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, 19th 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 20th-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 20th 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.
[13] Rorty op cit
note 5; pp 92-3.
[14] Lyotard op cit note 10 p 118
