Nature 354, 442-443 (12 December 1991)
Pornophilosophy
Richard Dawkins
Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality. By Lynn Margulis and
Dorion Sagan. Summit Books: 1991. Pp. 224. $19.95.
Lynn Margulis is a distinguished biologist: a courageous outsider whose
eventual hard-won triumph constitutes one of the important scientific
revolutions of our age, the startling realization that our cells are nothing less
than symbiotic colonies of bacteria. It would have been good to have heard
her views on “the evolution of human sexuality”, the subtitle of this book.
As for what we actually get, I imagine that she is less to blame than her
coauthor (and son) Dorion Sagan. Indeed, other evidence implicates him as a
sucker for those trendy French ‘philosophers’ whose influence liberally,
irrelevantly and distractingly pervades – indeed, ruins – the book. Their
‘philosophy’ avowedly consists in playing games, which might seem harmless
enough. But these charlatans want it both ways – to enjoy a self-indulgent
frivolity while simultaneously being thought profound.
Had you noticed that the French word lit means both ‘read’ and ‘bed’, hein?
Tiens, quel joli joke. Even better, “semantics and semiotics bear an evocative
resemblance to the sexual word semen”. Oh, such formidable deconstruction,
is it not? And “the English verb ‘mean’ shares roots with moan” (nudge nudge).
But attend, I can cap (wink wink) that trope there. At my school the slang
word for erection was – but no I cannot bare it, it has such a droll signification
– ‘root’.
What on earth have these puerile self-confessed games to do with anything?
There are several thousand languages in the world, a rich statistical sample.
Has the French ‘philosopher’ done a systematic survey of them to test his
hypothesis that words about sex and about meaning are connected? Margulis
the tough-minded scientist would demand no less when refereeing a scientific
paper. But chic savants can apparently indulge in idle tossing off and get away
with it. I mustn’t be too high and mighty, though: I recently heard a lecture by
an Oxford disciple of this school of modish French dippiness, and it took me a
full five minutes to see through him (it was when he made his big point about
Jesus’s name and Jacques Derrida’s both beginning with J).
The philosophical priorities in this book can be gauged from the authors’
bizarre estimation of Heidegger as “perhaps the most influential philosopher
of the twentieth century”. He was the old Nazi, you remember, who singlehandedly wrestled with the problem of ‘being’. Without Heidegger it would
have escaped us that “The nothing annihilates itself”. Even Lacan (a favourite
among Margulis and Sagan’s French mentors) refers to Heidegger’s “dustbin
style in which currently, by use of his ready-made mental jetsam, one excuses
oneself from any real thought”.
The book is built around a recurring theme of striptease. The androgynous
stripper peels off garment after garment, metaphorically revealing our
evolutionary past. S/he is forever twiddling round and changing sex – sorry,
“gender” – on successive gyrations of the mystery dance. At times the
language suggests a cack-handed attempt at eroticism. Or it may seek to
embarrass, in which case it succeeds:
As she climaxes a man briefly appears beneath her, existing only long
enough to ejaculate before disappearing again into her shuddering loins
[apologies to W. B. Yeats not offered]. In retrospect the audience realized
that they saw her give ejaculatory virtual birth to a full-grown male. The
body turned and below the rippling abdomen of the seven-veiled striptease
artist was an obscure pubis, dark and hairy. The erect penis, the
unmistakable signal of his sex, shrunk on the next rotation. It became the
clitoris [pp. 59-60].
Yuck! But there’s more:
She lustily stands spreadeagle. Slowly she turns and bends to expose her
dark buttocks and the wet genitals below, bidding him welcome [p. 60].
These passages are chosen more or less at random. The pages drip with
similar ‘pornophilosophy’, a genre which, I understand, originated with Sartre.
Personally, if I must have porn, I prefer it shorn of pretension. One cannot
help feeling that if Desmond Morris had written that paragraph (he wouldn’t)
he’d be noisily accused of flagrant, pot-boiling sensationalism. Should this
book get away with it just because of who Lynn Margulis is?
Actually, although it has a joyless earnestness where Morris has a teasing
sense of fun, Mystery Dance in one way approaches The Naked Ape – the
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same charmingly cavalier lack of evidence for the same daringly speculative
functional explanations. In some cases literally the same explanations, albeit
unacknowledged. Margulis and Sagan attribute one of their theories of the
female orgasm to an unpublished correspondent, a businessman inspired by a
conversation with a sexually boastful US airman. In fact, as I told the same
businessman when he wrote to me some years ago, an identical theory was
clearly set out in The Naked Ape (distributed around the world in a mere 12
million copies).
Meanwhile, back at the dance, more and more veils are lasciviously removed
until we expose the ancestral bacteria. Ah, you think, now Margulis must have
something worthwhile to say. But no. With a deft gyration of the intellect, our
scientific authoress rotates herself into her literary alter ego and, by the time
he has given vent to another stupefying salvo of continental obscurantism, the
moment has passed:
But there is perhaps a deeper phase, the metaphysical plane of pure
phenomena, continuous appearances. The evolutionary stripper is a
curious creature: the G-string is not a thin cloth decorated with tassels but
rather a word, a letter, a musical symbol for ultimate nakedness [honestly,
I’m not making this up]. Paradoxically, when the G-string is removed – to
the accompaniment of strange vibratory music consisting in part of a silent
triangle and a gentle crash of cymbals – the nakedness is gone. S(he) stands
before us as fully dressed as ever before [p. 27].
What on earth, you may say, is all this about? Well, wait:
We encounter our sexual ancestors along the slippery slope of signs and
signifiers, via the medium of language. The use of signs of any kind
necessarily obscures; words represent or replace signified things in
absentia; they are little black masks. We postpone reality to discuss it;
without this postponement, this instantaneous replacement of our sexual
ancestors, or things in general, by their signs there could be no possibility
of language, of signification at all [p. 28].
And then where would we be?
How a scientist of Margulis’s calibre and rigour can be gulled by this
pretentious drivel is as far beyond comprehension as the prose itself. Let us be
charitable and hope that she had an argument with her coauthor and lost. But
if, rightly, you value Lynn Margulis and her reputation, do her a favour and
ignore this book.
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Richard Dawkins is in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South
Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK.
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