The Delusions of Certainty

  In her book Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art, Elizabeth Grosz takes Darwin into other territory altogether. For Grosz, Darwin’s discussions of the differences in degree rather than differences in kind among species become vehicles of liberation. Our similarity to other creatures, she argues, “anticipates one of the most profound and motivating of concepts in twentieth-century thought and beyond: the idea of difference, of differences without the central organizing principle of identity.”175 In this view, the fact that Darwin did not draw rigid borders between one species and another, that evolution is by its very nature the creation of one form out of another, is what is most interesting about his work. In other words, the determinism Dawkins attributes to Darwin by adding atomistic genetics to the equation becomes its opposite in Grosz: indeterminism.

  To put it in a simple way, in this view of evolution the borders between human beings and other primates or between humans and all other mammals or reptiles or any living creature are not hard and fast. Grosz takes Darwin down another philosophical road, one she explicitly identifies with the names of philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray. These catalysts for her thought could not be more different from those that motivated Dawkins. In these philosophies of “difference,” boundaries blur, category is destabilized, and hybrids are created. Grosz gives us the postmodern Darwin.

  In a section labeled “Nature and Culture,” Grosz draws on Luce Irigaray’s feminist ideas. She explains that for Irigaray, “sexual difference is what characterizes the natural world, the multiple forms of culture, and the varieties of transition from nature to culture. This is why, for Irigaray, sexual difference is a given, not constructed.”176 Irigaray’s thought is influenced by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who directly links human subjectivity to language. Before language, there is a fragmented being but no subject. From this position, Irigaray argues that the whole Western philosophical tradition has prevented women from becoming subjects by silencing them. Moreover, she has suggested that women need a new language that is not the language of patriarchy. I have never understood exactly what that language would be, nor do I understand well what “nature” means in this thought.177 There are few feminists who would deny chromosomal difference between the sexes or that, despite the fact that some people are born with the chromosomes of one sex and the bodies of the other or born with ambiguous or intersex genitalia, or feel that they have the mind of one sex and the body of the other, most vertebrates, including human beings, are born physiologically male or female.

  The agreement on the matter in feminist theory pretty much ends there. It is easy to see why. Sexual difference, including (perhaps) the ability to perform spatial rotation tasks, has meant that women are both inferior and defective. Difference has been used to argue that women are polluted, stupid, weak, chaotic, and the work of the devil. From the Greeks into the seventeenth century, female genitals were regarded as inverted versions of male genitalia and therefore inferior. In the eighteenth century, the female body was understood as a thing wholly and completely different from the male body, and therefore inferior: female skeletons, brains, and cells, all different, and all worse. Instead of men and women as beings who are a lot more the same than different, they became polar opposites.178

  The refrain Just because the sexes are fundamentally different does not mean one is superior and the other inferior is alive and well today, and it is a refrain wisely regarded with suspicion. Feminist theory has been locked in its own nature/nurture debates for years, usually framed as an argument between essentialism (women are naturally different from men and we should celebrate and think through those differences) and constructivism (women and men are different because culture or “nurture” makes them that way).179 The question “What is a woman?” has not been answered. Like so many scholars in many fields, with notable exceptions, feminists have had difficulty articulating what biology is and what it means. The fact that women have been reduced to a crude version of the biological body or to matter because they theoretically can become mothers, even if they are not mothers, in ways men never are, created an alarm about “biology” in general. In recent years, however, a number of feminist scholars in various fields, including Grosz, have taken a renewed and vigorous look at biological bodies.

  Grosz’s language has a utopian ring: “We need a new, dynamized conception of nature that acknowledges that nature itself is continually changing, and thus never static or fixed, and is also a mode of production of change . . . This new conception must also recognize that nature is itself always sexed—that sexual difference marks the world of living things, plant, animal, and human—or that nature itself is at least two.”180 I couldn’t agree more that nature is dynamic, but, as she knows and mentions elsewhere in the text, it simply isn’t true that all living things are male and female or “at least two.” There is asexual reproduction in nature. Single-cell organisms—bacteria, for example—produce asexually. The technical term for reproduction without fusion of gametes is “agamogenesis.” There are citrus trees that reproduce through apomixis or budding, and some creatures, such as the sea squirt, can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Parthenogenesis, procreation without fertilization, can occur in vertebrates.

  Furthermore, from an evolutionary point of view, no one knows why there are two sexes, which exist in most multicellular organisms (although the two sexes sometimes come in one body). This strange truth stumps contemporary evolutionists. Why have two sexes when it’s much more efficient just to clone yourself? There are ideas about the advantages conferred by the much more difficult route of mating, fertilization, and birth, but there is no agreement. One might argue, in opposition to Grosz, that because our primeval evolutionary cousins are asexual, our origins are sexless, not sexed. Whether this would be a meaningful or important rhetorical strategy in relation to people is another matter. It is also important to recognize that despite chromosomal differences between male and female, the human embryo is physically undifferentiated at the start. Sexual differentiation begins after six to seven weeks of gestation, and it is a process influenced by both genetic and hormonal factors.

