Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond 9781400873869

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SO UNDING THE LIMI T S OF L I F E

Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer, series editors

This series presents innovative work that extends classic ethnographic methods and questions into areas of pressing interest in technology and economics. It explores the varied ways new technologies combine with older technologies and cultural understandings to shape novel forms of subjectivity, embodiment, knowledge, place, and community. By doing so, the series demonstrates the relevance of anthropological inquiry to emerging forms of digital culture in the broadest sense. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, ­ Stefan Helmreich with contributions from Sophia Roosth and Michele Friedner

SOUNDING THE LIMITS OF LIFE ESSAYS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF BIOLOGY AND BEYOND

Stefan Helmreich

with contributions from Sophia Roosth and Michele Friedner P R IN C E T O N U NIV E R S IT Y PRESS P R IN C E T O N A ND O X FORD

Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket design by Amanda Weiss All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-16480-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-691-16481-6 (paper) British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Pro and Univers LT Std Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

™ Life  s Water  £ Sound

List of Illustrations Sounding Life, Water, Sound

vii ix

CHAPTER 1 What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies

1

CHAPTER 2 Life Forms: A Keyword Entry (with Sophia Roosth)

19

CHAPTER 3 An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater

35

CHAPTER 4 Cetology Now: Formatting the Twenty-­First-­Century Whale

44

CHAPTER 5 How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839–­2010

48

CHAPTER 6 Homo microbis: Species, Race, Sex, and the Human Microbiome

62

CHAPTER 7 The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination

73

Contents

CHAPTER 8 Nature/Culture/Seawater: Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization

94

CHAPTER 9 Time and the Tsunami: Indian Ocean, 2004

106

CHAPTER 10 From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures

116

CHAPTER 11 Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science

137

CHAPTER 12 Seashell Sound

155

CHAPTER 13 Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies (with Michele Friedner)

164

CHAPTER 14 Chimeric Sensing Life, Water, Sound Resounding Acknowledgments Notes Index

vi

173 183 189 195 283

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1.

A screenshot of Tom Ray’s Tierra simulation, visualizing space taken up by “digital organisms” within random-­access memory (RAM) during one run of the Tierra program.  5

Figure 1.2.

An evolutionary sequence of Karl Sims’s virtual creatures, selected for “swimming.” 7

Figure 1.3.

W. Ford Doolittle’s “Reticulated Tree, or Net, Which Might More ­Appropriately Represent Life’s History.”  10

Figure 1.4.

Ovoid forms inside Martian meteorite ALH84001, as depicted through scanning electron microscopy.  14

Figure 5.1.

Engraving of Whitsunday Island, a lagoon-­island, or atoll, in the South Pacific, from Darwin’s Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842).  50

Figure 5.2.

An immersive encounter with the fleshy coral other.  53

Figure 5.3.

Coral egg and sperm bundles released in spawning.  54

Figure 5.4.

Sampling DNA from a Porites coral.  58

Figure 5.5.

Crocheters constructing the Scottsdale Satellite Reef at the Scottsdale Civic Center, AZ, 2009.  61

Figure 6.1.

Joana Ricou’s Our Self Portrait: the Human Microbiome. 63

Figure 6.2.

Cover art from Björk’s Biophilia. 64

Figure 6.3.

Femina sapiens, a Colombian feminist studies journal from 1982.  68

Figure 6.4.

Viveca McGhie’s Microbiome Face Cast. 71

Figure 8.1.

“In the Maldives, ministers in scuba gear met on the sea bed to draw attention to the dangers of global warming for the island nation.”  95

Figure 10.1.

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection of “Our Spaceship Earth: One Island in One Ocean—­From Space.”  118

Figure 10.2.

Cover of Whole Earth Catalog with Earthrise photo.  119

List of Illustrations

Figure 10.3.

Blue Marble photo.  120

Figure 10.4.

Image of Earth and Moon from Lunar Orbiter 1, 1966.  121

Figure 10.5.

Gaia in peril on The Vanishing Face of Gaia, by James Lovelock.  122

Figure 10.6.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, by Bill McKibben.  123

Figure 10.7.

Sea-­viewing Wide Field-­of-­view-­Sensor (SeaWiFS) representation of chlorophyll concentration.  124

Figure 10.8.

Google Ocean.  128

Figure 10.9.

Monterey Bay as viewed in Google Ocean, 285 meters below sea level. 130

Figure 10.10. Project Kaisei: Capturing the Plastic Vortex.  134 Figure 10.11. The Digital Ocean logo.  134 Figure 10.12. “Google Eaarth Shows Our Hellish 4°C Future if Republicans Filibuster 2010 Climate Bill.”  135 Figure 11.1.

Projection of underwater shape with sound source locations for Max Neuhaus’s Water Whistle V. 144

Figure 11.2.

Juliana Snapper and Jeanine Oleson performing “Aquaopera #2-­SF/ Lakme Redux.”  150

Figure 12.1.

Ear trumpet made of whelk shell, date unknown.  158

Figure 13.1.

Participants at Wendy Jacob’s Waves and Signs workshop at MIT reclining on Jacob’s transducing floor to experience low-­frequency vibrations. 168

Figure 13.2.

Bryan Christie’s visualization of a cochlear implant.  169

Figure 14.1.

“Light Is a Wave/Particle” ambigram, hand-­drawn by Douglas Hofstadter. 174

Figure 14.2.

Sensory cilia.  176

Figure 14.3.

A formalism for decomposing sound to recompose it, flipping envelope and fine structure.  177

Figure 14.4.

J. Gordon Holt’s taxonomy of hi-­fi sound.  179

viii

SOUNDING LIFE, WATER, SOUND

WHAT DOES BIOLOGY SOUND LIKE? If biology points to fleshly bodies, it might sound like bark beetles nibbling on piñon trees, dolphins echolocating their way across a bay, asthmatic humans breathing in polluted cities.1 If biology refers rather to the scientific study of such bodies, it might sound like field recordings of birdsong, laboratory whirrings of centrifuges and gene sequencers, classroom lectures punctuated with Latinate names.2 If biology signals, more narrowly, the technical activity of apprehending signs of life, it might sound like the lub-­dub of a heartbeat through a stethoscope, the vibration of yeast cells amplified through laboratory speakers, the supra-­audible pinging of an ultrasound device outlining a fetus in a human body or populations of zooplankton in the ocean.3 The watery media through which such apprehensions arrive—­blood and muscle, brothy stews in Petri dishes, the sea—­suggest a deeper dive into the question, What if things biological are not just saturated, but also shaped, by sound? In 1967, the physician and theosophist Hans Jenny coined the term “cymatics” (from the Greek κῦμα, “wave”) to refer to the study of sound made visible in tangible media (e.g., as with particulate matter or liquid pulsing in resonance with frequencies emanating from a loudspeaker [see cover for an abstract rendering of such vibration]). Jenny thought that examining cymatic patterns might reveal biological process as sonic process: “What we want to do is, as it were, to learn to ‘hear’ the process that blossoms in flowers, to ‘hear’ embryology in its manifestations.”4 “Life,” hypothesizes the Jenny acolyte and acoustics engineer John Stuart Reid, originated on “sonic scaffolding” and “formed in the stillness of cymatic patterns, on the surface of microscopic bubbles.”5 ™  s  £

Thinking through the relation of life to water to sound in these various instances presses up against the very definition, and also, perhaps, the very limit, of each of these concepts. What is life? What is water? What is sound? Those questions animate the essays collected in this book, which listen with an anthropological ear to contemporary practices in the life, marine, and sound

Sounding Life, Water, Sound

sciences, practices that I have investigated as an ethnographer of science over the last twenty years. They are also questions newly significant to many contemporary scientists themselves. Life: In an age when biologists push their research to its limits—­by using computer simulation to model living things, by scouting for extreme organisms in sea and space, by seeking to synthesize new life forms in laboratories—­the definition of “life” is becoming unfastened from its familiar grounding in existing earthly organisms. The relation of life to possible materials, circumstances, and processes is multiplied, moved toward uncertain limits. Water: In an era when changes in global climate drive rising sea levels; when pollution, hurricanes, and tsunamis upend landed technoscientific schemes; when infrastructures of aquaculture, irrigation, and water supply fracture and ramify into ever more elaborate schemes, the form and substance of “water” becomes disturbed, troubling stable boundaries between land and sea as well as modes of defining what water is in the first place, in both social and natural science. Sound: At a moment when modes of sonic representation and transmission bring into earshot sound from previously unheard realms—­the deep sea, the inside of the head, outer space;6 when new technologies make it possible to conjoin hearing and deaf worlds through a common currency of vibration; and when techniques of “sonification” render audible nonsonic material and information (sun spots, climate-­change data, nineteenth-­century visual tracings of vibration patterns), the definition of “sound” expands to access worlds previously inaudible, even unimagined. Sounding the Limits of Life is about this moment—­and more generally about the cultural formation, transformation, and deformation of scientific abstractions, of which life serves in this book as a lead example, with water and sound threading through as sometimes entwined, sometimes independent, instances. To employ a metaphor from music theory, life operates in this volume as the root note of a chord that has water and sound as the two other tones in the triad. Other abstractions beyond life, water, and sound also resonate through this collection, including form, culture, species, sex, race, and theory. While these are not all abstractions of the same kind, all have also come under definitional and practical scrutiny and pressure by scientists and humanists alike. All no longer mean what once they did. They are being sounded for new meanings. To “sound” something is to seek to ascertain its depth, as, for example, when oceanographers sound to find the ocean floor. This sense, of sound as fathoming, has etymological moorings in the Old English sund, “sea.” The sense of “to sound” as “to emit an audible tone” reaches back to Old English swinn, “melody” (and from there to Old English swan, the “sounding” bird).7 (In a confusing—­ but also, for my purposes here, felicitous—­pun, the sounding [sund] of the sea today is mostly done using sound [swinn], via SONAR [SOund Navigation And Ranging]). To sound out something is to seek to learn about its standing or x

Sounding Life, Water, Sound

position, a concept that has kin relations with to essay (from the French essayer, “to try” or “to attempt”). Sounding the Limits of Life collects essays concerned with how life scientists and others fathom as well as pronounce upon what life is, has been, and may yet become—­whether that life is simulated, microbial, extraterrestrial, cetacean, anthozoan, planetary, submarine, oceanic, auditory, or otherwise. I mean “sounding” here in overlapping, contradictory ways, running together all the word’s homophonic meanings, whether or not these derive from common etymological ancestors. “Sound” as “fathoming,” “resounding,” “uttering,” “being heard,” “conveying impressions,” “suggesting analogies” . . . the mashing-­up of these meanings is productive. First, for getting at the empirical world: such jumbling—­trafficking without full distinction between the empirical and the abstract, the material and the formal—­happens all the time in practice.8 Most of us do not operate with the precision dreamed of by analytic philosophers. Second, “sounding” is useful for making clear the representational apparatus of the analyses in this book: the word “sound” reminds me that I am writing in English, and that this language has limits—­as well as multiple and tangled histories and affordances (echoes of, at least, Germanic, Norman, Celtic, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Persian, and, later, through backward borrowing, ancient Greek and Latin). Third, and most important, “sounding” is appropriate for investigating things not yet known, things whose limits are not clear or whose boundaries may be obscured—­perhaps even by the sounding apparatus itself. Life, water, and sound are phenomena that are never fully crystal clear. The sociocultural and scientific worlds examined in these essays are sited primarily in the United States and Europe (with one exception, which draws on fieldwork in India). This is due in part to my training in one of the first cohorts of anthropologists to conduct ethnographies of science, which were, in early days (the 1990s), often concerned with studying the knowledge-­making activities of elite groups in the so-­called West, people used to thinking of their claims as universal, true, and unbounded by culture and history. The essays herein do not mimic that universality  but rather hope to give scientific works and lives social, cultural, and historical addresses, provincializing them. The sections just below—“What Is Life?,” “What Is Water?,” and “What Is Sound?”—­each open with a dispatch from contemporary scientific debates about the vital, the watery, and the audible, proceeding from there to introduce the volume’s essays. WHAT IS LIFE? For an answer to the question as to what life is, listen to an answer from Nature, the world’s most widely read scientific journal, which in a 2007 editorial entitled “Meanings of ‘Life,’ ” spotlighted the promise of synthetic biology, a field dedicated to manufacturing and designing artificial organisms from molecular parts. xi

Sounding Life, Water, Sound

For Nature the promise of synthetic biology was not that the field might once and for all define “life,” but rather, perhaps counterintuitively, that it might provide “a welcome antidote to chronic vitalism.”9 “Synthetic biology’s view of life as a molecular process lacking moral thresholds at the level of the cell,” Nature elaborated, could serve as a counter to worries about biotechnology researchers “playing God” and might even “be invoked to challenge characterizations of life that are sometimes used to defend religious dogma about the embryo.”10 Not quite noticing that their attempt to diffuse moral arguments about human conception and procreation was itself a moral argument, Nature’s editors swore off life as a metaphysical idea, concluding, “We might now be permitted to dismiss the idea that life is a precise scientific concept.”11 But where would biology be without “life”? In 2010, Science published a paper claiming that microbes might be able to employ arsenic—­in place of phosphorus—­as one of the six chemical building blocks of life.12 The geomicro­biologist Felisa Wolfe-­Simon, a lead researcher on the project, suggested at a televised NASA news conference on astrobiology that her team, which isolated a microbe from Mono Lake and fed it in an arsenic broth, had “cracked open the door to what’s possible for life elsewhere in the universe.” “This microbe,” she said, “if we are correct, has solved the challenge of being alive in a different way.”13 Far from dismissing life as a scientific concept, this declaration amped up “life” as a frame within which ever-­more expansive claims might be made. As it happened, in 2012, other scientists proved unable to replicate Wolfe-­Simon’s result, and microbe GFAJ-­1 vanished as a candidate for life-­as-­it-­could-­be.14 But another scientific claim about the capaciousness of life then arrived in 2013, when Nature announced in a headline that the sequencing of the “genome of the largest viruses yet discovered hints at [a] ‘fourth domain’ of life”15—­that, in addition to Eucarya, Bacteria, and Archaea, biologists might need to nominate a whole new domain (a higher-­level classification than the more familiar kingdom) in order to account for the genetic distinctiveness of mega-­viruses. Life, precise or no, would not, it seemed, be waved away so easily as Nature had proposed back in 2007. Even the boundary figure of the virus—­usually designated as not quite alive, wriggling between animate and inanimate—­could be invited into life’s dominion. The scientists who sequenced the outsized, new-­to-­science, viral genome at first named this entity simply “new life form.” When they considered the unexpected directions toward which the virus might point biology, they dubbed it Pandoravirus. “Life” seemed to be bursting out of the box, yes, but also remained contained within the frames of bioscience. Life, ever the vexingly imprecise concept for biologists, seems today to have entered a fresh identity crisis. Should life be cut down to size, scaled down from any metaphysical, special status? Or should life be scaled upward and outward to embrace and explain the unexpected and as-­yet unknown? The answer, for scientists, seems to be both. Life, for those biologists operating at the edges of their conceptual categories, is in a volatile state, pragmatically and theoretically. xii

Sounding Life, Water, Sound

The essays on life in this book are contributions to a field that has emerged in the last twenty years: the anthropology of biology (an inquiry that differs from biological anthropology, the study of human bodies in evolutionary time, often using archaeological or molecular and population genetic methods, sometimes with reference to nonhuman primates16). The anthropology of biology is a subset of the anthropology of science, the study of how scientific knowledge emerges from, as well as conditions, wider forms of cultural, social, and political life. Anthropologists of biology, often in dialogue with medical anthropologists, examine how projects in today’s life sciences—­in genomics, reproductive biology, pharmaceuticals, cancer research, animal breeding and cloning, bioinformatics, neuroscience, ecology, microbiology, genetic genealogy, stem cell research, telesurgery, and more—­emerge from and reshape a variety of social beliefs and practices about nature, identity, and cultural belonging.17 Many of the essays collected here derive from anthropological research I conducted among communities of scientists working in what I call limit biologies, research projects in academic biology that explicitly query the limits of life, both as an empirical question and as a conceptual matter. I have written on two of these limit biologies in book-­length studies. The essays in this collection, while building on those monographs, host material not present in those texts. In several cases, they are also not so single-­mindedly ethnographic; many lean more toward interpretative, historical, and rhetorical analyses of scientific artifacts and knowledge claims—­analyses, insofar as they treat how people create meaning around such themes as nature, embodiment, relatedness, law, exchange, power, and belief, remain firmly anthropological. Some chapters are more or less faithful reproductions of already published journal articles or edited volume chapters (often with corrections and updated references); others are substantial revisions. The first essay, “What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies” (2011), introduces a trio of cases around which several essays organize: Artificial Life, marine microbiology, and astrobiology. Artificial Life, the subject of Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (published in 1998), is a genre of theoretical biology that flourished most vigorously in the 1990s and sought to model—­the ambitious said “synthesize”—­living things in the medium of computer simulation. Marine microbiology, which is at the center of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (from 2009), is a field that has the world’s tiniest, most abundant, and metabolically extreme ocean creatures—­including microbes at deep-­sea volcanoes—­as its objects of study. Finally, astrobiology, my third case, is the study of life as it might exist on other worlds. The book I once thought to write on astrobiology was abducted by other projects, and what is left is an attenuated signal, audible in “What Was Life?,” the coauthored “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry” (2010), and “The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination” (2006). “What Was Life?” thinks across its three limit cases to suggest that “life” is wearing out, coming apart as a xiii

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coherent theoretical category in biology at the very moment when many scientists are seeking to discover or design novel forms of it. The chapter argues, too, that the conceptual trouble bedeviling “life”—­a trouble indexed by uncertainties about what constitutes its essential “form”—­is shadowed by worries about what form “theory” might take in natural and social analysis these days, when theory is being pushed to its limits by calls for attention to the posthuman, the ahuman, the nonhuman, and the ecological, to a world no longer satisfyingly or fully captured by such concepts as nature, culture, society, economics, or other theoretical scaffolds inherited from mostly European nineteenth-­century sources. I am interested in how accounts of life forms in biology and ideas about social and cultural forms of life inform and deform one another. “What Was Life?” is followed by “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry” (2010), coauthored with the anthropologist-­historian Sophia Roosth. This piece, which emerged out of a curiosity about where the term “life form” came from, sounds out a cultural-­scientific history, listening back to how natural philosophers and scientists in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries employed the phrase. Where once “life” and “form” were sounding lines into an archetypical or evolutionary past, nowadays they call out to speculative futures, preverberating (that is, resonating with a kind of premonitional echo) with science fictional fantasies about possible alien life. The next essays elaborate on Artificial Life; on marine, multispecies, and microbial biology; and on astrobiology. An essay on Artificial Life, “An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater” (2007), extends questions from Silicon Second Nature to ask how scientists working on Artificial Life have understood their practices as situated historically. Some scene setting: toward the end of my fieldwork, I became interested in how Artificial Lifers self-­consciously deployed the concept of culture to make sense of their research program, which aimed at creating “life” in artificial, inorganic media such as robots and computers. I argued, contrary to Sharon Traweek, who claimed in 1988 that many scientists inhabit a “culture of no culture,” that concepts of culture circulate thickly in the sciences.18 For Artificial Life scientists, culture could be imagined as a universal adaptive system, a homeostatic device keeping humans in sync with their environment; culture was a system of information, a cybernetic artifact natural to the human condition—­which belief had the effect of making the scientific enterprise of Artificial Life, dedicated to manufacturing a new, cybernetic phase of machinic evolution, seem to practitioners a quintessentially “natural” endeavor. “An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater” looks, however, not to scientists’ narratives about futures, but to their accounts of the past, examining Artificial Life scientists’ often grand claims for the history of their field, many of which call upon sources in classical antiquity. I suggest a less confident mode of imagining history that I call, playing on Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (which suggests that histories are mainly known by digging back from the present), an underwater archaeology of knowledge, a mode that, xiv

Sounding Life, Water, Sound

like sounding with sonar, sometimes produces ghosts, illusions, phantoms—­ interpretative artifacts of the sounding apparatus itself (think of the spectral fish and false ocean bottoms that persistently appeared in mid-­century uses of sonar to map the seafloor).19 In an underwater archaeology of knowledge, representational artifacts become mixed in with portraits of the world, requiring new sorts of narrative disentangling and qualification. The next essays, on marine biology, collect up some sea creatures that got away from the microbial mesh of Alien Ocean, larger organisms facing their own limits: disappearing whales and threatened coral reefs. “Cetology Now: Formatting the Twenty-­First-­Century Whale” (2005) is an update of the “Cetology” chapter of Herman Melville’s 1851 Moby-­Dick, tweaking Melville’s bookish classification scheme into a virtual, digital, and simulated register keyed to the tragic diminution of whale populations in the world today. “How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839–­2010” (2010) uses the work of the feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway to offer a reading of the history of coral reef science, one that moves from early British preoccupations with coral structure, which had reefs as a sort of architecture, to anthropological visions of coral as a metaphor for culture, to reproductive ecological fascinations with the spawning sexways of corals, to contemporary readings of coral genomes for signs of reef health in the age of warming and acidifying seas. Drawing on Haraway’s notion of the “figure,” the essay sounds for change and continuity in coral science. The multiplicity of species by now in the mix prepares the way for the next chapter, “Homo microbis.” This chapter departs from work I coauthored with S. Eben Kirskey on multispecies ethnography—­a mode of anthropology organized in the wake of what has been called the “species turn” in the humanities and social sciences: the move to include animals, plants, fungi, and other organisms as agents within ethnographies, histories, philosophies, and literary analyses.20 “Homo microbis” takes as its object the human microbiome—­the ecology of microbes that exist in human bodies—­and queries some of the celebratory accounts that have gathered around this figure, taking a look at how older idioms of “sex” and “race” infuse even this most putatively revolutionary of bio-­ objects.21 Dissecting the idea of the species, it also offers an argument against some of the new materialisms in science studies that, in the name of attending to the agency of the material world, take scientific stories as literal truths, as exhaustive of what microbial life and other material phenomena might be and mean.22 The relation between literal and figurative is a central theme not only in this chapter, but also throughout Sounding the Limits of Life. The next piece, “The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination” (2006), offers a brief for using the unconventional work of historian Hillel Schwartz to listen in on those sciences, such as astrobiology, whose topics edge into the science fictional. The essay operates across theories in the humanities and sciences—­occasionally hybridizing them, sometimes confusing xv

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them—­and occasionally messing up the distinction between the abstract and the material in a mode I call working athwart theory. As I detail in this book’s epilogue, “Life, Water, Sound Resounding,” such crosswise thinking becomes especially productive when following the zigzagged, analogical thinking in which scientists engage as they seek to capture entities that they imagine variously as logical, natural, social, or analytic kinds—­where “kinds” is a philosophical term referring to entities believed to exist either as independent of human categories (natural kinds), as only legible through human definition (social kinds), or as objects defined in the realm of abstract logic (analytic kinds).23 “Life” and “species” are canonical kinds, and philosophers disagree on whether they are kinds given in nature or emergent only from practices of classification. Water is another kind. WHAT IS WATER? Water is not simply H2O. As Hasok Chang argues in Is Water H2O? Evidence, Pluralism and Realism, the historical squeezing of such phenomena as drinking water, well water, seawater, sewage, and other liquidy elementalities into the reductionist molecular formula of H2O took philosophical, technical, and political work—­work that could well have created an alternative universe of experiment and empiricism and delivered a different accounting of water’s essence.24 At another scale, Jamie Linton in his 2010 What Is Water? advances the argument that “water” is a “modern abstraction.”25 He suggests that the hydrological cycle, which tracks water from rain to river to sea, as well as through various human and nonhuman nodes, emerged alongside and was made legible through agricultural, hydroelectric, and potable-­ water management regimes, which created the very idea of global water as such, water as circulatory (similar, it happened, to capital, also imagined as liquid). This emergence of global water has also made manifest a looming sense that water is in crisis. When ice caps melt, sea levels rise, bottled-­water waste proliferates, agricultural runoff creates dead zones in the sea, and access to drinkable water exacerbates geographical and social inequalities, water becomes a vector and vessel for a motley range of political problems and puzzles. “Modern water” becomes visible at the very moment when “water” starts to leak as a watertight abstraction.26 In the early twenty-­first century, scholars think of water as at once universal and multiple. It becomes universal through its circulation as well as through its description as everywhere essentially fluid, flowing. It becomes multiple, in part, because of the fluidity attributed to it, which some anthropologists have suggested makes it by nature pliable to a variety of cultural meanings—­a position against which chapter 8, “Nature/Culture/Seawater” will argue.27 That protean essence, of course, points back to water’s imagined universal character, and ­water thus becomes universally multiple, a claim resting both on water’s putative materiality and on its form, at the molecular and macro scales.28 xvi

Sounding Life, Water, Sound

But water—­like life, an amalgam of the conceptual and actual—­is also becoming newly readable as a substance-­concept with an unsteady identity, and not only to social analysts, but also to such in-­the-­thick-­of-­it agents as water managers, who struggle politically and technically to shore up categories of water coded as blue (surface freshwater), green (agriculturally purposed), or gray (recycled).29 As Marilyn Strathern suggested in the 1990s, much of the modern world has entered a time when it has become apparent to many social actors that the dearest foundational concepts of contemporary society—­nature, the family, money—­are contingent, relative, and changeable cultural constructions. Many of us now live in a moment when what it means to be social beings entails a self-­consciousness about our own practice. We “make explicit” to ourselves the very assumptions upon which we act.30 Water, made explicit, demands a multiplication of accounts. It may also demand dispensing with any ultimate claim about what water is. Water appears many times in this volume, often in liquidy suspension or solution with life science practices and objects. Water appears first in virtual form, as a rhetorical float for thinking about vitality in “An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater.” Most of the other water that appears in these pages is seawater, a lively and deadly element that swirls semiosis and substance together in an indivisible eddy. The sea manifests as bountiful, sacred, countercultural, military-­industrial, and biotechnological, and as a realm of endangered life (“Cetology Now: Formatting the Twenty-­First-­Century Whale”; “How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839–­2010”). Seawater appears front and center as a shifting symbol in the history of anthropology and social theory in “Nature/Culture/ Seawater: Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization” (2011).31 Following the historian of science Peter Galison, that essay argues that seawater operates as a theory machine, a substance or phenomenon to which people (here, mostly anthropologists—­from Boas to Hurston to Lévi-­Strauss to Taussig to Lowe) appeal as they model other phenomena in the world—­as when, for example, social scientists employ oceanic flows, currents, and circulations as metaphors for globalization, or as when Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity mobilizes scientific definitions of water to warrant a suite of oceany metaphors to theorize the at-­sea character of contemporary social life.32 But this essay, developing a theme first suggested in “The Signature of Life,” also proffers that we must treat theories not only as explanatory devices but also as themselves things in the world. The next essay, “Time and the Tsunami: Indian Ocean, 2004,” reports on an oceanographic conference I attended in Goa, India, just after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. This essay catalogs the various kinds of time—­of the ocean, of scientific research, of disaster, of governance—­ through which scientists and others grappled with the disaster and its implications. The following essay, “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures” (2011), examines how digital media represent seawater, relying upon, but also making invisible, the built xvii

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infrastructures—­commercial, political, military (think undersea telecommunication cables)—­that have permitted the oceanic world to be described as something like a “global ocean” in the first place. It repurposes the work of the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (whose theoretical schemes haunt many of these essays), asking how Earth and its ocean, as they have been ported into the digital, have become a confusing mixture of different kinds of signs—­the sorts Peirce would have called indexes, icons, and symbols. In “Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science” (2011), water and seawater meet up as media for modernist and experimental music, representing the ocean as a site (a lab? a field?) of life sublime and endangered. Listening to underwater music reveals water transforming from the static and sonar-­ed seas of Cold War modernism to the dynamic and confusing seas of global warming, from seas sound and sounded to seas unsound. WHAT IS SOUND? Maybe sound is alive. The minimalist composer Le Monte Young, according to Seth Kim-­Cohen, around 1960 proposed “sound as an organism with its own reason for being.”33 And composer Michel Chion pronounced in 1975 that sound “unscrolls itself, manifests itself within time, and is a living process, energy in action.”34 As the electronic-­music critic Tara Rodgers has shown, such statements, far from being loopy, emerge from an audio-­technical tradition dating back to Helmholtz that has treated sounds as individuals—­individuals whose lifetimes can be graphed, whose properties can be purified (as with the sine wave), and whose growth and decay can be formally known and represented (much as heartbeats are in electrocardiograms) through the narrative form of the waveform, a biographical tracing of a sound’s lifespan.35 Sound these days, however, also operates at the limits of life—­sound often materializes as ghostly, inhuman, noisy. Sound has many apparitions, and it is shot through with definitional uncertainty. Is sound an acoustic wave, a phenomenological event, an object? Such questions are very much under fresh examination. The first decade of the twenty-­first century was something like a Big Bang for sound studies, an academic field devoted to investigating the cultural and social meanings and manifestations of sound—­music, speech, and more—­and a field that has quickly grown into a novel zone for thinking about soundscapes, soundstates, vibration, echo, reverb, signal, noise: all the things that seem to go with and through sound as such.36 The old philosophical puzzler about whether a tree falling in a forest makes any sound without someone there to hear it seems, according to the gathering wisdom of sound studies, to have an answer: in the absence of a sensing presence, the tree doesn’t make a sound—­ sound is a relationship between the world and a sensing agent. And that sensing agent, of course, needn’t be human. Think of pine beetles eating piñon trees from the inside. Or think of the falling tree. Sound is relational. xviii

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But what kind of relation is it? A number of musicians, sound theorists, and engineers have posited that it is transductive, a form of energy transmitted through a medium—­from antenna to receiver, from amplifier to ear, from the lightness of air to the thickness of water. With such crossings, sound is transduced. The word comes from the Latin transdūcere, “to lead across, transfer,” out of trans, “across, to or on the farther side of, beyond, over” + dūcere, “to lead.” Transduction has a biological meaning, too: the transfer of genetic material from one cell to another, often via viruses. The media theorist Mark Hansen drafted that sort of meaning into a connection with life: “The medium perhaps names the very transduction between the organism and the environment that constitutes life as essentially technical.”37 Extending the work of the anthropologist Natasha Myers, who tracks how molecular biologists transduce their intuitions about proteins into embodied gestures—­and even into dances—­it may not be much of definitional stretch to postulate that sound is an organism!38 Such pronouncements, of course, should not be taken as the final answer on what sound and life really are. To do so would be to fall into the same trap as some scholars calling themselves new materialists do when they take, say, microbiologists as offering the final, most meaningful account of the biological world.39 Transduction is a representational recipe with its own rhetorical and historical starting points. Built into the concept of sound as transduceable is the notion that sounds travel (as opposed to being simply present-­in-­themselves at the time of apprehension, or, in a more realist register, as being merely a slice of propagating vibrations that are possible to capture with an auditory apparatus). As Jonathan Sterne and Tara Rodgers have suggested, the idea that sound travels emerges from a set of self-­reinforcing analogies: In late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century texts that were foundational to the fields of acoustics and electroacoustics, and to ideas and machines of sound synthesis, sound was defined as fluid disturbances that initiate sensory pleasures and affects. It was also figured as a journey of vibrating particles that voyage back and forth, outward and home again. . . . Sound and electricity were both understood as fluid media and were conceptually linked to each other through water-­wave metaphors and associated terms such as current, channel, and flow.40

For those of us embedded in technoscientific culture, sound has been so thoroughly theorized through the figure of the waveform that it has become nearly impossible to imagine its essence in any other way (but there is also a tradition construing sound as, like light, a phenomenon admitting of both wave and particle descriptions41). I have already mentioned the first sound essay in this collection, “Under­water Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science”—­although through the lens of sound one can hear it differently, listening for spaces in which sound is found and imagined, and always so through techniques dedicated to bringing xix

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vibration into a realm where it can become a technical object to be worked upon and modulated. Underwater sound is an empirical object that, to be heard by humans, must be transformed (brought into the air, cleaned up, etc.); in that process, ideas about what underwater sound should sound like become key to how people make such noises audible. The next essay, “Seashell Sound” (2013), argues that equally as significant as technological translations are the historically tuned settings through which people listen. What sounds resound in seashells? The ocean’s roar? The flow of a listener’s blood? A shell’s resonant frequencies? What people have heard has had a lot to do with how they think about the sea, about voices, about memory, about blood. Moving further into the realm of sound and its limits, the next essay, “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies” (2012), coauthored with the anthropologist and disability studies scholar Michele Friedner, presses “sound” and “hearing” up against their (erroneously) imagined others: silence and deafness. This is one of the only essays in which “life” has a meaning less to do with the narrow sense pursued by theoretical biologists and more to do with the experiential or the subjective (a limit of this volume is its focus on the sometimes esoteric conceptions of “life” conjured by elite scientists). In a final essay, “Chimeric Sensing” (2013), which is about the work of the experimental composer Florian Hecker, I compare the illusionary, compound qualities of sound—­most prominently, timbre, or the texture of sound—­to the chimeric, mixed qualities of living organisms—­particularly as theorized by the evolutionist Lynn Margulis—­ bringing the book, full spiral, back to biology—­to sounding the limits of life. GLACIERS SIZZLE AS THEY DISAPPEAR INTO WARMER WATER What do life, water, and sound have in common? As these essays will argue—­ and as the epilogue, “Life, Water, Sound Resounding” will elaborate—­life, water, and sound are abstractions as well as empirical phenomena to be investigated, reengineered, and rechanneled. Their status as abstractions is supported by a variety of formalisms—­formal models, maps, simulations, and equations that attempt to represent and manage their material qualities as well as the fleeting empirical or experiential coherence of these qualities.42 The abstraction that scientists call “life” becomes an empirical thing as formalisms pick out instances of it—­as when classifications of life forms, for example, make it thinkable to recognize different kinds of birds, flowers, or microbes as instantiations of the same thing: life. The empirical phenomenon known as “water” becomes an abstraction as bureaucrats, activists, and politicians seek to access and preserve clean drinking water, navigable waterways, and unsullied seas. “Sound” becomes both empirical and abstract as new tools for retrieving vibratory information make it possible to listen to, say, bursts of natural radio from the planet Jupiter. Scientific experiences of phenomena are filtered through formalisms that permit the building up of abstractions, and those abstractions in turn often become xx

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essential to recognizing entities in the empirical world, such that what was once upon a time considered abstract becomes empirical (e.g., now that science tells us that water is H2O, that compound can be found empirically in solution with different substances. Or now that we think sound is vibration in a particular range, we can modulate oscillations just out of the audible range “into” the realm of sound). “Abstraction” is thus a process—­an action—­and it is always partial, unfinished, undone, and sometimes reversible.43 Its relation to the empirical or to the material can be various—­opposite at one moment, identical at another, an unfinished hybrid at another.44 Abstract, empirical, formal, material: all are bound together. Life, water, and sound are themselves also bound together, in ways direct and indirect, especially at the opening of the twenty-­first century. Permit me, by way of explanation, to take a quick loop back in time to an earlier, ostensibly quite different, centurial prognostication: in 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois, looking at the question of racial inequality in the United States and in the world, wrote as he looked to the future, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-­line.”45 Du Bois was prescient. Many struggles during the twentieth century did indeed turn (and continue to turn) on that object for which Du Bois used “color” as a proxy: race—­from the politics of U.S. immigration in the 1910s and beyond, to the Holocaust, to mid-­ century struggles for self-­determination in former European colonies, to civil rights, and more. What fresh problem faces humanity now, at the beginning of the twenty-­first century? There are surely many, but inspired by Du Bois’s framing, I will provisionally nominate one that gathers together many of my concerns here: The problem of the twenty-­first century is the problem of the water line. In a century during which sea levels are projected to rise definitively, matters of life—­of survival, for humans and other creatures—­are at stake.46 In 2000, the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced the term Anthropocene to describe the contemporary geological epoch: an epoch, which dates back to the Industrial Revolution, during which human activity started to have global effects—­effects now layered into a geological record marked with evidence of coal extraction, atomic testing, ocean plastification, and attendant species extinction.47 The Anthropocene, for those who have taken up the framing, has as one of its signature properties sea-­level rise—­a process that will have implications for the shapes and sites of livable and unlivable cities, the tracks of human migration, and the scale of infrastructural adjustment called into necessity by shifting waterscapes. Some anthropologists have found the word “Anthropocene” appealing, perhaps because it sounds as though it moves their subject—­anthropos, the human—­into the center not only of the human sciences but also of natural, geophysical inquiry. In 2014 Donna Haraway suggested that the Anthropocene might better be named the Capitalocene, since so many geophysical transformations have xxi

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followed from capital-­intensive extractions of fossil fuels. But she also proposed that the collateral mud and mess—­oceanic dead zones filled with mucilage communities, new populations of jellies and slime—­has muddied the bright lines between evolutionary thens and nows, and that, stealing a page from the horror fantasist H. P. Lovecraft, we might take and remake Chthulu, the tentacled, unspeakable monster of the repressed, abject, but potent Earth, and call this moment the Chthulucene, a time in which what is past and what is future is not possible fully to sort.48 Haraway’s critique underscores the fact that “Anthropocene” is mostly a predictive rather than descriptive term—­unlike other geological epochs, which are completely in the past, this one has yet fully to reveal itself.49 It is a term of premonition. Modes of premonitory sensing at anything like a “global” scale are up for grabs—­though most representations of climate change futures come in the form of visualized or diagrammatic projections of warming temperatures, possible population shifts, and fluctuating markets.50 But sound can provide one unexpected, sideways way in, a way of rattling a common sense that usually operates in the domain of the visual, in the register of the panoptic view from above, or from the future. It turns out that there exist just-­out-­of-­direct-­experience sonic representations of planetary change, the vibratory preverberations of scientifically audited ecosystems. With assisted listening, scientists claim now to be calling into audibility a range of prophetic noises: the sounds of climate change. In November 2013, a news release from the American Institute of Physics reported that “glaciers sizzle as they disappear into warmer water. The sounds of bubbles escaping from melting ice make underwater glacial fjords one of the loudest natural marine environments on Earth.”51 Sound, water, life. The geophysicist Erin Pettit, who set up underwater microphones off the coast of Alaska, offers that hydrophonic recordings might track changes in the integrity of glacial ice. Underwater sound becomes a signal of the future, of life and death to come—­a mix of clarion call, rumor, and swan song. But it also calls into question the very difference between now and the future; soundings are not always easy to sort into echoes from the past, resonances in the present, or preverberations from the future. The essays in this book are soundings of life, water, and sound. All tune to the present in which they are composed, though all also have one technologically aided ear on an unknown future. And as I noted earlier, what it means to sound, to sound out, and to sound for varies across these writings, putting pressure on how one might think about the relation between the abstract, the empirical, the formal, and the material—­a relation that in no way is always working in one direction, in one order. The sound of water and life to come is all at once unclear, clear, abstract, and all too real. If the problem of the twenty-­first century is indeed the problem of the water line, it is also a problem that will be in no way fully linear, a problem that will demand rethinking the meanings and politics of life, water, and sound. xxii

SO UNDING THE LIMI T S OF L I F E

C H A P TER 1

WHAT WAS LIFE? Answers from Three Limit Biologies

“What was life? No one knew.” —­Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924

WHAT IS LIFE? A GATHERING consensus in anthropology, science studies, philosophy of biology, and even the biological sciences themselves suggests that the theoretical object of biology, “life,” is today in transformation, if not dissolution. Proliferating technologies of assisted reproduction, along with genomic reshufflings of biomatter in such practices as cloning, have unwound the “facts of life.”1 Biotechnology, biodiversity, bioprospecting, biosecurity, biotransfer, and other things bio-­draw novel lines of property and protection around organisms and their elements (e.g., genes, organs), which now circulate in new ways as gifts, as commodities, and as tokens of social belonging or exclusion.2 From cultural theorists and historians of science we learn that “life itself,” consolidated as the object of the discipline of biology around 1800, has morphed, as material components of living things—­cells and genes—­rearrange and disperse, and exist in distributed laboratory choreographies that have them frozen, amplified, and exchanged.3 Writers in philosophy, rhetoric, and cultural studies of science, meanwhile, claim that as “life” has become the target of digital simulation and bioinformatic representation, it has become virtual, mediated, and multiple.4 All these transformations unsteady any naturalistic or ultimate foundation that life forms—­embodied bits of vitality like organisms and species—­might provide for forms of life—­social, symbolic, and pragmatic ways of thinking and acting that organize human communities.5 In the language of anthropology, these changes unsettle the nature so often imagined to ground culture. Life moves out of the domain of the given into the contingent, appearing not as a thing-­in-­itself, but as something-­in-­the-­making in discourse and in practice. “Life” becomes 1

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a term increasingly placed within scare quotes—­even in the pages of the most cited scientific journal in the world, Nature, which (as I report in the introductory chapter to this book) in 2007 published “Meanings of ‘Life,’ ” an editorial calling for the abandonment of “life” as a scientific term of art. “Life” becomes a trace of the scientific and cultural practices that have asked after it, a shadow of the biological and social theories meant to capture it. In his 1802 discipline-­ dubbing book, Biologie, the German naturalist Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus asked, “What is life?” a question that, as it has traveled into the present, has admitted of various answers.6 The physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 What Is Life? offered that life might issue from a hereditary “code-­script,” which conception became in subsequent years enlisted into models of DNA and into informatic and cybernetic visions of vitality.7 Fifty-­one years after Schrödinger, the microbiologist Lynn Margulis and the writer Dorion Sagan offered a less unitary account in their book What Is Life?, in which they delivered a distinct answer to the question for each of life’s five kingdoms: bacteria, protists, animals, fungi, and plants—­emphasizing neither some underlying logic nor an overarching metaphysics but rather the situated particulars of microbial, fungal, plant, and animal embodiment; life was not something that could be compressed into the linear logic of a code but instead was a process ever overcoming itself in an assortment of embodied manifestations.8 If Schrödinger’s model fit into forms of life calibrated to Cold War practices of coding, secrecy, and cryptography, Margulis and Sagan’s view speaks to a world in which environmentalism and biodiversity—­and their unknown futures—­organize many contemporary forms of hope and worry. But if it is now possible to think of life as having a variety of plural futures—­as a 2007 conference, “Futures of Life,” held in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University had it—­it is also possible, in the face of a seemingly endless multiplication of forms, to inquire, as did a 2007 conference at Berkeley, What’s left of life?9 That question, posed by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, asked whether what Michel Foucault in 1966 identified as life itself, the epistemic object of biology that Foucault claimed first manifested in the early nineteenth century, still retains its force to organize matters of fact and concern—­life forms and forms of life—­arrayed around the life sciences.10 It is a limit question, a worry about ends. What was life? How has it become possible for scholars in the sciences and humanities to declare the possible end of “life”? How has the following diagnosis, offered by rhetorician Richard Doyle, become possible? “Life,” as a scientific object, has been stealthed, rendered indiscernible by our installed systems of representation. No longer the attribute of a sovereign in battle with its evolutionary problem set, the organism its sign of ongoing but always temporary victory, life now resounds not so much within sturdy boundaries as between them.11 2

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If, as Foucault argued, biopolitics brought “life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations”—­that is, if it drew on life science knowledge to organize practices of governance (public health programs, reproductive policies, etc.)—­what happens to such politics as life delaminates, escapes itself?12 Where is life off to? What was life? This essay offers possible answers to those questions, drawing on anthropological fieldwork I conducted among biologists in the late 1990s and in the first decade of the 2000s. In that ethnographic work, I pursued the question of what “life” is becoming for those professional biologists who worry very explicitly about the limits of life, both as an empirical matter of finding edge cases of vitality and as a matter of framing an encompassing theory of the biological, a theory that might unify all possible cases. In the three scientific communities I studied, such limit accounts of life forms are tethered—­sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly—­to claims about the forms of cultural life proper to a world in which understandings of nature and biology are in revision. Life forms and forms of life inform, transform, and deform one another. THREE LIMIT BIOLOGIES In the 1990s, scientists working in the field of Artificial Life dedicated themselves to modeling evolutionary and biological systems in computers. Many claimed not just to be simulating life in silico, but also to be synthesizing new life in cyberspace and in robots. For practitioners, “life” could be decoupled from its carbon instantiations and might one day supersede organic life. In Silicon Second Nature, I analyzed how scientists working in Artificial Life, in dialogue with post-­and transhumanists, argued that digital life forms would reveal the informatic logic of evolution, ushering in a science-­fiction world in which “life” would become fully technological, a pattern transposable across media.13 Around the turn of the millennium, a parallel community of biologists sought the limits of life in another context—­not cyberspace, but ocean space. In Alien Ocean, I looked to marine biologists studying microbes in extreme ecologies, like deep-­sea hydrothermal vents.14 These scientists’ encounters with organisms thriving at extremes of temperature, chemistry, and pressure pressed them against the boundaries of assumptions about organic embodiment—­with implications for comprehending the limits of life on Earth and for thinking about how political ecological forms of life (e.g., the consumption of fossil fuels) might encounter or, perhaps, overcome biological limits. With work with microbes that engage in lateral gene transfer—­mixing up genes “within” generations, that is, with their contemporaries—­even taxonomy, the naming of life forms, became unstable, with implications for apprehending the possible natural and technical malleability of living things. 3

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Moving from ocean space to outer space, another group of limit biologists—­ astrobiologists—­have been keen to theorize and scout out life at its boundaries. My research among astrobiologists investigated how these scientists define and discern “biosignatures,” possible signs of extraterrestrial life present either in extraterrestrial rocks that have made their way to Earth or in the remotely read atmospheric profiles of other worlds.15 Astrobiologists seek traces of possible life elsewhere in the solar system or galaxy and hope that such findings can be read back to situate Earthly life in a cosmic ecology. I here read across these three ethnographic examples to suggest that biological studies in which “life” is conceptually stretched to a limit resonate with uncertainties about what kinds of sociocultural forms of life biology might now anchor. Limit biologies such as Artificial Life, extreme marine microbiology, and astrobiology can be read as symptomatic of the emergence elsewhere, in less ivory-­towerish zones of practice, of growing instabilities in concepts of nature—­organic, earthly, cosmic.16 Such instabilities can be fruitfully mapped by attending to how scientists of extreme biologies test the limits of form in life forms.17 If, as Treviranus wrote in Biologie, “the objects of our research will be the different forms and manifestations of life,” those forms are being deformed by the object and form of biological inquiry.18 While there are implications here for the stability of the “bio” in biopolitics, I am equally interested in how biologists think about limits—­and I think that the very notion of the limit, as an object of study and fascination in biology and in interpretative social science, also requires analytic scrutiny. At the essay’s close, I train attention on limits in order to understand some limits of “theory” today, as it is transforming within both professional biological discourse and critical inquiry. ARTIFICIAL LIFE: LIFE FORMS AT THE LIMITS OF ABSTRACTION The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of Artificial Life, a hybrid of computer science, theoretical biology, and digital gaming devoted to mimicking the logic of biology in the virtual worlds of computer simulation and in the hardware realm of robotics. Named by analogy to artificial intelligence, Artificial Life promised to deliver a fully formalized account of life, one that could be instantiated across a variety of platforms, including, most crucially for practitioners, computational media.19 My 1990s fieldwork among Artificial Life scientists was centered at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity, where researchers claimed that life would be “a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of matter itself.”20 Some found this claim so persuasive that they held that life forms could exist in the digital medium of cyberspace; they hoped that the creation of such life could expand biology’s purview to include not just life-­as-­we-­know-­it, but also life-­as-­it-­could-­ be—­life as it might exist in other materials or elsewhere in the universe. On the initiate’s view, Artificial Life’s extreme abstraction leverages biology into the 4

What Was Life?

realm of universal science, like physics, with a formalism applicable anywhere in the cosmos. The founder, Chris Langton, characterized the ethos behind Artificial Life as animated by “the attempt to abstract the logical form of life in different material forms.”21 This definition of life holds that formal and material properties can be partitioned and that what matters is form. What was form for Artificial Life scientists? Two things: information and performance. INFORMATION

Artificial Life founded its reputation on computational models of evolutionary dynamics. One of the most popular models during my fieldwork was the biologist Tom Ray’s “Tierra,” a system in which assembly language programs resident in random-­access memory (RAM) self-­replicate based on how efficiently they make use of central processing unit (CPU) time and memory space. Ray described these programs as “digital organisms” and characterized Tierra as a “universe,” writ in “the chemistry of bits and bytes,” within which only the fittest survive (see figure 1.1). For Ray, who was trained as a tropical ecologist and self-­taught as a programmer, Tierra was not so much a model of evolution as it was “an instantiation of evolution by natural selection in the computational medium.” “Digital life,” Ray wrote, “exists in a logical, not material, informational universe.”22 Ray understood life to be a process of information replication and, like many of his Artificial Life colleagues, interpreted genetic code as analogous to computer code; in fact, the analogy was so tight that he considered it an

Figure 1.1. A screenshot of Tom Ray’s Tierra, visualizing space taken up by “digital organisms” within random-­access memory (RAM) during one run of the Tierra program. Images made using the Artificial Life Monitor (ALmond) program developed by Marc Cygnus. Image: Marc Cygnus. Used with permission. 5

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identity. “The ‘body’ of a digital organism,” he urged, “is the information pattern in memory that constitutes its machine language program.”23 The idea that genes are informational instructions for making organisms emerges from a long Western metaphysical tradition of separating form from matter, of assuming that ontogeny is the playing out of a developmental “program” and that, as Susan Oyama summarizes the position, “information . . . exists before the interactions in which it appears.”24 If one wanted to offer a longue durée account, one might hear in Ray’s digital ecologies—­originating from the action of an “ancestor” “seed program” “inoculated” into a “computational medium”—­echoes of an Aristotelian vision of form: a spiritual, often masculinized, force that informs the material, often feminized, world.25 Closer to our own time, twentieth-­century biology, under the spell of understanding DNA as a code script, often conflated vitality and textuality; the “secret of life,” genetic information, was imagined as the “really real” to the epiphenomenal world of the organism. Ray’s Tierra simply takes a metaphor first offered by Schrödinger to its logical conclusion. Such informatic visions appeared again and again in my fieldwork. Larry Yaeger, who programmed a system called PolyWorld, said to me, “I believe that there might actually be an information-­based measure of the quantitative degree of life.” Ken Karakotsios, programmer of SimLife, a popular Artificial Life game, said: “I started out looking at ALife as a computer architect and programmer. I’ve been trained to look at things as processes, where the same process can be run in different ways on different hardware architectures.” Such visions fall in line with Langton’s field-­founding claim that, “the dynamic processes that constitute life—­in whatever material bases they might occur—­must share certain universal features—­features that will allow us to recognize life by its dynamic form alone, without reference to its matter.”26 Such positions offer an extreme Platonism. And they underwrote a structure of feeling among Artificial Life researchers, a sense that the informational dynamics of “life” were immortal. For many practitioners, such a view offered a kind of cybernetically inflected spirituality—­one akin to that still celebrated by figures such as Ray Kurzweil, who believes that it may be possible to upload human consciousness into long-­lived robots.27 Here, life forms might be engineered to fit within a form of life that imagines itself as sculpted by and as sculpting an evolutionary narrative that prizes the continuation of life whatever its matter.28 PERFORMANCE

The other side of form for Artificial Life was performance. That aspect presented itself strikingly at an Artificial Life conference I attended at MIT in 1994. At this gathering, the computer scientist Karl Sims gave a talk in which he showed a video of simulated creatures with boxes for arms, legs, torsos, and heads. These 6

What Was Life?

