The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely

I first became interested in this book after seeing it in a bookshop. Having read some Darwin and a fair bit of Bergson I was interested. It is rare indeed nowadays to see any work at all on the concept of time in any other form than the typical linear classical physics/relativity idea. This posits time as something that either acts as a medium through which matter moves or in the case of relativity as another dimension much like the three known space dimensions. In both cases time is strongly spatialised i.e. thought of in the same way that space is.Time is of course strongly linked to change whether it is the idea of change prevalent in ancient times e.g. Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus or the more modern versions used in science. Grosz has studied time's presence through three well known figures Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. Darwin's concern was how organisms evolved over time, Nietzsche how the human being uses the "Will to Power" to become more and Bergson was interested in both. That is in how organisms evolved and what duration (time) actually is, especially in comparison to space.Grosz analyses all of them in turn. She does something unexpected with Darwin, she suggests that natural selection is in fact a positive "force" rather than a purely negative influence on species. I did not find myself believing this, it makes more of natural selection that it is originally posited to be. In turn she considers the ideas of Nietzsche who did foresee Bergson to some degree in that he proposed "The Will to Power" which can be recognised a little in Bergson's elan vital. Finally she discusses Bergson's ideas on time/duration, evolution, intelligence, instinct and so on. She studies Bergson far more deeply than either of the other two.She also relates these concepts to politics especially those of feminism, racism and other forms of political struggle. Her discussion of Bergson is deep and she understands his work well. At times I found myself impressed at her whole grasp of Bergson's issues. She locates a kind of complete whole within his work which eluded me. I had read Creative Evolution, Time and Free Will and The Creative Mind but have not as yet covered Duration and Simultaneity or Mind-Energy.I find that she takes the most from Bergson and relates it at the highest level to much else in our current cultural and political reality. However I did not feel convinced by her study of Darwin and the earlier parts of the book felt a little disjointed. Some parts, especially those on Bergson flowed well together. A good piece of work with more potential.

In The Nick of Time, Elizabeth Grosz wants to make Darwinism relevant for feminism, and for critical studies in general. This is a challenging task: social Darwinism has often been associated with a conservative or reactionary agenda. Darwin’s epigones, from Herbert Spencer to Francis Galton, who applied his theories to society and to culture, posited the hierarchy of races and the survival of the fittest. They in turn influenced Nietzsche and his theory of the overman, who was picked up by Nazis and by white supremacists for their nihilistic agenda. There seems to be an inherent contradiction between Darwin’s idea of natural determinism and a progressive agenda that emphasizes equal rights and opportunities. This contradiction is based, according to Elizabeth Grosz, on misreadings of Darwin and a deformation of Nietzsche’s thought. Darwin and Nietzsche never said what some people made them to say. The solution, for her, is to go back to the original texts and to read them in the light of recent advances in the biological sciences and in social theory. In doing so, one not only lays the foundation of a progressive social agenda; reconciling biology and culture, nature and society, is also a way to put back the body, and the corporeal, back at the center of political theory and feminist struggle. As Grosz argues, “the exploration of life—traditionally the purview of the biological sciences—is a fundamental feminist political concern.”Darwin’s ideas are very familiar to those working in the biological sciences, and have even given rise to whole disciplines such as evolutionary biology and genetics. Yet it is important to introduce to readers from the humanities the intricacies and details of Darwin’s own writings which, though popularized, are rarely read or referred to. They demonstrate that Darwin remains, in spite of feminists’ resistance to his work, one of the few thinkers of the nineteenth century to prefigure, not only an equalitarian feminism, but an ontology of sexual difference that has come to occupy a key position in contemporary feminist debates. Universalism, the claim that men and women are the same, always measures women in terms of how they conform to the characteristics and values of men. Darwin posits difference—between species, between the sexes—, rather than equality, as the criterion of social and biological value. Whereas sexual difference is often associated with patriarchal privilege, Darwin develops an account of evolution that is an open and generative force of self-organization and growing complexity. Elizabeth Grosz thus offers a primer in Darwinian studies, including a discussion of recent evolutionary scientists, such as Ernst Mayr, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, that she laces with her own comments on Darwin’s philosophical conception of time.She shows that Darwin’s model, based on the three principles of individual variation, retention of inherited traits, and natural selection, may provide an explanation for economic and cultural history as readily as for natural history. There are, for