TH3. The Law of Superposition & the Biogenetic Law

Spinal Catastrophism is constructible as the commixture of two venerable idea-clusters. First, the notion of Depth-as-Memory and the Law of Superposition, traceable to the seventeenth-century genesis of the geosciences; and second, embryology’s Theory of Recapitulation, also known as the Biogenetic Law, which is itself traceable to the late eighteenth-century collision of Absolute Idealism with Natural History.

The convergence of these two notions, the Law of Superposition and the Biogenetic Law, furnished the matrix within which Spinal Catastrophist notions first became articulable, via a self-obsolescing exacerbation of the internal logic of two core Enlightenment Idealist tenets: the Principle of Continuity was abrogated by Superposition, and Recapitulation arose as a mutation of the Principle of Identity.

An anciently held presumption, the Principle of Continuity was first given explicit and precise formulation by Leibniz (1646–1716).1 Inspired by his successes with infinitesimals and differential calculus, Leibniz proclaimed that, between any two natural instances, there is necessarily an infinity of intermediary instances: no interstice, no saltation, no genuine and irreducible abruption. (A genuine indivisibility—as a separation that just is, without further explanation—would introduce an unaccountability into the ligature of rationally structured nature: something that was firmly foreclosed by Leibniz’s cognate Principle of Sufficient Reason.) Thus, to be is to be concentrically included and to concentrically include in turn, ad infinitum. Spurred on by Leeuwenhoek’s innovations in microscopy, Leibniz therefore announced, ‘not only is there life everywhere [but] there are also infinite degrees of it’.2 Or, conversely, ‘there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe’.3 (This of course was the basis of his fractal vision of each quantum of matter being a ‘populated world’, itself containing further populous worlds, with telescoping interminability.)4 Each single life is contained within indefinitely many other lives and includes indefinitely many others in turn—without remainder—because, by the very same token, there is simply no external medium or environing death within which life could be excluded or suspended. By introducing infinitesimals into biology, then, Leibniz effectively biologized infinity. This applied both spatially and temporally: such an outlook coupled perfectly with William Harvey’s omne vivum ex ovo injunction (‘all life comes from life’) and the embryological idea of preformation (which proposed that—through infinite ‘scatulation’ or ‘encasement’—organic reproduction operates essentially like a never-ending Matryoshka doll).5 And so, if all life comes from other life, then, as far back as you can go, there is always life. What this meant is that the inorganic simply didn’t exist. Indeed, the very term ‘inorganic’ in the modern sense only appeared later, around 1800, in response to innovations in geochemistry and massive shifts in world view. (Previously, the archaic ‘inorganical’ had long referred, instead, to something incorporeal or spiritual. Here, the fact that the antonym of ‘life’ was not ‘death’ but ‘afterlife’ is incredibly telling.) The idea of nonliving matter was of course present, but it was only admitted as a temporary deviation from living instances (as Erasmus Darwin declared, channelling a presumption utterly typical for the eighteenth-century: ‘Awhile extinct the organic matter lies; / The wrecks of death are but a change of forms’).6 Thus, all matter was considered essentially biogenic and the idea of material entirely detached from (i.e. utterly indivisible vis-à-vis) an economy of organic utility and circulation was absent.7

And so, via the Principle of Continuity, homogeneity in space (infinite divisibility) was taken to also entail homogeneity in time (eternal inclusion of lives within parent lives, back to the beginning of time). In short, matter can have no ‘memory’, and can ‘tell no tale’, because it is always, everywhere and everywhen, the same (that is, basically alive) and is so continuously and interminably. Preformationism precludes memory in any meaningful sense, because everything is already contained (with infinite divisibility) within the present moment. And so, no matter where one carves or cleaves, no matter what the scale or time-step, one only derives further biogenic instances—producing only smaller, quotient lives—never reaching a basal indivisible that could be classified as lifeless matter rebarbative to all living utility. This led to an essentially placental or amniotic world view, wherein life is infinitely included in the universe because there is absolutely nothing in the universe that could exclude it.

