History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, "Sketches of a Conceptual History of Epigenesis" cluster, 2018
Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently... more Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic ''self-organization'' as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the episte-mological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant's heuristics of autonomous ''self-or-ganization'' in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought's critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigen-esis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of ''self-organization,'' allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.
Goethe’s late life science project, the journal On Morphology – and the living specimens it inves... more Goethe’s late life science project, the journal On Morphology – and the living specimens it investigated – were unusually heterogeneous and decadent forms. This piece examines Goethe’s neglected essay on the botany of “Dissipation” for the way it subverts vitalist and idealist discourses in biology to rethink living form under the aspect of its material dispersion. Here Goethe begins to substitute events that are non-procreative, but perhaps communicative, for the questions of embryogenesis and organization that had been foundational to the early life sciences. What, the morphologist asks instead, might life look like from the perspective of the particulate losses that mediate between beings? What forms of representation would be adequate to this view?
This essay explores Percy Shelley’s "The Triumph of Life" as a strategic revival of Lucretian poe... more This essay explores Percy Shelley’s "The Triumph of Life" as a strategic revival of Lucretian poetic science: a materialism fit to connect the epochal, romantic interest in biological life to the period’s pressing new sense of its own historicity. Shelley mobilizes Lucretian natural simulacra to show how personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time, exercising a poetics of transience that resists the triumphalism characteristic of both historiography and vitalist biology in the post-Waterloo period. Representing aging faces as mutable registers of the ‘‘living storm’’ of a post-Napoleonic interval, The Triumph depicts the face-giving trope of prosopopoeia as the unintended work of multitudes—demonstrating a nineteenth-century possibility of thinking biological, historical, and rhetorical materialisms together.
At the very outset of the so-called Anthropocene, through the lens of a social theory since releg... more At the very outset of the so-called Anthropocene, through the lens of a social theory since relegated to the “utopian” margins of critical thought, the visionary socialist Charles Fourier diagnosed a problem that mainstream modern science would spend much of the twentieth-century structurally unable to see: anthropogenic climate disruption and its etiology in the “progress” of European industry, slavery and colonial empire. This essay explores the heterodox naturalism that enabled such a prescient diagnosis, as well as the subversive image of “terraformation” that Fourier projected as a cure. For in contrast to today’s advocates of geo-engineering (but in concert with critics working to decolonize Anthropocene ecology), Fourier percieved that those who believe they know how to control the earth’s climate are the least capable agents of its emancipatory re-creation. He advanced, instead, the heretical proposition that nonhuman natures, no less than human ones, answer to justice and pleasure, rather than necessity and force. His dissident eco-social science thus aimed not to enable his Enlightened compatriots to engineer, but to disable them from thwarting the dazzling terrestrial futures that the earth’s other constituents were literally dying to create. Fourier’s techno-pastoral prophecies of orchestrated planetary transformation, then, beckon outside the familiar alternative between technofuturist hubris and ecological precaution, offering visions of multispecies luxury predicated on the abandonment of coercive labor and the adoption of a technics co-invented with human and non-human Others of Man. Next to the insane faith that our flourishing can still be founded on the earth’s domination (if only we do it right this time), Fourier’s outlandish prophecies, as Walter Benjamin once observed, “prove surprisingly sound.”
This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th... more This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th-century science of life, arguing that Darwin's theory of animation constitutes an unrecognized chapter in the history of what is now called "biosemiotics." I show how Darwin's earlier modern approach to epigenesis and plasticity-concepts resurgent not only in present day developmental biology and neuro-science, but also in continental theory and philosophy-challenges these present discourses to grasp mimesis, poiesis, and rhetoric as intrinsic to the logic of life and to any possible science of the biological sign. Uncovering this possibility means displacing Catherine Malabou's influential neo-Kantian approach to plasticity, which, like that of Kant himself, works to suppress the natural histories of meaning that epigenesis opened in the late 18th, as well as the late 20th, centuries. From the alternative, materialist perspective opened in Erasmus Darwin's work, rhetoric and poetics are implicated in the historical and actual conceptualization of epigenetic plasticity and biosemiosis not because biology is a fictive discourse, but because neural formation and communication comprise processes of transposition, association, double-meaning, part-for-whole substitution, and species-specific distortion that are actually and technically rhetorical and poetic. From this perspective, the most baffling and notorious feature of Erasmus Darwin's own use of words can also be conceived anew. His commitment to presenting science in, or better as, poetry constitutes a neurologically informed pedagogical strategy: a means of setting readers' sensoria in motion, premised on the fundamental educability of bodies that can live.