Figure 1.2. An evolutionary sequence of Sims’s virtual creatures, selected for “swimming.” Courtesy of Karl Sims.

creatures were not simple animations but actually “evolved” pieces of software in a simulated universe, which “space” was visualized on computer screens as a three-­dimensional world, complete with implied vanishing points. Using a technique called “genetic programming,” Sims treated the software running his programs as “genetic code” and assayed the “phenotypic” performance of the code by running the programs. The role of “natural selection” was played by a “fitness function” aimed at testing for whether the programs would function appropriately to a given test (see figure 1.2). At MIT, Sims’s graphics allowed his audience to watch these “creatures” attempt various tasks in artificial worlds. Sims’s brilliance in explicating his work was to show videos of his virtual organisms’ performances, calibrated so they would run in what looked like real time. As they passed or flunked their Darwinian fitness tests, Sims’s boxy critters elicited laughter. I joined Artificial Life scientists in their pleasure at these images and experienced the activity of the simulated creatures as cute, especially when they could be interpreted as valiantly failing at their tasks. What made the images funny was a sense that Sims was not fully in control; he had programmed a three-­dimensional artificial world—­and a visual representation of it—­that simulated Newtonian physics, gravity, and fluid dynamics, and he had introduced “creatures” that could interact with this world. Because the simulated physics and creatures were programmed together, their behaviors looked realistic, even purposeful. By playing with the boundary between simulation and animation, and by explaining the “genetic program” back end of the model, Sims bolstered his viewership’s faith in the lifelike character of the simulations. The persuasive force of Sims’s presentation was visual; watching a stream of computer code text would not have produced the same life vibe.29 Life was here a formal effect. 7

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The lesson viewers took from this was that the field of biology does not yet know about all the forms across which life might exist—­or be created. “Life” becomes abstractable, metaphysical, something that can be ported across substrates. What was life for Artificial Life? Pure form. And the ends of life would be in its endless forms.30 Form reaches out to embrace extreme, limit possibilities. But as the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern saw as early as 1992, the putatively oxymoronic “artificial life” hints at an undoing of the self-­evidence of “life” as a natural kind.31 As the philosopher Jean Baudrillard would have had it, simulation reveals there was never an original.32 When form is decoupled from life, we are left with free-­floating form. In the bargain, “nature” becomes everywhere and nowhere, both completely given and thoroughly constructed; we are left in a zone that Strathern calls “after nature,” referring both to being post-­nature and enduringly in pursuit of it.33 Artificial Life can be read as a sign of the instability, the limits, of “nature” as an ontological category. Biology becomes ungrounded. The form of life prepared by belief in these life forms is one in which bioengineering practice can simultaneously lean on “life” as a category and know that it is constructed.34 MARINE MICROBIOLOGY: LIFE FORMS AT THE LIMITS OF MATERIALITY AND RELATIONALITY At the same time, one could argue that “extreme nature” is the new “after nature.”35 Such certainly seemed plausible when I switched gears after Artificial Life to examine the work of biologists studying microbes living at deep-­sea hydrothermal vents, at extremes of temperature and pressure. Here were life forms—­extremophiles, in scientific parlance—­that pushed against the boundaries of what biologists believed living things were capable of; these creatures made their living not through photosynthesis, but through chemosynthesis, the production of organic materials using energy from chemicals, such as hydrogen sulfide. If Artificial Life scripted life as detachable from particular substrates, the marine biology of extremophilic microbes construed life as possessed of an as-­ yet-­unmapped elasticity—­though always one grounded in organic chemistry. Not abstract form, then, as in Artificial Life, but form plastic to extreme conditions, to limits. This angle is appropriate to the form of life known as environmentalism, which is concerned about material, embodied limits and flexibility in the biosphere (and also, in the age of environmental calamity, tuned to hopes that genetically engineered microbes might eat up oil spills and other toxic disasters). Here, life is surprising in its possible embodiments—­this speaks less to Schrödinger’s singular answer to the question, What is life? than to Margulis and Sagan’s multiple choices. Fieldwork among marine microbiologists in the early 2000s—­ with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, the Monterey Bay 8

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Aquarium Research Institute in California, and the University of Hawaii as key sites—­had me following scientists into labs, to conferences, and out to sea. Trying get a fix on how these people made microbial life legible, I spoke with them about their difficulties pinning down that most elementary of biological forms: the species. The stability of species has been troublesome for a while in microbiology but has become a central worry in debates about how to place marine microbes with respect to the origin of life on Earth. Some microbiologists believe life first emerged in the volcanic environs of hydrothermal vents—­and the origin-­story optimism that often suffuses the search for the last common ancestor among marine microbial organisms is flagged by the name under which deep-­sea hyperthermophiles have traveled for a while: the Archaea, or “ancient ones.” But without a microbial fossil record to draw on, microbiologists have grounded their case in present day microbial DNA, using this to reconstruct deep genealogies—­seeking the root of what they call the universal tree of life, that representational branching structure that Darwin advanced as a grid for organizing knowledge about the history of life on Earth. As it turns out, lateral gene transfer in microbes—­the travel of genes not “down” generations but rather across, within, and among contemporaries, which then change their genetic identities within their lifetimes—­places at risk treelike representations. The microbiologist Ford Doolittle argued in a 1999 paper in Science that the tree of life might better be imagined as a net: “if . . . different genes give different trees, and there is no fair way to suppress this disagreement, then a species (or phylum) can ‘belong’ to many genera (or kingdoms) at the same time: There really can be no universal phylogenetic tree of organisms based on such a reduction to genes.”36 The genealogy-­jumbling work of gene transfer is thick in marine environments, since “given the very high concentrations of bacteria and viruses in seawater, and the tremendous volume of water in the ocean, it follows that gene transfer between organisms takes place about 20 million billion times per second in the oceans.”37 Doolittle offered a brambled tree model to represent what was becoming of the lines through which one might map the history of “life” (see figure 1.3). Gene transfer interrupts what Darwin called the “natural classification” that would follow from tracking lines of descent. In a microbiological restaging of those personalized, family-­genetic-­history algorithms advertised for people curious about whether they have a haplotype that links them to, say, Genghis Khan, species, like the “pure” racial type, falls apart, denatures, and points in all sorts of possible directions.38 In part, this is because “sex”—­the obligatory passage point of what Foucault called biopolitics, joining together individuals and populations—­is supplanted by “transfer”—­an asexual, many-­directioned connection, which undoes the stability of the very categories it brings into juxtaposition. It makes clear that there is no “natural” classification—­that biology is bound up with human social purposes. Life forms are always described with respect to some form of life. 9

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Figure 1.3. “A Reticulated Tree, or Net, Which Might More Appropriately Represent Life’s History” Figure 3 from W. Ford Doolittle, “Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree,” Science 284 (1999): 2124–­2128, at 2127. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

There are attempts to salvage something like “species” with the concept of the phylotype, a genetic, but not genealogical, classification. In this formulation, microbes might belong to the same phylotype if they show more than 70 percent genetic similarity. Doolittle and his colleagues have proposed a “synthesis of life” that makes use of both tree and net linkages to represent phylogenesis, defined, they record, by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the evolutionary development of a species or other group of organisms through a succession of forms,” which, they write, “in no way requires that species or other groups be produced solely through divergence, nor that diagrammatic representation of the evolutionary development of species must be a bifurcating tree.”39 What is preserved in their new map is the figure of the gene, which continues to serve as a connecting thread and represents the flow of “life.” There is a tension between the real and represented in such mappings. Insofar as lateral gene transfer has fractured the arborescent model of microbial relatedness, it has done so via a detour into bioinformatic representation, a zone where genes are manipulated in a computational formalism. Ontological claims become formatted by the particularities of that representation—­and unwindable through that same informatic infrastructure.40 If Artificial Life took computer codes as 10

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genetic codes, full stop, bioinformatics is encountering their morphing similarity and difference, their unstable interoperability.41 The Platonism of Artificial Life can no longer be sustained by today’s computation-­in-­the-­wild.42 Categories—­genetic, metabolic—­proliferate. Some marine microbiologists revel in the complexity, making clear what this rearrangement of life forms might mean for forms of life. Some see it underwriting a bioengineering form of life: “Natural genetic engineering,” one biotech booster told me, “is very common.”43 People of this view have argued for “bar-­coding” microbes—­identifying organisms by their genetic profile while being completely agnostic about their evolutionary relationship.44 Still others think of microbial webworks as endorsing a thrillingly relational vision of the planet: “I like the idea of that picture of the tree that’s all knotted and tangled,” the Monterey postdoc Steven Hallam told me in 2003. “It fits with my view of the world, of everything being connected, as parts in a body, of a Gaian synthesis.” In Trends in Microbiology, Fernando de la Cruz and Julian Davies state, “It is clear that genes have flowed through the biosphere, as in a global organism.”45 Thinking of the planet as a global organism has led some to speak of the “ocean genome,” most prominently Craig Venter, who in 2004 embarked on a voyage in his private yacht to “sequence the Sargasso Sea.” As he put it in explaining the Ocean Microbial Genome Survey, which he undertook from 2004 to 2007, “by sequencing multiple sites we might be able to compile an actual sequence database of the ocean’s genome.”46 What does all this mean for the form that “life” takes? That it is multiple; even when reduced to “genes,” it flows all over the place. Marine microbiologists are clear that classifications are matters of framing. The “form” in “life forms” changes with scale and context. These scientists understand microbes with respect simultaneously to their genes, metabolisms, and interaction with one another in communities, in ecologies, and in global biogeochemical processes, like the carbon cycle. Many of their theoretical and classificatory conundrums are about how to link, as they phrase it, “genomes to biomes.” The question of how to think about the forms life might take depends on which properties are relevant to the unit of description in question and on how sociopolitical frames—­ biotechnological, environmentalist—­condition these choices, even as they are themselves summoned forth by biological knowledge in a cycle in which life forms and forms of life recursively (though never perfectly) inform one another. A dramatic effect on the category of “life” is that it oscillates between being located at the level of (at least) the gene and emergent at the level of the globe. The MIT microbiologist Penny Chisholm, in a 2004 talk entitled “How to Dominate the Oceans with 2000 Genes,” had this to say about Prochlorococcus, the world’s most abundant photosynthetic marine bacterium: “I consider this the minimal life form—­having the smallest number of genes that can make life from light and only inorganic compounds. It is the essence of life.”47 But after explaining Prochlorococcus’s place in the modulation of Earth’s biosphere, she concluded by offering that Prochlorococcus should guide biologists to “think of 11

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life as something with properties similar at all scales, a system of self-­stabilizing networks. Life is a hierarchy of living systems.” Here, the metabolic, energetic aspect of vitality provides the lattice through which one can link genes to globe. What are life forms here—­in this realm of extreme metabolisms, jumbled genealogies, and shifting scales? They are the result of how phenomena are contextualized, whether with respect to normal or exotic ecologies, with reference to genealogy, or through recalibrating relations of parts and wholes. The “form” in “life form” is a sign of one’s methodological and theoretical approach; in many ways it is an abstraction—­even as microbiologists would also claim, contra Artificial Life, that forms cannot be abstracted from living things. If for occasional Artificial Life participants, such as the late phenomenologist-­ biologist Francisco Varela, living things could be thought of as autopoietic—­as calling forth the conditions of their own existence through “interactions and transformations [that] continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and . . . constitute . . . [them] as a concrete unit[ies] in the space in which they exist”—­then marine microbiologists who want to keep genomic, ecological, and Gaian processes simultaneously in view might be considered as hewing to a view of life forms as allopoietic, where relation (including interpretative relation), not unity, is the parameter within which form materializes.48 What kind of limit might be detected here? Something like extreme materialist relativism; while the word “extremophile” (lover of extremes)—­which was coined in 1974 as a scientific-­sounding hybrid of Latin extremus and Greek philos—­has usually been taken to refer to microbial life forms, biologists point out that the term can apply to metazoans as well, and, moreover, that “extremophily” is a relative term.49 Humans might be imagined as aerophiles,  “air-­ lovers”: an extreme from the vantage point of anaerobes. The word “extreme” functions as a relativist, rather than totalizing, operator. What this accomplishes is attention to environment; the ends of this kind of biology are about ecological context—­and about displacing humans as the only ends of evolution. Such a view means to awaken humans to their superfluity to earthly life writ large and therefore to their responsibility for the effects of their anthropocentrism. This scalar, contextual “life,” always tumbling over its proper representation, is kin with contemporary ecopolitics, anxious about how properly to stage the scale and level of biological intervention in a time of environmental crisis, in a time when both “nature” and “society” seem to be pushing against their own and each others’ limits. ASTROBIOLOGY: LIFE FORMS AT THE LIMITS OF DEFINITION In 1998, NASA founded the Astrobiology Institute, which is distributed across a number of universities and research facilities. Scientists working in astrobiology are dedicated to the study of cosmic biology. They spend time in wet labs 12

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experimenting with extremophiles as analogues to extraterrestrial life. They also look to other worlds for what they call the signature of life, or often simply a biosignature, defined as “any measurable property of a planetary object, its atmosphere, its oceans, its geologic formations, or its samples that suggests that life was or is present. A short definition is a ‘fingerprint of life.’ ”50 According to common wisdom in the field, there are direct and remote signatures of extraterrestrial life. Direct signatures include measurements that show evidence (in extraterrestrial rock samples, for example) of the production of organic molecules. Remote signatures include such items as the spectral signature of other worlds’ atmospheres, which can point toward such bioproducts as ozone or methane. Astrobiologists often zero in on the spectral trace of water as an indication of the possibility of vitality. According to the astrobiologist David Des Marais, a founding challenge presents itself, which is that “our definitions are based upon life on Earth” and that “accordingly, we must distinguish between attributes of life that are truly universal versus those that solely reflect the particular history of our own biosphere.”51 This is no simple task, since knowing what is universal is precisely what is to be discovered. If the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence sought signals in an ocean of noise, looking for the arbitrary and organized surprise—­what scientists call information—­astrobiology searches in a less Saussurian mode, scouting for what the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce called indices—­indirect representations, or traces, of its object, life. Indeed, insofar as astrobiology has replaced SETI, this is a sign of the ascendancy of biology as a source of funding for space science. In my conversations with scientists working in astrobiology—­enough of a limit biology that most researchers in this field remain based in traditional disciplines (e.g., microbiology, geochemistry)—­this question of what would count as a proper trace was a live one. Several scientists referred me to the most famous picture in their field, an electron microscope image of the inside of a Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1984 (see figure 1.4; also see chapter 7 for a more thorough discussion). Mars meteorite ALH84001, which had been blasted off Mars sixteen million years previous by the impact of another meteorite and arrived on Earth thirteen thousand years ago, harbored elliptical shapes some believed to be outlines of ancient microbial life. David McKay and colleagues, in a 1996 Science article entitled “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001,” wrote, “Ovoid features . . . are similar in size and shape to nanobacteria in travertine and limestone. The elongate forms resemble some forms of fossilized filamentous bacteria in the terrestrial fossil record.”52 They concluded that they had found “evidence for primitive life on early Mars” with an age of about 1.3 to 3.6 billion years.53 Their evidence, arrived at by means of electron microscopy, offered a similitude that ended up leaving the object open to criticism. Other astrobiologists were skeptical of pattern-­matching recipes for seeing traces of life in ALH84001. Still, advocates’ arguments went beyond visual pattern matching; there were also traces 13

Figure 1.4. Ovoid forms inside Martian meteorite ALH84001, as depicted through scanning electron microscopy. The elongated shape in the center is some several hundred nanometers in length. Discussed in D. S. McKay, E. K. Gibson Jr., et al., “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001,” Science 273 (1996): 924–­930. Image: NASA.

of organic carbon compounds (though either biotic or abiotic processes could have produced these) as well as magnetite and sulfides similar to those made by earthly bacteria. Objections persisted. Many opponents pointed out that traces on ALH84001 indicated formations two orders of magnitude smaller than any microbe, too cramped to fit within their boundaries all of the apparati cells need to function. Supporters of life signs in ALH84001 countered that these were not microbes, but nanobes—­a reframing that recognizes a limit but then leaps over it by conjuring a new category. A constant repositioning of what life could be—­and the form it might take—­is a feature in astrobiological discourse. Some scientists have discussed the possibility of looking in as-­yet-­unexamined locales for “life,” such as the methane lakes of Saturn’s moon, Titan. Such a framing poses “life” as at once materially substantiated and capable of taking a variety of forms not yet known. Such framings are an expression of faith in form, and, in its way, life. What are life forms for astrobiology, then? Things that leave traces of their form. And astrobiologists are adamant that they do not yet know what all these forms could be, that they will always be operating at the limits of their knowledge. They hold that there exist many logics from which to reason about extraterrestrial life—­from Earth as one planet among others, from organic chemistry, from optics, and more. As Baruch Blumberg has suggested, “life has the characteristic, using philosophical terminology, of ‘being’ and ‘becoming.’ It exists in a particular form now, but has the potential, because of the diversity in its 14

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offspring, of becoming something related, but also different.”54 Within this awareness—­phrased though it is in terms of inheritance—­is a sense that astrobiology depends on what Peirce called “abduction,” the argument from the future.55 “Life” is revealed not just as the endpoint of processes of deduction (as in early vitalist accounts that knew life when they saw it) or induction (as with Darwin, who reasoned, from empirical data, up to what life’s processes might be), but also of abduction, which rests on a faith in the intelligibility of future cases (see chapter 2).56 Astrobiologists live firmly in the domain of Strathern’s “after nature.” But they also live in the time of “extreme nature,” nature imagined as host to entities that push its own limits. This extreme nature is in its way a secularized supernatural; its orbit extends beyond and embraces our planet, but it also posits a “natural,” encountered elsewhere, that can intimate its own incompleteness as a source of explanation. Limit, or extreme, natures necessarily fold back to ask questions about “normal” nature. Astrobiologists’ sense that life may have different conformations elsewhere in the universe is leading some to ask whether life may have originated more than once on Earth. Astrobiologists now ask whether such life might have left traces of its multiple origins. Known living things are made of left-­handed amino acids and right-­handed sugars, but this “handedness” is, it is largely agreed, contingent; molecules could have twisted the other way, with right-­handed amino acids and left-­handed sugars making up the molecular mechanics of earthly life. The astrobiologist Paul Davies has asked whether there may exist on Earth “shadow terrestrial biospheres of alternative life forms.”57 The forms of life at stake in this reimagining of the spaces within which life forms might manifest are multiple. At the institutional level, space science leverages uncertainty into institutional support. In a political economic register, as Melinda Cooper has suggested, the stretching of the limits of life may be keyed to an economic moment, one in which the notion of the untapped biological resource has to be reinvented constantly.58 That framing suggests that the “extreme,” or “limit,” may be a sign not of the ending of biology but rather of its bending toward a political economic purpose.59 But the form of life in the making is also one that situates Earthly life in a cosmic context that is increasingly “ecological” in its depiction.60 That fact makes clear, again, that life forms and forms of life not only inform one another (especially after biopolitics), but that the two may be impossible to disentangle, especially since they treat a “life” that is increasingly known to be both real and constructed, social and natural. WHAT WAS LIFE? W.J.T. Mitchell—­the author, fittingly for this essay about limits, of The Last Dinosaur Book—­wrote in 2003 that “there is . . . a new kind of vitalism and animism in the air, a new interest in Nature with a capital N. . . . The philosophy of 15

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life has returned with a vengeance in the age of biogenetic engineering and bio-­ terrorism.”61 But against this view, Eduardo Kac and Avital Ronell, in their 2008 book about art in the age of genetic engineering, Life Extreme, suggested that in this same moment, “the stability of life or of the living is thrown off course.”62 I agree. One of the concomitants of such a throwing-­off-­course is a fascination with extremes, limits. The three limit biologies I have examined here are symptomatic of wider processes and discussions in which the “nature” supposed to ground “life” is becoming unstable. They all query “life” through a wiggling of what is meant by the “form” that life takes, a loosening that suggests epistemic shifts in the biological sciences generally; in the age of synthetic biology, biologists know full well that their knowledge is, in addition to an attempt to describe the organic world, a thick epistemological construction.63 This puts biology as a universalizing science at risk, one reason these limit biologies come with the promise to reboot the life sciences. That promise may be read out of the argument of images the reader will have detected accompanying this essay. All the figures I reproduce—­which I would argue are representative of their various fields—­refer to elementary forms of life, a limit of beginnings. The three biologies presented here make explicit the instability of “life” in such other bioscientifically articulated domains as reproductive technology, biodiversity, and biosecurity. The very appearance of the word “life” in quotation marks—­in this essay, but also in many of the sources I cite—­indicates a social dissensus about its meaning.64 It marks a limit. What is a limit? It is the point at which an identity uncouples from itself and shades or snaps into something else. In thinking through limits, I find useful the work of the anthropologists Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Rane Willerslev, who have examined how the Yukaghirs, a hunter-­gatherer group in Siberia, think of their two primary hunting economies—­elk and sable, which are organized, respectively, around as hoc egalitarian collections of people or around close, hierarchical kin groups—­as “shadows,” or hidden sides, of one another. 65 The two modes of practice haunt one another, and it is possible for the one to transform into the other, rendering it impossible to decide which grounds the “real” economy. Corsín Jiménez and Willerslev suggest that, “at the moment of their conceptual limitation (the moment when they stand at the end [fin] of their worlds, their de-­fining moment), concepts capture their own shadow and become something other than what they are.”66 Corsín Jiménez and Willerslev argue for “a view of concepts that stresses not only their capacity for providing stable meanings but also their ability to out-­place themselves too, to unsettle their own reificatory tendencies.”67 Perhaps that is one of the appeals of the fantastical concept of “life,” for as Corsín Jiménez and Willerslev contend, “concepts create their own spaces for expression and . . . draw their own limits behind and around their shadows.”68 The limit, they say, “is also the place where the concept out-­grows its shadow, and becomes something else.”69 In the examples offered 16

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in this essay, “form” becomes the shadow of life, only to outgrow it—­at the same time as biologists continue to try to recapture it; no surprise that astrobiologists now explicitly discuss “shadow life.”70 What is the shadow of life? A first draft answer might be “death”—­and a good case could be made that today’s biopolitics are ever more entangled with necropolitics. Across a range of work in the anthropology of biomedicine, scholars have examined how “life” and “death” are being redefined in such practices as telesurgery, diagnoses of brain death, organ transplant and trafficking, globalized clinical trails, medical tourism, and transnational circuits of stratified human reproduction.71 To take one example, in Life Exposed, Adriana Petryna examines measures for governing individual and populational life put in place by the Soviet and then Ukrainian governments in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster; the lives of people poisoned by radiation have come to be organized—­and haunted—­by state measures of their “suffering,” of, to put it starkly, their proximity to death. Or consider the work of Julie Livingston, who, in her ethnography of an oncology ward in Botswana, shows how “cancer” in that nation-­state is not a domain of high-­tech chemotherapy but rather of extremes of suppurating and oozing wounds. Peter Redfield’s ethnographic monograph, Life in Crisis, tracks how the international nongovernmental medical humanitarian organization Doctors without Borders often formalizes “life” as a minimal measurement of nutritional health, operationalizing the organization’s ethical mandate to save lives while also often depoliticizing the contexts that distribute life and death chances in the first place.72 What comes into focus in these works is what Judith Butler has called “precarious life.”73 The notion of a limit biology would look very different if applied to cases such as Petryna’s, Livingston’s, or Redfield’s; what I seek to do in this essay is keyed to the narrower question of how to read ideological pronouncements from academic biology as symptoms of the conceptual instability of “life” today. A next draft articulation of the question of what the shadow of life is might be this: What can we see in the shadow of life’s limit? Answer: the absence of a “theory” for biology; reaching the limit of life reveals what was there all along—­that there is no once-­and-­for-­all theoretical grounding for life. And so, the Berkeley conference that asked, “What’s left of life?” might fruitfully be put alongside the 2000 book to which its name alludes, What’s Left of Theory?74 That text was dedicated to asking how, after post-­structuralism, leftist political concerns with social justice might find moorings in scholarly work. “Theory” had accomplished epistemological labor that disturbed the making of dominant social norms and forms, but it had also produced what some people worried was an agnosticism about politics and ethics. At What’s Left of Life?, where the conferees meditated on “ongoing wars, genocides, epidemics, genomics, life extension technologies, assisted reproduction, pharmaceuticals and potential stem-­cell therapeutics” to ask, “How is life defined and constituted, by whom, and in what specific disciplinary contexts? What kinds of tensions and contestations take place under the 17

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sign of life?,” the meaning of “life” seemed, similarly to “theory,” to have raised anxieties about how properly to think and act in a moment of epistemological dizziness. In Life.After.Theory, John Schad declares that “theory has made us wary of the idea of Life, or indeed any other organicist master-­word.”75 But “life” and “theory” may also be read as doubles of one another. Schad ventures such a connection for “theory” as it came to be known in the late twentieth century: To suggest that theory is, in its turn, a response to the Second World War is, in fact, to say that theory is “life” in the strict etymological sense of the word—­for “life” comes from the prehistoric German lib meaning “remain” or “be left” and, as one dictionary puts it, “the semantic connection between ‘ “remaining” and life . . . is thought to lie in the notion of being “left alive after a battle” ’. If life is necessarily, after-­life; if all living is a form of “living-­on,” in particular living-­on after war, then theory is very much a form of life.76

While the limit biologies I have examined emerged well after World War Two, they are contemporary with many crises. And, if anything, in current academic discussions, “life” and “theory” now double, or shadow, one another more densely than ever (with the elongating and warping this implies). At a moment when “life” is at stake in the biopolitics of disaster, human rights, and war, “bio” becomes ungrounded—­with Agamben’s revival of zoe, “bare life,” a last-­ditch patch, even a refetishizing of the biological.77 “Theory,” meanwhile—­like “life” for biology, an attempt to represent and register a world of difference—­finds itself the subject of worries about its adequacy in a post-­post-­modern world.78 “Life” and “theory,” wavering, gesture toward indeterminacy about where politics might now reside, about how life forms and forms of life form and deform in the shadow that has overtaken life after theory.

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C H A P TER 2

LIFE FORMS A Keyword Entry Stefan Helmreich and Sophia Roosth

IN A 2007 REPORT JOINTLY issued by the U.S. National Research Council’s Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems and Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life, biologists interested in the possibility of life on other planets speculate that living systems might employ ammonia, sulfuric acid, or methane as a solvent in the way that life on Earth uses water.1 Perhaps just as remarkable as the project of chemical conjecture delivered by this report, however, is the document’s opening inscription: “Dedicated to Non-­Human-­Like Life Forms, Wherever They Are.”2 Leaving aside the authors’ probable intention that “non-­human-­like” should be read as “unknown” or “extra­terrestrial,” what captures our attention in this address is its most workaday term: “life forms.” How did life come to have a form? More modestly and narrowly: Where did the term “life form” come from? And what has “life form” come to mean in the contemporary moment, when it is possible to use the term to refer to as-­yet-­conjectural manifestations, manifestations that may redefine the very referent of life itself? In The Life of Forms in Art, the art historian Henri Focillon wrote, “Form is surrounded by a certain aura: although it is our most strict definition of space, it also suggests to us the existence of other forms.”3 Inspired by Focillon, this essay asks, How does the concept of life form operate to suggest the existence of other life forms? In what follows, we argue that “life form” has, since its earliest nineteenth-­century enunciations, pointed to a space of possibility within which life might take shape. Exactly how that space is understood and theorized 19

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has transformed as the term has traveled into the present. We suggest that “life form” has moved from its origins as a term referring to abstract, idealized, aesthetic possibilities through reference to biogeographic and evolutionary possibilities to, today, conjectural and future possibilities. To put this in logical terms, we track a move from deductive reasoning—­the drawing of conclusions from known principles (e.g., when, as with German Romantic biologists, plant and animal forms were imagined deducible from archetypical aesthetic patterns present in nature, neo-­Platonically conceived)—­to inductive reasoning—­reasoning by inference from particulars toward general conclusions (e.g., when, as with Darwin, descriptions of organic variation were leveraged into hypotheses about the shaping of that variation by such forces as natural selection)—­to abductive reasoning—­reasoning from premises that may or may not materialize in the future (e.g., when, as with astrobiologists, life is posited as a coherent conceptual category even in advance of discovering all possible cases). The semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce described abduction as “a method of forming a general prediction without any positive assurance that it will succeed either in the special case or usually, its justification being that it is the only possible hope of regulating our future conduct rationally.”4 In its abductive articulation, life form has come to be a future-­oriented, even hopeful, term—­a term that in some instances underwrites a constructive approach to vitality (e.g., when, as with today’s synthetic biologists—­scientists seeking to make new life forms using what they call “biobricks”—­”life” becomes a conceptual category that may be explored through its de novo construction in the laboratory). CAPACIOUS DOCTRINES: WARRANTING A KEYWORD APPROACH The approach we take to mapping this historical transformation is inspired by Raymond Williams’s 1976 Keywords, in which Williams offered histories of key words in social theory, detailing the shifting, contested meanings of such terms as “culture,” “nature,” and “ideology.” Williams described his enterprise as an inquiry into a vocabulary. . . . Every word which I have included has at some time, in the course of some argument, virtually forced itself on my attention because the problems of its meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss.5

We intend, following Williams, for this keyword entry to be an examination of one term—­”life form”—­that has forced itself on our attentions in the course of our inquiries into the social and epistemological practices of the contemporary biosciences.6 Our account cannot be exhaustive, nor can it fully attend to proto-­ histories of “life form,” following, for example, how “life” and “form” circulated independently of one another prior to their amalgamation in nineteenth-­century 20

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German as Lebensform.7 As Williams suggested, “any account is bound to be incomplete, in a serious sense, just as it is bound to be selective.”8 Although tracking words and concepts may not be the same task, guiding Williams’s project was his conviction that language serves as a crucible in which ideas take shape: in words, “meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, qualified, changed.”9 Intellectual historians and literary critics such as Quentin Skinner and William Empson have taken issue with two aspects of Williams’s method: his yoking of concepts to words and his implication that language might not only express concepts, but also shape them.10 Even so, Skinner has admitted that “the surest sign that a group or society has entered into the self-­ conscious possession of a new concept is that a corresponding vocabulary will be developed, a vocabulary which can then be used to pick out and discuss the concept with consistency.”11 Our aim is to use “life form,” the term, as an index through which to gauge what life, the concept, has meant at different moments. We submit, following Williams, that changes in the manner in which “life form” is used may signal, even propel, conceptual changes.12 We also take as a model Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth Lloyd’s 1992 Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, which undertakes a project similar to Williams’s for terms such as “adaptation,” “natural selection,” and “fitness.” Keller and Lloyd have catalogued the utility of the keyword approach to historians and philosophers of science. Keywords, for them, serve as indicators of patterns of scientific meaning and of changes over time in the ways that particular scientific meanings have been structured. Attending to the multiple meanings of key terms provides a lens through which it is possible not only to understand better what is at issue in particular scientific debates but also to scrutinize the very structure of the arguments under debate. Such a lens enables an exploration of the historically evolving field of meanings from which these arguments draw and on which they depend.13

In line with Keller and Lloyd’s take on key terms in science, we hold that the “multiple meanings” of “life form” are fundamental to its prevalence in the life sciences: the term’s elasticity, its capacity to gesture toward senses and doctrines beyond itself, allows it to operate as a frame through which biological thinking can be worked out. If, as William Empson has explained, a keyword is a “compacted doctrine,” a form that compresses multiple, often divergent, meanings, then “life form” may be considered to embody a “capacious doctrine,” a term with a constitutive incompleteness, ready for use in working out fresh problems.14 If, as Alan Durant argued in his 2006 defense of Williams’s approach, the word “keyword” in the age of Google often summons up the sense of a “search” word, “life form” interestingly turns out to function as just that kind of scouting operator.15 We have selected our sources to draw attention to the curious history of a term that, while now so unassuming as to be the rhetorical equivalent of 21

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wallpaper—­overlooked and unquestioned—bears the residues of previous glosses. More than simply an exercise in etymology, however, this venture is an attempt to unearth how a concept undergoes multiple recalibrations and repurposings within shifting epistemological frames. “Life form” transforms as it is articulated in the registers of natural history, evolutionary biology, and, most recently, in dialogue with fields such as computer science and engineering. Rather than the term functioning as an easy answer to a conceptual problem, or set of problems, posed by different schools and eras of biological thinking, “life form” has, over the last two centuries, helped articulate new problems in biology, which have been addressed deductively, inductively, and abductively. Our keyword entry for “life form” (and its cousin, “life-­form” [more about the hyphen anon]) begins with the Oxford English Dictionary, which provides the following for “life-­form”: 1. Biol. A habit or vegetative form exhibited by any particular plant or which characterizes a group of plants. and 2. A living creature; any kind of living thing.16 The “vegetative form” to which the first OED definition refers is, in a rider to that entry, explicated with reference to the 1903 classificatory work of the Danish botanist Christen Raunkiær: “Various life-­form classifications have been proposed. That of C. Raunkiær (or a modification of his system) based upon the position of the buds relative to the soil surface during the unfavourable season is the one generally employed.” This classification system, aimed at sorting out plants, offers as examples of life-­forms such types as therophtyes (seed-­bearing annuals) and hydrophytes (aquatic plants, like water-­lilies). “Form” here follows from the habits of the plant (that is, its manner of growth and appearance). But “form” also immediately points to matters of classification and representation. These two notions of form—­as emergent with embodiment and as a tool of classification—­coil around one another in nineteenth-­century discussions about how an organism’s morphology might be affected by its surrounding environment and about how this might in turn guide possible classificatory schemes. This dual sense of form, as we will argue, shapes deductive, inductive, and abductive approaches to the question of how life takes form. The OED’s second definition not only points toward particular instances or embodiments of life, but also signals the capaciousness of the concept of life-­ form as such; in “any kind of living thing,” the emphasis is on “any.” But we must submerge ourselves more deeply in etymology, biology, and the history of natural history to detect lineages having to do with representation and classification as well as with the relation of organismic form to environment.17 “Life-­form” entered English from the German Lebensform, referring, according 22

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to the OED’s first usage quotation from 1899, to “groups of similar adaptational form [that] by no means coincide with natural families or groups of species.” From whence did this meaning arrive? LEBENSFORMEN: THE DEDUCTION OF LIVING FORM According to the Deutsches Wörterbuch of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Lebensform first appeared in German in 1838 in the Jenaer Literatur-­Zeitung: LEBENSFORM,  f.: die physische beschaffenheit der weltkörper und die auf denselben möglichen lebensformen [the physical properties of heavenly bodies and the life forms possible upon them]. Jenaer litt.-­zeitung 1838, no. 179 s. 468.

This extract suggests that physical circumstances might condition the space in which life forms manifest.18 But a quite different framing of Lebensform appeared in the German physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach’s Die Physiologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft (Physiology as a Science of Practical Experience), which was published from 1826 to 1840 and in which Burdach wrote, “The occurrence of new life forms [Lebensformen] is therefore not external, but is determined by inner life forces and grounded in life itself.”19 Where the 1838 Jenaer Literatur-­ Zeitung quotation situated life forms in external physical conditions, Burdach’s phrasing posited life forms as self-­organizing according to an inner principle.20 Burdach sought to render visible this principle by training his students in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s disciplined, aesthetic, perception, such that “living forms and their interconnections become evident in his [the student’s] soul.”21 Such vitalism, which first appeared around 1790, was one current in the German biology of the Romantic period.22 German materialist vitalism, tuned as it was to aesthetic considerations, also leaned strongly on Immanuel Kant’s conception of form.23 Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment (1790) considered the pleasure taken in observing a living thing to derive in part from perceiving a purposiveness in its form.24 Johannes Müller (1801–­1858), a comparative anatomist whose students included Helmholtz, Haeckel, and Agassiz, used Lebensform in 1840, toward the end of a handbook on human physiology, offering “Concluding Remarks on the Variations of Development in Animal and Human Life Forms on Earth” (Schlussbemerkungen über die Entwickelungsvariationen der tierischen und menschlichen Lebensformen auf der Erde). Tim Lenoir notes that “we learn from Helmholtz’s correspondence that in order to understand Johannes Müller’s lectures fully his spare moments had to be filled with reading Kant.”25 Müller’s conception of Lebensform was characterized by a conviction that biological systems behaved mechanically and could be subjected to analytic tools developed in chemistry and physics, even as teleological principles might still be applied effectively where mechanistic accounts failed. Within this Kantian formulation, Lebensform was 23

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something that informed itself. Evelyn Fox Keller describes the Kantian organism as “a bounded body capable not only of self-­regulation, self-­steering, but also, and perhaps most important, of self-­formation and self-­generation”; it is both an organized and a self-­organizing being.26 Goethe’s morphology, inspired by and in dialogue with Kant was animated by a demand to use disciplined perception, at once empirical and aesthetic, to uncover the laws behind pure forms—­what Goethe called Urformen. Such disciplined perception would permit a view of plant and animal form as “derivations from an ideal type.”27 As Joan Steigerwald has argued, Goethe sought to arrive at “objective knowledge of nature by discerning the ideal archetypes giving necessity to the transformation of form.”28 His colleague and sometime competitor Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller put front and center the deductive ethos that might motivate such an approach, arguing for a practice in which one would “start from abstract a priori principles, and deduce laws that are then to be demonstrated in the particular.”29 Lebensform thus bears an inheritance from Kant and Goethe (though this exact word was used by neither) in which form is aesthetic, self-­determining, and teleological, as well as (generously assuming sufficient knowledge of the mechanism of its formation) deductively predictable (even if the favored apprehensional approach was often a combination of the intuitive and empirical). For many thinkers, the address from which such form was ultimately derived was left open; it could be in some numinous world soul or latent in Newtonian nature.30 This open-­endedness remains a defining quality of life form, contributing to its continuing theoretical persuasiveness and semantic potency. The focus on the aesthetics of life comes next into tension with attention to how Lebensformen might emerge from organisms’ habits and habitation. Lebens­formen appeared in an 1836 article by the anatomist Theodor Bischoff in the Archiv fur Anatomie, Physiologie, und Wissenschaftliche Medicin, a journal edited by Müller. This article, which was concerned with the structure of crocodile hearts (!), had Bischoff writing: “This strange imperfection of hematopoiesis [blood formation], which in the class of amphibians is caused by forms of blood circulation, must have a direct relation to their whole life form [Lebensform], and is probably related a great deal to their habitation in various media, in air and in water, as Professor Weber has explained in detail.”31 Lebensform does double duty here: it refers to amphibianness as a general category, but also points toward the relation of an organism to its environment. That relation—­ of habit, habitation, and medium to the poiesis of the organism—­becomes key to refinements of Lebensform, in which form is not simply a manifestation of an aesthetic impulse but takes shape with respect to material circumstances. The central figure here is the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Alexander von Humboldt was influenced by the scholarship of his older brother, Wilhelm, a philosopher close to Goethe and Schiller. Wilhelm von 24

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Humboldt’s articulation of Lebensform, in a historical philology lecture at the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin in 1824, had it as synonymous with custom: “Yet the common parlance includes (admittedly in one life form less than another) the whole population, and what has influenced one part, will be acquired collaterally by all.”32 Lebensform was here used in a sense best translated as “form of life” or “way of life” (i.e., custom or culture).33 Alexander von Humboldt extended the notions of Lebensform as custom or habit to the organic world. Humans and other animals were influenced by their physical environments in a fashion similar to plants: “A savage’s state is primarily modified by the Nature of the climate and soil he inhabits. It is these modifications alone that distinguish the first inhabitants of Greece from shepherd Bedouins, and from Canadian Indians.”34 For plants, as the historian of biology Robert Richards notes, Humboldt “regarded the different species and subspecies of plants as playing variations on  .  .  . constant themes. The same types, he thought, would be found in similar environmental conditions (for instance, of temperature, elevation, and moisture) across the globe.”35 At the same time, Humboldt did not abandon aesthetic commitments: “The discrimination of form, according to Humboldt, is an aesthetic task, not a classification done according to the usual criteria of botanical systems, such as that of Linnaeus. Rather, we must be guided by the painterly eye, which highlights the distribution of leaves, the forms of stems and branches.”36 Humboldt brought into play the habitual, environmental conditioning of form, pulling aesthetic abstractions down to earth, beginning a shift from deductive to inductive thinking about life forms. Such a hybrid definition of form shaped his “Essay on the Geography of Plants” (1805): “It is in the absolute beauty of forms, in harmony and contrast, that the assemblages are created of what we call the ‘natural character’ of this or that region.”37 Humboldt’s Kosmos, written from 1843 to 1844 and published in 1845, directly imported the word Lebensform into an accounting of the nonhuman world; he wrote of “the microscopic life-­forms of the Antarctic seas.”38 Humboldt influenced the thinking of Charles Darwin, who read Humboldt on his voyage on the Beagle and took to heart Humboldt’s conception of the environmental shaping of form. Ernst Haeckel in 1866 and 1868 used Lebensform in a broad biological sense while maintaining Wilhelm von Humboldt’s use of the term to refer to custom, in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General morphology of organisms) and Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation): “This differentiation or separation, this continually increasing divergence of the human character and human life form expresses itself by the ever more pronounced and ongoing division of labor for individuals.”39 In Morphologie, which is considered to be Haeckel’s theoretical masterpiece, he wrote: “All life forms, even the highest and most complex among them, can arise only by this means—­through gradual differentiation and transmutations of the simplest and lowest forms of existence.”40 These texts were hugely popular—­Schöpfungsgeschichte went 25

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through twelve German editions and by World War I had exposed more readers to Darwinian theory than had Darwin’s own books.41 Lebensform also shows up in Haeckel’s 1899 Die Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe), though it always appears as “einzellige Lebensform” (single-­celled life-­form).42 “Forms of life” appears in a 1904 English adaptation of Haeckel’s text, entitled The Wonders of Life.43 Haeckel, a student of Müller, was an admirer of Goethe’s aesthetic theory of morphology, but he fused it with a Darwinian commitment to the notion of natural selection as the sculptor of form—­indeed, Haeckel dedicated the second volume of Generelle Morphologie to Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck, the “three founders of descent theory.”44 Haeckel faulted Darwin, however, for focusing too much on inorganic environmental determinants of form and for attending insufficiently to the ways living things shaped one another: “In order to comprehend truly the tremendous importance that the struggle for existence possesses for the formation of the entire organic nature . . . one must not conceptually extract the particular life-­forms and merely observe them. . . . Rather one must compare these life-­forms in their collective entirety.”45 Insofar as Haeckel retained something of Goethe’s intuition about archetypes, he sited those archetypes not in an ideal world but in the past. His dictum that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” located archetypes in a kind of evolutionary memory.46 Haeckel’s elaborate lithographs of radiolaria—­which he termed “art forms in nature”—­suggest a secondary meaning of form, referring to the precision and geometrical discipline he discerned in the organisms he illustrated.47 LIFE-­FORMS: THE INDUCTION OF LIVING FORM During the mid-­nineteenth century, “life form” became increasingly common in English. The earliest published instance of “life form” we have been able to find appeared in 1844 in The New Age, Concordium Gazette, and Temperance Advocate, where it was used not in the context of biology but instead to refer to studies of animal magnetism: “The Magnetist looks to the scriptures for confirmation for all that he advances when he says that the Deity is working three organizations—­the physical organism, the intellectual organism, and the Divine organism; and again, when he declares that the physical Life form has its senses, the Light intellectual form has its clairvoyance, and the Divine Love form its conscientious sensibility.”48 However, “life forms” does not enter common parlance for two more decades, after which it begins to be used regularly in journals such as The American Naturalist, where the word appeared in at least eleven separate articles between 1878 and 1898. An early use of “life form” in English came in 1869 in the Anthropological Review: “But geology bears unflinching witness to the fact, that the progression of life forms has not taken place by consecutive steps of ascent.”49 Indeed, there are many appearances of “life form” or “life-­form” prior to the OED’s mention.50 In these mentions, “life form” almost always is embedded in an account of descent with modification. Charles 26

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Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection is the overwhelming frame of reference.51 Prior to the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, allied terms circulated during Victorian arguments over the nature of geological and biological change, in which participants debated the merits of uniformitarianism, catastrophism, and transformism. In such discussions, “forms of life” referenced extant and extinct organic forms, pointing toward as-­yet undiscovered fossilized forms of life and (in early examples of abductive biological thinking) even future or imagined organisms.52 Although Victorian thinkers did not use “life forms,” “forms of life” was commonly used and suggests a similar conceptual niche in which life references its own limits.53 The capaciousness of “forms of life” served especially well those arguing for the possible limitless plenitude of living things and those speculating on processes that generated biological forms and their transmutations. In his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Robert Chambers in 1844 used “forms of life” and “organic forms” to speak to the diversity of biological matter, both in current and earlier eras: “These facts clearly show how all the various organic forms of our world are bound up in one—­how a fundamental unity pervades and embraces them all, collecting them, from the humblest lichen up to the highest mammifer, in one system.”54 The geologist Adam Sedgwick, who was one of the most forceful detractors of Vestiges, countered that the hypothesis “that the animal kingdom, including both the extinct and living forms of life, might be arranged in some preconceived order of natural development” was “but a physical romance, and a work of imagination” lacking any “base in true induction.”55 The years between the publication of Chambers’s Vestiges and Darwin’s Origin saw the “plurality of worlds” debate, an argument over the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Both sides of the argument deployed “forms of life” in reasoning about the limits of biology—­and reached opposite conclusions. William Whewell, a liberal Anglican and prominent Victorian scholar best known for coining the term “scientist” in 1833, maintained that life did not exist on other planets; he considered his position both a scientific and a moral one. A vocal proponent of Baconian induction, Whewell believed that gleaning general principles from particulars was a means of discerning how God’s laws governed nature. Belief in extraterrestrial life, Whewell contended, required that “[we] reject the laws which govern the known forms of life, in order that we may be able to maintain the possibility of some unknown form in a different planet.”56 To illustrate the dubiousness of suspending the laws discovered to determine known terrestrial biological adaptations, he imagined, as patently absurd, conscious vaporous creatures populating the surface of Saturn (an abductive move that, as we will see, will be just fine with astrobiologists reasoning from as-­yet unknown but possible cases). The Scottish evangelical David Brewster argued acrimoniously against Whewell, in favor of biological plenitude, of a universe filled with life. For 27

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Brewster, the diversity of life on Earth, and the voluminousness of space, pointed to the existence of intelligent life elsewhere.57 He suggested that the application of the comparative anatomist Richard Owen’s theory of vertebrate archetypes to “the possible forms of life in other planets possesses a more general interest, and forms an entirely new, and we think, irresistible argument for a plurality of worlds.”58 The following year, a Unitarian divine elbowed his way into the debate in a series of lectures titled Astro-­Theology, in which he speculated that “While the grand analogy is unbroken, inasmuch as gravitation, light and heat act by universal laws, the intensity varying in a known ratio to distance; that varied distance itself changes the result so greatly, as to forbid us to adhere too closely to the definite forms of life with which we are familiar on this Earth, in our reverent attempt to people those distant orbs.”59 In such arguments, the conceptual elasticity of “forms of life” allowed Chambers, Whewell, and Brewster to designate the conceptual category of life even as their referents outpaced themselves. In the twentieth century, “life forms” would again be tuned to the fantastic and fanciful morphologies that creatures might exhibit on worlds other than this one. In 1878, the British behavioral psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan wrote, “It is enough to state that it is almost universally believed by those competent to give an opinion, that all life forms have come into being by a process of evolution from primitive organic germs.”60 Morgan was a student of T. H. Huxley, who also had a fondness for the term “life-­form,” which appears several times in his essays. In the address of the president of the Geological Society in 1870, Huxley mentioned “our knowledge of paleozoic rocks and the life-­forms which they contain.”61 It is notable that Huxley was fluent in German, having translated the work of the German vital materialist Karl Ernst von Baer into English. How did Lebensform make it into English as “life-­form” or “life form”? It is possible that Louis Agassiz, who worked with Müller and wrote in German, English, French, and Latin, may have imported, or at least popularized, Lebens­form as “life-­form” in the United States. Agassiz, whose scientific approach was influenced by the Naturphilosophie in which he had trained, moved to the United States in 1846, after having studied in Germany and France with Müller, Humboldt, and Cuvier. Alpheus Packard, Agassiz’s student and fellow scientist at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, used “life-­forms” in 1885: “There is a strange commingling of life-­forms in the Straits of Belle Isle” and also in 1888, arguing against the theory of natural selection: “This point is one which the writer has also made . . . holding that it is an important objection to the theory of natural selection, the very nature of which involves the existence of a world already stocked with life forms.”62 Writing about Agassiz in The American Naturalist (a journal Packard edited) at the close of the nineteenth century, Packard described Agassiz’s theory of “embryonic,” “synthetic,” and “prophetic” types of organisms, twice using “life-­forms” to describe his mentor’s work.63 In Agassiz’s Contributions to the Natural History of the United 28

