The Southern Journal of Philosophy
Volume 48, Spindel Supplement
2010
EVENT AND EVOLUTION
Luciana Parisi
abstract: Why have theories of evolution become now (and again) a matter of
concern for critically rethinking sex and sexual difference? Why after years of
deconstructing the ontologies of sex rooted in biological discourses and metaphysics
of identity has critical thought turned to biology, physics, and mathematics? One
way to tackle this new turn toward scientific thought may be derived from the
reaction against an overused method of textual critique, which has come short of
engaging with the reality of matter. If sexuality and sex are material forms of irreducible difference, then one needs a window into the material processes that lead to
such forms.
sjp_26
147..164
Evolutionary theories, complexity theories, algorithmic information theories,
and topology provide some entry points into such processes that no longer
rely on predetermined forms but expose the material dynamics of formation.
This paper will argue that the study of these dynamics contributes to the
emergence of a neomaterialism and a neoempiricism, already anticipated in
the philosophical works of Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Henri
Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze, among others. By examining two specific
instances of these dynamics of formation based on a new use of evolutionary
theories in algorithmic modeling and genetic engineering, this paper will
suggest that sex and sexual differences are events: technocultural, ethicoaesthetic, sociopolitical assemblages. However, these events are not linked
simply to historical/epistemological contingencies determined by scientific
thought but are, above all, linked to the infinite potentialities of matter to
become and form anew as indicated by evolutionary theories.
Luciana Parisi is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of
London, where she runs the Interactive Media MA program. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex:
Philosophy, Bio-technology, and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum). She has since published articles
on the relation between evolutionary biology and digital culture and between virtual modalities
of perception and control. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Contagious Architecture (MIT Press).
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 48, Spindel Supplement (2010), 147–64.
ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.00026.x
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1. EVOLUTION AND RADICAL EMPIRICISM
Patricia Clough argues that the “turn to affect” has shifted critical theory and
cultural criticism toward an engagement with bodily matter.1 Beyond a mere
concern with affect as subjective emotion, Clough emphasizes that an alternative conception of bodily matter needs to confront matter’s capacity for
self-organization in being in-formational. Under the influence of the metaphysical architectures of Gilles Deleuze and his lateral thinking of the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Gottfried Leibniz (to name
just a few), the affective turn conceptualizes affect as pre-individual material
forces, as real yet abstract forms of process. The affective turn defines the
limits of poststructuralist and deconstructivist critique to address matter
beyond text and suspends the critical skepticism against metaphysics. For
those who have followed such challenge, the affective turn has meant a move
toward a new kind of empiricism, a radical empiricism attuned to the strange
pragmatism of William James, insisting that relations are as real and effective
as the terms that they connect. As opposed to the empirical tradition that
identifies reality with qualities projected onto things and against idealism that
imparts on things a unity in the mind, James rejects the dualism between
thoughts and things and insists that thoughts are as concrete, as real, and as
effective as things.2 In other words, relations are themselves things, or entities
of abstraction. These are virtual relations and not transcendental causes that
make things happen. They are, as Gilles Deleuze would argue, “quasi-causes”
originating from the incorporeal effects that precede all efficient causality: the
potential residues of the physical connections that they trigger.3
As the turn to affect has led to a new engagement with matter, so the
empirical enterprise has become concerned with the material forms of
process. But radical empiricism must not be confused with a new physicalism,
biologism, or organicism of matter. The effectiveness of virtual matter, in
Deleuze’s terms, or of “eternal objects” to borrow from Alfred North Whitehead, is radical empiricism’s purest field of enquiry. From this standpoint,
biological evolution is but one form of virtual matter, a form of process
exposing the potential conditions for the becoming of sex. Radical empiricism
affirms matter’s autoinformational potentialities: its being causa-sui in its
capacity of becoming.
1
See Patricia Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
2
See William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1996).
3
See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990).
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2. VIRTUAL EVOLUTION
In what follows, I will explain how the engagement with what could be called
metaphysical materialism rearticulates sex and sexual difference passing
through evolutionary theory. For instance, Elisabeth Grosz specifically argues
that beyond the metaphysics of reproduction and sameness, evolution is a
process of differentiation—in particular, of sexual differentiation. But if evolution is understood as a process, processes must be conceived as being made
of forms. “There are no processes of form, but forms of process,” Whitehead
argues.4 From this standpoint, no evolutionary form can endure forever. The
becoming of a form is eternal, not because the same form endures forever, but
because once a form perishes it implies the eventuation of the new.
