In 1853, the aging brig USS Dolphin, under the command of Otway Henry Berryman, tested the depths of the sea in a region of the North Atlantic. Dragging a partially hollowed cannonball fitted with hooks – a custom device designed by the military engineer John Mercer Brooke – across a great swath of the bottom of

01/12 the ocean in a method called sounding, the crew mapped a massive and (supposedly) flat region previously studied by the American oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury. Berryman found the region far more geologically uneven than Maury had believed, much to the latter’s displeasure. In 1857, at Maury’s request, the British HMS Cyclops expanded the search, Ben Woodard and in its soundings supported Maury’s earlier claim of flatness. Thus the region kept its name: Telegraph Plateau. Captain Dayman of the Slime on a Wire Cyclops, who was also instructed to take samples for scientific research, reported a curious sludge on the sounding device’s rope. đđđđđđđđđđSoon after, the first of many attempts to construct a transatlantic telegraph cable began as a joint venture between the US, Canada, and England, funded largely by Cyrus West Field, an American businessperson who had been consolidating telegraph companies for years. The project had a short-term success lasting just over a month in 1858, followed later by a redesign and many more failures. The construction drama involved the support of elaborate economic syndicates and drew notable physicists such as Lord Kelvin into its service. Differing ideas about the proper design and operation (in terms of power level, construction materials, signal detection) and ever higher costs finally led to the completion of a fully functioning cable in 1866.1 The endeavor combined industrial and naval feats and made large contributions to marine exploration, physics, and global politics (especially the military reach of the British Empire), including many shared congratulations, such as between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan.2 đđđđđđđđđđThe cable also casts a peculiar shadow over the stock understanding of the conceptual links between physics and biology, as defined in the era of Darwin’s rise to prominence. The typical historicization is that biology had begun to describe organisms in terms increasingly amenable to physics – that mechanical

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r explanations took over materialist ones. Yet the historical episode of the telegraph exposes the more dialectic nature of the relation between materialism and mechanism as epistemological programs within the nascent science of biology and how biology in turn affected physics. In the nineteenth century, materialism was defined negatively as the refusal of nonnatural or irrational explanations of materially existent

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT 02/12

Illustration of a Sonrel, Leon (1872)đBottom of the Sea, New York City, NY: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. Image: Public Domain/Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.đ

