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AN ARCHIGENESIS OF EXPERIENCE
Luciana Parisi
Published online: 28 May 2009.
To cite this article: Luciana Parisi (2009) AN ARCHIGENESIS OF EXPERIENCE, Australian Feminist
Studies, 24:59, 39-51, DOI: 10.1080/08164640802645141
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AN ARCHIGENESIS OF EXPERIENCE
Luciana Parisi
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There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming. The actual occasions
are the creatures which become, and they constitute a continuously extensive world.
(Whitehead 1978, 35)
Alfred North Whitehead conceives of a processual metaphysics whose continual
dynamics are defined not by a seamless plenum but by actual occasions, complex
arrangements of experience, breaking the continuum into atomic spatio-temporalities
while coming into being. For continuity without rupture allows for no act of veritable
becoming, but only for change, slight variations from the past to the present. Becoming
requires not movement from A to B but the achievements of atomic singularity, which can
neither move nor be divided. How is it possible, Whitehead asks, to reconcile spatiotemporal continuity with the spatio-temporal break of an event? How is the continuum of
infinite divisibility reconciled with the atomicity of actualities? Such a continuum,
Whitehead suggests, is purely potential yet it is indefinitely divisible. The actual occasion,
on the contrary, is atomic and cannot be divided. The actual occasion determines the
continuum as an act of becoming, which breaks from the perpetual mechanism of cause
and effects, allowing the potentiality for divisibility to become divided, singularised,
determined as new (Whitehead 1978, 3545).
Whitehead’s conception of an atomic time may help us to rethink feminist timelines
and to reconsider the notion of generation not in terms of a continuity in becoming but as
a becoming of continuity. In other words, to what extent can the concept of generation for
feminism defy the metaphysics of continuity, where feminist timelines are held together
by the phenomenological unity of sexual experience?
The notion of generation primarily defines genetically related organisms in a line of
descent. Here the genetic past is the hereditary material for a future contained by what
has already happened, a sort of return to the future stripped of all futurity. Yet feminist
timelines have never come in the order of sequential steps as governed by the mechanistic
chain of cause and effects deployed by the physical inheritance of the past into the
present. Indeed, where do feminist timelines begin and end if not in irregular diversions,
break-ups or fractal cuts in sexual experience?
The notion of generation, then, may need to be rethought away from a genealogy of
descent, which both genetically and historically unites feminist timelines into chronological time. To contain feminist timelines within the framework of biological or historical
inheritance may simply work to reify the ontology of identity, based on the transparency
of lived experiences, a physical nature that either determines an inheritance of biological
experience or a common history of deconstruction from such ideological nature. Even
when more than one historical experience is considered (of sexual difference together
with class struggle, for example) as a way to challenge the naturalisation of experience, the
spatio-temporal grid of identity remains unchallenged. What remains unchallenged,
Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 24, No. 59, March 2009
ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/09/010039-13
– 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08164640802645141
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LUCIANA PARISI
indeed, is the assumption that feminist timelines coincide with a gridlock of lived,
physically inherited positions from the past to the present.
In short, to think of feminist generation according to sequential timelines as those
represented by an inherited grid of positions is to under-evaluate the spatio-temporal
nexus of transitory relations, whereby the inheritance of the past into the present may
necessarily imply a break from the continuum for a novel experience of sexual difference
to come. The concern here is not for feminist timelines but primarily with feminist
timelines in a curving spatio-temporal continuum, the extension of sexual difference
outside the logic of chronos, the becoming of sexual difference as singular events
occupying determinate spatio-temporal blocs, implicating the potentiality of all experience of sexual difference into the eventuation of a complex extensive region.
From this standpoint, it may be useful to ask: why are we concerned with feminist
generations in the age of post-cybernetic capitalism, when spatio-temporal experience
coincides with the co-happenings of here and there, before and after (a sort of symbiosis
between past and future in an imperceptible all-too-fast present)? Is such concern with
feminist generation just an attempt to archive a feminist past in an information age
governed by short-term memory or forgetting? Perhaps not. The advanced condition of
political senility triggered by the devouring capitalist appetite for novelty may indeed
point importantly to the deployment of sexual experience in the non-linear workings of
time: if the past can no longer be remembered it is because, as Bergson pointed out, it
occurs not before the present but rather concurs with it. The past is not in the experience
that was but in the movement of a present to be. Perhaps the concern with feminist
timelines is not directed simply towards archiving the past but rather towards the
construction of an archive of the future; an extended nexus of incompossible experiences
where the past ceaselessly runs after the present since the present is, as Whitehead
argued, always occupied by the future: ‘The past has an objective existence in the present
which lies in the future beyond itself’ (Whitehead 1933, 191). The germ of futurity into the
past, however, serves not to justify the continual flow of timelines. Rather, such germinal
activity of the future in the past only attains to the continuum as infinite potentiality for
divisibility, which is eventuated into a future breaking from the past, or of the becoming of
continuity, a novel occasion of experience that cuts from the efficient mechanism of cause
and effect.