example, close resemblances between Darwin’s understanding of individual variation and Marx’s understanding of labor. Through their embodiment as use-value and then as exchange-value, differences in labor are ordered into systems of hierarchical structures that Marx explicitly models on biological categories. Similarly, by characterizing technological innovation as the result of a process of variation, selection, and retention, management scholars use the same model in business schools without even mentioning Darwin’s name. We see the same principles at work in the evolution of languages: here, less than the abstract discussions on the origin of language that were popular in his time, Darwin’s work find echoes in the modern theories of structural linguistics, from Saussure to Jakobson and to Chomsky. Human production, manifested most directly in the history of language or in the operations of economies, must submit itself to the same temporal exigencies as nature itself.One thing is to posit Darwin’s influence over many scientific disciplines; another is to claim his relevance for radical politics and feminist thought. Darwin is not only the first theoretician of natural selection: he also introduced the difference between the sexes, and its effect on variation and selection of life forms, at the core of his theory of the origin and evolution of species. Sexual selection entails that the human exists in only two nondeductible forms: male and female. Two forms which not only divide most of life into divergent categories, but also produce two types of bodily relations with the world, and two types (at least) of knowing. The Darwinian model of sexual selection comes to a strange anticipation of the resonances of sexual difference in the terms of contemporary feminist theory. For Luce Irigaray, sexual bifurcation—the biological difference between male and female—introduces irreducible difference. She rejects the false universalism of the abstraction of the individual, emphasizing that individuals always come in two sexes. The idea that there can be no human substance without sexual identity implies that democracies ca not legitimately define human rights, which are attributes of this substance, otherwise than as the rights of man and woman. In political terms, this line of thought led in particular to the parité movement, which aimed to achieve full equality between male and female representatives in elected bodies. It should be noted that sexual bifurcation is not the same as the sex/gender argument that American feminists first used and then deconstructed. Gender is a social and cultural construct, while the duality of human (and other) species is a condition for the evolution of life and natural selection as understood by Darwin.Emphasizing a politics affirmative of sexual difference can also benefit from a rereading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche enables us to consider the most abstract elements of Darwinism, Darwin at his most philosophical and political, even if Nietzsche does not provide a reading of Darwin himself and apparently learned about the author of On the Origins of Species only from secondary sources. His conceptualization of Darwinism is based on several misunderstandings. He sees in Darwin “a respectable but mediocre Englishman,” and detects in him “a certain narrowness, aridity and industrious diligence, something English in short, that may not be a bad disposition.” Darwinism, Nietzsche argues, is a discourse of the triumph of the weak over the strong, the herd over the individual, the servile over the noble, the mediocre and the average over the exceptional and the strong. What Nietzsche admires is not so much the survival of the fittest, which in his society takes the form of the bourgeois individual, as the survival of the noblest, the exceptional, even the abnormal and the monstrous. Only the human who joyously seeks beyond the human is worthy of consideration. Whereas the Darwinian model is based on lack and scarcity, Nietzsche emphasizes excess, a superabundance of energy and power. The struggle for more—that is, the will to power—is greater than the struggle for existence. Life is not about mere survival, but about profusion and proliferation, not existence, but excess, not being but being-more, that is, becoming. It tends towards a future that cannot be predicted but is yet to come. Humanity-to-come, or the overman, cannot be the product of natural selection but is the consequence of artificial selection, the breeding of the superior by means of the eternal return. Evolution, for Nietzsche, designates the precedence of a future that always overwrites and transforms the present, that directs the present to what is beyond its containment.For Elizabeth Grosz, it is ironic that much of what Nietzsche proclaims as part of his critique of Darwin and Darwinism is consonant with Darwin’s own position. In particular, Darwin provided a model of time and development that refuses any pre given aim, goal, or direction for natural selection. Evolution produces variation for no reason; it values change for no particular outcome; it experiments, but with no particular result in mind. Beings are impelled forward to a future that is unknowable, unconfined by the past, and forever new. Like Nietzsche, Darwin saw morality, reason, and other higher faculties in mankind, as resources that aid or hinder group and individual survival. His relativism provides a strange anticipation of Nietzsche’s own genealogy of morals. Moral Darwinism as seen by Nietzsche privileges the values of life at its highest, its most active and intense. The will to power is the concept that Nietzsche offers to replace Darwin’s account of natural selection. It is a force directed only to its own