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT phenomena, while mechanists believed living in offspring) and the mechanism of competition things were composed of interdependent (evident in the behaviors of populations). recognizable parts externally moved and đđđđđđđđđđBut this epistemological difference is motivated. Both materialism and mechanism known predominantly through historical attempted to slip between the long-standing reactions to it rather than its specific positive rationalist and empiricist conceptions of the content. Materialism invoked the wrath of the sciences, between the authority of hypothetical natural theologians because it submitted inquiry and that of experimental result. But 03/12 humans to the causal forces of nature, beyond this general orientation, the historical construing us as the evolutionary descendants of approaches to these epistemologies have “lesser beings.” Mechanism seemed to deny any diverged significantly over time, especially as purpose or inherent meaning to human existence they apply to living phenomena. other than the struggle for survival. While Darwin đđđđđđđđđđHistorian Jessica Riskin’s 2016 The Restless suppressed his materialist tendencies in print, T. Clock impressively demonstrates that for H. Huxley, who I will discuss at length, pursued Descartes and those that preceded him, the materialist consequences of Darwinian adhering to mechanism (via rationalism) did not evolution to the bottom of the sea. Huxley mean to deprive organisms of life. Machinery studied medicine and, like Darwin, spent a long implied a designer and that designer was either sea voyage playing naturalist, as he was divine (the God of Christianity) or inspired by the particularly interested in marine life. While divine (the rational soul). For Descartes, initially unconvinced by any theory of species describing organisms as machines expressed the transformation, Huxley was immensely need to isolate the rationality of the soul from impressed by Darwin and was so swept up by The the sensitivity of the body in order to shift to a Origin of Species that he became not only a mechanistic method of science. The extended convert but a tireless defender of evolution and physical world could be parsed and understood, of Darwin. But despite this, Huxley was less while the unextended rational mind could not, interested in the complexities of variation and since it was not only god-given (and hence natural selection (the mechanistic aspect) and immaterial) but needed to be separate enough far more enthralled by the notion of common from the body in order to think the extended descent – that humans, and all other existent world rationally.3 Descartes’s famous doubt (how species, shared a common lineage. do I know I see what I think I see?) is the basic đđđđđđđđđđIn 1868, Huxley wrote a report on the claim for the necessity of separating rationality dredging of the Cyclops, published in the from materiality in this way. Quarterly Journal of Microscopial Science. Huxley đđđđđđđđđđFollowing Cartesian rationalism, a swath of identified various new species of monera, single- systematic approaches to life gave rise to biology celled organisms with no nucleus, sent to him around 1800, which then became associated from the Cyclops’s expedition (Captain Dayman with the more general principles of materialism was an old friend). Among the samples, Huxley and mechanism. Naturphilosophical noted an exceedingly primitive substance, which investigations into the self-organization of he identified as “protoplasm” (a concept first matter and the dynamic movement of forces introduced by Lorenz Oken in 1802) but named, in grounded materialism, while mechanism honor of the concept’s ressurector, the German sprouted out of a rationalism freighted with biologist Ernst Haeckel, Bathybius haeckelii. teleological concerns about the capacity of living Huxley believed this protoplasmic ooze was the things to act spontaneously and with purpose. As basal matter of all life, that he had discovered biology advanced in the 1850s and ’60s it the primordial substance proposed in various became increasingly incompatible with forms by the aforementioned Naturphilosophie. theological articulations of life and mind, đđđđđđđđđđUnfortunately Huxley made the very public rational or not. As Riskin shows, mechanism error of becoming too enamored with the slime could still be made compatible with even a found by the Cyclops and therefore leaping to “hands-off” deistic god, but materialism conclusions about its importance. In (especially in the form of Darwinian evolution) emphasizing the biological role of this generative pressed even further against the divine – no god e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r scum, Huxley downplayed the mechanistic at all could be admitted into the natural world aspects of life, the understanding of populations, with its causes, forces, and matters.4 But this did as well as the functional approach to living not mean Darwin accepted the strict opposition things. It is tempting to see Huxley’s use of between materialism and mechanism. Darwin’s materialism here as the reduction of living beings great achievement was to synthesize these to physics in such a manner that deprives them approaches (at least as they applied to biology) of their liveliness or vitality. But this not only by emphasizing the materiality of inheritance contradicts Huxley’s debts to physics, it also (evident in variation between individuals shared assumes a false opposition between the

