Genes and Human Potential: Bergsonian Readings of

Gattaca and the Human Genome

7:1 | © 2003 Alan B. Wood

1.      How can we fail to see that if the event can always be explained
afterwards by an arbitrary choice of antecedent events, a completely
different event could have been equally well explained in the same
circumstances by another choice of antecedent -- nay, by the same
antecedents otherwise cut out, otherwise distributed, otherwise
perceived -- in short, by our retrospective attention? Backwards over
the course of time a constant remodeling of the past by the present, of
the cause by the effect, is being carried out.

Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind

2.      This paper consists of three interlocking pieces. The first develops the idea of
a metaphysics of becoming through readings of Henri Bergson's critique of the
notion of the possible, and Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return (as
interpreted by Gilles Deleuze). The second section analyzes the distopian science
fiction film Gattaca as a dramatization of these concepts. The third section turns
from this image of the future to current debates over the sociobiological
implications and appropriations of genetics and the mapping of the human
genome. The thesis running through these three sections is that contemporary
scientific approaches to studying and manipulating human genetics are based
upon and guided by conceptual prejudices deeply rooted in western metaphysics,
and that these prejudices need to be critiqued, overthrown and replaced with
richer forms of materialism and empiricism.

Bergson, Nietzsche, Deleuze -- The

possible and the real
3.      In his philosophical autobiography, The Creative Mind, Henri Bergson relates
the following story:

During the great war certain newspapers and periodicals sometimes

turned aside from the terrible worries of the day to think of what would
happen later once peace was restored. They were particularly
preoccupied with the future of literature. Someone came one day to
ask me my ideas on the subject. A little embarrassed, I declared that I
had none. "Do you not at least perceive," I was asked, "certain possible
directions? Let us grant that one cannot foresee things in detail; you as
a philosopher have at least an idea of the whole. How do you conceive,
for example, the great dramatic work of tomorrow?" I shall always
remember my interlocutor's surprise when I answered, "If I knew what
was to be the great dramatic work of the future, I should be writing it." I
saw distinctly that he conceived the future work as being already stored
up in some cupboard reserved for possibles; because of my long-
standing relations with philosophy, I should have been able to obtain
from it the key to the storehouse. "But," I said, "the work of which you
speak is not yet possible." -- "But it must be, since it is to take place." --
"No, it is not. I grant you, at most, that it will have been possible."1
4.      Bergson stuns his interlocutor by turning around the common sense
understanding of time and the common sense understanding of cause and effect.
These common sense understandings have been developed by philosophers and
scientists in both the ancient and modern worlds. Aristotle understood the real as
pre-existing its realization in the form of potentiality; Leibniz argued that the whole
of an effect could already be found in the whole of the cause. For Bergson, these
 are not ontological propositions, but cognitive fallacies. The mind searches to
understand what is -- what has become -- as having been preordained by what
was and in doing so projects a metaphysical image onto the world, which sees the
whole of the present and future as contained in the past. Bergson argues that the
possible is not what comes before, but what is discovered afterwards by the mind
looking for explanations and reasons for what has become.
5.      When we say something is "possible," Bergson explains, we confuse two
different propositions: on one hand, we mean simply that something is or was not
impossible. In this purely negative sense, Bergson writes, the great dramatic work
of the future was, of course, possible at the time he is writing. The existence of
this work at some future time would retrospectively reveal that the work, because
it now exists, must have been possible. But the reporter confuses this banal and
tautological sense of the word possible with a falsely assumed ontological position
-- that the yet to be created work already exists at the present moment, but in a
state of possibility rather than a state of reality.2 A linguistic habit is misconstrued
as an ontological verity. The difference between possibility as the immense
inchoate set of everything that is not impossible, (to be determined after the fact)
versus the possible as a predisposed future waiting to be realized, and subject to
prediction by a discerning intellect, is clearly vast.

6.      Bergson is not rehashing the familiar social science truism that prediction is
difficult because of the sheer number of variables to take into account. The
problem, rather, is with the metaphysical understanding of time that this
linguistically codified way of thinking projects onto the world. This
misunderstanding sees time as a succession of moments, each of which leads to
the next based on what has come before. This image supports an understanding
of the possible that governs what will become real, whether deterministically,
probabilistically or logically.3 Bergson's position regards each of these as
implicated in an understanding of the future put away in the "cupboard" of the
present, merely waiting to be taken out or "discovered" at the proper time. Its
moment of real-ization has therefore, in a sense, been prepared from the
beginning of time. Tautology becomes metaphysics; human language and
cognition are projected into the essence of things and later drawn out again as
"Truth." In reality, Bergson argues, the present refigures the past to
reveal/produce a possibility that only comes to be in retrospect, after the
conditions of existence have been actualized in its future.4

7.      According to the image that Bergson is critical of, the future already exists in
the past in a state of possibility. In this image, time is envisioned as a series of
distinct moments in which one follows the next as on the reel of a motion picture.
When we search the past for causes we simply reverse the film from what is to
what was and then let it run back again. Against this conception, Bergson argues
that neither the future nor the past exist as such or in themselves. They are not
frames of successive moments connected in sequence on a reel of past, present
and future.5 Rather, only one moment exists, and that is a moment in motion. Not
the moment of the present, because the present is already passing, but the
moment of the actual, the present becoming future in its passing. Not a movement
from one frame to the next or from point A to point B -- a spatial movement in
which motion is made a function of space -- but pure motion like dance or music:
past, present and future are compressed in the actual. In this single moment, our
memories and imaginations actively compress and create past and future. Our
bodies passively do so (as do rocks, trees, planets, stars, and so on) carrying the
past in scars, habits, and reactions. Bergson distinguishes between these two
understandings of the past as the "past-present" and the "present-past": a present
moment stored away in the past against the past carried in the present.

8.      The worldview in which the possible creates the real is what Gilles Deleuze
calls a "reactive" worldview. Destiny unwinding from an original impetus: God's
"let-there-be," the big bang's momentary and singular violation of the otherwise
immutable laws of physics, what have you. According to this understanding, all of
history was there at the origin if we only had the sensorium, data, and
understanding to see and comprehend it. There is one dramatic moment of pure
action followed by a chain of reactions, ripples, and reverberations.

