behind Joyce’s Ulysses as we can to the spontaneous, self-replication that occurs in our postmodern society.  It is not fair to say that James Joyce was consumed by the creation of simulacra when he wrote Ulysses.  Ulysses can be viewed as an experiment in the process of symbolic representation that proposes a model of a self contained world or system. In order for Ulysses to be viewed as a self contained world we must deal with the manner in which Joyce treats time.  The structure of Ulysses utilizes a special paradigm for viewing time and space in the context of a specific world definition.  The time/space paradigm employed by Joyce in Ulysses is best approximated by the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein’s General and Special theories of Relativity.    The paradigm for time used in the novel reflects Joyce’s reaction to contemporary theories on the nature of the physical Universe.   Joyce, like other seminal figures of the early twentieth century helped to nullify antiquated, church-dominated notions of time and space, and replace them with scientifically provable theories. The treatment of time in the novel is integral to both the effectiveness of his simulacrum and to the development of Ulysses as a dynamic system.

d.       In order to explicate the way in which Ulysses can be viewed as a dynamic system I have chosen a thematically relevant database of facts drawn from the overall text of Ulysses.  The database that I will draw on in my analysis of Ulysses has been filtered for my specific purposes.  My database has been filtered using the criteria of Rudy Bloom (Leopold Bloom’s deceased son).  Rudy died in early infancy and, as I will show in my analysis, thoughts (or sensory data) related to Rudy are an important and recurrent theme in Leopold Bloom’s compiled consciousness.  I refer to Bloom’s consciousness as having been compiled because for all intents and purposes the database of sensory data available to Bloom is closed.  How and why we can view Ulysses as a dynamic system when the database view that we are privileged to is inherently static is one of the primary concerns of this thesis. The death of Rudy Bloom proves to be a relevant dataset in the larger scheme since it logically connects procreation and the mimetic impulse.  Procreation and dissociating mimesis are a key element to the underlying structure of simulacrum employed by James Joyce in Ulysses.  The Rudy dataset is therefore used as both an example of database world-definition and as a thematic link between the development of a data driven system and the manner in which the impulse to procreate can easily be perverted into a meaningless urge to replicate in the postmodern sense of simulacrum.

e.      Marshall McLuhan asserts, in War and Peace in the Global Village that “new environments inflict considerable pain on the perceiver.” (War and Peace 7)  We can ask 1) What are these new environments? 2) What is the result of the pain inflicted upon the perceiver? and 3) How does this relate to Ulysses as a dynamic system and precursor of natural language programming?   The new environments of which McLuhan speaks are environments in which senses are produced and received by a perceiver.  In particular McLuhan is speaking of environments created by new communication technologies.  It is McLuhan’s assertion in W&P that these new environments created by technological change have inundated humans with a different set of sensations than in the preceding centuries.  These different sensations have caused humans to perceive their surroundings differently and ultimately to conceive of their relationship with the physical world differently.  No other field of technological endeavor has influenced the perceptual experience of humans in the twentieth century as concretely as that of communication technology.

f.       It is the contention of my thesis that James Joyce, unlike other seminal twentieth century authors, steps away from the novel form altogether and creates a form of expression more like that of natural language programming or world-defining database construction.    If Joyce has influenced writers of traditional narratives, so be it, but it is of more theoretical value that his influence has crosses the barriers of fiction to programming, communications theory and artificial intelligence.  Ulysses is a self-fulfilling prophecy; individuals hurry to the task of simulating their own self-defined world and the experiences had within those parameters.  To label Ulysses a Modern text purely on the basis of era, or a novel purely on the basis of advertising, is to commit an error of classification.  We may study it as a novel, or as a Modern text, or as a simulacrum, or as an example of world-defining database but ultimately it exists primarily as a dynamic system which allows for multifarious and often conflicting interpretations.

©James McKenzie 2000-2001