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT inorganic and the organic that Huxley never seas, the HMS Challenger confirmed that entertained. Bathybius haeckelii was an inorganic byproduct đđđđđđđđđđBut does Huxley’s materialism, suspended that appeared alive because of the chemicals between reason and evidence, allow the same used in laboratory preservation. Huxley accepted object to be both epistemic and material, to be a his mistake; Haeckel did not.8 At the time, formal explanation and a biological thing to be Huxley’s error was seen as a grave injury to the explained? For Huxley, protoplasm was simply young discipline of evolutionary theory and it has the first emergence of living matter from the 04/12 served as a cautionary tale for attempting to nonliving, the first result of abiogenesis.5 explicitly ground biological claims with đđđđđđđđđđIn “On the Physical Basis of Life” (1868) philosophical ones, for using outdated models of Huxley follows very much in Descartes’s spirit biological thinking, or for being too zealous about and disentangles materialist philosophy from one’s hypotheses.9 materialist science. While he allows that đđđđđđđđđđWhile Huxley admitted his laboratory error, materialism in biology implies a chain of causes, he did not seem to see a flaw in his overall he maintains that there is an empiricist limit to reasoning; the coincidence of an actual biology rational speculation, due to human ignorance entity and a model of biological life was, surrounding the full complexity of matter. While according to him, a necessary avenue, in Descartes maintains a metaphysical separation particular for studying the porosity of the between mind and matter as part of his membrane between the physical and the mechanistic methodology, for Huxley the biological.10 Over a decade after the Bathybius materiality of the living world requires (albeit in a haeckelii coated the dredging lines of the limited fashion) the divisions and categorizations Cyclops, Huxley continued to wonder about the of empirical science. Huxley writes: possibility of protoplasm being the first form of life generated from inorganic matter. The Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the difficulty in thinking through the problem of formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the Huxley’s slime in its historical context essentially potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, is this: the status of a theory, or model, or form in remains clay, separated by artifice, and not a fully materialist biology (one that is ultimately by nature, from the commonest brick or an exchange of matter and force) must itself be sun-dried clod. Thus it becomes clear that the result of matter and force. Of course this all living powers are cognate, and that all could potentially be avoided if one distinguishes living forms are fundamentally of one between materialism and mechanism (as a character.6 philosophy) and materialism and mechanisms as scientific epistemologies. But then this in turn Huxley asks us to imagine what could possibly be raised the question: Which epistemic tool should shared between beasts as colossal as whales one then use to make that distinction? and animalcules so small as to be invisible to the đđđđđđđđđđMechanism’s piecemeal treatment of reality eye, and suggests that what they have in – in which reality is made of separable parts, or common is the most basic organic matter and at least treated as such – appears to better the physical forces it receives, transmits, and evade these difficulties above. But whereas the modifies. As historian Robert Brain points out, concept of material continuity risks error when Huxley’s protoplasm is not only foundational overzealously applied, the mechanistic model matter (in a formal sense) but also a medium for contains an inverse problem. If the problem for waves of energy and of flowing biological biological materialism is the materiality of the material.7 Brain argues that Huxley’s protoplasm concept or model, for the mechanistic view the functioned as an epistemic object, as an problem is the choice and applicability of the experimental site for testing the boundaries model organism. between physics and biology. This is supported đđđđđđđđđđThe tension between the mechanistic and by Huxley’s use of the word “formal” – the materialist approach was not apparent only protoplasm as the “formal basis of all life” – and in biology, but attempts to resolve it within yet, his remarks on the slime on the telegraph biology showed possible solutions for problems cable potentially push this particular instance of e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r in materials physics and electrical engineering. protoplasm beyond merely an epistemic form. While the potentially primordial sludge of the đđđđđđđđđđHowever, Huxley’s identification of the soundings and dredgings may have seemed like substance as protoplasm was due to an only a byproduct of the surveys to pave the way experimental error, the result of an unexpected for the telegraph’s construction, it indicated a reaction between the inorganic materials deep affinity between the electrical and the scraped from the ocean floor and the material that cut across the divide of the preservation agent used to keep organic samples inorganic and the organic. intact. In 1872, during its four years studying the đđđđđđđđđđWhen the final and longer lasting

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT Thomson, C. Wyville,đDepths of the Sea: An account of the General Results of the Dredging Cruises of H.M.SS. 'Porcupine' and 'Lightning' During the Summers of 1868, 1869, and 1870 under the Scientific Direction of Dr. Carpenter, F.R.S., J.Gwyn Jeffreys, F.R.S., and Dr. Wyville Thomson, F. R. S., (1873).đLondon: MacMillan and Co. Image: Public Domain/Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT construction of the transatlantic cable was made the material and mechanical complexities of in 1866, it was in no small part due to Lord nerve action, it also opened a gap between forms Kelvin, then known by his birth name William of life as physically or materially conditioned, Thomson, a British engineer and physicist who which ran against the notion of the frog’s was knighted partly in thanks for the task. In “neutrality” as a model organism. Namely, the particular, Thomson’s use of a measuring device results suggested that the action and perception called the mirror galvanometer proved central. of an organism (including temporal perception)

