Rosemary McMullen

Penelope’s Labor:

Private and Public Consequences

of Being a Dynamic Evolutionist[1]

Rosemary McMullen 1990

… evolution is basically a gigantic, multifaceted…open learning process…. The difference between a given goal and heuristic alignment of processes on the one hand, and open, but canalized processes on the other is subtle but essential. It corresponds to the difference between structure and process-oriented thinking.[2]

Before we go much further, WESS members should carefully review the many uncomfortable, impolitic, and downright dangerous implications of practicing open process thinking. It unsettles the empirical ego, linear progress paradigms, known game plans in proper ballparks. Ye who enter dynamic systems theory and practice, private and public, be aware of the consequences.

Cogivertigo

WESS [Washington Evolutionary Systems Society] promotes dialogue loosely organized around dynamic systems, encouraging ongoing readjustments of viewpoints toward scientific and philosophical inquiry, discourse, and mind itself. New paradigms are set in motion, but the old ones are not disempowered immediately. Confusion and tension arise from constant deconstruction and tentativeness. The best world I have encountered for this sense is “cogivertigo”.[3] One is apt to get dizzy when the past and present contingencies of one’s “I,” knit into those of physical and social environment, perception, and interpretation are, even as we read, being propelled into new and never-ending uncertainties. Cogivertigo is a good word for the personal intellectual panic of one always in process.

Verwindung: or, It’s Not Just Me, It’s the System

Verwindung, a term developed by Martin Heidegger, helps to name facets of the process of distancing oneself from a thought system or paradigm central to one’s formation. For Heidegger, that system was metaphysics.

Gianni Vattimo summarizes it thus:

…overcoming… going-beyond that is both an acceptance and a deepening…linked to ‘winden’, meaning to twist…. Not only can one verwinden from an illness, but …loss…or…pain…. Metaphysics …is not something which can be ‘put aside like an opinion. Nor can it be left behind us like a doctrine in which we no longer believe’; rather, it is something which stays in us as do the traces of an illness of a kind of pain to which we are resigned…. There is ‘distortion’ to consider as well…for metaphysics can never be simply accepted… without reservation, since it is the system of technological domination…. it may be lived as an opportunity or … possibility of change…twisted in a direction which is not foreseen…yet is connected to it.[4]

Verwindung would be a condition of, perhaps a strategy for coping with, social “dis-eases” such as racism or sexism, the tenuousness of peace and justice, as well as the sterility of much structure-thinking. The dynamic evolutionist gravitates toward a mythic image not of a Platonic seeker ascending from the cave, but of Penelope weaving by day, unweaving by night. Her “Big Loom” may weave biology, mathematics, cognition, politics, etc., in dizzying arrays; but she knows it weaves her moment by moment, not the other way around, hence nightly verwindung, the private evolutionary systems science.

Separation from Mainstream Intellectuals

Dynamic evolutionists may well find the most stimulating company that of artists, poets, literary critics, and “ironist” philosophers (as opposed to metaphysicians). Such people capable of parallel processing can deal creatively with cogivertigo and verwindung. They are veteran quick-changers of vocabularies and semiologies. Mainstream intellectuals are structure thinkers. Like Richard Rorty’s metaphysicians (yes, the same eschewed by Heidegger) they:

…believe that we already possess a lot of the “right” final vocabulary and merely need to think through its implications…. He sees philosophical theories as converging — a series of discoveries about the nature of such things as truth and personhood, which get closer and closer to the way they really are, and carry the culture as a whole closer to an accurate representation of reality.[5]

Separation from the Public at Large

Dynamic evolutionists know that “reality” is open ended, verifiable only in temporal context-dependent “slices.” They view the history of human thought as a series of tacit substitutions of new vocabulary for old, to better describe the newest perceptions of the newest reality. But the spread of this understanding among paradigm shifters in many disciplines has “widened the gap between the intellectuals and the public. For metaphysics is woven into the public rhetoric of modern liberal societies” (Rorty, p 82). If you think cogivertigo is difficult for you, how would John Q. Public handle it? However, there may be an evolutionary silver lining to this gloom. Young people reared on video and sensory overload who do not like to read may be verwinden already, and are likely candidates for a dynamic evolutionary sensorium. Whether they will duplicate the rigors of thought as we know it is another query.

Collusion with Subversive Activities

The subversive in art, religion, and all “countercultures” is a consistent element in human history that parallels and at times alters the dominant structure of thought.[6] Some semiologists, linguists, social scientists, and psychologists argue that the phenotype resists behavior and thought (however dominant) that is incongruent and unhealthy to the genotype, and consciously and unconsciously expresses this resistance not only in illness and crime, but in far more diffuse forms: humor, irony, personal art, ritual, and stories, multiform private and group disobediences.[7]

Subversion of the Status Quo

Many formidable contemporary thinkers have critiqued the intertwining of thought and symbol systems with political and economic power systems.[8] The military complex has ruled since the historical record began. Saints, intellectuals, factions upholding alternative visions thus far have not contravened it, though they have influenced bifurcation points. Such continues to be the fate of dynamic evolutionists, watching for the warp to cross the woof within their spheres of influence.

