Travels with "Darwin"

Two new books by Elizabeth Grosz have recently been published. The Nick of Time, Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, and Time Travels, Feminism, Nature, Power. The first, an exploration of "the space between the natural and the cultural, the space in which the biological blurs into and induces the cultural through its own self-variation" (1). The second, a series of essays exploring how "reconsidering our concepts of time might result in new concepts of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics" (1). Both books argue for a concept of time shaped by the critique of the metaphysics of presence, a concept of time that is not given over to the privilege of the present, but points to the future, to a probabilistic but still indeterminate yet-to-come that nevertheless may have the power to transform human and non-human life in the direction of those yet unknown futures.

The Nick of Time is a timely contribution to the history of philosophy. Making the point that "philosophy and theory in general" do not address Darwinism, Grosz performs the considerable service of addressing that failure (19). What will be of interest to philosophers is the claim that Darwin produces a postmodern account of origin; that each origin is a function of language; that it depends on what we call a species; and that what we call a species refers to an arbitrarily chosen set of similarities that render differences marginal or insignificant. As such, it is argued, differences form continua whose divisions are arbitrary; differences of degree rather than differences of kind (25). To the extent that similarities that comprise species are formed out of the continuous trajectories (continua) of differentiating differences, then perhaps it makes more sense to say that species may be defined by not so much by differences of degree, as by differential relations. This conception makes it much easier to move away from the concept of evolution by descent and filiation and to define the animal by transversal communications between heterogeneous populations.² Nevertheless, the point is made that analysis of species, like that of natural languages, relies on genealogy, temporal processes capable of retrospective not prospective analysis whose principles are individual variation, reproductive proliferation of individuals and species, and natural selection. The implication here is that insofar as such systems cannot be predicted, they are creatively organizing themselves in myriad ways. However, contrary to Grozs's thesis, the similarity of evolution to deconstruction may not produce the desire result, that is, the randomness or contingency of evolution or of any other process in the universe is subject to numerous limitations. The reasons for this are complex.

The dynamism, growth, and the transformability of living systems are said to arise as a function of abundant variation; the indefinite, serial, or recursive replication or reproduction and long-term magnification or elaboration of variation; and the selection of fitness among competing individuals, varieties, species (32). Into this postmodern picture of undecidability intrudes a disturbing mechanism, something completely independent of the names humans give to species. First, from Darwin himself, there is the framework provided by the Newtonian universe, an undeconstructed metaphysics formulated by the laws of thermo-dynamics, a closed system governed by discoverable laws but leading to an "economic heat death," entropically unwinding, like the universe itself (34). It is in this context that Malthus theorized exponential increases in populations while natural resources develop at a linear rate leading to competition and life and death struggles for resources. To the extent that this does not occur, that instead life evolves and at least apparently, proliferates, at least two other factors have to be taken into consideration.

One, there is the possibility that the universe is not a closed system at all, that it may not simply dissipate into a uniform temperature, cosmic wasteland, but that it is open. Minimally, we can at least embrace the object of non-equilibrium thermodynamics which studies structures that increase in complexity and increase capacity to do work—open systems through which matter flows—entering living beings as food, drink, and air, only to be transformed, then excreted. In open systems matter circulates and...