Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (29 page)

IN
CHAPTER 8
, “Thermosemiosis,” I argued that behind our meaning making and goals is already always the in-itself-meaningless state of thermal equilibrium. In other essays I related this direction to psychedelic drugs, writing, and the recognition that human intelligence is already always a product of a far more encompassing, and in the end wiser, ecological intelligence. In
chapter 1
, “The Human Is More Than Human,” developing the figure Stefan Helmreich calls
Homo microbians,
8
I looked for symbiotic causes of our human moods, behaviors, and potential evolution. Although not explicit there, it is worth underlining that hypersex, the rampant gene-trading and endosymbiogenetics of microbes, depends on our status as open thermodynamic systems. Organisms, in the West long pictured as self-sufficient, Aristotelian or Linnaean species, as if they were creationistic instantiations of Platonic Ideas, are not. They are energetically and materially open systems. This is no minor point. It means that, when they get up close and microbial, in one another’s faces and bodies, they have the potential to permanently merge. Scintillating solar light, with excess capacity for work, is degraded by trees, reaching toward the sun and aiming their leaves to maximize their capture of energy, most of which is used not for growth but for moving water through the stomata of leaves, which spreads the energetic equivalent per acre per summer of six tons of dynamite. People troll the world, laying cables and looking for petroleum and methane. Social insects feed and kill one another, regulating the temperature and humidity of their hives and hills and mounds. Cells merge, and cells made of cells merge, and organisms grown of merged organisms evolve into societies that verge on becoming organisms at a higher level of inclusiveness and organization once again. Life’s modular basis, in other words, sets up the conditions for merging, for cellular economization, as organisms evolve ever-more-involuted solutions to ever-present problems of limited resources under regimes of excess and energy flow.

THE REINTRODUCTION OF FUNCTION—the reunion of ontos and telos with bios—is as empirically valid as it is spiritually salutary. As evolution connects us to other organisms, thermodynamics connects life to other complex systems. If life has been forged out of the clay of interstellar space, so thermodynamics instantiates a cosmic process of telic gradient reduction. The global system is organismic, and increases in energy efficiency, as well as in perception, add to the biosphere’s ability to seek out and stably reduce cosmic and earthly gradients. This broad thermodynamics of life and its telic roots is, I maintain, after Copernican heliocentrism, Darwinian evolution, and Wöhlerian antivitalism, a fourth Copernican-level deconstruction. Just as vitalism is wrong, and the chemical
stuff
of our bodies is not special, so mechanism is wrong and the basic
process
in which we are involved is not special. Thermodynamics is not all-powerful. Everything need not be reduced to or explained solely in terms of it. Telothermy is more like gravity, whose universal application in no way stops birds (whose wing energy comes from mitochondria-studded muscles powered by a redox, or delayed solar gradient) from flying.

But if we were cosmic journalists nursing our floating martinis and looking at old Io from the comfortable cushion of our space station lounge, and we wanted to report early-twenty-first-century humanity’s basic understanding of itself, we could do worse than to answer the five basic questions of that propagandistically pliable medium: who, what, where, when, and why we are. We are organized collections of cosmically abundant atoms, living on a little planet in the inner part of a planetary system, engaged in a planetwide process of intrinsically purposeful energy distribution.

In other words, telic thermodynamics, as Charles P. Snow suggested about the second law, deserves wide understanding among all human beings interested in empirical science and their connection to the natural world. Paraphrasing Darwin, we might say that anyone whose disposition leads him or her to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly not be attracted to the discovery of a vast overlap between human and living purpose and the telic tendencies of nonliving nature.

Although scientifically telic thermodynamics frames Gaia and symbiogenesis, it also illuminates other areas. For example, in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud postulated a death drive. Life was an aberration in terms of inanimate matter; it thus unconsciously longed to return to its former state, to nonexistence.

The drives, Freud wrote, far from tending toward progress, seek “to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were the state of things which had never been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’”

But Freud was perplexed not only at how the sex (and life) drive, eros or libido, could exist side by side with his death
Trieb
but also at what it was the sex drive was trying to recapture: “What is the important event in the development of living substance which is being repeated in sexual reproduction, or its forerunner, the conjugation of two protista? We cannot say; and we should consequently feel relieved if the whole structure of our argument turned out to be mistaken. The opposition between the . . . death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would then cease to hold.”
9

There is, I think, a simple, nonmetaphysical answer to Freud. Microbe studies, including organisms that have sex only when they are in dire straits and out of nitrogen, suggest fertilization began in multiple lineages among starved microbes, as discussed in
chapter 5
. If we grant (and it is not hugely generous) a primordial phenomenology to microbes that includes awareness and touch, urges and pains, chemical sensation and some sort of gratification, we can see the roots of a branching ur-drive. The phenomenological correlate to telos is a very basic kind of hunger, which accompanies or leads to destruction of local gradients needed to sustain the gradient-reducing system. Destructive hunger and procreative lust share a common root in gradient reduction.