The current concern with feminist generation, then, may indicate a kind of
presentiment for a sexual experience of a future moving ‘in the crannies of the present’
faster than the speed of light. In particular, the increasing investment of post-cybernetic
capitalism in the present-futurity of the molecular, nano and subatomic scales of matter
highlights an unforeseeable, un-sensed complexity of timelines, a critical point at which
the genealogy of the human species, the bio-logic of sexual difference and sexual
reproduction, and ultimately the generative evolution of life, may be radically transformed.
In short, the concern with feminist generation may implicitly address a concern with
the technocapitalist investment in ontogenesis*the generative capacities of life*where
the nano-designing of atomic matter is triggering the re-ingression of the biogenetic
strata of the human species and organic life into a non-biotic (unlived) past-futurity, before
yet after the order of life. Here, what counts as sexual experience risks becoming a pregenetic, subatomic and non-biological archigenesis of matter ready to insert imperceptible
nanovariations of sex in the lineages of feminist generations, impacting on the efficient
chain of cause and effect, the inheritance of the past in the present.
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AN ARCHIGENESIS OF EXPERIENCE
In this climate of nanoengineering, the issue is not simply the disappearance of
genetico-historical generations of feminism. Indeed, it serves very little here to order
feminist timelines into a past that is as unsettled as the future. The biological certainty of
sexed difference, the organic experience able to overcome all cultural relativisms, no
longer seems able to resist the technical re-insertion of the non-organic into a yet-to-bedetermined sex. Such non-organic mutations of sexual experience open the biological
genealogy of sex to the nanomovement of matter, where the future enters the past, reengineering ancient memories into an unforeseeable present. As previously suggested,
together with Whitehead, the becoming of continuity requires a break in the physical
chain of cause and effect, the atomisation of the continuum allowing for the future to cut
from the past. The nanomanipulation of the genetic past as data (algorithmic information)
rather adds another level of discontinuity directly investing the past, adding another layer
of inheritance into the genetics of the past-future.
Call such nanoprocessing of matter, an archigenetics of becoming, an incitation to
break the inherited continuity in the biophysics of sexual difference. Such archigenetics
invites a rethinking of the spatio-temporal experience of sexual difference beyond the
efficient chain of physical cause and effects. Such experience rather implies an unlived
abstraction; an experience whose singularity is irreducible to temporal continuity, since it
continuously confronts the complex assemblage of an extensive continuum out of which
spatio-temporal occasions generate. Whitehead’s notion of the extensive continuum
serves to challenge the ‘fallacy of simple location’, claiming that space and time are
secondary appearances and not the feature of objective reality. Such an extensive
continuum defines the primacy of space or extension as that which connects time with
time. The extensive continuum allows for congruent relations to extend to the temporal
realm, and to give to local time its proper extension; a fibred time uniformly flowing
through the criss-crossing paths of space-time with its infinite creeks, shortcuts and
detours (Whitehead 1978, 6366).
From the standpoint of the extensive continuum, nanoprocessing entails not simply
the remixing of the past and the future but the anticipation of future spatialities into the
past, which in turn is inherited in the present, whose capacity to become present lies in
breaking up from the past towards the future. Yet such a process would be tautological
and lead to an eternal spiral of continuity, if there were no potential for the atomic break
of an actual occasion in such temporal looping, defining the extensive region of an event.
How, then, in such nanoprocessing*when chronological spatio-temporality (the efficient
chain of inheritance of the past in the present) becomes open to infinite manipulation and
imperceptible division*is it possible to account for a novel occasion of experience for a
novel proposition of feminist generation?
Whilst some notions of genealogy (e.g. Foucault)1 have disentangled feminist
timelines from universal history, focusing on local, discontinuous, illegitimate knowledges,
an archigenetics of sexual difference may perhaps suggest that time folds back into an
extensive continuum of pre-acceleration, expanding in an elastic fashion, moving ahead of
movement. As Erin Manning has recently put it, this is ‘a movement of the not-yet [. . .] a
speed virtually prolonged, always already forgetting to actualize’ (Manning 2009, 45).