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States of America, “life-­form” does not appear but is nonetheless implied: “The combination, in many extinct types, of characters which, in later ages, appear disconnected in different types, exhibits thought, prophetic thought, foresight; combinations of thought preceding their manifestation in living forms.”64 This is exactly the position against which Darwin argued: “life forms” were not expressions of an abstract archetype and certainly not emergent from an internal teleological force; rather, any such archetype as there might be was a material ancestor. Robert Richards has remarked, “The generalized archetype of the vertebrates did not lie hidden away as an idea in the mind of God; rather, it was the form of a creature that walked the earth many generations ago.”65 Darwin argued inductively (though speculatively), from data he and others collected, that a process of descent with modification could be inferred as the force giving form to organisms—­form that was transmitted down generations. In Origin, Darwin wrote of the “general succession in the forms of life.”66 At the end of the first edition of Origin, though, he said that “probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed,” a phrasing that permits readers to imagine material form as separate from a life force.67 The reader will have noticed that the English “life form” appears in two ways, with and without the hyphen: “life-­forms” and “life forms.” “Life-­form,” with the hyphen, may be an attempt to preserve the word’s German origin. But also, by the opening of the twentieth century, “life-­form” began to have a specific meaning in botany (as, recall, a classification “based upon the position of the buds relative to the soil surface during the unfavourable season” [OED]). Christen Raunkiær’s technical meaning of “life-­form” is still in strong use in botany—­and employed a good deal in invasion biology to fix on the adaptational reproductive characteristics of invasive, or “alien,” species, keeping alive the biogeographic meaning pioneered by Humboldt. The OED credits Raunkiær for bringing “life-­form” into common usage, despite the fact that Lebensform and “life-­form” had been in use for about one hundred years and fifty years at the time that Raunkiær published Planterigets Livsformer of deres Betydning for Geografien.68 Nonetheless, the primary botanical sense of “life-­form” as it is used today is associated with the ideas of Raunkiær on the relation of plants to their environments, which he first presented in 1903 at a meeting of the Danish Botanical Society.69 Raunkiær owed much of his theory of life-­forms to Alexander von Humboldt, whom he credited in the French translation of his article for his phytogeographic theory in which a plant acts as “the recorder of the biological value of any climate.”70 Once imported from German into English, “life-­form” lost, along with its hyphen (which it consistently retains only in botany), much of the reference to deductive reasoning that had accompanied it when deployed in teleo-­mechanist discourse and other circles of German Romanticism. As “life” came to modify “form,” rather than being designated by form’s self-­generation, “life form” became the subject of Darwinian attention, and “form” referred to particular 29

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arrangements and shapes of living things. And, interestingly, “life form,” without the hyphen, permits “life” and “form” to signify independent concepts. Where, for Darwin, the “forms” at stake in his theory of evolution were species, the phytogeographic life-­forms of Humboldt, and later of Raunkiær, were emergent from particular habits, not, as with Darwin’s species, their genealogy or phylogeny. The form of life—­whether apprehended as materializing in species (durable, but changeable genealogical kinds) or as sorted into types occupying spaces of physical, metabolic, or ecological possibility (e.g. photosynthesizers, deep-­sea dwellers)—­thus crystallized with respect to different kinds of causal ontologies, different fields of possibility. Indeed, we will show in the next section how, in the twentieth century, possibility was amplified to become itself an object of theory; life forms not as archetypes, but as future types. “LIFE FORMS, WHEREVER THEY ARE”: THE ABDUCTION OF LIVING FORM The objects and phenomena to which the notion of the life form refers are framed by conceptual commitments. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, for example, offered an account of how living form materialized out of what we would now call environmental, or ecological, dynamics. In the twentieth century, a variety of attempts to expand biological theory sought to amplify explanations of living form by locating such accounts in the more universal territories of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.71 While such forays into what came to be called “theoretical biology” never fully reformatted the dominant empirical and experimental tradition of biology, they brought into relief how the “form” in “life forms” came to be epistemologically extended into the realm of the conjectural. Theoretical biology can help us understand the ampleness of the “any” in the OED’s second definition of life-­form, “any living thing” (and we write here of that genre of theoretical biology in dialogue with physics, chemistry, and geometry rather than of those versions occupied with mathematical models of population genetics, sex ratios, or selection72). Together with science fiction–­fueled speculations about life on other worlds—­about which more in a moment—­theoretical biology marks out the ways that “form” came unmoored from “life” as the two words, having lost their manacling hyphen, began circulating independently of one another. Indeed, theoretical biologists rarely—­if ever—­mention life forms at all, choosing instead to refer merely to “form,” which is often used interchangeably with “organization,” “morphology,” and “pattern.” The concept of life form has subsequently been generalized to include purely theoretical, even fictional, instances. Theoretical biology is generally understood to have begun with the work of D’Arcy Thompson in On Growth and Form, in 1917. There, Thompson argued that the shape of organisms was both constrained and shaped by physics, by a mathematics or geometry of nature; embryology might learn much from 30

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studying crystal growth patterns. The forces of natural selection and mutation alone could not account for the diversity and unity of forms of living things. Thompson wrote of “mechanical phenomena which are profoundly associated with Life, and inseparable from our understanding of Growth and Form” and urged that organisms be understood as objects, writing that “the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces.’ ”73 The developmental biologist John Tyler Bonner noted that Thompson “showed that to a remarkable degree the form of animals and plants could be described in physical and mathematical terms; nature subscribed to the sound principles of engineering.”74 As Evelyn Fox Keller summarizes the matter, Thompson thought that “families of animal forces are bound by an underlying algebraic structure.”75 In the end, Thompson was less concerned with the empirical world than with the logic behind it—­and, indeed, with what that logic might predict. He wrote less of the empirical than about what was, in his words, “theoretically imaginable.”76 Thompson had many successors—­biologists who trained less attention on selection and heredity and more on the manifestation of organic bodies with respect to the physics of the world. C. H. Waddington in 1957 wrote of “epigenetic landscapes”—­representations of the space of possibility for organismic embodiment, spaces occupied and realized when genotype is translated into phenotype. Life form, in this moment, lost its foundation in living material, such that living form came to be interpreted as just one instantiation of form more generally. Inquiring as to the essential mechanism driving morphogenesis at the 1968 symposium “Towards a Theoretical Biology,” which he had organized, Waddington provocatively contended that the question of form in biology had been given undue importance “because of a confusion between some of the numerous contexts in biology in which that very general word ‘form’ is used”: “If one could discover a ‘secret’ of form, that would have a good claim to be one of the secrets of life, and a major one at that; whereas if form arises by quite different processes in different instances, can it really be so fundamental after all?”77 Form, in that moment, became programmatic: it became a formalism describing the mechanisms by which biological structure, often conceived after the rise of the genetic code as purely informatic, is generated. As such, form came to be only conceptually useful as far as it was predictive: Waddington largely dismissed form because “in all realms other than the molecular, biological forms seem to me to originate as consequences of biological activities, rather than being primary causes of them.”78 Between the 1970s and 1990s, theoretical biologists of different stripes struggled to provide a universal account of life premised on self-­organized form. Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s 1974 theory of autopoiesis saw the key to organismic integrity and form in the dynamics of self-­organization.79 In such works as 1994’s How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, the developmental biologist Brian Goodwin sought to get at the question of “why life is capable of such diversity and beauty of forms while at the same time revealing an 31

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underlying unity.”80 Reviving the spirit of Thompson, Goodwin argued that “organisms can take any form, have any color, and eat any food, subject only to very broad constraints that are basically due to physical and chemical laws.”81 Goodwin maintained that organisms are “irreducible entities that are engaged in the process of generating forms and transforming them by means of their particular qualities of action and agency, or their causal powers”; “organisms express their natures through the particular qualities of their form in space and time.”82 In The Origins of Order, the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman wrote that scientists must ask “whether the morphologies of organisms to some extent represent the ‘self-­organized,’ or natural, forms readily constructed via known developmental mechanisms.”83 All of these writers wondered if biological theories of form can be grounded in more universal, less contingent processes—­and whether biology might thereby become a more universal science. The apotheosis of such a universalistic approach can be found in the computer-­simulation-­driven field of Artificial Life.84 The founder, Chris Langton, claimed that Artificial Life is about “the attempt to abstract the logical form of life in different material forms,” a definition that holds that formal and material properties can be usefully partitioned and that what matters is form.85 Langton’s declaration that life “is a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of matter itself ” offers an extreme Platonism that opens up the possibility that life might manifest in any material at all, anywhere, including cyberspace.86 Langton made the abductive quality of this kind of reasoning explicit when he said, “It’s very difficult to build general theories about what life would be like anywhere in the universe and whatever it was made out of, when all we have to study is the unique example of life that exists here on Earth. So, what we have to do—­perhaps—­is the next best thing, which is to create far simpler systems in our computers.”87 Continuing in the same vein, Langton merged abduction and construction, claiming that “since it is quite unlikely that alien life forms will present themselves to us for study in the near future, our only option is to try to create alternative life-­forms ourselves.”88 Langton, who was trained as a physicist (and holds an undergraduate degree in anthropology), emblematizes the move in twentieth-­century biology toward attempts to create a grand theoretical frame for biology, a frame that can be true, just as physics is supposed to be, anywhere in the universe. It is that universalism, in which life reaches toward forms as yet unencountered, that permits today’s astrobiologists to extend the concept of life forms into the unknown, to seek out life forms, as the National Research Council has it, “Wherever They Are.” It is this same open-­ ended deferral of meaning that renders the concept of life forms so generative for science fiction writers. An influential and epistemologically diagnostic genre of writing in which the form in life form has been universalized, then, is science fiction. The Science Fiction Citation project of the OED contains quotations going back to 1931, notably, from Amazing Stories: “I have thought of it at length. It is disgusting. 32

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Compelled to traffic with an alien form of life!”89 An earlier use of “life-­form” in science fiction can be found in H. P. Lovecraft’s 1929 short story, “The Dunwich Horror,” which describes the body of the “teratologically fabulous” teenager, Wilbur Whateley: “It could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-­forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.”90 This use of “life-­form” in science fiction combines the aesthetic, morphological uses of the term—­“ideas of aspect and contour”—­with notions of life as materializing in physical spaces of possibility (“the three known dimensions”). “Life form” in twentieth-­century science fiction has since become so commonplace as to risk cliché. The term appears multiple times in the stories of the SF novelists Douglas Adams, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick, even making an appearance in a variant of the classic Star Trek prologue in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, summarizing the starship Enterprise’s “ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations.”91 The uses in science fiction resonate with that of the National Research Council that opened our essay, in which Humboldtian concerns with materiality (now less about phytogeography than about the sorts of solvents in which life might thrive) fuse with Lovecraftian musings about aesthetic, transdimensional possibility. CODA: THE CONSTRUCTION OF LIVING FORM The latest research on life forms is no longer simply deductive, inductive, or abductive. Rather, it adds an element that we may describe as constructive. Scientists in the recently chartered field of synthetic biology seek to build biological parts that can be assembled into complex biological devices and systems. They justify their attempt to rebuild living systems from scratch on the basis of two arguments: that life may be made “better” through its redesign according to engineering principles, and that life itself may be better understood by fabricating viable systems de novo than by observing ready-­made living systems.92 The earliest use of “life form” we have been able to find in connection with synthetic biology came in 2004, the year of the first synthetic biology conference, which was held at MIT. That usage appears in a 2004 quotation from J. Craig Venter in Science: “ ‘We’d like to be building life forms from first principles,’ says Venter, ‘but it’s kind of hard when you don’t know all the first principles.’ ”93 Much of synthetic biology is future oriented, abductively anticipating what sorts of things could theoretically be fabricated in the near future, once first principles are known: news reports announce “Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms” and bloggers declare (abductively) that “synthetic biologists are the people who are going to build new life forms.”94 That life in this field is treated as a coherent entity, despite the fact that what is at stake is its material reconstruction, attests to the capaciousness of the concept of life form to designate conjectural possibilities that nonetheless stabilize present kinds. 33

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How can we understand the life of “form” in the trajectory we have traced here? A 2008 issue of Representations, devoted to the question of form and formalisms—­primarily as a concern in literary analysis, cultural history, and aesthetics—­provides a starting point. As Thomas Laqueur suggested in his contribution, “Form in Ashes,” at stake in discussions of form are questions about how to approach comparison across cases and how to find calibration across realms of discourse and practice. Moreover, he argued, formalist approaches have often sought to pin down isomorphisms: “an ‘identity’ or ‘similarity’ or ‘exact correspondence’ or ‘close relationship’ of form between seemingly different contemporaneous  or temporally distant domains.” Laqueur pointed out that the term isomorphism “comes from chemistry and geology,” in which “different but isomorphic  substances crystallize in the same ‘form,’ or from mathematics, where isomorphism describes the identity ‘of form . . . between two or more groups,’ thereby authorizing certain operations.”95 Laqueur named Weber’s claim of an elective affinity between Calvinist Protestantism and capitalism as an operation animated and authorized by an argument of isomorphism. What operations are authorized by the isomorphisms set in place by the term “life form”? The primary operations, of course, are abstraction and generalization—­ aimed at claiming that disparate living things share form as such. More grandly, the claim of isomorphism across diverse biological entities points to the hope that it may be possible to craft an encompassing theory of the biological, one that may, however, be ever out of reach, ever multiplying, and ever escaping.

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C H A P TER 3

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE, UNDERWATER

THE HISTORIES SCIENTISTS TELL ABOUT their fields exhibit an assortment of approaches—­biographical, triumphalist, revisionist, and more. Today’s synthetic biologists, to take one example, often imagine that their field has no history. Synthetic biologists sometimes suggest that their dedication to creating life de novo from molecular parts arrives only from their own inspired work, and only, in an ancillary way, from, say, metaphors and models imported from modular computer programming.1 Among the Artificial Life scientists with whom I conducted anthropological fieldwork in the 1990s, the story was quite the opposite. These researchers were keen to find both recent and longue durée lineages and legitimations for their attempts to replicate life in silico. While conducting that ethnographic work at the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I heard time and again the history of Artificial Life, a field named by analogy to Artificial Life and dedicated to using computer models to understand—­some said synthesize—­living things. The history usually started somewhere in the 1980s with the field’s founder, the physicist Christopher Langton, rediscovering the 1943 work of Warren Mc­Culloch and Walter Pitts on neural net–­like models, the posthumously published 1949 results of the computer scientist John von Neumann on self-­reproducing automata, and the 1969 investigations of the computer scientists Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert on “perceptrons,” mini-­algorithms for classifying computer inputs. Langton dubbed the latter two of these research programs the “common ancestors” of both Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life.2 I encountered many stories that took this history back further, too. Langton’s introductory essay in the proceedings of the first Artificial Life conference, held 35

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in 1987 at Los Alamos National Laboratories, positions ancient Egyptian water clocks, Hero of Alexandria’s first-­century Pneumatics, and Jacques de Vaucanson’s eighteenth-­century mechanical duck at the “roots” of Artificial Life.3 The roboticist Hans Moravec’s contribution to the same volume frames the human creation of artificial life on a somewhat grander scale, as a culmination of the “evolution of terrestrial intelligence,”4 and Doyne Farmer and Alletta d’A. Belin’s “Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution,” in the proceedings of the second Artificial Life conference, pitches the advent of Artificial Life as a hallmark of the phase shift from the Darwinian evolution of genetic information to the speedier Lamarckian evolution of cultural information.5 Such narratives allowed Artificial Life scientists to ground their claims for the field not only in a venerable intellectual lineage, but also in a genealogy—­sometimes even an explicitly evolutionary one—­leading up to their own endeavor. GENEALOGIES, BIOGRAPHIES, AND ARCHAEOLOGIES OF SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS In this chapter, I offer a commentary on this practice of finding genealogies for Artificial Life—­and for scientific endeavors and fields more generally. Such a search for ancestors carries acute historiographical and epistemological dangers. If, for Artificial Life, one simply claims that the notion of synthesizing “life” can be traced back to stories of Rabbi Löw’s Golem or to the homunculi of the medieval alchemist Paracelsus, for example, one overlooks the quite recent origins, in the early 1800s, of the very idea of a field of “biology” as such, the field that has “life” as its animating object.6 If one offers an account of medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern automata as early forms of “artificial life” without attention to the language that described these objects during their own period, one might easily mistake the family resemblance to, say, present-­day robots for direct family relation or even descent. In other words, as Lorraine Daston tells us, “A history of the word without the thing risks degenerating into etymology; a history of the thing without the word risks anachronism.”7 Objects—­like the scientific object of “life” with which Artificial Life has been concerned—­come into being as at once material and semiotic entities. Biography, the term Daston has proposed,8 might serve as a better concept to capture this process of coming-­ into-­being; scouting out putative genealogies risks essentializing scientific objects and finding ancestors everywhere one looks. But of course biography—­the writing of a life, after all—­might get would-­be genealogists into other hot waters when it comes to documenting the coming-­ into-­being of a concept like artificial life. As Michel Foucault argued in The Archaeology of Knowledge, obsessions with genesis can fool us into imagining clear historico-­genetic lines culminating in consistent objects. Moreover, a fixation on genesis and genealogy results in “the analysis of silent births, of distant correspondences, of permanences that persist beneath apparent changes, of slow 36

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formations that profit from innumerable blind complicities, of those total figures that gradually come together and suddenly condense into the fine point of the work.”9 Now, one could of course object to Foucault and say that any history is inevitably teleological and that keeping the glimmering multiplicity of possible histories constantly in focus is an impossible task. But I want to suggest that the task of keeping origins productively out of focus might be especially necessary when dealing with such a polyvalent concept as artificial life. In On the Origin of Objects, the philosopher of computing Brian Cantwell Smith offers a theory of ontology-­in-­the-­wild that is organized—­happily, for my purposes—­around the coming-­into-­being of computational objects. Smith argues that computer programs’ very existence is completely enmeshed in our social, material, and linguistic world, and that how disk drives, windows programs, file systems, and RAM caches work is the result of many scientific, cultural, and economic decisions.10 To treat computers as entities that can harbor life ignores the work and decisions that have produced them, labor that may not have a single originary moment. “Life” in silico is an object that emerges at the intersection of a heterogeneity of practices—­in taxonomy, molecular biology, and computer science, for starters, and probably also in cinema, biomedical imagings of “life,” and psychedelic culture (many Artificial Life scientists use their 1960s hallucinogenic drug experiences as analogies for the tuned-­in experience that permits them to see “life” on their screens). The making of computers as tools is also supported by a vast political economy of labor—­of people, often in marginalized social positions, working to make computer chips and to dispose of the toxic wastes consequent to computer manufacture.11 Silicon life is not, as Moravec and others would have it, simply the spirit of evolutionary history made digital. If “life” is a fact on which biology is made, it is one of the sort that the cultural historian Mary Poovey wrote of in her argument about the rise of the very idea of the fact. In her book, A History of the Modern Fact, Poovey insisted “that texts and events generate effects in multiple domains, even those distant from the domain a writer intended to affect.”12 Artificial Life has many histories, not all of which are about vitality, or even machines. I think Foucault’s archaeological method is congenial to the telling of these histories and allows us not to mistake one story for the true tale of artificial life. Foucault’s archaeology does not lapse into genealogy and does not try to restore “original” meaning, for it recognizes that every history is a rewriting, a “regulated transformation of what has already been written.”13 As an ethnographer, I find this approach has the added benefit of preserving something of the polyglot ways that Artificial Life scientists themselves have told their history. Archaeologies are always partial and interested, of course.14 And what I propose here will be a very shallow dig, one whose aims are perhaps more ethnographic and philosophical than historical. I want to focus on the time depth—­just back into the 1990s, really—­during which Artificial Life scientists 37

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begin to make the large claim that computer simulations could be understood as media capable of hosting life in silico. More narrowly, I want to center my attention on simulations that feature visual interfaces through which viewers are invited to “see” into virtual universes and, more narrowly still, those that offer artificial life forms visible through the computer screen understood as a kind of virtual aquarium. I will argue that “life” surfaces in such simulations as an ontologically and epistemologically liminal—­and therefore, to people interested in the boundary object that artificial life forms necessarily represent, as a particularly persuasive—­object. If the reader will follow me deeper into the metaphor of archeology, what I am interested in here is a sort of underwater archaeology of recent Artificial Life—­an archaeology that operates though the remote sensing of its object, operating something like SONAR, using sound echoes to draw a portrait of an inaccessible object, an object partially obscured by the medium through which the representational apparatus travels, an object that is remote from direct theoretical touch.15 ARTIFICIAL WATERWORLDS In the title of his widely read 1994 book, The Garden in the Machine, the philosopher of Artificial Life Claus Emmeche meant to call attention to the ways ideas about “nature” had been imported into the ecology-­minded computer simulations of Artificial Life.16 Such creations as the game SimLife, he suggested, offered a kind of green Edenic space in the machine, a zone that computer users could imagine as ready to be populated with digital organisms. Conceiving computers as spaces within which a surrogate, digital “nature” can reside, it turns out, has many historical moorings. The historian Peter Galison has offered that the 1940s invention of Monte Carlo methods at Los Alamos National Laboratories was a moment when computer simulations came to occupy a liminal place between theory and experiment. Monte Carlo methods were computational recipes developed to investigate patterns of neutron diffusion, subatomic patterns that could not be predicted using deterministic methods in mathematics. Monte Carlo methods depended on random numbers to generate dynamics in computer simulations, and, eventually, scientists came to give the “data” generated by simulations the same epistemic status as data from “real” experiments.17 On a deeper level, these simulations—­those using pseudorandom numbers as starting points for the emulation of physical processes—­could be seen, as Galison put it, to share a “fundamental affinity” with “the statistical underpinnings of the world itself.”18 Galison summarizes it this way: “The computer began as a ‘tool’—­an object for the manipulation of machines, objects, and equations. But bit by bit (byte by byte), computer designers deconstructed the notion of a tool itself as the computer came to stand not for a tool, but for nature itself.”19 I want to extend this historical analysis with an observation from symbolic anthropology. When computers came to have monitors, and particularly when 38

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the latter began to display computer graphics representing the unfolding of programmed procedures, the idea that computers contained “worlds” in which life might emerge was provided with a visually persuasive rhetorical armature.20 Further, those simulations using the computer screen as a “window” into those other worlds had consequential effects on how Artificial Life scientists would eventually come to “see” life in computers. I would like to look more closely at those simulations that fashion the computer as a kind of fish tank into which users can peer to see artificial life forms swimming about. Let me begin with a canonical artifact in this genre: Demetri Terzopoulos, Xiaoyuan Tu, and Radek Grzeszczuk’s simulation of fish locomotion, written up in “Artificial Fishes with Autonomous Locomotion, Perception, Behavior, and Learning in a Simulated World.”21 I first saw a presentation of this model at the fourth conference on Artificial Life in 1994. Terzopoulos enraptured the audience when he showed a video of simulated fishes acting out their programmed capacities to “swim” and “hunt.” His presentation ended with some of the simulations strung together in an extended (and soundtracked) parody of a Jacques Cousteau nature documentary. As the audience laughed at the video, and at the movements of the artificial fishes on the screen, it became clear that the “lifelike” quality of these simulations produced an unease and sense of wonder that was itself precisely the cultural resource that made these creatures seem lively. The laughter bespoke a set of unarticulated intuitions and untheorized thoughts about autonomy and agency. We were meant to see the computer screen as a kind of aquarium, itself a technology that has fashioned a way of manufacturing, thinking about, and seeing self-­contained ecologies. The aquarium is an exhibitionary technology that creates what Paul Edwards has called a “closed world.”22 Terzopoulos et al.’s simulation summoned forth for viewers a sense that worlds are just bigger aquaria or terraria. There were a host of technological features of computer simulations of this sort that were used to motivate belief in the fidelity of artificial life creations to real life. Most invisible perhaps was the fact that computer-­processing power permits images to unfold in what looks like real time, in the same temporality in which observers observe. Also important for fishy Artificial Life simulations—­ and Terzopoulos et al. are not alone: AquazoneTM is an Artificial Life toy that invites us to treat our computer as a fish tank—­is the very notion that viewers are watching “life” suspended in another medium. The Artificial Life scientist Walter Fontana, who in the 1990s paid careful attention to defining computers as worlds, told me in an e-­mail interview, “Computers are candidates for being worlds, not just describing them. The computer is not just a tool for fast calculations, sequence analysis, data base management, etc., the computer is a medium.”23 The contention that computers are media enables the evocation of the medium of water as a proxy for the alternative world that computers are meant to represent/materialize. Water is a persuasive rhetorical element in the visualization of these simulations. In addition to the symbolic association of 39

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water with life (which has water as the medium within which life began), there is the imagery of floating, about which more below. Wateriness showed up again in displays of digital organisms created by Karl Sims (see chapter 1 and figure 1.2), which were represented on his computer screen as inhabiting a three-­dimensional world and having boxes for arms, legs, torsos, and heads. During a video Sims showed at the same conference at which Terzopoulos spoke, his graphics presented a set of clumsy creatures moving through simulated “water,” movements governed by the “genetic programs” that governed each digital organism.24 This became more effective still when Sims sought to teach the creatures to “swim,” an activity associated with early lessons in many mammalian lives. In this simulation, images of artificial life forms swimming in the medium of an alternative world allowed the category and performance of “life” to “float” in front of our eyes. Life became both floating signifier and signified, something, to borrow from one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of the intransitive senses of “float,” that moves “unsteadily to and fro like an object on the surface of a liquid.” Such rhetorical productions of “floating” in Artificial Life are more than just rhetorical, more than just another way of speaking, as Artificial Life scientists often did, about the “emergence” of complex dynamics from simple systems and substrates. Emergence is meant to direct our attention to how low-­level dynamics produce processes that summon realities at higher levels for which interpretation—­the eye of the beholder—­is a crucial component. Floating shows us how the effect of empiricity can be produced through the medium of interpretation itself. BRAINS IN VATS AND MINDS IN WATERS Let me take a detour into a different realm of modeling, that of cognition in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Many practitioners see Artificial Life as growing from AI, even as Artificial Life means to leave behind the overly representational commitments that practitioners believe have hampered AI’s attempts to recreate intelligence in silico. Rather than thinking about Artificial Intelligence as “ancestral” to Artificial Life,25 I want to turn to the object of Artificial Intelligence—­intelligence—­and think about it underwater, using this meditation to think further about what it means to simulate life in floating worlds. My first example comes from the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s “brain in a vat” thought experiment—­which is canonical in the philosophy of mind—­and my second from John Lilly’s 1960s work on dolphin intelligence. In his 1978 essay “Where Am I?,”26 Dennett offered a thought experiment meant to help think through the possibility that a physically instantiated mind could exist separate from the body and, indeed, could be replicated in a computer. In the fable, his brain has been removed from his body and placed in a vat. He sees his brain, from the vantage point of his newly brainless body, suspended in water: “I peered through the glass. There, floating in what looked 40

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like ginger ale, was undeniably a human brain, though it was almost covered with printed circuit chips, plastic tubules, electrodes, and other parapher­ nalia.”27 Dennett then details successive disorientations as his brain is replaced by a digital double into which his consciousness can switch without signal (though he never describes how his digital double works! This for me makes the whole piece incoherent—­though diagnostic of the very model of mind that Dennett is advancing: one that holds that substance, while important, is trivial). Throughout this piece, Dennett’s consciousness floats, the briny substance in which his gray matter is floating becoming the literal medium for the rhetorical at-­sea-­ness of his mind. As he asks, “Where am I?” again and again, the answer slides around, suspended between the various material anchors—­ the vat, a computer, etc.—­into which his being has distributed. His “mind,” his “soul,” his “life” floats. At around the same time Artificial Intelligence was being consolidated as a named field of inquiry, the physician and psychoanalyst John Lilly was investigating nonhuman cognition in another world, that of the dolphin. Lilly’s unconventional work on the consciousness of cetaceans unfolded in the 1960s as he sought to communicate with dolphin partners. Lilly was engaged with his dolphin charges in what we might call an underwater version of the Turing test—­the “imitation game” that computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950 proposed might replace the question, Can a machine think?28 The Turing test simply asks whether a machine can pass as a human (either by producing written speech indistinguishable from a human’s or through some other performative test). In his 1962 essay “A Feeling of Weirdness,” Lilly wrote of “a very peculiar effect which we have noticed in the laboratory while working with the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncalus).”29 He reported that as he and his compatriots navigated the “rough sea of the unknown,” we began to have feelings which I believe are best described by the word “weirdness.” The feeling was that we were up against the edge of a vast uncharted region in which we were about to embark with a good deal of mistrust concerning the appropriateness of our own equipment. The feeling of weirdness came on us as the sounds of this small whale seemed more and more to be forming words in our own language. We felt we were in the presence of Something, or Someone, who was on the other side of a transparent barrier which up to this point we hadn’t even seen.30

According to Lilly, his dolphins began to repeat English phrases. Lilly gained access to the “mind in the waters” though tools that almost rhyme with Dennett’s “printed circuit chips, plastic tubules, electrodes, and other paraphernalia”31: “We first obtained the mimicry effect in 1957 by the use of electrodes implanted deep within the rewarding sites in the brain structures in these animals.”32 Such “direct” access was later complimented by the use of recording devices to replay 41

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dolphin sounds. Lilly and his colleagues began to replay tapes, speeding them up, slowing them down, and taking into account what happens to sounds underwater. Direct apprehension was aided by a mediation meant to reveal what the dolphins were “really” up to. Lilly was aware, of course, of the possibility that the communication that he heard emerged from his interpretive relationship with the dolphin. He did not allow that he might be imagining voices but did permit that his interpretative impulse contributed to (shaped) his observations. Later, Lilly would turn away from dolphins and move to self-­experiment in isolation tanks, where he would float, attempting to achieve the altered states that might give insight into what the mind was made of. Both Dennett and Lilly were accessing a process, and research object, that they believed floats elusively in water. “Mind” is suspended in relations of interpretation sited in a medium, liquid, that comes to stand for its ambiguities and the fluid relationships between the empirical and interpretive. Both experimental projects might usefully be classified as trysts with what the rhetorician Richard Doyle has called “wetwares,” “encounter[s] with flesh as a refrain, a repetition of algorithms or recipes of sufficient complexity that only through instantiation can they be experienced.”33 In both cases, “mind”—­however floaty—­cannot exist apart from its contingent meaty experience. Artificial Life has been no stranger to epistemological debates about the relation between the world and the agent that knows it.34 The vacillation between strong and weak claims in Artificial Life, between the idea that Artificial Life practice merely simulates or actually synthesizes vitality, organizes much of the field. Some of the strong claims for life in silico are grounded in the claim that properties like life, fire, and wetness exist only with respect to patterned relationships and that these can be suitably—­and genuinely—­instantiated in virtual worlds. As one Artificial Life scientist put it to me in an interview, “ ‘Life’ can only be defined WITH RESPECT TO A PARTICULAR PHYSICS.”35 On this view, processes can be alive, on fire, wet, or infectious (like computer viruses) with respect to the computational realm. The “wetness” suggested by simulations such as Terzopoulos’s supports the possibility that his artificial fishes have artificial life. They and the “life” they represent float—­to lift again from the OED—­”suspended in a liquid with freedom to move.” As such, the “wetness” of these entities is not the same as the wetness of the wetwares of which Doyle has written—­nor, it would seem, as those Jessica Riskin has documented in her paper “Eighteenth-­Century Wetwares.”36 Riskin tells us that in their construction of automata, the famous Jaquet-­Droz family used “lifelike materials such as leather, cork, and papier-­mâché to give their machines the softness, lightness, and pliancy of living things.”37 For in silico artificial life, being “lifelike” requires performative, not textural, simulation; after all, Langton canonically defined “life” as “a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of matter itself.”38 Intriguingly, however, the ghost of “matter itself ” is constantly summoned forth, and perhaps in its most surreptitious—­because invisible—­and 42

An Archaeology of Artificial Life

persuasive form when it appears as virtual water surrounding the fishy softwares of artificial fishes and their kin. THE UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE Doing a sort of underwater archaeology of knowledge, then, we could transport Galison’s arguments about the philosophical status of artificial realities into the virtually aqueous domain of such simulations as Terzopoulos’s fish worlds and see that wateriness is an important rhetorical float for the suspension of belief in in silico artificial life itself. Why underwater archaeology? The engineer and historian of technology David Mindell argues that a special characteristic of deepwater archaeology is that it must be enabled by techniques of remote sensing. For example, high-­ frequency, narrow-­beam sub-­bottom sonar and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) outfitted with cameras can retrieve data from the seafloor from which models can be built of what might be buried down below at great depth, pressure, and darkness. Trying to sound out the outlines of “life” using an underwater archaeology of knowledge requires us to admit that we cannot finally lay our hands on the buried treasure of “life itself.” Life is a material and a semiotic relationship between tools and interpretations, not a thing in itself. To conclude this meditation, let me go off the deep end and suggest, following Mario Biagioli’s analysis of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, that Artificial Life “confabulates” life.39 “Confabulations” according to Valentine Worth, a writer whose publications seem only to be available from the Museum of Jurassic Technology and who may or may not exist, are “artificial constructions of our own design built around sterile particles of retained experience which we attempt to make live again by infusions of imaginations.”40 Like the Museum of Jurassic Technology—­an institution that reproduces, repurposes, parodies, and confuses the very notion of the museum by archiving and displaying knowledge and artifacts that may or may not be part of actual human history—­Artificial Life simulations may be “a setting of and for confabulation where hermeneutics is suspended.”41 “Life” floats—­and is suspended in the interpretative medium within which it swims.

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CETOLOGY NOW Formatting the Twenty-­First-­Century Whale

IN HIS “CETOLOGY” CHAPTER IN Moby-­Dick, Herman Melville, through the narrative voice of Ishmael, seeks to take the measure of whales of all sizes and dispositions. Tacking away from the ready book-­learning categories of Cuvier and Linnaeus and the emergent conventions of biology, Ishmael names the whale a fish, not a mammal. In line with popular belief in the mid-­nineteenth century, he submits that the whale is “a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.”1 The classification that follows, which divides whales into types, veers still further from the ordered grids of natural science, even as it rests upon the encyclopedic impulse that organizes many anatomical typologies of Melville’s day:2 “It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera that I would now fain put before you. Yet it is no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.”3 Melville proceeds, then, to a classification of whales neither by family, structure, nor behavior, but rather by books: “According to magnitude I divide the whale into three primary BOOKS.” These are “I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO, the Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.”4 The three divisions thus class whales according their proportion, measuring them by analogy to sheets of paper folded in two, eight, and twelve. Melville satirizes the very idea that whales can be contained in books, can be put to paper. His Ishmael takes the most material, tangible feature of books—­their size—­and wraps the life of these uncontainable fish in this literal dimension. If one were to return to the classification of whales now, to a twenty-­first-­ century cetology and to the problem of mapping the terrible arc of today’s 44

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cetaceans’ trajectory toward diminution, disappearance, and even, perhaps, species-­death, what schemes might suggest themselves? I submit that refusing the outlines of common sentiment about whales and actually embracing the cutting-­edge idioms of biology: biotech, genomics, and bioinformatics—­that is, to some extent reversing Melville’s strategy—­might afford the most unruly and revelatory classification.5 Moreover, these latest languages can, I think, help us sound the distributed ways in which the disquieting deaths of contemporary whales are being gathered into representation. Beginning from a biology now reformatted by the sciences of genetics and information databasing and drawing upon media techniques more modern than Melville’s books, I propose that one could divide today’s whales according to three different FORMATS: 1. THE ANALOG WHALE; 2. THE DIGITAL WHALE; 3. THE SIMULATED WHALE. THE ANALOG WHALE This whale would be a whale of the waves, rising, though mostly falling. As the type of the ANALOG, think of the whale fall, the sunken carcass of a whale, which in its deep death can give rise to an ecology all its own. Whale falls appeared in a particularly phantasmatic format when they were first discovered in 1993, appearing to the analog soundings of U.S. Navy SONAR as wraithlike outlines reminiscent of submarines. SONAR (SOund NAvigation Ranging) is an appropriately analog form of representation for this fluid, decaying figure. A whale fall delivers a dose of nutrients to the bottom of the sea far more potent than the steady fall of “marine snow,” small bits of organic detritus that continually drift down to the lightless world of the deep. A whale fall is given its first going over by scavengers such as fish and sharks, after which, creatures like invertebrate worms settle on its bones, often digging roots into the marrow for minerals. Such minerals are processed by microorganisms that take up residence inside the cells of these busy worms. According to the biological oceanographer Craig Smith of the University of Hawaii, the decomposition of whalebone lipids in combination with seawater sulfate reduction can produce sulfides off of which the endosymbiotic microbes residing within worms can thrive.6 The processes that unfold on the decaying body of this snow-­white analog whale are analogous to the strange conditions found at the more famous exotic undersea locales of sulfur-­spitting deep-­sea hydrothermal vents. Some scientists think the cold-­water enzymes that break down fats within whale bones might be good ingredients for cleaning detergents—­a biotech analogue, perhaps of such products as the whale oil of Moby-­Dick’s day. A difference, of course, is this: the whales hunted, harpooned, and rendered by such ships as Melville’s Pequod were delivered in their bodily entirety (if not integrity) to landed networks of commerce, reducing the number of potential whale falls. With the cessation of industrial whaling, it may be that there now exist a greater number of whale falls on the seafloor, even as there are fewer whales plying the world’s seas. As a sign 45

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and substance of modern whale mortality, whale falls are eerie shadows of once ample populations. Reflecting on their early apparition on navy sonar, we might say that analog whales are cetacean ghost ships. THE DIGITAL WHALE Into this category fits the cetacean understood as a linear sequence of DNA, of discrete nucleotide bases. Biologists tell us that where digital computers employ base two—­ones and zeroes—­as a calculative infrastructure, flesh and blood organisms depend on the paired purine and pyrimidine bases of DNA—­adenine and guanine and cytosine and thymine—­to spell out the codons that summon the amino acids involved in making proteinaceous biological bodies. Treating these bases as a kind of digital readout is based on the metaphor of coding that lies behind gene sequencing. The digital, genetic, whale was notably called up several years ago in the suitcase of a scientist from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. The marine ecologist Stephen Palumbi traveled to Tokyo’s fish market to investigate the possible sale of illegal whale meat. In his luggage, he had toted along a portable polymerase chain reaction machine for amplifying DNA. Acting as an ordinary consumer, he purchased sashimi-­style, salted, and partially cooked whale meat from the Tokyo market, checked into a hotel, and started amplifying genes in his room.7 With this genetic bounty created, he returned to his lab in the United States to sequence the genes and to identify the species to which the sequences belonged. Particularly useful were two digital technologies: 1. a mitochondrial control region database for whale product identification put together by the government of Japan’s Fisheries Agency; and 2. a bioinformatic computer program for making family trees out of digitized DNA data. Palumbi found the digital fingerprints of the endangered species for which he was looking, the traces of death at the hands of under-­the-­radar, black-­market whaling. Although I would wager that Palumbi would follow the fictional whale researcher in the novelist Christopher Moore’s Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings in saying “Just because I’m using a computer model to study this data doesn’t mean I think whales are digital,”8 I take the species of digitality that Palumbi employs to be a mortal scientific signature of particular whale bodies, dead and digested. THE SIMULATED WHALE Under this head, I place the fiberglass whale made by the marine biologist Jenifer Hurley, of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, to train sea lions to film migrating whales. Hurley’s SLEWTH (Sea Lions Exploring Whales and Their Habitat) Program trains sea lions to carry Sony digital cameras in order to record the below-­water habits of migrating whales9—­to gather visual data on creatures usually only seen fleetingly above water, giant creatures that might 46

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more often be classed, for humans at least, in one of the categories of Borges’s famous “certain Chinese Encyclopaedia,” as animals “that from a long way off look like flies.”10 Hurley’s lab built the model whale, a simulated whale, to be dragged behind a boat, and they outfitted it with a camera to film the sea lions filming it. Because of early difficulty in financing this project (marine science funding agencies often favor high-­tech solutions to problems of monitoring), this impressive model organism sat unused for a good while outside the beat-­up beach trailer parked outside Hurley’s beachfront laboratory. Forlorn and forgotten, it served as a piece of dusty cetacean driftwood awaiting a resurrection in a more virtuous time, a time when the vanishing of whales awakens a real fear that soon we will only have simulated, virtual versions, models of the fish that was not a fish that got away. A VIRTUAL END All of these representations of whales in their migrations toward death reach toward another format: the virtual. The sonar shadow, the digitally delayed DNA, and the quasi-­automatic fiberglass mannequin are all species of the spectral. At the close of “Cetology,” Melville halts in the face of an impossible task of cataloging: “But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished.”11 With whales themselves frighteningly (virtually?) close to being finished at the opening of the twenty-­first century, their analog, digital, and simulated doppelgängers are reminders to stay tuned to the bodied, biological world of these creatures, lest we soon hear them sing an apocalyptic swan song.

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HOW LIKE A REEF Figuring Coral, 1839–­2010

IN HOW LIKE A LEAF, the historian of science Donna Haraway, in an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, reflected on her early interest in marine biology, reminiscing about a summer course she attended in 1968 at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.1 She recalled her fascination with sea grapes, a colonial marine organism able to continually regenerate its constituent parts, called zooids. Many years after her encounter with this totipotent tunicate, Haraway again meditated upon the generative capacities of marine creatures, this time in her foreword to Women Writing Culture, in which she turned to coral reefs and described “non-­mammalian replicative doings among marine invertebrates: egg-­release into open waters, followed by larval feeding, and finally the settling and metamorphosis into the adult forms of myriad species.” She likened the process of crafting conversation on common reading and writing to the process of reef building: “the written, collected, and published book of interviews becomes the finished scaffolding, the coralline reef, on which the next generations of spineless, non-­bilaterally symmetrical entities will settle, eat each other and passers-­by, and proliferate their drifting, always hungry, and seedy brood.”2 In this chapter, I fasten my attention on this figure of the reef. Haraway’s analyses have often been attached to figures—­creatures of fact and fiction that symbolize and embody social and scientific tensions, trends, and transformations. Thus her cyborg, vampire, modest witness, FemaleMan, and OncoMouse™ are figures that gather up the ways that information technology, flows of blood, transfers of genes, and images from science fiction have rewired, reformatted, and rerouted many of our apprehensions and experiences of our bodies and 48

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selves. Drifting into this densely populated zone, I nominate the coral reef as a figure worthy of joining this Harawavian menagerie. Coral reefs, I propose, can attune their human visitors and inquisitors to empirical and epistemological questions of scale and context—­where context, drawing upon a once-­upon-­a-­ time literal, but now more figurative, meaning, refers to a “weaving together” (Oxford English Dictionary). Which earthly and oceanic entities and agents might be woven together through reefy bones and bodies is, of course, a polysemous, shifting question. Indeed, part of what I am fascinated by when it comes to coral reefs is how densely they come prefigured through the historically layered descriptions of biologists, fisherpeople, ecologists, and, occasionally, members of my own professional guild, anthropology. Offering a reading of reefs, then, must simultaneously perform a kind of underwater archaeology of the proliferative scaffoldings upon which reefs have already been written. Haraway never conjures her figures whole; rather, they are always borrowings—­from, for example, the iconography of the scientific revolution, the culture of U.S. militarism, the tides of feminist politics, and the fables of Christian salvation history. Her figures are entities she has repurposed for her own ends.3 The coral reefs I grapple with here are no different. They too come with durable, multiple, and porous inheritances. Emphasizing their surprising capacities to connect scales and contexts must attend to these historical holdfasts. This essay is divided into three parts, which more or less chronologically follow figurations of coral from their emergence as nineteenth-­century architectures of curiosity, to their fashioning as twentieth-­century polymorphs inviting immersive and fleshy encounter, to their twenty-­first-­century rewriting as nodes in global genetic networks that might be read in light of biomedical economies and climatological emergency. EMERGENCE Coral began its career in the scientific imagination as a boundary object, an assemblage of flesh and stone that generated speculation about the boundaries of the living and nonliving.4 Natural historians in the eighteenth century went back and forth about whether coral was a mineral, the creation of a marine plant, or the product of a marine animal. Sliding between animal, vegetable, and mineral, coral classification confounded such figures as Linnaeus—­though naturalists eventually settled on a convention that had “coral” as the skeleton/ rock/fossil/stone/mineral and “corals” as the organisms that produce such material. Still, the liminality of this marine object was precisely what captivated such later thinkers as Robert Grant, Charles Darwin’s teacher at Edinburgh University, who saw coral forms as a missing link between plants and animals and who inspired Darwin’s 1842 book, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs.5 Darwin’s questions about coral in this book turned out to be largely geological; he wanted to know how reefs were formed, and he postulated that the intriguing 49

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Figure 5.1. Whitsunday Island, a lagoon-­island, or atoll, in the South Pacific. This engraving (probably by John Lee) of a ring of coral left behind by island subsidence is from Charles Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs: Being the First Part of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle, Under the Command of Capt. Fitzroy, R.N. During the Years 1832 to 1836 (London: Smith Elder and Co., 1842), 2. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

forms of reefs—­rings around islands, barriers near shores—­resulted from the continued growth of reefs up to (but no higher than) sea level, growth that unfolded at the same moment as, down below, reef foundations subsided (see figure 5.1).6 The comparisons that motivated Darwin’s thinking were less organic than they were architectural. In 1839, for example, in his Voyage of the Beagle, he rhapsodized, “We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!”7 Just two years later, the social-­evolutionist-­to-­be Lewis Henry Morgan wrote an essay on reefs, inaugurating his career-­long fascination with the way living things transformed their earthly surroundings. His later meditations on the creative character of nonhuman mammals in his 1868 The American Beaver and His Works and his interest in Iroquois notions of the land as an ancestral living presence stemmed from attempting to understand the creation of life through imagery in Genesis; according to the Biblical creation tale, “earth [was] the medium from which the living things [were] created.”8 The example of earth Morgan fixed on first, though, in his 1841 “Essay on Geology,” was the coral island: These islands are formed by the labours of millions of little insects, whose industry and ingenuity almost exceed belief.—­It is but lately that any attention has been directed to these animals in a scientific manner and many questions relating to the nature of the animalcules and to the manner in which these islands are elevated above the level of the sea, are not as yet, fully answered.9 50

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For Morgan, coral stood as a symbol of life emerging from and returning to geology and the sea. Coral animalcules, bridging the past and the future, were animated by the practice of building the world and bodies they inhabited, an activity that linked them to human collectives, who, for the Morgan who wrote Ancient Society in 1877, could be classed by their scale of technological achievement, which then determined for him their stage of social evolution.10 Figurations of reefs as examples of the production of the inorganic through organic activity inspired the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in his 1948 essay “The Nature of Culture,” in which he used coral to illustrate his concept of the “superorganic.” Kroeber, a student of Franz Boas, enlisted reefs to explain the culture concept: A simile that may further help the realization of what culture is and how it works is that of a coral reef. Such a reef may be miles long and inhabited by billions of tiny polyp animals. The firm, solid part of the reef consists of calcium carbonate produced by the secretions of these animals over thousands of years—­a product at once cumulative and communal and therefore social. What is alive and organic in the reef is these innumerable little animals on its ocean-­fronting surface. Without their ancestors, there would have been no reef. But the reef now exists independently of the living polyps, and would long continue to endure even if every polyp were killed by, say, a change in ocean temperature or salinity. . . . While a coral reef is the accumulated precipitate of dead polyps, it is also a phenomenon affording to millions of living polyps a base and a foothold, and a place to thrive.11

Kroeber concluded: “Each of us undoubtedly contributes something to the slowly but ever changing culture in which we live, as each coral contributes his gram or two of lime to the Great Barrier Reef.”12 What is remarkable about this description—­aside from its sexing of polyps as males (a strict, if problematic, gametic reductionism would alert us to the fact that many coral host both eggs and sperm)—­is the way Kroeber described a social constructivism that was enabled by biogenesis, even as the biotic part of the equation became finally less intriguing to him than the “superorganic.” As in Darwin’s and Morgan’s coral conceptions, what was compelling for Kroeber were not so much the organisms themselves, but the results of their social labor; that is, what emerged from their collective agency, not how the agency was itself constituted. These writers were primarily concerned with what Haraway, above, called “the finished scaffolding” of cultural production and are less interested in how “the next generations . . . will settle, eat each other and passers-­by, and proliferate their drifting, always hungry, and seedy brood.”13 Coral scaffolding was of interest to another kind of actor in the mid-­twentieth century: the United States military, which, as part of its nuclear weapons testing projects, drilled deep into limestone reefs around Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands in order to test the site’s geological stability for detonating the 51

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world’s first hydrogen bomb. The drilling that set the stage for the explosion had the dividend of providing geological evidence for Darwin’s century-­old theory of coral formation.14 More consequential for biology—­particularly as lived experience—­however, were the devastating effects on the South Pacific of “­radioactive colonialism.”15 Nuclear fallout and its egregious mismanagement by the United States radically transformed the social and ecological realities in this huge area of water, islands, and people, leaving a legacy of disease and environmental racism that persists to this day. The anthropologist Joe Masco has described how nuclear testing changes the way “nature” is imagined and inhabited by those haunted by the half-­lives of radioactive elements. What he terms “mutant ecologies”—­“enriched,” for example, with bomb carbon—­have been woven into the microstructure of local biogenesis. “The Bikini Island ecosystem” (where the United States began atomic testing in 1946), for example, “continues to negotiate the eight-­day half life of iodine-­131, the 28.5-­year half-­ life of strontium-­90, and the 24,500-­year half-­life of plutonium.”16 Such mortal negotiations show up as cancer in humans and radioactivity in coral reef fish. One year after the first hydrogen-­bomb test at Enewetak, Harper and ­Brothers published in English the first book by Jacques Cousteau, The Silent World, which in 1953 included some of the first photos of fleshy life on the reef. Scuba diving, along with the ecological aesthetic of writers such as Rachel Carson, would in the next decades transform the idioms within which oceanographers and others would figure reefs. In her 2010 ethnographic meditation on laboratory research into coral generation at the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California, Eva Hayward wrote of the “fingeryeyes” that now materialize in the hydro-­ optics of marine research on cup coral.17 In the wake of Cousteau, the fingery tendrils of coral polyps would beckon scientists and their publics to new promises of what we can call, borrowing from anthropology, immersive participant-­ observation. Corals would become interesting not just as architectural agents but also as animate matter. Reefs would come to new life. IMMERSION In the last half of the twentieth century, scientific figurations of coral worlds shifted focus from bones to flesh, from coral to corals—­pulpy polyp and algal bodies, brooding and spawning. To be sure, much of this interest might be chalked up to transformations in methods of study. Where Darwin and others primarily encountered dead coral fragments, and imagined these sculptural, sepulchral forms almost as archaeological artifacts, twentieth-­century naturalists sought to submerge their bodies and eyes in the midst of coral communities.18 Architectural language still surfaces in descriptions of reef structures from time to time, albeit in a different register. The journalist Osha Davidson, in his loving 1998 account of coral reefs around the world, The Enchanted Braid, wrote that seeing a reef underwater is “like being dropped into the center of a huge city 52

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Figure 5.2. An immersive encounter with the fleshy coral other. “Penny Bailey observes coral spawning in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary off Key Largo,” Florida Keys eNewsletter (www.fla-keys.com/newsletter/200508)./ Used with permission.

on an alien planet.”19 Coral cities are now alive, not archeological. And instead of being simple analogues to human cultural productions, they have become a more lively other (figure 5.2). We might say that they have become subjects for an appreciative relativism rather than for the derivation of universalistic lessons of the sort gleaned by Kroeber. Corals have been increasingly figured as critters offering a cultural critique of received wisdom about the nature of such things as embodiment and sex. To begin with bodies: corals are classed as animals that live in “colonies” made of thousands of small sedentary creatures called coral polyps. A polyp is “a tiny ring of gelatinous tentacles fluttering above an equally small, internally rippled sac. Hard corals also have a skeleton, or corallite, at their base, into which the polyp retreats during the day.”20 These polyps are symbiotic with a microscopic form of algae called zooxanthellae, which live inside the polyps and provide them with nutrients derived from photosynthesis. This relationship with zooxanthellae also helps to “speed up the process by which corals build their stony skeleton, putting down layer after layer of calcium carbonate, a form of limestone. It is this process of calcification that physically constructs coral reef, the literal bedrock of the coral reef.”21 This mutualistic relation between an assemblage of animal and plant is a compound, what Haraway has called “a composite 53

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of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into one.”22 On this view, corals can be a model for distributed subjectivities and agencies, for what the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, following McKim Marriot, has called “dividuality,” the partibility of persons or subjects.23 Let me turn now to sex and reproduction. Until the late 1970s, most marine biologists believed that coral was viviparous; that is, that polyps plopped up new polyps through an asexual process called budding. This model was called into question when in 1979 biologists at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, discovered that many coral “broadcast” sperm and eggs into the ambient waters around their reefs, producing slicks of gametes that provide yummy food for fish and also allowing for the creation of planktonic coral larvae (figure 5.3). In many settings, such spawning happens only once a year, on a full moon. When it was established that most corals spawned and that larvae could survive for days, it became evident that widely distributed reef ecologies were hyperlinked to one another. Coral ecologies turned out to be translocally constituted—­connected through ocean currents, which Davidson calls “watery highways for coral larvae.”24 The spawn of polyps in one locale are relations of those in another; moreover, in the process of recombination that unfolds during spawning, new sorts of corals can come into being through hybridization.

