The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870-1920

Conclusion: New Folds in Space and Time

conclusion New Folds in Space and Time I n p a r t f o u r , i h a v e u s e d t h e p r o m i n e n t panoramic mode trope of “wandering” as a means of hybridizing a theoretically concrete position on the role of information processing with locomotion , sensation, and affect. Specifically, I extended earlier observations of class-based notions of distinction (Part One), the phenomenological domain of epistemological practices (Part Two), and the relationship between developmental thinking and narrative (Part Three) to understand the complex relationship between property acquisition and cultural memory. The next section characterizes one of the products of this hybridization: how new information-processing technologies opened up new ways of conceiving of biological relationships. Before we move to that characterization, it is important first to pause to suggest just how much cultural work the trope of wandering and its mediation of the two folds of processing space and time still does for us. The conceptual ecology is complex. The interactions between memory 1 and memory 2 contributed to remediating forms of wandering in old and new cultural products.1 Modern wanderers literally wandered the industrial infrastructure (using trains or cars) as a means of exploring the opportunities at the edge of an industrial society, as opposed to exploring the immediate countryside on 2 6 6 foot. It is no coincidence that two of the literary figures covered here helped promote this type of vision: Jack London on the railroads with The Road and Theodore Dreiser with the automobile in Hoosier Holiday.2 Other wandering figures emerged at this time as well. In 1914 Charlie Chaplin appeared in what would be his most enduring screen persona, the little tramp. In this film Chaplin mimics the action on the screen as he mimed the actions of the cameraman.3 It is possible that much of this figure’s popularity came from its complex relationship to industrial systems. Needing to participate in but never being quite contained by modern society, the wanderer provided a comforting counter-voice to emerging industrial systems that were more interested in evolving than moving . Much like Malcolm D. Forbes’s naturalization of the capacity to trot in horses (see Part One), the tramp achieved his cultural authority through the complex relationship between two durations of memory in modern society. Today it is easy to look back at these wanderers as miscast romantic longings for an earlier era. This ignores, however, the agency of the informational subject. Wanderers were more than critics of industry; they were explorers offering up new ways to use industrial infrastructures. In this regard, they experimented on themselves as agents constituted within an environment.4 One last biological example demonstrates the fecundity of looking at how information processing allowed for new folds in the processing of space and time, the phenotype/genotype distinction. Researchers began using the new ways of folding space and time to parse out the different kinds of variance exhibited by organisms. Importantly, this work depended on sequestering organisms from environmental fluctuations. This allowed researchers to differentiate two types of biological variance: variance due to environmental conditions and variance due to genetics. Mapping the variance due to genetics would at first require the tools of memory 2. This in turn allowed for a differentiation of two types of cellular environments: the nucleus, removed from the vagaries of experience, where the durations of chemicals crossed with the durations of the cell governed the dynamics of heredity, and the cytoplasm, where the body and world productively co-mingled in the durations of dynamics in action.5 These were not so much co-constitutions as a type of wave analysis, such as Fourier-transform analysis, that breaks complex waves into simpler constituent waves. The complex durations of embodied time were parsed into two new distinct durations. I have been calling these durations memory 1, the relationship between goods and stories, C O N C L U S I O N : N E W F O L D S I N S P A C E A N D T I M E / 2 6 7 and memory 2, the relationship between infrastructure and information. This parsing out also provided new ways of looking at cells and defining cellular spaces. Memory 1 embodied itself as a domain of interaction between environment and organism, known today as...