Whilst the formation of minor genealogies has precisely attacked ontologies of
linear descent, an archigenetics of sex rethinks feminist timelines beyond the primacy of
space and time as unlived sexes running beneath the bio-logic of experience. What is
shared by feminism is not primarily the lived time-space of sexual difference but the
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untimely spatium of unlived relation; an archigenetics of non-sensuous sex, a felt
connection in abstraction.
Instead of tracing feminist genealogies, this archigenetics is concerned with a
feminine war-machine, moving in the interstices of the chain of cause and effects, past and
present occasions, in the void of spatio-temporal coordinates. Here, the concern is neither
with time nor with space but with an extensive continuum, an intensive spatium of gaps,
lapses, anomalies, breaks from the linear inheritance of the physical past into the present.
Such a war-machine has nothing to do with militarised activism, with interventionism and
positioning, but it has all to do with the real activity of extensive abstraction: a pure
potentiality for division, for processing becoming, a creative advance of destruction and
production entangled to activities of prehension, anticipation, presentiment composing
the alinear spatio-temporal nexus of sexual experience. A war-machine of femininity
exposes the causal chain of feminist generation to veritable tectonic vibrations,
earthquakes and fissures in the experience of sexual difference; a schizoecology of sex
whose social, affective, and technical machines are directly connected to the unlived,
untimely, unthought.
The notion of feminist generation seems to be concerned with what Whitehead calls
the one-way descending series of efficient cause. This is a physical causality where the past
is inherited in the present and events are arranged in a sequential chain of cause and
effects. For Whitehead, efficient causality defines the naturalistic chain of causes and
effects, the way an entity inherits the weighty conditions of the ‘immortal past’ (1978, 210).
Hence, each entity is causally dependent on each predecessor, which the entity feels as its
cause. Thus, efficient cause defines the objective transmission of the affective power of a
precedent entity. In such chain of inheritance, defined by the repetition of affective power,
a deviation from the physical past occurs; as Whitehead highlights: ‘the repetition is not
perfect’ (1978, 237). For Whitehead, this is because time is irreversible and thus the initial
conditions never match the final conditions of a system according to the law of
thermodynamics. Similarly, the conditions of repetition in the present can never be
equivalent to the original conditions of the past. For Whitehead, ‘two entities cannot have
identical actual worlds’ (1978, 210). The repetition of the past in the present cannot be
perfect since inheritance itself is never simply neutral. Every act of inheritance involves a
valuation of the data inherited on behalf of the receiving entity, valuing data ‘up and
down’ (1978, 224). As a result, the affective power of the inherited world is appropriated
selectively according to qualities of adversion and aversion, distaste and attraction (1978,
234). Such selective appropriation entails a conceptual, and not simply physical,
prehension of the inheritance of affective power from the past. A conceptual prehension
allows for the selection of the qualities (the eternal object or pure potentialities) implicit in
the data inherited.
Thus, the efficient chain of physical cause and effects is doubled by a final cause of
valuation and selection of the qualities of inherited data. The act of becoming of an entity
thus resides in such activity of conceptual selection of qualities, which does not simply
interrupt the physical cause but accompanies it, demanding to be recognised alongside it.
Hence no dualism is at play here between efficient or final cause, between physical and
mental poles of an entity. Whitehead’s double mutual causality contributes to complicating the notion of generation, the gravitational weight of the inherited past, whose
continual physical chain is superseded by another layer of causality oriented towards
the future, and exposed to the reversal activity of the future in the past. The conceptual
AN ARCHIGENESIS OF EXPERIENCE
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selection of the qualitative force of inherited data enables futurity to enter the present, to
atomise the actual occasion. As a result, a veritable becoming of experience occurs as the
affirmation of an event, whereby the past ceases to be in order for the present to become
anew.
The double causality (of efficient and final cause implying physical and conceptual
prehensions) acts to immanently connect not only the historical, cultural and biological
experience of sex but also the molecular, atomic, and nano orders of sex with technical,
affective, and social machines of experience. Such doubled-causal movement defines an
archigenesis of sexual experience where feminist timelines remain entangled in
submolecular sexes. An amodal continual space between the tiniest, shortest, slowest,
fastest moments of variation reverses the past and the future, the micro and macro scales
of sex at each turn of the present.2
Feminist Ontologies
The quest for a non-linear spatio-temporal experience has been at the core of a
materialist ontology of sexual difference, the groundbreaking works of Luce Irigaray and
the writings of Rosi Braidotti and Elisabeth Grosz. Far from reifying the identity of sexual
difference, such ontology has reworked the whole problematic of space and time beyond
the homoerotics of chronos.