  Unlike Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, Elizabeth Grosz’s book remains securely inside the academy. She is not invested in making her views comprehensible to a nonprofessional reader. Her thought is directed at fellow academics, most of whom have already embraced social constructivism, the idea that human beings are mostly shaped by culture and language. By the end of the book, I found it hard to know what Grosz means by nature or biology, those endlessly mutating words, perhaps because her conceptions are intended to escape the fixity of definitions. There are people who are attracted to each of these views, to the soft and dynamic and to the hard and mechanical. The interesting question is why. For some people, change sounds nicer than fixity. For others, staying put is good. I daresay the notion of the fixed or programmed must be far more pleasant for those who are satisfied with their lot in the world than those who aren’t: “I can’t help it. I’m a rich, entitled, white guy, full to bursting with testosterone and hardwired for happiness. Blame my genes.”

  Survival Stories

  When I was a girl in Lutheran Sunday school, I had a difficult time understanding certain biblical characters. Why was I supposed to root for Jacob, who cheats his older brother Esau out of his birthright? Was I supposed to applaud the way Jacob and his mother colluded to trick the boys’ old blind father? Why wasn’t Jacob condemned in the story? Why did he win? Why was his cheating celebrated? When I questioned my teachers about this odd state of affairs, they inevitably looked embarrassed, muttered something wholly unsatisfying to me, and went on with their classes.

  Years later, I came to understand that a simple principle of vivacity might be at work. The clever, wily boy who wins the game is a beloved character, and he has a long history. Odysseus and Sinbad are irresistible survivors.
Today people rush out to buy memoirs written by people who were beaten by their parents or kidnapped by maniacs or succumbed to heroin addiction or fell ill with cancer or were lured into cults but triumphed over the bad and brutal in the end by sheer willpower. Dawkins’s gene may be selfish and to some degree deterministic, but when the molecule is personified, that selfishness has the admirable appearance of many a clever, heroic figure. Despite Schopenhauer’s gloomy view of humanity in general and his virulent misogyny, his ruthless will has oomph, as does Nietzsche’s later will to power. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Defoe’s Moll Flanders are female examples of champion survivors. Jane Eyre is a later incarnation of the tough orphan who perseveres and wins in the end. In the United States, popular culture has raised the male version of this character to dramatic heights. The capitalist hero, hoisted up by his proverbial bootstraps, aggressive, selfish, but oh so clever and rich, is a winner admired by many. The late Steve Jobs of the Apple computer company is a recent example. Not a nice fellow by all accounts, but then “nice guys finish last”—to draw from the seemingly endless well of clichés on the subject.

  My point here is that Dawkins’s personified gene fits an old type. I am well aware that the zoologist later rethought his adjective “selfish,” that his view of genes is not a wholly deterministic one, and that he admits in his preface to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of the book that he had not thought carefully enough about “ ‘vehicles’ (usually organisms) and the ‘replicators’ that ride inside them.”181 He also popularized the idea of memes, traveling idea bits that spread in the culture from one person to another. None of this, however, alters his essential tale of a robot waltzing, running, or just walking along the highway of life with a gene at the controls. I am posing the question again: Aside from the obvious truth that there is hereditary material in organisms, why is the metaphor of a human being as a programmed robot vehicle seductive to so many?

  In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Dawkins reveals his foundational assumptions. In the blunt form typical of him, he writes, “If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”182 This often-quoted sentence could never have belonged to Darwin, not only because the father of evolution could not have understood information technology in the way Dawkins does, but because he did not characterize natural processes in mechanistic terms. But what exactly are Dawkins’s vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes? I couldn’t help thinking of familiar images from science fiction movies, in which bubbling, brilliantly colored concoctions are intended to depict life being created artificially. Is Dawkins referring here to biology in general? Are these vibrant throbbing gels and oozes shorthand for our bones and tissues and blood and organs, our cellular makeup? Or is this throbbing gel, as I suspect, an embryo encased in the uterus, what we think of as life’s beginning? Is he telling his reader, if you believe life begins as a yucky, messy, slimy, wet business inside a woman’s body, think again? Or is this a latter-day version of the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter?