In this context we might think of Freud’s death drive, a danger to what Derrida wants to say is an archival drive of conservation (which might be allied with the Schopenhauerian will to live, although in a more symbolic register), in terms of an “archive fever . . . [a] limit [which is not] one limit or one suffering of memory among others: enlisting the in-finite, archive fever verges on radical evil.”
10

Of course, Derrida is interested in the necessary obfuscations, a kind of philosophical refusal to collapse the wave function, to keep open possibilities and opposites as part of his own deconstructive kabbalistic project, his metaphysical agenda, his fetish of the secret, the promise, and an ever-changing algebraic shibboleth, one might say the magic word, that protects as sacred an activity beyond discrete formalization. As part of a deep project of what might be called an apophatic or general Judaism, Derrida, critical of biologism, nonetheless gives Freud his materialistic due, underscoring that Freud’s explicit distinction of archaeological and “impressive” representations of memory from the actual, spatial, material operations of the brain does not preclude that such possibilities (and by extension, other cognates of Freudian speculation) will occur in “the future of science.
11
It is as if Derrida wants to maintain (not negating the scientific register, but certainly not preferring it either) that life
in its bodies and in writing
is safeguarding a great secret (as if from itself) that is already always in as much danger of being destroyed as it is of being revealed.

Eros and thanatos stem from the common root of a
psychrotropos
—a movement toward cold (
psychros
), a dance of the atoms in chemically cycling and near-equilibrium systems, a natural movement to come, if not to order, then toward equilibrium. And with differences in effectiveness basically correlated to the maturity of subjectively judged beautiful ecosystems—rain forests and old-growth forests more effective than grasslands, more effective than deserts, and so forth—global life, 3.8 billion years strong with no allegiance to humanity, is the most effective dissipative planetary structure we know of. Borneo and Java jungles, for example, dissipate heat equivalent to Siberia in midwinter. This is known from thermal satellite measurements that show what superficially seems the reverse: these jungles are as cold as Siberia in midwinter. The area above them stays cool as latent heat dissipates via evaporation, water recondensing as cloud cover and rain in the atmosphere. The actively cycling rain forests, reminiscent of “purposeful” convection, are the most powerful biological dissipative systems on the planet. Highly species-rich, they also seem to have more long-term potential stability than the human technological monoculture that is tearing them down.

I have argued that both inanimate, near-equilibrium systems and technoscientific nation-states reflect the natural if amoral intelligence of a universe that creates complex systems to do its thermodynamic dirty work. Death, built into bodies as aging via apoptotic, insulin-regulated, telemorase-rationing cells, helps life hone its gradient-reducing function via natural selection, which works not only at the species but at the cellular (e.g., embryogenesis) and neurological (e.g., memes, mnemic algorithms, habits and their neural correlates) levels.

“I WAS A HIDDEN TREASURE and I longed to be known,” says Allah in Sufi scripture.
12
Long before Renaissance paintings portrayed cherubic angels flying toward sun-spangled clouds, life was attracted to concentrated sources of energy, moving toward the light.
Tikkun olam
(
) is a Hebrew phrase meaning “repairing the world,” originating in classical rabbinic literature but popularized by the sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac Luria. As the universe continues to explode, we generally move away from radiating stars even as their matter and energy has, as us, come to life. In the material creation as described in the kabbalah, the world is infused with sparks of divine light, and the spirit’s journey is to reunite with its divine source to restore the primordial realm. Here then is a potential story of the spirit in no obvious conflict with the scientific facts. Life and its intelligence, including human technological civilization, serve to equilibrate the environment, becoming enlightened as light itself dissipates.

We can sign on to the possibility, recognize the phenomenology of a destructive drive intrinsic to nature, destroying also information and archives, without dismissing the possibility that it has another, “deeper” meaning, although what this might mean in terms of a Gnosticism, say, is as quixotic as it would be for a Judeo-Derrideanism. It is worth mentioning, perhaps, that deconstruction is itself, both in its name (derived from Heideggerian
destruktion
) and in its “method,” a form of destruction, of taking apart, of textual dismantling, rearranging, and suturing, a process reminiscent of microbial recycling to recapture, reassimilate, and reframe nutrients and chemical elements, a critical breakdown and return, the better to recapture prematurely foreclosed possibilities.

Derrida tells us (in
Archive Fever
) that
arkhe
is a kind of opposite of telos, meaning both commencement and commandment. The arche is the beginning, both literally and factually, and as a kind of fiat by the record keepers, this root word of archive and archon and archaeological coming from the Greek
arkheion,
“initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates.”
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After I read my essay “The Human Is More Than Human” to the American Anthropological Association in Montreal on the eve of my mother’s death, Kim TallBear, a Native American theorist and activist, remained frankly critical of the very idea of origin.
14
Thus the
arkhe
not only as innocent commencement but as legislative fiat, a commandment that we recognize in a sense as arbitrary, fateful, self-foundational, with an element of fantasy to it commensurate with the judicial humorlessness of its authority. If the future is not closed, why should the past be? For Derrida and his ilk, the past is not original but originary, and the stakes of its foundationalism are too high to rush to agreement on beginnings so quixotic. So although I have said much about where we are going, and how, it would, in the end, let alone this conclusion, be presumptuous to pretend really to know.