For Irigaray, the ontology of sexual difference is inseparable from the fluid
movements of matter. By detracting spatiality from the geometry of solids and time
from the irreversible entropic model of energetic accumulation and discharge, Irigaray
insists that fluid dynamics directly entails the spatio-temporality of feminine sex as multifolded declinations from linear trajectory, resulting in vortexes and whirlwinds (Irigaray
1985, 108).
The physical movement of liquids suggests that what appears as the stoppage of
time in sequential positions forming solid structures consists rather of irregular rhythms
never arresting at definite points, leaking from grids, vibrating through the cosmos,
shaping out of contours. Yet such fluid matter is not simply disorganised substance but
has its own liquid or feminine alogical order. The swerving spatio-temporality of sexual
difference*feminine sex*coincides with an ontology of fluid matter itself, the untimely
space of movement, the imperceptible curves and dens of time. Sexual difference ceases
to be the spatial ground for the masculine subject of time to become spatio-temporally
autonomous from the finite self.
Similarly to the maternal-feminine in Western culture, space is treated as passive,
neutral, formless, lacking, empty or void. Yet for Irigaray, feminine space is an envelope,
moving inside out, a volume without contour, made of passages and transitions. Here,
sexual difference is given in the nature of the spatio-temporal interval, a temporal delay in
all spatial presence, and a spatial extension of all temporal intensities. Such an interval is
the site of spatio-temporal movement: non-linear passages or topological continuities
autonomous from*metaphysically prior to*the biologic of chronos using the spatial
matrix as its own receptacle. In particular, Irigaray claims:
The maternal-feminine remains the place separated from ‘its’ own place, deprived of ‘its’
place. She is or ceaselessly becomes the place of the other who cannot separate himself
from it. With her knowing or willing it, she is then threatened because of what she lacks:
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a proper place. She would have to re-envelop herself with herself, and do so at least
twice: as a woman and as a mother. Which would presuppose a change in the whole
economy of space-time. (1993, 11)
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Similarly, Elisabeth Grosz argues that feminism has left behind notions of causality, nature,
matter, by strictly focusing on the historical effects of sexual difference. In particular, she
points out that the dismissal of biology has led feminism to overlook what biology, and
biological evolution in particular, does for the notion of sexual difference:
Biology does not limit social, political, and personal life: it not only makes them possible,
it ensures that they endlessly transform themselves and stimulate biology into further
self-transformation. The natural world prefigures, contains, and opens up social and
cultural existence to endless becoming; in turn cultural transformation provides further
impetus for biological becoming. (Grosz 2004, 12)
Inspired by the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, Grosz has engaged with
theories of evolution, arguing for a need in feminism to re-address biological difference
not as a social, cultural, political limit but rather as a radical challenge to essentialist views
of sex. Grosz rethinks sexual difference in terms of timelines for a feminism open to the
virtual, the indeterminate, the untimely as enveloped in lines of evolution exposing the
elastic tension between the past and the future, where the present is a recursive
momentum of change. She works out the ontological relations between Darwin’s theory
of descent and Bergson’s cosmology of time to explain the evolution of sexual difference
in the framework of natural and sex selection, explaining how the evolution of sex depends
on the aesthetics and not the function of reproduction.
In The Nick of Time, Grosz explores Darwin’s evolutionary theory to highlight the
metaphysical link between the biological evolution of sexual difference and non-linear
time. Whilst arguing that Darwin’s notion of natural selection is intended as the active,
selective and over-transforming milieu of evolutionary change (2004, 51), Grosz indirectly
discusses the question of genealogical-generative time. With great detail, she explains
Darwin’s theory of descent with modification not as a linear genealogy of the human
species but as ‘an extraordinary contemporary conception of time’, where the descent
remains the virtual past of all actual living beings. Here, an uncertain time is at the core of
all generations linking temporal modifications of sexual difference across milieus and
populations.
The descent with modification implies not filiative genealogies of actualised forms
but the way in which contingencies, random variations, and indeterminacy govern nonchronological evolution. Ultimately, for Grosz, what makes Darwin’s work important for
non-linear sexual differentiation is the ‘force or impetus that propels the individual to
processes of self-transformation through his or her sexual relations and his or her relations
of inventive survival in a world of competition’. The struggle for existence entails a
struggle for sexual differentiation, self-overcoming in duration. Drawing on Bergson, Grosz
argues that ‘[B]eings are impelled forward to a future that is unknowable, uncontained by
the past. It is only retrospection that can determine what direction the paths of
development, evolution or transformation have taken’ (2004, 5152). From this standpoint,
she argues, history, archaeology and anthropology only serve to understand retrospectively the partial, residual situation of the present, without being able to control its
direction in the future. Despite having been attacked for the socio-biological model that
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AN ARCHIGENESIS OF EXPERIENCE
his theory of evolution implied at first sight, in Grosz’s view, Darwinian evolution already
provides crucial insights into the ingredients, processes and forces that are at work in
generating the conditions of change in relation to the past and the present.
