This discussion of the relationship between biology and capitalist ideology reminded me of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin exhibition, which I went to see in London over Christmas. While the connection between Darwinian evolution and a Malthusian economy of scarcity and competition is often remarked on and fairly obvious, there are other ways of construing the capitalist economy that also have interesting parallels with Darwin’s understanding of evolution. What struck me at the Darwin exhibition was the importance of abundance. What caused Darwin to look for an alternative to a religious account of creation was the huge number of subtly different species he encounted. This struck him as excessive: why would God have created so many species? Doubtless one reason this occurred is because a 19th century scientist was in a position, unlike most people throughout history, had the opportunity to travel the world and see a greater variety of animals than would usually be seen. But I wonder, too, if Darwin’s ability to see the excessive creativity of biology wasn’t also due to the unprecedented productivity of industrial capitalism.

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Anarchism is the usher of science-the master of ceremonies to all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development. From the natural resources of the earth, all artificial restrictions, that the body might be nurtures, and from universal truth, all bars of prejudice and superstition, that the mind may develop symmetrically (“The Principles of Anarchism”).

Which is not to say that Parsons was only interested in science as a theoretical enterprise. Rather, she emphasized how technology changed the conditions of labor and resistance; including in some unconventional ways:

Each of you hungry tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land.

Learn the use of explosives! (“To Tramps”).

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This, incidentally, is why William Lane Craig is a fucking idiot. A modern advocate of the cosmological argument, he doesn’t seem to be aware that the word “cause” in “first cause,” translation of the ancient Greek αἴτιον, doesn’t mean what the modern English “cause” means, but instead is bound up with Aristotelian metaphysics. But I digress (in more “fucking idiot” news, see A. C. Grayling vs. Steve Fuller, like some kind of chain-reaction of stupidness).

Anyway. Religion and science are both ways of using reason to make sense of the world; but it occoured to me the other day that, because I usually take theologians as the best representatives of religion (after all, they’re the ones who know most about it), I’d sort of missed a distinction. You can have a system of using reason to make sense of the world without expecting everyone involved to make use of reason themselves, where the weight of reasoning is taken on by particular people. This is clearly the case with Catholicism, and I think it’s somewhat true of Islam, too. On the other hand, modern science is supposed to be accessible to everyone’s reason (something it shares, I imagine not coincidentally, with Protestantism).

But the “supposed to” is kind of important here; obviously not everyone actually has equal access to scientific knowledge, and this emphasis on formal, rather than substantive, universality, makes science’s self-understanding a little like bourgeois rights. What would science look like if it were organized around making its methods and knowledge actually universally available? It seems to me this is what a Marxist science should be about, rather than proving Marx’s metaphysics. Well, that’s kind of obvious; Marxist science wouldn’t be about having the right ideas, but about changing the material conditions in which these ideas are produced.

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If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works.

In response to which the New Scientist compared him to Sarah Palin, and a couple of Nobel laureates are calling for him to be sacked from his position as education director of the Royal Society. And of course Dawkins got involved.

I initially posted this just because I thought it was amusingly stupid. But now I think there may be something a bit more pernicious going on. A number of people objecting to Reiss have said things like “teach creation in religious studies,” or “keep it in philosophy class” (see e.g. the comments on that New Scientist blog post). What’s wrong about this is the suggestion that philosophy of science, or the question of the nature and bounds of science, is irrelevant to science itself. This is a problem because it implies a belief that a scientific worldview is somehow obvious, rather than a particular way of thinking that took a long time and a lot of trouble to develop.

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“I’m gonna be a tractor,” Garretson said. “Tractors are fun.”

Although Garretson does not have a six-cylinder diesel engine, independent-link suspension, or a comfort command seat with air-suspension swivel, the 5-year-old said she was excited to be both red and shiny someday. Garretson added that as a tractor she would sleep in the barn with the cows and the chickens, but not with the pigs, because the pigs make too much of a mess.

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It’s funny, though, that these advocates of our glorious extropian future don’t seem to realize how historically specific is the idea of the “human” that they’re so keen to transcend. As Foucault puts it in The Order of Things:

It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that  man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form (xxiii).

The transhumanist idea that at some point in the future technology will lead to a radical alteration of what it means to be human assumes that there is something fixed about “what it means to be human” in the first place. But it seems to me that, if there is a defining characteristic of human beings, it’s our lack of a defining characteristic: “man is what he is not, and is not what he is,” as Sartre says. To put it another way, the technological event that changed the meaning of being human is the invention of technology itself; our bold futurists aren’t just 19th century throwbacks: they’re a couple of million years behind the times.

The other 19th century ideology underlying transhumanism, of course, is the idea of progress, the idea that the present will have its meaning given to it by something existing in the future; “the desire to be saved by something that isn’t there (or even the desire to be destroyed by something that isn’t there) and throws off no evidence of its ever intending to exist,” as Ellis puts it. Though he doesn’t mention it in the post, this aspect of the Singularity ties in with Ellis’s new comic series. Doktor Sleepless is about the future or, rather, the absence of the future. The story is complicated, and the motivation and character of the “cartoon mad scientist,” Doktor Sleepless remain opaque. One theme, though is disappoint at the failure of the future to materialize: “where’s my jetpack?” But I wonder if the Doktor’s nurse (in the panels at the top of the post) doesn’t have it right. If the future was always a trick, “pie in the sky when you die,” shouldn’t we start thinking about the absence of the future as a liberation?