9.      Deleuze contrasts this reactive world view with an active world view in his
Bergsonian reading of Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return, described by
Nietzsche as "the closest approximation of a world of becoming to world of
Being." It must be an approximation precisely because language itself and our
habits of mind are working against us from the start. Being, what is, has been
poisoned by Plato's transcendence, by theological eternities, by Newtonian
reversibility -- by being made into something that it most decidedly is not -- i.e.,
fixed, eternal, and self-identical. In all of these conceptions, Being has been
opposed to becoming and abstracted from time. Deleuze and his Nietzsche,
contrarily, theorize becoming, and only becoming, as being, the only being. To do
 this, time must be brought right into the mix rather than being bracketed,
formalized, or turned into a measuring device.

10.      The question that the concept of the eternal return seeks to answer is "How
can becoming have being without "being" being something besides becoming?"
Deleuze begins to answer this question by citing two passages from Nietzsche's
Nachlass: The first is that "nothing exists outside of the whole"; the second "is that
'there is no whole': 'It is necessary to disperse the universe, to lose respect for the
whole.'"6 Deleuze explains that these two passages do not express a simple
contradiction or inconsistency, but rather indicate an attempt by Nietzsche to
escape the limitations of our language of Being. This is not a contradiction, but a
movement in thought: a moving thought to match a moving world. "Nothing exists
outside of the whole": this says, there is no transcendent world, no dualism, no
subject and object, not even a place to stand to view the whole. "There is no
whole": this says, the whole is not a unity, not a set of interlocking reactions, not a
preset movement from past to future. The whole is multiple, active, open, creative
-- in absolute terms, all the parts are in restless, indeterminate motion. We first
move away from transcendence to immanence, then from immanence to
becoming, to multiplicity; from a world playing out its inevitable sequence of
reactions, to an active, vital, creative world with innumerable centers of activity
and protean possibility. Becoming is not a movement from one state of being to
the next, but being itself in its entirety. The eternal return approximates this
becoming by the recurrence of a single moment that produces its own possibilities
out of its multiplicity casting forth into past and future.

11.      In Bergson's language, this understanding of the whole of becoming is

expressed as "the virtual," which he describes as "real but not given." The virtual
exceeds the actual, the given, without being, for that reason, unreal. The virtual is
real, but real in a virtual state that cannot be understood in terms of a
resemblance to the given actual. Unlike the idea of "the possible," which suggests
a prefigured future waiting in the past (it should be noted that whether there is one
or many different possibilities is not the issue here, but the "shape" of the
prefiguration), the virtual does not take the shape of what-becomes-actual, and
the actual is not actualized in the sense of a possible realizing a reality that it
resembles, but invented in the sense of "lines of differentiation" that create the
actual without defining or completing it.

12.      Deleuze reads Nietzsche's metaphor of the dice throw as another
approximation of this idea of the Being of becoming. Nietzsche speaks of this
becoming as two moments of a dice throw: the dice are cast -- a moment of
uncertainty, creativity, activity -- the virtual whole is in play. The dice fall back, the
moment of determinacy, reaction, what is -- the actual multiplicity instantiated. The
dice are cast again. There is not one roll of the dice from which all the rest follows
but a repetition of throws. Becoming (the roll of the dice) has being (the dice fall
back), but it is in the active nature of being to become (the dice are thrown again).
This is not about probability; it is about creativity. You can't know in advance what
will happen because the future is not the realized potential of the past. The future
is the throw of the dice, the present is the dice falling back, the actual is the
moment of repetition. Only after the dice have fallen can we look back and say
that it had to be this way.7 And "what is" already has its "what-it-is-not" inscribed
within it. This is not mysterious and not dialectical ("what it is not" is not "its
opposite" -- difference is not opposition). It only sounds this way because our
language of being excludes time -- it's what we're used to hearing. In reality, no
thing is self-identical because time never stops.

13.      This does not mean, however, that the world of becoming is without order,
continuity and stability for Bergson, Deleuze or Nietzsche. It is just that these
elements are not given a different or privileged ontological status outside of
becoming. They are moments of becoming, relative to becoming, whose
formation, endurance, transformation and dissolution are functions of immanent
differential relations. The form-matter dichotomy wants to assert itself here, but
must be resisted. "Being" is not necessary to impose limits or order upon
becoming, it is the multiplicity and differential character of actually existing forces
of becoming itself that articulate, preserve and unsettle determinations within
becoming. The point is not to favor indeterminacy over determinacy, or chaos
over order, but to reconceptualize the relationship between being and becoming in
a way that allows for order without exiling the new or reducing difference to the
same.

14.      Only becoming has being, and it is in the nature of being to become. Not to
realize a potential but to become without a preset image, a becoming-possible
that creates its own image retroactively. Each moment new, a miracle of creation.
 Bergson, again:

Let a man [sic] of talent or genius come forth, let him create a work: it
will then be real, and by that very fact it becomes retrospectively or
retroactively possible. It would not be possible, it would not have been
so, if this man had not come upon the scene. . .. As reality is created
as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind it
into the indefinite past; thus it finds that it has from all time been
possible, but it is at this precise moment that it begins to have been
always possible. . .. The possible is . . . the mirage of the present in the
past.8
15.      The term "genius" that Bergson uses here is a way of expressing what
Deleuze calls "active force." Properly understood, "genius" or "active force" can
refer not only to a human being, nor does it even refer to any particular human
being in total (a person is at best only part genius) but to a quality of open
multiplicity, of the world of becoming which hides and reveals genius/genesis
everywhere. "Let there be" this and this and this and this. . . recurrently. This, for
Bergson, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, is the concept of eternity proper to our world --
a world of active becoming. Not a world of dumb matter bumping into itself in a
pre-set chain reaction, guided by transcendent laws operating behind and
beneath things, but a world imbued with the spark of the new, generating events
capable of rewriting the past and creating their own conditions of possibility as
they invent the present and the future.9

