Postmodern theory prefers DNA-as-code because it is generative, not merely representational

Evidence

The universal fascination of contemporary (or poststructural or postmodern) theory with DNA -the exemplum of the concept of “code” for Jean Baudrillard, for example, who is himself an enthusiastic reader of Ballard — lies not only in its status as a kind of writing (which displaces biology from the physics model to that of information theory) but also in its active and productive power as template and as computer program: a writing that reads you, rather than the other way round. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 372

Categorization

• DEFINE: Marks the shift from code-as-representation to code-as-generative program — central to the postmodern ‘spatial’ paradigm.
• XREF: The idea that code ‘reads you, rather than the other way round’ echoes how informational systems invert the subject-object relation, similar to theories of surveillance capitalism.