Review by Michael A. Winkelman
Richard Doyle. Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere. In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011. 358 pp. $35 paperback, $70 hardcover.
Wrong. He was so wrong! —Cady Heron in “Mean Girls”
Judging Darwin’s Pharmacy by its cover produces a positive initial impression. The image from the nineteenth-century painting In Fairyland is quite fitting; additionally, it is cleverly apt because it is by the Victorian artist also named Richard Doyle. Cracking the book open and reading it, however, is like experiencing a really long, bad trip. Days after putting it down, this reviewer still cannot get over how incredibly sucky it was. Its themes are intoxicating flora and partakers’ written reactions to ingesting or smoking them, evolution (albeit haphazardly), and Gaia. The term “noösphere” in the subtitle denotes the “thinking stratum” of our planet, while Gaia refers to the concept of a living Earth. The bulk of this text consists of stream-of-consciousness trip reports and Doyle’s “rhetorical” analyses, both of which tend to ramble on and randomly jump around a lot. But check it out dude, it’s so far out! Doyle doesn’t actually present an argument per se; however, he does float the cockamamie hypothesis that humans are to psychedelic plants as insects are to flowers, and that higher-order human consciousness and cognition resulted from this symbiotic co-evolution. His writing style also merits mention. The author mixes Green and Indian mysticism with random linkages and druggy observations —one might call it the voice of the pretentious academic hipster. And although Doyle’s training and teaching interests lie in rhetoric and science, he seems not to comprehend the difference between causality, on the one hand, and analogy or anthropomorphizing on the other. As an example of the former, cats and tigers share several traits because they are closely related felines with common ancestors; as an example of the latter, the Grand Teton mountains do not look like breasts (as they appeared at least to the French-Canadian voyageurs who named them) because the Earth is literally our nurturing mother, but because of the movements of ancient tectonic faults millions of years before humans existed. This book veers close to self-parody, but in fact it’s not, it’s meant in earnest.
Rather than launching into a full-scale dissection of its myriad gruesome details, I will instead quote one representative passage:
Darwin’s “Really Dangerous Idea,” sexual selection, might prove more effective as a framework for Darwinian descriptions of the earth. The spread of video and information technology across the planet was driven by the very content of some very particular post-modern channels of sexual selection—namely, porn, chat, and dating—so origin stories drawing on sexual selection itself may be even better than accurate; they provoke transformations of the monoid self capable of grappling with a scientific vision that demands an essentially pluralized vision comfortable with fluctuation. Such organized fluctuation is helpful in rendering a more satisfying—what Miller calls a more Dionysian—vision of human intelligence and mind, one that recognizes and works with rather than against the meshed, ecosystemic nature of life and intelligence. (75-76)
This reads like an attempt to out-Sokal Sokal.[1] Does Doyle mean sentient computers are literally, not metaphorically, taking over the globe? That surfing the Web for porn produces well-adapted übermenschen? Or does it, as a certain King of Scotland might put it, signify nothing?
This monograph, let me also note, is too advanced and higher order to argue explicitly for the legalization of drugs on the grounds that they are good for mental health and organic. Furthermore, there is little to be gained from its attempts to actually analyze trip reports rhetorically in any sustained manner. Some defining characteristics are pointed out: viz. they often deal with heightened awareness; they’re frequently hallucinatory; and they sometimes struggle with the limits of language’s capabilities to capture extranormal perceptions and phenomena. Beyond that, there isn’t a great deal of substance presented. By now, of course, there is a tremendous amount of lab research on pharmaceuticals done by investigators in medicine and biochemistry, as well as growing Humanities’ subfields in which drugs are looked at from literary and cultural perspectives. While many such studies are invoked here, the classic text written “under the influence,” De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), is not cited.
Steering people away from this travesty is a beneficial and amusing exercise, but I would like to end by raising serious questions: How the bleep did this get published?! What were the series editors and folk at the University of Washington Press, all presumably highly educated and experienced professionals in their field, thinking? Believe it or not, Darwin’s Pharmacy makes up the third tome of the author’s trilogy, following On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, 1997) and Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minnesota, 2003). Didn’t anyone along the way point out that the Emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes? The author is a tenured full professor of English and Science, Technology, and Society at Penn State University, with a PhD in Rhetoric from UC-Berkeley ’93. Yet since his work betrays a fundamental inability to write clearly or to provide insightful rhetorical interpretation, I would submit that it is legitimate to wonder about how effective he could be at teaching those skills. It is very hard to imagine that this guy (whose official school website photo reveals the mandatory goatee and earring) with his stoner persona and faux-hippie nostalgia (he was born in 1963) isn’t a caricature of the groovy 60’s guru prof in the classroom—the target of conservatives against ‘tenured radicals’ who progressives would like to pretend doesn’t exist. Penn State faces a much bigger scandal than this minor mortification right now, of course, but the publication of this tome is truly appalling.
The final irony: though it purports to put the Earth first, this book truly wasn’t worth all the trees destroyed in printing it.
Works Cited
De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. London: Oxford UP, 1949.
Doyle, Richard. On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
—. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2003.
—. Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere. In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011.
Editors of Lingua Franca. The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 2000.
[1] In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal published an article of gibberish larded with nonsensical theoretical concepts and buzzwords in the journal Social Text in order to satirize postmodernism, engendering notorious commentary; see Editors of Lingua Franca, The Sokal Hoax.
‘D’sPharmaRvw.docx,’ misc dox / iBook11
wc ≈ 950
2-2012