Gattaca: Become what you are vs. Be all

you can be.
16.      The film Gattaca10 tells the story of a not-too-distant future world in which
genetic research and engineering has fulfilled its wildest dreams. Genetic
engineering has eliminated birth defects and developed cures for deadly illnesses.
It can tell us who we are and what we will become at the instant of birth. It guides
us to the jobs most likely to give us satisfaction. This is a world in which your
possibilities are inscribed on your body before you are born, a world in which
human identity and human being has been reduced to its genetic code. The event
of your birth is the first of the many non-events which will constitute your non-life.
17.      In this highly rationalized society there are laws prohibiting discrimination on
the basis of genetic information but, in practice, everyone looks the other way.
The distopia is created, therefore, not according to some coercive, centralized
plan, but as the result of the independent preferences of individuals regarding
procreation, employment, hiring, and so on. In the tradition of rational choice
theory, rational calculations of probability based upon genetic profiles are the
determining forces guiding social life.

18.      The narrative tells the story of Vincent (played by Ethan Hawke), a non-
genetically engineered person in this genetically engineered world. Conceived the
old-fashioned way, in the back seat of a Buick Riviera, he is marked by a gene for
a faulty heart (a bit too obvious a trope, perhaps) that closes the door to his dream
of traveling in space. Because of his faulty genetic profile, he is consigned to
working as a janitor despite all of his hard work and study in pursuit of his dream.
He is a bad investment and so is dismissed from consideration out of hand.
Refusing to give up on his dream, Vincent buys a new genetic identity on the
black market. The identity he buys is that of Jerome (played by Jude Law), a
genetically flawless individual crippled by an automobile accident and now an
embittered alcoholic. By becoming Jerome, Vincent is able to pursue his dream.
The film tracks his struggle to escape detection by the authorities, his developing
friendship with Jerome, and his romance with his coworker Irene (played by Uma
Thurman). The film ends with Vincent flying into space and Jerome incinerating
himself. Both aspects of this climax are presented as victorious.

19.      As I read it, the film dramatizes two competing conceptions of becoming and
identity. The first is the standard conception, a red thread linking Plato and
Aristotle to modern day genetics. In this conception, what you become is a
realization of your potential. Because your becoming is already written in your
genes, the development of the ability to read these genes succeeds in collapsing
the difference between potential and real. Genetic science finally realizes Plato's
dream of the Philosopher King who is able to accurately select at birth those
capable of being philosophers, guardians, or common tradespeople. To "be all
that you can be" (to borrow the old Army recruiting slogan) -- becomes here a
matter of maximizing your genetically pre-given potential. Your potential marks the
goal and endpoint of your becoming before you are even capable of formulating
 your goals and desires for yourself. Your telos is inscribed in your genetic code.

20.      The second, subversive, conception of becoming dramatized by the film
illustrates Nietzsche's dictum to "become what you are." According to this
conception of becoming and identity, becoming precedes identity, and who you
are is who you become rather than the reverse. In this understanding, potential is
only revealed at the end, and it is the actual that creates the potential retroactively
rather than the potential creating the actual. One's "true" identity is not to be found
in a hidden code, but in the actions and events making up one's life. This is not to
say that the biological, "the social" and other "involuntary" and trans-individual
"actants"11 are not involved. It is, rather, to say that we should see these types of
elements as belonging to this assemblage of becoming (without, however, being
fully reducible to any single assemblage), and not see them as elements of Being
transcending and determining this becoming. (To properly understand the
distinction being made, we must resist focusing on transcendentalized contests
between different abstract elements such as determination vs. free will or body vs.
spirit, and instead focus on the different modes of relation between these
elements that these different conceptions of becoming project.)

21.      Let's return to our characters, each of whom illustrates a different conjunction
of becoming and identity.

22.      Jerome is full of potential -- it's written all over his genetic code. Yet he fails, he
comes in second place in Olympic competition. As he notes in the film, "he wasn't
meant for" second place. He fails to realize his potential, and doesn't become
what he is, what his genes say he is, because he isn't all that he can be. What he
is, therefore, is nothing because he can only measure himself in comparison to his
potential. He wants to end his failed life -- we find out later in the film that his
"accident" was a failed suicide attempt -- but ends up only crippling himself. He
gets by on selling his potential self -- an identity that is more real than the non-
being he's become, the absence, the lack -- on the black market that grows at the
edges and in the cracks of this highly ordered, rational society. He provides the
body, the fragments of the body -- blood, urine, hairs, flakes of skin -- that house
the ineffable genetic identity. These fragments of his being are him; his life, his
becoming, is only a shadow.

23.      The character of Irene is defined by having reached her limit. She is genetically
superior in every way but one -- like Vincent, her genes show a high risk for early
heart failure. She is obsessed with her flaws, her lacks, continually comparing her
endowment with the endowment of others. To get to know Vincent, she takes his
hair in for genetic "sequencing." When Vincent is falling in love with her, she gives
him a piece of her hair and says -- "go ahead, take a look at the real me," thinking
that once he gets a look at her DNA he'll realize that whatever he finds attractive
about her is a sham. Her limited possibilities stand like a brick wall in front of her
at all times, fixing her to her endowment of genetic possibility, impeding any
movement, any spontaneous becoming. Like Jerome, her actual becoming is only
a pale shadow of her "true" being (her genes), and she has no way out.12 Where
Jerome suffers from his perfection, Irene suffers from her imperfection. If the
tables were turned, each could just as easily suffer in the way of the other.

24.      Vincent is the genius, the savage in this Brave New World, the non-engineered
child of chance. The dynamic of the story is Vincent's struggle between these two
types of identity: who he becomes and who he is, the self he creates and the self
preexisting and fixing his becoming. He struggles with the fragments of his body,
which continually threaten to betray him. No matter what he does, who he
becomes, he can never altogether escape this detritus of his (allegedly) true self,
the dead matter he sloughs off in each new moment of becoming-other that ties
him to what he is in potential.

