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Article Excerpt
American cellular biologist Lynn Margulis and science journalist Dorion Sagan's view of life processes is underlined by their comment in What is Life?, "Life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, recreates, and outdoes itself" (22). This idea is pitched at a somewhat different, but related, level by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who write, "[W]e are constituted in language in a continuous becoming that we bring forth with others" (234-35). What relates the biological creation of life to the discursive production of identity is the concept of autopoiesis that Margulis and Sagan borrow from Maturana and Varela. Defined by Margulis and Sagan as "life's continuous production of itself" (23), autopoiesis suggests that life can be regarded as not a state of being, but rather of becoming. The image of life as becoming is indeed powerful, for Margulis and Sagan's deployment of autopoiesis challenges the traditional portrayal of Darwinian evolution as supporting a competitive individualism. That autopoietic systems, moreover, defer any notion of a discrete self-identity connects them to Judith Butler's argument in Bodies That Matter that performativity constitutes subject formation, where no self exists before or beyond performance.
This connection between Margulis and Sagan and Butler is significant, I propose, because it allows us better to understand how the social materialization of performance in the United States in the early twentieth century becomes informed by a shift from natural to cultural readings of evolution. Anticipating Margulis and Sagan's critique of competitive individualism, Edith Wharton's 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, suggests that economic, social, and political changes challenge the validity of natural selection. And rather than endorsing a biologically determined identity, Wharton elaborates a self-destabilizing narrative of performance that mimics a nation always in a state of becoming, which discloses anxieties about national citizenship and belonging. (1) In what follows, I first offer a theoretical analysis of the connections between evolution and performance, before discussing how, in The Custom of the Country, Wharton's understanding of debates among evolutionary theorists, such as Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Russel Wallace, shapes her investigation of how social environments shape performative identities. (2)
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Margulis and Sagan's rereading of evolution emphasizes Darwin's idea that life forms are interconnected. In What is Life?, they refer to the final passage of the Origin of Species, where Darwin describes life as "an entangled bank," containing a multitude of "elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner" (Origin 489). From here, Margulis and Sagan propose that "individuality, always in flux, is relative" (110). And if life is so entangled, then the belief in a competitive struggle is undermined, or at least, complicated. They comment that living beings "are no more inherently bloodthirsty, competitive, and carnivorous than they are peaceful, cooperative, and languid" (192). That natural conditions in no way demand that competitive individualism take prime place in the discourse of evolution supports their proposal to rethink the neo-Darwinist approach to natural selection. Evolution occurs, they posit, chiefly through the acquisition and exchange of genomes by organisms in symbiotic, not competitive, relationships. Their embrace of British geo-chemist James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which depicts the Earth's biosphere as a single, self-regulating system, radically expands the perspective from which interlocking symbiotic relationships are viewed. They write, "Gaia is symbiosis seen from space" (156). Thus natural selection is transformed: "Evolution is no mechanical law but a complex of processes, sensitive and symbiogenetic, in part resulting from the choices and actions of evolving organic beings themselves. Natural selection is often said to 'favor' this or that trait. But the nature that selects is largely alive. Nature is no black box but a kind of sentient symphony" (134).
While opposed to the idea of a unified, individual self, Margulis and Sagan still argue for some level of self-control. Applying Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoiesis, they contend that an organism is connected to its environment; evolutionary development is not random, but directed according to the "internal teleology of the autopoietic imperative" (184). Life as "continuous production of itself," as becoming, not being, is what allows for Margulis and Sagan's argument for goal-directed evolution. As they put it, "Nonhuman beings choose, and all beings influence the lives of others" (180).
Such choice does not serve human interests; instead, it blurs the distinctions between human and nonhuman life forms. Margulis and Sagan are rather contemptuous of claims for human superiority, which they discredit in part by critiquing the humanistic inflections in the language used to describe evolutionary processes. They assert in Acquiring Genomes that value-laden ideas, such as competition, "have been borrowed from human enterprises and forced on science from politics, business, and social thought" (16). While humanistic and economic language does at times seep into their own descriptions of genomic acquisition as marriage or corporate merger (72), a more crucial issue, I think, is how the trope of vision both informs and is articulated through their evolutionary model; recall, for instance, their statement that "Gaia is symbiosis seen from space." What makes such an issue so vital is that their model relies heavily on the concept of autopoiesis, without due regard for the complexity of vision that it introduces. As Maturana and Varela assert, autopoietic systems cannot be said directly to perceive their environments, because "the operational closure of the nervous system" means that it "does not 'pick up information' from the environment, as we often hear. On the contrary, it brings forth a world by specifying what patterns of the environment are perturbations and what changes trigger them in the organism" (169). They would, I believe, be somewhat skeptical about Margulis and Sagan's claim that natural selection is life making choices governed by an "internal teleology." As they remark, "[T]he observer can point out that, from among the many changes he sees as possible, each perturbation has triggered ('chosen') one and not another from that whole body" (101). Similarly, "We can thus describe the behavior of an organism as though it arose from the operation of its nervous system with representations of the environment or as an expression of some goal-oriented process. These descriptions, however, do not reflect the operation of the nervous system itself" (131-32). As a result, any notion of choice or goal-directedness in evolution is there because it was introduced by the perspective of the observer.
But Maturana and Varela's disavowal of natural selection leaves their account of evolution incomplete. Stating that natural selection is merely an "apt metaphor" (101), they define evolution as the "conservation of autopoiesis and adaptation." (3) According to N. Katherine Hayles, the problem with arguing for the conservation of autopoiesis is that the organism's "organization is conserved" which "does nothing to articulate autopoiesis with evolutionary change" (152). Two important ideas thus emerge. First, Margulis and Sagan's model complements that of Maturana and Varela's; the former provides a rationale for evolutionary change, through genomic acquisition, absent in the latter. Second, although Maturana and Varela stress the importance of the observer, the political and historical location of the observer remains inadequately addressed. For Cary Wolfe, "Maturana and Varela drain the assertion of contingency of its materialist, pragmatic force ... [A]ll points of view are not equally valid precisely because they have material effects whose benefits and drawbacks are distributed asymmetrically in the social field" (Critical Environments 79). The challenge that I want to take up is to re-theorize vision in evolving...
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