  In one of the essays collected in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, Steven Pinker approvingly quotes Dawkins’s sentence about gels and oozes and explains why conceptualizing the question of life in terms of information is superior to discussions of the workings of actual molecules:

  Dawkins’ emphasis on the ethereal commodity called “information” in an age of biology dominated by the concrete molecular mechanisms is another courageous stance. There is no contradiction, of course, between a system being understood in terms of its information content and it being understood in terms of its material substrate. But when it comes down to the deepest understanding of what life is, how it works, and what forms it is likely to take elsewhere in the universe, Dawkins implies that it is abstract conceptions of information, computation, and feedback, and not nucleic acids, sugars, lipids, and proteins, that will lie at the route of the explanation.183

  Notice Pinker admires Dawkins for his courage. He is a brave figure who courageously resists those biologists who resort to purely concrete descriptions of life. (Dawkins here becomes rather like his own description of the cowboy gene.) Nevertheless, Pinker is invested in harmonious levels of description. He argues that the “ethereal commodity,” “information content,” is not in conflict with its “material substrate.” In this view, information is on top as a concept and matter lies below it as its substrate, the actual molecular material stuff. Information is an abstraction that covers the biological reality, which in a figurative sense lies somewhere underneath it but is not at odds with it. However, in the next sentence, the metaphor “deepest understanding” appears, which moves the reader from one hierarchy into another, effectively flipping what is on top and putting it on the bottom. Now information, computation, and feedback occupy the depths of true knowledge, not the gels and oozes that may appear under the biologist’s microscope. Why? Because life may not be like that elsewhere in the universe, but information processing and computation will as they are embedded in the very nature of the physical universe. Information is at once superior to and deeper than biology because it can encompass other life-forms on other planets that may indeed exist somewhere. Information appears to be less like Aristotle’s form and more like Plato’s eternal idea.

  When I first ran across claims like this one, which essentially argue that it is information pattern that defines life, not matter, that organization is what counts, not the material of which it is made, I was deeply puzzled. What does it really mean that information, computation, and feedback are more important than molecules, sugars, and lipids, not to speak of bone and muscle and flesh? Are these biological realities incidental to what we think of as life? What is “information” in this context? For the moment, it is enough to say that after much reading, it became clear to me that this “ethereal commodity” has become dogma, at least for some. The word “information” is ubiquitous, and we know it is a valuable commodity, but its meaning changes with use. What is it?

  In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles asks, “When and where did information get constructed as a disembodied medium? How were researchers convinced that humans and machines are brothers under the skin?” By tracing the history of cybernetics and the interdisciplinary Macy conferences held between 1946 and 1953, Hayles argues that in the first conference Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon devised a theory of information that was at once dematerialized and decontextualized: “Shannon and Wiener defined information so that it would be calculated as the same value regardless of the contexts in which it was embedded, which is to say, they divorced it from meaning.”184 She further notes that not everyone at the conferences thought this was the best strategy.

  Hayles is right that the word “information” took a new turn with Shannon and Wiener, but she does not say that there was a long precedent for what Shannon and Wiener did. Separating symbols from their meanings to find the essential patterns or laws of human reasoning is what logicians have been doing since the Greeks. Galileo and Descartes both sought abstract solutions to the secrets of nature and mind. In his 1847 The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, the innovative logician George Boole wrote, “They who are acquainted with the present state of the theory of Symbolic Algebra, are aware, that the validity of the processes of analysis does not depend upon the interpretation of the symbols which are employed, but solely on their laws of combination.”185 Boole was interested in not only advances in logic but uncovering the laws of the human mind. As the mathematician Keith Devlin explains in his book Goodbye, Descartes, “Since Boole, logicians have regularly exploited the possibility of working with ‘meaningless’ symbols. By stripping away the meaning, it is possible to ignore much of the complexity of the real world and concentrate on the pure, abstract patterns of logic.”186 Whitehead writes, “The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular
sorts of entities.”187 These patterns are the “deep understanding” of existence. With such a theory, one can move easily from organic bodies to machines and back again. Information remains the same no matter what it is made of, and it is not dependent on its material, its context, or its meaning.

  Norbert Wiener opens a chapter called “Organization as the Message” in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950) by confessing that what follows will contain an element of “phantasy.” Fiction and dream will invade his science just a bit. Wiener’s main point, which makes the familiar distinction between form and matter, however, is emphatic, and, by his lights, nonfantastic: “The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made.” It is the pattern or form that counts, he tells us, whether the form is organic or of some other material: “The individuality of a body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance.”188 He ends the chapter by arguing that the reason “we cannot telegraph the pattern of a man from one place to another” is “due to technical difficulties.” In other words, soon it will be possible to beam a man from one place to another. His essential point is that “traffic” in the modern world “is overwhelmingly not so much the transmission of human bodies as the transmission of human information.”189 One can certainly argue that Wiener’s statement was right then and is even more right now. We are drowning in information.