25.      Vincent is not guided by his potential, by what he "is," genetically. To become
what he is he must go beyond all that he can be (his potential). He must become
what he is not in order to become what he is, to be other than it is possible for him
to be, donning the (genetic) mask of Jerome to receive the proper clearance.
Vincent is a dramatization of Deleuze's concept of the mimic or simulacrum13 --
that which becomes what it is by imitating what it is not, rather than by realizing its
potential. Through this deception he creates his own possibilities, to be
discovered retroactively, as it were.

26.      Vincent is marked and discriminated against as an "In-Valid," but paradoxically
this status allows him a way out that the others in the film are denied. Because his
identification with his genetic identity is imperfect, inasmuch as there is a gap
between his potential and his desire, he is driven to create something new, a new
becoming -- a becoming-himself through becoming-other. Vincent, bad genes and
 all, nourishes and develops the spark of the active force, the èlan vital, the
unpredictable and unknowable, the open becoming.

27.      As he pursues his dream, Vincent is himself pursued by his genetically
engineered, genetically superior younger brother, Anton (played by Loren Dean).
Anton is the father's namesake, identified and elevated over Vincent as the true
heir, demoting Vincent to the status of false pretender or bastard. Anton is a born
cop, so to speak. In the climactic scene Vincent and Anton swim out into a lake in
a competition to see who will turn back first. The outcome of this game of chicken
is seemingly preordained. Anton is bigger, stronger, genetically superior: he can't
possibly lose, but somehow he does anyway. Vincent explains to Anton and us
that he wins because he doesn't hold anything in reserve for the return to shore.
By going to the limit, he transcends the possible and performs the miracle that
rewrites the past. It turns out that he could do it after all -- retroactive possibility.
Vincent is a winner because he wins (and, because of this, he's a winner even
when he loses). He rolls the dice, he wins some and he loses some. Anton begins
with the confidence of one who never doubts his self, whose victory is
predetermined. He knows he can't lose and so he falls apart the moment
something unexpected happens. Once he starts to lose, he can't stop losing. All is
lost. Like Jerome he never recovers from this traumatic separation from his being.
His identity has become uncertain and like Irene he will now have to live
constantly in the shadow of comparisons with others. He must take others down
to lift himself up.

28.      Vincent knows how to roll the dice. In the parlance of his society, he "plays
someone else's hand." Anton and everyone else just play the hand they were
dealt, confident that, for better or worse, the outcome is predetermined. But this
means that they don't actually play. All the cards are on the table from the
beginning, the prizes doled out. There's no betting, no bluffing, no next deal, no
action. There's no game and no players. Vincent has to bluff because if he shows
his true cards he'll certainly lose. But because he's the only one who is playing,
he's also the only one who can win. The others might as well go home.

29.      Jerome sums things up when he remarks to Vincent near the end of the film, "I
got the better end of the bargain. I only provided my body, you provided the
dream." The reactive forces of the body, even the most genetically superior body,
are necessary but secondary to the active forces of "genius," or "the dream," not
to be understood as something other than the body, but as the body exceeding its
reactive conceptualization -- a reactive conceptualization that is the idealist
hangover of mechanistic science. Inspired by this dream, Jerome, in a crucial
scene in the film, is able to transcend his now-imperfect body, going beyond his
limits by dragging his useless legs up the stairs and pretending to be himself in
order to deceive the police and protect Vincent. The body, purified and
essentialized into its identifying DNA, has been imagined to be the real world, the
ineffable stuff, but here is transfigured into the mask, the illusion of a higher reality
that functions by allowing active force to emerge and create the actual. Jerome
completes his transformation by incinerating himself and his silver medal, leaving
behind only the stockpiles of his DNA, which now belong to Vincent. This
incineration is a victory -- a becoming virtual. Through his actions he finally
becomes who he is by following the only line of flight available to escape from the
cage of unfulfilled potential.

30.      The blurb on the box of my copy of Gattaca is unfortunate in this respect. It
reads, "There is no gene for the human spirit." We must resist any slide back into
an easy dualism of ideal and material. It is not an issue of spirit versus body, or
free will versus determinism, or even the individual versus the social order, but
between active and reactive worldviews, active and reactive conceptions of
corporeality. The lesson of Gattaca is not that there is no gene for the human
spirit, but that human being cannot be defined and delimited by genetic
possibility.14 What Gattaca reveals to the person willing to look beyond the
comfortable dualistic reading is that a social order that defines its possibilities in
terms of a projected metaphysics of genetic essentialism may actively produce
the conditions under which this determinism can become true. Even if it manages
to do this, however, this order, because it is only relative and incomplete, is
subject to disruption by the active forces that it denies and contains but cannot
fully eliminate. In doing so, Gattaca gives us a lever with which to pry loose the
hold of sociobiologically inflected understandings of the relationship between the
human genome and human nature over popular and scientific consciousness.

The Human Genome and Human Potential

31.      The Human Genome Project has been described by many of its supporters as
 the means by which human beings will finally discover the human essence, the
"blueprint," for human being, the real, scientifically and empirically established
"human nature."15 Behavioral genetics and sociobiology, in any case, are
predicated on this idea. This understanding has an intuitive appeal because our
understanding of being since Plato has always reserved a place for this blueprint,
this key, and DNA is the latest entity to fill that place. DNA is the ineffable stuff,
the higher reality, the formal agent giving shape to the dumb, plastic matter of life.
32.      The issue I want to raise is not whether positions that assert or imply this
status for DNA are forms of genetic determinism. Supporters of these positions
often insist that they are not determinists, but "interactionists." That is, they don't
believe that behavior is completely determined by the genes, but recognize that it
is also affected by "environmental" factors. But the important question is not
whether "nature" and "nurture" interact, but how they interact, and this is a
question that has not been rigorously asked or answered by behavioral genetics,
particularly as it has been applied to human beings.