Figure 5.3. Coral egg and sperm bundles released in spawning. From James P. Gilmour, “An Experimental Investigation into the Effects of Suspended Sediment on Fertilisation, Larval Survival and Settlement in a Scleractinian Coral.” Marine Biology 135 (1999): 451–­462. Used with permission. 54

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Sexual relations among corals are distributed beyond discrete bodies and result not so much in populations of individuals, but rather in networks of dividuals. These webs of relation continually recontextualize one another. Perhaps the biggest stars of the reef when it comes to offering examples of sexual variety, however, have been the sequentially hermaphroditic fish that live in the embrace of many coral reefs. These are fish that can change “sex” (the production of distinctive hormones, kinds of gametes, and scaly coloring being the markers here) in response to social cues like the balance of hormones in their ambient crowd of conspecifics. Such piscines—­by and large transitioning female to male—­have been favorite creatures for cultural critiques of the stability of natural sex identity, reminiscent of the kinds of biological differences offered by the biologist Anne Fausto-­Sterling in her argument that, when it comes to apportioning sexual identity based on genes, chromosomes, genitals, and hormones, we might reasonably splice the world into at least “five sexes” rather than the traditional two.25 The evolutionary ecologist Joan Roughgarden, in Evolution’s Rainbow, referring to reef ecologies, discusses coral bass that switch within one mating episode between making sperm and making eggs.26 While Roughgarden draws instructively upon her own experience as a male-­to-­female human, much of her argumentation works sociobiologically, naturalizing varieties of human behavior either by anchoring them in long-­ago adaptations or by comparing them to purportedly analogous activities in other animals. Her definition of sex—­based on the size of gametes an organism produces—­is curiously reductionist for someone ostensibly so attuned to the variety of scales and contexts within which something so unruly and vague as “sex” (as practice, as identification, as trajectory) materializes. Elizabeth Wilson, revisiting Darwin’s work on barnacles and his puzzlement over their polymorphous sexual arrangements, tries to be more cautious in drawing lessons about sexuality from marine organisms. In her “Biologically Inspired Feminism,” she cautions that to characterise Darwin’s barnacles as queer is too glib—­if by this characterization we mean that the barnacle simply mimics those human, cultural, and social forms now routinely marked queer (the transgender barnacle! the polyandrous barnacle!). This characterization has more punch if it is used, contrariwise, to render those familiar human, cultural, and social forms more curious as a result of their affiliation with barnacle organisation.27

In other words, treating a creature like coral as a figure rather than a sedimented site of literal truths about nonhuman nature is a better bet for generating a socially useful discourse on biology. Eva Hayward’s 2010 essay on Balanophyllia elegans, cup corals, offers a state-­of-­the-­art-­and-­science example of how to “disarticulate sex, sexuality, and reproduction” and then, perversely, to rearticulate them with a diffractive attention to “perverting meaning, inverting power, gendered perversions, coralline inversions.” “Perhaps both species of ‘inverts,’ ” 55

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suggests Hayward, “the kind without backbones and the sort who transpose gender roles, interrupt heteronormativity, although not for the same reasons, but because of a shared activity of making bodies pliable, mobile, transposable.”28 Corals are good to queer with. EMERGENCY If architectural metaphors had coral as a primitive premonition of the more filigreed cultural construction projects of humans, and if attention to coral sex and reproduction has sometimes served as a reminder that sex/gender does not describe a natural hierarchy or binary, how is the world of the coral reef predominantly figured now, at the opening of the twenty-­first century? In the wake of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—­which was held in Brazil and popularly known as the Rio Summit—­reefs became a symbol for marine biodiversity. Indeed, it is now easy to find descriptions of coral reefs as rain forests of the sea. And like rain forests, they are under threat. Recent worldwide degradation of coral reefs has been linked to the effects of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—­that is, to global warming, which can lead to ocean acidification, the lowering of pH levels in the sea. When seawater becomes more acidic, it is able to dissolve more quickly the calcium carbonate of which reefs are made. Warming seawater, meanwhile, is linked to coral “bleaching,” a process during which the symbiotic algae in coral polyps lose their ability to photosynthesize efficiently and may be ejected from their hosts. Bleaching is so named because it leaves polyps translucent, allowing white coral bone to show through. Corals also suffer when sunlight is obstructed by the rapid growth of surface algae, which often happens in water suddenly loaded with nutrients from sewage flow or fertilizer runoff (think coastal golf courses). Because of the calibration of these deleterious changes to large-­scale processes, many ecologists now consider that corals offer an indication of planetary health. Because the changes registered indicate declining oceanic health and are often triggered by anthropogenic causes, scientists sometimes pose coral as delivering a message from the living planet: “Coral reefs may be warning us to pay closer attention, just as they can signal the pressures that modern populations are placing on tropical resources.”29 In their barometric readings, reefs sound a warning signal from Gaia, chastising humans for self-­indulgent, shortsighted activities. Environmentally conscious scientists often translate this scold into one particularly aimed at so-­called developing, hyperurbanized countries such as the Philippines or Indonesia, which have yet to tune into Gaia’s alert.30 As participants at an international conference on coral reefs held in Bali in October 2000 argued, however, reef degradation must be seen through the lens of the world political economy.31 The depredation of, say, the Java Sea—­flooded with runoff from logging and agriculture; mined for coral construction materials; blast 56

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fished for food; and scoured for tropical fish for international collectors—­is linked to the dynamics and demands of intercalated and unequal local and global markets.32 Reefs are not just climatic barometers but also serve as indicators of North-­South inequality. The contexts they conjoin are legibly political, connecting local biogenesis to international patterns of fossil fuel usage, tourism, and food production. In worries about climate change, the flow and connection that captured the attention of coral biologists in the 1970s and ’80s have been eclipsed by a sense that coral reefs are under threat because of their immobility; they drown or bleach because they cannot move. Flipping prefixes in a phrase from Bruno Latour, they are mutable immobiles.33 Any figuration, of course, is prone to gestalt shifts in what will count as figure and ground, and coral immobility has also been construed as a virtue. Coral’s defense against predators comes not from the evasive mobility so characteristic of many fish, but from the manufacture of toxins that can be released when polyps come under threat. This has made corals intriguing creatures for natural products chemists who have been interested in drug leads. The Coral Reef Research Foundation (CRRF), founded in 1991 by Patrick Colin and Lori Bell and supported in part by the United States National Cancer Institute (NCI), has employed scientists to collect marine invertebrates as potential sources for new anticancer drugs.34 CRRF, a nonprofit organization, is incorporated in California and also in the Indo-­Pacific Island nation of Palau, which became independent from the United States in 1994. CRRF scientists freeze and fly material samples to the headquarters of the NCI in Maryland, where they are screened for bioactivity against cancer cells and HIV. Recognizing Palauan sovereignty over of these resources, the NCI has in place a bioprospecting contract with Palau. If the NCI wants compounds sourced in Palau to be developed into drugs, the contract specifies that any pharmaceutical partners to whom the U.S. patent is licensed must compensate a Palauan agency. On paper, this contract seeks to ameliorate North-­South inequalities by putting a price on coral biodiversity. Whether this agreement secures a flow of benefits is not clear; a study of the sort undertaken by Cori Hayden in When Nature Goes Public, a 2003 ethnographic account of a bioprospecting contract between the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Arizona (partnered with Wyeth-­Ayerst and American Cyanamid) would be instructive.35 These most recent figurations of coral—­as a monitor of planetary health and as a potential resource for tropical economic health and biomedical human health—­are threaded through—­what else?—­genomics.36 It should come as no surprise that many coral biologists have called for a coral genome project. Coral-­list, a digital scaffolding of online conversation scrabbled together, in English, mostly by coral researchers, has been one place where the discussion has unfolded. Almost as soon as the subject of a sequenced coral genome was raised on Coral-­list (around 2003), talk turned to the question of which genus of 57

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reef-­building coral might offer the most useful model system. Scientists engaged in practices of figuration as they discussed which coral DNA to sequence. The first creature floated as a candidate was the reef-­building lobe coral, Porites lobata—­which, its advocates maintained, showed “rising importance as a ‘laboratory rat’ in coral ecotoxicology, coral cell biology, coral immunity and coral neurophysiology,” and might be used as “a model for molecular genetics, cell biology, biochemistry, lipid chemistry, sterol/polyphenol chemistry, environmental/physiological monitoring, ecotoxicology, stress physiology, coral immunity, coral oncology, coral endocrinology and coral neurophysiology.”37 Its wide distribution in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf was also offered in its favor, though its durability, flexibility, and amenability to molecular and biochemical techniques in the laboratory setting were selling points as well. Porites was lab friendly because, as a summary of the discussion had it, “Nucleic acid isolation and in situ hybridization and RNAi would work better the ‘meatier’ the coral.” Even in this new realm of code, flesh matters (see figure 5.4). Another consideration in choosing a species would be how well it allowed for study of the interaction between polyps and their mutualist endosymbionts, the zooxanthellae. Such research could be instructive for understanding coral bleaching. A 2004 New York Times article suggested that some robust strains of “heat-­tolerant algae may move in to replace strains lost in bleaching events.”38

Figure 5.4. Sampling DNA from a Porites coral. From “Coral Reefs May Have Fighting Chance of Surviving Climate Change,” Wildlife Conservation Society Reports: A Media Resource (https://web .archive.org/web/20080412025019/http://www.wcs.org/wcspubs/wcsreports). 58

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Some advocates of Porites said that the huge coral heads this genus forms are good sources for records of long-­term climate change—­although there were also those who “didn’t agree that a coral that is primarily useful for fossil/paleoclimate studies would be one of the best choices for a genomics project,” arguing rather that “the coral community should figure out what would be the coral equivalent of a . . . fruit fly. A species should be selected that is most amenable to laboratory manipulations.” A feature of Porites that makes them potentially attractive lab creatures is that many do not spawn, but rather, they brood, releasing larvae throughout the year, rather than slicks of gametes only on particular nights. Against Porites, others championed corals of the genus Acropora, the most widely distributed (and studied) genus in the world, which would in the bargain allow for a more thorough representation of Caribbean reefs. One participant added an intriguing pitch, arguing that Acropora arabia from Kuwait would be a fruitful subject for study because it seems to be tolerant of high temperature variations, salinities, turbidity, and—­a regionally relevant geopolitical hazard—­ the presence of petroleum hydrocarbons swirling on the surface. The robustness of Acropora arabia, it was offered, might hold lessons for how “to help other fast-­ growing acroporids to maintain their distribution better.” On this view, corals must change with the times, whether it is in environments modulated by petroleum, global warming, or, in the north-­central Pacific, radiation. Apropos of the Pacific thermonuclear tests in the 1950s, some biologists have begun to claim that the reefs around Bikini are recovering in “a testament to nature’s ability to heal itself.”39 Questions of figuration were central in this Coral-­list discussion. Environmental representativeness, lab tractability, and conservation concerns were all in the mix, channeled through gene talk. Biomedical interest was not absent from the conversation; indeed, the summary from which I have been quoting concluded that basic science questions can be greatly aided by knowing the sequence of the coral genome. For example, is this coral immunocompetent or endocrine modulated? We need to know the genes that contribute to these systems to explore their individual and combined behaviors. . . . Can our understanding of cancer in mammals be aided by our understanding and the future discoveries of how corals get cancer?

Some participants questioned the limits of the figuration work that coral genomics could do. One pointed out that “corals are probably not a monophyletic group and the different families differ significantly in their physiology, ecology, and genetics.” But coral biodiversity can fit neatly into other genres of figuration. Recent work in coral genomics has shown corals and humans sharing genes bound up in the nervous system—­genes intriguingly missing from the standard model organism of Drosophila—­a result that could press for a rethinking of the evolutionary history of corals.40 59

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In the figurations of coral I have followed here, I discern a movement from opacity, to visibility, to readability. For Darwin, corals were glimpsed dimly, as bare bone, after death and, if living, through foamy water. For twentieth-­century scuba-­diving scientists, coral was best encountered from an immersive, embodied point of view. And for today’s environmentalists, biotechnologists, and would-­be coral genomicists, coral is something to be read—­for climate change, for potentially patentable genes, for representativeness. This itinerary of signifying substance—­bones, flesh, genome—­might be examined alongside the tripartite division that Haraway offered in her history of biological kinship categories in the United States, “Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture,” in which she suggested that craniometry, blood typing, and gene mapping have been successive techniques for figuring human (racialized) difference.41 What difference does a figuration of coral make? What successor epistemologies can be imagined settling on and metamorphosing the textual idioms of genomics? Building on Haraway’s comparison of reading to reef building, I want to suggest that the idea of reading coral represents an opportunity for reconstructing understandings of the cultural and scientific politics of the sea—­or, better, for reconfiguring such understandings, since coral/corals must be read not simply or only as signs, but also as figures. Corals and coral figure significantly for the Los Angeles–­based Institute for Figuring (IFF), “an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts.”42 Coordinating community-­ based and community-­ crossing handicraft projects, the IFF’s co-­ directors, Margaret and Christine Wertheim, seek to promote and facilitate hands-­on apprehension of such scientific and natural forms as the Fibonacci series, the snowflake, and the sea slug through the modeling and making work of weaving, knitting, and origami—­a fusion of calculation and fabrication that, according to a New York Times profile, threads together the Wertheims’ interests in “science, mathematics, art, feminism, handicrafts and social activism.”43 The activity for which the IFF has become best known is the Crochet Coral Reef Project (see figure 5.5), a networked crocheting enterprise inaugurated in 2005 that means to create a material homage to the Great Barrier Reef through concatenating “loopy ‘kelps,’ fringed ‘anemones,’ and curlicued ‘corals’ ” fashioned through the craft of hyperbolic crochet, a technique invented by the Cornell mathematician Daina Taimina in 1997 to model hyperbolic geometry in three-­dimensions. As the Wertheims explain the enterprise, “The Institute For Figuring is crocheting a coral reef: a woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.”44 By 2008, the reef was already some 3,000 square feet in size and had been exhibited and extended at events in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York. It includes such features as “The Ladies’ Silurian Atoll, a ring-­shaped installation with close to 1000 individual crochet forms made by dozens of contributors from around the world.”45 The New York Times calls the reef an “environmental 60

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Figure 5.5. Crocheters constructing the Scottsdale Satellite Reef at the Scottsdale Civic Center, AZ, 2009. Photo © Institute For Figuring Archive, by Margaret Wertheim.

version of the AIDS quilt,”46 meant to draw attention to the worldwide destruction of reef systems, a concern dear to the Queensland-­raised Wertheim sisters. Sophia Roosth, who has written the essential ethnographic study of the making of this reef, argues that new ways of figuring biology may be in the making here, ways that render “tangible the traces of gestural knowledge necessary to gather and sediment information about living forms.”47 In parallel with the reading practices and politics of the Coral Genome Project, then, emerge the wooly writing activities of the Crochet Coral Reef Project. In her first book, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, Haraway examined how metaphor shapes scientific theory.48 Metaphor—­from the Greek metaphora, to “carry between”—­transports conceptions from one realm to another. Figures, on the other polyp, direct a denser rhetorical traffic, spawning not only multiplicities of meanings, but also new material, corporeal structures and substances. Like coral and corals: architected, embodied, experienced, read, written, rewritten, and woven into the fiber of human words and worlds.

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HOMO MICROBIS Species, Race, Sex, and the Human Microbiome

ONCE UPON A TIME, ECOLOGICALLY minded folklore had it that humans were connected to the wider environment by the fact that their bodies, like the biosphere, were mostly water. Human bodies harbored an ocean within. At the opening of the twenty-­first century, however, one is more likely to hear statements like the following, from the microbiologist Jo Handelsman: “We have ten times more bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells, so we’re 90 percent bacteria.”1 But what does this figure really mean? And who, precisely, is the “we” in such a declaration?2 In “The Human Is More Than Human,” a mind-­unwinding essay in his 2013 book, Cosmic Apprentice, the science writer Dorion Sagan provides an uncanny take on the microbial constituents of human bodies.3 No longer merely the lineal descendants of previous generations of earlier hominoids, anthropoids, mammals, chordates, animals, and so on, humans are tangled mixtures, Frankensteins, of a welter of teeny microbial friends and enemies. The traces of relic viruses and companion microbes have twined into human genomes, cells, and selves, with microorganismic inheritances from many different stages of evolutionary history surviving and thriving in human blood and guts. The Human Microbiome Project, inaugurated in 2008 and sponsored by the United States National Institutes of Health, summarizes it this way: “Within the body of a healthy adult, microbial cells are estimated to outnumber human cells ten to one.”4 It is an arresting figure, this microbial human (figure 6.1). Call it Homo microbis. Might it be time to rename Homo sapiens? Are “we” still, as “our” double-­ barreled Latin Homo sapiens scientific name has often been translated, “thinking 62

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Figure 6.1. Our Self Portrait: the Human Microbiome. Joana Ricou, 2011. Oil on canvas, two panels, each 16 × 16 in. (www.joanaricou.com). Used with permission.

man”? Or are “we” something else (and more, in a moment, about that pesky gender-­specific “man”)?5 Renaming Homo sapiens has been a language game of long vintage in political philosophy. There have been many offerings, most prominently: Homo faber (making man), elaborated by Hannah Arendt in 1958 to draw attention to human creativity, but with earlier precedents and mentions from Appius Claudius Caecus (a Roman politician credited with coining the term in 280 BCE), Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, Henri Bergson, and Max Frisch (who wrote a novel by that title in 1957).6 Homo ludens (playing man), celebrated by historian Johan Huizinga in 1938 but named earlier by Friedrich Schiller in 1795.7 Other candidates in the renaming game have included Homo duplex (divided man; humans as both individual and collective, as both instinctual and moral, as capable of self-­reflection), Homo economicus (rational man), Homo loquens (talking man), Homo pictor (aesthetically minded man), Homo religiosus (religious man), Homo sanguinus (warlike man), and Homo socius (­social man).8 These all do different sorts of work, though all make some cultural activity the subject of the species slot, that second word in the binomial. What I have called Homo microbis might be a peculiar folding back, a weird back-­to-­the-­ bio move. This splice could be seen as part of the same historical moment that has lately welcomed such enterprises as the biological feminism of Elizabeth Wilson, in which Wilson approaches biological knowledge not as a form that purveys essentialist ideas about sex and gender as “fixed,” but rather as a field that might provide critical resources for exploring the flexibility of bodily identities and processes.9 This biological turn belongs to the same epoch as Icelandic 63

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Figure 6.2. Cover art from Björk’s Biophilia. Polydor Records, 2011. Used with permission.

pop star Björk’s 2011 album, Biophilia (figure 6.2), on which she sings, in a song entitled “Virus,” Like a virus needs a body, as soft tissue feeds on blood, some day I’ll find you—­ one day I’m there. Like a mushroom on a tree trunk, as the protein transmutates, I knock on your skin—­and I am in.10

What is the appeal of biological substance and sentiment in these and other recent ruminations on human being and becoming? For the Dorion Sagan of Cosmic Apprentice, the imaginative and social possibilities of the microbiome are clear: a call to reposition, to rethink, to defamiliarize the “nature” upon which scientists and their publics have believed human biological being to rest. In the place of the ruggedly individual human, complete unto itself, we have the never pure, the ever-­swarming, the ever-­connecting, the ever-­ multiple biobody. The anthropologist Heather Paxson, in her writing on raw food politics, has suggested that the ascendancy of the microbe—­in public health, in the politics of cheese making, and in many other arenas—­is not just a noticing of new nonhuman natures. It is microbiopolitics, “the creation of categories of microscopic biological agents; the anthropocentric evaluation of such agents; and the elaboration of appropriate human behaviors vis-­à-­vis microorganisms engaged in 64

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infection, inoculation, and digestion.”11 Paxson’s term is a union of the microbial with the biopolitical, where the biopolitical is a concept, following Michel Foucault, that describes how politics has come in the last twoish centuries to operate through the abstractions, as well as material commitments, of the sciences of biology (take, as the most extreme example of biopolitics, eugenics, those programs of human breeding or genocide aimed at transforming populations so as to be in line with political ideologies. More subtle forms of biopolitics might include prenatal testing and counseling as well as more benign versions such as socialized health care). But let me return to Dorion Sagan and to some of the rhetoric he has threaded into his account of what I am calling Homo microbis. I wish to query what I detect as an emergent microbiomania among writers of popular science and science studies alike. The microbiome is a novel kind of object or figure in biology, to be sure, but its multiple meanings do not themselves follow from the fact that microbiomes are composed of a multiplicity of organisms. Nor, as Brigitte Nerlich and Iina Hellsten have observed in their analysis of metaphors in scientific and popular stories about the microbiome, is it simply obvious that microbes in human bodies are (to take terms that pop up with some frequency) “communities” of “mostly friendly” “aliens” that make “us” into “superorganisms” or “hybrids.”12 These are descriptions, metaphors. The microbiome, among all that it also might be, is a representation, a figure.13 Next to the figure, however, is persistently posed, in microbiome talk, the literal: in spelling out the thickness of our microbial complement, for example, Sagan tells his readers that “we literally come from messmates and morphed diseases.”14 But what is it that “literally” means? The Oxford English Dictionary reports that “literal” is originally theological: “Of or relating to the ‘letter’ of a text” (usually the Bible).15 Taking things literally, then, that which is “literal” points us to text, to representation, and not to the ultimate materially of things, as the word “literally” is often taken to mean. What are the “letters” of the organismic text that describes the assembly of tiny critters that make up Homo microbis? The letters of this text come to biology from the binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus, who in the 1750s established the two-­termed form Genus species, as in Homo sapiens. This Latinate system is the one Sagan calls upon in his essay to describe humanity’s microbial familiars. He reports on microbial critters with gnarly names like Campylobacter jejuni, Toxoplasma gondii, Candida albicans, and Convoluta roscoffensis, organisms that teem on human insides and outsides, and he quotes Clair Folsome as offering that humans are a “seething zoo of microbes.”16 In a kind of oblique support of Sagan’s argument, though, one might point out that there is nothing “literal” at all about names like Campylobacter jejuni. The meanings in genus and species names writhe against their staid Latin boxiness. If to be literal means to be “free from metaphor, allegory, etc.,”17 these are literalities that are not at all 65

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literal—­they teem with rhetoric. Think about the “literal” translations of these microbial binomials: Campylobacter jejuni: twisting, fasting stick Toxoplasma gondii: crescent shape from the gundi rodent Candida albicans: a glistening whiteness Convoluta roscoffensis: rolling-­around thing from Roscoff, Brittany Literality, then, does not escape from the figural. More important, there are not immediately obvious—­and uncontestable—­meanings for the microbiome. A clear politics of the “human” do not necessarily follow from redescriptions of the biological. Such redescriptions can be progressive, retrogressive, liberatory, oppressive, strange, and familiar, all at once. Take, for example, recent scientific work that asks whether there is a place for human race in the microbiome. Early twenty-­first-­century human population genetics has reinforced the American Anthropological Association’s 1998 “Statement on ‘Race’ ”—­that “present-­day inequalities between so-­called ‘racial’ groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.”18 Genetically tuned genealogies do not confirm those social groupings that various humans have called “race”—­groupings that in the United States by midcentury settled on “Caucasian,” “African-­American,” “Asian,” “Native American,” and “Hispanic,” but that once included such groups as “Neapolitans,” “Bohemians,” and “Hebrews.” Under Apartheid, South African racial categories included [on one system] “Europeans,” “Asiatics,” “coloureds,” and “Bantus.”19 During the colonial period in Spanish America and the Philippines, “Españoles,” “Indios,” “Mestizos,” Castizos,” “Cholos,” “Pardos,” “Mulattos,” Zambos,” “Negros,” and more were the dominant terms.20 All those groupings have been fractured by any attempt to map them onto stable, bounded genetic lineages. Genetic reductionism has had the ironic effect of undoing the very categories it was originally chartered to solidify. If the microbiome is even more riotous than the genome in underwriting category-­confusing connections, it would seem that race would be unplayable in the key of the microbial. But race as a social ideology and as a set of effects that modulate people’s experiences of embodiment is more molten than that. There is nothing preventing race from manifesting in microbiome talk, in both reductionist and complex ways. Consider, for instance, a 2012 piece entitled “The Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Diversity of Human-­ Associated Microbiota in Key Body Sites,” which suggests that it is possible to characterize the microbiomic diversity of Caucasians, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians—­categories grounded less in “biology” as flesh than in nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century US American categories for kinds of persons who might or might not attain to the rank of citizen.21 Examining five sites on the human body that might have distinctive microbiomic profiles—­the gut, the skin, the 66

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oral cavity, the airway, and the vagina—­the authors suggest that “the vaginal communities of Asian and Caucasian women were more often dominated by lactic acid-­producing Lactobacillus species than those of Hispanic and African American women.”22 The authors do not, however, tell the reader how those categories were selected or defined, why they might matter, nor, importantly, which direction the causal arrows might go, leaving the reader to fall back on notions of these categories as foundationally biological. As the epidemiologist and critic J. Dennis Fortenberry suggests, in a racial economy in which “the stigma of . . . sexually transmitted infections [is] often associated with racial and ethnic minorities,” such terms as Caucasian and African-­American are far from neutral markers for investigating matters impinging on sex/gender and race.23 This microbiota article advances something akin to what Troy Duster has called “the molecular reinscription of race”24—­though now not in the register of human genetics, but in the key of the microbial, or, to be more accurate, of microbial genomics. With microbes sequenced, the gene is still the coin of the realm—­as, sometimes, are categories such as “Asian” and “Caucasian.” One reason such ungainly categories continue to manifest in medicine is because of demands for social “inclusion” in biomedical studies, long critiqued for enlisting only white subjects (itself a response to earlier studies exploiting vulnerable racialized, nonwhite populations). But such inclusion then offers only off-­the-­shelf demographic categories, rather than taking the opportunity to explore whether other categories might be more revelatory.25 Just like H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which took the main character to an AD 802,701 world that repeated the race and class anxieties of Victorian England, the future world of the microbiome has here deposited readers of the scientific literature back into the bio-­racialized landscape of the mid-­twentieth century United States. This time machine has delivered the microbiomization of race. Would it make sense to take a more sophisticated approach and ask how social categories like race and processes like racism—­and its attendant stresses and deprivations (and, in some cases, privilege)—­can reach into people’s biologies and reshape their microbiomes? The evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, in “Are Our Microbiomes Racial?,” wonders just this and suggests reappropriating the terms of the debate. By a true social science of the microbiome we can investigate host determinants under a more sophisticated rubric than clunky clinical metadata. For instance, how is microbiome diversity geographically distributed? Are microbiomes racially segregated more in racially segregated neighborhoods, cities or countries than in integrated ones? . . . Does racial oppression, and its material and sociopsychological stresses and deprivations, select for particular microbial profiles over others? Do microbiomes display a class structure?26

This is a view of racialization as a dynamic, changing system.27 But this framing steps away from the molecularization of race only to offer the molecularization 67

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of environmental influences on race.28 The problem with this sort of corrective is that it takes “the microbiome” to be a thing in the world separate from the technologies that have permitted scientists to access and draw boundaries around phenomena this way.29 Donna Haraway, drawing on Alfred North Whitehead, once diagnosed “gene fetishism” as an instance of what Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”30—­and I would say the same here of Wallace’s claim: that it treats “microbiomes” and “class” as concrete things, only to brought into relation after they have been named as distinct. Moving now to the politics of sex and gender, recall the Homo formulations I mention above. Why never Femina sapiens?31 Or almost never (see figure 6.3). Thinking about gender, listen to some of the new “facts of life” to which Dorion Sagan points his readers, “facts” that tangle with sex/gender and the transgression and unwinding of that dualism consequent upon microbial activity. Take Sagan’s suggestion that

Figure 6.3. Femina sapiens, a Colombian feminist studies journal from 1982 (Bogotá, Colombia: Centro de Documentación y Communición Feminista). Used with permission. 68

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multiple insect species transform because of Wolbachia bacteria. The genus is nearly ubiquitous in insect tissues. Too big to fit within the sperm of insects, infective Wolbachia can confer parthenogenesis on insect populations, that is, transform a population with two genders into one that is all females, this of course to the advantage of the “selfish” bacteria, as the sperm bottleneck impedes their propagation. By disabling the gender-­bending bacteria, antibiotics can make separate species of jewel wasps interbreed again.32

In other words, when female wasps are infected with the Wolbachia bacterium, they no longer need to have sex with males to produce viable offspring. I am not certain, though, that “gender-­bending bacteria” is the right term to describe this dynamic. Rather than saying that Wolbachia are “gender-­bending,” it might be that they are sex-­bending.33 Why “sex” rather than “gender”? Because “gender” does not and should not always reduce to “sex” and be about reproduction.34 Look to a critique delivered by the queer and transgender theorist Eva Hayward of the work of the sociologist Myra Hird in The Origins of Sociable Life, a book that seeks to draw sociological lessons from the doings of microbes. In that book, Hird advances the idea that “gender” might be used to refer to “features that bring organisms together to share DNA and/or reproduce”—­which rendering then produces such claims as “The mushroom Schizophyllum commune has 27,000 genders, encoded by ‘incompatibility genes’ that come in many versions (alleles) on different chromosomes.”35 Hayward argues that such a framing makes gender into a simple proxy for sex—­not heterosex, to be sure, but, still sex, as reproduction.36 Calling on the work of Kath Weston, Hayward goes on to say that “binary ontologies of sex–­gender are not necessarily destabilized by the addition of a third—­or even a fourth or fifth.” As Weston showed in her 1996 text on lesbian identity and community, Render Me, Gender Me, gender—­whether butch, femme, or stud muffin—­can attach to race, class, nation; that is, to many things other than reproduction.37 Rather than gender-­bending—­or, for that matter, sex-­bending—­it might be useful to adopt the vocabulary of what “Eva Hayward and Lindsay Kelley call ‘tranimals’—­enmeshments of trans and animals, critters that cross or queer normative sex and gender configurations,” and that include sex-­switching coral but also rabbits bioengineered to express jellyfish genes.38 Trans-­ can unwind the naturalization of both sex and gender (Sagan mentions another figure with which it might be useful to think: the planimal.39 The example he gives is a green slug that produces chlorophyll.40) Such lessons can help to think through and against more putatively traditional connections between things microbiomic and sex-­ish, too. Contemplate the case of fetal microchimerism. As Laura Fugazzola, Valentina Cirello, and Paolo Beck-­Peccoz described this phenomenon in a Nature Reviews Endocrinology article from February 2011, “Fetal cell microchimerism is defined as the 69

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persistence of fetal cells in the mother after birth without any apparent rejection. Fetal microchimeric cells (FMCs) engraft into the maternal bone marrow for decades after delivery and are able to migrate to blood and tissues.”41 This means that women who have been pregnant have been biologically remodulated by their fetuses. Again, this does not mean anything in itself. Some scholars have suggested that fetal microchimerism might remind anthropologists of the Wari’ of Peru, who are noted for a kinship system built upon the incorporation of kinspeople—­through the food they give, and in some cases, through anthropophagy. But this comparison is simply suggestive, not a claim about what biology really tells people apart from cultural interpretations. Ayrn Martin, in her history of the metaphors people have used to speak of microchimerism, notes that “the characterization of these cells has shifted from invaders to insurgent foreigners to assimilated productive immigrants . . . , demonstrat[ing] that the case of fetomaternal cell trafficking contributes to a growing uneasiness with dominant ontologies of bodies as bounded, defended, pure collectives of homogeneous inhabitants.”42 The biology does not tell us what it will mean. Categories like race and sex/gender are not obviously either shored up or dissolved by microbiomic knowledge. They are in motion—­as is the notion of the species, which has been unspooling as a durable category for a while—­particularly in connection with “sex.” The backstory is as follows. In 1942, the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr formulated the biological species concept, which held that ”species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.”43 That definition was keyed to sexually reproducing creatures—­and, more, as philosopher Ladelle McWhorter has suggested, to groups of endogamously reproducing organisms: “Mayr’s definition is all about sex—­all about who has sex with whom. . . . In order to become and remain a ‘good species’ (Mayr’s phrase) rather than a mere variety, a gene pool must dam itself off from alien gene flows.”44 The biological species of 1942 held a family resemblance to the eugenically pure, unmiscegenated phantom family-­nation of mid-­century Anglo-­America.45 Just as race purity was a social illusion, so species turned out to be a biological one. Mayr rested too much of his definition on the imagined isolation of populations. The definition was immediately unsatisfying for the rhizomatic ways of plants and fungi. And it didn’t work at all for the microbial majority—­ not, at least, without thorough conceptual revision. Today, as Sarah Franklin has observed, “sex” has become everywhere fungible and fractured—­from its rearrangement in cloning, to its bypassing in gene splicing, to its strategic deployment in a world of IVF, surrogacy, and queer family-­making.46 “Sex” hasn’t disappeared, of course—­and its operation as a token of power hasn’t vanished—­ but it is harder to pin down within received categories. If the unwinding of “sex” has unwound “species,” a revised definition seems in order, perhaps a resurrection of this obsolete meaning recorded by the OED: 70

Homo microbis

species, n. 4. A thing seen; a spectacle; esp. an unreal or imaginary object of sight; a phantom or illusion. Obs.

Homo microbis might then look like the phantom in figure 6.4, Viveca McGhie’s Microbiome Face Cast, an agar gel sculpture overrun by microbes cultured from various locales on McGhie’s face. So, I end in partial solidarity with Sagan, interested in using biological knowledge to reflect on . . . biological knowledge. But I am wary of stopping there. The biology, astonishing as it is, is not the end of the story. Why do accounts like those of Sagan have the purchase they do on contemporary readerships? Why the interest in multispecies, interspecies, and transspecies now? Why is the erosion of human organismic integrity exciting to some social scientists and humanists (to say nothing of natural scientists)? Why biological “posthumanism” now? Sagan suggests that the “nonhuman” is coming into view because of the increasing stress placed on planetary resources by the human species. In the context of the geological epoch that some scientists are

Figure 6.4. Viveca McGhie’s Microbiome Face Cast, a final project for Eben Kirksey’s Tactical Biopolitics course at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Used with permission. 71

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coming to call the Anthropocene, he suggests, we would do well to recognize that “the human is more than human.” But I would add that we must recognize an additional fact: that “biology” does not speak for itself, either about humans or nonhumans. Biological material is not a substance to be read in a simply literal mode. It cannot be. Rather, biology is a historically crafted discipline, and its materials come thickly figured and configured by the histories and cultures through which they are imagined and inhabited. The biological is more than biological.

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THE SIGNATURE OF LIFE Designing the Astrobiological Imagination

CENTURY’S TURN In his 1990 book, Century’s End, the historian Hillel Schwartz wrote that Mars came into focus at the end of the nineteenth century as fin de siècle anxieties propelled people to look toward the red planet for clues about the past and future of life on Earth.1 Percival Lowell saw canals on Mars, which he read as signs of a once great but now dying civilization. H. G. Wells, in The War of the Worlds, from 1897, scripted Mars as the dystopic destiny of industrial-­age Earth; his invading Martians were vampiric machines embodying the worst excesses of capitalism. Schwartz tells us, too, that the poles, the Arctic and its double, Antarctica—­twin origin points for zero-­degree orientation and snow-­ blind disorientation—­have also featured in centurial meditations on life and its limits. In Kurd Lasswitz’s 1897 science fiction book, Two Planets, fantasies of Mars and the poles converge when balloonists discover a conduit between the North Pole and Mars, which is maintained by an advanced Martian civilization.2 Schwartz predicted that Mars and the poles would again come into view around the turn of the last century—­a forecast more than borne out by the public fascination in 1996 with fossil-­like remains found in the Martian meteorite ALH84001, which was discovered in Antarctica.3 And in spring 2001, a publication appeared that neatly fulfilled Schwartz’s centurial prognostications: the first issue of the scientific journal Astrobiology. This number was filled with speculations about bacterial life at the Martian poles and below the 73

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icy shell of Jupiter’s satellite Europa. An interesting reversal had taken place with this second coming of Mars and the frozen limits, however. In The War of the Worlds, invading Martians were brought low by terrestrial microbes. According to a 2001 Astrobiology article entitled “Cave Biosignature Suites: Microbes, Minerals, and Mars,”4 however, the newest news from biologists of the extraterrestrial seems to be that Martians, if they do exist, may be microbes.5 This century, the search for microbes on Mars has drawn new audiences, most notably with the 2004 arrival on Mars of NASA’s remote-­controlled exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which began to scribble the surface of the red planet with tire tracks, scouting for signs of water. Europa’s ice, meanwhile, has retained the allure of the extreme—­although, in a transposition not surprising in disquisitions about vertiginous frontiers, this heavenly body has become appealing primarily because it may conceal, beneath its cracked crystal shine, hot baths of hydrothermal vents harboring extremophilic, chemosynthetic microbial life.6 “Astrobiology,” thrice coined with little result before denominating the new journal—­once in 1941 by Laurence Lafleur in a long-­forgotten leaflet of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific; once in 1955 by Otto Struve, who immediately believed biology was too immature to speculate on cosmic life, and once in 1959 by Albert Wilson, who proposed the field as a laboratory-­based simulation science (and whose discipline-­building efforts were overshadowed when he cultivated connections to space medicine)—­finally, in 1998, became a favored designation for the study of cosmic biology when NASA founded its Astrobiology Institute, edging out earlier disciplinary monikers such as “exobiology” and “bioastronomy.”7 The new astrobiology spends much of its time in wet-­labs experimenting with extraterrestrial analogues and also in looking to other planets for what researchers call “the signature of life,”8 or often a “biosignature,”9 which is defined as “any measurable property of a planetary object, its atmosphere, its oceans, its geologic formations, or its samples that suggests that life was or is present. A short definition is a ‘fingerprint of life.’ ”10 A formidable challenge presents itself here, according to the astrobiologist David Des Marais, which is that researchers face the difficulty that “our definitions are based upon life on Earth” and that, “accordingly, we must distinguish between attributes of life that are truly universal versus those that solely reflect the particular history of our own biosphere.”11 This by no means easy, since it is that which is universal that astrobiologists hope eventually to discover. Astrobiologists seek to discern the signature of life through examinations of, for instance, chemical assays of extraterrestrial rocks or spectral analyses of distant planets and then “infer from the biosignatures that life is or was present.”12 This is a scientific abstraction that operates by ever outrunning itself, predicting particular materializations of life while also predicting the breakdown of prediction. Such a search for signs of life from or in the sky is akin, of course, to the forecasting (and hindcasting) practices of SETI, the Search 74

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for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, although there are important mutations, too, most of which involve the retreat from the category of “intelligence” to a substrate called “life.” In this chapter, I examine the project of astrobiology and its object, the “signature of life,” using the unconventional work of Hillel Schwartz, particularly his writing on time in Century’s End, on duplication in The Culture of the Copy,13 and on signification in “De-­Signing.”14 Schwartz’s work can provide a fresh angle on the doublings, redoublings, definitions, and redefinitions at the heart of astrobiology’s quest for extraterrestrial life.15 Schwartz’s heterodox historical method—­which in The Culture of the Copy allows him to leap from a discussion of simulated prizefights to parrots to documentary film—­proceeds, as he characterizes it, “more often by similitude than chronological lockstep.”16 His crabwise approach offers provocative paratactical techniques for traversing the networks of association, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that support the concept of the signature of life. A puzzled reviewer of The Culture of the Copy, finding Schwartz’s approach hard to pin down, asked, “What forms of analysis become necessary when using ‘similitude’ as the basis of a scholarly argument?”17 Many answers are possible, surely one of which is that, in The Culture of the Copy at least, similitude itself operates as an analytic apparatus demonstrating the unexpected connections and comparisons that practices of copying themselves enable. In a nontrivial way, decisions about what counts as similitude constitute the analysis. Similitude seeking also organizes much of astrobiology’s quest to find life elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiology’s similitudes are animated primarily by the search for the analogous, for those structures “similar in certain attributes, circumstances, relations or uses” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.). A Schwartzian sally through astrobiology’s similitude-­scouting practices offers a view into the explicit and implicit logics of the enterprise, a way into thinking about the transferences associated with analogies and a path toward thinking about how patterns of inference can be disturbed by interference from without and within. My itinerary will be as follows. I will first glance at SETI through the optic of Schwartz’s writings on copying and his work on noise and then turn to an examination of astrobiology’s notion of the signature of life, diffracting this through Schwartz’s semiotic provocations in his essay “De-­Signing,” which examines the afterimage of the sign: de-­sign, or what he calls “the urge away from plan and plot.”18 Feeding the signature of life through Schwartz’s mesh of tales about time, duplication, and noise, I shall use de-­sign as a tool for making CAT scans of an astrobiological imagination that comes of age at a time when the replication and restitution of the signs of life is the order of the day in enterprises ranging from the computer simulation of living things to cloning.19 Tinkering with Schwartz’s tool kit—­using it as a rhetorical Mars Rover—­I conclude by offering a meditation on method along with suggestions for thwarting the overreaching of the theoretical impulse in both life sciences and humanities. 75

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A NOISY CULTURE OF THE COPY Astrobiology is not SETI. SETI has largely assumed that extraterrestrial intelligence will twin human cognition. When SETI has looked for signs of intelligence in the universe, it has looked for an imitation of itself, setting up a sort of cosmic Turing test, screening for signals in a sea of noise.20 Extraterrestrial communications, many SETI scientists believed, would copycat our own; aliens would tune into the same channels as earth scientists. Dedicated radio astronomy hams, they would be happy to join in a spaced-­out signal-­to-­noise jam session.21 With SETI, the radio telescope, like the organic electrochemical transducer of the human ear on which it was patterned, became, to borrow a phrase from Schwartz, an “actively straining medium,”22 listening for murmurs from the cosmic beyond. This scientific sounding of the universe required tools of amplification and a patient attention to the very quiet. In this sense, SETI operationalized, in a scientific register, what were, historically speaking, relatively recent associations of quiet with spirituality. Schwartz notes that “to be ‘spiritual’ around 1900 was, in the most nondenominational of senses, to be receptive, contemplative, inwardly quiet. It was, in the most nonscientific of senses, to be attentive to ‘vibrations’ emanating from other hearts, other beings, other times.”23 Nikola Tesla, one of the first to tune in to unusual electrical disturbances, wrote that these “positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural. . . . The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greetings of one planet to another.”24 SETI retained Tesla’s early twentieth-­century sense of mystery but under the stewardship of such optimists as Carl Sagan modulated his terrified response into a hopeful openness, a nondenominational attentiveness to potential good vibrations. Interested in receiving a signal from the stars and partitioning out noise, SETI scientists chose wavelengths—­ what they called “naturally identified frequenc[ies]”—­that they imagined they themselves would have chosen were they trying to communicate with aliens, which of course they were.25 Searching for a frequency between galactic and atmospheric noise, some held that “the region of the spectrum from 1 to 3 Gigahertz (1 to 3 billion cycles per second) was the location of ‘likely beacon frequencies,’ in particular the portion from 1.420 GHz (the 21-­cm hydrogen line) to 1.662 GHz (the OH line).”26 Transporting symbolic associations between water and life to the skies, the engineer Bernard Oliver and the space doctor John Billingham explained in 1971 that “surely the band lying between the resonances of the disassociation products of water is ideally situated and an uncannily poetic place for water-­based life to seek its kind. Where shall we meet? At the water hole, of course!”27 SETI scientists would listen for the water music of the spheres.28 Whether what they heard would resemble the chance sounds created by the avant-­garde composer George Brecht in his 1959 Drip Music29 or the unfamiliar but intelligibly equal-­tempered 76

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melodic messages imagined by the astronomer Sebastian von Hoerner in his 1974 meditation on alien communication, “Universal Music?”30 would depend on how they drew the line between sound and sense, on whether they listened simply for oceanic echoes of their own voices. SIGNED, LIFE Astrobiologists do not require that aliens employ technical or symbolic associations between water and life in their communications. Astrobiologists seek rather to head straight for “the signature of life,” often zeroing in on the spectral trace of water as an encouraging indication of the possibility of vitality (an account of “life” that assumes it can always be found, that “life” would never have anonymity as its modus operandi). On the missions of Spirit and Opportunity, such assays are conducted in situ, even as reasoning by indirection and inference still saturates the search: Life, as we understand it, requires water, so the history of water on Mars is critical to finding out if the Martian environment was ever conducive to life. Although the Mars Exploration Rovers do not have the ability to detect life directly, they will be offering very important information on the habitability of the environment in the planet’s history. The rovers will focus on questions concerning water on Mars: its past, where it was located, and the chemical and geological interactions with the rocks and soil. . . . NASA will also look for life on Mars by searching for telltale markers, or biosignatures, of current and past life.31

What exactly is a biosignature? Des Marais and colleagues note in “Remote Sensing of Planetary Properties and Biosignatures on Extrasolar Terrestrial Planets” that a biosignature is a feature whose presence or abundance requires a biological origin. Biosignatures are created during the acquisition of the energy or the chemical ingredients that are necessary for biosynthesis or both (e.g., leading to the accumulation of atmospheric oxygen or methane). Biosignatures can also be products of the biosynthesis of information-­rich molecules and structures (e.g., complex organic molecules and cells).32

Biosignatures, then, are traces that can be read, that require literacy in organic chemistry; indeed, that take as read an ontological difference between the organic and the inorganic. What reading practices are employed to make sense of such biosignatures? According to the petrologist Monica Grady, both direct and remote “signatures of extraterrestrial life” might be sought.33 Direct signatures include measurements that show traces (in, for example, rock samples) of the production 77

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of organic molecules through biological process. If a compound—­like a sugar or amino acid—­is present in two mirror-­image versions, for instance, and one version is found in greater quantity than is another, then it is possible that disequilibrium processes of biology are responsible. The chirality—­or “handedness”—­of such stereoisomers, which can be determined with polarized light, can be used to infer biological activity. The asymmetries of stereochemistry can thus be a pointer to possible life; more specifically, these might be indicators that processes of metabolism are reproducing contingent asymmetries of an initial collection of compounds.34 Similarly, if a variety of isotopes of the same element (say, carbon) are found in different instances of an extraterrestrial organic compound, this may also suggest disequilibrium processes that may be biological in origin. Remote signatures of extraterrestrial life might be traces like the spectral signature of a planet’s atmosphere, which can indicate the presence of such bioproducts as ozone or methane. Des Marais and colleagues argue that “spectral biosignatures can arise from organic constituents (e.g., vegetation) and/or inorganic products (e.g., atmospheric O2).” Assuming that “all life requires complex organic compounds that interact in a liquid water solvent,” they argue that “life is an information-­rich entity that depends fundamentally upon the strong polarity of its associated solvent.”35 This means, “detection of O2 or its photolytic product O3 merits highest priority.”36 Water retains its special place in this semiotics of life.37 David McKay, one of the key researchers on the Martian meteorite ALH84001 project, offered, with his colleagues, a ranking of different kinds of biosignatures based on their persuasiveness, arguing that “the reliability or usefulness of a biosignature is inversely proportional to how difficult it is to produce by non-­biologic processes.”38 Category I biosignatures—­akin to Grady’s direct signatures—­are “nearly indisputable evidence for life,” and examples include “complex fossils such as trilobites, skeletons, and other forms with indisputable morphologies (extremely challenging with single-­cell life).” Category II biosignatures—­remote signatures—­include the “presence of ozone and methane in a planetary atmosphere.” Category III biosignatures embrace such items as “micrometer-­size spherical or ovoid objects of appropriate composition”—­which describes the shapes found in ALH84001 (see chapter 1 and figure 1.4) and might be described as direct but iffy signatures.39 We are in the presence here of a sign-­searching practice distinct from SETI. Whereas SETI searched the silent cosmos for signals, for the arbitrary but structured communicative act that linguists after Ferdinand de Saussure would see as the defining quality of language (later known in information theory as information40), astrobiology sounds out the cosmos more impressionistically, seeking for what Charles Sanders Peirce called indices—­indirect representations, traces, of its object, life (fingerprints and smoke are canonical Peircean indices of fingers and fire, respectively).41 78

