ABSTRACT
This chapter offers dynamic inherent to the idea of the innovation of barcoding. Like others following genomic actors and their technosciences, it deals with dizzying claims of novelty and purchase. The chapter describes the interesting ways in which the more intense ontological entanglements between the human the non-human, and the natural, have necessarily elaborated and thickened as Barcoding of Life Initiative has embraced and attempted practically to enact its own original ambitions, promises and commitments. B Latour has described the modernist paradox as a dominant drive towards more-and-more complex and deeper entanglements between human and natural entities, a drive which is accompanied by declarations of the purity of the 'natural', and scientific, and of the social, and human. Michael Taussig draws upon the philosophy of Walter Benjamin in stressing the importance of always problematizing the relations between words and their things between DNA barcodes and the global nature that they come to represent.