33.      Stephen Jay Gould points out one aspect of this defect of sociobiological
reasoning when he discusses an unacknowledged slippage between two different
forms of sociobiology, one "soft," and the other "hard." "Soft" sociobiology claims
merely that biology must play some role in human behavior and culture, a claim
that most modern, materialistically inclined human beings would find axiomatic --
"both trivial and uncontroversial," as Gould puts it.16 "Hard" sociobiology slides
from this unobjectionable and very limited claim to more controversial specific
claims about genetic causes for behaviors and cultural practices without
specifying precisely how a gene produces a behavior or practice. In a sense it is
very similar to the slippage between two different meanings of "possible" noted by
Bergson in the first section of this paper: the "soft" position merely states that
without genetic material capable of allowing certain behaviors such behaviors will
not be possible. The "hard" position envisions this possibility in terms of a positive,
pre-formed (though ill-defined) "tendency" to realize a specific behavior.

34.      In one sense, as Gould points out, the claim that behavior is determined by a
combination or interaction of "nature" and "nurture" is a truism accepted by nearly
everyone. In another sense, however, this claim is completely false. There are
many, perhaps countless, forces acting upon human behavior, but none of these
forces is clearly identifiable as "nature" or "culture."17 These terms are
abstractions that impose a simplifying dualistic way of thinking upon a complex
multiplistic world, and then allow us to imagine that these abstractions are real
and effective agents. Rather than investigating or explaining specific interactions
and relations, these elements are plugged into a pre-set essentialist formula.
Human "nature" is equated with genes and the genome, and therefore these
become the fixed, the absolute, and the necessary while environmental factors
are seen as the variable, secondary and contingent. Environmental factors are
inessential distortions (whether positive or negative) of a deeper, truer essence.
This is repackaged Platonism, and the same sort of logic governing the Gattacan
idea that a person's true identity can be best discovered by sequencing her DNA.

35.      The impact of this image of thought upon the verities of genetics becomes
even more evident when one goes beyond the headlines proclaiming the
"discovery" of "a gene for X." What has typically been discovered is nothing more
that a statistical correlation between a certain behavior and the presence of
certain genetic material. This statistical correlation on its own can in no way imply
a causal relationship between the gene and the trait, as correlation does not prove
causation.18 It is only the neo-Platonic assumption that DNA is a "blueprint" that is
able to suggest that this correlation is sufficient proof of causality.

36.      The "interactionism" currently popular among behavioral geneticists maintains
and relies upon this dualistic image by continuing to process its findings through
the vague and misleading language of nature and nurture. In this understanding,
"nature" is equated with genetic variation, and nurture with cultural variation. But
this already assumes too much. It assumes that everything biological is reducible
to DNA, and that everything environmental is reducible to culture. It assumes that
the words "nature" and "culture" refer to distinct entities rather than being
ambiguous abstract categories. It makes the crucial mistake of confusing the
categories of nature and nurture with things existing in the world, and when it
proclaims that a particular trait is, for example, 70% genetic and 30% cultural, it
confuses a statistical measuring device with a causal explanation. It's like using a
baseball player's batting average to explain how it is that he hits a fastball. In both
cases, the percentages are not explanations, but rather are themselves in need of
explanation.

37.      This leads us to the second mystification of behavioral genetics. If the first
mystification is a kind of neo-Platonism, the second could be referred to as neo-
scholasticism. For just as the scholastics began with a set of general truths that
 were held to be above doubt and then worked from those truths to try to explain
any particular fact, the sociobiologist begins with a commitment to a particular
understanding of the theory of evolution, and then explains any observed
statistical correlation in terms of the metanarrative of the "selfish gene." These
explanations are functionalist and teleological rather than mechanistic, as there is
no demonstration of how a particular strand of DNA directly causes a particular
behavior. Nor is there any direct tracing of the movement of this genetic material
from generation to generation correlated with observed outcomes. All there is, is a
general speculation about how a particular behavior may have been useful to the
transmission of genetic material over time, what Gould calls "verbal appeals to
plausibility."19

38.      Even within the limited terms of mechanistic science, there are deep problems
with sociobiological explanations. The problem becomes all the greater when we
fold in Bergsonian conceptions of time, becoming and emergent causality.

39.      The shortcomings of these explanations is further demonstrated by the

frequency with which they are naïve or banal. Take as an example Steven
Pinker's evolutionary explanation of the origin and purpose of punishment. Pinker
argues that examining the real -- meaning evolutionary -- function that punishment
performs can clear up confusion about why we punish. Pinker argues that ideas
associating punishment with justice, responsibility, retribution and the like, are
really just mystifications, and that the true origin and purpose of punishment is
and always has been a single thing -- deterrence. Operating beneath whatever
explanations, concepts, and constructs human beings have given it, this one true
meaning and purpose has always been acting behind the scenes. Therefore, he
concludes, we should set aside all of these other ideas and rationalize
punishment in terms of this deterrent function.20

40.      Setting aside the fact that the theory of deterrence remains a contested idea in
contemporary sociology and criminal justice theory, we can see that Pinker's form
of explanation partakes in the same dualistic, teleological model that we saw in
Bergson's discussion of the possible and the real. One purpose, meaning, or
function that has historically been assigned to the practice of punishment is
projected back onto the origin, as if this purpose somehow preexisted,
transcended, caused, and maintains on its own the existence of the practice itself.
We see again, here, the reactive understanding of the world as a sequence of
effects emanating mechanically from an original causal element, and yet this
radical mechanism ultimately boils down to a simplistic teleological formula.
Despite their efforts to present evolutionary explanations as alternatives to
teleological explanations, sociobiologists continually fall back into a teleological
language that has to stand in for a genuine scientific explanation that is not
forthcoming.

41.      I focus on this example because it can be readily contrasted with a classic
example of a non-teleological approach to theorizing punishment found in
Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche would have lumped Pinker in
with the other "naïve" genealogists identifiable by their tendency to "seek out
some 'purpose' in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then
guilelessly place this purpose at the beginning as causa fiendi of punishment, and
-- have done."21 Pinker, Nietzsche would argue, makes the error of confusing
origin and purpose. Nietzsche's genealogy of punishment, on the other hand,
does not attempt to reduce punishment to a single, "true" meaning, but rather
draws attention to the many different and distinct meanings and purposes that
have been given for punishment at different times and in different cultures. His
argument is that each of these meanings has been useful and has given
punishment a use. For all that, none of them can be essentialized either as the
origin or as the ultimate goal of punishment.

