Darwin in Atlantic Cultures

Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Jeannette Eileen Jones, Patrick B. Sharp

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415872348
• eBook ISBN: 9781135178727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

This collection is an interdisciplinary edited volume that examines the circulation of Darwinian ideas in the Atlantic space as they impacted systems of Western thought and culture. Specifically, the book explores the influence of the principle tenets of Darwinism -- such as the theory of evolution, the ape-man theory of human origins, and the principle of sexual selection -- on established transatlantic intellectual traditions and cultural practices. In doing so, it pays particular attention to how Darwinism reconfigured discourses on race, gender, and sexuality in a transnational context. Covering the period from the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) to 1933, when the Nazis (National Socialist Party) took power in Germany, the essays demonstrate the dissemination of Darwinian thought in the Western world in an unprecedented commerce of ideas not seen since the Protestant Reformation. Learned societies, literary groups, lyceums, and churches among other sites for public discourse sponsored lectures on the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution for understanding the very ontological codes by which individuals ordered and made sense of their lives. Collectively, these gatherings reflected and constituted what the contributing scholars to this volume view as the discursive power of the cultural politics of Darwinism.

Part I
Genders and Sexualities

1 Strange Birds

Friedrich Nietzsche, Djuna Barnes, and Queer Evolution

Robert Azzarello

“Bend down the tree of knowledge and you’ll unroost a strange bird.”

—Djuna Barnes (1936)^{1 2}

Let me begin with an extended quotation from a short article published just recently in The New York Times. This article, I hope, will illustrate a crucial problem facing Darwinian thinking, and also, I hope, provide the seeds, so to speak, of the problem’s resolution. In “Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes” (2007), Nicholas Wade writes his first three paragraphs:

When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raising the greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes.³

In reading this excerpt, one should find, at first, that there is nothing surprising or unique about these three paragraphs. Indeed, the “sex and science” section in the popular press is as ubiquitous and conventional as the weather report on the nightly news.⁴ We find in this article all the exacting nonchalance of excessively grandiose claims, the tired guilt of not presupposing “the other side,” the quasi-absurd attempts at qualification; in short, we find the complete denial that the primary claim is questionable even in spite of all the talk of “it seems” and “it may.” I would like to pause for a moment, however, and try to unpack this truly unique grouping of epistemological, ontological, and ethical elements and positions condensed in these few short paragraphs in order to stretch out and magnify a portion of the philosophical problem I will address in this paper, a problem with profound political repercussions.

In his article, Wade quite obviously rehearses the rhetorical protocol of his professional craft and begins, in the introductory “narrative hook” at least, with the bravado characteristic of “Darwinian fundamentalism,” to borrow a term from Stephen Jay Gould.⁵ The first few moments of the text—and especially the title itself—do not allow room for disagreement from either the sources consulted or the reader him or herself. The entire, complex, and intricately toned realm of human life is explained in a cliché, figured scientifically of course, that is careful to mystify any evidence of itself as such. And once again, as is typical in this type of article, freedom versus predestination, the perennial philosophical and theological problem, is condensed—or rather, transferred to and answered—in the gene.⁶

What is more, and more important for my purpose here, is the quietly spectacular slippage between various modern gender and sexual identities. Wade begins by identifying “the human” as his subject. This general subject, then, is divided and specified—perhaps species fied—into three subsubjects: straight men, gay men, and women. Lesbians, of course, are completely elided; indeed, as are bisexual, transgender, and numerous other modes of queer beings. But this article is not really about them, but about “human [read: straight] sexuality,” a kind of sexuality that produces the only thing that “evolution cares about,” that is to say, more straight children.⁷ The slippage, in the end, allows the author to pretend that he is talking about everyone when, in fact, he is talking about someone.

