DAVID STARR JORDAN SUPPOSED THAT GIVEN THE right resources, the correct training, and the proper selective environment, individuals with reserve force would rise to lead the nation. Jordan even gives a brief mention at the end of the first volume of his autobiography of some of the accomplished Stanford graduates between 1892 and 1899.1 The most highly accomplished students earned a mention in the body of the book as well. Foremost of these was the “best known of all graduates,” Herbert C. Hoover.2 Jordan's self-perceived success at graduating men of accomplishment reminds us of the larger paradox at the heart of selectionist thinking: how does one select for that which goes beyond one's vision? In other words, how does one select for qualities and capacities that will arise in the future? This question speaks directly to what has been called the problem of innovation. One is not really innovating if one already knows what one wants to build. According to the mathematician John Holland, innovation is not a straightforward application of deduction but a process that “seems to involve a controlled invocation of emergence.”3
As we saw in Part One, Jordan's answer was to use intra-institutional competition, or corporate inheritance, as a basis for selection. If sufficiently complex, an institution could select for traits that may not have been consciously characterized but whose expression would help the institution as a whole. This implied, however, a more complex relationship between the environment and the individual than that for which the recapitulationist model accounted. Intrainstitutional agency suggested that the environment helped define the relationship between the agent and his actions. At the very least, it implied that the institution provided the conditions that brought the competing individuals together in the first place.
Institutions were just one mechanism that late nineteenth-century thinkers appealed to as they addressed the problem of innovation. The figure of the “wanderer” often did this work as well. Directed action already knows what it wants to acquire; wandering, however, is a form of pragmatic exploration that has no ultimate direction. Wandering provided a period in an agent's life in which he or she identified and pursued unforeseen opportunities. The agent could then develop these opportunities in new ways.
With its emphasis on mobility, wandering also stressed the affective and perceptual modes of being in the world. Wanderers blended perception, affect, and activity in a situated dialogue with an environment more about half-articulated tendencies and dispositions than ultimate ends. For this reason, wandering often occurred for literary subjects after an aporia or impasse. A subject would come to the limits of his or her capabilities in a specific environment and then wandered to acquire new goods or information. This established the possibility for a different relationship with the environment. Like many other tropes in the panoramic mode, wandering permeated many types of discourses. Consequently, panoramic mode thinkers used the trope of wandering to understand novelty in many different situations. Wandering subjects in literature encountered new situations; wandering subjects in political economy acquired new goods and resources; and wandering subjects in evolutionary theory acquired new traits. In the terms of information processing developed in these pages, wandering allowed subjects to process information about themselves and the world.
Let me explain. The world presents itself in distinct ways when one is wandering. First, one is more aware of one's environment if one is not rushing to get to someplace else. Second, wandering inhibits the accumulation of possessions. It is difficult to wander carrying a large number of goods. The philosopher Vilém Flusser recognizes these points in his collected essays on modern migrants. “It is true that the settled possesses and the wanderer experiences,” writes Flusser. Because of this, settled people “rush between the private and the political, the wandering of nomads is open-ended.”4 Wanderers tend to highlight forms of information predicated upon communication and experience; settlers tend to highlight forms of information based on the possession of goods. This then highlights the importance of concentrating on the infrastructure settled folk use to accumulate and distribute information. When one is settled, one needs to rely on the social infrastructures to encounter new experiences. In a sense, settled folk need for their information to wander, even if they do not. If individuals primarily receive information in the form of goods, then the development of that third space in natural history, the space I have been calling “the space of flows,” becomes important as a tool for processing information as well as distributing resources.
As we saw with Spencer Baird, specimen collecting, and our investigation of fish markets, natural history relies on both modes of information processing: information gathered by the experience of wandering and information accumulated as goods in a private collection or a natural history museum. Large collections were possible in the first place precisely because they were able to be stored in a repository, whereas wandering allowed collectors to gather new specimens. The history of natural history can be analyzed by investigating how researchers have exploited the relationships among these three ways of processing information: the collecting of specimens, the circulation of specimens in information, and the arrangement and analysis of specimens.
Wandering was a unique way of inhabiting the world that upheld a specific mode of interacting with the world and a specific type of agency. First of all, wandering required a moving subject. This reinforced, to a small degree, the more pervasive conception of the dynamic individual in the panoramic mode. It also privileged a conception of time as a function of movement or change.5 For the wandering subject, time was always perceived as a function of changes in space. The important implication of this is that one could affect time-based processes (like evolution or memory) through changes in location.
Sudden disjunctures in the experience of space, such as those provided by industrial transportation and communication technologies, promoted new foldings of space and time. One consequence of this folding was a heightened perception of the passage of time distinct from change in location. In many instances, time replaced movement as the irreducible variable of experience. Perhaps the most remarked upon example of this is how the extension of the railroads made a single standardized time desirable. The coordination of a spatially vast transportation network meant the coordination of one aspect of the social experience of time. The rise of new recording technologies also challenged the privileged position of movement for ordering the perception of time and space. Time could now be manipulated by altering the relationship of the recording to the playback of information. In the case of the phonograph, for instance, this would transfer the ordering principle of the embodied experience of time and space from the movement of the listening or performing subject to the movement of the recording or playback device. For the listener, time would then be conceived of as a variable independent of his or her change in space. This did not mean that human experience existed outside of space; rather, it meant that space was no longer the predominant means for ordering relationships in time. The material basis of the medium contributed new possibilities for the way that time and space were folded.6 Although a more detailed explanation for how scholars of heredity exploited this new relationship forms the subject matter for the concluding section of the book, the section that follows demonstrates how wandering as a biologic, political economic, and affective/phenomenological dimension helped to destabilize the conception of the dynamic individual.