Nonetheless, the first in a series of conceptual innovations that would go on to unwind this cosy world view had already been developed. In 1668, Nicolas Steno (1638–1686) had announced his Stratigraphic Law of Superposition: the founding gesture of modern geognosy and geohistory.8 Steno was the first to note explicitly that stratigraphic succession correlates with temporal succession. In other words, that depth is time. (Hence, centuries later, McPhee’s coinage of ‘deep time’.)9 This marked the inception of the notion of depth as mnemonic and temporal retrogression that would later be so vital to psychoanalysis or so-called ‘depth psychology’ (Tiefenpsychologie). (Here we cannot fail to mention that Steno was himself a neuroanatomist: one of the first polymaths, alongside Descartes and Willis, to map the deeper structures of the brain, he hypothesized that brain function arose from the nervous parenchyma [cellular tissue] rather than from the ventricular system.)10

Importantly, Steno’s Stratigraphic Law expedited the scientific formulation of an entirely chronometric notion of time (which was already beginning to release horology from its pre-modern subordination to exclusively embodied, circular, rotational, sidereal or calendric motions) since it implied that all space and body is itself nothing but coagulated time. As a direct consequence, the spatial (morphological and tectological) relations within our own bodies could, at least potentially, be disarticulated into striated timesteps.11 With the eighteenth-century consolidation of comparative anatomy—from William Hunter to Georges Cuvier—our body-plan suddenly became, unmistakably, a chronicle.12 (As indeed did the entire cosmos: in 1824, the great astronomer William Herschel, having realized that many observable stars were likely already long extinct, consequently observed that something like Steno’s Law applies just as much to astronomy as to geognosy and that the Milky Way is thus itself a ‘kind of chronometer’.)13

Every object an hourglass. Time is not produced by bodies and motions; all bodily motions, without exception, are the effluvia of Grand Time. The somaticized reading of ‘memory’ proposed by Spinal Catastrophism descends directly from this revelation, via a particular transliteration of Steno’s Law onto vertebral levels (the junction of T-12 and L-1—‘lumbar transfer’—echoing stratigraphy’s iridium layer marking the K-Pg boundary, as Barker argued). With this filtration of all spatio-morphological continuity through disarticulating horology without exception (the emptying out of nature’s infinitesimal embodiment into a chronometrics unpinioned from ab ovo concentricity), somatic containment catastrophically becomes reformatted as self-abruption rather than self-inclusion. The Principle of Continuity, along with its stipulation of infinite soma-divisibility and self-similarity, is rescinded and depth becomes available as an internalized heterogeneity, giving rise to something more like a Principle of Mereological Alienation. For chronometric horology is not limited to the structures and strictures of embodied and objectivated chronotopes and thus is not divisible into living time, the tempos native to the Lebenswelt (the embodied time of our lived experience is limited to the motion of bodies in space, and thus to sidereal circulations and calendric rhythms of observed events; clock time, in contrast, abstracts time into a blank ordinal series no longer defined or measured by observable and calendric cycles).14 When the indivisibility of ordinal time is read through embodied self-divisibility, the body becomes a thread to be unravelled. Thus the geognostic Law of Superposition came to compromise and revoke that of Leibnizian Continuity.

And yet, if we must include the indivisible recalcitrance of a time that outstrips containment within experience (because bodies are glaciated temporality), then somatic self-inclusion must, at a certain depth, invert into historical self-exclusion (as Ballard much later realised, at some stage, mnemonic recall must become ruinous for the framework of personal experience). That is, if we contain the grandest time, then we carry within us our outside, the trace of our prior nonexistence (in more contemporary terms, this is the organism’s internal pact with its own dissolution through dissipative renewal—the fact that we must constantly die in tiny amounts in order to stave off dying entirely). What we arrive at by way of such self-excluding self-inclusion, however, is an almost geometric deduction of Recapitulationism—the second tributary of Spinal Catastrophism after the Law of Superposition. Made infamous post-1860 by Haeckel, recapitulationism finds its true roots in the 1770–1830 Goethezeit and the naturphilosophisch speculations of philosophers such as F.W.J. Schelling and Lorenz Oken.

Recall that, according to the Principle of Continuity, every division or scission only arrives at further quotient lives, never bottoming out in a partition between ‘life’ and indivisible ‘non-life’ that simply cannot be further accounted for or biotically justified. This exhaustive expelling of ‘unaccountability’ and ‘unjustifiability’ is all-important, because it reveals the Principle of Continuity to be a strict entailment of the higher-order Principle of Identity. The wholesale expulsion of unjustifiability from existence is nothing but the converse of the maximal identification of existence with judiciality. Or, in other words, this ‘expulsion’ is simply the necessary collateral of the Dogmatic Idealist conviction that there is some mutually-exhaustive and foundational identity between rationality and reality (as embodied in the Leibnizian mantra: ‘Whatever is, is just’.) The Principle of Identity allowed Enlightenment Idealism to stipulate that everything, without exception, is contained within (and, thus, justified by) ‘the Idea’ (inasmuch as ‘thinking=being’ or ‘A=A’). In this way, these Idealist Principles (i.e. the Principles of Identity and of Continuity, but also of Plenitude and Sufficient Reason) serially interlock to define nature as nothing but the bodying forth of the infinitely divisible fasciae of judicial and jurisprudent reason. Nature is, without exception or saltation, the interminably uninterrupted connective tissue for the self-expression of the law.

