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circlejourney · 3 years

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Societies of control and the failure of the taxonomic project. Or, how pride flags are related to pelicans.

Just throwing ideas at the wall because I have nothing better to do. It’s not an academic document by any measure.

The categorisation of things stems from but a single aim: to organise very large numbers of things, or collections of data, so as to harness and manipulate them. This is particularly useful--and profitable--as global systems of commerce and administration are handed to the purview of information technology, as big data looms increasingly large on our collective horizon.

Weather, human psychology, evolution, disease--everything is to be rendered as data, so that it may be analysed, regulated and controlled. And through it, that the things they signify may be analysed, regulated and controlled, too.

Consider taxonomy.

Taxonomy, the project of classifying and naming all living things, was formalised by Carl Linnaeus in 1735. It tries to assign every living species a branch on the tree of life, and a standardised name corresponding to its location, so that we may easily discuss organisms and relationships between them on a global scale, across the entire breadth of life’s diversity.

Today, via the long and storied route of evolutionary theory, we know that all living things are related, and knowing where each organism fit on the tree of life gives us leverage to make predictions about it.

If we discovered a new species, and we saw that it has feathers and can fly, we would provisionally classify it as a bird and assume that it lays eggs, has internally regulated body temperature, and has ZZ/ZW sex chromosomes.

But with recent molecular analysis, we are quickly learning that our taxonomic categories are often defined arbitrarily--and wrongly. As recently as 2013, the order Pelecaniformes (as defined by Sibley-Ahlquist) which includes pelicans, storks, herons and seagulls, was found encompass birds that were not very closely-related, and exclude some close relatives of the pelicans. All of those groups have since been made their own families.

And further probing has revealed the failings of the notion that these animals can be consistently grouped and organised at all: birds, in the past placed in their own class, were found to be closer relatives to crocodilians than crocodilians are to any other reptile group. And so, circa 1994-2004, the reclassification of birds under Reptilia was gradually adopted. This brings us to more questions: if a group must include its most recent common ancestor (MRCA) as well as all of its descendants, then doesn’t the class of fish include mammals? After all, the MRCA of all mammals is descended from the MRCA of all fish.

More complexities abound on a more granular level. How are the boundaries of a species defined? There are various species concepts, one of the most popular being the biological species concept: all members of a species freely interbreed and exchange genetic information, and therefore form a single gene pool.

But what of geographically-dispersed subpopulations? Blue whales constitute several separate breeding populations, divided by the continents geographical barriers. And yet due to being morphologically and genetically very similar, the scientific community is very much divided on how many species or subspecies of blue whale there are.

The science of taxonomy has run into the unyielding barrier of simply not being adequate to describe life as it is.

We cannot give every possible subspecies by every definition a name; distinctions between species are sometimes gradual, with some members of a species able to interbreed while others are not, and ever-shifting geographically-divided populations.

And yet, of course, we persist with binomial nomenclature, with referring to gorillas as Gorilla gorilla and chickens as Gallus gallus domesticus.

Why? Because as a system, standard Latin names allow us to access existing information about the species, to extend and infer predictions about novel species, and to discuss them on an international scale, where any animal could have hundreds of names.

We see a similar mechanism at work with the nomenclature of sexual orientations. In this case, I do need to specify that categorising orientation is important in a wholly different way. As queer people, we seek community. Social communication occurs through systems of language--verbal discussion, onscreen text, systems of visual signs like flags--we need handles by which to discuss such abstract things as our attraction, or non-attraction. And it entails grouping. Categorisation. Simplification.

Putting communally-defined names and categories to things, I think, requires that those categories be finite.

But variations of attraction are infinite, as the variations in lived human experience are. We cannot whip out a word for every variation, and still be understood.

And here’s the other thing. Putting things in easy categories also makes them amenable to be processed as data. You must have noticed how brands consistently only slap the rainbow flag on their products. This year, I saw some corporations add the lesbian flag, the bi flag, and the trans flag to their commercial offerings.

They are, indeed, learning. This isn’t the evil in itself, but what this is a symptom of, is insidious. Because we are already raised in a culture prioritising symbols as equivalent to what is signified, where image and concept are equal, and therefore see the policing of correct, standard use of flags and terminology as an end in itself--we also make our own modes of community more amenable to processing and control by the systems that envelop us.

Those categories are becoming ossified in the signs that represent them. Communities are becoming territorial about them, and they are, as we speak, being distilled to processible data. Data through which they can be understood, as they were meant to be, but also harnessed, and controlled.

I’m just some blogger so there is no harm in me saying that we seem headed towards a world governed by a bona fide Deleuzian society of control, where the gathering of information becomes the application of that information to harnessing our lives, selling us products based on our current behaviours, conveying media that has been regulated for its latent messaging, exploiting our own predilection for recognisable visual signs to, in Trojan fashion, masquerade as our own and market things back to us, et cetera.

Species don’t intrinsically have names or categories. We name and categorise them to know and harness them. Orientations and genders don’t intrinsically have names or categories. We name and categorise them to know and harness them.

For essential reasons of course, but when left unchecked, are easily co-opted and refashioned as tools of control.

I will add sources another day, I need to head off now oops.

#thinks

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