An important tool for explaining novelty while maintaining the delicate balance among action, affect, and sensation was poetry. Again, David Starr Jordan provides an interesting case for how this worked. Although Jordan placed a premium on an industrious life, he frequently found time to indulge in his own reverie. Jordan was, in fact, a poet of some note.7 One presumes that for an educated man at the time poetry was an acceptable medium to describe the more sensual and emotional elements of experience. For a panoramic-mode thinker, plot may have moved the world, but poetry best described the world's constant state of flux. For instance, Jordan especially liked to write poems about places he visited. These loco-descriptive poems supplemented the daily accounting of his activities by evoking specific scenes. Take the following poem he wrote while in Mazatlan:
Perchance, dear heart, it may be thou and I, In some far azure of infinity,
Shall find together an enchanted shore
Where Life and Death and Time shall be no more, Leaving Love only and Eternity.
For Love shall last, though all else pass away,
Till each occasion Time from Life has wrung
Like outworn garments from the Soul be flung,
And it shall stand, with back no longer bent,
Slave to the lash of its environment!
Then this great earth we know shall shrink at last
To some bare Isla Blanca of the past—
A rock unnoted in the boundless sea
Whose solemn pulse-beats mark Eternity.8
This seemingly radical surrendering to the environment, where action was subordinated to sensation and feeling, where the rhythm of the verse evoked the lulling of the waves, and where the repetition and the immensity of the sea invite the reader to contemplate a cosmic time in which human activity meant little, remained useful for Jordan as long as it was safely embedded in the narrative accounts of an active life. As we will see in this section, this model of writing reflected Jordan's ideas on agency, evolution, and the importance of wandering. Much like wandering, sensation was important for guiding active organisms. Sensation for itself, however, led to the dangers of idleness and sensualism.
It is significant that Jordan used poetry when engaging in reverie. Poetry has always been credited with describing sensation and evoking affect. For Jordan, the poem was a place to dream, see, and feel. As such, it was useful for exploring hopes and fears of what may happen. As Aristotle recognized in his Poetics: “It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.”9 Poetry gave Jordan a way to explore or mentally wander in order to identify new descriptive and affective capacities. Gaston Bachelard (in deference to Henri Bergson's Mind and Matter) called this function of poetry the “poetic image” as opposed to the mechanics of writing a poem. “Because of its novelty and its action,” Bachelard observed in The Poetics of Space, “the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own; it is referable to its direct ontology.”10 Bachelard's turn to ontology in this passage is not just a static portrayal of “being” but a dynamic appeal to the role of imagining in becoming. “To the function of reality, wise in experience of the past, as it is defined by traditional psychology, should be added a function of unreality, which is equally as positive.… If we cannot imagine we cannot foresee.”11 In Bachelard's conception of poetics, imagination and representation exist in a rhythmic relationship that breathes life and significance into a poem: “We are offered a veritable cure of rhythmo -analysis through the poem, which interweaves real and unreal, and gives dynamism to language by means of the dual activity of signification and poetry.”12
Although Bachelard's use of “poetics” has been criticized for its consciousness-centered approach, my eventual broadening of it into a “material poiesis of information” helps me identify how novelty manifested itself as a function of the different ways in which information was processed at different times.13 Consequently, my adoption of this term is intended to shift the focus of discussion from what constitutes the subject and object of experience to how novelty occurs in complex systems. This shift allows for a “productivist” approach, similar to that recently outlined by Brian Massumi, that can envision how new tendencies come into being as a function of the “wandering” of information as well as the informational subject.14
Interestingly, this broadening of Bachelard's use of the term “poetics” bears similarity to how some complexity theorists have used the term “dynamic model” for understanding patterns of emergent properties. According to John Holland, a dynamic model is useful not because of its representational capacity (as would be the case in a static model) but because of its ability to iterate a few simple rules in order to understand the dynamics of how complex environments emerge and develop.15 Philosophers and literary critics can also be seen as working out iterations in narratives of a few dynamic properties.16 Interestingly, this is also the type of process that Jordan had envisioned developing at Stanford University. In his case, the iterations came through the large numbers of students processed as they wandered to new careers. In the terms I used in the introduction to the present study, this type of iteration allowed for an unfolding of possible futures. In other words, it concentrates on “what may be” and not on “what is now.”
Although it lacks precedent,17 casting the history of heredity in this light not only fits much of the literature of the late-nineteenth century (and makes new sense of some of it); it offers a way to think about evolutionary debates as “unfoldings” in the modes of experiencing space and time. This perspective also complements the study of the intellectual inheritance from either the perspective of “natural selection” or the “inheritance of acquired characteristics.” Although these debates certainly exist (and have been covered in detail by others),18 I find them less prevalent in my sources than other less characteristic ways of thinking about speciation, such as biogeography, analogies with language, and models of development. Understanding the emergence of a genetic rationality involves much more than understanding the influence of specific scientific traditions. It also involves an exploration of what it was possible to think at a specific time. In the panoramic mode, the boundaries of the possible were often limited by the informational capacity of the poetics of wandering.