42.      Punishment endures, Nietzsche argues, not because it has an essential and
universal purpose underlying all of these other, as Pinker would see them, "false"
meanings, but rather because it has been "overdetermined by utilities of all
kinds."22 He writes that, "the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility,
its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart;
whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again
reinterpreted to new ends."23 These interpretations are not, for all that, something
merely added on but integral parts of the phenomenon itself.

43.      What's important here is not the issue of punishment, but rather the different
approaches to "integration" and causality on display. Nietzsche's approach rejects
the teleological explanations given by Pinker and other "naïve" genealogists in
favor of a mobile, de-centered assemblage of meanings and practices developing
over time in a becoming that is not predetermined by a transcendent drive or
 imperative, but is constantly subject to transformation by immanent active forces,
and dependent upon other immanent forces for its relative stability and endurance
over time. There is not a universal thing, "punishment," with a universal meaning,
"deterrence," that is then subject to various inessential and contingent
interpretations by different cultures in different time periods. Rather, the particular
interpretations are themselves folded into the essence of punishment. Without
these "interpretations" punishment could not continue to exist, therefore these
interpretations, which reflect multiple immanent forces and de-centered points of
view, are as essential to the existence of punishment as any putative evolutionary
drive or the activities of "selfish genes."

44.      Nietzsche's genealogical approach, in other words, accounts for the active
character of becoming, and understands causality not as simply mechanistic, but
as emergent. In Nietzsche's account, there is not a single arrow leading from
cause to effect, but multiple arrows moving forward, circling back, forming
alliances, running into dead ends or missing the mark altogether. Punishment, as
it has actually become, is layered with intersecting and divergent meanings and
practices. It is not a distinct thing with a trans-historical meaning and purpose, but
a complex contraction of entangled meanings, purposes, and practices. From this
perspective, Pinker's explanation of punishment can itself be seen as another
moment within the history of punishment: another attempt to incorporate practices
of punishment within a framework of ideas and justifications that may resonate
within a specific assemblage of ideas and beliefs of a particular time and place.
As such, it might also be able to take on the role of emergent cause by producing
real effects in practices of punishment, continuing the twists and turns within the
actual history of punishment, even as it tries to flatten these twists and turns into a
smooth, rationalist narrative.24

45.      This Nietzschean approach to "integration" suggests that humanity must be
approached in terms of the open totality of a historical, biosocial assemblage, and
rejects the notion that "consilience" can be achieved by beginning with genes and
building our way to Shakespeare, as is suggested by Edward O. Wilson.25 Genes
do not and never have had an existence distinct from the historical, social and
biological (since biology is more than genes, and the interaction and relation
between biological elements cannot be reduced to genetic determinism, either),
"environments" they are part of. Indeed, it is only a prejudice to suggest that
genes are in an environment, rather than part of the environment, so that we
might just as well say that society is impacted by being in a particular genetic
environment than the other way around. But we don't wish to say either of these
things. What is important is to shift from the idea of things in environments to
elements in an assemblage, each of which may be influential on any of the others,
none of which is simply or absolutely determinative; none of which is simply or
absolutely determined.

46.      These philosophical speculations drawn from Nietzsche are supported and
mirrored by some of the latest empirical and theoretical work in biology. In his
book The Dependent Gene, for example, the psychologist and biologist David S.
Moore argues against behavioral genetics precisely that it underestimates the
extent to which genes, from the moment of conception, are continuously affected
and enabled by both social and biological environmental factors, and overstates
what genes are capable of doing without directly showing or explaining these
alleged capabilities. He additionally points out that there is no such thing as "a
gene" in any absolute or ontological sense -- that the boundaries between units of
genetic material are themselves ambiguous and have to this point only been
defined in functional terms that have varied depending on who is doing the
defining for what particular ends.26 That is, the gene itself is defined as a
theoretical function, further complicating the notion that things can be defined
absolutely in terms of their genetic or evolutionary function. Moore even argues
that this complex interdependence is the case not only for behavioral traits, but
also for physiological traits such as hair and eye color previously understood to be
completely determined by genes.27 Embryological studies show that absent
certain "environmental" determinants, even supposedly wholly genetic traits will
not develop in predicted ways.

47.      Barry Commoner, another biologist and head of the Critical Genetics Project,
has summed up the biases of genetics as it is currently practiced in a single
phrase. These geneticists have forgotten, he writes, that "DNA did not create life;
life created DNA."28 Life, nature, what have you, are not things, but complex
assemblages within which DNA, genes, etc. are elements that both act and are
acted upon in complex and un-predetermined ways.

48.      The attempt to define "human nature" in terms of genes or any other single
aspect of the human totality -- which is ultimately inseparable from the non-human
totality as well29 -- disregards the fact that the nature of human being, whatever it
 is, is not something pre-given but is something actualized and achieved through
various types of human activity. "Man is the undetermined animal" because
humanity continuously redefines itself through its various forms of activity. The
human totality is thus an open totality. Culture, meaning, sociality are not artificial
things grafted onto human nature, but elements of human nature as it has
developed, elements that are as essential and fundamental as any other. When
sociobiologists imagine that genes hold the definitive answers about who we are,
whether as individuals, cultures, or a species, they minimize the importance of this
recognition and overlook the reality that who we are is continuously being
overtaken by what we are becoming.