If at the core of evolution is variation, differentiation, and ultimately
novelty, then one cannot dismiss how, for instance, the mathematization of
biological evolution through algorithmic modeling, genetic engineering, and
nanotechnology can eventuate new forms of sex. The mathematical modeling
of evolutionary processes is not simply another inscription on the surface of
matter. Far from being always already enframing matter through scientific
epistemologies and technological applications (as a certain Heideggerian
thought would have it), mathematical models deploy incorporeal forms of sex
as they partake of the autoinformational capacity of matter. As Clough
argues, informational technologies are making it possible to grasp and
manipulate the imperceptible dynamics of virtual matter. These dynamics are
indistinguishable from events, which as Whitehead observes, deploy a “nexus
of occasions” at once configuring and configured by ethico-aesthetic, technocultural, sociopolitical, and biophysical occurrences. In other words, evolutionary events are not merely historical/epistemological determinations of
scientific thought, or merely instantiations of a biological ground, but explain
how these determinations are intrinsic to the potentialities of matter to
become and form anew. Recently, Bruno Latour has insisted that the “bifurcation of nature” between primary and secondary qualities—between the inert
stuff of matter and its meaningful attributes determined by perceptions
and conceptions—cannot be simply overcome by hybrids or artifacts.5 Two
4
Whitehead dedicates a chapter of Modes of Thought to explaining that there are multiple
forms of potentialities and not just one continual process. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of
Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 117–42.
5
Following Whitehead’s process metaphysics, Bruno Latour has repeatedly argued against
the bifurcation of nature between primary and secondary qualities that he attributes to Galileo
and Locke. Whereas things/objects are said to be reducible to their material components,
atoms, molecules, or electrons, which are primary qualities of real nature deprived of all senses,
colors, and odors, secondary qualities are said to attribute arbitrary meaning to the imperceptible real nature. In particular, Latour argues that this separation has characterized much of
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artifacts will create only a third artifact. Instead, in the first place, one has to
deny the claims that imply the bifurcation of nature by describing and
arguing for an extensive continuum of events. Here scientific facts are modes of
aesthetic expression to the extent that aesthetics defines the prehensive activity of being abducted by the happening of things.
From this standpoint, I will use two examples. On the one hand, I will
suggest that algorithmic models are prehensive forms of evolutionary activities and not representations of biological strata. On the other, I will address
biological and technobiological instances of cloning as forms of species’ reproduction, which bypass the ontobiological model of sexual reproduction.
These examples are not used to suggest that mathematical and technobiological forms simulate the evolution of human sex or represent its enhanced
technoevolution. These are instead real forms of material processes, determining events in evolution, whose implications for what we take sex and
sexuality to be have yet to be addressed.
3. EVOLUTION AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
French philosopher, Luce Irigaray argued that the ontology of feminine sex
can be deployed by the fluid mechanics of matter. By disentangling space, the
maternal, and the feminine from the geometry of solids, and time from linear
chronology, Irigaray insisted that the fluid state of matter is already evidence
of the autonomy of femininity from the patriarchal economy of the two.
Feminine sex acquires the forms of manifolds, vortexes, and whirlwinds.6 For
Irigaray, femininity is where sex moves inside out: a volume without contour,
or simply what happens at the time-space of passages and transitions. Sexual
difference is given in the dens of spatiotemporal intervals, the delays of all
temporal determinations, the voids of all spatial surfaces. The ontological given
of sexual difference is to be found in the irregularities of matter or topological
deformations. Irigaray insists that feminine sex must be multiple and irreducible
to the metaphysics of the one.
One must admit that Irigaray’s ontology for sexual difference is still to
date groundbreaking. It offers at least two radical propositions: that sexual
sociological enquiry and proposes to reconsider the work of Gabriel Tarde as an example in
which social sciences are not separated from natural sciences. See Bruno Latour, “What is the
Style of Matters of Concern?” Spinoza Lectures Series, Department of Philosophy, University
of Amsterdam (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 2008). See also Bruno Latour, “Gabriel
Tarde and the End of the Social,” in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social
Sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, 2002).
6
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 108.
EVENT AND EVOLUTION
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difference must be conceived metaphysically and that such metaphysics is
immanent to the fluid dynamics of matter. To put it shortly, Irigaray’s
metaphysics of sex unequivocally rejects ontological sameness, which discards
matter’s autotransformations. This Sex Which is Not One clearly remains the
Irigarayan formula for warning us against the solidification of sex yet again.
For instance, Elisabeth Grosz suggests that feminist theorizations of
sexual and gender difference have embedded femininity in cultural systems
of ever-slipping signs without fully engaging with the materiality of sexual
difference. As feminism has mostly focused on the textual enframing of
sexual difference, the realm of nature has always already been locked in a
signifying structure of signs. Grosz claims that the poststructuralist lack of
engagement with the materiality of sex beyond text has led feminism to ignore
what biology, and biological evolution in particular, can do for sexual difference. Far from precluding nature from the politics of sexual difference,
feminism needs to connect with what is given in nature as potentials for alternative constructions of the cultural and the biological. “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.”7 Grosz specifically suggests that theories of evolution can
help feminism to re-address biological difference not as a social, cultural, or
political limit, but as providing a compelling challenge to essentialist views of
sex. This is why her analysis of evolutionary theories and metaphysics of
time offers a radical rearticulation of the biological, of nature, and ultimately
of sexual difference. In particular, Grosz rethinks sexual difference through
the time of evolution and proposes that feminism should not base its critical
views on chronological orders. Feminism should be truly open to the virtual,
the indeterminate, and the untimely. As a consequence, sexual difference
should be open to the unthought of sex. Similarly, if evolution exposes the
potential of time through the elastic tension between the past and the future,
it defines the present as a recursive momentum of change, open to the
reality of difference. It is in the present of evolution that a politics of sexual
difference activates its potentiality.