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This language of “signature” demands direct comment. Schwartz wrote in The Culture of the Copy that signatures as signs of irreproducible authenticity “acquired their full authority only with the Romantic celebration of genius.”42 As it happens, the signature of life also celebrates a metaphysical concept—­namely life itself, which Michel Foucault argued came into being as kin to the mystic individual of Romanticism.43 But such metaphysical concepts as genius and life are haunted by an anxiety about the stability of their identity in a regime of reproducibility; the signature becomes the reproducible sign of the irreproducible, destabilizing the very conceit of irreproducible authenticity. “Life” migrates into quotation marks—­not just in cultural studies of science but in recent theoretical biology as well—­because it is at once so quotable and so definitionally unstable.44 Indeed, insofar as life is known by its associated disequilibria, it is by definition definitionally unstable.45 A detour into the work of Jacques Derrida brings into relief a key conundrum. In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida wrote that taking the signature as a trace of the authentic, of presence, depends on the absence of the signer, resulting in the error of attributing presence to signature itself: “In order to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness.”46 On this view, the signature of life can exist only insofar as life itself is a replicable absence, a metaphysical quality we know when we don’t see it. Putting it this way, however, reveals that Derrida’s claim is too singular; a signature might rather be thought of as a family of differences rendered related by witnesses that attest to their similarity, not their sameness. The paradox that then follows, of which astrobiologists are more than aware, is that the search for extraterrestrial life is strongly constrained by what we have witnessed of life on earth: “Our concepts of life and biosignatures are inextricably linked.”47 The protagonist of Dave Eggers’s novel You Shall Know Our Velocity! encounters a kindred vexation when trying to cash a traveler’s check: “At the currency exchange desk, I added my name . . . to twelve $100 traveler’s checks and handed them under the glass wall to a glowering man. . . . The man . . . wouldn’t take them; my signature did not, he said, match my passport. . . . I told him, yes, I changed my signature not that long ago, thus the mismatch.”48 One risk astrobiologists run is becoming that glowering man at the currency exchange, overlooking the mark of the unexpected traveler, ignoring what the rhetorician Richard Doyle has nominated as “the very essence of the alien presence, its characteristic ability to proliferate and mutate, disturbing the various taxonomical categories that we bring to bear on ‘them.’ ”49 To be sure, astrobiologists want to be awake to surprising multiplicity, which is one reason the researcher Baruch Blumberg has suggested in his official account of astrobiology that the field is open to a promiscuity of evidentiary regimes: 79

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Astrobiology is an interesting mixture of scientific processes. One emerges from the historical sciences that make up a large part of the astrobiology enterprise: astronomy, ecology, field biology, geology, oceanography, paleontology, and others. The events being investigated have happened, and it is the task of the scientists to tell the explanatory story. It is inductive science in that the data are collected first and then the hypothesis is formulated. . . . A second scientific approach emerges from the ethos of contemporary medical/biological research. It is deductive in the sense that it is hypothesis driven. . . . There is a strong emphasis on experimentation, in which the scientist creates his or her own universe that is, or is assumed to be, a simulacrum of the real world beyond the laboratory bench.50

Astrobiologists disagree, then, with the nineteenth-­century Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell, who wrote, “There is nothing from which to reason. The planets may or may not be inhabited.”51 Astrobiologists hold that there are many sites and logics from which to reason about extraterrestrial life—­from Earth as one planet among others, from organic chemistry, from optics. Astrobiologists are even open to the idea that they might not yet know what to reason from. As Blumberg suggests, “Life has the characteristic, using philosophical terminology, of ‘being’ and ‘becoming.’ It exists in a particular form now, but has the potential, because of the diversity in its offspring, of becoming something related, but also different.”52 Even if this reflection is phrased in terms of the normal and unexpected outcomes of kinship and family (She looks like me! and/or, Hey, I didn’t know my kid was going to turn out like that!), it demonstrates that astrobiology is in part an enterprise that depends on what Peirce called “abduction,” the argument from the future, which he described as “a method of forming a general prediction without any positive assurance that it will succeed either in the special case or usually, its justification being that it is the only possible hope of regulating our future conduct rationally.”53 Abductive reasoning appears on NASA’s Mars Program website: The challenge is to be able to differentiate life from nonlife no matter where one finds it, no matter what its varying chemistry, structure, and other characteristics might be. Life detection technologies under development will help us define life in non-­Earth-­centric terms so that we are able to detect it in all the forms it might take.54

Abductive reasoning appears again in NASA’s “Astrobiology Roadmap”: “Catalogs of biosignatures must be developed that reflect fundamental and universal characteristics of life, and are thus not restricted solely to those attributes that represent local solutions to the challenges of survival.”55 Abduction, we could say, is open to the sort of surprise screamed by the astronomer Ogilvy in Jeff Wayne’s 1978 disco–­rock opera version of War of the Worlds: “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one—­but still they come!”56 The 80

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question now becomes: If scrutiny of the signs of life reveals “life” to be one endpoint not just of processes of induction and deduction but of abduction, what, in contemporary biological sciences like today’s astrobiology, is “life” being abducted by? What analogies and disanalogies guide astrobiology toward its future objects of study? DE-­SIGNING Schwartz can help us chart such gravitational fields of similitude. His work offers an exuberant, off-­in-­all-­directions approach to the culture of the abducted copy, one that reads between and weaves across the lines of figures like Derrida.57 Schwartz’s approach veers away from channeling all semiotic practice into one vector of tightly coiled presence/absence, recognition/misrecognition, and opens up analysis of the signature of life to the wider field of traveling anxieties and pleasures—­similitudes—­constituting this object. Astrobiology, after all, is founded not just on empirical commitments; it is a project that is optimistically tuned into finding life elsewhere, that earnestly believes that “life” unproblematically describes processes on Earth, and that often actively seeks the shudder of realizing that we earthlings, too, are cosmic creatures. If SETI has presumed aliens to be, like (some of) us, curious and well-­intentioned, astrobiology assumes that extraterrestrial life forms reside in a passive and patient nature rather than in an oppositional wilderness; they are what Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics termed Augustinian rather than Manichean opponents.58 In other words, McKay and colleagues’ “fingerprint of life”59 is not the trace of a careless criminal but of a comfortable homebody with nothing to hide. Schwartz’s account of the culture of the copy is extended in his “De-­Signing,” in which he asks us to consider the Other that haunts Design, “De-­Sign, the urge away from plan and plot.”60 “De-­Signing,” he avers, “exposes & usually opposes the scheming found to be embedded in the word, work & world of Design.”61 For Schwartz, De-­sign—­a strategy, a tactic, a tendency in the arts and sciences of today—­comes in eight flavors: 1. Defacing—­overwriting design in the name of another code: “wrapping buildings, hanging graffiti in galleries, tattooing, tongue-­piercing, erased lines & scratched film as graphic invention” 2. Displacing—­removing design from the context that makes it intelligible: “collision architecture, digital photography, cyberspace, earthwork sculpture, fictive archaeologies, quick forward/reverse time fantasies” 3. Simplifying—­reducing design in the name of common sense: “stream-lining, basic black dresses, ergonomics, Zen gardens & 81

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sheetwater-over-­basalt fountains in front of downtown office buildings” 4. Amplifying—­magnifying design until it becomes caricature, monstrous, terrifying: “superrealism, heavy metal, electron microscopy, National Enquirer headlines, nationally inflated & pharmaceutically overwrought campaigns against obesity” 5. Transparency—­denying design, affirming a clear reality that shines through: “glass buildings, visible plumbing & service ducts, sunshine laws, the Reader’s Digest Bible” 6. Glare—­subjecting design to high contrast, saturation, super-illumination: “mirrored skyscrapers, mirrored sunglasses, halogen bulbs, police helicopter spotlights, MS-­NBC” 7. Spontaneity—­interrupting design with the improvisatory: “roller­coasters, impulse purchase display & advertising, Polaroids, cellphones” 8. Surfeit—­multiplying design recursively, effacing origin and destintion: “Warhol’s Sleep, satellite TV with 480 channels, cloning, hyper-­supermarkets, Einstein on the Beach, digital copies, octuplets surviving.”62 Within the biosignatures astrobiologists employ—­or, better, design—­as evidence for life, do there lurk logics of de-­sign? That is, having installed a representational system for detecting direct and remote signs of life, might astrobiologists also be curving away from this system, from these signs? Having set up force fields of Peircian indices, is astrobiology also being grabbed by the gravities of other similitudes? As my answer will obviously be yes, I should remark on what searching for such roving logics will accomplish. Teasing out similitudes between Schwartz’s eight rhetorical energies and moments in astrobiological analysis allows us to discern semiotic fissures in the notion of “life.” Such discernment is not meant as a disabling critique of the project of astrobiology but aims, rather, at tracking the semantic ricochets that make vitality what it is today, when it has become imaginable to prospect for, and not just speculate about, life on other worlds. Just below, I read astrobiological texts through Schwartz’s eight de-­signs. I present this as an unbalanced list, a permutation of Foucault’s Borges’s “certain Chinese encyclopaedia,”63 the fantastic classificatory grid Foucault uses to illustrate the riotous unsteadiness of the practice of taxonomy. I want to frame the multiple, sometimes contradictory features of astrobiological classification, not with the aim of fully sorting things out, to borrow the title of a book by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, but of torquing things out, attending to the swerves 82

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and spirals that make astrobiology’s object.64 Some of my examples highlight difficulties or contradictions in astrobiological epistemology; others the dizzy giddiness involved in searching for life in the stars; still others the interpretive complexities that texture any accounting of things biological. A killjoy might begin by saying that it is obvious that astrobiologists, in thinking life has a signature at all, believe vitality to be simple, transparent, and spontaneous and so, yes, they are de-­signing, but in the most empiricist sense. Most of the signs astrobiology searches for seem to be standard indexical signs, footprints of life, signs of Yeti, not ETI. There’s a lumbering literalness here that makes such de-­signing unremarkable—­or at least not surprising, because this empiricism by proxy has become fundamental to the natural sciences’ ways of authorizing knowledge. But this analysis is too simple, so let me begin with the double vision of Schwartz’s second de-­sign. DISPLACING

Spectrographic portraits of planets, which require differently located data points, work best if “the observer is near the orbital plane, and badly if the observer is near the orbital pole.”65 In other words, potential remote biosignatures have to be on register before they can be read—­not a straightforward matter, especially for previously unknown planets, since orbital planes have themselves to be discovered through inferences that often depend on interpreting spectrographic features. Taking a cue from the anthropologist Peter Redfield, who suggests in his Space in the Tropics that fixing an equator takes iterative semiotic work, we might say that here the signature of life risks displacement, a tropic turn away from sense.66 If one is interested, for example, in using spectral imagery to surmise whether extrasolar planets harbor microbial life, getting oriented will be a potentially recursive process that will mix calibration with false positives in a cascade of difficult-­to-­contain displacements.67 SIMPLIFYING

The definition of life offered by the astrobiologists Des Marais and colleagues—­ “an information-­rich entity that depends fundamentally upon the strong polarity of its associated solvent, [water]”68—­trades on an urge toward simplifying, a forgetting of the multiple personalities that have haunted “life” since its historical emergence as a thing-­in-­itself. Simply announcing that life is wrapped up with information skims over the reductionism entailed in the idea of the genetic code, the unwritten referent in Des Marais and colleagues’ definition. The transformation of DNA into a semiotic molecule—­the founding mixed metaphor that transported biochemical specificity from crystallography into cryptography—­is a historical accomplishment, not necessarily a fact of nature, ready to be ported across the universe.69 To be sure, the polarity of water sits here as an 83

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ergonomic backbone for the materiality of the DNA molecule—­but wait a minute, why should such a complex of wet information necessarily materialize everywhere? In a report on the Mars Rovers, NASA’s astrobiology website suggests that in addressing “Goal 1: Determine If Life Ever Arose on Mars,” some sort of witching stick will be desirable, though no guarantee of finding life: “On Earth, all forms of life need water to survive. It is likely, though not certain, that if life ever evolved on Mars, it did so in the presence of a long-­standing supply of water.”70 The abduction of life by information theory by Des Marais and colleagues streamlines life away from other possible articulations—­as autopoietic systems for which information is only an observer’s imposition, to take just one example.71 Des Marais and colleagues’ damp definition, though simple—­basically, that life is smart and wet—­holds water only by announcing itself as simple. AMPLIFYING

One piece of evidence advanced to support the potential biological origin of the possibly Martian microfossils on Martian meteorite ALH84001 was that on magnification these forms resembled the shape of earthly bacteria: “Ovoid features  .  .  . are similar in size and shape to nanobacteria in travertine and limestone. The elongate forms resemble some forms of fossilized filamentous bacteria in the terrestrial fossil record.”72 This evidence, arrived at through the amplification of electron microscopy, offers a similitude—­“similar in size and shape”—­that seems to have left the object open to ridicule, collapsing this aspiring Martian into a parodic mascot for an overeager, resemblance-­seeking biology.73 Many astrobiologists balked at early pattern-­matching recipes for seeing traces of life in the pictures of ALH84001. Indeed, as Robert Markley observed in his cultural history of research and writing on Mars, Dying Planet, “these photographs, first unveiled at the NASA news conference in 1996, looked like segmented biological forms and offered the same kind of challenge that Lowell’s first photographs of the ‘canals’ had posed in 1905.”74 Resemblances to familiar structures demanded attention to the “ground”—­the chemical substrate of the meteorite, the putatively watery atmosphere of Lowell’s Mars—­on which these figures sat magnified. In his 1997 play, Wittgenstein: On Mars, George Coates put his finger on the uneasiness that researchers skeptical about the presumptive nanobacteria in ALH84001 may have felt. Coates offered a dramatic comparison of the ovoid in ALH84001 to the famous drawing in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, a figure that suggests the outline of either a duck or a rabbit, depending on how one looks at it (an image later borrowed by Thomas Kuhn to illustrate the underdetermination of interpretation by evidence).75 The Martian ovoids have become category III biosignatures—­direct but iffy—­and those who seek to draw them closer to being signs of life, including some of the initial researchers, have pressed for more rigorous morphological matching.76 Others have begun to call 84

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for more chemical evidence.77 Cady and colleagues argued that “the ALH84001 controversy underscores the need to be able to distinguish the biogenically produced characteristics of morphological microfossils from those produced non-biologically.”78 Moreover, the burden of proof now resides with researchers who would posit a biological rather than nonbiological origin for the figures—­ though it should be noted that the original scientists continue to claim that a biological origin offers the most parsimonious explanation. But simplicity, the previous flavor of de-­sign on Schwartz’s list, is not as simple as it seems. Markley noted that “in invoking Occam’s razor, the two sides in the Martian meteorite debate voice different conceptions of scientific ‘simplicity,’ and their arguments and counterarguments reframe philosophical (and theoretical) questions about the usefulness of biological—­or ecological—­analogies between Earth and Mars.”79 They also raised technical questions—­such as whether amplification can actually zero in on simplicity. What Schwartz might call amplification, unsympathetic scientists may simply call exaggeration. At the same time, the playful cartoonishness of the ALH84001 ovoids directs us to the joys inherent in finding liveliness wherever one looks, as well as to the fun of playing hide-­and-­seek with elusive Martians and credulous colleagues. Scientists are well aware of the pitfalls of analogical reasoning—­even as they employ it to build hypotheses and interpret data—­and astrobiologists have to be keenly on the lookout for illusory results. After all, as Kevin Zahnle wrote in a 2001 review of Martian research in Nature, “Always life on Mars seems just beyond the fields that we know.”80 One example from recent debates about Mars orbited around discussions of whether erosional formations on Mars that look like gullies might have been formed recently by liquid water, might be more ancient formations, or might be the result of debris carried by carbon dioxide, released from structures of ice called clathrates opened up by avalanches.81 The treks of Spirit and Opportunity appear to have put the clathrate thesis to rest by swerving away from the technique of amplification, through measuring chemical samples instead. Close-­ups, it turns out, can sometimes provide a superrealist vision that is less than clear. TRANSPARENCY

Which gets me to transparency. Looking at the optical chirality of extraterrestrial stereoisomers using polarized light is an attempt to see through and into the biological, an impulse toward transparency. Here the handedness of isomers potentially points toward the invisible hand of life. Schwartz maintains that “De-­Sign as transparency swiftly becomes anti-­metaphorical, anti-­symbolic; collapsing the sign upon the signifier, it becomes uncomfortable even with simile. . . . De-­ Signing leads to magical discoveries of ur-­languages, panhuman ethics, universal rites, syntax hard-­wired in the infant brain . . . the human genome.”82 And maybe “life” as well? What sort of enchantment is at work that allows us to see 85

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vital signs shining through the mirror images of molecules? Perhaps it is similar to the enchantment analyzed by Joseph Dumit in his analysis of the visual rhetoric of brain scans, which conflate a highly mediated, digitally enhanced snapshot of chemicals coursing through a human brain with a state of the brain itself and, more, with a kind of brain and person: “the symptom has been collapsed into the referent.”83 The trickiness here is that transparency—­collapse—­is in the techniques of the beholder. Consider, for example, this extract from a letter sent by a W. Charles Lamb from Hubbell, Nebraska, in 1928 to the scientists at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California: “If you will study the scriptures and the photographs, you will find probly [sic] more than 33 points of identity—­ proving the dwelling place of Gods—­in The Great Nebula of Orion.”84 Seeing into or through chemical compounds in itself demonstrates nothing; optical chirality needs an account of how it stands for life—­but this account will always be unsteady, able to condense ideas about biological disequilibrium as well as the similitude-­seeking magical cosmology of readers like W. Charles Lamb. It may be no surprise that the skew toward left-­handedness in most amino acids on Earth has been read by some creationists and intelligent-­design advocates as a sign of the agency of a creator rather than the result of potentially godless physical powers, like the weak nuclear force.85 GLARE

This de-­sign is oddly appropriate for thinking about astrobiological claims for life on Jupiter’s ice-­covered moon, Europa. In “Locating Potential Biosignatures on Europa from Surface Geology Observations,” Patricio H. Figueredo and colleagues explain that “features on Europa tend to brighten with time.”86 Cracks in Europa’s ice send up water from below, which initially darkens swaths of the surface—­marking these areas as promising sites to look for life that might be flourishing beneath Europa’s dead shell. Figueredo and company suggest that “because of their inferred association with transfer of briny material from or to the subsurface, low-­albedo [dark], geologically recent smooth bands are among the most interesting sites for astrobiological studies.”87 But such bands are ever in danger of brightening overmuch, saturating the optical landscape so that spacecraft like Galileo might find their spectrometers blinded by the light (moot for Galileo itself, crushed on September 21, 2003, in the shadows of Jupiter’s atmosphere). Does the glare of the frosty disco ball of Europa dazzle with promise or blind with false hope? We might understand in Europa’s harsh light proposals to site on this moon’s exterior a suite of magnetic sounding robots called SOUNDERs, Surface Observatories for UNDErground Remote-­sensing.88 In the switching of frequencies from light to sound, one might hear nostalgia for SONAR (following Schwartz’s history of sexuality and hearing aids,89 might there also be a desire for stethoscopic intimacy with this heavenly body?). In “Near-­Infrared Detection of 86

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Potential Evidence for Microscopic Organisms on Europa,” J. Brad Dalton and colleagues caution that “inherent noise in the observations and limitations of spectral sampling must be taken into account when discussing these findings [about Europa].”90 Switching from light to sound is an attempt to turn away from the glare. Glare attunes us to the problems of visualization that inhere in many astrobiological attempts to image the signs of life on other planets. On the Spirit and Opportunity voyages, for example, from which photographs of the Martian surface have been sent back to Earth, color correction has become a key issue, especially in the search for hematite, an iron oxide, the presence of which might point toward water. NASA has offered calibration details: When you adjust the color on your television set, you do so by picking something on the screen that you know should be a certain color (such as grass should be green) and you adjust your set accordingly.  .  .  . The Pancam calibration target is, by far, the most unique the rover carries. It is in the shape of a sundial and is mounted on the rover deck. Pancam will image the sundial many times during the mission so that scientists can adjust the images they receive from Mars. They use the colored blocks in the corners of the sundial to calibrate the color in images of the Martian landscape. Pictures of the shadows that are cast by the sundial’s center post will allow scientists to properly adjust the brightness of each Pancam image.91

All this calibration depends on assumptions about how the sun and the atmosphere interact on Mars, which is not known for certain. The Earth’s atmosphere can have effects too. As Jim Bell, lead scientist for the Pancam explains, “If there is rain in Spain near the Deep Space Network station, or some other communications problem, a packet of information can get distorted mid-­stream and not show up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.”92 Glare appears again in the search for biosignatures on extrasolar planets. Roger F. Knacke states that “the zodiacal light in an extrasolar system is a source of interference for all observations of extrasolar planets.”93 Trying to see life, scientists may see stars. SPONTANEITY

In “Does Life’s Rapid Appearance Imply a Martian Origin?,” the physicist Paul Davies suggests, “Suppose that . . . life is very hard to start (i.e., that the expectation time for life to emerge spontaneously on a suitable Earth-­like planet is very much longer than the habitability duration of that planet).”94 Building upon this hypothesis, Davies argues that Mars was habitable earlier than Earth. Mars’s small size may have attracted fewer disruptive meteors and allowed it to cool more quickly than Earth, “permitting the early establishment of a deep subsurface zone in which hyperthermophilic organisms could take refuge from the 87

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bombardment.”95 Possibly, he argues, life originated on Mars and then traveled to Earth in a process he calls “transpermia” (to distinguish it from more general theories of “panspermia,” which is associated with such figures as the astronomer Fred Hoyle, which imagine life to be widespread throughout the universe). As Davies put it, “if life emerged from a series of highly improbable chemical and physical steps, as is widely assumed by biologists, then a Martian origin for terrestrial life is probable, or even highly probable.”96 This is a call for the recognition of the biological through its spontaneity.97 To this instance of the spontaneous can be added discussions of extraterrestrial organic compounds in which the distribution of isotopes, atoms of the same element, show signs of disequilibrium. Monica Grady wrote that “one of the key aims of the Beagle 2 lander, due for launch in 2003 on board ESA’s [European Space Agency’s] Mars Express, is to search for chemical traces of life on Mars, by looking for an unbalanced isotopic signature between carbon in different samples.”98 The focus on “looking for” carbon in this last example subtly suggests an astrobiological desire for cosmic company, a desire to answer in the negative the question so often on the lips of astrobiologists, Are we alone?99 To reply by quoting a Schwartzian similitude: “Carbon copying is, for us faithful carbon-­based life forms, a prime analog of the process of replication . . . of impressing ourselves into another in the midst of making something of ourselves. The carbon copy restores to us a companionate twin, running happily along with us.”100 For readers moved by “Does Life’s Rapid Appearance Imply a Martian Origin?,” we have long-­lost relatives on Mars. Too bad, of course, that the United Kingdom’s Beagle 2 lost its way on Christmas 2003 and is now traveling without signal on an errand into the Martian wilderness. Beagle cannot phone home—­cannot make use, for example, of the “Beagle Ringtone” written by the British rock band Blur, which now only sounds on the old cell phones of those people spontaneous enough to have double-­clicked on the website where the ringtone could be impulse-­purchased.101 SURFEIT

The multiplicity of signs of life that astrobiology offers might be read not just as doubling or even triangulating on an object, “life,” but as indicating that we are searching for signs of something we can define only after having defined it.102 It might, of course, be that this very spiraling around the concept is what defines “life” at all. The interference patterns support the mirage of vitality as a thing-­in-­itself, a semiotic webwork that signals what Richard Doyle glosses as “a transformation of the scientific concept of life itself, a shift from an understanding of organisms as localized agents to an articulation of living systems as distributed events.”103 This shift is what makes the operation of similitude—­the sideways travel from one concept to another—­worth watching, worth mimicking, worth torquing. The off-­kilter recursive logic of astrobiology—­local 88

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definitions of life shape universal definitions that in turn redistribute the possibilities for local instantiations, and so on, endlessly, without finish—­is the de-­sign of Schwartz’s surfeit, and he argued that the resulting indiscernibility leads to “feedback, white noise.”104 DEFACING

From canals on Mars to worlds on wavelengths, we are back by recirculation to Schwartz’s first mode of de-­sign: defacing. Astrobiology’s claiming of the specters of the spectrum in the name of the code of life, the signature of life, is a gathering of spectrographic analysis into the project of biology. We can take a page from Michael Taussig’s Defacement, in which he argues that it is only by becoming scribbled over that objects—­here, “life”—­acquire a sacred, reified status.105 In “Year Zero: Faciality,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari make a resonant argument, maintaining that the sign of the face—­that collection of features we take for granted as the exterior guarantee of interior life—­exists only insofar as it is a “wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of ”;106 that is, to bounce off to produce the signified, in this case “life.” The famous face on Mars, a geological feature frequently celebrated on the cover of the National Enquirer, is exemplary here, especially because, as Deleuze and Guattari have argued, “the face has a correlate of great importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritorialized world,”107 and “the collapse of corporeal coordinates or milieus implies the constitution of a landscape.”108 And bringing together Schwartz’s amplification and glare: “The face, what a horror. It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its pores, matts, bright colors, whiteness and holes: there is no need for a close-­up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close-­up, and naturally inhuman, a monstrous hood.”109 Ripping a page from Paul de Man, one might also see in the signature of life a moment of prosopopeia, a “rhetorical figure by which an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting” (OED, 2nd. ed.). De Man wrote that “autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause” and that “death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography . . . deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores.”110 This “whirligig”111 motion between auto/biography (self-­portraiture, the signature of life) and fiction (life as it is conjectured to exist elsewhere) could, to tweak de Man, be precisely the movement that sustains something like “life” at all. Thus, we might rewrite de Man’s words as: “Life is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of distance by astrobiology . . . deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores.”112 We have returned, it would seem, to Schwartz’s displacement—­to the between emphasized by Doyle, to the place where Schwartz’s cacophony of de-­signs does its work. What do we make of all this? Is it something like a “theory” of de-­signification? I’m not sure; theory may capture too much, may imprison analysis, may reduce 89

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astrobiology to an enterprise organized around an ordinary semiotic conundrum of presence and absence. Might we resist theory—­or, better, move orthogonally to it? ATHWART THEORY Schwartz, who for more than twenty years has worked as an independent scholar—­that is, as a scholar outside the gravitational pull of academic departments and institutions—­has sometimes been reprimanded for leaving to one side concerns that travel under the name “theory.” Thus, the reviewer of The Culture of the Copy who was quoted earlier wrote, “I craved more discussion and use of theory to examine, for example, how the various historical anecdotes supported or contradicted other interpretations of simulation or ‘the copy.’ ”113 I would say that Schwartz’s work is supersaturated with theory if we understand theory—­from the ancient Greek theorein, “to look”—­as inhering in his strategy of scrutinizing diverse subjects through one another.114 Schwartz’s multiplicative refractions are animated by suites of similitude pointing variously to historical lineages, symbolic resonances, accidental associations, and, sometimes, to the sheer assonance, consonance, or rhyme of words and phrases. But lest the optic of my easy etymology of theory be too de-­signedly transparent, let me offer another angle into how Schwartz’s method works in a mode I will call athwart theory. Working athwart theory is not the same as writing “against theory,” a practice proposed by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in 1982 in Critical Inquiry.115 Knapp and Michaels argued that all appeals to accounts of interpretation—­whether they offered schemes for understanding everything or, on the other hand, denied the idea of correct interpretation at all—­foundered on a “single mistake”: the assumption that problems set up by theoretical frames were themselves real. But what is wrong with claims about reality? Or with making “mistakes”? I argue here in favor of a multiplicity of mistakes as proper guides into what is real for communities of interpretation.116 “Theory” cannot serve as a stable frame for such interpretation. In astrobiology, for example, as Markley notes, controversies about ALH84001 have been structured “on different conceptions of what a biological ‘theory’ is supposed to do—­offer probabilistic arguments for ancient microorganisms on Mars or present evidence that meets standards of certainty for terrestrial life-­forms.”117 “Theory” is not always anyway the motive force animating astrobiological searches for signs of life. Schwartz’s sideways approach to history exemplifies what Edward de Bono has termed “lateral thinking,” which is described in the OED (2nd ed.) as “a way of thinking that seeks the solution to intractable problems through unorthodox methods, or elements which would normally be ignored by logical thinking.” Such an approach operates through roving, through roaming,118 not taking for granted a context within which a text or event will sit but rather creating and 90

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inhabiting contexts along the way, through juxtaposition. The frustration that this ricocheting recipe produces for some readers, like the Schwartz reviewer who wants to know “what forms of analysis become necessary when using ‘similitude’ as the basis of a scholarly argument,”119 rests on a fear that similitude cannot properly be a basis of argument because it is too slippery, too subjective. But whence this anxiety? In Error and the Academic Self, Seth Lerer argues that academic worry about mistakes, about error, is closely connected to apprehension about the errant, the nomadic. Containing, fixing, and erasing errors has become the province of such disciplinary formations as the philology of J.R.R. Tolkien, which seeks to fasten traditions to firm foundations such as national linguistic genealogies or scientific accounts of the steady evolution of words. Meanwhile, the finding of sustenance in slippage—­indeed, in troping—­has often been the province of the exile, the émigré, and the estranged. Thus, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney arrived at a kind of postcolonial translation of Beowulf through a fascination with the lateral transfection, rather than vertical transmission, of words into and out of Anglo-­Saxon. Lerer also detects an attachment to errancy in many American émigré intellectuals’ practices of rhetorical philology, which etymologize the names of tropes—­in effect using the tools of philology to at first moor and then unmoor the literal meanings of rhetorical devices—­in order to demonstrate that language is figurative all the way down. Lerer suggests that such fascination “with estrangement and displacement” and “the wandering of meanings” has become the hallmark of rhetorical philology in America, “a landscape rife with being lost,” so that “to read as an American is to make tropes of words and, in the process, to replay in linguistic terms the patterns of emigration and estrangement that have made us who we are.”120 Schwartz’s strategy in “De-­Signing” is certainly to turn words into tropes, to unfasten words from etymology toward new rhetorical energies. On this view, Schwartz might be a scholar situated in Lerer’s reading of the errant American. But turning to Schwartz’s farewell book review for the Journal of Unconventional History, in which he calls for “histories written with a sense of our own human nonsensicalness,”121 one as easily could detect a demand not just for troping but also for tripping over ourselves. The more important question for me, however, is how Schwartz’s work aids in understanding and uncovering the exuberance of such scientific enterprises as astrobiology, which chase after such overflowing objects as “life.” Rather than following a genealogical or archaeological model, Schwartz’s methods of association suggest a fluid dynamics that follows flows of history into eddies that swirl both backward and forward in time and that operate at a variety of scales.122 The recirculating temporalities that Schwartz offers complicate such science studies formulations as Andrew Pickering’s “mangle of practice,”123 which assume that historical accountings must cleave rigorously to a physical ontology of unidirectional time. Schwartz’s analysis, animated by poetic linguistic play, can be brought into conversation with the refusal of science studies to rush to 91

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distinguish content and context, a strategy Joseph Rouse connected to a particular view of language in the inaugural issue of Configurations, the journal of the Science and Literature Society: “There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language.”124 Schwartz’s system of setting up discursive diffraction patterns rather than unified force fields of theory might be used as a tactic for writing a cultural studies of science attentive to the contingent conversations, conversions, and inversions that fashion the edges of the scientific lifeworld—­fashionings that, because of their locatedness in a world of signification, often force scientists and theorists of science back on linguistic connections not entirely under their control. Schwartz’s focus on language accents the complex pleasures and anxieties that animate the most technical research. Schwartz’s similitudes are thus trippier than the traffic written of by Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth Lloyd in Keywords in Evolutionary Biology: By virtue of their dependence on ordinary language counterparts, technical terms carry, along with their ties to the natural world of inanimate and animate objects, indissoluble ties to the social world of ordinary language speakers. . . . [They] have insidious ways of traversing the boundaries of particular theories, of historical periods, and of disciplines. . . . They serve as conduits for unacknowledged, unbidden, and often unwelcome traffic between worlds.125

Schwartz’s approach does not highlight the insidious. By undertaking histories of configurations axial to but also at the edges of cultural consciousness—­copying, noise—­Schwartz tracks a variety of motions, including tracing analogies that are sometimes out of bounds of a general articulated cultural experience or, more important, outside of disciplinary strategies for making sense. This makes it less interdisciplinary than adisciplinary or, if that’s too evasively de-­signing, undisciplinary—­which is not to say undisciplined. Schwartz’s historical research, which is comprehensively condensed in his thorough cultural chronicles and also documented at high-­resolution in his detailed endnotes, is extensive, exhaustive, and exemplary in its curiosity and care. How else can we place this approach? In addition to Lerer’s provocative claim about the errant, we might also detect resonances with critiques of reflexivity in the social sciences, with those attempts to move away from reinscribing an already known social order in situating the cultural address of one’s own theorization. In anthropology, Bill Maurer offered (rhyming with de Bono’s sideways thinking and Lerer’s attention to error) what he calls “lateral reasons for a post-­ reflexive anthropology,” arguing that if, after all, anthropology is not a quest for an accurate description of a social reality, but a “scale model of all the mistakes to be made in figuring it out,” and if those mistakes are already anticipated by the social reality “under” investigation, 92

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. . . anthropology would then be a practice of lateral reading and writing, neither descriptive nor explanatory but repetitive, multiplicative, and/or accelerative.126

An anthropology of astrobiology would tune into, would sound, the shared motives, mistakes, and meanings in representing social life and searching for extraterrestrial life. Such an analysis would be alien to discipline. But aliens, as astrobiologists can tell us, are good to think with. About life. About difference. About polar opposites. About doubles and imperfect twins. Insofar as this chapter is about both astrobiology and Schwartz’s method, it is an attempt to see what happens when different inscription tactics, different scholarly worlds, collide. I have sought to double astrobiology’s similitude-­seeking strategies by drawing upon Schwartz’s, hoping in the process to generate connections that might be followed up empirically, theoretically, poetically, and politically by people in cultural studies of science and also by astrobiologists curious about how their practice looks from a world perhaps not so different from their own. At century’s turn, doubles of earthly life abound and rebound off the face of Mars and the glare of Europa, signals of the noisy nuisance of this thing we call vitality. As Schwartz proposed, “at the ends of centuries, when fatefulness is widely at stake, Doubles rise to the occasion.”127 The Janus face of astrobiology, looking backward, looking forward, looking far away and close up, is a token of millennial preoccupations with self-­reflection and with the limits of life.

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NATURE/CULTURE/SEAWATER Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization

ON OCTOBER 17, 2009, FOURTEEN officials of the Maldives government convened a meeting on the seafloor, 20 feet below the water’s surface, to sign a document exhorting nations around the planet to cut carbon dioxide emissions. At an average of 5 feet above sea level, many of the 1,192 coral islands of the Maldives are in danger of vanishing beneath the Indian Ocean if climate change proceeds as many scientists predict. The Maldives meeting, staged as a simultaneously silly and serious photo opportunity, saw cabinet ministers outfitted in full scuba gear, and it mobilized seawater—­in its apparition as what Lévi-­Strauss would have called maleficent water (against beneficent water, rain water)—­as a symbol of drowning (see figure 8.1).1 The meeting was a call to recognize a local “culture” under threat from a global “nature” transformed by distant “cultures” of consumption and pollution. Water materialized as a cycling, hybrid substance, at once natural and cultural. The anthropology-­minded analysis I have offered just now presses the nature/ culture binary to do a good deal of critical work—­conceptual work conditioned by anthropology’s wider epistemological inheritance. As Marilyn Strathern has observed: “Western nature-­culture constructs . . . revolve around the notion that the one domain is open to control or colonization by the other.”2 Water oscillates between natural and cultural substance, its putative materiality masking the fact that its fluidity is a rhetorical effect of how many of us speak and think about “nature” and “culture” in the first place. Water as nature appears as both potentiality of form and uncontainable flux; it moves faster than culture, with culture often imagined in a land-­based idiom grounded in the culture concept’s origins in European practices and theories of agriculture and cultivation.3 Water 94

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Figure 8.1. “In the Maldives, ministers in scuba gear met on the sea bed to draw attention to the dangers of global warming for the island nation.” From New York Times, October 17, 2009. Photo by Mohamed Seeneen.

as nature appears as that flowing substance that culture may be mobilized to channel—­think of canal locks, dams, and irrigation networks. Water as culture, meanwhile, can materialize as a medium of pleasure, sustenance, travel, poison, and disaster. I here consider water as substance and symbol in anthropological theory, asking how the nature/culture pair imposes particular qualities on water, which water is then sometimes imagined to overflow. In asking after water this way, I retool the historian of science Peter Galison’s notion of a “theory machine,” an object in the world that stimulates a theoretical formulation.4 For Galison, networks of electrocoordinated clocks in European railway stations at the turn of the twentieth-­century aided Einstein’s thinking about simultaneity. Animal husbandry provided a theory machine for Darwin. For the French physicist Sadi Carnot, water was a theory machine; his second law of thermodynamics in the 1820s hypothesized that heat was a fluid that behaved like flowing water.5 How has water operated as a theory machine in anthropology? How has water been framed by nature/culture? How has it in turn reframed nature/culture? Water is not one thing.6 For natural science, water’s effects depend on its state (solid, liquid, gas), on its scale (from molecular to oceanic), and on whether it is fresh or salty, still or turbulent, deep or shallow. For interpretative social sciences, water can be sacred substance, life, refreshment, contaminant, grave.7 95

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I fix in this essay on seawater—­mindful that rivers,8 lakes,9 rain,10 irrigation systems,11 glaciers,12 bogs,13 and other aqueous elementalities demand their own accounts.14 In “Common Senses: Water, Sensory Experience and the Generation of Meaning,” Veronica Strang compares her ethnographies of water in Aboriginal north Australia and Dorset, England, to suggest that the variety of meanings attached to water issues from its form: “Water’s diversity is . . . a key to its meanings. Here is an object that is endlessly transmutable, moving readily from one shape to another: from ice to stream, from vapour to rain, from fluid to steam. It has an equally broad range of scales of existence: from droplet to ocean, trickle to flood, cup to lake.”15 Strang suggests that water’s qualities of mutability “are crucial in that they provide a common basis for the construction of meaning.”16 I agree with Strang on the mutability and multiple meanings of water but would emphasize that such mutability has no meaning apart from human conceptions of it. Strang’s argument offers one kind of theory machine, positing that a formal flexibility in a substance’s “nature” underwrites its flexibility in culture.17 Strang’s claim is emblematic of the larger turn to “the form of water”18 in recent anthropological and social theory. In what follows, I track that turn and its history to motivate a discussion of seawater imagery and metaphors in early ethnography, in maritime anthropology, and in recent social theory. I trace a three-­part story. First, I suggest that in early anthropology the qualities of seawater were portrayed impressionistically, even Romantically. Using Franz Boas’s famous suggestion that the color of seawater is a matter of cultural construal, rather than of sheer empiricity, I argue that such figures as Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Firth, Claude Lévi-­Strauss, and Margaret Mead treated water, paradoxically, as atheoretical, a substance upon which to meditate when they were not building social theory. Second, I discuss how, in maritime anthropology, water became a more explicit substance to think with, its materiality a crucial factor in accounts of fisher people. Third, I show how in today’s social theory—­in the work of Paul Gilroy, Zygmunt Bauman, and Peter Sloterdijk, for example—­scientific descriptions of water’s form, molecular and molar, have become prevalent in figuring social, political, and economic forces and dynamics. I argue that seawater has moved from an implicit to an explicit figure for anthropological and social theorizing, especially in the age of globalization, which is so often described in terms of currents, flows, and circulations. Indeed, I suggest that, in light of such tropes, “globalization” might also be called “oceanization.” But although directing salutary attention to watery materiality, such turns to “the form of water” can conjure new reifications, which should prompt anthropologists to puzzle further about how best to think across nature, culture, water, and theory. Rather than treat water as a “theory machine,” then, I conclude—­drawing on an image often used in nautical talk—­that anthropologists might work athwart theory: that is, they might think of theory neither as 96

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set above the empirical nor as simply deriving from it but, rather, as crossing the empirical transversely.19 Theory (and, for that matter, seawater) is at once an abstraction as well as a thing in the world; theories constantly cut across and complicate our descriptive paths as we navigate forward in the “real” world. ANTHROPOLOGY’S OCEANIC ORIGIN STORIES One origin story for anthropology goes back to Franz Boas’s reflections on the color of seawater as a matter decided divergently within distinct cultural epistemologies. Looking back on his 1881 University of Kiel physics-­geography dissertation, “Contribution to the Understanding of the Color of Water,” Boas wrote, In preparing my doctor’s thesis I had to use photometric methods to compare intensities of light. This led me to consider the quantitative values of sensations. In the course of my investigation I learned to recognize that there are domains of our experience in which the concepts of quantity, of measures that can be added or subtracted like those with which I was accustomed to operate, are not applicable.20

Seawater prompted Boas to consider qualitative aspects of seeing.21 Seawater, seen, became a theory machine for the qualitative, relativist cultural epistemology for which Boas became known—­which perhaps is fitting because the word “theory” derives from the ancient Greek for “to look on” and “to contemplate.” Alexandra Lorini took this argument further, suggesting not only that “water in its different forms, and the human activities related to it, was at the center of Boas’s geoanthropological descriptions of the Northwest Coast,” but also that the mutability of water—­in rivers, rain, snow—­served as a model for Boas’s belief in the mutability of cultural practice.22 Seawater figured more practically in early anthropology as the medium supporting passages toward fieldwork. Gísli Pálsson has written that “as a result of voyages by sea, different and isolated worlds were connected into a global but polarized network of power-­relations. Prior to these voyages, the idea of anthropology did not exist. In a very real sense, then, anthropology, the study of humanity, is as much the child of seafaring as of colonialism.”23 Such European seafaring saw the sea as a blank space between nation-­states, as Philip Steinberg has argued.24 Malinowski’s stay in the Trobriands during World War I resulted from his status as an Austro-­Hungarian citizen permitted to substitute internment as an enemy alien in Britain with a stay in the Western Pacific. For ­Malinowski, the Trobriands became anthropological islands out of history because of a view of the sea as a dissociating space.25 European anthropologists rhapsodized about the waters over which they passed. Malinowski, in his 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, wrote of “intensely blue, clear seas” and reflected on how “the sea will change its colour once 97

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more, become pure blue, and beneath its transparent waters, a marvelous world of multi-­colored coral, fish and seaweed will unfold itself.”26 Raymond Firth, in We the Tikopia, recalls that “in the evening the shades of the sea vary from a steely grey where the light is reflected on it through a pale green of the reef waters inshore to a darker green near the reef edge, and an indigo beyond.”27 Lévi-­Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques tells of the “blue crucible of the sea” and of “a gleaming, satin-­smooth tropical sea.”28 We can use Boas to help make sense of such imagery. Accounts of the color of seawater often bespeak qualitative intuitions about the meaning of the ocean. For Malinowski, Firth, and Lévi-­Strauss, seawater was a symbol of changeable nature. Water functions not so much as theory machine but rather as an other to theory: as description.29 These anthropologists held “theory” in abeyance while at sea, only to set it in motion once the ethnographer hit land. Malinowski’s opening tableau in Argonauts is canonical: “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.”30 ­Michael Taussig, in What Color Is the Sacred?, suggests that Malinowski’s fixation on color uses detail to conjure the ineffable. Taussig offers this tidbit from Malinowski: “During that walk I rested intellectually, perceiving colours and forms like music, without formulating them or transforming them”;31 without, that is—­in the terms of my analysis—­using color and form as elements for thinking, for theorizing.32 Such aesthetic visions of seawater are European, Romantic. They are signs of nostalgia and fantasy. Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued that “colonial mystifications of an idyllic South Seas . . . interpellated the Pacific Basin as a vast, empty (feminized) ocean to be filled by masculine European voyagers,”33 and insofar as this tradition continued in the anthropology of such figures as Malinowski, whose writings are lush with what Malinowski, in The Sexual Life of Savages, himself called a “half-­idyllic South Sea pastoral,”34 one might, following Catherine Lutz in “The Gender of Theory,” detect a masculine cast to these makings of “theory” as a land-­based activity35—­although Margaret Mead’s 1928 rhapsody on the “gleaming sea”36 in Coming of Age in Samoa also aestheticizes the sea. So, too, in an Atlantic context, does Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnography of Haiti and Jamaica, Tell My Horse—­although Hurston also wrote of ocean floods and drowning, pointing to the Atlantic as a distinct theory machine in African American anthropology.37 It is worth noting another chromatic of the sea: the sea at night. This can be another aesthetic reading, but it has also been deployed more directly as a theory machine. Consider Henk Driessen’s “A Janus-­Faced Sea,” in which Driessen uses ethnography among clandestine trans-­Mediterranean migrants to “offer a counterpoint to the romantic image of a benevolent Méditerranée—­smooth as glass, bathed in sunshine, blue, green and turquoise colours and consumed by mass tourists,”38 writing that “over the past ten years the clandestine, mostly 98

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nocturnal, crossing of the Mediterranean has become a dangerous passage into Europe for an increasing number of migrants from Africa and Asia.”39 Driessen employs a distinction between daytime and nighttime seas, seas of tourism versus seas of perilous migration, to offer the maleficent waters of the nocturnal sea as a theory machine for understanding dispossession. MARITIME ANTHROPOLOGIES Maritime anthropologists center much of their work on examining how people think about and negotiate property in ocean resources.40 One objective of such work, which is often carried out in applied anthropology, has been to demonstrate (to governmental organizations that regulate fishing) the rationality of local knowledges in managing fish stocks. Maritime anthropologists have also studied how technocratic experts are possessed of culturally particular practices around the sea.41 Maritime anthropology is a fruitful place to look for distinct deployments of seawater as theory machine.42 In early articulations, maritime anthropology projected land-­based notions onto seafaring life.43 Tim Ingold observes that foraging wild food resources, on land or sea, has been represented as akin to activities of nonhuman animals, whereas agricultural cultivation has been associated with production—­and thus, by extension, culture.44 Early literature on fishing communities focused on the hybrid represented by peasant fishermen, like those studied by Firth.45 Only with one foot planted on terra firma could these fishermen appear as legitimate subjects of study. Treating the sea as a zone to be brought under containment has led to what Pálsson, riffing on Foucault, has called “the birth of the aquarium,” the rise of management regimes that treat the sea as a mammoth aquarium that must be enclosed.46 Such enclosure is predicated on a separation of nature and culture, with the sea scripted as a hypernature until now outside culture. In Rough Waters, an ethnography of a Marine Park in Tanzania, Christine Walley reports that people of Tanzania’s Mafia Island did not share the distinction between nature and culture to which transnational marine scientist park consultants were committed; far from seeing the sea as a wild Other to human culture, their seascape was a space of fishing, fish, and biographically meaningful stories of seafaring.47 Treating the sea as naturally distinct from the land has other pitfalls. One trap is to assume that the ocean is ontologically unpredictable and can therefore explain, say, the apparition of magic in fishing practice.48 Such a model, owed, canonically, to Malinowski, operates as a functionalist theory machine: oceanic vagaries produce urgency, which in turn produces a certain kind of ritual engagement. Another hazard is a treatment of the sea as fluid and unbounded prior to its enclosure in “culture.” When Ingold counsels that “as terrestrial mammals, we humans stake out our differences on the land; the sea, 99

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however, is a great dissolver—­of time, of history, of cultural distinction,” this must be heard as a summary of an historically particular view.49 Such a culturally specific vision animates the fluid ontology that the geographer Sarah Whatmore assigns to the sea: “The spatial codification of ‘real’ property as a grid-­like surface finitely divisible into mutually exclusive estates is both unimaginable and impracticable if we substitute the socio-­materialities of land for those of air or water.”50 But seeing the sea as the most unbounded nature there is has a lineage—­one connected to colonial projects of keeping the high seas “free,” outside sovereign territorializations. Western constructions of the “nature” of the sea—­contrasted to the grounded “culture” of land, as “fluid” and “protean”51 or, as early anthropologists who traveled to “the field” by ship might have had it, as “another world . . . without human culture”52—­are not universal.53 But they remain powerful, perhaps nowhere so much as in views of ocean resources as “by nature” common.54 Maritime anthropology has demonstrated that how people understand property in ocean resources has to do with local systems of management and meaning rather than with the nature of the sea as such.55 Liberal economists hold that the seas are a common resource that invites overexploitation owing to a natural selfishness that drives human action. Maritime anthropologists, however, have documented a variety of norms around marine resource use. Pálsson, quoting Arthur McEvoy, has noted that Hardin’s thesis of the tragedy of the commons represents a “mythology” of resource use, a model “in narrative form for the genesis and essence of environmental problems.” The claim that access to the ocean is open for everyone in most fishing societies, and that this is the root of all environmental problems, needs to be qualified. . . . The theory of the tragedy of the commons, then, is an important means for making history, an authoritative claim with a social force of its own, and not simply an attempt to understand the world.56

Scholars thus detail the diversity of the kinds of sea tenure, “collectively managed informal territorial use rights in a range of fisheries previously regarded as unownable . . . ways in which inshore fishermen perceive, name, partition, own and defend local sea space and resources.”57 How that “space” is imagined is relational. Ajantha Subramanian, in her study of South Indian artisan fishers competing with mechanized trawlers for fish, describes “fishermen in pursuit of mobile species” who operate at different speeds with respect to the fish they seek.58 Mobility is not “in the nature” of fish, so much as a relational category that depends on technologies and speeds of access. The way water operates as a theory machine depends on how quickly one frames it moving, flowing, with respect to “culture.”59 How else might seawater be imagined and engaged? I consider some possibilities by turning now to how seawater is figured in recent social theory. 100