Conclusion
49.      The problem with genetic accounts of "human nature" is not that they reduce
human beings to biological creatures, but that their conceptions of biology are
themselves limited and flat. The biological cannot be equated with the reactive,
and it cannot be abstracted or isolated as an essence, limit, boundary, or norm for
understanding and measuring human society and behavior. The constitutive
problem of sociobiology is that it is driven by just this imperative -- to map a
teleological and essentialist conception of nature onto an open-ended and
multiplistic becoming. Every sociobiological text of which I am aware at some
point makes the leap from discovered correlations to genetic tendencies, and then
to normative or quasi-normative proclamations about what humans are or should
be. What is genetically average is reified and made somehow more real, authentic
or correct than the actually existing diversity of which the average is merely a
mathematical function. Witness Pinker's recent attacks on some forms of
contemporary art as "unnatural," and therefore bad.30 This sort of judgment can
only make sense if we assume that what may count as art is genetically
predetermined and fixed rather than in an open-ended state of biosocial
becoming.31
50.      What Gattaca dramatizes is the way that reactive worldviews like sociobiology
can function to produce and complete a social order. It is the widespread
internalization and codification of the value and significance of genetic
determination as much as it is the inherent effectiveness of genetic determinants
that produce and reproduce the social realities and personal outcomes
dramatized by the film. It is genetics and geneticism (the disciplinary formation
and willingness to place faith in this discipline), not genes, that produce the
distopian milieu of Gattaca by creating the conditions for the actualization of the
'truth' of genetics after the fact. And yet, even so, Vincent manages to produce a
different truth and, in retrospect, different conditions of truth against all
expectations to the contrary.

51.      Just as Vincent creates an alternative past, present and future for himself, the
Bergsonian conception of becoming provides us with an alternative to reactive
worldviews and their closed totalities. With Bergson, as with Vincent, this is not a
matter of rejecting the genetically given (Bergson does not reject evolutionary
theory in favor of creationism, but revises it as "creative evolution") but of rejecting
the notion that the genetically given encompasses the whole, whether as
determination, limit or 'possibility.' This is also not a matter of rejecting the given in
favor of "the Beyond" (of whatever sort), but of encountering the virtual as an
irreducible dimension of the real in excess of the given. The alternatives are not
between materialism and idealism, but between dualism and open multiplicity.32
As Deleuze writes in Bergsonism: "The Whole is never 'given.' And, in the actual,
an irreducible pluralism reigns."33 Bergson's work provides a conceptual basis
upon which to re-imagine nature and human nature as biosocial becomings. The
development and dissemination of this conception may allow for a reciprocal
engagement between the life sciences and social theory that does not fall into the
traps of sociobiology. Ultimately such an engagement might promote a theoretical
and ethical sensibility capable of greater responsiveness to the political
geography of the present and future, and provide tools with which to engage this
sensibility.

Acknowledgements
52.      Thanks to Jane Bennett, Stephen Engelmann, Kam Shapiro, Keith Topper,
Stephen K. White, Robert Harris, Leo Masursky, and Julia Toews for reading and
commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.
Endnotes

1 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, Trans.

Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 100.
2 Bergson, 102
3 For an excellent discussion of the relationship between possibility and
probability as they relate to the work of Bergson and Deleuze, see Brian Massumi,
Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, 2002), 135-136.
4This is similar to Victor Borges's understanding of the Kafkaesque as existing
only after Kafka (see Victor Borges, "Kafka and his Precursors," in Everything and
Nothing, trans. By Donald A. Yates (New York: New Directions, 1999)), even
though we can find elements of Kafka in his precursors. This is a paradox only
because our common sense understandings as carried in language and habit are
not in perfect synch with the world as it is. Common sense endures because it is
useful, not necessarily because it is true.
5Bergson prefigures the chemist and chaos theorist Ilya Prigogine in critiquing the
concept of "reversible" time that has dominated Western thought about being,
from Socrates to Einstein. Like Prigogine, Bergson is astounded by a
philosophical and scientific tradition that has managed to understand Being as
outside of time in a world in which time is fundamental and inexorable. Time has
been bracketed in the quest to understand reality when time is itself at the heart of
reality. See, Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the
Physical Sciences (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1980), Preface
and Introduction.
6 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University, 1983), 22.
7 Deleuze, 27.
8 Bergson, 100.
9 Bergson here seems to follow Nietzsche in seeing the image of possibility and
causality that he seeks to overthrow as illicit modern holdovers from
transcendental and monotheistic modes of thought. This can be illustrated by
reference to Thomas Hobbes's materialist critique of religion. Hobbes argues that
religious belief is rooted in the desire of human reason to find the causes for
things that it cannot understand through reason and experience alone. Unable to
discover the real, material causes of things, reason invents absurdities like
"bodies immaterial." Bergson's critique turns this same line of thought back onto
the sort of mechanistic materialism that Hobbes champions as the proper
alternative to religious superstition (See, Hobbes Leviathan, Eds. Richard E.
Flathman and David Johnston (New York: Norton, 1997), Chapter XII.). From this
point of view, Hobbes substitutes materialism for "bodies immaterial" but doesn't
respond to the broader implications of his recognition that the concept of causality
is itself a production of human desire and cognition projected onto the world. For
Nietzsche and Bergson, Hobbes's mechanistic materialism is equally mystified in
this sense.
10 Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol, Columbia Tristar Pictures,
1997, Motion Picture.
11 In Bruno Latour's vocabulary: see Bruno Latour Pandora's Hope: Essays on
the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
12 See Jane Bennett's discussion of Kafka's "Report to an Academy" for an
excellent expansion of this notion of a 'way out' as a modality of freedom more
relevant to a Bergsonian conception of becoming than standard conceptions of
positive and negative liberty. In Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 19-21.
13 For a discussion of Deleuze's idea of the simulacrum, see "The Simulacrum
and Ancient Philosophy," The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles
Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. (New York: Columbia University, 1990) 253-
279.
14 On this question of the relationship between body and spirit, it is important to
note the differences between Bergson, on one hand, and Nietzsche and Deleuze,
on the other. Nietzsche and Deleuze both work to eliminate any mind-body
dualism from their thinking, and could both be characterized as immanent
materialists who seek to understand intellect, spirit and active force in terms of a
refigured understanding of matter and corporeality. Bergson uses language that
reinvokes spirit and intellect as active forces acting upon matter that is sometimes
characterized in reactive, mechanistic terms. His understanding of the material, in
other words, tends to be more conventional in this regard even as the form of
dualism he develops is radically non-Cartesian. This leads Bergson ultimately
back to a form of theism that Deleuze and Nietzsche forego. Deleuze's
Bergsonism (translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York:
Zone Books, 1991)) presents versions of Bergsonian time and becoming that do
not rely upon this infusion of spirituality. By reading Bergson through Nietzsche
(and Nietzsche through Bergson), Deleuze develops an understanding of èlan
vital as a dimension of materiality found throughout nature. In this essay, I follow
Deleuze and his take on materialism without trying to resolve this other debate
regarding the place of 'spirit.'
15 See, for example, Joel Davis, Mapping the Code: The Human Genome Project
and the Choices of Modern Science (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, 1990),
where the Human Genome is referred to as "the bio-molecular essence of a
human" (3), and the answer to the question "Who am I?"(25). It is, however, very
difficult to generalize about a project as massive, overcoded, and revolutionary as
the HGP. Many of its supporters, it should be noted, avoid such grandiose
metaphysical proclamations, and instead focus on pragmatic applications to
human health. This approach, of course, raises political and ethical issues of its
own, issues that, it must be added, have been formally recognized by the HGP,
which has included the funding of ethical research as part of the project. I think it
is evident, however, that even when the "blueprint" idea is not explicitly asserted
or defended, it lurks in the background, in the "image of thought," as Deleuze
would call it; in the conceptual apparatus guiding research and interpretation at an
underlying level. In any case, as I will expand upon in the following section, this
projected image is very evident in attempts by both scientists and social theorists
to apply genetic research to social and ethical issues.
16Stephen Jay Gould, "Genes on the Brain," An Urchin in the Storm (New York:
Norton, 1987), 113.
17Gould, 112. See also Bruno Latour's Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of
Science Studies. Latour is actively engaged not only in critiquing the dualism of
nature and culture, but in theorizing conceptions of both science and reality in
terms of complex "collectives of humans and non-humans" that draws upon
Deleuze's idea of an assemblage.
18 David S. Moore, The Dependent Gene (New York: Times Books, 2002), 46.
19 Gould, 115.
20Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New
York: Viking Penguin, 2002), 181.
21Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, Trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 77.
22Nietzsche, 81.
23Nietzsche, 77.
24 As such, it would likely be insufficient on its own. As William Connolly points
out (in the chapter "The Desire to Punish," from The Ethos of Pluralization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995), 41-74), contemporary justifications
of punishment rely upon the coexistence of multiple fragmentary and even
contradictory ideas that are marshaled at different junctures. For example,
especially in capital cases, it is generally necessary to paint the defendant both as
a responsible agent who freely chose to do evil, and as an inherently evil-natured
monster who is incapable of goodness (implying a lack of agency).

