Civil Disobedience: J-B. Lamarck & the Aspirational Self

Previously:
Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon pt. 1
Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon pt. 2
Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon pt. 3
Achieving Humanity: Theoretical Background

‘The folk process is as old as music, and depends on the ability of musicians to adapt from existing sources. A.P. Carter heard an old spiritual, probably while on the road, and arranged it for the Carter Family as “Can’t Feel At Home.” Woody Guthrie took “Can’t Feel At Home” and modified it further into “I Ain’t Got No Home.” As intellectual property laws become more restrictive, the folk process suffers. When Woody sings, “Rich man took my home and drove me from my door,” it relates not only to the human right to shelter, but also to the human right to culture.’
From “The Absent Second, an Explanation,” by Steven Arntson

1. Recombination

I went to a reading by MacArthur grant winning novelist Richard Powers the other night wherein the narrative of science (evolving epistemologies through history) and its influence on our everyday ontologies (how we approach and understand being) was the primary theme. Which is just a heavy way of saying: during the Q&A, he talked about our fluctuating/evolving sense of self as based on technological advances.

Because he’s a novelist, Powers was primarily interested in the intersection of this evolving (imagine, if you can, this word without valuation) self-cognizance as it relates to the mounting context of fictive narrative. I.e. the way we understand both ourselves and the world is constantly changing – Powers primarily invoked self-awareness and DNA mapping – and so should/does literature.

2. Literature and the Aspirational Self

Most interestingly along this line of thought was a discussion of the self in literature as distinct from the experiential self: the aspirationally complete self vs. the self as-is, fragmented. Since my discussion of copyright, plagiarism, and humanity has been unrepentantly Lacanian so far, I feel honor-bound to bring up the fictive imago one last time (for cliffs notes, see: Achieving Humanity: Theoretical Background, specifically Part 2. Becoming Human – Towards De-Normalizing Desubjectification):

If it’s going to be suggested that good literary characters are aspirational (and by aspirational I mean comprehensively understood to a degree not possible in reality, as was implied in the discussion) – and I’m not sure I’m on board with this – what sort of psychological holes are we supposed to be using them to fill? And is our admission that there’s a distinction between completionist literary fantasies/reality more prying psychological wedge than emotional spackle?

3. Aspirational Identity and Genomic Change

These would be rhetorical questions – or, anyway, something to talk about with your analyst – if they were questions about literary narrative exclusively – safe… but the overarching take-away from the talk was that: just as DNA is increasingly recombined and rewritten – rewriting, in essence, ourselves – so are we continually rewriting and re-imagining culture (and, by implication – again – ourselves). So the question, if we’re concerned at all with psychic well being, is whether we’re conscious of the differences between representational (re-written) reality… or if ostensibly more complete, but effectually one-dimensional, representations become the aspirations we model ourselves after.

Unspoken, but latent, was the notion that this isn’t just a question of personal, psychological identity – but the province of cutting edge biological/evolutionary inquiry. Which… is a distinction worth talking about. I’m not sure I’m the one to talk about it explicitly, but the suggestion was that DNA is much more suggestable to change than previously thought – even, perhaps, willing to bend to fit the stereotypes of aspirational literary identities. It’s easy to discount sociopolitical criticisms of the monolithic gestalt – itself both a biological and psychological term – but it’s hard to ignore Science.

4. To Sum Up So Far, Pictorially

5. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Revisited

Applied to science – just to drive the point home – this Lacanian rubric is more causal than analytical, describing not only our psyches but influencing our component molecules, etc. It’s Lamarck-ian – you remember him, the guy Darwin out-theorized: genomically, we’re in constant flux and full of latent potential (both good, bad, and smoking out the ennui on the chaise); our Ys and Zs, our technologies and resultant cultural identities – literary and otherwise – create not only a sense of self but the self itself.

Which isn’t such a left-fielder in general ontological discussions – when you’re talking sort of cavalierly about existence… but those discussions usually have a line in the sand: either you’re here in the world, another ape on spaceship earth, electromagnetically vibrating, or you’re something more philosophical and refined. Culture influencing genes fine tuning humanity creating culture, the whole damn thing continually rewriting itself into an ourobouric human palimpsest – that’s another discussion entirely.

6. Repetition with Difference

So what’s all this got to do with Woody Guthrie? Well, with all his talk about genetic and cultural influence – the forever act of revision and rewriting – what Powers got me thinking about was proprietary litigiousness vs. evolution. Which isn’t a new thought by any means; that epigraph up there, it and its ilk are the basis of many dinner table polemics. What’s different here is the posited connection between culture and biology. Evolution, here, is used non-metaphorically in the strictest Lamarckian sense.

And at its simplest, Lamarckian evolution is merely the idea that an outside stimulus – physical, epistemologically sound – can introduce change into an otherwise static population. If I can quote The Encyclopedia of Post-Modernism for just one or two sentences, just to make a maybe-oblique point: “Repetition is the inscription of difference or otherness within identity. The post-modern conception of repetition is best understood as part of a general critique of the traditional Western assumption that identity is always stable, complete, and atemporal” (338).

7. Life in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The ultimate idea, for most post-modern theorists – and this is something I definitely subscribe to – is that “repetition with difference” – a scientific and psychological fact of life – highlights the uniqueness of every cultural, individual, and biological iteration, aggravating any misplaced notion of trans-temporal sameness that anyone not paying attention might have. In other words: even though we live both linearly and cyclically, repeating basic actions and rituals out of physical and emotional necessity… reproducing – and sometimes it does feel like that Philip Larkin poem, I won’t deny that – we’re always changing.

And, relatedly, we’re faced with lingering doubts re: self-autonomy. The individual, distinct, n’existe pas- so, maybe, like Powers suggested, we have the balm of literature. Culture. Art. Except that off-hand, at the end of his talk, Powers cited Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as an early influence. The tangential message of which (and I admit beforehand, I take liberties with all my theory) is that in contemporary society, the ritual object – Art – has lost its intrinsic religiosity through mass reproduction/use (and this is where literature as filling some sort of psychic hole scares me)… but can be imbued with the same – or close to – through personal/creative context.

8. Life as an Artist in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This is near the heart of what I’m trying to get at. Past questioning the autonomous self – and, believe me, I’m past that; past the combination fiction/threat of sameness; past the inability to really know; the infancy of science; the instability of our very foundational building blocks (and, in turn, their component parts) – past all that, all we have is creative agency. It’s too late for me to rehash all the theory, but read any of it: Lacan, Baudrillard, Derrida, Bhaba, Butler – it’s all there in different forms – doubt the artifact but not the action, the content but not the enveloping context.

So, in a last ditch effort to bring it all home: some two-bit agency owns the rights to a Woody Guthrie song that was – in its day – not only in its fourth repetition or so culturally but – at its moment of creation – the one-time sonic apex of 250,000 years of mounting context (and I’m only talking societal H. sapiens evolution – it’s 2.2 million for hominids, and we can go back even further). Despite evidence that creation and mounting context are all you have – ontologically or otherwise; regardless of their own insubstantiality in the grand and not-so grand scheme of things; of your own genetic and psychic necessity; of the inherent hilarity/possibility of the world as we live in it… they say you can’t use old amenable Woody to make art out of artifact and effect your own aspirational existence.

What’re you gonna do?

• AMR Podcast #22: Poetry of Departures/Two Feminists
• Achieving Humanity: Theoretical Background
• Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon, pt. 3