The evolutionary metaphor is everywhere in common speach, and in literary criticism. We constantly hear about how genres 'evolve' over time, but of course, that doesn't match up with the scientific definition of evolution.
I am by no means a biologist, but I try to pay attention to the basics, and it seems to me that we rarely invoke evolution in its scientific form, which is worth reviewing for a discussion like this. Evolution is not a directed process. It is not teleological. There is no goal. There is no 'forwards' or 'upwards' in evolution. Species do not get 'better' or 'superior' or 'higher' (as in 'highly-evolved'). Evolution is merely the outcome of natural selection, in which some animals die because their random mutations, large and small, aren't suitable in a given environment, and vice-versa. It's a reactive process. If getting dumber and shedding opposable thumbs made us survive better in our environment, then that’s what would happen in the long term.
Most startlingly, evolution is not fixed on simply producing humans or human-like animals. In fact, in the forward to Noam Chomsky's last book, Hegemony or Survival, he mentions a theory that states that intelligence may in fact be an extremely bad evolutionary trait, because it has given rise to an animal that seems to be incapable of living homeostatically with its environment (I.e., us).
When I read accounts of evolution written by people who don't understand it, they tend to include a desire to inscribe essential differences between humans and 'animals' using evolutionary theory, and they can achieve that by assuming that evolution inexorably moves towards humanity, and that it will, by the same logic, continue to make us ‘better.’ In science-fiction, you see this with creatures who ‘evolve past’ their bodies, becoming pure energy, the pseudo-scientific equivalent of spirits, angels, or demons (see the Vorlon and the Shadows from JMS’s Babylon 5, so often evoked on this blog). From a Western (read: Christian) pre-evolutionary point of view, humans have souls and are made in God's image, and that makes us feel right good about ourselves. Losing that feeling of specialness is a real blow to the cultural ego, so we occasionally try to make the ‘new’ theory, evolution, do the same thing.
One of the most interesting things about evolution, though, is that it demonstrates that we aren't all that different from animals. To some, that means that humans can be 'reduced' to their biological imperatives, and there's no shortage of made-for-TV documentaries that work exclusively on that basis (most of them have titles like "The Science of Sex" or "Why We Like Shiny Things"). This point of view essentially sees culture as an emergent property of biology; our bodies and our environment are the cause of all our social habits. It’s kind of a base/superstructure thing. Sort of.
I prefer, however, to take our kinship with the rest of the animals as an indication that maybe they have some of the things we've previously assumed were exclusive to us, like emotional complexity, intelligence, community, all of the things we tend to abbreviate into the word 'soul.' But of course, to admit that kinship (in that form) would require us to treat animals in a very different way because if they are 'like us' then our ethical systems (which say things like 'don't kill') ought to apply to them, too. Evolution can be a very strong basis for an argument in favour of radical environmentalism or something simple like vegetarianism/veganism. (For the record, I'm a fairly mild environmentalist by most standards, but others routinely try to ‘hail’ me, à la M. Althusser, as a radical because if they can make me look radical, then their own positions look reasonable by comparison. Basically, they'd like me to be their strawman. But I digress.)
The point of all of this is to show that evolution can lead us into places that are simultaneously revelatory and scary, all at the same time. The metaphorical version of evolution, however, carries very different implications. It's most often taken to mean 'change over time' or simply 'growth of some kind.' If I were to overcome my intense fear of spiders, for example, someone might say that I have 'evolved.' If a genre undergoes minute changes to fit new times and places, over the course of a century or so, we might say that it has 'evolved' to suit a new social and ideological environment. It’s important to remember that this is a metaphorical use of the concept of evolution, and as such, its accuracy ought to be immediately suspect.
That said, some of the parallels are there, or at least appear to be. The predominant cultural attitudes are likened to an ecosystem, and one that 'naturally selects' which genres and individual works 'live' or 'die.' Shakespeare 'lives' in our cultural context because we keep choosing to read his work (or even, gasp!, to watch it). This point of view is inherently related to a capitalist one, which treats the market (instead of the culture) like an ecosystem: self-correcting, and ruled by simple cause-and-effect rather than conscious choice.
But as the often dim-witted Neo so "adequately put it" in The Matrix: Reloaded, "The problem is choice." In order to characterize reader/viewer/consumer 'choice' as 'natural selection,' we have to first establish some kind of deterministic framework in which those choices can somehow be 'natural.' And by 'natural,' we usually mean 'determined by some mechanism other than free will.' The very definition of the word ‘natural’ is a thorny matter in and of itself, but I think I’m accurately describing how the word is most commonly used. This twin characterization, the market as ‘natural’ ecosystem and the individual as free-thinking, reveals a serious contradiction.
