Destabilizing Order, Challenging History: Octavia Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, And Affective Beginnings‪.‬

The world is full of origin stories--tales of the world's genesis. Whether in the form of myths passed down through generations or as scientific theories that order the world, the desire to understand the origins of life on Earth remains constant. In her science fiction trilogy, Xenogenesis, Octavia Butler posits an alternate origin chronicle for Earth. Written in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Xenogenesis draws on traditions of post-apocalyptic and origin narratives as humans cross-breed with an alien species in order to repopulate Earth. Butler challenges and revises other foundational stories by framing hers within the format of a slave narrative--making a marginalized textual format the heart of her book and the impetus for Earth's new population. At the same time, Xenogenesis questions and reevaluates contemporary scientific principles of evolution and natural history by presenting alternate forms of generation and descent. By placing a black woman as the origin for the new species on Earth, and creating alien forms of filiation, Butler questions evolutionary models and highlights natural history's racist and sexist underpinnings. Like Butler, theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari emphasize alternate theories of species' development and generation in their essay, "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible." Deleuze and Guattari question natural history's reliance on "the sum and value of differences," and instead propose a rupture within natural history that makes room for a jump from "A to x" not just "A to B" (234). In their essay, Deleuze and Guattari also counter filial and descent-based evolution's long, straight line and instead propose a theory of 'involution' and 'becoming,' focusing on a more affective, rhizomatic theory of generation. The emergence of alternate theories of species formation and development that Butler and Deleuze and Guattari propose leave the hierarchy of evolution and natural history behind to initiate and become something completely dissimilar than Darwin and Linnaeus could imagine; the recontextualization of evolutionary and origin narratives provide a space whereby alternate--oftentimes subversive--origins can be imagined.