Setler, Dana.
Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008.
The post-Darwinian theory of atavism forecasted obstacles to human progress in the reappearance of throwback physical or cultural traits. In this stimulating work, Dana Seitler explores how modernity itself is an atavism. Examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, fiction, and photography, Seitler discovers how modern thought oriented itself around this paradigm of obsolescence and return—one that served to sustain ideologies of gender, sexuality, and race.
[Key Concepts]
●Atavism: a
theory of biological reversion emerging out of modern science. / modernity
sought a break with the past, but that break necessitated the past’s return.
(1) atavism is a “reproduction” and a “recurrence” of the past in the present,
a recurrence that is specifically one of ancestral prehistory./ what it meant
to be human after the advent of such disturbing concepts as evolution and the
unconscious (5)この二つは同時なのだな Constituted by discernible signs of ancestral
recurrence in a present-tense body, atavism made the past of the human present,
and it rendered this past not only visible but material, figuring forth the
modern human subject as a subject of the deep past. (6) atavism signaled a
retrogressive animalism (7). Derrida’s hauntology:
what this means for Derrida is that there are always ghosts haunting the
constitution of the subject: a plurality of temporalities, identities, and
epistemological positions hovering over the certainties of being. (11) As a
living embodiment, atavism incarnates the past in the present: it is a
material, corporeal recurrence of the past, the past in the flesh. By way of
such an embodiment, the gap between past and present, between history and
prehistory, becomes bridgeable. (20)
[Key Concepts]
● Atavism as a new ontological mode: Operates less by a process of continuity than by
sporadic interruption, atavism skips generations. . . . It thus belies the
conception of identity as direct and individualized and of time as an unbroken
continuity, instead placing human being in a more inclusive and unpredictable
history of biological origins and influences. Instead, atavism is posed as a
category of personhood that erases an immediate reproductive connection between
parent and child, situating the locus of the individual’s identity in much
earlier ancestral moment that is no longer secured in the past but destined to
recur. (2) Put simply, atavism proposes a lateral, directionless relation of
subjects in time. Unimpeded by the command of rationality, it calls into
question some of the most widespread and traditional ideas about human identity
as teleologically ordained. More interesting than simple exposé, though is how
and what atavism produces, namely a new relation to self. Such a notion of
being and existing in relation (with other objects, nonhumans, animals, and
thing) allows for a different way of thinking of ourselves in the world. Atavism, to press hard on the term, may
even be thought of as a new ontological category, but one that does away with
the dualities of the subject-object relation. (236)
●After Darwin—Foucaudian mode of power: What ensued was a linking of the individual,
biological body to the species body, what Foucault has variously called
“biopolitics” or “governmentality,” the modern forms of power and knowledge
concerned with the management of the biological population. (6) clinical gaze.
Corresponding with Foucault’s description of “governmentality,” regulartory
institutions of science, medicine, and the law emerged to elaborate a new way
of conceiving of the social world as a sphere of biological management. (73)
●Modernity and awareness of time (ToC): rational, progressive, and machinelike…. 時計やカレンダーによって可視化される時間 (81)。1839—invention of
Daguerreotype (69). Liner model of progress—Taylorism and Fordism (136).
●Melancholia⇔Atavism???: Neurathenia, hysteria, melancholy: each has been a
noted aspect of the medicalization of personhood at the fin de siècle, and each
in many ways is a potent expression of the experience of modernity. (30)
Melancholy thus emerges, for Proust as much as for James, as the overriding and
undergirding state of the subject, as the place from which the subject moves,
breathes, and comes to knowledge. Atavism, however, is not a memory of things
lost and therefore is not a melancholic reverie of a past experience. . . . An
allegory for the modern as much as an invention of modern science, atavism
materializes the past in the present, disallowing the past to remain past,
keeping it alive as a constitutive feature of the modern self. Atavism,
therefore, doesn’t allow for the melancholic distance that Proust forwards as
the fundamental relationship between the modern subject and her history. (229)
Within the theory of atavism, our very bodies become shrines to and enshrined
as human prehistory. (230)
●Freud and Darwin: Deliberately extrapolating from the Darwinian theory with which he
was so enamored, Freud yokes together human and animal and thereby provides an
interpretation of the human subject as embedded in a former primitive state. .
. . The unconscious is thus assigned a layered temporal function. (32)
[Darwin’s influence on Freud: 44] Freud’s oedipal structure follows Darwin in
its assumption that an inherited characteristic has behind it the developmental
and experimental history of the species. For Freud, this means that oedipality
is the ontogenic repetition of the phylogenetic experience of the race. (44)
Put more boldly, if all instincts are atavistic, then the Freudian subject is
itself an atavism. (45) In Freud’s interpretative scheme, sexuality itself is
deployed as an archaic category or practice and therefore as a relay through
which the modern subject can be at once established and deferred. (45) As
developmental phases, the oral and the anal are thus posited by Freud as
anachronisms of the modern constitution of self. (47) In this light, atavism
can be read as the materialization of the trauma of our inability to secure for
ourselves the truth of ourselves: the anachronism of human identity, the
destabilized relationship between the past causalities and present predicaments
of the modern subject. (52)→ “degeneration
narrative” (95) such as Norris (Vandover)
and Barnes (Nightwood), in which
sexual perversity is represented as retrogression into animality. “a
devolutionary turn” (102).