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OCEANIZATION The Black Atlantic is an analytic unit that Paul Gilroy proposed in the early 1990s in order to link histories kept apart by such landed terms as African and African American.60 “Black Atlantic” is a term that includes the horrors of the Middle Passage but that can also point to the way that the sea has been a positive presence in the Afrodiaspora.61 In spaces such as the Sea Islands, off the coasts of Georgia and North Carolina, where people escaping from plantation slavery in the United States sometimes found refuge, water can be a buffer from mainland politics as well as a symbolic baptismal substance associated with swimming escapes from captivity. And where some writers might suggest that people in such locales as the Sea Islands have a “local” relation to the sea, it is also the case that such people possess a “global” imagination of the ocean, one connected to what Gilroy has written of as the “rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the black Atlantic.”62 Gilroy’s move—­one of the first in a trend in historical studies to pose oceans as units of cultural analysis—­ operates as a theory machine for renarrating sociality.63 Work on the black Atlantic, along with anthropologies of the Indian Ocean64 and cultural studies of the Pacific,65 mark a moment of rethinking the “natures” that subtend “cultures” (often providing a resource for metaphors, too; for example, in Enseng Ho’s ethnography of trans–­Indian Ocean kinship, he explained, “Hadramis, especially the sayyids, were a strong current in this restless ocean”66). I suggest that these works might be read not only as responses to “globalization,” but also as offering a new framework: oceanization, a reorientation toward the seas as a translocally connecting substance.67 John Kurien has pitched such an approach in a multinaturalist direction, suggesting thinking about “seacosystems”;68 he asks social scientists to attend to tropical and temperate seacosystems as enmeshed in distinct ecological and sociopolitical dynamics. The use of maritime analogies by anthropologists seeking to reconceptualize analysis owes much to the 1972 writings of Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean and to the introduction into anthropology of a world-­systems approach by those, like Sidney Mintz, interested in an Atlantic space crisscrossed by ships, slaves, and sugar.69 Scholars have become interested in rethinking the world in fluid terms and also in looking at those entities—­refugees, nomads, weapons and drugs, fish—­that challenge borders because they flow across them.70 As ­Pamela Ballinger has written, authors of both popular and scholarly accounts of globalization often employ watery metaphors—­of flows, fluidity, circulations—­in an effort to capture the increasing unboundedness of movements of capital, communications, and persons. The sea and its qualities thus come to symbolize the growing permeability of borders in a globalizing world, even as the oceans themselves literally represent both medium and site of globalization.71 101

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Thinking with watery metaphors has become a prescriptivist enterprise. We should be thinking with water—­even oceans—­say many theorists.72 What kind of theory machine is seawater in new social theory? For some, the ocean is a boundary-­blurring body, a space of liberation. Epeli Hau‘ofa, of the University of the South Pacific, has argued that Europeans have belittled Oceania by construing it as a scattering of islands, rather than as a “sea of islands.” This “sea of islands,” holds Hau‘ofa, is actually connected, not divided, by water.73 For others, the rise of the ocean in social thought represents the unwelcome return of “capital’s myth element,” the site of unimpeded circulation.74 For still others, the liquidity of water summons up the specter of maleficent water. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, for example, worries that “liquid modernity” unmoors people from grounds of politics; in liquids, he writes, quoting the Encyclopedia Britannica, “ ‘molecules are preserved in an orderly array over only a few molecular diameters,’ ” with the result that large-­scale structures deliquesce.75 The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk sees in globalization a shrinking and multiplication of spheres of human action, fusing and fissioning, and employs the image of “foam” to describe this state, which he views as negative. In “Towards an Amphibious Anthropology,” René ten Bos summarizes Sloterdijk’s position: “Politically, foam is uncontrollable and unruly: we live our lives in what can best be described as a morphological anarchy.”76 What I have called, drawing on Strang, the turn to the “form of water” takes shape at a variety of scales, but usually with some appeal to the formal properties of water: its hydrography as a connecting element for community and commerce, its molecular structure, and so forth. If the sea is a potent material for the formation of theory, it may be because, as Taussig put it, “the sea has disappeared into our heads”77—­by which he means that the ocean is not, for many European, American, and other social theorists a quotidian presence but, rather, a space of imagination (a view easily complicated by contrast with the experience of contemporary maritime laborers, such as Filipino workers who can be found in large numbers on cargo and cruise ships the world over78). Scholars across disciplines should think critically about this turn to water, recognizing, for example, that it often appeals to abstract, scientific descriptions of water as though these have meaning in themselves. But the “materiality” of water does not tell a self-­evident, beyond-­human story. Attention to materiality is, in part, consequent upon an environmentalist common sense that increasingly takes water to be a self-­evidently “global” substance, one that connects vastly different cultural, political, and economic worlds. Jamie Linton, in What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction, suggests that water has come into view as an abstraction—­in accounts of the hydrological cycle, in debates about bottled water, in discussions of contaminated ground water—­at the very moment when it is at risk.79 Similar arguments may apply to the specific case of seawater, which is overfished, acidifying, irradiated, polluted, deoxygenated. We should keep in sight the epistemological conditions and contentions of the recent turn to water and to seawater. 102

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Discussions in feminist theory point one way forward. Writers have examined the use of water metaphors—­flux, flow, sea—­to speak of women’s worlds and have pointed to the essentialism such rhetoric can summon.80 Scholars worry about the “wave” metaphor (first, second, third) in histories of feminism. Edna Keah Garrison argued in 2005 that the feminist oceanography (a term coined by Deborah Siegel) of the wave narrative homogenizes women, linearizes movement, and posits times of lulls, which mismeasures histories of activism.81 Alison Wylie is more sanguine about water waves, suggesting that waves do not so much overtake and succeed/supercede [sic] one another as rise and fall again and again in the same place, transmitting and diffusing energy in complicated ways.  .  .  . Waves propagate and interact even in the simplest of ­circumstances. . . . Waves are generated in many different ways: by river or tidal currents, by snags and obstructions under water, by wind and traffic on the surface, and, on rare and catastrophic occasion, by grinding shifts in tectonic plates.82

Wylie’s is a call to think with the form of water, yes, but it is also tuned to empirical variation as well as to the inescapable rhetoricity of such thinking. Thinking with water might best be done with such fusing of the theoretical and empirical. In anthropology, Celia Lowe’s Wild Profusion, an analysis of biodiversity in Indonesia, asks readers to take the view of Sama fishers in the Togean archipelago off the coast of Sulawesi: For those without intimate experience with the sea, land and water can seem binary entities. The land is start and finish; the sea is a way to get there. The land represents the rich world of human history and domestication; the sea is a temporary pathway. But in many places with watery histories—­the Mediterranean, the Pacific Islands, the Netherlands—­land and water join together in configuring senses of place.83

Where the Indonesian state has seen Sama as “extraterrestrial others,” outside institutional frameworks because of maritime nomadism, Lowe details how sites like lowland swamps are considered anthropogenic spaces by Sama people. Lowe does and does not use water as theory machine; Sama views structure her own, but she does not generalize them.84 WORKING ATHWART THEORY, THINKING THROUGH WATER In a review essay on water and sustainability, Benjamin Orlove and Steve Caton urged anthropologists to treat water as “a total social fact.”85 Crucial to such treatment, they insisted, is an understanding of “the materiality of water,”86 anchored in water’s molecular properties, which shape the quantities in which w ­ ater can manifest (from drop to deluge) and the qualities that water can support (from 103

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purified to polluted). Although Orlove and Caton allowed that “quantity and quality are always experienced as social constructions,”87 they suggested that limits to such constructions inhere in water’s materiality (and insofar as Orlove and Caton appealed to molecularity, that materiality is itself a kind of form). My petition to think critically about the turn to the form of water in social theory asks not for the further reach of “social construction,” although attending to historical controversies about water’s materiality—­form (When did people come to believe that it was an element? A compound?)—­can generate useful hesitations about ontological claims.88 Rather, I am interested in how simultaneously to employ water as a theory machine, when useful, and to treat both water and theories as things in the world. I think of this approach as operating “athwart theory”: that is, as tacking back and forth between seeing theories as explanatory tools and taking them as phenomena to be examined. Such an account does not separate meaning and materiality because such sequestering only reinstalls a preanalytic nature–­culture. I return, in conclusion, to an oceanic phenomenon of recent contemporary “global” concern, a bookend to the Maldives vignette with which I began this chapter. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill—­which, like the crisis faced by the Maldives, was bound up with fossil fuel use—­also churned up nature and culture and may best be understood by refusing that binary. The spill became available to comprehension because of an intermingling of the empirical and the theoretical. Awareness of the spill and its extent emerged at a variety of levels, from shoreline experiences of a slick arriving on beaches to fishers’ and shrimpers’ experience of their poisoned supply chain. But the phenomenon was also made apprehensible through models—­simulations that use data from satellites and submarine sensors and that plug these into algorithms that model flow and currents. As David Bond has noted in his ethnography of the spill, what counted as “the environment” was an outcome, not a stable category already in place before such representations.89 The very “empiricity” of the spill—­including as a “national” and “global” event—­became manifest through machines instantiating theories of seawater behavior (see chapter 9 on simulations of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami).90 Such simulations are both theoretical models of the world and things in the world that are mobilized in the service of social priorities and agendas.91 Rather than use water as a theory machine itself, then, I would suggest that any social scientific or historical account of events such as this spill—­or of hurricanes, of storm surges, of tsunamis—­track how oceanographers, politicians, corporations, citizens, NGOs, and other actors themselves used water as a theory machine to motivate their analyses. Such a reading does not treat the form or substance of water as the privileged province of scientific description, which is then simply drafted into cultural accounts that give that form different “meanings” (following Ivan Illich in H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, the reading I favor would “refuse to assume that all waters may be reduced to H20”92). 104

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Rather, such an analytic practice takes scientific accountings—­including social scientific ones—­as events in the world in need of examination. Put another way, scholars could import the antiessentialist insights developed to rethink biogenetic, bioengineered, and ecological “nature” in the age of biotech into their understandings of the “nature” of seawater.93 Seawater is both good to think with and here to live with, in multifarious actuality.94

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TIME AND THE TSUNAMI Indian Ocean, 2004

ON JANUARY 4, 2005, MARINE scientists on board the Sagar Kanya, the flagship research vessel of India’s National Institute of Oceanography, set out for the Andaman Islands to survey the damage wrought by the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004, a disaster that took the lives of over 200,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and several other countries around the Indian Ocean. Embarking on a voyage quickly mandated by the Indian Department of Science and Technology on December 29, researchers on the Sagar Kanya planned to assess the undersea movement of the Indian tectonic plate toward the Burma plate and to assay the geological and geographic transformations visited upon the landscape of the Andaman archipelago in the wake of the tsunami. This rapid scientific response was more or less simultaneous with the speedy travel to the Andamans of Amitav Ghosh, one of India’s most noted writers and anthropologists. Ghosh had just published The Hungry Tide, a novel set in another out-­of-­the-­way archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, the Sundarbans.1 The book’s story—­in what, in retrospect, seems an eerie prescience—­culminates with the disastrous arrival in a small village of a massive cyclone-­generated wave, a narrative element that gave Ghosh’s Andaman visit a powerful resonance and relevance. By January 1, Ghosh had arrived in Port Blair, the Andaman’s capital, to see how people were managing in the aftermath of the disaster. On January 11, in the first installment of a three-­part newspaper feature in The Hindu, he wrote of the recent history of the Andamans as a site to which the dispossessed of Bengal, Orissa, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh had migrated in search of land and a chance at middle-­class lives. He lamented the awful coincidence in which these settlers were caught, reflecting on the cultural 106

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and natural temporalities locked together in the calamity: “it is as if the hurried history of an emergent nation had collided here with the deep time of geology.”2 To these two temporalities might be added the unpredictable time of the sea, that oscillating body of water imagined to contain the immensities of primeval time as well as the more immediate intensities of everyday time, with its flows, fluxes, and calamities. Traveling through the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala a couple of weeks after the tsunami (away, it must be said, from the areas worst hit by the wave, with the exception of a few days in Chennai, where I stayed near the still-­recovering Marina Beach), I followed these parallel oceanographic and anthropological stories with interest. I was en route to Goa, where I was registered for a scientific conference on deep-­sea, mid-­ocean ridges to be held at India’s National Institute of Oceanography. I had registered for the late January meeting—­a convocation of an international group of scientists devoted to understanding the geology and biology of the undersea fault lines that circle the planet—­well before the tsunami, planning to listen in as part of anthropological research I was completing about contemporary marine biology. Ridge sites are famous for hosting the ecologies of deep-­sea hydrothermal and volcanic vents, and I hoped at the meeting of InterRidge scientists not only to hear comparisons between Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean sites and science, but also to learn how international groups of researchers managed access to these sites, many of which sit outside national exclusive economic zones, in portions of the seabed that the United Nations calls “the Area.” By early 2005, however, I already knew that questions of mining, genetic bioprospecting, and research access to vent ecologies would be eclipsed at the conference by talk of the tsunami, which, after all, had been caused by a quake epicentered at a ridge in the Indian Ocean. Ghosh’s observation about the collision of political and geological time prepared me to listen for how the temporality of the tsunami as well as the timeliness of oceanographic inquiry might be handled at the meeting. I came to discern parsings of time and history as pertaining variously to nature, to scientific inquiry, to bureaucracy, and to emergency. At a higher level of generality, I detected an implicit distinction in play among scientists between geological time (which pertained to deep “nature” and which was considered to be the object of steady scientific inquiry) and what I will call oscillating ocean time: a more watery genre of time, one that takes in such long durée processes as ocean circulation as well as such rapid changes as tides and waves. Oscillating ocean time can be a bit more slippery to handle both methodologically and theoretically than geological time, especially since human activity (e.g., fishing, coastal construction, greenhouse gas emissions) can be so thickly stirred into this turbulent temporality. An uneasy wavering between discourses on geological time and oscillating ocean time at the conference, I came to believe, signaled a tension among scientists about how to think about the nature of the tsunami and their professional and personal relationship to it. In the reflections that follow, 107

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I arrive at this argument by first cataloguing a variety of other kinds of time—­ news time, political response time, computer simulation time, Internet time, the time of the Other—­all genres of time that coursed through newspaper and Internet narratives of the tsunami and its aftermath. These various species of time might be understood as sorts of cultural flotsam and jetsam—­effects washed up—­on the tide of that uncertain discourse pertaining to oscillating ocean time. That discourse—­and note that “discourse,” appropriately enough, has its earliest meaning as “to run, move, or travel over a space, region” (Oxford English Dictionary)—­found a tremulous articulation, in tension with talk of geological time, as scientists at the Goa conference grappled with how to comprehend the tsunami in time and, indeed, with how to position their structures of feeling with respect to the human disaster the wave brought in its wake. Before I had departed from Massachusetts for India on January 5, I had already noticed that attention to time structured most news coverage of the catastrophe. There was the speed of the tsunami itself: “as fast as airliners.”3 There was the time the tsunami took to hit the shores of countries around the Indian Ocean: “an hour to reach the coast of Indonesia and two Indian islands, another hour to hit Thailand and Sri Lanka and a full six hours to reach Africa.”4 There was the slow response time of many scientists, particularly those at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, who notoriously complained about not having had contact numbers for colleagues in the Indian Ocean. And there were stories about how the speediest of intentions did not always lead to timely warnings. On December 31, the New York Times offered a breathless account of a scientist who feverishly tried to simulate the disaster before its full impact was realized: It was 7 p.m. Seattle time on Dec. 25 when Vasily V. Titov raced to his office, sat down at his computer and prepared to simulate an earthquake and tsunami that was already sweeping across the Indian Ocean. . . . Two hours had already passed since the quake, and there was no established model of what a tsunami might do in the Indian Ocean. . . . The pulse of energy transferred from seabed to water, traveling at jetliner speed, was already most of the way across the Bay of Bengal . . . In the end, Dr. Titov could not get ahead of that wave with his numbers. . . . With an eerie time lag, his data would reveal the dimensions of the catastrophe that was unfolding across eight brutal hours on Sunday.5

Then there was the whiplash of discussion about whether scientists and politicians had been adequately prepared, whether they had done enough to predict and detect tsunamis and to put warning systems in place. The New York Times editorialized, “Human foresight could, and should, have mitigated the resulting tragedy. . . . [The] death toll could have been cut at least in half if the affected region had had the same kind of international warning network the United States has set up to protect the adjacent Pacific basin.”6 One read, too, of how 108

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the rapidity of Internet connections could not overtake the momentum of the wave: “The sequence of events as knowledge of the earthquake, the tsunami and the destruction unfolded suggest the speed and precision of science and modern communication, as well as their limits.”7 In this context, however, bloggers who sent quick bulletins of the disaster were held up as examples of individuals overcoming widespread institutional and international confusion and inertia: “Bloggers at worldchanging.com, some of them living in the affected nations, began chattering immediately after the waves hit and began discussions of ways to help.”8 Finally, there was the time of international and national response. The New York Times editorial page took U.S. president George Bush to task for his delay in recognizing the magnitude of the disaster, writing on December 30 about how “President Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday’s tsunamis in Asia.”9 In India, after the country had declared that it would not accept international aid—­staking an implicit claim, against China and Indonesia, that India counted as the primary regional power in the Indian Ocean—­there was public outcry about delays in getting aid to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, some of the very worst hit areas in the Indian polity. In his second installment in The Hindu, Ghosh observed, “Most of the refugees had to wait several days before they were evacuated. Forgotten in their far-­flung islands, they listened to radio broadcasts that told them their nation was rushing aid to Sri Lanka and had refused all outside help as unnecessary: for the thirsty and hungry there was little consolation in the thought that these measures might help their country establish itself as a superpower.”10 The time of the Other so famously analyzed by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian—­in which metropolitans translate spatial and colonial remoteness into distance backward in historical, cultural, developmental, and, sometimes, evolutionary time—­was here translated into a lag in the calendar of aid delivery.11 Ghosh pointed out that the Union Territories of the Andamans and Nicobars—­so often associated with “an administrative conception of the ‘primitive’ that dates back to the British Raj”12—­do not have representation in India’s congress, one reason, he argued, that aid was slow in coming.13 Indeed, islands themselves often feature in national, colonial, and anthropological imaginations as kinds of time capsules, cultural throwbacks separated by water from the contemporaneity of metropolitan life. In this vision, an expanse of ocean equals an expanse of time. The interval between metropolitan aid and its receipt at the margins could be named as an instantiation of real time and the Other—­where “real time” is that temporality created through just-­in-­time bureaucratic responses that move through already smoothed channels of financial, legislative, and political connection and therefore leave in place and render invisible existing social and infrastructural relations of wealth, location, and inequality.14 In her history of the 109

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penal colony sited in the Andamans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kath Weston demonstrated how the Andamans—­which are geographically far closer to Burma than the subcontinent—­were constructed in relation to British and independent India as its “back of the beyond.”15 Ajantha Subramanian, in a commentary at “Crisis in Southern Asia: The Tsunami and Its Aftermath,” a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Social Anthropology Seminar Series of Harvard University, pointed out that aid was often funneled to fishers while farmers whose land was disastrously salinated were ignored, and argued, too, that class and caste inequalities were sometimes exacerbated by the disaster, as many sanitation workers, cleaning up bodies and fish, were Dalits and not always provided with gloves, shoes, or masks in these potentially infectious environments.16 As the days of the InterRidge conference drew near, I regularly visited Indian Internet cafés to check in on the National Institute of Oceanography’s website and see whether and how marine and earth scientists were tracking the tsunami’s aftereffects. The first account posted to the institute’s site was a dry, scientific explanation of tsunamis. The site was trying to provide a reasoned account of the event, making the important point that tsunamis are rare and that people did not have to worry about an imminent return of the waters. Clicking around a bit, though, I found that, like scientific institutions elsewhere, the institute had been held up to withering public scrutiny. The Times of India had this to say: The country’s premier National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) under the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research is clearly at a sea of loss to explain why it failed to alert the nation before the killer Tsunami waves took the highest ever around 150,000 toll of human life. This is what the NIO director, S R Shetye had to say: The Bay of Bengal has a low probability of 0.8 per cent of being affected by Tsunamis caused by earthquakes with no recorded evidence of any such episode over the last 60 years.17

The reporter reproduced his follow-­up question to Shetye along with an acerbic rendering of Shetye’s reply: “ ‘Would you have done better had you not adhered to the low probability factor in this zone?’ ‘Well! You have the data and the facts. I cannot answer,’ was his trite reply.” Shortly after the publication of this piece, the institute decided to reply to its critics. I had a sense, later confirmed, that, after the tsunami, the NIO had never received so much attention—­“a lot of hate mail” one scientist told me. The next text to go up on the site was the following: Since 26 December 2004, considerable attention has been focused on that day’s tsunami in particular and on ocean research in India in general. We at NIO have also been asked about the tsunami and NIO’s role. . . . Tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean. During 1881–­2004, 4 tsunamis have been recorded in this region, 110

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besides the last of which was on 26 December 2004. In comparison, about 5 tsunamis are recorded in the Pacific Ocean each year. . . . A research organisation (in this case, NIO and the oceanographic research community in India) has to prioritise its research programmes. Focus on recurring events like storm surges, the ocean’s role in India’s climate, and exploration for living and mineral and fuel resources led to tsunamis being ignored. . . . The decrease in deaths in India’s coastal areas owing to storm surges over the last few decades shows that we can make progress if we make the collective effort. This progress was possible because of the longer period of incubation in research in laboratories, leading to robust, reproducible science, and because of the longer period over which the results of such research was disseminated to the concerned officials and the affected people. It takes time to do both: achieve a level of understanding or knowledge and translate this knowledge into a practical system that benefits many.18

Time features in several ways in this text. First is the reminder of geological time, and of previous disastrous events, even within recorded history, that have been forgotten. (In the United States, the New York Times was full of stories of larger volcanic and seismic events that had happened in the last few hundred years; Krakatoa was a frequent mention). NIO’s text carries as well the reminder of the relative rarity of tsunamis, even across large stretches of time. This long-­ term (if stochastic) temporality is offered as requiring the patient attention of painstaking and deliberate science—­what the site glosses as “the longer period of incubation in research in laboratories, leading to robust, reproducible science.” Stepping outside this frame, the text suggests, may lead to wasted time for scientists and lost money for India. Undue attention to probabilistically rare events (the “hundred-­year flood”) will generate neither the sort of reproducible science that prudence demands nor the proper priorities for Indian oceanography. In this framing, science operates in calibration with the extended time of measurable, predictable nature itself, understood as ultimately grounded in geological time. Such science responds not to crises but to questions. Insofar as oscillating ocean time does appear in NIO’s text—­in the figure of the “storm surge”—­this temporality is still set within the frame of reproducibility, secured by its “recurring” quality. By the time I arrived in Goa, the Sagar Kanya was well on its way to the Andamans, stopping first in Kerala and Tamil Nadu to test for water contamination and to pick up more scientists.19 There was as yet no word on its research, and the InterRidge conference opened with an echo of the NIO website. Satish Shetye, director of NIO, welcomed the assembled: We are meeting at a time when nature sends us a reminder. The reminder came on December 26 in the form of a tsunami. Nature follows its own agenda and doesn’t care what society thinks. The last tsunami happened in the Indian Ocean sixty years ago. The new one was not on our radar. 111

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Shetye emphasized that the event was something that required the time frame of geology to comprehend and the pace of slow scientific work to understand. He continued, Sixty years ago, a tsunami would have been examined from only one point of view in seismology. Today, you cannot look at the tsunami without looking at subduction zones, spreading centers, and mid-­ocean ridges. Nature is complex; you have to take a more holistic view of what nature does.

The holistic, long view of earthquakes and tsunamis that was soberly enunciated here and on the website, however, constantly bumped into a sense among conferees that something should be done. Social, political, and bureaucratic time as well as oscillating ocean time kept interrupting geological time and the time of steady long-­term science. Indeed, the head of the Indian government’s Department of Ocean Development, Dr. Harsh Gupta, had been invited to inaugurate the conference with the announcement of a national plan to build a tsunami warning system. A local Goan paper reported his speech concisely: India is going to develop early warning systems for tsunamis, cyclones and storms with an initial fund of Rs 30 crore, Dr Harsh Gupta, the secretary to the department of ocean development said here today. Making this announcement at the inaugural session of the three-­day InterRidge workshop on ‘Tectonic and Oceanic Processes along the Indian Ocean Ridge System’ at the National Institute of Oceanography, Dr Gupta said that the decision to set up a project with central assistance was taken during a recent meeting convened by the department and participated by the space, technological as well as scientific agencies of the government.20

Here was still another temporality—­a future tense substituting for a turning back of the clock to an ideal initial response, a hypercorrection to compensate for past oversights with future foresight. A last-­minute addition to the conference schedule, a talk, “The Recent Seismic Event off Sumatra,” delivered by Satish Singh, a geoscientist from the Institute de Physique du Globe in Paris, stood in contrast to the more measured pronouncements of the NIO website. Singh was one of the few speakers at the conference who let it show that he was quite shaken by the tsunami, and he opened his talk with an acknowledgement of the human dimension of the disaster that had been scarce in the earlier lectures. Those presentations had been characterized by slides of the Indian Ocean as seen from satellites, as rendered by computer simulation as an ocean basin spookily empty of water, and as a collection of graphs and charts. There were no traces of people—­running, struggling, drowning—­in such representations.21 And time did not flow in these presentations. Rather, the images in the talks looked like snapshots, or glacially still time exposures. Even when computer simulations were put in motion, the presenters controlled 112

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them, moving them stepwise to explain what was happening, pointing to phase transitions, rewinding earthquakes. This was the scientific capture of rationally flowing time, not a grappling with the fluxional time of changeable water, with oscillating ocean time—­much less with the time of human emergency. It was a Newtonian, quantifiable, reversible time of the kind that Maria Assad, in “Time and Uncertainty,” in KronoScope (the journal of the International Society for the Study of Time), argues serves to place uncertainty as other to time itself.22 The people in the Andamans—­and, even, elsewhere—­were completely absent, other to the space and time frame of geology highlighted in the talks. They did not, by and large, even feature as temporary features in the more enduring geoscape of the Indian Ocean. Singh’s talk began very differently from those earlier presentations: “The earthquake has altered our shores and we are very lucky to be here, especially in India. We cannot ignore this event.” Singh was the only speaker at the workshop who made mention of knowing anyone affected by the tsunami. He told us of a Cambridge University colleague who had been in Sri Lanka during the tsunami and had taken terrified note of the receding waters at his beach hotel. Singh also showed pictures of people fleeing from the waves—­a choice that gave his later animations of aftershocks on a computer map of the Andamans a chilling edge. By asking, “What shall we do?” as computer models replayed the path of the wave, Singh came closest to calibrating the scale of science to the scale of recent history and, indeed, to a temporality in which not everything was under control, a temporality that, like ocean water, could overwhelm one’s rational capacities to make order out of perception and sensation. As I watched circles representing quakes gradually dot Singh’s Andamans map, I struggled—­along, I later learned, with many others—­to think of the real, human consequences of the diagram as well as to consider what the patterns might add up to in the longer frames of geology. By asking that we imagine what his simulational formalisms meant in human terms, Singh made the general audience quite uneasy, and his talk was met with something of a bewildered silence. In a setting in which “geological time” had been the organizing catchphrase—­and an epistemological mooring for scientific objectivity—­Singh’s talk came closest to summoning up the uncertainties in scale that characterize oscillating ocean time, the at-­sea feeling that attention to watery time can engender.23 Singh broke the silence after his lecture by saying that more bathymetry should be done, that remotely operated vehicles should be used to map the seafloor. He offered that his institute in France might put an instrument in the Andamans and made an impassioned case for international cooperation. This brought up another tension organizing the dynamics of the conference: the place of India in global ridge science. The conference was meant in part to welcome the Indian oceanographic community to the InterRidge organization. India had recently become an associate member of InterRidge (full members are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan; other 113

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associate members are Canada, China, Korea, Norway, and Portugal24), and many Indian participants at the meeting were hoping to use this opportunity to gain access to collaborations with countries with more oceanographic research infrastructure. Some Indian scientists phrased their concern to me as one of “catching up” to other nations—­introducing another temporality into this discussion, the time of national scientific “development.”25 The announcement at the InterRidge meeting of an early warning system by the secretary to the Indian Department of Ocean Development must be seen in this context, as must the Sagar Kanya’s voyage to the Andamans.26 Amitav Ghosh’s trip to the Andamans might now be seen in a new light as well. More than documenting the “hurried history of an emergent nation” colliding “with the deep time of geology,”27 his writings suggest how the shifting temporalities of water are bound up in narratives of the tsunami as well. Thinking not about the quake, but about the wave can lead us to a different science, a different sociology. In The Hungry Tide, one of Ghosh’s main characters, a translator from Kolkata, reflects on time in the Sundarban archipelago. I hear in this passage something of what I imagine drew Ghosh so quickly to the Andamans to bear witness: To me, a townsman, the tide country’s jungle was an emptiness, a place where time stood still. I saw now that this was an illusion, that exactly the opposite was true. What was happening here, I realized, was that the wheel of time was spinning too fast to be seen. In other places, it took decades, even centuries, for a river to change course; it took an epoch for an island to appear. But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life; rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days.28

To be sure, the oscillating ocean time that unleashed the tsunami is different from that motivating Ghosh’s river of spinning time. It is, rather, the common fact of inundating suddenness to which I wish to draw attention, a suddenness that not only roils immediately into social forms of life, but that also sometimes pushes people into the arms of steadier, longer-­term temporal imaginaries, like those attached to geological timescales. In the final installment of his Andaman and Nicobar series, Ghosh recounted an encounter with the director of the Car Nicobar Malaria Research Center. This scientist had lost his wife and daughter to the tsunami and, when presented with belongings of theirs that survived the disaster, refused to entertain the idea of keeping them. He was far keener to hold on to the record of his research, a series of slides of the malaria parasite. Ghosh found himself amazed by this choice and asked, “Was it perhaps that in this moment of utter desolation there was some comfort in the knowledge of an impersonal effort? Could it be that he was seeking refuge in the one aspect of his existence that could not be erased by an act of nature?”29 These are questions, it seems to me, that Ghosh was well prepared to 114

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ask; one strand of The Hungry Tide follows the tale of a scientist who loses much of her data in the wave that follows the book’s climactic cyclone. As in his novel, Ghosh fastened on to the emotion of science as vocation, to a structure of feeling that takes objective knowledge as subjective succor. I am left wondering—­and I don’t have an answer, not having done long-­term ethnography with scientists at NIO or their relevant international interlocutors—­ whether geological time and its coordination with slow scientific time might have offered for some of the scientists at the Goa meeting what Ghosh glosses as “comfort in the knowledge of an impersonal effort.”30 Still, at the InterRidge conference, scientific structures of feeling seemed in some turmoil. On the one hand, many speakers held the tsunami and its victims at a distance, the distance available by speaking in terms of long, geological time frames (and, in other contexts, by placing the victims in another time, a time of the Other). Others, like Singh, seemed to find themselves transformed by the disaster, more eager than before to call this international group of scientists to do something, to find ways to calibrate geological time to social time, and to risk mixing methods and theories in order to wrest their reproducible science into the present, into the unpredictable and turbulent moment of oscillating ocean time.31

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C H A P TER 1 0

FROM SPACESHIP EARTH TO GOOGLE OCEAN Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures

WHAT SORT OF IMAGE DOES the planet Earth possess at the opening of the twenty-­first century? If in the 1960s, the Whole Earth, the planet as seen from space, became a cold war, proto-­environmentalist icon for a fragile ocean planet, in the 2010s, Google Earth, the globe encountered as a manipulable virtual object on personal computer screens, tablets, and smart phones, has become an index for multiple and socially various interpretations and interventions; its thicket of satellite images, text legends, and street-­level photographs can all be tagged, commented upon, modified. The digital media scholar Jason Farman has written that Google Earth offers the opportunity for users—­note, not simply “viewers”—­to debate and augment representations of the world and to do so at a variety of scales.1 In this chapter, I examine a kindred image-­ object, Google Ocean, asking what sort of representation of the planetary sea is in the making in these digital days. Stirring up the century-­old classification of signs by the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, I argue that Google Ocean is a mottled mash of icons, indexes, and symbols of the marine and maritime world as well as a simultaneously dystopian and utopian (that is to say, heterotopian) diagram of the sea—­though one that floats in a media ecology that tends to occlude the histories of the infrastructures (civil, national, military, computational, and more) upon which it depends and which provide its conditions of possibility. To begin, I wind back to the 1960s, to a tale about the architecture of a ship.

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SPACESHIP EARTH In 1968, Buckminster Fuller argued in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that the modern world was first connected by those he called the Great Pirates, agents who in traversing the sea comprehended how the globe could be connected and created through the lines of their repeated routes between nations and empires.2 Using such practices as triangulation—­the taking of bearings from two sites such that a third can be fixed—­they filled the world with imaginary triangles, shapes that sliced the earth into segments that could be mapped to scale and that could therefore allow the Pirates to scale up their own traveling enterprises. Fuller names Great Britain not the center of an empire, but rather a ship fixed in place by Pirates who commanded compliance (global Earth, of course, was also fashioned out of a more terrible, not unrelated, geometry called the triangle trade, which led people in their millions across the Atlantic into slavery). Fuller’s geometric vision of world history inspired his invention of the geodesic sphere, a ball constructed of triangles, as well as his Dymaxion map of the planet (figure 10.1). Ultimately, his tale of equal-­sized triangles was a utopian one—­a diagonal, diagrammatic modernity that offered a coming planetary unity. His ship shapes scaled up to the planet, providing an armature for what the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding, in his search for new images of world economy, had in 1966 called Spaceship Earth (a term used the same year to title a book about planetary conservation by the British economist Barbara Ward).3 On “Spaceship Earth,” Fuller maintained, we Earthlings were “all astronauts.” Spaceship Earth came to have a more documentary, smoothly spherical, visual life with 1968’s Earthrise photo, taken from Apollo 8. This was an image of Earth emerging from behind the Moon (figure 10.2). This picture, taken by astronauts on the first lunar orbital flight, famously graced the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog, a manual for a back-­to-­the land counterculture. A photo of the full Earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972—­known as The Blue Marble—­became even more iconic, concretizing Boulding’s claim that “gradually . . . man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity”4 (see figure 10.3). Much has been written on the Earth-­from-­ space photos.5 In the usual story, Earth seen from space fixes a moment when “the globe” emerges as an eco-­object—­a world delivered by the techno-­eye of a Cold War superpower and appropriated into environmentalist iconography. President Lyndon Johnson’s distribution of the Earthrise photo as a gift to other world leaders staked a nationalist claim while simultaneously sending the picture into globalizing orbit.6 The capture of the Earthrise image by globalized environmentalism was not inevitable.7 Readings of the whole Earth as alienating, irresponsibly transcendent, and ungrounding also circulated. Heidegger, speaking of a 1966 black-­and-­white picture of an Earthrise taken by the unmanned Lunar Orbiter 1, reported that he

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Figure 10.1. Dymaxion projection of “Our Spaceship Earth: One Island in One Ocean—­From Space.” The Fuller Projection Map design is a trademark of the Buckminster Fuller Institute. ©1938, 1967, & 1992. All rights reserved (www.bfi.org).

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Figure 10.2. Cover of Whole Earth Catalog, with Earthrise photo.

was “scared” when he saw the image, seeing not a grounding “home” but a vertiginous unmooring (figure 10.4).8 The orientation is important here: the moon is not a horizontal grounding for the Earth, but rather a vast and looming presence threatening to eclipse the grainy gray Earth (the original Earthrise image was similarly sideways; it was only turned 90 degrees in orientation when it arrived on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog). In a less romantic idiom, Sheila Jasanoff suggests that “the planetary image [may] . . . convey . . . a serene (some might say contemptuous) . . . disregard . . . for the day-­to-­day environmental insults suffered by billions of the world’s poorest citizens: dirty air, polluted water, inadequate sanitation, infectious diseases, damaged crops, loss of green spaces, and the decay of built environments.”9 This interpretation points to a semiotic unsteadiness in the image. As a photograph of the Earth, Whole Earth is what Peirce would have called an index, a sign that stands for (or points to) its object by virtue of the object having made an impression on the carrier of the sign. A footprint is an index, and so, in a material fashion, is a photograph—­an impression made by light on a medium. But the Whole Earth also exists as a kind of icon, a diagrammatic representation 119

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Figure 10.3. Blue Marble photo. Image: NASA.

of a quality of Earth, namely its “wholeness.” It is an index with iconic features. We might go further and position the image as an icon in a more sacred sense, too; one might say about it what the anthropologist Karen Strassler observed about photographs of holy personages: “Revelatory traces, such photographs also retain the aura of their originals through a property of indexical ‘contagion’ or ‘contact.’ Within this semiotic ideology, the indexical nature of the photographic image—­its physical connection to its referent—­enables it to embody and transmit the power of the photographed subject.”10 The Whole Earth was certainly touted in its day—­ particularly by Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog—­as a revelatory image, charged with power in and of itself, an “icon” in the religious sense.11 That would also make it into what Peirce called a symbol, a sign that stands for something by interpretative convention. Whole Earth is an icon, index, and symbol of unity and planetary vitality and fragility—­though it may, of course, as Jasanoff points out, be melted back via critical viewing into a swarm of other sorts of indexes pointing to colonialism, imperialism, economic inequality, and the like. 120

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Figure 10.4. Image of Earth and Moon from Lunar Orbiter 1, 1966. NASA/LOIRP. Image: NASA.

I am more interested in another reading that has circulated. For many viewers, the image of the Earth from space is not an image of Earth as ground (or unground) but an image of earth as sea. The science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke is said to have famously pronounced (in an impossible-­to-­source quotation one finds everywhere people write about oceans these days), “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.” Lifted above the ocean that Edmund Burke in 1757 named as the signature symbol of the sublime—­that which overwhelms with terror and beauty—­viewers in the 1960s came to name Earth the “blue planet.” In the January 14, 1966, issue of Life magazine, Gemini 7 astronaut Frank Borman suggested, “Anyone on Mars looking at Earth would call it the Blue Planet” (the use of this term, “blue planet,” skyrocketed in popular use from then forward).12 Earth is redone as Ocean. Spaceship Earth both floats in and contains a Sea.13 Photographs of Ocean Earth from space became, in the years following the first Earth day in 1970, rallying points for environmentalist arguments. The image of a homey, extraterrestrial Earth sounds a call to intimacy with the 121

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planet, what Donna Haraway named a “yearning for the physical sensuousness of a wet and blue-­green Earth.”14 Fast forward to the millennium and a bit beyond. The fragility and finitude so fastened to Earth’s marbled image is increasingly leveraged into warnings of an irreversibly changed planet, of a state of permanent crisis to which humans must now adapt. In 2010s The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, James Lovelock—­who envisioned Earth as the self-­regulating “Gaia” after imagining how it would appear spectrographically from space—­argued that global warming is shifting Earth into a long-­term “hot state.”15 Bill McKibben agrees and suggests that “we no longer live” on the planet represented by the 1968 Earthrise photo.16 His 2010 book, Eaarth, points to melting ice caps and increasingly acidic oceans. McKibben, respelling “Earth” with two a’s to flag a silent but significant change (akin, perhaps, to what Derrida did with différance), tells readers that there is no going back to Earth (with one a). In the images of Earth on the covers of The Vanishing Face of Gaia and Eaarth, the Blue Marble turns red, suggesting oceans aflame or filled with blood (figures 10.5 and 10.6; These pictures also share aesthetics with apocalyptic imagery on popular evangelical Christian novels about the

Figure 10.5. Gaia in peril on The Vanishing Face of Gaia. James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York: Basic Books). Used with permission. 122

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Figure 10.6. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Black Inc., 2010). Cover design: Thomas Deverall.

rapture, e.g. the Left Behind series. Gaia becomes the avenging avatar of Whole Earth17). What representations of Ocean Earth animate these warnings? Those delivered by such objects as the OrbView-­2 spacecraft, which produce data compiled into the “Sea-­viewing Wide Field-­of-­view-­Sensor” (SeaWiFS) false-­color representations of chlorophyll concentrations (figure 10.7), which can used as proxies for changing temperatures. Graphs of increasing atmospheric temperature fill out this picture.18 Such technologies of “overview,” made epistemologically possible by space-­age accounts of the Earth, have become increasingly digital—­and, importantly, less photographic, even as (as with SeaWiFS images) they rely on conventions of realist indexical and iconic representation established by 1960s images of Earth from space (the Earth as closed sphere, seen from somewhere between the Earth and Moon; the Earth as a colorful ball against a black background). But such technologies of representation have also become increasingly 123

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Figure 10.7. Sea-­viewing Wide Field-­of-­view-­Sensor (SeaWiFS) representation of chlorophyll concentration. Image: NASA.

available to a variety of viewerships and readerships—­which brings me to today’s avatars of Spaceship Earth-­Ocean: Google Earth and Google Ocean, both products of Google, one of the world’s largest Internet service and product companies. GOOGLE EARTH Google Earth is a virtual 3-­D globe patched together from satellite imagery, aerial photos, and Geographic Information System (GIS) data.19 In Google Earth, users start with a composite satellite-­image of Earth that hovers on their (2-­D) computer screen (or smart phone or tablet) at about the same virtual distance as Earth did from the Apollo 17 astronauts who snapped the Blue Marble image (about 28,000 miles away from the surface of the planet). Google Earth is a weightless virtual object that one can “spin” with a wave of one’s mouse (with a 124

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cursor icon shaped like a hand, a virtualization of the gesture of spinning a globe with one’s fingers). Google Earth is thus a descendent of the playful inflatable Earth beach balls that made their way into outdoor countercultural events in the 1960s. In his analysis of such bouncy Earth toys, Volker Welter writes, “In antiquity, Atlas could barely move, so heavy weighed the planet on his shoulders. . . . Modernity gradually took that weight off man until space travel tore apart his final ties to Earth.”20 But if Spaceship Earth is a photographic record of a ball floating in space, Google Earth virtualizes this flotation device into a computer-­ generated sphere of representations pieced together from software whose particulars remain out of view of the user interface (screens, after all, both occlude and display, both enable and mask the objects they would reveal21). Google Earth thus shares with Spaceship Earth something of the quality of a fetish, a shimmering image meant to be consumed, perhaps as an icon of nostalgia for an Earth we may be about to lose (though, as we will see, Google Earth can invite more hands-­on [or fingers-­on-­the-­mouse] thought-­experimenting, too, some of which may interdigitate with forms of online and offline political organizing).22 Google Earth’s interface permits users, as if in a dream, to “fly to” (or zoom in on) features of the planet that they may find of interest (tourist destinations, their own homes, etc.) and to do so at various degrees of resolution (as of 2010, the “average zoom in major cities such as San Francisco, London, and Tokyo is around 90 meters before pixilation”23). “Street-­level” images appear in many locales, first visible as bubbles into which one can virtually leap with a click of the mouse, maneuvering into a 360-­degree panoramic image. Three-­dimensional representations of skyscrapers and large-­scale natural features abound. Google Earth offers a number of “layers,” graphics that the user can toggle on and off to superimpose on the basic globe digital portraits of weather, tracings of international borders, maps of highways, and the like (“layers” themselves have an earlier pedigree in such software tools as Adobe Photoshop). Google Earth would thus appear to be a very personal and personalizable Earth, a quintessentially contemporary computational object, an app. We could as well call it iEarth. It invites individuals to have their own unique encounters. In her writing on software, the media studies scholar Wendy Chun suggests considering such a claim with some caution: Interfaces—­as mediators of the visible and the invisible, as a means of navigation—­ have been key to creating “informed” individuals who can overcome the chaos of global capitalism by mapping their relation to the totality of the global capitalist system. . . . The dream is: the resurgence of the seemingly sovereign individual, the subject driven to know, driven to map, to zoom in and out, to manipulate, and to act.24

Chun may have overstated her case here—­for example, not all of the Facebook and Twitter traffic coincident with the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt in spring 125

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2011 may be so easily boiled down to stories of people possessed by a false consciousness about capitalism. But Chun does remind us of the infrastructure behind something like Google Earth. If the graphic user interface produces a sense of mastery over the globe (this is different from the Whole Earth image, which was usually spun rhetorically to shock people into their finitude and dependence on a fragile ball), this mastery depends on the institutions that produce the imagery. Google Earth was launched from a US-­based company, Google, and it relies largely on representations made by the office of the US Department of State geographer and therefore necessarily embeds the traces of US mapping concerns and conventions—­including keeping at low-­resolution, images of areas containing U.S. military facilities. Google’s attempts to stay on the good side of the Chinese government have also had effects; as of this writing, Tibet does not appear on Google maps. While Google Earth has moved beyond older politics of map projection (no one worries about the Eurocentrism of Mercator projections here), it is certainly, for all its spherical, photographic and photo-­ realistic representation, far from shutting the door on cartographic controversy. It is also worth noting that Google not only relies on US military and imperial infrastructures, but also crucially depends on public works funded by the US government (geodetic surveys undertaken to determine the shape of the planet,25 the interstate highway system, and the like), works that are then treated as given, almost “natural,” facts and features of the landscape. Google Earth may give us cause to worry, with Siva Vaidhyanathan, about the “Googlization of everything,” the work of a private company to leverage other people’s historical infrastructural work into its own network.26 Google Earth is a mixture of representational forms. Indexical: satellite images. Iconic: road maps. Symbolic: nation-­state boundaries. But in the days of computational imagery, Google Earth exceeds the usual frames of representation even within canonical Peircian categories. So, for example, one might at first glance say that the satellite photos in Google Earth are indexical. But, as Chun reminds us, computers do not show pictures; they generate them.27 Moreover, if we think of Google Earth as giving us a kind of movie (of, say, a zoom into a landscape or a spin around the globe), this neglects the fact that having computational processes happen in “real time” requires that programs keep up, prioritize what count as important elements in an event.28 There is no “transparency” here: “Computers have fostered both a decline in and a frenzy of visual knowledge. Opaque yet transparent, incomprehensible yet logical, they reveal that the less we know the more we show (or are shown).”29 Google Earth offers an oscillation between the hypermediated and the immediate.30 Insofar as what we see in Google Earth appear to be like photographs, we might think of these items as haunted by all the representational techniques that have to be erased for them to appear this way. We might also inquire into what sort of notion of indexicality animates our vision of Google Earth. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler tells the story of the Indonesian queen of the South Sea, 126

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Ratu Kidul, “ruler of the unseen spirit realm and traditional lover of Javanese kings,” and she reports (with surprise) that some of her Javanese interlocutors spoke of oil paintings of Ratu Kidul as photographs—­indexical traces of her presence, impressions made on a medium. Strassler finally accepts that, yes, these are photographs within an “ideology of indexicality” that does not require that an emulsion of silver halide that can register light (or a charge-­coupled device that can digitally register photons) count as the only medium for photo-­graphy, light-­drawing.31 Taking things in the reverse direction, we could construe the photos in Google Earth not as photos, but rather as drawings, results of the use of instruments to mark a two-­dimensional surface. For Peirce, Google Earth would not properly be what he would have called an image, which for him was simply an expression of qualities. Peirce might have called it a diagram, an icon that represents “a set of rationally related objects,” which themselves may be represented by icons and indexes.32 Perhaps this representation is a rebus—­“a cryptic representation of a word or phrase by pictures, symbols, arrangement of letters, etc., which suggest the word or phrase, or the syllables of which it is made up” (Oxford English Dictionary)—­or, better, a reverse rebus: a cryptic and transparent representation of a picture by words, symbols, arrangement of letters, etc. which suggest the picture.33 With this bevy of signs—­ straightforward and roundabout—­in mind for Google Earth, what of Google Ocean? What sort of image of the sea is in the making with Google Ocean? GOOGLE OCEAN Google Ocean is a program that adds layers to Google Earth and itself features many sublayers (see figure 10.8). It permits users to look, for example, at outlines of marine protected areas, data from the Census of Marine Life, icons representing locations of sunken ships, surf forecasts, and videos about creatures in peril (from the “ARKive: Endangered Ocean Species” website, itself part of Google Earth’s “Global Awareness” layer). When Google Ocean was released, in 2009, the polar explorer Pen Hadow wrote, “This is a watershed moment of shared global understanding of our oceans. . . . Ocean in Google Earth will enable a global audience to follow the progress and findings of the Catlin Arctic Survey, an international scientific endeavour resolving the likely meltdown date of the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice cover.”34 The layers in Google Ocean are pointedly shaped by ecological orientations; anxiety about global warming hums in the background of this platform. But we must dig a little deeper to get a sense of what sort of representation of the ocean—­or oceans—­is in motion in Google Ocean. Unlike Google Earth, Google Ocean is not grounded in satellite photographs—­or, for that matter, street-­level (or even sea-­level) photographs. Rather, Google Ocean is founded in topographical maps of the seafloor (these have negative elevations; sea level is Google’s zero elevation). These maps appear through the thin veneer of a 127

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Figure 10.8. Google Ocean.

uniformly wavy water surface rendered in computer graphics. This is iconic, not indexical, water, and it has the same texture anywhere one goes (one can even make the water surface disappear by clicking on a pull-­down menu, realizing the oft-­narrated literary dream of sucking away the sea). “Flying in” permits the user effortlessly to penetrate the water surface, getting a closer look at the seafloor—­though “effortlessly” may well be the wrong adverb here, since the “flying” movement requires a culturally tuned skill with a mouse or touchpad (I discovered that my own habitus was not fully up to the task of submarine navigation when I repeatedly overshot my target depth by what I was informed were several kilometers). The seafloor at which one arrives after flying in is not so much a topographical map or picture as it is a model. A blue 2-­D image of a 3-­D lumpscape, the seafloor is compiled and built up from sonar tracings as well as satellite bathymetry (radar bounced off the surface of the sea to infer the topography below). As one writer on the Google Earth Community BBS put it, it is satellite radar geodesy (a coarse model of the seafloor based on radar measurements of sea height) corrected by actual single-­or multi-­beam sonar recorded by research vessels (much finer detail, much higher quality depth information). 128

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Neither of these two sources are “images” . . . ; they are both collections of mathematical data points.35

Although these models do manifest as images in the common-­sense use of that term, this writer is correct that they are a particular species of representation the specifics of which Google Ocean does little to reveal. These models are mash-­ ups of the iconic, indexical, and symbolic—­none of which the interface makes clear, until one considers another element of the Peircian model of semiotics: that all signs must have an interpretant, a meaning, and therefore a frame of reference or capture. A simple way of thinking about this is to consider how data are captured for seafloor models, which is through an interpretative assemblage of ships, satellites, and computer programs. Artifacts in the data reveal some of the assumptions built into the human and machine intepretant ecology. Take the seafloor. The same user on the Google Ocean BBS reported that several lines “radiating away from Cape Town are artifacts, errors in the model which correspond to ship tracks from the research vessels which left (or arrived at) Cape Town, recording sonar data as they traveled which is replicated in the GEO seafloor model.”36 The image of the real, filtered through the model, indexes its social and institutional conditions of possibility, underscoring the way that systems of meaning can preshape what will count as a sign. There’s an odd sensory feature to Google Ocean’s underwater world. Once beneath the virtual waves, the user sees, just above, a sea-­surface ceiling of generic ripples and, just below, a rumpled blue seafloor. The “water” is absolutely transparent, with no indices of refraction, no attenuation of light.37 This is not the dark deep, but a clear fishbowl—­though with no fish, no sea life. It is also difficult to grasp scale here; understanding the size and location of the body one would have to inhabit to access these views is unclear (see figure 10.9). There is also no change in “medium” with our “travel” below the waves; the user still “flies” or “floats,” indicating something very strange about the place of “gravity” in this model, a point to which I will return. I would put this image of the sea into the lineage of oceanographic apprehensions of the sea as follows: During the first oceanographic voyages, in the nineteenth century, ships such as Britain’s HMS Challenger drew their knowledge of the abyss from dredging—­bringing up objects from the bottom of the sea using buckets attached to piano wire. The deep was a mysterious zone of unknown depth, a dark and frightening realm of thick secrecy (in fact, in the early nineteenth century, naturalists thought the deep to be devoid of life because of a prevailing belief that seawater was compressible, that it got thicker as you went down). In the early twentieth century, sonar afforded a dimensional portrait of the deep that had been unavailable through the patchwork deployment of sounding lines. In her history of wire and acoustic sounding, Sabine Höhler argues that sounding with sound marked an arc toward visual representations of the deep: 129

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Figure 10.9. Monterey Bay as viewed in Google Ocean, 285 meters below sea level.