To explain the virtuality of sexual difference, Grosz elegantly appeals to
the evolutionary mechanisms of natural and sex selection and articulates the
ontological relations between Charles Darwin’s theory of descent and Henri
Bergson’s cosmology of time. Together with Darwin, she emphasizes that the
evolution of sex is determined not by natural selection, according to which
biological reproduction realizes the law of the fittest, but by aesthetic
7
Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004), 1–2.
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selection, which is bounded to the arbitrariness of perceptual choice. In
The Nick of Time, Grosz particularly engages with Darwin’s theory of sex
selection to discuss how the variabilities of sex are not determined by
principles of fitness and adaptation. Sex selection adds a large amount of
un-predictabilities to the established forms of biological evolution.
Like Darwin, Grosz considers sex and natural selection to be intricate parts
of the same evolutionary activities. She also insists that cultural selection
contributes to biological evolution because cultural systems obey the same
imperatives and forces as organic and temporally sensitive inorganic systems.8
In other words, as much as natural and sex selection, although differently,
share nonlinear dynamics of evolution, so artificial (or cultural) selection adds
to nature a complication, which undergoes the exigencies of the evolutionary
process.9 However, one needs to point out that while adding more complexity
to natural selection, sex selection can also work in opposition to it as it may
privilege members of either sexes who are unfit. Ultimately, between natural
and cultural selection, there can be diversion and opposition, which are
intrinsic to the process of evolution and sexual differentiation.
Grosz argues that sex selection crucially explains why sexual difference—
and the sexed organism—has persistently endured in evolution. Despite the
workings of natural selection, sex selection has grounded the bio-logics of
evolution in the model of the two sexes—or sexual differentiation. 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.10
Following Darwin, she emphasizes that sexual difference will never be
removed from evolution, but this form of sex would only complexify. In short,
the two sexes—and sexual difference—mark the very beginning of individual
differentiation of all life forms. As Grosz claims,
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
sexual selection . . . provides the outline of a nonessentialist understanding of the
(historical) necessity of sexual dimorphism, the earliest intimations of Irigaray’s
understanding of the ineliminable variation of sexual difference, and its productive
inventiveness for future forms of life.11
Grosz investigates this point further by suggesting that Darwin went so far as
to consider sex selection as a mechanism at work prior to the existence of
sexual difference. Here, sex selection is taken to provide an evolutionary
8
Ibid., 65.
Ibid.
10
Ibid., 67.
11
Ibid., 67–68.
9
EVENT AND EVOLUTION
153
advantage to the interbreeding of pair over forms of self-generated or hermaphroditic reproduction. In short, sex selection privileges sexual diversion,
which contributes to the refreshment of variations, and evolution as a whole.
Similarly to Freud, one can argue that Darwin saw the evolutionary advantage of the two sexes for organic life, and as a significant counterpoint of the
tendency of the living to die and return to undifferentiated inorganic matter.
As much as sexual division enables evolution to admit more divergent morphological structures, so sex selection rewards the most beautiful and attractive, producing and exaggerating differences that have no particular
advantage for survival and adaptation. Grosz claims that feminist theories
and feminisms have remained suspicious of the concept of sex selection and
have overlooked “the centrality of an individual level of choice.” Instead, she
observes, the advantage of sexual division and differentiation defines the way
“by which inventiveness, creation and the new coincide with the elaboration
of life.”12 Far from criticizing Darwin’s theory of sex selection as fundamentally sexist, Grosz shows us how this may be used by “a feminist politics of
transformation” for its open-ended relation between sexual success, fitness,
and survival.
However, if sex selection is independent from sexual reproduction, and is
rather driven by aesthetics, as Grosz (drawing on Darwin) points out, why is
sex to be ontologically grounded in the evolution of the two sexes, driven by
the impetus of organic life to self-differentiate? Even when Grosz implies that
sexual difference will endure in the future through a radical complexification
of biological life forms, and, like Irigaray, poses sexual difference at the center
of all kinds of variation (natural and artificial), there still remains the problem
of a metaphysics of sexual difference based on the onto-organic complexification of life. In short, the bio-logical form of evolution and sexual difference,
predicated on a continual duration of life diverging into two main forms of
sex, may fail to explain the reality of bacterial, viral, informational, nano, and
thought sexes sprawling beneath the law of the two. The biological formation
of two sexes may coincide not with the ontological duration of sexual difference but, namely, with an accident, an event in evolution. As evolutionary
theorist Stephen J. Gould points out, the evolution of the eukaryotic form of
two sexed organisms is but an accident in the evolutionary forms of bacterial
sexes, and as such it may cease to be dominant and swift in the background.13
Grosz combines Darwin’s focus on the evolution of sexed forms with
Bergson’s conception of evolution in terms of duration. La durée in Bergson is
12
Ibid., 72.
