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states of evidence
Whether one begins with a pattern of traces or a theory of means, inquiry into biological variation is tempered by fortuity. The problem is compounded when the object of research is not the trace of an organism as such, but rather a hypothetical taxonomy of devices residing behind phenomena, and constituting mechanisms for inducing rapid, and radical, species-specific changes. There is, however, an intermediary technology, one which preserves these ephemeral traces of biological deviation and which also alludes to their generative conditions: cinema. The tracery of light and shadow on film is, by analogy, a residue of the same order as that of the impression of ancient bodies in paleo-sedimentary depositions. In the case of certain relatively short-lived phenomena, only the cinema has been able to record and preserve sufficient primary data for the study of artificially induced aberrations in growth and form. Cinematic impressions, therefore, may be treated in the same manner as geological strata: they are spatio-temporal markers which define parameters for analyzing morphological variance. This model, while promising, is far from unproblematic. Cinematic evidence, and analysis, may suffer from similar sorts of gaps and lacunae that punctuate paleozoological reconstructions from incomplete fossil records: information may be incompletely or badly preserved, data may be lost or deformed, and so on. Nevertheless, both paleozoology and cinema present a palimpsest of surfaces, a recuperable chemistry of traces, with a cryptic proximity to their originary objects. The task of this study is to attempt to decode from such flickering sensibilia, certain patterns and predispositions in evolutionary thinking, as well as to excavate and analyze some of the embedded claims on the causes of mutations as they are reflected in popular cinematic and televisual environments.
“. . . . our basic categories record vestigial preferences of history . . . .”
—Stephen Jay Gould
Photographic technologies have always been complicit with scientific endeavor. Defined early on as a passive recording device, photography's ‘objective’ description of events, objects and states of physical phenomena, inscribed into its own practices the prejudices of contemporary forms of reasoning. These predispositions became more pronounced—and more hidden— as photography, cinema, televisual, and digital scanning devices became active perpetrators in scientific experimentation. Tacit configurations of race, class, species, nature and culture entwined themselves within these new technologies, producing their own reflexive systems of interstitial logic and inference. Photographic technologies represented themselves as a transparent interlocutor between various segments of the phenomenal world, a world increasingly re-made by those same technologies, an invisible—or altogether too visible— sovereign domain within which we, also, are continually inscribed. Nonetheless, encoded within the practices of cinematic and televisual mediation are certain referential trailings, traces of forms of analogic reasoning about the world, its inhabitation and reflexion. These tracings, embedded and naturalized in familiar representations, are recuperable, and a comparison of certain kinds of scientific theorizing with its own reflection upon itself, and its appropriations or distortions within the public sphere of popular media may uncover certain useful, if problematic, presuppositions in the analysis and representation of mechanisms of aberration. In other words, certain certain forms of analogic thinking are preserved along with the traces of biological aberrations caught on celluloid. These utterances, the embedded classifications and embedded speculations that are attached to cinematic impressions of aberrant biological taxa, are the raw material of a nascent investigation into the mediations between scientific and popular cultural spheres.
“The introspective statements of a psychologist are not, in principle, to be interpreted differently
from the statements of his experimental subjects . . . .
. . . . the statements of an experimental subject are not, in principle, to be interpreted differently
from his other voluntary or involuntary movements . . . .
. . . . the movements of the speech organs and of the other parts of the body of an
experimental subject are not, in principle, to be interpreted differently from
the movements of any other animal . . . .
. . . .The movements of an animal are not, in principle, to be interpreted differently
from those of a volt-meter . . . .
Finally, the movements of a volt-meter are not, in principle, to be interpreted differently
from the movements of a raindrop . . . .”
—Rudolf Carnap,
Die Physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft, 1931
Employing a similar analogical tactic, we may propose that the biomorphic traces inscribed into the photosensitive surfaces of celluloid (and ferric oxide substrates in video) are not different, in kind, from the impressions of life-forms found in geologic sediments. This follows logically when we treat the history of cinema as simply another field of data containing a record of biological transformations, specifically, in this case, of short-lived aberrations in corporeal form and behavior. Cinema has much in common with paleozoology: both exhibit a complex pattern of substrata wherein, over time, the diversities of life have left their mark. Moreover, only cinema records the interplay of non-repeatable and rapid technical/biological processes. This is primary data from which we may derive a theory of cinematic aberrations which mediates between different registers of the received tradition of scientific and evolutionary thinking and other conceptual traditions, moving from intra-cinematic to inter-cinematic, and out into a public sphere where comparisons with conventional extra-cinematic evolutionary models becomes valid.