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, "Sketches of a Conceptual History of Epigenesis" cluster, 2018
Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently... more Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic ''self-organization'' as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the episte-mological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant's heuristics of autonomous ''self-or-ganization'' in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought's critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigen-esis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of ''self-organization,'' allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.
Goethe’s late life science project, the journal On Morphology – and the living specimens it inves... more Goethe’s late life science project, the journal On Morphology – and the living specimens it investigated – were unusually heterogeneous and decadent forms. This piece examines Goethe’s neglected essay on the botany of “Dissipation” for the way it subverts vitalist and idealist discourses in biology to rethink living form under the aspect of its material dispersion. Here Goethe begins to substitute events that are non-procreative, but perhaps communicative, for the questions of embryogenesis and organization that had been foundational to the early life sciences. What, the morphologist asks instead, might life look like from the perspective of the particulate losses that mediate between beings? What forms of representation would be adequate to this view?
This essay explores Percy Shelley’s "The Triumph of Life" as a strategic revival of Lucretian poe... more This essay explores Percy Shelley’s "The Triumph of Life" as a strategic revival of Lucretian poetic science: a materialism fit to connect the epochal, romantic interest in biological life to the period’s pressing new sense of its own historicity. Shelley mobilizes Lucretian natural simulacra to show how personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time, exercising a poetics of transience that resists the triumphalism characteristic of both historiography and vitalist biology in the post-Waterloo period. Representing aging faces as mutable registers of the ‘‘living storm’’ of a post-Napoleonic interval, The Triumph depicts the face-giving trope of prosopopoeia as the unintended work of multitudes—demonstrating a nineteenth-century possibility of thinking biological, historical, and rhetorical materialisms together.
At the very outset of the so-called Anthropocene, through the lens of a social theory since releg... more At the very outset of the so-called Anthropocene, through the lens of a social theory since relegated to the “utopian” margins of critical thought, the visionary socialist Charles Fourier diagnosed a problem that mainstream modern science would spend much of the twentieth-century structurally unable to see: anthropogenic climate disruption and its etiology in the “progress” of European industry, slavery and colonial empire. This essay explores the heterodox naturalism that enabled such a prescient diagnosis, as well as the subversive image of “terraformation” that Fourier projected as a cure. For in contrast to today’s advocates of geo-engineering (but in concert with critics working to decolonize Anthropocene ecology), Fourier percieved that those who believe they know how to control the earth’s climate are the least capable agents of its emancipatory re-creation. He advanced, instead, the heretical proposition that nonhuman natures, no less than human ones, answer to justice and pleasure, rather than necessity and force. His dissident eco-social science thus aimed not to enable his Enlightened compatriots to engineer, but to disable them from thwarting the dazzling terrestrial futures that the earth’s other constituents were literally dying to create. Fourier’s techno-pastoral prophecies of orchestrated planetary transformation, then, beckon outside the familiar alternative between technofuturist hubris and ecological precaution, offering visions of multispecies luxury predicated on the abandonment of coercive labor and the adoption of a technics co-invented with human and non-human Others of Man. Next to the insane faith that our flourishing can still be founded on the earth’s domination (if only we do it right this time), Fourier’s outlandish prophecies, as Walter Benjamin once observed, “prove surprisingly sound.”
This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th... more This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th-century science of life, arguing that Darwin's theory of animation constitutes an unrecognized chapter in the history of what is now called "biosemiotics." I show how Darwin's earlier modern approach to epigenesis and plasticity-concepts resurgent not only in present day developmental biology and neuro-science, but also in continental theory and philosophy-challenges these present discourses to grasp mimesis, poiesis, and rhetoric as intrinsic to the logic of life and to any possible science of the biological sign. Uncovering this possibility means displacing Catherine Malabou's influential neo-Kantian approach to plasticity, which, like that of Kant himself, works to suppress the natural histories of meaning that epigenesis opened in the late 18th, as well as the late 20th, centuries. From the alternative, materialist perspective opened in Erasmus Darwin's work, rhetoric and poetics are implicated in the historical and actual conceptualization of epigenetic plasticity and biosemiosis not because biology is a fictive discourse, but because neural formation and communication comprise processes of transposition, association, double-meaning, part-for-whole substitution, and species-specific distortion that are actually and technically rhetorical and poetic. From this perspective, the most baffling and notorious feature of Erasmus Darwin's own use of words can also be conceived anew. His commitment to presenting science in, or better as, poetry constitutes a neurologically informed pedagogical strategy: a means of setting readers' sensoria in motion, premised on the fundamental educability of bodies that can live.
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