But how does this model of evolution contribute to the elaboration of a non-linear
spatio-temporal ontology of sexual difference? Here, Grosz reserves a special place for
Darwin’s theory of sex selection. Sex and natural selection are considered here as intricate
parts of the same evolutionary activities. If cultural selection does contribute to evolution,
it is because its cultural systems obey the same imperatives and forces as organic and
temporally sensitive inorganic systems (2004, 65). Yet with artificial selection culture also
adds a complication to nature, which will, however, undergo the exigencies of the
evolutionary process (2004, 65). Put differently, sex selection, whilst adding more
complexity to natural selection, can also work in opposition to it by privileging members
of either sex who may not be the fittest or the most adapted to certain environmental
conditions.
For Grosz, sex selection is crucial to the enduring persistence of sexual difference*
the sexed organism*in evolution, and of the bio-logics of the two sexes. Even before the
evolution of the human, she argues, there have always been two forms, female and male,
negotiating two types of relations with the world (2004, 67). Following Darwin, she
emphasises that sexual difference will never be removed from evolution, but only
complexify, since the two sexes mark the very beginning of individual differentiation of all
life forms.
The posthuman future is more likely to be sexually differentiated (in whatever form) than
anything else we recognize in the present. The Darwinian model of sex selection outlines
a nonessentialist understanding of the (historical) necessity of sexual dimorphism,
Irigaray’s understanding of the uneliminable variation of sexual difference and its
productive inventiveness for future forms of life. (Grosz 2004, 6768)
Grosz investigates this point further by highlighting that Darwin went so far as to consider
sex selection as prior to the existence of sexual malefemale bifurcation. Indeed, sex
selection provides an evolutionary advantage to the interbreeding of pairs over forms
of self-generated or hermaphroditic reproduction. In short, sexual diversion contributes to
the refreshment of variations, difference, evolution. Similarly to Freud, it can be suggested
here, Darwin saw the evolutionary advantage of the two sexes for organic life, as a
counterpoint of the tendency of the living to die and return to the undifferentiated
inorganic. Sexual division enables evolution to ever more divergent morphological
structures and rewards the more beautiful and the more attractive independently of
their fitness. As an amplification of natural selection, sexual selection produces and
exaggerates differences that have no particular advantage for survival and adaptation.
Nevertheless, as Grosz highlights, feminist theories and feminisms have remained
suspicious of the concept of sexual selection and overlook ‘the centrality of an individual
level of choice’, whereby the advantage of sexual division and differentiation defines the
way ‘by which inventiveness, creation and the new coincide with the elaboration of life’
(2004, 72).
Far from providing a criticism of Darwin’s sexism, Grosz shows us how Darwin’s
theory of evolution may be used by ‘a feminist politics of transformation’ (2004, 74). What
remains crucial to the theory of sexual selection is the open-ended relation between
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sexual success, fitness and survival. What counts as fitness and as successive survival is still,
she suggests, an open question in Darwinism.
For Grosz, the centrality of sexual difference for all kinds of differences specifies how
crucial sexual difference is to a politics of transformation as it plays itself out in all races
and across all modes of racial difference (2004, 91). This model of evolution provides a
different model of history too:
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History is a broader phase space than that which can be occupied by living beings and
the history or genealogy of living beings transforms and magnifies this phase space, the
space of virtualities or latencies, thus history remains open ended. (2004, 91)
Grosz invites feminism to engage with the time of life, investigating the biological
necessity of sexual difference for evolution. Sexual difference is rethought in terms of
evolutionary potential rather than functions of reproduction and survival, giving a new
sense to generation; feminist timelines concerned not with ontological identity but with a
vitalist metaphysics of sexual difference. Here, the bio-logics of sexual division is not the
source of malefemale binarism but the result of natural selection prompting the
complexification of life.
Evolution Involution
If sexual selection is independent from sexual reproduction, and driven rather by
aesthetic moods, as Grosz drawing on Darwin points out, it seems problematic to base
sexual difference on the onto-evolutionary biology of the two sexes, driven by the impetus
of organic (carbon-based) life to self-differentiate. Even when Grosz suggests that sexual
difference will endure in the future, despite the eventual radical complexification of the
human species, and, like Irigaray, poses sexual difference at the centre of all kinds of
variations (natural and artificial), there still remains the problem of a metaphysics of sexual
difference based on the onto-organic complexification of life.