● Eugenics as a Fordism of biological reproduction: Taylorism and Fordism→the mechanization of
reproductive labor afforded the possibility of rationalized, and thus more
efficient, kinship units. At the fin de siècle, such mechanization took the
form of the science of eugenics, a specialized theory of the optimal production
of human being for an ideal social order. . . Male and female reproductive
bodies were seen as a function of time; the healthy body of the future, the
unhealthy body of the past. (136) Sexology—“we generate the race; we alone can
regenerate the race.” (139) The temporal paradigm of reproduction avers that
modern progress depends on the biological continuance of the human species. The
temporal paradigm of mass production avers that modern progress depends on the
technological massification of culture. But the two paradigms are really one;
each participates in the idea of the managed producibility and reproducibility
of the cultural and social world. (170)
● Eugenics and white feminism: eugenic conceptualizations of motherhood not only
served certain white feminist goals, buttressing national expansion and
concomitant nativist ideologies (176)→ “regeneration
narratives”—twofold narrative of how to improve the social condition of women
and how women can improve the race (179/182)/ “negative eugenics”—“More
children from the fit, less children from the unfit.” (182)/ “reproductive
familialism” (184)/ Gilman’s narratives do not so much strive to repress female
sexuality as they do to compel the incorporation of female desire into the
regulatory ideals of heterosexual reproduction in such a way that these ideals
are experienced as part of the constitutive core of women’s very essence. (184)
Positioning women at the center of national progress—at the center of the
birthing of history—means corroborating the racialist impulses of
national-patriarchal discourses. (189) a deheterosexualization of the
middle-class family. (191) Throughout her work, Gilman provides an example of
how conception of eugenic science offered feminist authors and intellectuals
the means to redefine their relationship to heterosexual imperatives. (193) In
Gilman’s brand of eugenic feminism, the female crossing into “male” terrains
and subject positions operates entirely in keeping with US nationalist
assumptions—that is the duty of white people (male or female) to expand,
extend, colonize, and reproduce. (196)
[Comments]
l
Melancholy and
Atavism—Freud’s “temporally messy theory of subject”: although Seitler attempts
to distinguish atavism from melancholia, stating that “atavism doesn’t allow
for the melancholic distance that Proust forwards as the fundamental relationship
between the modern subject and her history,” when Seitler describes atavism her
description comes so close to Freud’s theorization of melancholia as a
regression into the narcissism, in which the subject merges with the lost
object: “within the theory of atavism, our very bodies become shrines to and
enshrined as human prehistory” (232). This, of course, is not to point out that
Seitler’s understanding of Freud is inadequate; rather, through Seitler’s
theorization of atavism, I was struck by a realization of the reason why I have
been drawn to melancholia. Seitler, in arguing “a lateral, directionless
relation of subjects” that atavism would introduce, proposes that this concept
can be regarded as a new ontological category that sidesteps the subject-object
binary: “Atavism, to press hard on the term, may even be thought of as a new
ontological category, but one that does away with the dualities of the
subject-object relation” (236). This new ontological category is exactly what I
have been looking for in queer theory, which so tactically resists the
temptation of identity politics: what comes after the post-structualist
fragmentation of identity—a new mode of envisioning agency—so inclusive, almost
cannibalistic mode of being that incorporates other inside oneself—the thing
Bersani calls “the It in the I,” which he unapologetically illustrates with a
metaphor of HIV virus—a community inside the self. Queer community⇔family
l
Eugenics as a
Fordism of biological reproduction: efficiency oriented mode—but quality rather
than quantity in case of eugenics. I have been so interested in the
relationship between material production and biological reproduction (Abelove’s
hypothesis on the relationship between the rise of capitalism and the
privileging of “sexual intercourse, so-called”). So this is interesting, too,
especially when considering the fact that Gilman harshly critiques female
consumption in a book that is so production oriented (Women and Economics). In a sense Gilman is anachronistic—that was
an age of consumption, after all—she could not exactly realize the power of
consumption in the age of the late capitalism. But what is a counterpart of
“consumption” in biological reproduction, then? Waste—Benjy’s theory of
lesbianism as waste of productivity—pleasure for pleasure’s sake is attractive
here.
l
Darwin’s sexual
selection: Gilman’s eugenics echoes Darwin’s sexual selection as an “unconscious
self-breeding.” "Just as dog-breeders pick out
the pups they want to mate, so in nature the struggle for existence 'selects'
the offspring that go on to reproduce. Artificial selection was the kennel
counterpart of natural selection. Darwin had only to extend the analogy and see
all animals as self-breeders, picking their own mates, creating fancy
varieties of themselves--races--for 'sexual selection' to be born. He had
substituted his own anthropomorphism for Anglican anthropocentrism, humanizing
nature even as he naturalized mankind" (xxv). But at the same time it is
intriguing that Darwin’s idea of sexual selection was originally intended to
explain mono-genism (anti racialism): human races have different features
because they have developed and chosen different aesthetic standards.
[Key Text, Person]
l
Max Nordau Degeneration (1898)
l
Francis Galton:
the originator of the term “eugenics” (1883) p.71
l
Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species (1859)
l
Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, The Crux (1911), With Her in Outland (1916)
l
Frank Norris Vandover and the Brute (1914)
l
Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity
(1994)
