All the Modern Things Have Always Existed

I have been on a Björk kick for a while now. While listening to her song “Modern Things” from her album Post, I was struck by the thought of what kind of genealogy of modernity we would get if we took the lyrics of the song seriously. It begins with the following lyrics:

All the modern things

Like cars and such

Have always existed

They've just been waiting in a mountain

For the right moment

The “modern things” have been waiting, forced to listen to the “irritating noises / Of dinosaurs and people / Dabbling outside.” Now, says Björk, it is their turn. A funny image, no doubt. But there is also a genealogical insight here. When we stay within the old Aristotelian metaphysics of form and matter, we are forced to say that there is something mysterious that persists under change. But what if change itself could be thought of as a principle of identity? What kind of change holds things together?

This thought returned me to a genealogical idea I had come across some time ago from an unlikely place. Kurt Lewin is best known for his work in Gestalt psychology and his ingenious experiments that mapped psychic forces into human situations. Yet his 1922 Habilitationschrift, The Idea of Genesis in Physics, Biology, and Evolutionary Development (Der Begriff der Genese in Physik, Biologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte), attempts to answer the question of how the natural sciences understand the identity of things through time. It mentions psychology only in passing. It is a significant, if largely forgotten, contribution to the philosophy of science. But it also gave birth to a radical genealogical concept: “genidentity” (Genidentität). Genidentity is based on existence, and existence is not a "property" of a thing. It “can never be asserted of any qualities, nor does it signify the relation of various qualities to a single thing . . . but it is a relation between various existing things as such.” Though Lewin never gave it a simple definition, preferring to explicate it through example, he often refers to it as an “existential relation” between things, or “the relation between structures which derive existentially from each other.” It is an empirical and not a logical relation in the first instance. But how this relation is conceptualized depends upon the field of inquiry. Therefore, physics and biology, the primary studies of his work, have different conceptions of genidentity, though no hard and fast law prevents concepts from migrating across these fields.

In physics, the construction of a closed system ensures the complete genidentity of one state with another in time through the conservation of energy. The genidentity of the system is, then, independent of time. No matter when we look into a closed system, the genidentity of its energy will be the same. In biology, however, things appear different. The identity of a biological entity is its position in a developmental series. Lewin draws a distinction between three types of biological genidentity. The first is the genidentity of an individual organism at different phases of its life. The second is the ancestral relation, an “existential relationship between relatives of different generations.” Finally, there is the species or evolutionary genidentity, that which makes humans human.

Lewin’s example of “genidentity” considered from the ancestral point of view.

Our own life is bounded by our birth and death. Our individual genidentity is, considered by itself, a monad. This, of course, is not how we actually experience life. We are part of a longer story. But what holds that story together? If we conceive of ourselves in terms of total genidentity, we are the final node of a branching tree made up of all our ancestors. This produces a striated grid of steps and nodes that cannot be mapped onto physical space. Whereas physical division is “dense everywhere” the generational sequence is “leaky” and “discontinuous.” Its form of time is not marked by motion but by the sequence of generations, which can, of course, be actually contemporaneous with one another at various points of life. A great-grandmother may see her great-granddaughter, but in genealogical space the two shall never cross. The genidentity of our species, however, is fully continuous. It cannot be broken into generations. The attempt to do so is a category error and leads to the familiar chicken-or-egg paradoxes. Its oldest point is fixed, but it is not a single node. Rather, it is a broad group or population. Nor does it have a terminus—at least not yet. The human species continues indefinitely, if not infinitely, into the future.

Björk’s poetic vision of the continuity of “modern things” with mountains defies the ancestral, step-wise logic of generations and opts instead for phylogenetic continuity through time. But she goes one step further. The limit of a “tribe” or group is underdetermined at both ends. Since our individual lives are all bounded discretely at beginning and end, we must seek to understand our past as something before we existed. The branching logic of generations gives a view of the past that is discrete and includes only our ancestors. This logical space is branching but discontinuous. It excludes life for the clarity of descent. The phylogenetic principle of genidentity transforms the past into a continuous movement of life.

Our contemporary politics is characterized by radical alternatives that understand our place in the world through competing genidentities. We are here either through our membership in the human species, and, with Björkian humor, our membership in the modern things once waiting in the mountains, or we assert our place in a generational, ancestral schema, one that is not universally shared.

Global warming is one vision of how the “modern things” have taken their turn. Those cars and other things are now affecting the mountains, the oceans, the winds, and, not least of all, their humans. What we once drove now may drive the winds and raise the waters. Migration crises have erupted all over the world and will continue to as the ecological crisis deepens. How we understand our own genidentity will determine our response. Are we humans or are we tribes?

“They've just been waiting in a mountain

For the right moment. . .”