In short, a bio-logical genealogy of sexual difference predicated on the inner time of
life forming the two sexes may actively overlook the unlived yet real molecular and nano
spatio-temporalities of non-organic sex. If an engagement with the ontology of nature and
with the biological foldings of sex is indeed what has been left behind by feminisms, as
Grosz claims, then it may be important not only to engage with organic sexuality but to
further abstract from it the autonomous layers of non-biotic, unlived, unthought
movements of sex. Indeed, Darwin’s emphasis on sexual division as key to the evolutionary
complexification of life misses a crucial*both ontological and biological*point.
As Lynn Margulis suggests, it may not be the case at all that sexed organisms
suddenly emerged in the biosphere as the best-adapted mode of organic differentiation,
driven by an individual impetus or force responding to natural selection. Studies on the
symbiogenetic activities of bacteria and viruses have suggested that sexed organisms have
not been directly naturally selected as best fitted to the evolutionary drive towards
diversification. Rather, they are the result of long-term symbiosis between different kinds
of bacteria forced to merge together under certain atmospheric conditions (triggered by
the anaerobic bacterial emission of oxygen as waste into the environment). Similarly,
bacterial and viral sex has not at all been substituted by the more complex two-sexed
organism, but rather has continued to trade genetic material across the two forms of sex
of animal, human and plants (Margulis and Sagan 1986, 3949).
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AN ARCHIGENESIS OF EXPERIENCE
Margulis maintains that there are as many varied and versatile sexes as there are
colonies of bacteria passing on genes across genealogical species. Whilst the focus on the
evolution of the two sexes suggests that individual organisms respond to the activities of
natural and artificial selection by self-overcoming their previous form, the endosymbiotic
insistence on bacterial sex highlights lateral processes of code drifting and non-linear
continuity amongst colonies ceaselessly breaking down the eukaryotic genome of sexed
difference. The bacterial trading of un-kindred genes points not to increasing selfdifferentiation but more importantly suggests a veritable schizoecology of sex governed
by the georhythms of surplus values of codes, genetic fissures, and viral outbreaks
spreading across the most spatio-temporal distant colonies, establishing anomalous links
between the inorganic and the organic strata of matter.
In the age of post-cybernetic capitalism, biotechnology, genetic engineering and
nanotechnology, it is impossible to overlook molecular and subatomic layers of non-linear
extension in evolutionary processes. For endosymbiosis, the evolutionary formation of
sexed difference should be rethought through the sub-biological substrate of bacteria and
viruses enveloped in sexed organisms as an immanent residue of a pre-nucleic past. The
ontomateriality of sexual difference may not primarily entail the two-sexed form of biodifferentiation but the underbelly of evolution, the nexus of microworlds of invisible sexes
never ceasing to vary independently from the eukaryotic realm of the twos. Indeed,
endosymbiosis highlights the involutive yet non-regressive tendencies of the evolution of
life, the flashback of ancient pre-eukaryotic memories in the matter of a non-sexed future.
For endosymbiosis, the eukaryotic order of the two sexes indeed remains dependent
on the imperceptible activities of a pre-carbon-based bacterial environment which is
indeed far more ancient and diversified than any splitting into twos. The organic formation
of two sexes rather implies a geology of morals, as Deleuze and Guattari call it (1988), with
power directly nested in the bio-logic of nature itself.3 The bifurcation of sexes into twos
marks a veritable tectonic shift in the archigenetics of discontinuous becoming reengineered by the increasingly pervasive manipulation of the physical chain of cause and
effects in contemporary technoculture. Whilst, not long ago, studies of the immune
systems conceived of the battlefield between the organism and its environment in terms
of a war between a nucleic inside and a viral outside, it is increasingly evident today in the
face of the inefficient use of antibiotics that the nucleic order is in a discontinuous relation
with its bacterial substrate. From this standpoint, the evolutionary bifurcation of the sexes
entails not simply the generative complexification of the two sexes, alongside a continual
change from the past to the future, but more importantly a discontinuous relation with
(pre-carbon) sexes not of this world, forcing open evolution to its extensive dynamics of
involution.
Whilst Grosz insists on the biological endurance of sexual difference even after the
human form, the most recent speculations in biotechnology and nanotechnology suggest
rather that the entire biological realm of evolution*including the genetic architecture of
bacteria and viruses*is ready to be redesigned from scratch, leaving the two forms of sex
open to the grey-goo scenarios of atomic and subatomic sexes: an unformed, dedifferentiated, pre-accelerated sex.