His device was a more precise update of a 06/12 could be conditioned by the interior fine-scaled preexisting version constructed by Hermann von composition as well as the bulk and mass of a Helmholtz, which could detect minute electrical living thing. This was noted by Helmholtz himself, signals by receiving current that charged a coil, when in a lecture titled “On the Methods of turning it into an electromagnet. Helmholtz’s Measuring Very Small Portions of Time” (1853) he version utilized a fixed needle and was designed invited his audience to feel pity for the to measure the speed of nerve impulses. harpooned whale, who would not learn of the Thomson paired the electromagnet with a small harpoon in its tail for a second or so after it was mirror with magnets fixed to it, suspended on a pierced. silk string (which reduced resistance đđđđđđđđđđThomson and the telegraph’s electrician, E. extensively). The polarity differential caused the O. Whitehouse (a surgeon by training), repeated mirror to spin, which then projected light from a the amphibian drama between Volta and Galvani lamp or other source onto an external ruler. noted above about the circuit of propagation, the Looking at Helmholtz’s device takes us deeper signal, material composition, and power level. into the materialism/mechanism relationship. Even before constructing his mirror đđđđđđđđđđHelmholtz was a physicist and physician galvanometer based on Helmholtz’s frog who, among his many accomplishments, spent machine, Thomson argued that Whitehouse’s 1849–50 attempting to measure the signal speed approach of increasing voltage to guarantee the of nerve impulses. He did this by connecting a telegraph signal made it across the ocean detached frog leg with an exposed sciatic nerve ignored the problem of noise if the cable was to a myograph – a device (pictured above) that simply large and high-powered. Thomson proved Helmholtz adopted and updated to provide a that variations in frequency in the line would demonstration and a proper measurement of the “pile up” and cause exponential interference. time required for a nerve impulse to travel đđđđđđđđđđIn their respective mediums, both through the muscle fibers, coupled with the Helmholtz and Thomson argued that a effect of the reaction. The device used a fine purportedly continuous process of excitation or needle attached to the exposed nerve that, when transmission was in fact saltational: a series of receiving the impulse given to the other end of jumps and variegated events indicated multiple the frog leg, caused the leg to contract and thus simultaneously operating processes, indexing move the needle along a rotating glass tube that different materials as well as different forces. In had been blackened with smoke – thus making this regard, the synthesis of the mechanical and the two lines etched by the needle easier to read. the material approaches checks the debilitating đđđđđđđđđđHelmholtz’s frog-writing device (as he excesses of both: the continuity of material referred to it in a letter to the physician and composition pushes against the limitations of physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond)11 is part of a mechanical focus, while the partition of living or long history of the use of amphibians as model mechanical things into components or organs organisms. As the French physiologist Claude emphasizes the localization of forces relative to Bernard put it, the frog had long been the Job of their material grounds. In terms of their experimental physiology.12 At least since the respective conceptual investments, materialism experiments of Luigi Galvani and Alessandro reigns in the teleological temptations of Volta, frog bodies functioned as an experimental mechanism, while mechanism localizes the site and a temporal circuit, which was massively wide field of forces for materialism. interpreted in terms of organically produced đđđđđđđđđđThus the construction of the telegraph and chemical electricity (Galvani’s animal electricity) its operation exhibit these differences not only or in terms of chemical and physical energy that e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r as a engineering problem but also as concepts was thought to be independent of organic bodies that have been redeployed into other fields.13 (Volta’s electromagnetism). Helmholtz’s Helmholtz embodies this place of synthesis, and myograph not only measured the speed of the it is telling that both Thomson and Huxley, who reaction of the frog muscle to the electrical pulse drew from his results, took from them but also indexed a complex process of action and mechanistic ramifications on the one hand reaction, rather than a straightforward cause and (Thomson) and materialist ones on the other effect, in the curve’s rise and fall. (Huxley). For instance, Helmholtz’s reverse- đđđđđđđđđđWhile the frog-writing device demonstrated engineering of the physiology of the human

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT Illustration of Myograph of Helmholtz,đNew York, 1881. Image: Public Domain/The National Library of Medicine.

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT eyeball (and of sight) dethroned the visual organ understanding of the dynamic richness of matter as a bastion against the evolutionary explanation and its effects in and on living things. For Huxley wielded by the natural theologians that had (and Darwin), Helmholtz’s work on the eye haunted Darwin. While working feverishly on provided a great weapon against the natural modifying Helmholtz’s galvanometer for the theologians and other purveyors of design – the laying of the telegraph, Thomson wrote a letter to eye was far from perfect and vision was a shoddy Helmholtz with the following postscript: physiological and cognitive patchwork that bore