Subversion of Male Authority

Jean-Francois Lyotard is one of the few male intellectuals to note the congruity of the feminist critique of the patriarchal thought and symbol system with the ferment on the unreliability of structure thinking in science, philosophy, and semiology. Female thinkers who have done so are legion.[9] Lyotard summarizes eloquently:

…philosophy is not just any discipline. It is the search for a constituting order that gives meaning to the world, society and discourse….The complicity between political phallocracy and philosophical metalanguage is made here: the activity men reserve for themselves arbitrarily as fact is posited legally as the right to decide meaning….women are discovering something that could cause the greatest revolution in the West, something that (masculine) domination has never ceased to stifle: there is no signifier; or else, the class above all classes is just one among many; or again, we Westerners must re-work our space-time and all our logic on the basis of non-centralism, non-finality, non-truth.[10]

Social Political Commitment

Helen Longino “would practice science as a feminist by (1) recognizing the ways in which the background assumptions of mainstream science facilitated certain conclusions and excluded others; and (2) deliberately using background assumptions at variance with those of mainstream science.”[11]

Her politics are practical, however. She sanctions participation in the most inclusive scientific community because one must measure a theory “not against some independently accessible reality but… against the cognitive needs of a genuinely democratic community. This suggests that the problem of developing a new science is the problem of creating a new social and political reality.”[12]

A Career of Fiction, Film, TV

How could dynamic evolutionists efficiently speed the creation of a new society? Let us return to the mythic image of Penelope’s labor as well as the premise that artists and poets are comfortable with cogivertigo and verwindung. Both Rorty and Lyotard, continuing the bent of Sartre, conclude that the optimal place for intellectuals to put their energy is reading and writing stories, literary and journalistic, multiplying versions of possible lives, transmuting the symbol systems of the status quo. I would add visual art to this project: TV, film, performance, with feedback from the receivers provided not just by turning the channel but also by enacting a critical stance.

Rorty argues that the philosophical inheritance of Nietzsche through Heidegger and Derrida is apposite for private sifting of thought, but useless politically. His ironist thinks that “what unites her with the rest of the species is not a common language but just susceptibility to pain and in particular to that special sort of pain which the brutes do not share with humans…humiliation…. Whereas the metaphysician thinks of the high culture of liberalism as centering around theory, she thinks of it as centering around literature….”[13] Verwindung thus becomes political as the thought-symbol arrays of ordinary citizens evolve in dynamic systemic sophistication.

Fiction is, paradoxically, an eminently practical activity for a dynamic evolutionist. Why? (1) It’s a clear shot. The politicians foolishly consider fiction harmless. (2) Lodged in ordinary life, fiction is far more accessible a language than theory. (3) Sensitization to others’ pain is a major constituent of social psychological and political evolution. For example, 19^th century England’s breakthrough liberal legislation (Great Reform Act 1832) was directly fed by the poetry and fiction saturating the leadership and reading public. Disraeli himself wrote twelve novels.

Lyotard advises: “One should not attack him head-on but wage a guerilla war of skirmishes and raids in a space and time other than those imposed for millennia by the masculine logos…. Let us set to work forging fictions rather than hypotheses and theories; this would be the best way for the speaker to become ‘feminine.’” [14]

Let’s not forget Penelope’s dramatic situation, after all. Weaving and unraveling her father-in-law’s burial shroud was a holding tactic, fending off forced marriage, her son’s murder, usurpation of their holdings, while Odysseus underwent a ten-year transformation on his way home from the ten-year war, and Telemachos grew up.

What allegory could better approximate the psychological and political situation of a dynamic evolutionist today?

NOTES

[1] First published in WESS.com Vol 1, Number 1 January 1991 [Washington DC Evolutionary Systems Society is WESS.]

[2] Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (Pergamon Press, 1980), p 202.

[3] Charles Levin, “Art and the Sociological Ego: Value from a Psychoanalytic Point of View,” in Life After Postmodernism ed. John Fekete (St Martin Press, 1987) p 50. Cogivertigo is to be distinguished from Umberto Eco’s term cogito interruptus (in Travels in Hyperreality, 1983) applied to Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964). Eco describes cogito interruptus as the writer’s reversal or cessation of “rational explanation,” which may constitute a message, i.e., “irrationality” is in fact a modus operandi for the writer, for us all.

[4] Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture (trans. Jon Snyder, Johns Hopkins U Press, 1988), 172-3. For other 20^th-century treatments of double binds like verwindung, see discussions of Nabokov, Borges, and Pynchon by N. Katherine Hayles in The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategy in the 20^th Century (Cornell U Press, 1984).

[5] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge U Press, 1989) p. 77.

[6]A huge topic in psychology, theology, art and literary history. See for example: Charles Levin note 3; Elise Boulding, The Underside of History (Westview Press: Boulder CO 1976); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House 1979); Paul Zweig The Heresy of Self-Love: A Study of Subversive Individualism (Basic Books, 1968).

[7]Michel Foucault Foucault Reader (Pantheon Books 1984), Julia Kristeva The Kristeva Reader (Columbia U Press 1986); Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life (U California 1984).

[8]A good sampling of the range would be the canon of Michel Foucault, especially The Archaeology of Knowledge 1972; Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford 1986); Raymond Williams The Politics of Modernism (Verso 1989); Hazel Henderson The Politics of the Solar Age (Doubleday 1981).

[9]Kristeva op cit note 7; Susan Bardo, “The Cartesian Masculinity of Thought” (Signs Spring 1986); Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, 1988; Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge (Rutgers 1989); Andrea Nye, Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man (Routledge 1988); Evelyn Fox Keller Reflections on Gender and Science (Yale 1985); Sandra Harding The Science Question in Feminism (Cornell 1986); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper & Row 1980). See also Clifford Deertz, “A Lab of One’s Own,” NY Review of Books 11/8/90.

[10] Jean-Francois Lyotard, “One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles,” The Lyotard Reader (Blackwell 1989) 118-120.

[11]Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton 1990) p 214.

[12] Ibid

[13] Rorty op cit note 5; pp 92-3.

[14] Lyotard op cit note 10 p 118

Rosemary McMullen

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