Liminal Sex, Biopolitics, and Cyber-Space

    This past June, Naomi Most, a/k/a DJ Prefect, science news community broadcaster¹, and a listener to the weekly science talk show of University of California at Davis KDVS radio 90.3 FM, "This Week in Science"², offered the following comment to the program's hosts via Twitter:

@jacksonfly³ should try an analogy -- Newton:Einstein :: Darwin:??? Newtonian model not complete but also not obsolete.

    Upon seeing the foregoing tweet, I suggested the following:

@drkiki @jacksonfly #Newton:" #physics in space" \ #Einstein:"physics of space"; #Darwin:"evolution in niche" \ t.b.d.:"evolution of niche"

    The readings this week comport nicely with this extended analogy.  To understand how, we may explore the ways in which Darwin's theory has been taken up in the understanding of biopolitics (and political embodiment) and identity (and identification), and the ways in which each of these open and are opened by niche.

    Darwin, in his Origin of Species, claims as supporting his argument the challenge of clearly differentiating species and varieties, and the arbitrariness by which such distinctions are made and upheld, as demonstrative the validity of his theory of descent through natural selection, while Stefan Helmreich, in "Trees and Seas of Information", points to just such arbitrary designation (both at the level of bioinformatic processing systems and the information upon which patents are based) and the problem of clearly identifying species, as such, in biota engaging in lateral transfer of genetic material, as challenging Darwin's claim that all life might be traced to a single genealogical trunk.  Meanwhile, where Darwin identified the tensions of reproductive and productive potentials among various casts of social insects, Donna Haraway, in her "A Cyborg Manifesto", disputes feminisms that cast one gender as being constituted as potentials of labor and/or sex.  Likewise, even as Haraway develops her ironic hybrid of machine and organism, so Helmreich opines that life forms on the land in effect hybridize the organic with the oceans that give organisms life.

    In each circumstance, we witness the dialectic between an essentialism and a dynamism.  It is not that there are essential species, of which other groupings are variants, but that through increasingly divergent variation species become apparent (or, in the very least, conventionalized).  It is not that there are essential re-productive identities, but that all identities operate as liminal interfaces of information and material transmission between the identified.  It is not that there are essential organisms, as distinct from machines and from a non-organistic environment, but that life organizes as at once bringing together and drawing apart, of information and material, node and system.  If there is an essential here, it is not in identities as constituted, humble-bee or hive-bee, man or not man, life or sea, but rather spacings by which variation constitutes and through which divergent forms interface.  It is in the unfolding of spaces, the opening of niches, the evolutionary process by which, in Darwin's words "new places will be formed", whether biological or political, cybernetic or scientific, that this dynamism--of both diversification and hybridization--plays out.

notes

¹ As host of "Subversive Science" on San Francisco's Pirate Cat radio 87.9 FM.

² The program is available to an international audience via podcast.

³ Justin Jackson, who together with Dr. Kirsten Sanford (a/k/a, Dr. Kiki) co-hosts "This Week in Science".