08/12 no fingerprints of divinity. P.S. When will your book on the eye be đđđđđđđđđđA materialism as thorough as Huxley’s and completed, or is it so already? I find people Darwin’s could still be (and was) recombined and greatly interested in it, especially regarding audited in ways that attempted to reinstall the adjustments. human importance, naturalize progress, or otherwise bring back some form of direction or development. In the decades following Darwin, I was out with a shooting party a few days this was done by retroactively justifying existent ago at Largs, and looked into the eyes of hierarchies between cultures, often mediated by various birds immediately after death. I saw technological capacity, while remaining blind to the three images of the sun well in a decidedly contingent conditions of material woodcock’s eye, but was puzzled by the wealth, climate, fortuitous landscapes, and so position of the image by reflection at the on. Cultural and technological outputs could posterior surface of the lens. I had a very then be read back into the structures of living curious view of the interior by simply matter – in terms of dispositions, habits, and pressing my eyeglass on the front of the capacities. “Playing god” should not be an cornea so as to nearly flatten it. Have you accusation reserved for Dr. Frankenstein but seen an owl’s eye? It is a splendid thing. I rather a description of the national pastime of cut one open, but learned nothing more self-appointed superiority.16 than that the cornea is very tough.14 đđđđđđđđđđBut the externalization of supposed “inborn” capacities via technology is not Huxley provided similar descriptions of motivated solely by interhuman dominance; it is Helmholtz’s experiments described as “beautiful also a condition of thought. It results from methods” before summing up the measure of collectivized knowledge and its subsequent nerve signals in his “On the Present State of epistemological programs (like mechanism and Knowledge as to the Structure and Functions of materialism). To see technology only as a form of Nerve” (1854): anthropogenic violence would again ignore the generative synthesis of mechanistic analysis and Science may be congratulated on these materialist supposition. The denial of progress, results. Time was when the attempt to even if limited to the technological output of reduce vital phenomena to law and order human beings, requires treating technological was regarded as little less than objects both mechanically and materially, as well blasphemous: but the mechanician has as demonstrating particular forces and matters. proved that the living body obeys the Or as philosopher Gilbert Simondon approached mechanical laws of ordinary matter; the it, technology can be defined as a designed tool chemist has demonstrated that the on the one hand and as having a life of its own on component atoms of living beings are the other.17 governed by affinities, of one nature with đđđđđđđđđđA matrix arises between the intentional and those which obtain in the rest of the unintentional effects of mechanistic design, and universe; and now the physiologist, aided between the intended and unintended by the physicist, has attacked the problem ramifications of technology. If the rationality of of nervous action – the most especially the mechanistic approach can no longer be vital of all vital phenomena – with what isolated from its own mechanisms, then the result has been seen. And thus from the effects of intentional and unintentional design

region of disorderly mystery, which is the e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r can be mapped onto, or extrapolated from, the domain of ignorance, another vast province human mind. The theme of technology as organ has been added to science, the realm of projection, heavily employed by the geographer orderly mystery.15 and arguably the first philosopher of technology Ernst Kapp, treated tools and devices as For Thomson, the eye’s mechanisms could externalized sections of human anatomy and eventually be fully understood, albeit with physiology. difficulty, while for Huxley, the impact of his đđđđđđđđđđWriting in 1877, Kapp refers to the recent myograph experiments deepened the transatlantic telegraph as the globalization of