In more condensed, philosophical language, I am arguing that Wade’s article articulates a heteronormative ontology grounded in an objectivist epistemology and that this articulation coincides very clearly with a certain tendency in contemporary Darwinian thinking.⁸ The initial questions that compel Wade and similar writers have a long history and extend well beyond scientific discourse into philosophy and literature. The answers to these questions within philosophy and literature, however, often disrupt the truisms of contemporary Darwinian thought.⁹ In this essay, then, I would like this tendency—heteronormative ontology grounded in an objec-tivist epistemology—to serve as my primary focus and Friedrich Nietzsche, especially in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and Djuna Barnes, especially in Nightwood (1936), to serve as my primary methods, and theoretical orientations, of critique. Heteronormativity here signals the ubiquitous ideological framework that identifies heterosexuality as the norm, the “default setting,” and all other expressions of both sexuality and gender abnormal, deviant, or exceptional—and not in a good way. This taxonomical system, like many taxonomical systems, also includes very specific modes of valuation based upon the subject’s classification and the degree to which it deviates from the norm. Objectivism here distinguishes a mode of theory and praxis that locates truth—and in the context of ethics, value, and the regulatory “ought”—outside of the realm of the human, including human history, cognition, and language. It signals a methodological position that purports ontological description while ignoring epistemological problemat-ics. It is often associated with “realism” or “naïve realism,” depending on one’s own philosophical orientation, but I am hesitant to make this conceptual link because the association implies that its philosophical rival— that is, constructivism—is unrealistic, or rather, has nothing to do with that which we call reality.¹⁰ Heteronormativity and its stronger variations, homophobia and heterosexism, in the Darwinian context seem to gain their rhetorical force by grounding themselves in a more general objec-tivism. Sustaining that which it polices, objectivism itself is a prerequisite for “compulsory heterosexuality,” to borrow Adrienne Rich’s famous formulation. ¹¹ This tendency is not very surprising since most evolutionary theorists discuss nature (human and otherwise), or that discursive, metaphysical, and physical realm most heavily—indeed violently—regulated by a putative heteronormativity.¹²

These explanations—or rather, interpretations—of Wade’s article lay a foundation and serve as a springboard for my project in this essay, an essay which ultimately will consider, under various shades of light, Djuna Barnes’s queerly Nietzschean notion of life, of sexual life, of natural life, in all its productively perverse manifestations.¹³ My main argument will be that for these thinkers—Nietzsche and Barnes—ontology, or “first philosophy,” is always already implicated in epistemology. Ontology does not necessarily come “second,” but instead emerges as epistemology. Or, as Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution (1907) succinctly puts it, “theory of knowledge and theory of life seem to us inseparable.”¹⁴ Indeed, it is no coincidence that a text such as Beyond Good and Evil, a text that can easily represent Nietzsche’s life work, begins with “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” a chapter in which the author unmasks philosophers’ ostensibly innocent will-to-truth as indicative of a deeper will-to-power. This textual moment and philosophical position contains the quintessential Nietzschean epistemology. But Nietzsche does not stop there: Will-to-power becomes, in the end—or maybe, in the beginning—his ontology, his theory of life, his strange antifoundational essence of all beings and becomings: “Theory of knowledge and theory of life seem to us inseparable.”

My purpose expands on Bergson’s position here, in thinking about Nietzsche and Barnes—and even, as we shall see, Nicholas Wade—and attempts to add aesthetics as a third term to this inseparability. Beyond Good and Evil begins with “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” as I have noted, but its conclusion is equally important to the structure of the overarching, philosophical argument. The text ends with a poem, an aftersong, that Nietzsche titles “From High Mountains.” Beyond Good and Evil originates in epistemology, transforms into ontology, and culminates in poetry. To focus my argument here even further: The aesthetic comes to the fore in both Nietzsche’s philosophy and Barnes’s poetic fiction to solve, heuristically if not pragmatically, the contradiction between epistemological (constructivist) problematics and ontological (evolutionary) description. Theory of knowledge, theory of life, and theory of beauty seem to us inseparable.

How, then, does this proposition relate to Charles Darwin himself, the figure to whom this essay—through Wade and Barnes, through Bergson and Nietzsche—ultimately refers? As is quite clear in reading the primary texts, Darwin’s approach to knowledge is firmly rooted in nineteenth century objectivism. For example, let us consider the elegant conclusion to his Origin of Species (1859):

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.¹⁵

For Darwin, there are laws governing the formation of life on earth. What appears as an “entangled bank,” as chaos, beautifully anarchic, has, in essence, an underlying order that the scientist can untangle, grasp, and explain.

Darwin describes this underlying order in his next sentence:

These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.¹⁶

This single sentence, heavily punctuated, sums up the law of evolution according to Darwin in 1859. If he has epistemological doubt, he is careful to erase such a tone from his ontological theory. He presents the law as certain, as fact. Although it is difficult to maintain such a faith in the concept of law after so many critiques of objectivism even from within the scien-tific community in the twentieth century (the most famous example may be Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), one can nonetheless be sympathetic with the general ethos of Darwin’s project. So, I am less interested in Darwin’s epistemology than with the ultimate conclusion of Origin of Species. Like Nietzsche, Darwin will end with an appeal to the aesthetic:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.¹⁷

Without “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” one would be unable to understand the full force and meaning of Darwin’s work. Although one could argue that Darwin here is pandering to his audience, that he is cunningly anticipating religious backlash, ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I GENDERS AND SEXUALITIES
• PART II RACE AND DIFFERENCE
• PART III COLONIZATION, NATION, AND “PROGRESS”
• CONTRIBUTORS