Stephen Jay Gould, “Planet of the Bacteria,” Washington Post Horizon 119 (1996):
H1. Retrieved online June 2010 from http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_
bacteria.html.
13
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used to explain how physical forms of evolution are ultimately bound with the
enduring force of the élan vital, tending not toward the elimination but the
proliferation of difference. For Grosz, sexual difference as the ontological
enterprise of feminism deploys its bio-physical reality of continual differentiation, precisely enduring through the forces of the élan vital. And yet, there
are at least two problematic implications, which derive from such compelling
conceptions of sexual difference and evolution. On the one hand, the notion
of durée in evolution may imply a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” as
Whitehead points out, as it substitutes the “becoming of continuity,” and thus
evolution as made of events of irreparable breaks and novelties, with the
“continuity of becoming,” where all remains fundamentally determined by a
physical chain of variations. On the other hand, to ground sex and its forms
of process into the biological model of sexual differentiation, able to contain
all past and future forms of sex, risks congealing the fluid mechanics of sexual
difference into a solid continuity of sex yet again.
From this standpoint, if sexual difference and the bio-evolution of the two
sexes are central to politics and philosophies of difference, as Grosz (following
Irigaray) sustains, then one may need to reconsider that this difference is but
an accidental form in evolution. As such, this form is determined by the
contingencies of physical causality, which can be empirically explained as
evolutionary occurrences, but are far from implying a radical empiricism of
evolution and sex. In other words, Grosz’s emphasis on sexual difference as
key to the evolutionary complexification of life misses a crucial—both ontological and biological—point: that evolution entails not the continual differentiation of one form of sex.14 There is not one virtual sex bio-ontologically
coinciding with sexual difference, but an infinitesimal number of differential
sexes that are completely determined and yet do not exactly constitute the
14
If, according to Grosz, Darwin’s evolutionary theory provides a materialist insight into
the centrality of sexual difference, it is because Darwin’s descent with modification presents “an
extraordinary contemporary conception of time,” where the descent remains the virtual past of
all actual living beings. Ultimately, for Grosz, what makes Darwin’s work important for sexual
difference is the “force or impetus that propels that individual to processes of self-transformation
through his or her sexual relations and his or her relations of inventive survival in a world of
tension and competition” (The Nick of Time, 89). The struggle for existence entails a struggle for
sexual differentiation, self-overcoming in duration. By juxtaposing Darwin’s notion of “descent
with modification” to Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of virtual time, Grosz argues that “beings
are impelled forward to a future that is unknowable, relatively uncontained by the past. It is only
retrospection that can determine what direction the paths of development, evolution or transformation, have taken” (ibid., 90). In other words, the descent is here conceived not as the a priori
form of life, but as its infinite potentialities to become, to differentiate and add novelty to the
species. According to Grosz, 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.
EVENT AND EVOLUTION
155
biology of sexual difference. Virtual matter “can be completely determined
(differential) and yet lack the determinations that constitute actual existence (the
thing is undifferentiated).”15 In other words, the process of sexual differentiation
cannot remain in royal isolation from a thousand forms of process: sex-events
exposing immanent relations between virtual and actual worlds of sexual
experience.
While Grosz’s materialist rearticulation of theories of evolution contributes
to bring matter back into the question of sexual difference, one may yet find
it problematic to ground sexuality and the sexes in the bio-complexification of
life. It is clear that Grosz offers a compelling reading of Darwin’s descent with
modification and Bergson’s ontology of time. However, such a reading falls
short of challenging a subtended bio-ontological ground, which ultimately
identifies sexual difference with the complexification of organic life. If Darwin’s model of evolution is embedded in metaphysical time, which admits
that the future of life is open to increasing differentiation, then to ground such
differentiation into the specific form of sexual difference will admittedly deny
the unpredictability of virtual sexes. Similarly, Bergson’s notion of the virtual
remains problematic if it is conceived as the enduring complexification of life:
an ontological continuum where process coincides with the ceaseless evolution of the same form. As opposed to a virtual One, Deleuze’s reading of
Bergson highlights that nonchronological time is irreducibly complex and
does not coincide with one form of actualization. In other words, what is
proposed here is a notion of heterogeneous virtualities or differential sexes,
which are as real as all the terms of sexual difference. As opposed to a notion
of virtual descent, which differentiates itself through actualities, there are a
thousand virtualities immanent to any form of differentiation. Instead of a
virtual form of difference infinitely self-differentiating through the form of the
two sexes, there are infinite singularities, multiplicities, virtual and actual
planes of sex, which are evolutionary events that cannot be contained by the
rule of the two.
If evolution can explain the ontological dynamics of sexual difference, it
has to be radically addressed as an incomplete process, open to the unthought
of sex. With Deleuze, one must conceive of virtual and actual planes as
multiplicities whose differentiation necessarily implies a becoming in kind
and degree, and not a continual complexification of one form. The ontology of sexual difference cannot eternally endure beyond the event and
evolution of sexes, which are not governed by the bio-logics of complexification. Such bio-logics risk reifying the bifurcation of nature through
the logic of the third excluded, or as Michel Serres argues, the
15
Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 100.