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT the human nervous system. But in line with the The panoramic effect of the visible telegraph tension between the intentional and does not apply to the underwater cable. The unintentional aspects of technological design, underwater cable more strongly represents the Kapp sees this feat as exhibiting both conscious archaic and submerged nature of the and unconscious tendencies. He finds that the physiological system, since we receive messages designed artifact revealed both forms of but do not see the structures that deliver them. knowledge simultaneously and believes While Schivelbusch notes that when riding on a technological objects (and therefore human 09/12 train one embodies the nerve flash across the beings) can only emerge in situ: muscular landscape (because the train follows the telegraph wire’s path), in the submerged Our point of departure is the human being, cable one exists on a shoreline, waiting for a who, in all he thinks and does, unless he signal and also uncertain that one has breaks with himself entirely, can proceed comprehended what was heard. Living in a world from nothing other than his thinking, acting of measured temporality, we are in many senses self. We are not dealing with a hypothetical more like Helmholtz, observing the lost time of bathybius-being nor with a hypothetical the electrophysiological curve, or like his wound- ideal human being, but with the human to ignorant whale – lived time is somewhere whose being may attest only the traces of between a measure of time and the knowledge and changes in the things he has made with that the signal’s path determines our very sense his own hands.18 of time – temporality is conditioned by materiality.21 This marks the central difference Kapp sees himself as poised between between Kapp and Schivelbusch. The feats of mechanism and materialism, as occupying a engineering involved in measuring mechanistic position like Helmholtz, whom he often cites and material time externalize communication so approvingly. But by operating from a time and space are folded up in such a manner technological position rather than a biological that our bodies or voices can cut across the one, Kapp essentially restores the mechanist earth in mere minutes with or without our bodies position as a means to return to the moving through space. If Kapp sees the anthropocentric and teleological mode of technological object as a prosthesis, Simondon thought. He misrepresents Darwin as essentially sees it as a fossil. Both views invite regular Lamarckian and insists upon “original reinterpretation but for the former, the mode dispositions” teleologically necessary in humans, runs from anthropological to psychological, while such as for speech, mind, and toolmaking. for the latter it goes from technological to Simondon’s position can be taken as a cultural. materialist alternative to Kapp’s, as Simondon đđđđđđđđđđIn the mechanistic view, any disparity sees technology as a crystallization of labor. For between time scale and its perception is an Simondon, the human interpretative capacity engineering mistake or limitation, and an relevant to technology is to construct devices apparatus can smooth out the differences that maximize this materialist open architecture through measuring and averaging. But from the of formed matter.19 materialist perspective, the effect of externally đđđđđđđđđđAs a further counter- and materialist measured temporality, as it involves structures reading of the telegraph, one might follow that redirect and situate the measure and cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s well- perception of time, is not reversible – it is a known portrait of the earlier railway telegraph, historical change in how time and space are which inaugurated the modern trope of understood and experienced. Without the checks technology as the annihilation of space and time: and balances of materialism, mechanism can cast drastic differences as essentially The landscape appeared behind the calibration problems (inciting the design of finer telegraph poles and wires; it was seen instruments) without questioning the relative through them. As we noted earlier, the rail ground of human perception. traveler’s perceptions were changed by the đđđđđđđđđđKapp’s displacement of the

intervention of the machine ensemble e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r mechanistic/materialist difference from its older between him and the landscape; there was teleomechanistic perspective allows him to a material demonstration of that utilize Helmholtz to reinstate a radical split intervention in those poles and wires, between organism and machine, and to claim which were a part of the machine that the mechanists of the past foolishly thought ensemble. They interposed themselves, that living beings were automatons that needed both physically and metaphorically, no winding up.22 For Kapp, by way of his reading between the traveler and the landscape.20 of Helmholtz, mental work must remain qualitatively separate from physical work: the

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT body can be a machine but the mind cannot. In two schools of clock-theorists, one this regard, Kapp essentially restates the studying the hammer and the other the mechanistic program but in terms of the pendulum.25 codependency of anthropology and technology as the naturalistic emergence of human thought August Weismann’s theories of the mechanisms – the human machine is made of special of inheritance, combined with the rediscovery purposive parts that can be materially exported and development of genetics by the early but not materially grounded.23 10/12 botanist and geneticist Hugo Marie de Vries, đđđđđđđđđđAgain, following Riskin, the clockwork of life formed the proper synthesis of the material and did in fact require winding, but the clock key was the mechanical for the theory of evolution to turned by divine fingers.24 What is insidious operate. This solidified form of Darwinism, about Kapp’s view, and what Riskin critiques in however, became increasingly mechanical (in the twentieth and twenty-first century biology sense of measurable and predictable) at the (especially in cybernetics), is that mechanism in beginning of the twentieth century (in the so- biology increasingly disavowed its teleological called “modern synthesis”).26 Both Huxley and roots by attacking any epistemological program Darwin’s materialisms were retroactively painted in biology that would grant agency or as foolhardy by those who eventually gave rise to intentionality to living things as materially population genetics and those who placed a intrinsic to their organic nature. This classical heavy emphasis on DNA-based explanations. The mechanistic paradigm, Riskin argues, historical element of evolution became continuously foreclosed any possibility of antithetical to the genetic program as evolution naturalized agency, of the possibility that was cut off from its structural-mutationist and disquiet could be a central part of living things, historical-epigenetic roots. The relevant paths of of the possibility that organisms could be viewed evolution became genetic information and not as restless clockwork. But the question of how to the forms and histories of species nor the radical articulate this restlessness divided even contingency of how the branches of life on earth Thomson and Huxley. took shape. Huxley’s dreams of generative slime đđđđđđđđđđThomson calculated that the age of the were a means of maintaining this material earth was not sufficient to allow for evolution to continuity as a research program to explore the take place. Huxley refuted this in his address to maximal possibilities of Darwinian evolution, the Royal Geological Society in 1868. Since regardless of what it did to human stature. neither party had any inkling of nuclear fusion, đđđđđđđđđđRiskin is also concerned with the twentieth- the debate was in many ways about experimental century emphasis on information by way of certainty between calculations regarding types cybernetics, piggybacked on the modern of known energy. The disagreement raised the synthesis in evolutionary biology and later issue of whether the evolutionists were in fact integrated in the discovery of DNA.27 With suggesting some force unique to living beings, cybernetic information, agency becomes an something that could cheat the laws of physics. appearance of negative feedback, since to say Huxley’s main point was that Thomson’s any more would be to theologize or philosophize. calculations assumed a relatively stable world At the same time, the critics of these tendencies devoid of catastrophe, while evolutionary time tend to draw a straight line from Descartes to was the synthesis of temporal forms: Darwin to Dawkins, as if the reduction of life to machines or information has been a well- It is very conceivable that catastrophes organized march towards modernity – as if what may be part and parcel of uniformity. Let we think by “machine” has not radically changed me illustrate my case by analogy. The in the last five hundred years. working of a clock is a model of uniform đđđđđđđđđđYet mechanism in biology, without its action; good time-keeping means materialist accompaniment, is not a blanket uniformity of action. But the striking of the reductionist program but a formalization of life clock is essentially a catastrophe; the that desperately, and often disastrously, leaves hammer might be made to blow up a barrel open a path by which one can decide the relevant