Oceanographic research commencing in the mid-­19th century could not rely on the direct observation of its object, but had to create its images of ocean depth through remote investigation. Depth became a matter of scientific definitions, systematic measurements, and graphic representations. In the course of a century, the opaque ocean of the 1850s was densely depicted in physical terms and transformed into a technically and scientifically sound oceanic volume.38

The next move along the sensory trajectory was visualizing the deep with light. Jacques Cousteau’s television specials and all their descendants, from Blue Planet to James Cameron’s IMAX documentaries about hydrothermal vents, now afford optical access to bits of this oceanic volume. The sensory trajectory through which the deep sea has been scientifically apprehended has traveled from the tactile, to the auditory, to the visual. With Google Ocean, the ultimate fantasy of visualizing the deep—­making it totally see-­through—­is, if not realized, approximated (for those with the requisite media skills and imaginations). Google’s is in many ways a post–­Cold War ocean, an ecological ocean, an icon of a hoped for transparency of ecological auditing and governance. I remarked earlier on the politics inscribed into Google Earth. What might those be and how do they connect—­or not—­to the Google Ocean layer? Jason 130

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Farman, in “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography,” suggests that Google Earth necessarily inherits some of the imperial histories that gave rise to the practice of mapmaking. It may be difficult to see these, he says, because the platform is made of photos, suggesting that it is a simple one-­to-­one index of reality, an objective representation39 (though see my contention, above, that these are not photos, but rather drawings). Moreover, since these pictures are sourced from satellites or anonymous photographers, they seem clean of authorial agency or agendas. Of course, the “view from nowhere” is a well-­critiqued figure in science studies. In “Situated Knowledge,” Donna Haraway famously pointed to the “god trick” that so often comes with “overviews” that purport to be neutral—­ especially as they may be embedded in mapping practices dedicated to owning and controlling territory.40 The first-­person character of Google Earth street views—­or submarine models, as the case may be—­does not exile that god-­ trick, but rather obscures it by presenting a view supposedly analogous to one that an “individual” can have (though, again, a weird individual, made of a virtual, roving eye, operated by a fleshy hand both present and absent to the user’s consciousness). Just as with Google Earth, Google Ocean depends on representations that come from institutional addresses, no surprise given the very labor-­and technology-­intensive practice of mapping the sea. Ocean-­floor topographies are provided by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Navy, the National Geospatial-­ Intelligence Agency, and scientists making the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). Many sublayers are from other organizations. Many of these are less “layers” in the sense of fully-­covering-­sheets-­of-­representation than they are skeins of factoids. A couple of these—­such as Cousteau Ocean World and National Geographic—­simply geo-­locate/tag stories or clips from TV shows to particular spots on the Google globe. The Shipwrecks and Ocean Sports layers direct wreck divers and surfers to points of interest. Particular points of view are built into these layers. “State of the Ocean” ­layers—ocean observations, sea-­surface temperature, arctic sea ice, dead zones, Monterey Bay Aquarium: Seafood Watch—­all have environmental concerns at their heart. In 2005, Google provided documentation of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The Census of Marine Life has tags that key to pictures of sea life. The mélange of government, university, and nonprofit sources of layers in Google Earth sketches out a diagram of contemporary ecological politics. But human or cultural agency cannot fully explain the image of the sea in Google Ocean. Some of the artifacts that appear in Google Ocean result from left-­on-­their own algorithms dedicated to generic tasks. To a roughly tuned algorithm meant to map the seafloor, everything can “look” like the seafloor. Some users report that upgrades of seafloor models have sometimes erased entire islands. Thus, a user on the Google Ocean BBS: 131

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I’m going to report some of the islands which have gone missing, or partially missing after the update. . . . Here are a few examples of problem areas: • Maldives—­some atolls and surrounding waters are now covered by the new ocean floor41 • Island of St. Helena in south Atlantic half missing • Several of the South Georgia islands near Antarctica are missing or partially missing. Examples: Montagu Island, Saunders Island, Cook Island, etc. • Isles of Scilly off the SW of the UK are all missing. • The shallow waters in the Bahamas are now all obscured. Please bring back the satellite imagery!42

The commentary by users of Google Earth and Google Ocean points toward an intriguing feature of this image of the planet; it is one that permits, even invites, critique—­and not only in the form of text. Users can add layers to Google Earth, which they can then share with other users. Farman observes that the Google Earth Community, a social network that assembles online to comment on Google Earth helps to foster cartographic debate, even undoing some of the imperial hauntings of the platform. Farman notes, “Google Earth uniquely engages its users, not as disembodied voyeurs, but as participants in global dialog, represented spatially on the digital map.”43 He says that “users can spatially debate the very tool they are using while simultaneously augmenting the borders in Google Earth to offer a different map altogether.”44 Farman suggests that the Google Earth “overlay” feature—­which permits users to overlay the map with alternative cartographies, which they can then email to other users—­makes Google Earth a space of productive wandering, an electronic zone for what the situationist art movement called derive and détournement. As a kind of heterotopia—­a mix of the real, the imagined, the possible, and the impossible—­Google Earth may be a more unstable and promising representation than Spaceship Earth. Here, the map exceeds the territory. Google Earth has become an authoritative platform for making maps and countermaps. Take, as one example, the use of Google Earth by Adrian Myers, a Stanford archaeology doctoral student, to track the growth of Guantánamo Bay prison construction.45 While Myers’s project, which visualizes what oceanic distance is meant to obscure, might be seen as a kind of citizen auditing of governmental doings, he points out that there are “ethical concerns inherent in the use of remotely sensed images, as Google Earth might be seen as a panoptic viewing technology that leaves no voice to those being viewed.”46 Any number of examples could be given—­though it is also important to keep in view older questions of a “digital divide”; Google Ocean requires a high bandwidth that not 132

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all would-­be maverick cartographers can access (which underlines a difference between the infrastructural realm Google takes for granted—­a mid-­twentieth century, publicly funded system of roads, cables, etc.—­and today’s increasingly privatized commons, which could be otherwise; a publicly funded broadband initiative could undo much of the digital divide). Google Ocean also hosts a fleet of maritime overlays (see, e.g., http://www .justmagic.com/GM-GE.html): submarine cables, marine-­park wildlife surveys, fishing-­zone maps, navigational charts, world tides, sea-­surface temperature, rising-­sea-­level animations, sites of recent piracy, oil spills.47 The variety of concerns now writable into Google Earth and Google Ocean display a range of agendas, a range of mapping concerns, some of which may be informational, some of which may underwrite maritime activism. They diagram an ocean imagined in multifarious registers. Google Ocean has also generated a series of heterotopian social-­network interventions. Think, for example, of a recent voyage to the plastic vortex—­a giant loop of floating plastic trash caught in the Northern Pacific gyre—­that has lately been undertaken by ex-­NASA employees who offer maps of their travel on their website, using Google Earth as their orienting map.48 The connected Ocean Voyages Institute, a California registered 501C3 nonprofit organization, organizes the plastic vortex expedition, and their website features a Google Earth Globe onto which they have overlaid the path of their voyages as well as links to videos of themselves poking at plastic gunk in the ocean (see figure 10.10). Or look at animations of the BP oil spill that employ Google Earth as a backdrop (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DS6smLuzBk). Google Earth has become a passage point in what Kim Fortun has called “the informating of environmentalism,” the making legible of environmental concerns using databases.49 The Digital Ocean project, which is aimed at adding environmentalist overlays to Google Ocean, is part of this moment. Its logo, an image of a pixilated wave, plays with the tension between the quintessentially analog and wavy—­the ocean—­and the digital (see figure 10.11). One of the project advisors is Constance Penley, a critical theorist known for her analysis of science-­fiction-­fan remixes of popular TV shows, such as Star Trek, which in its “slash fiction” version has Kirk and Spock in a steamy love affair.50 When, during a visit to Santa Barbara, I asked Penley how she imagined Digital Ocean, she said, “It’s about slashing the ocean! It’s about getting people to be fans of the ocean.” Popular cultural boosterism, yes, but perhaps an index of possible geometries for new digital writing, reading, and thinking.51 As a space of possible mappings—­many of which are to do with ocean health, Digital Ocean and Google Ocean are like Spaceship Earth before them, tools for thinking about possible futures (see figure 10.12, an alarming editorial image that offers, after McKibben, a Google Eaarth).52 That promise is packed into the medium of the representations themselves; both Spaceship Ocean and Google Ocean arrive as high-­tech images of the planet, images that have been rhetorically deployed to prompt thinking about planetary futures, using 133

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Figure 10.10. Project Kaisei: Capturing the Plastic Vortex.

Figure 10.11. The Digital Ocean logo.

at-­their-­time futuristic modes of mechanical reproduction (cameras in space, computer graphics). How, then, shall we understand the many signs swimming around in Google Ocean? Here I find it useful to pirate a concept from Peirce’s work in logic and think of Google Ocean as an existential graph, 134

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Figure 10.12. Google Eaarth. From Susan Kramer’s “Google Eaarth Shows Our Hellish 4°C Future if Republicans Filibuster 2010 Climate Bill,” on the Clean Technica website (http://s.tt/12xAf).

a logical graph governed by a system of representation founded upon the idea that the sheet upon which it is written, as well as every portion of that sheet, represents one recognized universe, real or fictive, and that every graph drawn on that sheet, and not cut off from the main body of it by an enclosure, represents some fact existing in that universe, and represents it independently of the representation of another such fact by any other graph written upon another part of the sheet, these graphs, however, forming one composite graph.53

Google Ocean as existential graph is a logical diagram, a formalism, that conjoins multiple representations, real and fictive, and multiple semiotic registers, iconic, indexical, symbolic, which can operate independently of one another (in different layers) while still forming part of a composite. So seeing Google Ocean points, I think, to the utopian heterotopia it enacts and promises—­its existential politics—­a world one and many, public and idiosyncratic, simultaneously.54 On the topic of utopian heterotopias, compare Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome.55 Both the geodesic dome and the rhizome are constructed of lines. In the first case, the lines have a tensile strength that, properly harnessed, can hold a sphere together. In the second, the lines fly away from a center, away from coherence but not connection. Earth as double-­ dome unifies; Earth as rhizome disperses and multiplies. Google Earth Ocean 135

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does both. The rhizome may scribble over and into the dome, making a zone at once home and not-­home, a fusion of Spaceship Earth, Gaia, Eaarth, and more. THE GRAVITY OF THE GLOBE Well before Spaceship Earth or Google Earth, the shape of the Earth was known by geodesy, the science of measuring the planet in three-­dimensional space. In the late nineteenth century, Peirce, when he was not working on logic and semiotics, held a job as a geodesist.56 From 1859 to 1891, Peirce worked for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, seeking to determine the shape of the Earth from measurements of gravity made using swinging pendulums positioned at different locations on the planet. This was not a floating Earth, but a heavy one; as his aunt Charlotte Elizabeth put it in a letter she wrote home, “Charles Peirce & his wife are away off at Key West on Coast Survey business—­weighing the earth or something.”57 Google Earth and Google Ocean have no weight. It is true that Google Earth’s spheroid form uses geodesy from the World Geodetic System of 1984 to organize its coordinate system, and thereby implicitly records the effects of gravity on the shape of the Earth. But the program does not model gravity.58 This may be especially difficult to remember when we go “underwater” in Google Ocean, in which the “experience” of floating may feel more “realistic” than it does on land.59 Even so, there are many watery substantialities missing here: pressure, currents, thermoclines, salinity, smells of beach rot. One may of course worry that this observation is a bit off target since Google Ocean offers only a visual, rather than a sonic or tactile or echolocative interface, but in the optical domain, too, much is askew: the refractive and attenuating effects on light of seawater are absent. This is an image of an ocean utterly light—­ weightless and transparent both. This is an image that is not, in the Peircian sense, an image, a manifestation of qualities. Nowhere in the semiotics of Google Ocean can we find the quality of seawater as a medium in which light refracts, in which sound is transduced, and in which lively creatures spawn, swarm, respire, and expire. For all its heterotopian possibility, this is not the space of material and semiotic confusion that I have elsewhere named the alien ocean.60 It is instead a diagram of the ways that many of us image now, layering icons, indexes, and symbols on top of an Earth made on and of previous infrastructures, transparent and opaque, an Earth taken-­for-­granted as well as, increasingly, forgotten.

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UNDERWATER MUSIC Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science

HOW DOES LIFE SOUND UNDERWATER? How have people apprehended sounds subaqueous and submarine? As humans, our access to underwater sonic realms is modulated by means fleshy and technological. Bones, endolymph fluid, cilia, hydrophones, and sonar equipment are just a few apparatuses that bring watery sounds into human audio worlds. As this list suggests, the media through which humans hear sound under water can reach from the scale of the singular biological body up through the socially distributed and technologically tuned-­in community. For the social scale, which is peopled by submariners, physical oceanographers, marine biologists, and others, the underwater world—­and the undersea world in particular—­often emerges as a “field” (a wildish, distributed space for investigation) and occasionally as a “lab” (a contained place for controlled experiments). In this chapter, I investigate the ways the underwater realm manifests as such a scientifically, technologically, and epistemologically apprehensible zone. I do so by auditing underwater music, a genre of twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century composition performed or recorded under water in settings ranging from swimming pools to the ocean, with playback unfolding above water or beneath. Composers of underwater music are especially curious about scientific accounts of how sound behaves in water and eager to acquire technologies of subaqueous sound production. We can learn much about how the underwater domain has been made sonically perceptible by attending to how composers adapt their practice to scientific language and technique in ways both rigorous and fanciful. We can learn how sound has been abstracted from the water medium to reveal and produce resources imagined as musical. We can track how technologies of 137

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underwater audition are often adjusted to deliver aesthetic experiences in line with the way composers imagine submerged sound should sound; how, to take one example, the notion of water as sublimely immersive can be reinforced in compositions that make use of hydrophonic listening and playback. We can also sometimes discern a querying of dominant thinking about the symbolism of underwater sound.1 One tradition in the history of sound tells us the ocean was once taken to be a place of silence—­thus, in 1953, Jacques Cousteau’s book The Silent World.2 Auguste and Jacques Piccard the same year described travel two miles down in their bathyscaphe Trieste as surrounded by the “quiet of death.”3 That tone had been set in 1896, when Kipling wrote in his poem “The Deep-­Sea Cables” that “There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep” (resonating with early nineteenth-­century theories of the deep as a lifeless “azoic zone”). However, there has existed a more sonorous imagination of the sea—­think of singing mermaids and sea monsters. In Charles Kingsley’s 1863 novel, The Water-­Babies, the boy protagonist, approaching a submarine volcano, comes “to the white lap of the great Sea-­mother, ten thousand fathoms deep  .  .  . aware of a hissing and a roaring, and thumping, and a pumping, as of all the steam engines of the world at once.”4 As we will hear, the underwater world was, even in its first scientific manifestations, full of sound—­even music—­echoed in the poetic descriptions such vibration often called forth. Such soundful seas found expression in Romantic musical efforts to evoke underwater realms, which bequeathed a store of symbolism to later music meant to be realized under water. Notions of the immersive and sublime continue to saturate audio work. However, listening closely to such work, as this chapter does, also reveals how underwater music tracks shifting perceptions of the sea (from a space of Cold-­War mystery to a commons imperiled by global warming), changing ways of inhabiting swimming pools (primarily implicating gender), and transforming practices of connecting sound, art, and science in contemporary enterprises such as field recording, sampling, and sound art. EVOKING, INVOKING, SOAKING I distinguish three modes through which music meets water. In the first, musical composition or performance evokes water symbolically, metaphorically, or timbrally—­in the arrangement of notes, the organization of rhythms, or the choice of instrument.5 In the second, music invokes water as a material instrument or sonic element. In the third, music soaks in water—­that is, music is immersed in actual water as an encompassing medium within which it is performed, recorded, played back, or listened to (see the end of the chapter for a musicography—­a playlist, really—­organized according to the evoking, invoking, and soaking trio). This chapter concentrates on the third mode.

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Before settling into soaking, however, some notes on evoking and invoking: EVOKING: The Romantic composers Berlioz, Debussy, and Ravel, along with the modernists Satie and Schoenberg, are known for portraying tranquil and tumultuous seas with an orchestral palette.6 The acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer tested the waters of scientific seas in 1978 with String Quartet no. 2, Waves, which offered “dynamic, undulating wave patterns, the rhythm and structure of which [were] based on his analysis of wave patterns off both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of Canada.”7 The undersea world came into palpability in soundtracks to science documentary and science fiction film and television. Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle’s 1956 film The Silent World—­not at all silent (bubble noises and scuba breathing abound)—­features an Yves Baudrier score, towed down by dropping cello lines, suspended with gurgly horns, and buoyed up with tinkling harp notes8 (which are indebted to Liszt’s 1877 The Fountains of the Villa d’Este, full of rippling piano9). In the soundtracks to 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (Paul J. Smith, 1954) and The Deep (John Barry, 1977), the composers elicit the undersea with arpeggiating harps and minor-­keyed swelling strings. In line with apprehensions of the ocean as a feminized, mysterious Other, Western composers often employ orientalist motifs. In Angela Morley’s 1969 “Martineau and Organ,” from Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, the Mellotron organ and the Theremin evoke mellow swirls and half-­forgotten siren songs. A lexicon for music evocative of the underwater world comes into being.10 In the mid-­twentieth century, composers moved from the iconic to onomatopoetic, seeking to create sounds that sound as though they originate in water. Electronic effects became important.11 Ussachevsky’s 1951 “Underwater Waltz” employed reverberated piano. Synthesizers burbled onto the scene. For Jean Painlevé and Genevieve Hamon’s 1965 film, The Love Life of the Octopus, the musique concrète composer Pierre Henry offered oozy synthesizer noodlings.12 The electric guitar is adapted for surf music. The “sopping-­wet ‘surf ’ sound,”13 realized by “[l]iquid guitar drenched in deep-­tank reverb,”14 results from reverberation: “Surf guitarists are noted for extensive use of the ‘wet’ spring reverb sound and use of the vibrato arm on their guitar to bend the pitch of notes downward.”15 Jamaican dub drips reverb. David Toop suggests that “sonar transmit pulses, reverberations and echoes of underwater echo ranging and bioacoustics” constitute the “nearest approximation to dub.”16 In the late twentieth century, the Detroit techno outfit Drexciya conjured an imagined underwater sonic universe; ­their homage to Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, “Aquabon,” guides German electronica into a disturbing fantasy of a black Atlantis founded by Africans thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.17 Important in these works is how the underwater world is imagined, for this imagination remains influential when composers work under “real” water as they coax out of the medium that which they imagine they should hear. Underwater soundworlds are unearthly, evanescent, all encompassing, dreamlike, alien.18 Aesthetics saturates technique.

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INVOKING: Douglas Kahn’s Noise Water Meat is the essential scholarly work about modernist music that calls upon water. “The first notable use of wet percussion was Erik Satie’s use of boutelliphone (a series of tuned bottles suspended from a rack, ‘a poor man’s glockenspiel’) in Parade (1918),”19 John Cage’s 1952 “Water Music” “included among its forty-­one events a duck whistle blown into a bowl of water and two receptacles for receiving and pouring water.”20 The genre of “drip music,” starting in the 1950s, dipped into nonsense, babbling.21 However, “drops of water were [also] conducive to music because they could comfortably assume musical speeds and were amenable to total organization by the composer,”22 as in Hugh Le Caine’s 1955 “Dripsody: An Etude for Variable Speed Recorder.” Yoko Ono’s 1963 “Water Piece” (followed by her 1971 “Toilet Piece”) keys into the context for drip music, the art movement known as Fluxus, Latin for “flow.”23 In the late 1960s, flows and drips—­artificially created in laboratories of modernist aesthetics—­were joined by a new genre of field recordings. In 1966–­1967 New Zealand composer Annea Lockwood began a project called The River Archive, recording sounds of rivers around the world. The aesthetic aim in pieces that evoke and invoke water is a sense of immersion, and one purpose of this chapter—­especially as I turn in the remainder of this text to underwater music that soaks—­is to think critically about how that immersion is achieved in controlled lab-­like spaces such as swimming pools and in the wilder field of the ocean. It turns out that immersion is accomplished through composers’ appropriation of scientific and technical models of underwater soundworlds, as well as their tweaks of those models to align with ideas about how the underwater domain should sound. If the sounds of science saturate underwater music, these sounds are multiply mediated and manipulated.24

TACKING BETWEEN FIELD AND LAB IN UNDERWATER MUSIC: SUBMARINE NOISES AND WHALE SONGS Musical language shapes descriptions of early experiments in underwater sound propagation. In a 1708 issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, Francis Hauksbee published “Account of an Experiment Touching upon the Propagation of Sound through Water,” in which he pronounced that a bell under water sounded “much more mellow, sweet, and grave at least three notes deeper than it was before.”25 Imagery of music played under water reverberates through early technoscientific inquiries into submerged sound. By the early and mid-­twentieth century, as oceanographers and antisubmarine warfare researchers listened closely to the underwater realm—­realizing that it was not a place of silence—­music and its metaphors continued to shape sea-­sound description. Maritime military research history entwines with musical history: In World War I the composer and conductor Sir Hamilton Harty was called in by the British Admiralty’s Board for Invention and Research to identify the most 140

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likely frequency bands of hull and propeller noises.  .  .  . Ernest Rutherford also took a colleague with perfect pitch out in a small boat as part of the war effort. At a prearranged spot one of the great names in atomic physics took a firm grip of his companion’s ankles while this man stuck his head into the Firth of Forth and listened to the engine note of a British submarine. Hauled back into the dinghy and toweling his head he announced it was a submersible in A-­flat.26

Submarine pilots used less fanciful discernment. The U.S. Navy created instructional LPs to train submariners to distinguish enemy submarine sounds from ambient ocean noise.27 “Still,” records Hillel Schwartz, sonarmen went “ping-­happy.” Straining to identify threats within an underwater environment that behaved “very much like a large empty room with bad acoustic properties,” they heard pings bouncing off what turned out to be whales and schools of fish, heard pips refracting off what turned out to be temperature gradients, heard roars from what turned out to be waves rushing at rocks on distant shores, and heard much better in mid-­morning than in the late afternoon.28

In order to endow submarine space with immersive sonic depth, to carve a soundscape for humans out of the subaqueous milieu, it takes technical and cultural work and translation. Equipment must be constructed that can capture submarine vibrations in the audio register and ready them for humans to listen to—­equipment like hydrophones, which can capture underwater vibrations using microphones fashioned of ceramic or some other material sufficiently denser than water to allow propagating waves to be impeded. The earliest hydrophones were manufactured in 1901 by the Submarine Signal Company of Boston, which imagined “a network of underwater bells whose sonorous gongs would carry through the water at great distances.”29 The company, seeking an alternative to foghorns, built receivers to capture underwater bell sounds for listeners on surface ships—­though plans to use bells for Morse code were scuttled by the turbulence of the submarine medium. Hydrophones came into their own on submarines with sonar, which was in operation by the 1930s. Sonar works by bouncing signals off the ocean bottom or other boundaries in water, permitting submariners to time echoes to compute distances. It produces a dimensional portrait—­not so much a soundscape as a soundedscape. Hydrophonic signals were rendered into stereo by the use of devices that transformed signals arriving at separate underwater receivers into “binaurally centered” impressions in headphones, creating spatial relations meaningful to hearing humans. If, as Emily Thompson has argued, the soundscape of modernity is patterned by sounds fed through technological filters, underwater soundscapes do not exist at all for humans without such filtering all the way through.30 It was incumbent on early submariners to be attentive auditors of sonar, and it was through such listening that the crackling of crustaceans and the snapping 141

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of shrimp were disclosed, providing a portrait of soundscapes already in existence for underwater creatures with means to hear them.31 Such human listening participated in “field” science in its canonical form—­the investigation of a space of shifting boundaries, of natural and cultural agents.32 The care with which submariners listened emerged in part from Cold War anxieties about the possibility that missing the faintest signal might be disastrous. It was through such field listening—­filtering “noise” from sound, tuning it to the human auditory range—­that whale “songs” were discovered. The biologist William Schevill of Woods Hole was the first to call these sounds whale “music,” though musical metaphors—­and comparisons to birds—­had circulated earlier. Once whale sounds had been separated, they were aestheticized as lonely, majestic, ecologically tuned-­in arias to the wounded sea.33 They were pressed onto LPs, notably by the bioacoustician Roger Payne on Songs of the Humpback Whale, in 1970. They were fused with classical composition in Alan Hovhaness’s 1970 And God Created Great Whales, a mix of recorded and represented, indexical and iconic sounds. One could describe the trajectory this way: The underwater realm starts out as silent, becomes soundful (eerie with Cold War echoes), occasionally noisy, and, once so revealed, turns out to be full of music from creatures imagined close to humans in cognitive power, creatures whose songs can then be separated from their medium—­field—­for contemplation. This trajectory is accompanied by another, in which humans experiment with their own subaqueous music to see whether they can move from the iconic and symbolic mode of Ravel and Debussy, from the octopoid onomatopoeia of Pierre Henry, to a more indexical evocation of “actual” immersion, or soaking. This other trajectory for underwater music is less natural historical than “experimental.” Having learned lessons from the oceanographic “field,” musicians tinker in lab-­like settings, spaces where they control boundaries and variables. The primary such space is the swimming pool, and one of the first to dive in was composer John Cage. THE POOL OF EXPERIMENT: CAGE AND NEUHAUS Cage—­son of an engineer who worked with hydrophones—­first brought water sound/noise into his modernist composition in his collaboration with Lou Harrison, Double Music (1941), in which Cage specified the use of a “water gong (small—­12"–­16" diameter—­Chinese gong raised or lowered into tub of water during production of tone).” . . . Cage . . . traces his use of the water gong to 1937 at UCLA, where, acting as an accompanist, he sought a solution to the problem of providing musical cues to water ballet swimmers when their heads were underwater.34

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Cage’s approach later became more experimental, mixing subjective and scientific methods. Water was important to Cage because, as he put it, it “prepared me for the renunciation of intention and the use of chance operations.”35 In such renunciations, the authorial self d ­ issolved—­as in Cage’s tale of his time in an anechoic chamber, in which he heard his own blood flow as part of the environment. Water stood as a symbol of gentle noise, of a scientific modernist sublime into which an individual might dissipate, a view literalized in the self-­ experiments of dolphin researcher John Lilly, who reported auditory hallucinations while floating in isolation tanks (see chapter 3). In some measure, this immersive symbolism is read out of how human hearing works under water. Sound waves travel four times faster in water than air—­ making it nearly impossible for humans to use underwater acoustic vibration to locate themselves in space. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that human eardrums are too similar in density to water to provide the resistance that can interrupt many underwater vibrations so they might be translated into tympanic movement—­sound—­in the ears; many vibrations pass right through our bodies. For humans, underwater sound is largely registered by bones in the skull, which allow enough resistance—­impedance—­for vibrational motion to be rendered into resonances in the body. Moreover, conduction of sound by bone directly to the inner ear confounds differences in signals received by both ears, making it impossible to compose a “stereo image.” Unaided human ears perceive underwater sound as monophonic: coming from all directions at once (and because of sound’s seemingly instantaneous arrival, often as emanating from within one’s own body). The underwater world is not immediately a soundscape for humans because it does not have the spatiality of a landscape; one might, rather, think of it as a zone of sonic immanence and intensity: a soundstate.36 The sound-­installation artist Max Neuhaus was next in the pool: In Water Whistle [1971–­1974], water was forced through whistles under water to produce pitched sounds that could be heard by the audience only when they submerged themselves. In Underwater Music [1976–­1978], he modified this technique by using specially designed underwater loudspeakers and electronically generated sounds, which were composed through a combination of scientific experiment and intuitive, creative decisions.37

Simon Miller offers that, “Such compositions literally immersed Neuhaus in the medium—­the sites were swimming pools—­as he adjusted pitch perimeters and envelopes, in effect ‘coloring’ the sound. They dramatized the spaces of sound, its limits, because the medium contained them.”38 In planning for these works, Neuhaus made drawings to think through “configurations of the sound sources in the three-­dimensional space of each body of water” (see figure 11.1). Neuhaus’s experiment, like the use of hydrophones and sonar, took place within

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Figure 11.1. Projection of underwater shape with sound source locations. Water Whistle V, 1983, ink and colored pencil on paper, 96 × 96 cm; Sound work reference: University of California, La Jolla, 1972 (http://www.max-neuhaus.info/images/WaterWhistle.V.gif). Courtesy of the estate of Max Neuhaus. 144

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a soundscape of modernity,39 depending crucially on standardized knowledge of—­and formalisms concerning—­how sound behaves in water. In this work, the pool is a lab, a site with clear boundaries within which variables can be manipulated and in which the “nature” of water can be brought “indoors” to be controlled and cleaned of agents that populate it in “the wild.” It becomes a placeless, universalized space, though because of its artistic repurposing, it also becomes a space in which subjective experience—­objectively modulated—­can be realized as immersive. So rather than a space in which scientists generate inscriptions on paper, it becomes a space for generating impressions.40 In addition, as with the “house of experiment” described by the historian Steven Shapin—­a site where gentleman scientists could gather to agree on matters of fact—­this “pool of experiment” admits a properly trained public of modest auditors, ready to be immersed.41 CONDUCTING TRANSDUCTION: REDOLFI’S MUSIQUE SUBAQUATIQUE The aim of immersion is elaborated in the work of the French composer Michel Redolfi, who in 1982 performed in Dartmouth College’s indoor pool. As Redolfi put it, “Listeners of the Underwater Concerts ‘immerse themselves not only in the 90-­degree heated swimming pool, but in the sound itself.’ ”42 How does this immersion work? Redolfi uses modified speakers in his underwater events. Managing the mix of electricity and water is key. Redolfi’s sound engineer, Daniel Harris, explained: Having people, the audience, and speakers with electrical connections in the water together can be a concern unless proper measures are taken to insure that no harm comes to the audience. The SWSS (Sonic Waters Safety System) was developed in response to our concern about the speaker systems introducing stray electrical currents in the water. The SWSS inserts a 50-­kHz pulse wave into all cables entering the water in the same manner as DC power is introduced into microphone cables to power microphones. The return signal is passed through a counter/comparator circuit, which will instantly shut down any line that drops a settable number of pulses, usually 3, indicating a short or other malfunction.43

As this list of equipment makes clear, “immersion” is a hard-­won pun, a hard-­ won laboratory effect. It depends on engineering a sequence of transductions—­ translations of signals across various media: acoustic, electronic, watery—­so that the transduction itself is inaudible, seamless. The immersive effect would be ruined if Redolfi ‘s listeners were electrocuted. The symbolism of water as a sublimely immersive medium must be actively realized technologically. Harris opines that “the genius of Michel Redolfi is in how he applies his knowledge of the human acoustics of underwater sound and intimate familiarity with the playback systems to the composing and mixing of 145

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his very original and enchanting music.” In some cases, however, that knowledge is subordinated to Redolfi’s sense of how underwater music should sound. Harris writes as follows, of an underwater xylophone: Hitting a metal bar under water results in a very unsatisfying “tink,” no matter how hard the performer strikes the instrument, nor how heavy the bar. [So] I glued piezo sensors on the bars, which, when struck, triggered samples or other electronic sound sources via MIDI triggers.  .  .  . The resultant audio was mixed with other sources and sent to the SWSS and then to the underwater speakers.44

The philosopher of music Daniel Charles hears such modulations as an ideal meeting of water and music: “What is at stake, then, is not the spatial idiosyncrasy of the environment, but the degree of achievement of the blending of a music which can be described as simple, tranquil and transparent, with the physical characteristics of water—­its density, temperature, and color.”45 Redolfi is, of course, alive to how science and symbolism come together, though he doesn’t always call attention to the artificiality of that relationship. In connection with a later piece, “Sonic Waters,” Redolfi wrote as follows: [W]ater materializes sound, thickens it, and makes it palpable and penetrable. Water and sound, combined together at the molecular level, create a sonic and fluid substance that can be appreciated not only by looking at its surface reflections, but by sinking oneself into its volume, density, warmth and vibrations.46

In addition: The very concept of underwater sound, Redolfi says, goes all the way back to the songs of sirens, the bells of submerged cathedrals, the voices of lost mariners. “These noisy and eerie myths,” he notices, “have been swept away by the XXth Century and replaced by a quiet and sterile belief in the ocean as a silent world and occasionally disturbed by the long song of the Aqua Diva” whale. But the fact is that the sea is a cacophony of sound, complete with fish “barking and croaking,” shrimp “snapping,” dolphins “whistling” and sea urchins “click-­click-­clicking.”47

Note that Redolfi does not mention sonar surveys, pings, or the like; technological intrusions do not figure in his impression of water. Such intrusions are far from trivial—­as the ears of cetaceans damaged by underwater sounds attest.48 Dialing in to deployments of sound deleterious to dolphins and whales might reveal a genre of underwater music no human has yet considered describing: cetacean death metal.49 So, while Redolfi knows that transductions are necessary to immersion, he ontologizes water as dreamy, alive, penetrable. Charles argues that Redolfi has done something radical here, however. Redolfi not only seeks to 146

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reduce all metaphors of presence, but make of presence the metaphor of itself. In that sense, Redolfi is no more a minimalist: thanks to technology, he transforms the very status of presence until presence becomes, through the acceptance of its reproducibility, an instance which does not need any more to be interpreted or symbolized or displaced, because it entails its own interpretation or symbolization or displacements.50

However, if we thought not of reproducibility but of transducibility, we might hear more clearly the material conditions of Redolfi’s “presence,” which depends, again, on making sure the underwater audience is not flash-­fried by subaqueous electronica.51 From 1981 to 1984 Redolfi scaled up his enterprise, moving into the field—­ the ocean—­when “Sonic Waters” was performed off the coast of Southern California. This opening up of the dream lab of the pool into the field was accompanied by campy sea-­creaturey devices, such as the giant colorful “jellyfish” that kept a low-­frequency speaker afloat in La Jolla Cove. Such playfulness is a reminder that Redolfi does not imagine crustaceans, fish, or marine mammals as audiences: “Redolfi is only concerned with humans: ‘Every dolphin, he says, has a person nowadays to take care of him. . . . I prefer to take care of humans.’ ”52 Redolfi ‘s approach looks similar to that of the Florida Keys underwater music festival. Celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2014, the festival offers to scuba divers music played over Lubell Laboratory speakers attached to boats floating near the reef.53 Attendees dress up as fish. LISTENING TO THE SOUNDS OF SCIENCE: THE WET SOUNDS FESTIVAL In 2008, announcements of the United Kingdom’s first underwater sound festival, Wet Sounds, asked people to dip into municipal swimming pools to listen to music specially composed by industrial, electronica, and noise performers, as well as sound artists.54 Sound art—­a genre of art that creates sound objects to be experienced in galleries, in public spaces, and via headphones—­made a good match with this festival, which treated the pool not just as a chill-­out room but also as a gallery space/lab.55 Listeners’ attention was persistently drawn to technoscientific frames of reference. Wet Sounds pieces are archived online. A few are hydrophonic recordings—­so that the fact that they were played back underwater raises the question of whether these are compound or redundant underwater pieces (and what happens when we listen to them in air). The attempt to superimpose one underwater space (the ocean) on another (the pool) makes particularly explicit the multiple meanings of “medium” in this practice of schizophonia—­the splitting of sound from its source.56 Slavek Kwi’s “Sonafon,” for example, is “a structural and textural exploration of echolocation sounds made by Pink Dolphins recorded in Rio Jaupaperi in Amazonas, Brazil, using ultrasound range 147

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hydrophones.”57 Klaus Osterwaldt’s Donatus Subaqua offers “recordings made in a quiet lake in the forest using hydrophones placed two meters below the surface. There are sounds of the underwater environment like gas bubbling up from the bottom, plants producing oxygen, insects and even the calls of waterboatman.”58 Amie Slavin’s “Wave Play” is “an abstract interweaving of pulse, saw, and triangular waves designed to invoke the playfulness and the latent power of waves, in both sound and water.”59 In addition, Disinformation’s Ghost Shells plays back sferics and whistlers, sounds produced by storm disturbances in Earth’s electromagnetosphere (and captured on very low frequency radio bands): “These phenomena are referred to as ‘hydrodynamic’ because the math used for modeling their behaviour has been extrapolated from observations of how equivalent wave phenomena behave in the variety of fluid media.”60 By 2008, then, scientific representation—­as a warrant for underwater realism, as an aestheticized device for delivering other worlds, as a fetish for formatting serious art—­was sharply in presence as a passage point for making underwater music and sound art.61 QUEERING THE MERMAID: SNAPPER, OLESON, LEBER, CHESWORTH In May 2009 the singer Juliana Snapper premiered an underwater opera titled You Who Will Emerge from the Flood (written with composer Andrew Infanti) at the Victoria Baths, a historic public swimming pool in Manchester, England. Snapper took on the challenge of singing under water, fusing technique and ­aesthetic: “Maximizing bone conduction and controlling bubble output as part of a new vocal fabric,” her website reports, “Snapper merges extended techniques with Baroque tropes that represent human longing and passion as aspects of weather. Pre-­recorded sounds from oceanic bubble fields and birdcalls throb above the water as Snapper’s voice (amplified by an underwater microphone) presses through the soundscape.”62 There is a virtuoso, alien effect to be won from doing something under water that requires breathing. As with the work of Neuhaus, Redolfi, and Wet Sounds participants, this is music that requires research: About the field. About the body. Snapper continues on her website as follows: I have researched underwater acoustics by reading, consulting at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and spending hours submerged in my bathtub and borrowed pools. My experimentation up to now has allowed me to control my voice for long stretches under water, negotiate changes in depth and pressure, and to invent a new expressive vocal language that I call mouth-­to-­water singing.  .  .  . ­Vocalizing in water involves working with air pressure shifts that compress the air in the lungs and effect the sound of the phonation at varying depths. Mouth-­to

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water singing relies heavily on bone conduction to transmit voice, and that vibration is also the basis for sensing/hearing sounds in the water. The interference of bubble sounds in the breath-­born phonation begets lightly percussive rhythmic textures, and it may be possible to control the pitch material and rate of bubble noise through breath pressure and buccal aperture so that as I sing I am also releasing a secondary melody in duet with my vocal cords.63

Snapper imagines herself a modern-­day mermaid—­though one schooled in critical feminism. Snapper, who performed at the Queer Up North festival in the United Kingdom, does not stage herself as a deliquescent delicacy for a heterosexual masculine imagination, a woman merging with a uterine medium, a möbius mother/lover in the way that, as Douglas Kahn has argued, “submerged women” have persistently been posed, particularly in surrealist representation (see Redolfi ‘s website, full of pictures of bikini-­clad women floating in pools).64 Snapper modulates water as feminized other into a critical substance, one that can detour the way water and waves have been symbolized as feminized flux.65 She is an active rather than a passive part of the medium—­the aim of her work is thus distinct from Cage’s, which sought to eliminate intentionality. She is interested, too, in the pool as a simultaneously public and intimate space in which sex and sexuality have historically been subject to disturbance—­and also strictly ordered, policed, and ranked (she reports that, historically, the water used on “women’s days” in the Victoria Baths was recycled from “men’s days”!)66; what better place to play with gender and sexuality? Snapper’s critique of canonical mermaid models becomes crisp in work in private spaces. In “Aquaoperas,” Snapper joins Jeanine Oleson to visit home bathrooms and perform minioperas, with Snapper in the tub and Oleson singing into the toilet (see figure 11.2), their voices fusing through a “snorkelabra.” Snapper and Oleson’s performance of what they call the “hot lez flower duet” from the opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes combines a lesbian sublime with a heterodox dabbling with the abject space of the toilet. In this “pool of experiment,” this soak opera, the relation of water to public/private, feminine/feminist/queer is up for grabs. Snapper and Oleson’s work is kin to the sinister work of the Australian sound artists Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, who in The Gordon Assumption (2004) offered a recording installed in the subterranean toilets of Gordon Reserve at Parliament Station, Melbourne: An incessant outpouring of female voices lures passers-­by down the stairwell to the cave-­like subterranean toilets. At the lower gates, they are confronted with an asynchronous chorus of female voices in infinitely rising pitch. The voices gather and thicken without respite, in upwards glissandi, constantly trailing upwards. . . . The voices recall the mythologies and mysteries of voices heard in caves, where

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Figure 11.2. Juliana Snapper and Jeanine Oleson performing “Aquaopera #2-­SF/Lakme Redux” (http://underwateropera.blogspot.com/).

the voices of spirits, sibyls and oracles are believed to announce predictions and warnings from the mouth of a cave.67

Linda Kouvaras read The Gordon Assumption as a feminist critique of mythological siren songs; the songs float indeterminately above signification, yes, but are sited in an abject locale. The piece recalls Duchamp’s urinal. Pools, baths, and toilets become laboratories for rethinking water, gender, and sexuality. But this laboratory research longs to go into the field. In 2009, Snapper wrote on her website, “I am now fully prepared to realize opera in the ocean depths.” Why? Snapper said, “I am interested in the rub of cultural metaphors in which water represents a dangerous zone of ‘pure’ emotion and now-­urgent specters of drought and drowned cities.” Snapper’s words summon memories of Hurricane Katrina (recalled in the image of an “underwater jazz funeral” used in a review of a 2008 play staged by Tulane Environmental Law Society students in New Orleans). Snapper has suggested that “the material tension between water and air (breath, foam, thirst) . . . speaks to an unknown ecological future.”68 Ecology is of signal interest in new underwater music. This is another arena in which science and sentiment, substance and symbol, join.

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RETURN TO THE SOUNDED SEA: WINDEREN Tracking back from lab to the field, we find the Norwegian field recordist Jana Winderen. Winderen uses hydrophonic recordings “sourced from beneath the oceans surrounding Norway, Greenland, and Iceland” (White Line [UK])69: “The music here is assembled from various auditory documents gathered from research trips, all treated as improvisational material, and morphed into elaborate sound collages” (Boomkat [UK]). Heated, from 2008, is a recording of warming water. Like other underwater composers, Winderen is interested in technologies of underwater audition. Heated’s liner notes report the use of the following: “2 × 8011 DPA hydrophones, 2 × DolphinEAR/PRO hydrophones and 2 × 4060 DPA microphones.”70 Winderen is artist and empirical researcher both. What is all this water music in search of? Again: immersion, though now in the sea—­though a sea accessed by treating it as a lab, a recording studio. One reviewer has written of Winderen: “With my headphones on and my eyes closed it sounds as if you are really in the middle of this water” (Earlabs [Nether­lands]).71 However, the possibility of imagining oneself immersed depends, press rewind, on transduction. It depends on a cyborg sensibility—­one indexed in David Toop’s Ocean of Sound, which he concludes with this cyber­ netically inflected contention: “Music—­fluid, quick, ethereal, outreaching, time-­based, erotic and mathematical, immersive and intangible, rational and unconscious, ambient and solid—­has anticipated the aether talk of the information ocean.”72 However, if immersion is a submersion of self in water, water is controllable only in swimming pools. The “field” is different, full of other critters. Winderen, in The Noisiest Guys on the Planet, uses snapping shrimp to shift to a multispecies soundscape.73 Unlike Redolfi, who ignores underwater nonhumans, Winderen calls listeners back to these creatures, sentries now of climate change. The field, Winderen’s work suggests, is becoming more like a lab not only for artists like herself but also for humanity, which is experimenting on its ecosystem. What Winderen is creating, then, is not just music but—­in the idiom of sound art—a set of ­documents as well, one reason she and others find technological access to and scientific models of the sea compelling. If earlier generations of composers sought simply to replicate a submarine sublime, today’s sound artists hope not just to soak in sound but also to broker ear-­opening accounts of human relations with the water around us. DUNN’S CHAOS AND THE EMERGENT MIND OF THE POND Take now David Dunn’s 1992 composition, “Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond,” a collage of recordings of aquatic insects in ponds in North America and Africa. This collage—­fusing recordings from different ecologies—­stages a

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different construal of underwater worlds, one that hears a percolating intelligence in water. In Insectopedia, Hugh Raffles wrote of Dunn’s practice: Listening to the pond with two omnidirectional ceramic hydrophones and a portable DAT recorder, he hears a rhythmic complexity altogether greater than that in most human music. . . . The sounds can’t be arbitrary, he decides. These animals are not simply following their instincts. “The musician in me cannot help but hear more.” . . . He begins to hear the pond as a kind of superorganism, a transcendent social “mind” created from the autonomous interaction of all the life within it, terms not dissimilar to those used by complexity theorists to describe the nest colonies of the eusocial insects. . . . [His] soundscape is more than a recording, more even than a composition. It is also a research method, one that flows easily from a principle of wholeness.74

The piece is inspired by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s model of mind as a phenomenon present in worldly relations, not locked in people’s heads. Dunn’s insect recordings posit water not simply as a medium but also as organically enlivened, cogitating, “When I see a pond, I think of the water’s surface as a membrane enclosing something deep in thought.”75 Unlike Cage, who would have advocated listening to these sounds “in themselves,” Dunn wants to preserve sounds’ referentiality, their link to empirical ecological processes—­as on his recordings of bugs in piñon trees, in which he tracks how their sounds flag global warming. While there exists a risk of romanticizing balanced nature, Dunn’s Batesonian approach tunes into how water may not only contain life but also be constituted through living things. There can be no purely lab-­like pool of water; water is made of vitality—­which gets me to the field recordings of the vital signs of ocean Earth. FROM THE COLD WAR TO GLOBAL WARMING: UNDER ARCTIC SEAS Andrea Polli’s Sonic Antarctica CD consists of “recordings of the Antarctic soundscape made during the author’s seven-­week National Science Foundation residency in Antarctica during the 2007/2008 season.”76 Polli mixes field recordings of melting glaciers with audio translations of scientific data (“sonifications”77) on climate and peppers these documents with snippets from interviews with climate scientists. The sound of ice melting and of data about ice melting are signs of global warming. This aesthetic production has a scientific-­political point.78 Charles Stankievech’s DEW Project has a scientific-­political point as well. As Stankievech explains, “As much ideological deterrent as defense infrastructure, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line constructed between 1954–­56 [near the Arctic Circle] was a joint venture between the US Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force. A long-­distance radar and communication system, the DEW 152

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Line created an electromagnetic boundary able to detect airborne invasion.”79 Stankievech revisits questions of territorial sovereignty, listening not up for enemy others, but down for global humanity’s ecological depredations: “The radio station [at Stankievech’s Yukon river site] monitors the sounds of the river’s ice and underwater flow on a continual basis, transmitting the signals to Dawson City, where the field-­recordings are processed and broadcast via the internet.”80 April 6, 2009, saw Stankievech deliver “a sound performance using live samples from the river installation, electromagnetic microphones, radios and computer.”81 Submarine sounds such as these melt the distinction between music and data collection. However, even data collection is available for aesthetic contemplation. The PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean (PALAOA) transmits sound from the Antarctic Ocean. In addition, PALAOA (Hawaiian for “whale”) detects marine mammals and provides a research baseline for relatively quiet underwater environments.82 The PALAOA MP3 audio stream at the Alfred-­ Wegener-­Institut für Polar-­und Meeresforschung website anticipates listeners, warning that its sound is “not optimized for easy listening, but for scientific research. . . . Beware of sudden extremely loud events.”83 The sound travels from hydrophones to a research station and then to Germany, where it is put online. In addition, PALAOA’s hydrophones, hanging just below the hundred-­meter-­ thick Ekström ice shelf (near Neumayer Station, a German research center), are placed well above the SOFAR (SOnar Fixing And Ranging) channel, a layer of seawater in which the speed of sound reaches its underwater minimum. Low-­ frequency vibrations can travel long distances through this conduit (about 800 to 1,000 meters deep at midlatitudes and higher toward the surface in temperate zones) before they dissipate.84 Sounds from this region are essential for ocean acoustic tomography, the study of ocean temperature using sound.85 Submarine sounds in art and science now echo concerns not about the Cold War but about global warming. Rather than evoking, invoking, or soaking, they broker connections between the ocean understood as natural field and considered, for better or worse, as a lab for global ecopolitical futures. Summing up the arc of underwater music over the last half-­century, there have been two primary venues for underwater music: field settings of the ocean (with rivers, ponds, and lakes less frequently used) and lab settings of swimming pools. For the field tradition, underwater music emerges from the noise of the Cold War, which reveals the songs of whales. Those songs then become submerged within the worked-­over subaqueous soundscapes of modern human enterprise—­soundscapes that harbor evidence of global warming, of sea creatures under stress; evidence that becomes source material for composers who mine scientific idioms for artistic and political statements. For the lab tradition, the pool begins as a stage to realize the ascetic aesthetic of Cagean modernism. It then becomes a space to play with meanings of water—­either, as with Redolfi, to reinforce canonical symbolisms of dreamy, meditative, womblike space or, as 153

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with Snapper, to queer such imagery, to experiment with gender and sexuality, and public and private. However, while the field setting is “wild” and entangled with nonhuman sounds and the lab setting is more social, cultural, or anthropocentric, artists working in both settings seek to evoke an “immersive” experience. Moreover, in both settings the transductive properties of water must be managed in order to invoke water as a material accomplice in this enterprise, this aim of soaking listeners in the sublime surround of sound submerged.