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immanence of the parasite: discontinuity in all virtuality or interference in
any system of information.16
If, as Grosz underlines, sexual differentiation is driven not by the reproductive logic of fitness predicated on natural selection, but on aesthetic values
divorced from the logic of survival, then one can argue that alluring elements
of femininity and masculinity may coexist in nonsexually differentiated bodies
(of whichever sort). Aesthetic selection does not guarantee the enduring form of
the two sexes because it is determined by the activities of prehension, which,
according to Whitehead, are general activities of negative and positive selection common to all entities across kingdoms. Here, aesthetic selection implies
not arbitrary choice of one sex or the other but is triggered by the “lure for
feeling” intrinsic in all entities. According to Whitehead, a “lure for feelings”
includes the activities of seduction, repulsion, or incitation, which are derived
from happenings, encounters, and events. This is an aesthetic capacity
detached from the need of reproduction and biological endurance, pushing the
logic of sex beyond recognition. If sex selection has no implications for the
survival of one species, it is because it is governed by the prehensive activities
of a thousand forms of sex, spreading beneath the two-sexes’ rule of attraction.
As Deleuze and Whitehead insist, events are everything. Events are happenings not things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than substances.
More specifically, Whitehead conceives of events as a nexus of actual occasions interrelated on the extensive continuum in a determined way. If an
occasion is the process by which anything becomes, an event applied to a
nexus or society is a set of extensive, temporal series of such occasions. The
contrast between individual becomings and the progressive summation of
such becomings is crucial to Whitehead’s process metaphysics. An actual
occasion is what Deleuze calls “a singularity”: a point of inflection or of
discontinuous transformation. Once an occasion happens, it is already over.
An actual occasion never changes, “it only becomes and perishes.”17 There is
no veritable endurance or continuity of sexual difference because nothing
comes into being once and for all. Nothing just sustains itself in being, as if by
inertia or inner force. An actual occasion can endure only if it radically
renews itself, by breaking from its actual form. In other words, for sexual
difference to be thought in evolution, it cannot remain an eternal form of sex
but must go through a radical becoming, a cut from a form of sex that is as
completed as stratified sex.
16
Michel Serres’s argues that the logic of the parasite embraces culture, technology, politics,
and metaphysics and not only biology (The Parasite [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007]).
17
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 204.
EVENT AND EVOLUTION
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4. ENDOSYMBIOSIS AND THE SEXES
If the evolution of sexual divergence is a form of process, which admits that
sexual difference implies an individuation of virtual potentials, then there may
be other forms of evolution and sex that are not necessarily differentiated into
two sexes. For instance, system-based models of evolution, such as Lynn
Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s Serial Endosymbiosis Theory, suggest that it
may not at all be the case that sexed organisms emerged in the biosphere as
the best-adapted mode of organic differentiation. Studies on the symbiogenetic activities of bacteria and viruses have suggested that sexed organisms
have not been naturally selected as best-fitted and have not endured in
evolution because of their diversification. On the contrary, the permanence of
sexual difference is 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 sexes have rather continued to
trade genetic material across animals, humans, and plants.18 Margulis and
Sagan argue that there are as many varied and versatile sexes as there are
colonies of bacteria passing on genes across sexed species. The bacterial
trading of un-kindred genes points not to increasing self-differentiation taken
as the ground of an onto-organic complexification of sex, but more importantly addresses heterogeneous forms of sex establishing anomalous links
between inorganic and organic strata of matter.
In the age of postcybernetic capitalism, biotechnology, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, where bacterial molecules are used to design cells
and proteins and to clone bodies, it is impossible to overlook these nonlinear forms of evolution and sex. For endosymbiosis, the evolutionary formation of sexed difference should be rethought through the subbiological
strata of bacteria and viruses enveloped in sexed organisms as a residue of
a prenucleic past. Here the ontomateriality of sexual difference entails not
the two-sexes form of bio-differentiation, but the underbelly of evolution
and sex, the nexus of microworlds eventuating new sexes underneath the
eukaryotic realm of the two. Endosymbiosis highlights how ancient preeukaryotic sex memories are coming to matter in our asexed future. This is
neither the future of increasing sexual differentiation nor the time for the end of sex. It
rather points at the unthought of sex, whose unprecedented forms confirm that evolution is
an open-ended history, according to which it is not yet possible to provide a retrospective
account of the most enduring form of sex.
18
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 39–49.
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For endosymbiosis, the eukaryotic order of the two sexes cannot remain in
royal isolation from the prehensive activities of a pre-carbon-based bacterial
environment, which is far more ancient and diversified than any splitting into
twos. The organic formation of the two sexes is not neutral and rather tells us
of a geology of morals, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, with power directly nested
in the bio-logics of nature.19 The evolutionary bifurcation into a dominant
two-sex form stems from an endosymbiotic battlefield between heterogeneous
microsexes, whose sexual culture became parasitically locked into the eukaryotic order of masculine and feminine genes. When the evolutionary order of
the two cut open from bacterial worlds, microbial sexes continued to intrude
in the history of sexual difference through their topological infection of the
realms of nature and culture, of the past and the future of evolution. While
Grosz insists on the biological endurance of sexual difference beyond the
human, the most recent speculations in synthetic biology and nanotechnology
rather suggest that the entire biological realm, including the genetic architecture of bacteria and viruses is ready to be redesigned from scratch, leaving
the two forms of sex laid open to the grey-goo scenarios of atomic and
subatomic sexes: unformed, de-differentiated, pre-accelerated forms of sex.