of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water; e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r timescales and the desired contingencies in and, by proper arrangement, the clock, advance – a desire to be a machine that can wind instead of marking the hours, might strike its own key in the name of progress.28 at all sorts of irregular periods, never twice đđđđđđđđđđ× alike, in the intervals, force, or number of its blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular, and apparently lawless, catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action; and we might have

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT Ben Woodard is an independent scholar based in đđđđđđ1 464 (2010): 681–82. Germany. His work focuses on the relationship Arthur C. Clarke dramatizes this in his Voice Across the Sea: The đđđđđđ12 between naturalism and idealism during the long Story of Deep Sea Cable-laying, Henry Schmidgen has written nineteenth century. He is currently preparing a 1858–1958 (Muller, 1958). See extensively on Helmholtz’s monograph on the relation of naturalism, formalism, also John Griesemer, Signal & myograph experiments and has and embodiment in French and German continental Noise: A Novel (Picador, 2004). noted how, when working in Paris, Helmholtz referred to the thought. His bookđSchelling’s Naturalismđwas recently đđđđđđ2 curve made by the needle as “le published by Edinburgh University Press. There have also been several temps perdu’’ (an utterance of fictional and historical accounts “lost time” some hundred years

11/12 of the Great Eastern, the ship before Proust). Such treatments that unspooled the cable. See of animals and especially model Griesemer’s Signal and Noise as organisms has a long and ugly well as Howard Rodman’s The history. Both Claude Bernard and Great Eastern (Melville House, his teacher François Magendie 2019). describe some of the most sickening reports of vivisection I đđđđđđ3 have encountered. In terms of Jessica Riskin, The Restless frogs, the happiest report I have Clock (University of Chicago found is the work of the great Press, 2016). Lancelot Hogben who devised a quick pregnancy test for women đđđđđđ4 by injecting their urine into the Riskin, Restless Clock, 70–71. frog species called Xenopus. The frogs would then lay eggs within đđđđđđ5 hours, thereby confirming a T. H. Huxley, “Biogenesis and woman’s pregnancy. This did not Abiogenesis,” 1870 harm the frog and replaced https://mathcs.clarku.edu/hu dissections of injected rabbits xley/CE8/B-Ab.html. and mice which were previously used to identify pregnancies in đđđđđđ6 women. Huxley’s own “Has a https://mathcs.clarku.edu/hu Frog a Soul?” is steeped in xley/CE1/PhysB.html#note1. details of frog torture and dissection over the ages. đđđđđđ7 Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse đđđđđđ13 of Modernism: Physiological Too often the figure of the Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle engineer is caricatured as the Europe (University of pragmatist against the Washington Press, 2015). theoretician. Mark Wilson’s work on the philosophy of engineering đđđđđđ8 is very helpful in this regard as Haeckel spent several years of he demonstrates how engineers his life documenting the utilize theoretical concepts but thousands of species of treat them as pliable in a way microorganisms sent to him by that too often philosophers of the Challenger Expedition. On science do not. See, for this, see the short film Proteus. instance, Physics Avoidance (Oxford University Press, 2018). đđđđđđ9 For a critique of this “dangerous” đđđđđđ14 mixing of philosophy and Cited in Silvanus Phillips biology, see the preface to Peter Thompson, The Life of William Brian Medawar and Jean S. Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos: A (Cambridge University Press, Philosophical Dictionary of 2011). Biology (Harvard University Press, 1983). For a critique of đđđđđđ15 Huxley being too old fashioned https://www.tandfonline.com/ (and mechanistic), see Loren doi/abs/10.1080/002229357094 Eiseley, The Immense Journey: 87876?journalCode=tnah08. An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man đđđđđđ16 and Nature (Vintage, 2011). For a Peter Bowler and Stephen Jay closer analysis of Huxley’s error Gould have documented the and what it came to represent in decades following Darwin and evolutionary science, see Donald the various forms of progressive J. McGraw, “Bye-Bye Bathybius: or directed evolution. See The Rise and Fall of a Marine Bowler’s The Eclipse of Myth,” Bios 45, no. 4 (1974): Darwinism (Johns Hopkins 164–71. University Press, 1992) and Stephen Jay Gould’s Ontogeny đđđđđđ10 and Phylogeny (Belknap Press, There are of course many ways a 1977). model can be wrong, and an incorrect or incomplete model đđđđđđ17

