<<TRANSMATHOME

III          A Kind of Schizophrenia

One writer exploring the philosophical and scientific habits of attributing sexual values to everything around it is Evelyn Fox-Keller. She points to a ‘kind of schizophrenia’ plaguing understandings of science and  gender, causing polarized oscillations between ‘fixed natural categories in one moment, and constructed, perhaps even indefinitely plastic, categories in another.’ The solution to this impasse, she argues, is ‘learning to count past two’.[304] A first result of this is that matter becomes understood in terms of interacting forces, rather than as the content of form. Keller argues that this has been scientifically problematic because it seemed to sentimentalize nature; immanently co-operative matter self-organizing coherent systems without external direction implied a natural altruism of form on the part of individuals, their willingness to ‘die’ for the system.[305] A similar problem of balance concerns all trade-offs between group benefit and individual cost. The critical question concerns the maximum degree of cost to themselves individuals will tolerate before any socially desirable character is disinvested. This situation is clearly that of the multiple +1, and so does not correspond to the space occupied by Deleuze and Guattari.

Counting past two, but not by using another one, argues Keller, involves paying scientific attention to the middle ground ignored by zero-sum cost benefit analysis. She cites Lynn Margulis’ work on bacterial sex as doing this; that it has been described as ‘introducing feminism to Darwinism’[306] rather than as a piece of “proper” science indicates a resistance to the radical differences implied by the breakdown of basic taxonomies in her work. It is problematic for feminism because the body as a whole object, complete with vagina or penis, womb or testes, is no longer the site for discussions of sexuality and reproduction: bacterial sex problematizes sexual difference beyond the possibility of its redemption by two bio-socially defined terms, male and female. Patterns conceived of as socially constructed, teleologically directed or divinely imprinted become understood as self-organizing material functions, and the body is merely one amongst many solutions to problems of matter and force. Initial explorations of these functions often drag anthropomorphic hangovers with them - altruism, for example, or zero sum games.

But thinking past two involves understanding that ‘Nature is oblivious of all our romances, and knows nothing of our gender roles and distinctions.’[307] The implication of all this is that feminist categories can only reach so far: a feminist epistemology can no more reach  back into matter than can a male intellect. A further implication of Keller’s paper is this: since the impulse towards sexing and gendering parts male or female, masculine or feminine is an old scientific habit, an imposition of romance onto nature, its continuation by feminists is a subscription to that romance. At bottom her paper addresses the legitimacy of the thought of sexual difference which emerges as a question out of the middle.