5. CASE ONE: ALGORITHMIC SEX
Most recent algorithmic speculations on evolutionary processes have highlighted that endosymbiosis breaks from gradualist forms of sex. For instance,
computer scientist Richard Watson has used algorithmic models to argue that
evolution is not gradualist but compositional.20 He claims that Darwin’s
algorithmic model, a formal step-by-step procedure describing adaptation in
biological systems, is based on a simple process of linear incremental complexification. As Darwin himself admitted, this model offers only one algorithmic possibility of evolutionary processes, which does not exclude
alternatives. Through algorithmic calculation and modeling, Watson demonstrates that alternative processes of genetic variation, such as genetic or
viral transfer, and symbiosis, explain how the unprecedented combination of
preadapted genetic material leads to unpredictable changes in evolution.
Watson uses mathematical models such as the genetic algorithm to explore
different evolutionary scenarios, comparing evolution based on gradual
19
The bio-physical 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.
20
Richard A. Watson, Compositional Evolution: The Impact of Sex, Symbiosis, and Modularity on the
Gradualist Framework of Evolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), ch. 1.
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differentiation to those forms involving point mutation, sexual recombination, and symbiotic encapsulation.21 He shows that models of sex and symbiosis are algorithmically distinct from simpler stochastic optimization of
genes based on gradual processes. Challenging the linear gradualism of Darwin’s model of evolution moving from simple cells to diversified complexity,
Watson employs parallel forms of algorithmic processes showing that heterogeneous complexity is not the teleological aim of evolution but its starting
condition. Watson uses an algorithmic model based on the symbiotic mechanisms of genetic variation to suggest that eukaryotes derive from the combination of semi-independent, preadapted genetic material (bacterial genomes).
Parallel algorithms point out that eukaryotic cells stem from the combination
of preadapted bacteria, mitochondria, and chloroplasts, entering an aerobic
bacteria and becoming entrapped within its membranic walls.
Ultimately, Watson observes, evolutionary computation can be used to
explain how nonteleological adaptive processes are key to biological evolution. Through algorithmic data, Watson’s computational modelling affirms
that there is more to evolution than a gradualist development of sexual
difference. In particular, algorithmic modelling points out that there are as
many systems of evolution as there are sexes of genetic transfer, which cannot
be contained in one form of sex. But these computational models are not
mere simulations of what has happened in biology. Algorithmic models of
evolution are mechanisms of prehension affecting the material process of
evolution and the eventuation of new forms of process. If algorithmic models
are a form of process, far from imitating natural dynamics, they are geared to
expose matter’s irreducible complexity. From this standpoint, one may ask:
how are these mathematical forms affecting what we take sex and evolution
to be? If algorithmic design does not physically cause an evolutionary change
and, contrary to other information technologies such as genetic engineering
21
The “genetic algorithm” is a search technique used in computing to find exact or
approximate solutions to optimization and search problems. These algorithms use techniques
inspired to evolutionary biology, such as inheritance, selection, mutation, cross-over or genetic
recombination. Here a population of abstract representations—for instance, chromosomes or
the genotype of the genome—of possible solutions—also defined as phenotypes—explain how
a system evolves toward optimal solutions. As solutions appear in the form of strings of 0 and 1
binary calculations, the evolution starts from a population of randomly generated individuals
and happens in generations. In each generation, the fitness of every individual in the population
is evaluated through stochastic processes of probabilities through which multiple individuals are
selected and modified to form a new population. This new population becomes the protagonist
of the next iteration of the algorithm. The latter either terminates by defining a maximum
number of generations or a satisfactory solution. Usually a genetic algorithm requires a genetic
representation of the solution domain and a fitness function to evaluate the solution domain.
Genetic algorithms are systems of probabilities used in bioinformatics, economics, computational science, physics, manufacturing, design, and so on.
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and nanotechnology, it can only delineate abstract mechanics of evolution,
then can it at all be considered as an event in the evolution of sex?
At this point, one will have to consider that algorithmic models of evolution
are forms of programming. The operative workings of digital computation
and its effectiveness in determining the potentialities of matter are therefore
imparting yet another inflection on the creation of new forms of evolution. As
much as evolution is a form of programming so algorithmic rules are procedures of processing. If the virtual is not a transcendental One, as the ground
out of which difference emanates in the form of actualities, it remains, as
Deleuze argues, a multiplicity exposed to the algorithmic logic of the differential. Deleuze borrows the thought of the differential from Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus to make a diagram of ununified potentialities, which are
immanent to actualities. As Watson has demonstrated, algorithmic calculations as much as Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus, serve to draw a diagram—or
virtual design—of the un-unified potentialities of matter, and not to establish
a priori forms or subjects of formation. Algorithmic models are not representations of evolution and sex but are themselves immanent forms or haecceities, a nonreferential description of the discrete qualities of form. In other
words, nongradualist algorithms of sex and evolution are events exposing
infinite virtualities of evolution and the incomplete nature of forms of sex.