What is suggested here is not a techno or cyborg ontology of sexual difference but
rather a view towards the pre-acceleration of matter, a reversal movement between the
organic and the inorganic, where new kingdoms of sex may eventuate from the realms of
nanomachinic involution. Such reversal causality defines matter’s readiness or propensity
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to become and not simply to continually change, the activity of a final cause, whereby
futurity acts on the past in the extended continuum of the organic and the inorganic.
According to William James, what propels matter to change is the experience
of spatio-temporal passages, relations. ‘The relations that connect experience must
themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation must be accounted as ‘‘real’’
as anything else in the system’ (1912, 76). There is a reality of relations themselves, which is
distinct from the things related. There is an amodal or interstitial togetherness of the most
unrelated things that is experienced, a lived abstraction of events superseding the order of
spatio-temporal connections.
Experience, Whitehead suggests, entails the living body as a whole (1978, 10509).
Each experience has its origin in the physical activities of a body, which change when any
part in nature undergoes variation. Thus, experience extends outside the actual organism
traversing spatio-temporal scales and milieus. Experience, then, cannot be disentangled
from what happens to all particles of a body, which are at the same time entangled in
what happens to the whole of nature. Experience, therefore, is always relational, pushing
the body outside its lived, organic architecture entering ecologies of virtual connections.
These are virtual or real propensities to experience sexual difference as a becoming
of sex, an event in which the physical chain of cause and effects enters a level of valuation
of data whose qualities are selected anew. Hence, sex is not primarily biological, belonging
to the efficient cause of evolutionary inheritance, or cultural, belonging to an aesthetic
selection, which is always already rooted in a biophysical logic of inheritance. Rather, if
such aesthetic selection is at play, it concerns the eventuation of a conceptual valuation of
physical data, a way to abstract potential qualities from data, and thus exposing the
fissures in the chain, the relational interstices that enable continuity to become.
For James, to qualify as real, a relation should be directly open to experience. There
must be a perception able to grasp the reality of the relation, the abstract continuum of
the concrete. Call such perception prehension. For Whitehead, prehensions are microtemporal modalities of perception defining not only the feeling of past occasions in
present experiences but also the way the objective existence of the present lies in the
future. Conceptual prehensions indicate not that the past predicts the future but that
the future is anticipated in the feeling of the present. As Whitehead argues: ‘Cut away the
future, and the present collapses’ (1933, 186).
Perception is caught in between two parallel feelings*the feeling of the precedent
world or the past and the feeling of the current world or the present-future. These feelings
are not primarily sensory of the lived experience. Indeed, there is a sensuous and
conceptual dimension to them, which defines prehensions as the grasping of the abstract
yet concrete connection between actual occasions of the past and future in the present.
From this standpoint, the nanotechnical machine of sex brings forth the prehensions
of the nano composition of matter, an affective experience (at once physical and
conceptual) of the quantum scale of sex entering a quantum future of matter. Here, sexual
difference does matter, but in a new sense. It is not intellectual experience that makes
sexuality autonomous from the binarism of the sexes. Similarly, it is not biological
evolution or sex selection that ensures the enduring experience of sexual difference (Grosz
2004). What matters is that the experience of sexual difference entails a relational abstract
togetherness of many sexes, the felt changes that happen not in the world but to the
infinite worlds up and down the scales of matter.
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The nanotech adventure into quantic sex entails the microprehension of a nonorganic sex of nature, the felt experience of incompossible microsexes exceeding the
dreamed unity of phenomenological sex in evolution, as the ontological ground of all
experience. Here, sexual difference is neither in the subject nor in the world. It belongs to
the multiplexing of the world. It is what happens to the folds of a yet to be completed
world: its open-ended futurity superseding the bio-logic experience of sex.
If, as Grosz argues (2004), sexual difference has to be rethought in terms of
durations, a continual differentiation of the two sexes, whereby sexuality and sexual
difference remain independent from survival (and sexual reproduction), then it is also true
that such duration is, as Whitehead would suggest, a quantum region, an event that
requires the becoming of the before and after, of the here and there. From this standpoint,
sexual difference and the evolutionary division of the sexes marks an event in the
extensive continuum of potential sexes, and yet the duration of such eventuation is
limited to a quantic region and does not exhaust the multiplicity of sexes that have been
and that are yet to come.