It could be argued that a jury would be unlikely to sentence a person to death or

imprisonment based purely on the idea that doing so might deter similar crimes by
others in the future, without some notion that the person actually deserved
punishment. It would be even more difficult, given the lack of clear evidence of
any clearly demonstrable deterrent effect. Therefore, Pinker's account of why we
punish could easily be turned into an argument for why we shouldn't punish.

25Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage,

1998).
26 Moore, 78.
27 Moore, 12-13.
28Barry Commoner, "Unraveling the DNA Myth: The Spurious Foundation of
Genetic Engineering," Harper's Magazine, February 2002, 39-47, 47. The primary
focus of Commoner's article is on the "central dogma" of genetics, which states
"that an organism's genome -- its total complement of DNA genes -- should fully
account for its characteristic assemblage of inherited traits" (39). In order for this
premise to hold true, it is necessary that there be a one-way and one-to-one
relationship between DNA genes and proteins synthesized. The DNA transmits its
code, which is received, unchanged, by the proteins. There is no transformation of
the information, nor any feedback. Relationships must be well regulated and
hierarchical. As Commoner explains this theory, it is crucial that "the genetic
information originates in the DNA nucleotide sequence and terminates,
unchanged, in the protein amino acid sequence [. . .] because it endows the gene
with undiluted control over the identity of the protein and the inherited trait that the
protein creates" (41-42). Commoner argues that the central dogma has been
shown to be false (by the HGP itself, among other empirical evidence), and that
because of this, genetic engineering is not what it thinks it is or claims to be. If
there is transformation, feedback and so on between gene and trait, then an
irreducible, and potentially dangerous, element of unpredictability is introduced
into the process of engineering. The understanding of this relationship that
Commoner puts forward is in line with the Bergsonian conception of becoming,
and it is easy to see the Platonism involved in the formulation of the central
dogma.
29 I have been emphasizing here the problems of genetic science as it is applied
to the human realm, and am in danger of being interpreted as drawing a
qualitative distinction between humans and non-humans in this regard. This is
something that I do not wish to do. There are important differences between the
human and the non-human, especially when seen from the point of view of the
human, and it is much easier to see the idea of creative becoming in the human
realm than in the non-human. Be that as it may, the Bergsonian concept of
becoming is applicable to the human and the non-human alike. This is clear from
his book Creative Evolution (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1998),
which is presented as a response to evolutionary theory in general, not only as it
is applied to human beings.
30Pinker, 413-420.
31This desire to invoke genes as teleological absolutes is made even more
explicit by Roger Masters. In his book Beyond Relativism: Science and Human
Values, he argues for bringing modern science back within the ancient teleological
and moral conception of nature upon whose repudiation modern science is based.
Hopefully, scientists encountering this work will see it as an opportunity to reflect
critically upon their continued entanglements with these moralized views of
nature, rather than an incitement to abandon the fact-norm duality and begin
compiling lists of "Thou Shalts." Roger D. Masters, Beyond Relativism: Science
and Human Values (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), 6.
32See endnote 14, above, for my discussion of the differences between Deleuze
and Bergson with regard to the status of the material and the spiritual. To
reiterate, despite these noteworthy differences, the overall approach to time and
becoming remains the same.
33Gilles Deleuze, 1991, 104.
Alan B. Wood is Visiting Assistant Professor of
Political Science at Northern Arizona University. He
is currently completing a book on readings of
Nietzsche in contemporary political theory for a
university press. He can be reached at
Alan.Wood@nau.edu.

Copyright © 2003, Alan B. Wood and The Johns Hopkins

University Press