What is suggested here is not a techno or cyborg ontology of sexual
difference, but rather a view toward the preacceleration of matter defining
matter’s readiness or propensity to become beyond itself in the extended
continuum of the biological and the mathematical. Whitehead insists that all
happenings, all events are themselves things/objects. If algorithmic sex is an
event, it is precisely the thing that happens, and such happenings—no matter
how divergent, how inorganic, how inhumane—are precisely what determine
the incompossible worlds of sexes.
6. CASE TWO: PARTHENOGENIC SEX
In the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researcher Anna Himler, a
biologist at the University of Arizona, has reported that Amazonian ants have
dispensed with sexual difference and developed into an all-female species.
The ants reproduce via cloning: the queen ants copy themselves to produce
genetically identical daughters.22 These cloning ants have dispensed with
22
See Victoria Gill, “Ants Inhabit ‘World without Sex’,” BBC April 15, 2009. Retrieved
online from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7998931.stm. “By ‘fingerprinting’
DNA of the ant species—Mycocepurus smithii,” it was found that they were all “clones of the
colony’s queen.” Physically dissected, the ants were found to be “incapable of mating, as an
essential part of their reproductive system known as the ‘mussel organ’ had degenerated.”
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sexual reproduction because of evolutionary contingencies, implying that
reproduction need not be mediated by sexual difference and that sex—
intended as the act of transferring information—can acquire an infinity of
forms.23
Asexual reproduction is but another form of engineered sex. Genetic
engineering for instance has demonstrated that asexual reproduction does not
simply involve the reduction of sexual difference to an asexed form of reproduction, but incites the reawakenings of mitochondrial preadapted forms of
bacterial sex. As I have explained elsewhere, this future–past form of sex
implies not a reduction of sexual difference to undifferentiated repetition, but
the proliferation of unintended forms of sex whose ontological effectiveness
has yet to be realized.24
Ultimately, it is not the case that sexual difference is and will remain the
dominant mode of sex in evolution. Sex is instead an event in evolution and
must neutralize the “bifurcation of nature.” From this standpoint, one must
suspend the dominance of the physical chain of genetic inheritance in evolution, where one entity directly passes information on to the next (for
example, as in the model of sexual reproduction where information is passed
from parents to offspring directly). If sex is an event and evolution is the nexus
of events, there must be no mechanism—sexual reproduction or genetic
engineering—that can guarantee the ontological persistence of the two sexes.
This is not to say that the efficient cause—guaranteeing that the physical data
is inherited from one mode of sex to another, from biological to technological
reproduction, for instance—does not generate an infinity of effects in all kinds
of sexes. On the contrary, biotechnological clones, for instance, exercise their
virtual effects in the infinity of occasions succeeding their own creation. From
this standpoint, the evolutionary past—as also Grosz (drawing on Bergson)
points out—unleashes a potential for virtual effects on future modes of sex,
which explain how sexual difference can be evolutionarily defined in terms of
“Asexual reproduction of males from unfertilized eggs is a normal part of some insect reproduction, but asexual reproduction of females is “exceedingly rare in ants.”
23
At Carl Hayden High School in Arizona, a marine biology teacher kept a pet shark in her
classroom. The female shark, Twilight, had been alone in her tank for four years when students
saw a baby shark in the tank with her. The shark’s unfertilized egg formed into a pup through
a process of parthenogenesis, where the mother’s gene divides in half and, rather than combining with a male’s genes, recombines with its own collection of genes. As opposed to the
bio-logical imperative of sexual reproduction and genetic exchange, said to guarantee diversity
and complexity to species that would otherwise regress and disappear, parthenogenesis or
cloning reveals the plasticity and adaptability of forms of sex and reproduction, that is, their
capacities to change according to environmental constraints.
24
For instance, see my Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology, and the Mutations of Desire
(London: Continuum, 2004), ch. 4.
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becoming. But on the other hand, as Whitehead also claims, the efficient
transmission of such potential, according to a gradualist model of continual
accumulation and transmission of changes, risks a congealed becoming in an
endless now. However, when becoming is congealed in a dominant form of
sexual difference, one denies the heterogeneity of virtual and actual forms of
sex: the immanence of singularities that explain how becoming could ever
occur in evolution. On the contrary, if the dominance of efficient causation—
determining the uninterrupted continuum or the ontobiological permanence
of sexual difference—is suspended, one can account for the abstract reality of
past and future forms of sex and admit incompossible sexes-worlds in evolution. As Whitehead suggests, in order to break from the “continuity of
becoming,” one must admit that each and every form, entity, occasion, or
object must include the means as well as the end of processes. In other words,
there is no becoming if a process is determined only by the transfer of
objective data (efficient cause). Nothing will become something without the
drive of the subjective aim (final cause). From a temporal point of view,
Whitehead defines objective data as the past, also conceived in terms of real
potentialities, or according to Deleuze, possibilities or actualities linked by the
efficient cause. Actualized occasions constitute the present of a form, whose
subjective aim is delimited by pure potentialities, eternal objects, or in
Deleuze’s terms, virtualities. From this standpoint, pure potentialities of sex
constitute the enabling constraints of all forms of sex, adding breaks to the
permanent inheritance of data. In short, the subjective aim of a form of sex
makes it unrepeatable, complete, and perishable. No actual form can eternally endure, as its final aim is to achieve ultimate satisfaction in itself and thus
to pass away. Only by perishing can an actual occasion become objective data
for a new occasion. Only by receding into the background can a form of sex
become.