Such multiplicity may extend beyond the biotic order of life as much as nature
precedes and exceeds organic or carbon-based self-organisation. Similarly, if the ontology
of sexual difference is always embodied or sexed, then it is important to highlight that a
body is not definable away from the passage-mutation of nature, the abstract experience
of transition, from a sexual experience in transitu. Here, a multiplicity of subatomic sexes
acts back on the organic architecture of the two sexes, constructing a multiplex of curving
times of experience suspended around an intensely netted centre: a virtual sex.
Yet it may be misleading to assume that the expansion of sexual experience onto
the quantum field of matter is a way to favour, for example, nanotechnological
possibilities of redesigning the genetic and neural patterns of sex, inciting, therefore, a
plurality or simply a neutralisation of sexual difference. Rather, such expansion partakes of
an extensive continuum of sex, the experience of an abstract relation between a manifold
of actual occasions of sex; an extensive pre-movement of matter autonomous from the
organic unity of sexgender identity. Hence, it is not a question of having one or many
sexes*unity or pluralism*but of challenging the unity of biological sex, the always
already self-overcoming of sexual difference. This requires feminist timelines to remain
concerned with a nexus of occasions autonomous from the self-time of evolution, the time
of organic life, the lived experience of sex.
Ultimately, the problem of ‘generation: feminist timelines’ resides precisely in the
ontological premises of the bio-logic of life, the genealogical bioformation of the
two sexes, the self-complexification of sexual difference. An archigenetics of sex rather
suggests an anti-genealogy of sexual difference, a sort of reversal causality nesting
together incompossible worlds of sexes in the abstract fabric of a sexual difference yet to
come: the unthought of sex.
This is a route towards feelingsthoughts ready to prehend the nanomutations of
experience. Call such a route a trans-politics of sex. Here, sexuality ingresses its futurity not in
a way to predetermine or progress towards the future but to let the virtual in; to become
affected by what happens to the world at the intersection of bodies, the felt experience of a
relational continuum.
But what, one may ask, can feminist timelines gain from an archigenetics of abstract
sex that does not even privilege the bio-logic of sexual differentiation, which at least
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accounts for the phenomenological experience of sexual difference? Answer this question
with another question.
How can feminist timelines challenge the chrono-ontology of experience if what
constitutes sexual difference is a bio-logic of life, an ontology of the organic privileging the
evolutionary stratification of thousands of microsexes into two? How can feminist
timelines challenge the linear continuity of variation overlooking the singular becoming
of sex, if sexual difference remains centred on the phenomenological unity of selforganisation? To be discussed . . .
NOTES
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1.
2.
3.
Foucault often uses the term ‘genealogy’ to refer to the union of erudite knowledge and
local memories, which allow us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to
make use of this knowledge tactically today. Genealogy focuses on local, discontinuous,
illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory. Foucault says: ‘Let
us give the term ‘‘genealogy’’ to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories
which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this
knowledge tactically today’ (1994, 42).
This means that, contrary to the acclaimed feminist politics of anti-essentialism through
which generations of feminists have fought against biological determinism, there is a
sense in which the evolutionary mutations of sex rather remain central to the abstract
engines of change of sexual experience.
The biophysical stratification of bacterial and viral colonies into two sexes defines the
bio-logical imperative of sexual difference, a nucleic order of sex at war with the
pervasive promiscuity of bacterial sexes.
REFERENCES
DELEUZE, GILLES, and FELIX GUATTARI. 1988. A thousand plateaus. Translated by B. Massumi. London:
Athlone Press.
FOUCAULT, MICHEL. 1994. Genealogy and social criticism. In The postmodern turn: New perspectives
on social theory, edited by Steven Seidman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
GROSZ, ELISABETH. 2004. In the nick of time: Politics, evolution and the untimely. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
IRIGARAY, LUCE. 1985. This sex which is not one. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
***
*
*
*. 1993. Ethics of sexual difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. London
and New York: Continuum.
JAMES, WILLIAM. 1912. A world of pure experience. In Essays in radical empiricism. New York:
Longman Green.
MANNING, E. 2009. Incipient action: The dance of the not-yet. In Choreographesis, edited by Lynn
Turner. New York: Routledge (Unpublished).
and DORIAN SAGAN. 1986. Origins of sex: Three billion years of genetic
recombination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH. 1933. Adventures in ideas. New York: Free Press.
*
*
*
*
*. [1929] 1978. Process and reality. New York: Free Press.
MARGULIS, LYNN,
AN ARCHIGENESIS OF EXPERIENCE
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Luciana Parisi is the convenor of the Interactive Media MA at Goldsmiths, University of
London. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the
Mutations of Desire (Continuum). Currently, she is writing a monograph on soft
architecture and the metaphysics of computational culture.
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