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r can, and has, led to significant See chapter 1 of Gilbert gains in scientific knowledge. Simondon, On the Mode of For a helpful overview of the Existence of Technical Objects importance of false models, see (University of Minnesota Press, chapter 6 of William C. Wimsatt, 2017). Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise đđđđđđ18 Approximations to Reality Ernst Kapp, Elements of a (Harvard University Press, 2007). Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture đđđđđđ11 (University of Minnesota Press, Cited in Alison Abbott, “Lost 2018), 29–30. Curve Hits a Nerve,” Nature, no.

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT đđđđđđ19 eugenics programs which were Here I am following Henning overwhelming the product of the Schmidgen’s text “Inside the biometricians and Black Box: Simondon’s Politics biostatisticians of the early of Technology,” SubStance 41, twentieth century such as no. 3 (2012): 23–24. Ronald Fisher, Walter Weldon, and Karl Pearson. đđđđđđ20 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey (University of California Press, 43). 12/12 đđđđđđ21 Henri Bergson’s portrait of the intuitive mind as caught between thought and perception seems structurally not far off from Helmholtz’s perch between rationalism and empiricism (although their motivations for such an island are opposed). In Matter and Memory, Bergson attempted to avoid idealism and materialism, even describing the conscious mind as a telegraph operator suspended between waiting for a message and sending one. For Bergson the brain is a bureaucratically boring central office, while for Helmholtz it is the ship that navigates the unknown. Bergson’s metaphor has been criticized, notably by Catherine Malabou, as there is no central power anymore, nor is the mind best understood as a computer when one takes into account the plastic nature of synaptic activity. Incidentally, Bergson gave the Huxley lecture “Life and Consciousness” in 1911.

đđđđđđ22 Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 97.

đđđđđđ23 In this sense Kapp is quite Kantian in maintaining a difference between a constitutive and a regulative role regarding purposiveness in human organisms. But while the split for Kant was at least in part to engender a normative dimension regarding the treatment of living things as non-mechanical, for Kapp it is about using the productions of thought to strengthen the case for a human or non-divine teleological program.

đđđđđđ24 Riskin, Restless Clock, 370–74.

đđđđđđ25 Huxley, “Geological Reform,” 1869 https://mathcs.clarku.edu/hu xley/CE8/GeoR.html.

đđđđđđ26 The term “modern synthesis” was coined by the evolutionary biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley, grandson of T. H. Huxley

as well as brother of the writer e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 2 — c t b 0 đ B W d S l i m e o n a W r Aldous Huxley.

đđđđđđ27 Riskin quotes Ernst Schrödinger as an exception to the strict mechanist trend and cites a passage about the chaos of clockwork that is very much in line with Huxley’s reasoning.

đđđđđđ28 I am of course speaking of the

10.22.20 / 09:57:10 EDT