Yet ever since Steno’s first suggestion of its fundamental principles, the nascent earth sciences, practised from Buffon to Deluc, had been uncovering temporal prospects that far outstripped, in precedence and possibilia, both ideational and organismic horizons.15 And from within the bosom of Idealism Recapitulation arose, almost spontaneously, as a compromise (and immune response) to the injurious and injudicious discovery of this vast outside, postulating that Spirit somehow still contains it because, crucially, Spirit repeats and recalls all exteriority through its own developmental self-realization (Entwicklungsgeschicte). Spirit thus comprises the ages of its deepest past as prepersonal stages on its long and inevitable journey to personeity. Noogeny ‘includes’ geogony.

This internalization (‘phagocytosis’) of a gargantuan inorganic outside, however, inevitably led to fatal indigestion. Consuming earth history triggered intussusception within the sphere of the Idea. Put differently, this was the first discovery (which is to say, production) of the Unconscious.

That is, the stance of ‘developmental repetitiousness’ forced acceptance, amongst Schelling and his naturphilosophischen peers, that swathes of Spirit’s development are not self-conscious, yet must still somehow be (genetically) included within Spirit. Since containment, noetic as much as somatic, could no longer equal telescoping self-similarity or infinitely divisible inclusion, memory became the domain of the unconscious (Unbewußtsein). Spirit had to contain everything, but it came to appreciate (via burgeoning natural historical researches) that it could not transparently recall the entire route to transparent self-consciousness. Its Bildungsroman was partly foreclosed to it, but no less real for it. With most of Spirit’s long history proving troublingly unavailable to itself, then, memory became the domain of the unconscious. In Germany, this unconscious memory came to be studied under the title of the ‘night-side of natural science’.16 ‘Forgetfulness’ was no longer just a cognitive lapse but the very principle of embodiment and of chronology. To even have a body, riddled as they are liable to be with disease and recalcitrance, was for pure spirit a form of forgetfulness. (Amnesia, indeed, is the only way that certain strands of Idealism can even begin to explain natural history.) Ergo, innermost interiority was suddenly tenanted by the outermost past, invisible to the life of mind, experienced inwardly as a kind of opacity to intellect (though manifested outwardly as a body and its evolutionary history). The body as entrenched amnesia. Person, after all, is an entirely forensic term: meaning that one’s personhood is only ever constructed post hoc.

Matter is amnesiac mind. Applied embryologically, this conviction led to the so-called Meckel-Serres Law, which claimed that ‘[t]he development of the individual organism obeys the same laws as the development of the whole animal series; that is to say, the higher animal, in its gradual development, essentially passes through the permanent organic stages that lie below it’.17 This law was formulated in 1821. By the time of Ernst Haeckel’s work in the 1860s, the principle had been raised to the status of evolutionary axiom and had attained maximum slogan density: ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’.18 Thus the Biogenetic Law was announced.

Provoked by the unstable compromise between Absolute Idealism and Natural History, this obsession with developmental repetitiousness became a core tenet of Goethezeit Naturphilosophie.19 It promulgated the conviction, among many practicing naturalists, that the entire external universe was simply the fossilized museum of various arrested stages of evolutionary development, ‘relics’ or ‘abortions’ from mind’s unconscious voyage unto self-consciousness.20 (In consequence, the first models of ‘the unconscious’ were radically ectopic, physicalized, and extended.)21 So that what appears, from within chronotopic constraint, as a ‘unified present moment’ or ‘window of simultaneity’ is revealed instead as an exploded-view cross-section of radically disarticulated moments of total time: each internal organ or external species a piece of suspended historical shrapnel. Recapitulation, quite simply, is the nemesis of any stable de nunc indexicality. It detonates the unity (synecheia) of the present, revealing not only unilinearity but also all windows of simultaneity, to be entirely downstream of CNS enclosure and its contingent quirks.