(This might tie in with discussions at Nate’s about an obsession with “newness” in political theory, as well as Benjamin’s connection of futurity with social democratic reformism. And, I recommend reading Doktor Sleepless while listening to Benga’s  “Zombie Jig”).

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So given this, I was interested to discover that the USSR had its own analogous cybernetic moment. According to this review of the splendidly titled 1959 work, Cybernetics at Service of Communism (3 volumes, US Department of Commerce), cybernetics seems to have been adopted in the USSR as something like an extension of Taylorism to the whole of society. This brings up all kinds of Dialectic of Enlightenment-type questions about whether the rationalization of society doesn’t also always involve an objectification of society and hence unfreedom. Firestone is interesting here because she applies a Marxist method of a sort, without the productivist assumptions that made rationalization seem like a non-problem. Now, Firestone is certainly a rationalist of a sort (most obviously in her resolutely anti-psychoanalytical account of post-revolutionary sexuality); is this a rationalism which, enlightenment-style, transforms into its other? Or will the future cybernetic communism acheive what actually existing cybernetic communism only parodied?

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A particularly good illustration of this point is the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It’s housed in a building designed as a “Cathedral to Science,” which has much the same kind of neo-Gothic sense of the sacred as Victorian railway stations, with vaulted ceilings, saints of science (Newton, Darwin, erm, Prince Albert) on plinths along one wall, reconstructed dinosaurs looming over the visitors. And I don’t mean that facetiously; there really is something religious about 19th century industrial modernity, but, as I say, that’s not necessarily a criticism. Unless you sign up to the village atheist position that the entire history of religion is some kind of inexplicable mass stupidity, presumably you have to recognize that religious ways of thinking have had some utility; shouldn’t we actually expect post-religious ways of thinking to fulfill some of the same rôles as religion? The French revolutionaries, with their religion of reason, and the Victorians, with their more plainspeaking (and thus significantly more arrogant) devotion to truth, mocked by Nietzsche, were largely right.

The OU Museum of Natural History’s exemplary quality doesn’t stop there, however. Rather splendidly, the museum treats natural history itself historically. What was once natural history’s central activity, classification, is turned into a game for children, while the museum exhibits flagrently refuse to classify anything at all. I don’t have Moll‘s knowledge of the anthropology of museum representations of science, but I was fascinated by the way the exhibits recognized the contingency of what have been considered scientific facts at different times. Science becomes an eminently human activity.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the Museum of Natural History instantiates a Feuerbachian self-overcoming of religion; which is something much more interesting than broadsheet denunciations of religion or atheism.

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Benjamin himself describes this as the construction of “an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly,’” the activity of the collector. Benjamin writes:

What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this “completeness”? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. (Arcades, H1a, 2)

How new is this system of collection, however? Is it not, in fact, the strange unmooring of a rather older system? In his chapter on “Classifying” in The Order of Things, Foucault describes “a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history“:

The documents of this new history are not other words, texts, or records, but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed: herbariums, collections, gardens; the locus of this history is a non-temporal rectangle in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside another, their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features, and thus already virtually analysed, and bearers of nothing except their own individual names…. The natural history room and the garden, as created in the Classical preiod, replace the circular procession of the “show” with the arrangement of things in a “table.” (131)

Cornell presents a kind of parodic fulfillment on this sort of natural history, producing “tables” displaying, not natural objects, but the ephemera of history itself. The collector is a parody of the scientist because, by the late 19th century, this method no longer makes sense to us; and Cornell is a parody of the collector because his assemblages of objects no longer have any purpose except to display what he knows is “a surprising and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connection” (Arcades, H2,7).

Something similarly incomprehensible greets the visitor to SFMOMA’s Olafur Eliasson exhibition. His piece “Model Room” is like a department store run by a mad scientist. Shelves overflow with imaginative pieces of solid geometry, stellated dodecahedrons, strange wire toroi, a kaleidoscope with the mirrors angled just so, reflecting the couple of pieces of wire at the end into a copper sphere. But Eliasson’s madness is, I think, different from Cornell’s; a collection not based on obsession, but on exuberance.

If Cornell’s work appears so fantastical because of its relation to a now impossible science, Eliasson’s is almost spookily up to date. Perhaps the clearest example of this is “Remagine,” a painting that isn’t there, as it were, formed by the overlapping light cast by a series of lamps. As with many of the works on display here, the art is intangible, immaterial, rarefied like information theory, particle physics, or cosmology. Other of Eliasson’s works emphasize nature, as with the both beautiful and rather eery “Moss Wall” (a wall of the gallery covered in still-living moss) and his photographs of stark Icelandic landscapes. Perhaps the most charming installations combine both these qualities. The rainbow-in-a-room of “Beauty” is a painstaking re-building of nature as artifice. I find myself standing in the middle of an art gallery suddenly thinking of Heston Blumenthal’s molecular gastronomy.

(The title of this post comes from a very different, but equally entertaining, idea of science, Jonathon Coulton’s song, “Still Alive”)

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