For Whitehead it is the final cause that accounts for the becoming of an
actual occasion. Final cause here is not teleologically preprogrammed by
God. Rather, it points at actual occasions’ activities of decision, involving a
negative or positive prehension of data. Final causes define the general conditions by which processes physically give rise to actual occasions. Deleuze
calls such incorporeal causes entrenched in after (final) effects, “quasi-causes”:
“an unreal and ghostly causality.”25 As these are nonlinear causes, whose
vectorial trajectory deploys a field of action spilling out of its physical location,
they are not determined by an eternal now: a continual endurance. On the
contrary, what happens is here determined in an “instant without thickness
25
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 33.
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and without extension, which subdivides each present into past and future.”26
A final cause is an effective or affective causality, and in so far as it occupies
the present, it is induced by a futurity by which actual occasions can ultimately become something new.
From the standpoint of final causes, evolution and sex are not congealed in
an eternal present form—whichever this might be. If evolution is a process of
infinite differentiation and sex is a form of such process, then one needs to
account for the perishing of forms and the becoming of sex, for those events
that cannot be reduced simply to variations of continuity. In this sense, past
forms of sex (for instance, bacterial sex) and its potential effects are not
redundant but are effectively involved in other actual forms of sex, including
sexual reproduction, but also endosymbiosis, parasitism, viral transmission,
parthenogenesis, cloning, transgenesis, IVF, and synthetic reproduction. In
other words, the effects of the past (for example, bacterial sex, endosymbiosis)
and of the present (for example, synthetic reproduction, algorithmic modeling, genetic engineering, nanotechnology) are real operators of the becomings
of sexual reproduction and sexual difference. At the same time, however,
these becomings are irreversible breaks from previous forms of sex and could
not occur without the ingression or the selection of pure potentialities, eternal
objects or virtualities on behalf of actual occasions. This is where the immanent activities of a transcendental realm come to haunt its effects as “it
maintains with the effect an immanent relation which turns the product, the
moment that it is produced, into something productive.”27 From this standpoint, evolution is constituted by events only if these events, as contingencies,
accidents, irreversible adaptations, and variations, are infected by pure potentialities, abstract forms of sex that are as real and as effective as any actual
mode of sex.
To conclude, all forms of sex—bacterial sex, endosymbiosis, sexual reproduction, parthenogenesis, algorithmic sexes, engineered cloning, nano and
synthetic sexes—are events that expose sexual difference to a multiplicity of
actual sexes, ontologically irreducible to the model of the two. At every
moment the continuity of sexual difference must become a new event and not
26
Ibid, 164.
Ibid., 95. A transcendental realm is defined by virtual worlds, or as Whitehead defines
them, eternal objects, potentialities that are always more than mere possibilities. As these are
autonomous from all actualities, or occasions of sex, they are also un-tight from the physical
chain of causes and effects, which connects in a continuum biological and technological forms
of sex. Pure virtualities or eternal objects rather admit an incomputable quantity of sexes whose
qualities are abstractions from the sensory and conceptual prehensions of sex. Such qualities
indeed can only be encountered in experience. But this is an experience that can have occasions
at all levels and scales of matter: for Whitehead an electron as much as a bacterium can feel and
have thoughts. In short, the prehension of incomputable quantities of sexes and their sensorial
and conceptual qualities is as much an event as it is a becoming, and an evolutionary novelty.
27
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the endurance of one form. This is why sex emerges from the world as world
itself, rather than being the projection of one point of view toward the world.
As every form of sex is an event, it has a physical and mental pole that realizes
effects in evolution, no matter how small or how artificial a form of sex can be.
This is why the inheritance of a potential datum means the break from the
weight of the past, the necessary multiplicity of forms of sex.
Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s metaphysics show us a path toward a radical
empiricism attuned to the finding of experimental science and technology,
which, far from enframing matter into an instrumental ontology, open experience to an infinite series of events. However, as Isabelle Stengers puts it, if
the scientific enterprise is a necessary condition for understanding the world,
it is not a sufficient one.28 No evolutionary science can explain sex, sexual
difference, and the ontological condition of sexual experience. A radical
empiricism must search for the sufficient reason—the immanent and not
transcendent conditions—that explains how sexual experience cannot but
become infected by a thousand forms of sex.
28
Isabelle Stengers, “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day,” Configurations 13 (2005):
35–55, at 37.