In addition to assuming that the market is an ecosystem, capitalism requires us to believe in rugged individualism, in which we are free to decide which products to buy, thus allowing them to 'live' or 'die.' From a pure-capitalist perspective, the exact same logic ought to apply to art, by the way. It's just another product, after all (to admit that there are things that can't be quantified in dollars would presumably cause the whole system to dissolve). But to make those choices the way that capitalists argue that we do, we have to, first, be fully informed and, second, have complete freedom of choice. Our information would come from media systems that would appear to ‘fill a market gap,’ satisfy our desire for knowledge, and we would have to be in a meritocratic social system. In the first place, our ‘media system’ is advertising, not the most accurate source of information, and in the second place, we can’t possibly live in a meritocracy that still contains prejudices regarding race, gender, and class, or one that tends to select for those who already have money, but that’s a bit of a side issue in this discussion. If our choices are at all curtailed by ideology or limited in scope, then the meritocracy that's ostensibly at the heart of the system is revealed to be a lie.
Capitalism, therefore, requires that billions of so-called 'free thinking' individuals 'naturally select' some products over others, and it concludes that we will consistently select for those products that are inherently superior. Actually, the logic is that whatever we select for will be by definition inherently superior. See the circular logic? It's a common tactic, to define something into existence rather than employing actual logic or empirical evidence. The over-all model rests on inherently contradictory metaphors of homeostatic biology and meritocratic free will. Which is to say, it can’t be a conveniently deterministic system and a rugged individualistic system at the same time.
The problem here isn’t necessarily that the system doesn’t ‘work’ in practise; I have said very little about how it functions in the real world. I don’t think it does, to be perfectly honest (assuming our goal is the fair and/or equal distribution of wealth), but that’s not what I’m talking about today. The problem today is that the chosen metaphors are inconsistent and contradictory. The solution, then, might be to find better metaphors, and thus we arrive back at my original thought: genre.
There is only a partial resemblance between genres and biological organisms. Genres can do things that animals can’t (and vice-versa, of course). Genres, for example, can be revived long after they’ve died. If you don’t believe me, ask the Renaissance. In fact, they don’t ‘die’ or ‘live’ in any literal sense. That biological reference is also a metaphor. Genres can, as another example, freely combine with other genres, unlike organisms. Once animals reach a certain level of difference from each other, their genes become incompatible and there is no opportunity for interbreeding anymore. Humans cannot have children with our closest genetic relatives, the primates. A house cat, good old felinus domesticus, could not impregnate a panther. Opera, however, can easily be combined with cyberpunk. The result might not be all that good, but it can exist.
But, you say, we now have technology that could potentially achieve both of these things. We can, in theory, clone an animal that died out centuries ago, and with the same technology, combine two animals that are otherwise genetically unrelated (the old ‘salmon genes in the tomatoes’ thing, which I am not making up). The problem, though, is that both of those things would be examples of organisms acting like genres, as opposed to the other way around. Animals don’t do those things spontaneously, by themselves. Humans, and our technology, would have to step in to do those jobs. Which is how genres actually function, as a product of human choices, regardless of whether those choices are determined or not.
I’m not here to argue against or for determinism, either biological, materialist, or cultural. That’s another argument for another day. I’m here to point that, instead of finding better metaphors, perhaps we should just stop using them. Perhaps we should treat genres like genres. They ‘behave’ (metaphor!) in their own ways, according to their own history and context. Instead of stuffing them into boxes in which they don’t fit, why don’t we just observe them as they are?
Metaphors are inherently manipulative. They imply, without overtly claiming it, that two things just are the same. I am aware, by the way, that I’m deliberately, almost obtusively, refusing to buy into even the simplest aspects of the metaphor of evolution in art, which might dictate, using my most recent example, that the cyberpunk/opera combination is akin to a foetal organism so malformed that it cannot survive in the womb. Thus the cyberpunk opera’s low quality is metaphorically the equivalent of being stillborn. But that’s just the point. The two things, genres and organisms, are not ‘the same,’ as metaphors always covertly imply, or to be more accurate, as we tend to treat them. We treat comparative representation (organisms/genres) as metaphors, as if they indicate equivalent identity, exact sameness. We ought to treat them like analogies, with all of the openness that that mode of representation implies. Analogies rely on active comparison of similarity and difference in order to be meaningful, whereas metaphors elide difference.
Posted by orion at June 6, 2006 3:20 PM