Junkware

Thierry Bardini is professor of communication at the University of Montreal.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Coda: Lambdas All Over the Place

Introduction, or a set of promoters: Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight, and Vik Muniz Piling Them Up

PL Envoi: where one learns about a deafening condition and a couple of figures of junk--PR' Presence of junk, this signature of our age--Pantiq Philology of junk, or what's in this name, the fabric of the rhizome, our very fiber--PRE Mapping junk, or how I wrote this book (or, maybe, how it wrote me)--PR Bio-molecular junk, first three chapters of the book: this uncanny detail on our genetic capital--PRM The Junkness of culture, last three chapters of the book, that might not be chapters at all: out of control.

Part I. 3' Bio-Molecular Junk

Chapter 1, or a repressor complex: How Junk Became, and Why it Might Remain, Selfish

cI On genetic insignificance and its semiotics, or variations on the uncanny detail created by a "mini-revolution"--OR3 Bootstraps: two opposite takes on junk DNA, selfish and snake--OR2 The selfish contention, a repressor argument in Nature--OR1 Even the sharpest razor cannot shave its handle (scholastics return with a vengeance)--cro Genes and signs of meaning, or the fiction that turned us into junk--N Why junk might remain selfish, after all--Q Design, or everybody's good for a make-over.

Chapter 2, mostly head: From Garbage to Junk DNA, or Life as a Software Problem

cII Incipit junk: Ohno and the birth of a name--A (May) a thousand loops (bloom), or from teleology to teleonomy--B Regulation, without a program--C Bioinformatics, biologists using computers (or the other way around)--D Hyperreal junk, the aufhebung of code itself.

Chapter 3, head again: Multi-Medium, or Life as an Interface Problem

E The Field, back to the snake--F Rush and Burst, a real-life encounter with the X-files.

Part II. 5' Molar Junk: Hyperviral Culture

Chapter 4, all tail: Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

Z (which could appear to mean the end) The crime of the Millennium: it's a wonderful world, if you can afford it--U (as in U2 my son) Post-scripta: genetic capitalism and the machine of the fourth kind--V (Bio)ethics, or what to do you with your brand new (bio)engineered freedom--G The end of a common nature: junk as the black matter of the ontogenesis of the machine of the fourth kind--T Individuation, without a principle (or a program): another return of scholastics, from number to Oedipus.

Chapter 5, lysis and replication: Homo nexus, Disaffected Subject

S A philosophical fiction; nexus, nexialism and other aliens--R The debt and the contract, or nexi and addicts, all unite!--O Dis-affect, the condition of our times--P Promethean Angst: The god of junk and his paradoxical legacy, hope and all.

Chapter 6, tail again: Presence of Junk

H Stigmata, or the world Dick made--M Kipple: how it got its look and feel, from retrofitting and the semantics of Dr. Junk himself--L (yes, the "l" of "tail", the point of entry) Hypervirus, where it eventually becomes obvious why phage is the model entity for the ontogenesis of capitalism of the fourth kind--K Junkyard terror, or a mind for murder--I Junkspace, or how it got built--J Future Eves, artificial menials and capitalist re-genesis: a junk aesthetics.

De-Coda

Sib Tripping over the organism, or a tribute to Moebius: DNA is a spirit is a drug is a program--xis Thinking junk and period pieces; a Gnostic theodicy--attP (a vital non-coding sequence) Molecular gods, or when the religious is disqualified, remains the mantic--int Vanishing sequences (end credits).

Glossary

Notes

Index