(r)evolutions

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the relationship between evolution and culture. It's become somewhat of a perennial "big question." For one, we have for want of a better term, the "materialization of information," what Derrida would call "writing" in the broad sense. That is, technology has cut the earthly tethers of the simulation, and now it is increasingly meaningless to distinguish a "thing" from its representation. The symbolics of computer code occupies this threshold. Code is at once material and immaterial, operating in a threshold space that destroys this distinction. The posthumanists tell us that as the difference between artifice and reality implodes, so does the distinction between nature and culture. The mapping of the genome and the possibility of its free manipulation is perhaps the primary marker of this paradigm shift. It is only "natural" that we start asking not only whether culture is subject to natural laws, but also whether it is part of some greater Gaian development. And what are the mechanisms of these changes?

The extant attempts to reconcile nature with culture under an evolutionary framework do not seem to capture the full story. Many of these take Richard Dawkins' "selfish gene" as central to the process and culture as derivative. These theories state that either culture is a direct expression of our genes or the genes hold culture on a long leash where it can have somewhat a life of its own. Then came so-called "meme theory" where the replicator gene became a very poor analogy for understanding how ideas propagate. In the meme theory put forth by Susan Blackmore, a meme is "any attempt at imitation." Memes survive because they are, as tools, "useful." Meme theory hit a pretty solid dead end in academe, doomed from the beginning it seems by a false analogy. The language of memes continues to survive in the popular lexicon, however. "Meme" is also still a buzzword in the world of viral marketing.

Most of these theories were hatched by scientists used to seeing the world in terms of human subject-object relations - a world of tools. Instead, I think we ought to be thinking about cultural evolution in terms of "political technologies." Political technologies are symbolic systems that produce various configurations of people, and I conceive of "political" in a Foucauldian way: as a micropolitics of production. That is, culture on a grand scale produces political organs. We can conceive of these political organs much like the supercolonial anthill. What keeps the anthill solvent and the ants from just wandering off? The answer is that ant evolution is also the evolution of political technologies - probably pheremonally based. The learning of political technologies is perhaps the defining characteristic of humanity. The existence of our large brains - especially our linguistic capacity - has baffled evolutionary scientists for quite some time. But here we may have an answer. Our seemingly evolutionarily disadvantageous brains allow for complex social networks to form - for a larger "organism" (a political organ or body politic) to develop. This larger organism has an evolutionary advantage, much like the anthill as an organism has an advantage over the ant. Language and image are the primary technologies of production, but all kinds of other technologies are involved such as brick and mortar architecture, communication tech, "tools," energy flow, etc.

Let's imagine watching human history from an easy chair on the moon. We would very likely notice various competing human configurations. Some would survive and some we would watch become obsolete. Empires would rise and crumble like some strange circuitry on the surface of an orange. We would probably have no better idea of what kept these configurations solvent than if we were staring at an anthill. If we looked closer, we would find that various discourses of identity were the main mechanisms by which these political organs were constituted. Communication logics would be the stuff of which these human organelles were made. We could then say that the discourses would be the political organisms themselves, and these discourses would compete in Darwinian fashion.

In order to survive, these political organisms would have to police themselves and produce themselves. Foucault has outlined both of these processes: institutions of discipline and discourses of production, reproduction, and propagation. Foucault and Nietzsche are uniquely suited for this task given their reliance on a guiding metaphor of "geneology" with regard to knowledge structures. The problem is that Foucault is not so interested in evolution as he is very critical of any metanarrative of progress. We can cross Foucault with evolution, though, even the idea of abrupt non-linear cultural shifts, what he calls episteme. We can say that evolution is comprised of abrupt epistemic shifts if we can conceive DNA as a kind of knowledge structure. (Indeed, genome informatics are dematerializing DNA to the extent that computer code is materializing language.) The informatics of nature are always "vibrating" evolutionary biologists tell us. This idea is featured in so-called "quantum evolution" and SJ Gould's notion of "punctuated equilibrium." Nature is always in a process of overcoming itself in the Nietzschean way, always opportunistically mutating to meet changing circumstances, always ready to initiate new ecological pairings. In this same way, political technologies will also constantly vibrate. Discourses mix, self-efface, mutate. Though flesh and blood dies, the political organ lives. In the middle ages, they would say "The king is dead; long live the king," meaning that the real king was the discursive constitution of the people (the king's other body, as Ernst Kantorowicz would have it.) Thus, I think that narratives of identity that constitute political organisms (as well as the knowledge logics that animate them) have a place in the discussion of this ever evolving, living planet.