expansion, without regard for the perspectives of the multiplicity of other forces. The will to power may prove to be another name for the principles of emergence, of the chaotic, competing distribution of forces in systems as they reach a point beyond equilibrium to destabilize and convert themselves to a different mode of organization. It is the principle that underlies the world itself, the most fundamental principle of ontology, the single principle, for Nietzsche, governing all of existence. For Grosz, Nietzsche may help provide a way of understanding politics, subjectivity, and the social as the consequence of the play of the multiplicity of impersonal active forces that have no agency. His postulate of the eternal return, the culmination of Nietzsche’s understanding of a world populated by proliferating and competing wills to power, is a cosmological principle that strangely echoes recent advances in theoretical physics and contemporary philosophy. In modern cosmology, the time of the universe is seen as unlimited in both directions. But the matter of the universe, or equally its energy, is limited, finite, and is blighted by the prospect of the gradual winding down and dissipation predicted by the second law of thermodynamics. It follows that in the infinity of time past and time future, every conceivable combination of matter has already occurred, and will occur again, an infinite number of times. Even the Big Bang is not an origin, the birth of the universe, but a transition, a kind of quantum leap between one universe at its death and the birth of another.Henri Bergson is another thinker whose fecundity for contemporary science and social theory has yet to be reassessed. Bergson’s writings demonstrate no evidence of having read Nietzsche, as Nietzsche himself never read Darwin; nevertheless, his understanding of duration and creative evolution brings together the key insights of Darwin, modulated by a Nietzschean understanding of the internal force of the will to power and the external force of the external return. The will to power is transformed in Bergson, not into a will to command or obey, but a will, a force, or élan vital, which propels life forward in its self-proliferation. Bergson must also be regarded as the philosopher most oriented to the primacy of time, time as becoming, as open duration. Like Nietzsche, Bergson wishes to elaborate a theory of time in which the past is not the overriding factor, and in which the tendencies of becoming that mark the present also characterize the future. Insofar as the future functions as a mode of unpredictable continuity with the past, the future springs from a past not through inevitability and necessity but through elaboration and invention. Bergsonism has often been equated with dualism, and the French philosopher is indeed best remembered for his couples of oppositions between mind and matter, space and duration, the virtual and the actual, habit-memory and memory-image, differences in kind and differences of degree. Yet Elizabeth Grosz shows that these oppositions are more complex than they first appear: at some point, couples of opposites can no longer be binarized, for they form a continuum and merge into each other, or coalesce into a new whole. The difference between differences in kind and differences of degree is itself a difference of degree. There is a fundamental similarity between mind and matter, between the object of perception and the images formed or memorized. The past does not come after the present has ceased to be, nor does the present become the past: rather, the whole of the past is contained, in contracted form, in each moment of the present. In the end, for Grosz, it all comes down to politics, which she defines as “this untimely activation of the virtuality of the past as challenge to the actuality of the present.”Elizabeth Grosz is concerned with advancing social theory and feminist thought, and sees in the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson a source of inspiration for scholars engaged in challenging the present. I come to the study of philosophy and critical theory with more practical concerns in mind. My modest ambition is to contribute to the understanding of business organizations in the context of globalization and social change. I am looking for ideas, concepts, and metaphors that I may use in my research, while being cognizant that reality has to be observed first at ground level and by using the domestic categories of social actors. There is a risk in the flight to abstraction that characterizes the discussion of general notions such as mind and matter, time and space, power and servitude. And yet I see value in rubbing shoulders and stretching minds with the great thinkers who have marked the history of the twentieth century. The three authors discussed in this book are indeed towering figures that dominate the way we approach notions such as evolution, power, and duration. One may think that the gist of these three thinkers’ work has already been extracted by successive disciples and commentators, and that they can now quietly rest on the dusty shelves of intellectual history. And yet, as Elizabeth Grosz successfully argues, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson cannot be reduced to Darwinism, Nietzscheanism, and Bergsonism. Going back to their original work, and attending to their texts through close readings, allows the social scientist to extract more juice from their pulp. To come back to this book’s title, it appears that the expression “the nick of time” comes from an old custom of recording time as it passed by making a notch or a nick on a tally stick. Ordering my reading notes by writing this review was my way to carve a nick in the (b)log of my reading habits.