Opposed to the fixism is the theory of
transformism, antecedent to the evolutionary doctrine, in the pre-Darwinian period, which asserts that plants and animals are modified and transformed gradually from one species inte another through many generations [22].
This was the strategy which Gramsci described as '
transformism'--the reprocessing of a reforming set of goals and values (in this case social democratic) within a pre-existing (in this case neoliberal) framework, providing a semblance but not the reality of change.
It would be difficult to overestimate the force of this tropical anxiety, materializing in the wake of what Kelly Hurley has called the "disastrous and traumatic" implications of Darwin's On the Origins of Species (1859) and other late-nineteenth century accounts of evolutionary development (6), particularly, in the French context, Larmarckian
transformism (Tort 330).
Melanie Jackson a Revital Cohen:
Transformism, commissioned by The Arts Catalyst
Instrumental
transformism and the unrealities of realism, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 16, 449-461.
This article is not intended to question the general validity of the Darwinian theory of species
transformism by natural selection, which I consider to be the best available scientific explanation of the origins and diversity of the organic forms we see around us.
In his reading, Culion is a forge for a new form of citizenship, a 'biological and civic
transformism in which the contaminated became hygienic, and "savages" might become social citizens.' (11) The evident seriousness with which this bio-political project is pursued is clear from the high proportion--approaching one third--of the colonial health budget which was devoted to Culion and to leprosy after 1922, attributed by Filipino nationalists to an American obsession with leprosy and its relation to civilisation.
Transformation or
transformism: Engestrom's version of activity theory?