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SEASHELL SOUND

Shell of the bright sea-­waves! What is it, that we hear in thy sad moan? Is this unceasing music all thine own? Lute of the ocean-­caves! Or does some spirit dwell In the deep windings of thy chambers dim, Breathing forever, in its mournful hymn, Of ocean’s anthem swell? —­Amelia Welby, “To a Sea-­Shell,” 18451

FOR GENERATIONS, PEOPLE WHO LIVE by the sea have held that, when pressed to the ear, seashells sound with something like the roar of the ocean—­a sound whose explanation has offered a pleasing and provocative puzzle to scientists and lay listeners alike. In his 1915 Book of Wonders, the popular science writer Rudolph Bodmer suggested that the association followed from the symbolic power of shells: “The sounds we hear when we hold a sea shell to the ear are not really the sound of the sea waves. We have come to imagine that they are because they sound like the waves of the sea, and knowledge that the shell originally came from the sea helps us to this conclusion very easily.”2 But the likeness, he urged, had a technical explanation—­though one in which similitude still figured. Both sea and seashell sounds were generated by waves: “The sounds we hear in the sea shell are really air waves”—­waves, that is, of concentrated, resonant noise from the listener’s surroundings. That explanation sought to supplant superstition with science, trading sublime enchantment for fascinating fact. The account in Bodmer’s book rested on a century of empirical and theoretical investigation in which sound had 155

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come to be understood as vibration, and not, as earlier, more numinously, on the model of music or voice, exampling what Jonathan Sterne names as a “shift from ­models of sound reproduction based on imitations of the mouth to models based on imitations of the ear.”3 Tune in a century later, however, and ear-­centered explanations like Bodmer’s coil in on themselves; his explanation of seashell resonance (in agreement with scientific thinking then and now) loses out in most popular accounts to the erroneous claim that what we hear in seashells is the flow of our own blood. Jennifer Lawson’s 2001 Hands-­On Science and Technology asserts, “Many students will tell you that they hear the ocean in the seashell. Actually, the dull roaring sound they hear is the echo of the blood moving inside their ear.”4 OMGFACTS. com—­“the #1 fact source on Twitter” and a contemporary analogue, perhaps, to the Book of Wonders—­offers, “When you put a seashell next to your ear, it’s the sound of your blood surging in your veins, not the ocean.”5 Oceanic other, sounded out, outs itself as inside noise. Why this slide from the sound science of reverberating air to the sciency-­ sounding relay of blood? In 1889 Robert E. C. Stearns coined the term “ethno-­ conchology” to describe how shells have “been curiously interwoven with the affairs of men, both in civilized and barbarous communities.”6 I suggest that the changing ratios of ocean, air, and blood in seashell-­sound accountings track a European-­Atlantic-­American ethno-­conchology, one that unrolls from Romantic enthrallment toward a double-­edged modernity that uses the language of science to disenchant at one moment and then reenchant at another.7 This essay puts an ear to popular science and poetry, following a history that has, first, shells singing, speaking, sighing, and echoing distant oceanic and communal pasts, and next, shells reflecting back the personal and present moment, and, then, as the story approaches the present day, delivering sounds imagined deep inside, rather than outside, human bodies. At stake are changing models of the relation between hearing, the world, and the self, with the avowedly mystical and communal gradually replaced by the secular, scientific, and individual—­ though, with the arrival of the blood-­in-­the-­ears interpretation, echoing anew with the inhuman hum of not-­so-­human nature. SPEAKING SHELLS Begin with shelly speech. Around 1800, William Wordsworth wrote of a dream in which he was given a book in the form of “a shell / Of a surpassing brightness.” Instructed to hold it to his ear, he “did so,” And heard that instant in an unknown tongue, Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony;

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An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold Destruction to the children of the earth By deluge, now at hand. —­William Wordsworth, The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Book Fifth, 1799–­18058

English and American poetry through the nineteenth century continued to hear speech in seashells—­sometimes clear, sometimes ghostly.9 Wordsworth’s ode came from the future (a “prophetic blast”), but most—­and one need not distinguish between lesser and greater poets to offer a cultural diagnosis—­seemed to hear sounds from a distant past: Gather a shell from the strewn beach And listen at its lips: they sigh The same desire and mystery, The echo of the whole sea’s speech. —­Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Sea-­Limits,” 1849–­185510

I send thee a shell from the ocean beach; But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech. Hold to thine ear And plain thou’lt hear Tales of ships. —­Charles Henry Webb, “With a Nantucket Shell,” 188811

FROM VOICE TO VIBRATION AND PART WAY BACK While poets invited readers to listen at seashell lips and hear tales of ships, scientists put forward accounts of seashell sound as the result of wave mechanics. The explanation was in place by 1835, in a college textbook: The concave, undulating, and perfectly polished surface of many sea shells, fit them to catch, to concentrate, and to return the pulses of all sounds that happen to be trembling about them, so as to produce that curious resonance from within, which resembles the distant murmur of the ocean.12

In 1836, John Ayrton Paris’s Sports and Amusements for the Juvenile Philosopher translated this accounting for a younger readership: “The interior of the shell merely concentrates and thus multiplies the sounds around us, so as to render them audible.”13

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Figure 12.1. Ear trumpet made of whelk shell, date unknown. © Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library. Used with permission.

The language of vibration became a steady feature in such explanations, as, for example, in 1857’s The Reason Why: A Careful Collection of Many Hundreds of Reasons for Things Which, Though Generally Believed, Are Imperfectly Understood: Why do sea-­shells give a murmuring noise when held to the ear? Because what may be called expended vibrations always exist in air where various sounds are occurring. These tremblings of the air are received upon the thin covering of the shell, and thus being collected into a focus, are transmitted to the ear.”14

Such understandings of sound, which would be famously codified in 1862 by Hermann von Helmholtz in his On the Sensations of Tone, were not immune to fanciful appropriations, especially alongside spiritualisms that held that worldly vibrations might contain the voices of the dead.15 In Florence McLandburgh’s 1873 story “The Automaton-­Ear,” a scientist constructs an ear trumpet that can be tuned to the decaying sound waves of any moment in history (see figure 12.1, for an image of an ear trumpet made from a whelk shell).16 Not dissimilarly, seashells sometimes harbor the diminishing, but never final, sounds of the dying: I low mine ear incline: Within your convolutions sway and swash All voices of the brine: I hear on barren reefs the surges dash. The breakers roar; The homeless billows fret and foam and wash. And die far off upon an alien shore.

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. . . Though all things fade apace, Do fade and fall, they pass not utterly; Within your jasper vase There lingers still a tone, a mystery. A something hides Of glory fled, of love that cannot die: All life that ever was somewhere abides. —­Benjamin Hathaway, “Sea-­shells,” 187817

As spirit mediums, shells were strangely active vessels. Like mediums, they were often female, with voices Like the sigh of a maiden in lone despair, . . . Such, such are the sounds of the wild sea shell, . . . Across my ear like the tones of woe, It soundeth to me Like the voice of the sea, And sweet is its mournful melody . . . Like a holy hymn Of nymphs in deep devotion. —­William Quarmby, “The Song of the Sea-­Shell,” 186718

or like the sound Of my mother’s voice—­the ocean’s voice—­ The murmur of the sea. —­E. W. Bäärnhielm, “The Song of the Sea-­Shell,” 189119

As Susan Gubar suggests, “Associated iconographically with Venus and the Virgin, the shell is also said to represent the female genitals.”20 Mother Ocean bodied forth messages from a mysterious past, with seashells the vibrating vessels of that murmurous history. EERIE AND EARY DOUBLES The seashell was a whisperer of secrets,21 a vulval threshold, and sometimes, reversing identification as an organ of speech, an ear (or, even, a nascent telephone):

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I saw the sea-­shell’s lips burn like a flame When the wave chased and caught it with a breath of laughter, And whispered in its ear the ocean name That it sings o’er and o’er forever after. —­Avanelle W. Holmes, “A Beautiful Life,” 187122

Such ear-­shell connections were in the making earlier (rendering this whole history, perhaps, more spiral than linear, with symbolisms washing to and fro, especially in the devious sounding devices that are poems). The Paduan anatomist Gabriele Falloppio, describing the spiral cavity in the inner ear in 1561, called it the cochlea, Latin for “snail.”23 Ear-­seashell analogies remain saturated with the oceanic. Tara Rodgers explains that the ear has been construed as holding an ocean within: the “term ear ‘canal’ itself evokes a channel of water for navigation, an arm of the sea.”24 She reports that the physicist James Jeans, in his 1937 Science & Music, advanced a “vibrant analogy of sound and water waves that transposed this turbulent fluidity of the sounding world onto the interior of the subject.” Jeans had written: Sound reaches our ears in the form of waves which have travelled through the surrounding air, much as waves travel over the surface of a sea or river; some of these waves travel down the inch-­long backwater formed by the auditory canal, and finally encounter the ear-­drum, which forms a barrier at the far end.25

The shell operates at once as mouth, damp and resonant grotto, and doppelgänger ear—­an eerie object becoming (never entirely) a disenchanted scientific thing. Walter Benjamin played with the notion that shells contain worldly echoes, writing in the 1930s about his childhood around 1900: “Like a mollusk in its shell, I held my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell.” Imagining he could hold that century to his ear, he asked, “What do I hear?” answering, the brief clatter of the anthracite as it falls from the coal shuttle into a cast-­iron stove, the dull pop of the flame as it ignites in the gas mantle, and the clinking of the lampshade on its brass ring when a vehicle passes by on the street. And other sounds as well, like the jingling of the basket of keys, or the ringing of the two bells at the front and back steps.26

Robert Ryder suggests that “what Benjamin hears in the conch are the primordial murmurings of the universe, but in the form of their smallest acoustical singularities.”27 This, argues Ryder, is the acoustical unconscious (or “un-­conch-­ious”). But Benjamin’s is also a moment in Euro-­conchology, in which shells concentrate memory by gathering the history of the vibrating 160

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world around them. We have the meeting of two models for seashell sound: a mythic model that has seashells as channels for voices from a communal past, and a materialist model that has seashells as resonant chambers of individual, located experience.28 BLOOD MUSIC Seashells echoing back sounds around—­that interpretation might have been that, were it not for the fact that today a weird explanation of seashell sound has wormed its way into folk acoustics: that shells amplify the flow of listeners’ own blood. Although I have not been able to trace a definitive origin, the notion appeared in the late nineteenth century. From 1882: The hollow sea-­shell, which for years hath stood On dusty shelves, when held against the ear Proclaims its stormy parent; and we hear The faint far murmur of the breaking flood. We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood In our own veins, impetuous and near, And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear And with our feeling’s every shifting mood. —­Eugene Lee-­Hamilton “Sea-­Shell Murmurs,” 188229

From James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922: Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar. . . . The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood is it.30

For this explanation to gather momentum, blood must first be imagined to have a sound. Such became newly possible with the stethoscope, invented in 1816 and fine-­tuned throughout the nineteenth century. Interestingly, the sounds it delivered were sometimes compared to those from a seashell. An 1893 manual: “The principal pathological venous murmur is the venous hum or bruit de diable. It is compared to the sound heard on placing a sea shell of moderately large size against the ear.”31 It would be important for doctors not to confuse the sound of blood with stethoscopic channels; an 1886 advertisement for a “binaural stethoscope” suggests that an imperfect device “reminds us of the child’s toy resonator, a sea-­shell.”32 But if seashells play tricks, stethoscopes 161

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enable people to imagine hearing their own blood.33 In further stanzas of Lee-­ Hamilton’s “Sea-­Shell Murmurs,” the heart itself becomes a shell: Lo, in my heart I hear, as in a shell, The murmur of a world beyond the grave, Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be, Thou fool; this echo is a cheat as well,—­ The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave A world unreal as the shell-­heard sea.

The move from hearing a communal mythical past to auditing an individual present continues, now reaching into physiology. Lee-­Hamilton’s sly suggestion that even heart sound has no intrinsic meaning, however, indicates an emergent ambivalence here—­something like the ambivalence of modernism, which oscillates between disenchantment and re-­enchantment.34 One can find the blood-­echo explanation these days in many venues, mostly—­ ironically—­educational ones devoted to clearing up misconceptions of scientific facts. The 1993 textbook Science Interactions reports, “What you’re really hearing is the sound of your own blood rushing through the vessels inside your ear. You normally don’t hear this sound. The seashell makes it easier for you to hear it.”35 Gifted and Talented, Questions and Answers: Super Edition for Ages 4–­6, from 2000, suggests, “The seashell’s hard, smooth surface bounces, or echoes, the sound of the flowing blood back into your ears. This sound is very much like the sound of the ocean.”36 Even the rationalist skeptic Carl Sagan got behind this angle: “Everyone knows the ‘sound of the sea’ to be heard when putting a seashell to one’s ear. It is really the greatly amplified sound of our own blood rushing.”37 Sometimes such explanations bring waves back in. The cochlea contains fluid that carries traveling waves.38 Deeper confusion arrives, courtesy of www. faqkids.com: When you put a seashell up to your ear, what you hear is not the ocean. The sound comes from inside your own ear. The inner part of your ear, the part that is far back into your head, has both bone parts and soft tissue parts. In between these is your cochlea, which is a tiny organ that looks like a snail’s shell. Your cochlea is filled with fluid. This fluid helps you transmit sounds from your eardrum to your brain. And it sloshes around like waves. We don’t usually hear this sound because it is so quiet. But when you hold a seashell to your ear, this small sound echoes off the shell and back into your ear.39

This explanation recalls Jeans’s conception of the ear holding its own ocean. But how has the blood-­(or other fluid)-­in-­the-­ears account gained its popularity? The shell, which in Wordsworth had a “tongue” and an “articulate sound,” came to have a voice whose “speech” (Rosetti, Webb) was always competing 162

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with the “moan” of “unceasing music” (Welby), a “sigh” (Rosetti, Quarmby), an “echo,” or a “murmur” (Rosetti, Bäärnhielm). The murmur became vibratory, a sign of present-­day rather than long-­ago worlds. It blurred the boundaries between mouth and ear, and the shell became like a telephone—­as in Holmes’s 1871 poem in which shell is “lips” and “ear,” a chamber of echoes conjoining listening and speaking, turning auditors back on themselves. That transformation prepared the way for a model of subjectivity in which people could imagine themselves sensing themselves sensing. Fast forward to a key moment in the history of modernist sound. In the early 1950s, after visiting an anechoic chamber, a room designed to absorb all sound, the composer John Cage wrote: “In that silent room, I heard two sounds, one high and one low. Afterward I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds. He said, ‘Describe them.’ I did. He said, ‘The high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation.’ ”40 As Douglas Kahn has observed, Cage, who in most settings refused to ask after the “source” of sounds (he wanted “sounds to be themselves”), here conjured a dematerialized, disembodied self: a listener inside the shell of the body.41 The blood-­echo explanation winds the scientific back to the fantastic. The echoing ocean, once dethroned by vibrating air, has now been displaced by brute blood, something of a solipsistic surrogate for the salty sea. But what the ocean-­wave and blood-­pulse explanations have in common is the idea that human experience arrives from depths and natures we cannot fathom—­that what we feel in the moment comes to us from far away or inside, from zones beyond the legibly human, from worlds existing at scales far above or beneath the everyday, from places ever out of reach and range of full apprehension.

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SOUND STUDIES MEETS DEAF STUDIES Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich

Once upon a time there was a deaf coal miner. Like everyone at the mine, he had to be at work promptly at 5:00 a.m. But he could not wake up on time. A kind neighbor agreed to help, tying to the miner’s foot a rope long enough to hang out the window. Every morning at 4:30, the neighbor came and tugged at the rope. The miner told a deaf friend about this arrangement, and his friend suggested another method: he could attach an old-­fashioned wind-­up clock to a heavy iron. When the alarm went off, the iron would fall and the vibration would wake him up. He switched to this method and subsequently the shrill sound of the alarm clock became the sound everyone else in the village used to wake up. Instead of the deaf man depending on others, the villagers came to depend on the deaf man. —­Retelling of a Deaf joke, from Ben Bahan’s lecture “Deaf Ways: Extending Sensory Reach,” presented at MIT on April 29, 2009

HOW MIGHT SCHOLARS WORKING IN sound studies, listening to the cultural meaning of the audible realm, join with scholars and activists in Deaf studies to discover articulations between their common and uncommon senses of the world? Sound studies and Deaf studies would seem, at first perception, to operate in worlds apart. Sound studies privileges attention to listening and hearing in cultural experience, seeking to combat the primacy of vision as an organizing frame for social analysis.1 Founding work in Deaf studies, by contrast, argues that audist and phonocentric tendencies suffuse everyday inter­actions as well as cultural theory, overly tuned to hearing and voicing as key modes of describing human sociality.2 Deaf studies has urged in response to sonocentrism a fresh consideration of the visual, particularly as a space of communicative practice.3 164

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Both sound studies and Deaf studies rely on a divide between hearing and seeing. So while the sound scholar Bruce Johnson made a critical point when he wrote that “an auditory rather than a predominantly visual approach to the past produces a different cultural history,”4 such a phrasing risks posing the visual and auditory as at odds with one another. Deaf studies, meanwhile, often repeats and reifies the claim that Deaf people are “first, last, and all the time the people of the eye” (as George Veditz, President of the National Association of the Deaf, phrased it in 1910).5 In both sound and Deaf studies, then, scholars often assume a clean division between hearing and deafness. In sound studies, deafness becomes a ready (and audist) figure for critical inattention. Ari Kelman’s “Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies” suggests that “attending to sound can amplify critical aspects of social and cultural life that otherwise fall on deaf ears.”6 Hearing, deafness, and seeing operate as ideal types, downplaying continuities between and multiplicities of sensory capabilities as well as obscuring points of contact between sound and Deaf studies.7 We here explore zones of possible articulation. It is old news that technologies of sound reproduction and relay have been bound up with hearing and hard-­of-­hearing people’s attempts to ameliorate deafness, commonly understood as a condition to be “overcome.” From Thomas Edison to Alexander Graham Bell, phonographs and telephones emerged in part from attempts to train deaf speech into alignment with the norms of the hearing world.8 Mara Mills has proposed the phrase “assistive pretext” to examine how the deaf have been at once the target of “improving” technologies as well as guinea pigs for technological investigations made primarily for the benefit of hearing persons.9 In the 1980s, the US-­based Deaf Pride movement staked claims forcefully against such assistive pretexts, articulating a Deaf politics modeled on the civil rights, identity, and liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s.10 Many activists followed the sociolinguistics scholar James Woodward, who in 1972 suggested writing “Deaf ” with a capital D in order to mark Deaf people as a cultural group. Many began to write of a distinctive Deaf culture, forged within communities held together by sign language.11 The move from “deaf ” to “Deaf ” contested the naturalization of deafness as disability and affirmed Deaf identity (sometimes “deafnicity”). In this chapter, we slide between “deaf ” and “Deaf ” (not always consistently), flagging how deaf/Deaf, like sex/gender, makes use of but unsteadies the divisions between nature and culture—­though if “gender” in sex/gender underscores the malleability of gender, “Deaf ” in deaf/Deaf asserts the coherence of Deafness as culture. As we will see, though, “Deaf ” may also enable a diversity of Deafnesses, akin to what has happened with the word “queer,” which has multiplied ways of thinking about and inhabiting sexuality and sociality.12 We consider four major practices that might prompt scholars in sound studies and Deaf studies into conversation. These practices ask how sound is inferred in 165

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deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-­frequency vibration can upend deaf-­hearing dichotomies, how “deaf futurists” champion cyborg sound, and how signing, non-­speech-­based communicative practices, and listening might unwind phonocentric models of speech and move analysis away from the simple frame of “speech communities.”13 Proceeding through an inventory of these trends, we ask how to move beyond the ear and eye, rethinking the subjects of sound and Deaf studies.14 INFERRED SOUND/INFORMED VISION Consider Deaf people’s inferences of sound worlds experienced by the hearing. There is a tradition of Deaf jokes involving use of sound to achieve Deaf ends. An oft-­told joke involves a Deaf couple on a honeymoon, staying at a motel one night. The husband goes out to the car to retrieve something and then realizes he does not remember his room number. He leans on his car’s horn, letting out a steady honk. Eventually, every room in the hotel has a light on except for one and this, of course, is the room in which his new wife waits. In such jokes, Deaf people use the tools of the hearing world, often against it, to achieve desired results—­in this case, Deaf intimacy. Frank Bechter calls such jokes and stories “penetration narratives” because they refer to the ways Deaf people sometimes “penetrate” the boundaries of hearing worlds.15 Far from being peripheral, sound also penetrates deaf/Deaf worlds. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries write about the ways Deaf children learn about the significance of sound to the hearing.16 They tell of Deaf people being told to regulate and censor their own voices and of learning about the shame associated with some bodily noises. For Padden and Humphries, a “sound barrier” exists between Deaf and hearing people. Similarly, Haualand has written about the difference between hearing and Deaf worlds by arguing that communities of hearing people “hear together” and “hear same,” or constitute themselves as community through a implicit (to them) assumption about hearing.17 For such Deaf studies scholars, the way around sound can be found through focusing on Deaf peoples’ visual orientations.18 In such an approach, Deaf people are, as Veditz put it, “first, last, and all the time the people of the eye.” This articulation finds momentum in online worlds, with the emergence of blogs such as Deaf World as Eye See It and Deaf Eye for the Hearing Guy.19 And for much of Deaf studies, Deaf culture has a visual future—­as evidenced by the National Science Foundation–­funded Visual Language and Visual Learning Center at Gallaudet University, a major center for deaf undergraduate and graduate education, where research is conducted on Deaf peoples’ visual learning activities.20 Such programs as the Michigan-­based deaf music camp (www.deafmusiccamp .com) encourage deaf teens to experiment with music “through deaf eyes” which include “seeing” (in addition to “feeling”) music. Sound studies scholars might

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find inspiration here, undoing audist notions of “music” by examining such practices, expanding what it means to have an “acoustemology” (a sonic way of knowing and being in the world), one that expands beyond a limited definition of the auditory.21 INFRASOUND/VIBRATION Emerging alongside strategies of inferring sound or valorizing the visual are practices of tuning in to the zone of low-­frequency vibration. This is an area in the frequency spectrum where hearing and deaf scholars have recently met in order to unsettle the ear-­centrism of sound studies and the visually centered epistemology of much Deaf studies. One data point for thinking about this attention to “infrasound” (vibration lower than 20 Hz) is the work of the artist and sculptor Wendy Jacob, who in April 2009 organized a conference entitled “Waves and Signs,” a workshop on low-­ frequency vibration co-­organized by faculty and students from Gallaudet University along with MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (where the event was held). The idea was to refuse a simple hearing/not-­hearing binary by pitching the discussion, quite materially, down to a frequency register in which all parties could hear-­by-­feeling sound.22 For this event, Jacob built a one-­foot tall, twelve-­ by-­twelve-­foot platform through which sound and infrasound were transduced: Acting as a silent speaker, a raised floor will be activated to insert low-­frequency vibrations into the space of architecture. The floor will be used alternatively as a platform, instrument, and stage for an event in three parts. In the first the floor will be used as a platform for dialog [in speech and sign] between artists, designers, scientists, and students. In the second, the floor will be used as an instrument in a workshop on resonant vibrations. In the third, the floor will become a stage for performances and a silent dance party. This project is part of an investigation of the politics of experience.23

A variety of material was played through the floor—­elephant stomps, a low-­ frequency recording of a bike ride a Gallaudet student took that morning, and dubstep music (figure 13.1). The workshop could be understood as an intervention into what Steve Goodman (a.k.a. dubstep artist Kode9), in Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, calls the “politics of frequency.”24 Goodman’s interest in very low sounds—­sounds that edge from hearing into tactility—­has him developing concepts such as “infrasound” or “bass materialism,” an intriguing place for new encounters of sound studies and Deaf studies since it moves away from purely audiological conceptions of sound, torques notions of “shared experience,” and queries connections between mediation and experience. As Shelley Trower

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Figure 13.1. Participants at Wendy Jacob’s Waves and Signs workshop at MIT, reclining on Jacob’s transducing floor in order to experience low-­frequency vibrations (http://wendyjacob.net/). Used with permission.

points out, “Vibration appears to cross distances between things, between people, between self and environment, between the senses and society, promising (or threatening) to shrink or break down such distances.”25 Here, vibration produces a social and experiential space for hearing and deaf participants alike. But lest this way of phrasing matters appear to romanticize vibration as some proto-­or infra-­sensory force of unity across bodies and difference, we note, along with Trower, that vibration is itself in need of cultural and historical situating. As Trower notes, ever since nineteenth-­century theories of electromagnetism, vibration has been “imagined to operate before being translated into sense-­ data (sound, light, heat), let alone language or image or sign.”26 The Waves and Signs conference made it clear that vibration is rather always already itself a kind of mediation. It may produce shared experience, but it does not therefore produce identical experience; even within “one” individual, sense ratios and relations may shift and mix synesthetically. Phenomenologies of vibration are by no means singular.27 Deaf presenters at the Waves and Signs workshop, in discussing affinities for music, resisted the dichotomies of sound and silence. In “Re-­Defining Music Through a Deaf Lens,” Summer Crider recounted attending rock concerts while holding balloons to capture the vibration of music. Kindred Deaf artistic productions include the work of Rathskellar (www.rathskellar.com/), a 168

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Deaf performance group that employs sounds in the form of heavy bass and drumbeats at such intense volumes that hearing audience members are offered earplugs. The UK-­based “deaf rave movement” (www.deafrave.com/) delivers similar experiences. These examples define “sound” as a vibration of a certain frequency in a material medium, moving away from the demand that vibrations must always be registered by the cochlear to sound as “sound.” Such works trouble the pronouncement that deaf people are “all the time people of the eye.”28 CYBORG SOUND/UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN VISIONS Technologically mediated—­transduced—­vibration might remind readers of a device at the heart of debates about deaf relations to sound: the cochlear implant. Deaf scholars and activists have in the last decades participated in an impassioned debate about this assistive technology. A cochlear implant consists of a tiny receiver placed under the skin behind the ear. The receiver has a probe with electrodes that is implanted into the cochlea, a spiral-­shaped portion of the inner ear filled with liquid that transmits vibration to cilia (“hair-­cells”) attached to the interior of this coiling structure (figure 13.2). A person with a

Figure 13.2. Bryan Christie’s visualization of a cochlear implant. From Michael Chorost, “My Bionic Quest for Bolero,” Wired 13, no. 11 (2005): 144–­159. 169

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cochlear implant wears a hearing-­aid-­like device that features a microphone, a processor, and a transducer. The processor manipulates what the microphone captures, and sends a signal to the transducer, usually worn just behind the ear. The transducer changes the signal from electrical to magnetic, a signal that can be received through the skin by the implanted receiver. The receiver then stimulates the probe in the cochlea, initiating—­some would say simulating—“hearing” (where this “hearing” is itself emergent from formalisms that seek to capture what the device’s creators judge that a normatively hearing person should hear; implants often favor voice over music and are notorious for their poor capture of tonal languages).29 Where some advocates envision cochlear implants bringing deaf people into the hearing world by providing sound through an electromagnetic interface, others worry that the technology may contribute to the attenuation of signing and to the privileging of speech, and therefore, calamitously, to the eventual death of Deaf culture. The most heated debates around this technology center on whether it is acceptable for parents to choose implant surgery for deaf children.30 Some users of cochlear implants, however, have lately been staking out another position, one Mara Mills calls “deaf futurism.”31 Mills has suggested that the standard terms of the debate—­are implants devices that support audist and oralist supremacy or are they heralds of liberation, delivering the deaf into the hearing world?—­have recently been joined by a position that poses implants as cyborgian elements that are more than mere devices that make deaf people “hear.” On this view, cochlear implants are technologies that betoken new human-­machine interfaces, with the deaf at the vanguard of a networked post-­humanism. If cochlear implants, for example, can be used to port into virtual worlds—­à la Google Glass—­then people with implants are at the forefront of sonic cyborgian embodiment, with hearing people left behind in an unaugmented state. In deaf-­futurist readings of implant technology, neuro-­ enhancement is ultimately the goal. In his 2005 autobiography, Rebuilt, Michael Chorost, a well-­known public face of cochlear implantation, celebrated what he had experienced as the emancipatory capacities of his implant.32 His 2011 book, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet, extrapolates into a fully web-­worked cybernetic sensory future in which virtual and actual sensory worlds intertwine.33 This discourse of post-­humanism has been adopted by only a few. Many implant recipients have ambivalent relationships with what this technology means for their identities and abilities, especially since, through implantation, they become biomedical subjects and are consequently more likely to identify or be identified as being disabled.34 Moreover, the question remains as to what kind of relation a cochlear-­implanted cyborg might have to the sociality of sign language and other Deaf social forms. Cochlear implantation may betoken the rupture of some key kinds of Deaf sociality.

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ARTICULATION Studies of sign language would seem to offer little intersection with sound studies, since here questions of visuality are paramount and sound has no clear relevance. We would like to experiment, however, with the notion that spoken and signed language both concern articulation. For phoneticians, who make their living tracking the sounds of speech, articulatory phonetics details the physiological motion of parts of the vocal tract in the production of speech. Sign language also operates through a process of articulation, though here not of bodily managements of the flow of air via the larynx, glottis, tongue, and teeth, but rather through the positioning of fingers, hands, and facial expressions in space and time. But by articulation, we do not wish to reduce communicative connections to those simply to do with bodily mechanics of speech and sign but want rather to amplify attention to how language and sociality are entangled with one other in fashioning phenomenological and cultural worlds.35 The sometimes phonocentric approach of sound studies and the often oculocentric epistemology of Deaf studies can miss shared interests in articulations of communicative practices with lived experience.36 But sound and Deaf studies have also both been interested in transcending spoken language as a starting point in creating social worlds, an interest evidenced in recent ethnography and cultural history. Ethnographers of music such as Steven Feld examine the making of relational ontologies—­practices that call anthropologists, their interlocutors, and many others into co-­presence through sound and vibration not always spoken (and not always only human; Feld’s work on recordings of toads in Accra, Ghana, adds a multispecies dimension to his dialogical anthropology of sound).37 Bauman discusses the ways that Quaker meetings, constituted through silent worship, articulate a shared sense of purpose and community.38 Friedner examines how deaf young adults in India engage in “sameness work” through which differences such as class, caste, and religious belief are backgrounded in order to create a cohesive deaf sociality.39 Participants in this deaf sociality learn deaf practices and norms from each other, in addition to learning sign language. Sign language, then, is not only a language: Deaf social practices and aspirations are articulated within its transmission. Studies of signing and sign-­ language-­using communities analyze Deaf poetics and narrative;40 the formation of Deaf social and political organizations;41 integrated Deaf and hearing sign-­ language communities;42 myths surrounding “utopic” integrated sign-­language communities in which both hearing and Deaf people are purported to sign,43 or ideas of “deaf development”; and the emergence of Deaf-­administered structures and institutions premised upon valuing sign language, helping other deaf people, and sharing and working collectively.44 Learning sign language means becoming a specific kind of deaf person, oriented toward other deaf people and

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deaf development.45 Such articulations of language, culture, and sociality foster new forms of affiliation as well as new senses of self and belonging. UNSOUND, UNSEEN, AND BEYOND In Deaf studies, a focus on the visual may erase deaf experiences of sound. Scholars in sound studies, meanwhile, miss deaf and Deaf experiences of sound through similar oversights. Attending to different degrees, kinds, genres, and articulations of hearing and perceiving sound, however, can open up new ways of “hearing with” and “being with,” complicating Deaf studies’ focus on “deaf-­ deaf same,” or deaf similitude. Such challenges can build on those in motion from studies on Deaf-­Blind communication. Deaf-­Blind studies challenge the hegemony of the visual and auditory by centering attention on the possibilities and politics of tactile sign language. A new bumper sticker reading “Pro Tactile,” found on cars in Seattle, Washington, home of America’s largest Deaf-­ Blind community, and exhortations, also found mostly in Seattle, such as “Tactile love” remind us of the centrality of something other than sound or vision in many peoples’ social worlds.46 Goodman proposes the notion of “unsound” to refer, among other things, to “that which is not yet audible,” to “sonic virtuality,” and to “the nexus of imperceptible vibration.”47 He means primarily to tune to the infrasonic and the ultrasonic as zones at “the fuzzy periphery of auditory perception, where sound is inaudible but still produces neuro effects or physiological resonances.”48 In so doing, he stays near the realm of “sound,” canonically conceived. But he also opens up space to think about the not-­yet-­articulated. Sound studies and deaf studies have points of articulation—­points of common concern about sensory socialities in their shared desire to carve out analytical and experiential spaces for contemplating what is unheard and unseen. In such spaces, and in focusing on how diversities of sensory socialities emerge, we can join with George Veditz, who said of deaf people what we might say of anyone seeking to think anew about embodied circumstances: “They are facing not a theory but a condition.”49 “Condition,” as we read Veditz, is experience—­and experience rarely fits into ideal types such as “seeing,” “hearing,” “signing,” or “vibrating.” What is called for are more ethnographies of the places where the objects and subjects of sound and Deaf studies meet, domains in which, as with the joke that opened this article, we can stir from our everyday senses of social relations and wake up to new possible worlds.

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C H A P TER 1 4

CHIMERIC SENSING

THE WORD “CHIMERA” HAS BECOME an ordinary term in today’s biosciences. It refers to a life form composed of cells or tissues drawn from genetically distinct lineages. Chimeric lab animals such as OncoMouse—­the trademarked rodent that hosts genes for human breast cancer—­have become totem examples of such entities.1 Whether created out of the fusion of embryos, through grafting, or via mutation, chimeras mix biological elements not typically conjoined in a single creature. They materialize in a scientifically describable creature a mundane version of the fantastical figure of the Chimera of ancient Greek mythology—­a fire-­breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent.2 But biological chimeras are not just the result of recent molecular biological enterprise and cross-­species gene or tissue transfer. Before her death in 2011, the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis had been urging the claim that almost every living thing on Earth originated as, and still can be considered, a chimera. We animals and plants are all of us organisms made out of other organisms. In her initially heterodox, but now increasingly accepted, theory, Margulis argued that evolutionary biological novelty emerged not only through Darwinian descent with modification, but also through the symbiotic fusion of different sorts of cells and organisms, through a process she called symbiogenesis.3 The mitochondria in animal cells were once free-­living, oxygen-­respiring bacteria, and the chloroplasts in plants were once independent cyanobacteria. As Margulis and her colleagues put it in their 2011 book, Chimeras and Consciousness, “We merge chromosomes and chemistries within species, bodies, and minds. . . . Chimeras are real. Life is not shy.”4 For Margulis, life was—­and is—­a chimeric process, a gathering and compounding of creatures into new assemblages. 173

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I wish to use biological chimerism in this chapter to think through another sort of chimerism: auditory chimerism, an experimental technique in which sound recordings are decomposed and then reconstituted otherwise, often with the aim of testing the limits and possibilities of human hearing. Auditory chimeras are sound events realized through a technical practice of sieving one sound through another—­pressing the “fine structure” (the second-­to-­second pitch and texture) of one sound (say, a drum) through the “envelope” (overall attack, sustain, and decay profile) of another (say, a piano). Such auditory chimeras—­in my parenthetical example, a drum sound that has something of the feel of a piano—­are weirdo hybrids often employed to investigate the texture of human hearing, in the service, for example, of fine-­tuning such devices as hearing aids and cochlear implants. More generally, the auditory chimera delivers a kind of structured nonsense meant to force listeners to confront their assumptions about how and what they are hearing when they hear. One might make an analogy to the writing trick known as the ambigram, in which words are forced into a conformation that permits the reading of two things at once, as with the rendition of “light is a particle” / “light is a wave” in figure 14.1. Here, “particle” is the fine structure, and “wave,” the envelope—­though one could make the argument that it goes the other way, too, indicating the flippiness of figure/ground distinctions in chimeras. While auditory chimeras are usually employed in the service of scientific research into the nature of hearing, their technical and aesthetic possibilities have not gone unnoticed by musicians and sound artists. In what follows, I consider auditory chimerism through the work of the electronic composer Florian Hecker, who has experimented with this technique to produce not better models of hearing, but against-­the-­grain redescriptions of sound. Not orientations, but disorientations. Hecker’s chimeric compositions attempt to decompose common sense about music, sound, hearing, and listening. To create the piece

Figure 14.1. Ambigram hand-­drawn in Douglas Hofstadter, For the Love of Line and Pattern: Studies Inspired by Alphabets and Music (Hopkins Hall Gallery & Corridor: Ohio State University, 1999), 30. Used with permission. 174

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“Hinge*,” for example, Hecker took apart a recording of a text by the philosopher Reza Negarestani and then put it back together after flipping the recording’s fine structure and envelope.5 The philosopher Robin Mackay describes the strategy—­and outcome: According to psychoacoustical research, the brain functions that serve to identify the “what” and the “where” of a sound operate upon different timescales, a finding Hecker exploits to produce sequences in which the fine time structure of one voice is sheathed in the amplitude envelope of another, producing an entity that remains recognizable as a voice while being spatially delocalized and semantically scrambled, and which the listener must reconstruct as a unified yet impossible synthetic creature—­a chimera.6

Insofar as the sounds in “Hinge*” have biographies as waveforms,7 these are scrambled into new forms; the life of these sounds emerges from its chimerization other than how it originated. But back, for a moment, to biology. Lynn Margulis in her last years was exploring a new player in symbiogenesis, not mitochondria or chloroplasts, but a swimming, corkscrew-­shaped bacterium called a spirochete. She suggested that the tiny hairs on the edges of cells, the filaments in mitotic cell division, and the tails of sperm all came from earlier organismic incorporations of spirochetes. She was developing, too, the idea that the human senses, which operate using cilia, may themselves be chimeric compounds of once-­free living organisms, now yoked together in our animal bodies and harnessed to enable sensory apprehension. Vision, smell, touch, and hearing apparatuses are all composed in part of cilia, which Margulis maintained derive from a symbiogenically incorporated spirochete-­like critter. On this model, hearing, as a biologically enabled capacity, is itself enabled by chimerical compounds (see figure 14.2). How, then, to think of bio-­chimerical human hearing next to the technical process of making auditory chimeras? What happens when chimeric listening meets chimeric composition? In his various works using chimerization, Hecker asks auditors to tune in to the new sound that emerges when different sound qualities are pressed into juxtaposition. He draws from the work of Zachary Smith, Bertrand Delgutte, and Andrew J. Oxenham, who, in their study “Chimaeric Sounds Reveal Dichotomies in Auditory Perception,” describe an algorithm that can create audio artifacts that have “the envelope of one sound and the fine structure of another” (see figure 14.3).8 I will confess that the first example that came to my mind when I initially read about this kind of thing was the talking guitar in the rock star Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do,” from his 1976 PolyGram album, Frampton Comes Alive!9 In that piece, an electric guitar output was fed through a plastic tube, which was then fed (yikes!) into Frampton’s mouth, which, when he sang, gave the guitar something like the sound envelope of a human voice 175

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Vision

Touch Smell

Hearing

Figure 14.2. Sensory cilia. From Lynn Margulis, Celeste A. Asikainen, and Wolfgang E. Krumbein, eds., Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self, Sensory cilia, plate VII, © 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press.

(one reason the apparatus was called a “talkbox”). The result was that the guitar sounded as though it were speaking, or articulating words. In a more highbrow register, what is under investigation and pressure in research into auditory chimerism is timbre—­the quality of sound described in 1960 by the American Standards Association as “that attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a listener can judge two sounds similarly presented and having the same loudness and pitch as being dissimilar.”10 Clarinets and pianos, for example, have different timbres: the same note will have a different feel on each instrument.11 But what is timbre, really? One famous attempt to pin timbre down came in 1971 in the pages of Stereophile magazine, in which the editor and audiophile J. Gordon Holt offered a taxonomy of hi-­fi sound, a chart in which he keyed adjectives to frequencies. Thus, the range between 20 and 40 Hz—­the zone of organ pedals and bass drums—­he described as “thunderous” and “shuddery,” while the range between 160 and 320 Hz, the home of harps, cellos, and guitars, was “wooden”; and the space between

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a

Filter bank F1

Sound 1

F2

FN

Chimaerizer Chimaerizer

Filter bank F1 Sound 2

F2

∑

Multi-band chimaera Sound 1 envelope Sound 2 fine structure

Chimaerizer

FN

b

Chimaerizer

Envelope 1 Filtered sound 1

Hilbert transform

Fine structure 1

×

Single-band chimaera

Envelope 2 Filtered sound 2

Hilbert transform

Fine structure 2

Figure 14.3. A formalism for decomposing sound to recompose it, flipping envelope and fine structure. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: From Smith, Zachary M., Bertrand Delgutte, and Andrew J. Oxenham, “Chimaeric Sounds Reveal Dichotomies in Auditory Perception,” Nature 416(2002): 87–­90.

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1280 and 2560 Hz, the domain of violins and trumpets, was “tinny,” “nasal,” and “brassy” (see figure 14.4).12 What is notable is the way that this taxonomy depends upon mixed metaphors, even on untethered, free associations. In this way, timbre is itself chimeric. It is a compound effect—­to do with the production of sound—­as well as a compound affect—­relating to people’s feelings about it. Chimeric hearing, meet chimeric sound. These are phenomena that, to be sure, have met before. Back in 1857, Hermann von Helmholtz suggested that the ear itself assembled disparate data into new hybrids, writing that the ear “analyzes the interdigitation of the [sound] waves,”13 and thereby acts as a kind of frequency analyzer. The banks of cilia in many animal ears could be imagined as detectors of sound’s fine structure, from which perceptions of sound envelopes are then crafted. Biological chimerism becomes a support for chimeric listening and, thereby, an embodied tool of perception—­and one that can sometimes be misled (though also retrained) when particularly jarring auditory chimeras are presented to the ear. So, let me go out on a limb and propose this: If biological chimerism is one of the supports of “life” and auditory chimerism is one of the supports of “timbre,” both life and timbre are revealed as abstractions that emerge from chimerism. Both life and timbre are chimeric. Answering the question What is life? may thus be akin to asking What is timbre?14 Both yield answers that, at their most hand-­wavy, define their object by what it is not (not inanimate or dead, not loudness or pitch15) and, at their more reflexive, point to life/timbre as an effect of how people model or inhabit, say, vitality or hearing as such. Dorion Sagan, Lynn Margulis’s son and frequent coauthor, has argued that because consciousness is a subjective phenomenon, our theories of it—­and perhaps of life—­must derive from experience. And so it seems to be with timbre. What Hecker and Sagan each underscore, then, is the fleeting and compoundly experiential character of vitality and sensing. But as Hecker’s pieces may help listeners discern, experience is far from an obvious, unmediated phenomenon. What might an auditory experience be, after all, of Hecker’s music? What can one learn from the texture of that experience? How, to take a specific example, can auditors think anew about timbre through listening to Hecker’s sounds (whoever that “we” is, since “we” are all chimeras and more than a few of us are deaf)? A piece such as Hecker’s “Hinge*” pokes at the wholeness often associated with timbre, a wholeness that is usually the result of stepping back and regarding a chimeric whole as, in fact, a whole (as a student of mine remarked when I asked him to describe the timbre of a heavily treated but smooth and glassy Neil Young guitar solo: “Man, that guitar sounds so real, so natural.”). As the vocalists in Hecker’s “Hinge” pieces (the composer Joan La Barbara, the historian Sugata Bose, and the theatre actress Anna Kohler) recite a text by Reza Negarestani entitled “Nature, Its Man and His Goat (Enigmata of Natural and Cultural Chimeras),” their voices are fed through a chimerization 178

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Thuddy

Shuddery

Thin

Shallow

Pinched

LOWER MIDDLES

POWER

Constricted Hollow

Distant

UPPER MIDDLES

VIOLINS

Strangled

LOWER HIGHS

PRESENCE

Bright

Hard

Glassy

Steely

Shrill

Muted

HIGHS

BRILLIANCE

Muffled

Dull

UPPER HIGHS

CRISPNESS

Zippy

(Deficiency not usually noticed except by comparison)

Sweet

Soft

EXTREME HIGHS

SHEEN

20,480

“SNAP”

DETAIL

HIGHEST OVERTONES

Consonant “t”

Airy

Whiskery

10,240

ATTACK TRANSIENTS

SURFACE NOISE

5,120

HIGH PERCUSSION

Sibilant “ss”

Crisp

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Wiry

Spitty

OVERTONES

Vowel sound “ee”

2,560

TRUMPETS

1,280

PROJECTION

PIANO

FLUTES

Vowel sound “eh” (bed)

Brassy

Nasal

Honky

Forward

Tinny

Raucous

Vowel sound “aw” (straw)

640

MIDDLES

320

SOPRANO CONTRALTO HORNS OBOES

Vowel sound “unh” (run)

Grunty

Hollow

Figure 14.4. J. Gordon Holt’s taxonomy of hi-­fi sound. From The Stereophile 3, no. 4 (1971): 5. © The Enthusiast Network.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Most of the imagery used in the above chart was concocted by Ye Editor over a period of 18 years of comparative analytical listening. Now that we are big-heartedly making it available to the world at large, you will undoubtedly see some of the terminology appearing in other hi-fi rags. When you do, just remember that You saw it in Stereophile first.

Cold

Sparse

Dry

Tight

(Deficiency not usually noticed except by comparison)

UPPER BASS

MIDBASS

RICHNESS

GUITAR

160

CELLOS

CELLOS

BARITONE

WARMTH

HARP

TYMPANI

DEEP BASS

80

Vowel sound “oh” (Joe)

Vowel sound “oo” (food)

FULLNESS

40

Wooden

Cavernous

Fat

Boomy

FOUNDATION

20

DOUBLE BASSES

BASS DRUM

DOUBLE BASSES

Sodden

Flaccid

ORGAN PEDALS

Billowing

Thunderous

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algorithm that Hecker uses to fracture any kind of humanist understanding of voice—­and indeed any humanist model of hearing (the fact that the falling-­ apart text in the left channel is about “nature” and the text on the right is about “culture” adds a particularly anthropological cast to this epistemic fracture). The chimerization recipe that “Hinge*” adapts from Smith and colleagues describes hearing as artificially reproducible by multiple Fourier analysis16—­that is, by the decomposition of sound waves—­which might be accomplished via the technology of band-­pass filters (lots of them). And if such sound can be put together artificially, it can certainly be put together in ways that go against the grain of everyday experience. There’s an intriguing connection here to the limits of hearing, and to the world of the hard-­of-­hearing, since Hecker’s chimerizations, playing as they do with the slicing up of sound waves, generate sounds reminiscent of those highly granular reconstructions of sound generated by cochlear implants.17 Comparing the sound of cochlear implant simulations at various frequency resolutions with the sound of Hecker’s “Hinge*” reveals remarkable similarities.18 It also points to the often-­occluded history of disability—­and of utopian projects of deafness amelioration—­in the history of the invention of sound technology, from the work of Alexander Graham Bell to that of Norbert Wiener, both famously interested in helping people “overcome” hardness-­of-­hearing.19 The technology that produces chimeras can thus direct attention back to the historicity and, indeed, artificiality of experience. As Donna Haraway once wrote of the cybernetic human condition, “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”20 There is, perhaps, a poststructuralist devil in these details, too. “Hinge” is a word that Jacques Derrida uses in Of Grammatology to press the reader toward the possibility of holding two contradictory concepts in mind at the same time. Derrida quotes a letter from Roger Laporte to motivate his use of the notion of hinge to name this idea of the or/and: You have, I suppose, dreamt of finding a single word for designating difference and articulation. I have perhaps located it by chance in Robert[’s Dictionary] if I play on the word, or rather indicate its double meaning. This word is brisure [joint, break] “—­broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack, fracture, fault, split, fragment [bréche, cassure, fracture, faille, fente, fragment.]—­Hinged articulation of two parts of wood-­or metal-­work. The hinge, the brisure [folding-­joint] of a shutter. Cf. joint.”—­Roger Laporte (letter).21

Hecker’s “Hinge*” means to point to sounds in which fine structure and envelope contradict one another and yet are co-­present.22 Chimerized (cyborgian?) pieces such as “Hinge” are thus composed through decomposition. And one of the key musical/sonic features being decomposed is timbre—­precisely what the American Standards Association suggested, recall, 180

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was “that attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a listener can judge” (emphasis added). The judgment that permits listeners to understand timbre is being taken apart, atomized into a collection of abstracted, formal processes. There remains, of course, the question of whether and how Hecker’s atomization can succeed; having blasted the coherence of sonic unity through decomposition, one might wonder whether what Hecker presents can fully escape from being recaptured into stable perception. Listeners, after all, might listen to, with, or through his compositions, adding them up to new experience.23 I hasten to add that this would not then reveal or recapture timbre as a holistic property of sound—­much less an organic one. The electrical and computer engineer Kailash Patil and his colleagues, in a 2012 article entitled “Music in Our Ears: The Biological Bases of Musical Timbre Perception,” make just this organicist claim—­that timbre is a property of sound that humans are biologically tuned to judge.24 They locate this capacity in the auditory cortex, tunneling their analysis away from the cilia in the ear and into the head—­or, more accurately, into the heads of ferrets(!), laboratory animals they use as surrogates for humans. Their results are not sonic, but visual: close-­up maps of ferret neurons that are activated by particular frequencies (which look like heat maps, with activated neurons rendered in red and quiescent ones in light green). Patil and his colleagues describe these maps as “representations” of timbre in the ferret brain; for these researchers, judging whether ferrets recognize timbres consists not in asking these rodents whether they heard—­to take the instruments offered by the authors—­a piano or vibraphone, but in looking to see if the same neurons are activated for the same sound. This turns (ferret) “judgment” into something seated in the brain, rather than in an unfolding set of encounters. Curiously, the judgment of timbre is naturalized through becoming cyborg, through fusing information and flesh, through becoming a chimera. Perhaps this is no surprise. As Jonathan Sterne has observed, “Everything that is known about hearing in its natural state is a result of the interactions between ears and sound ­technologies. . . . To get to hearing-­in-­itself, twentieth-­century researchers first had to pass through media.”25 Timbre can only be technologically described in the way Patil and company do by recomposing it through decomposition and then forgetting that one has entered a cyborg circuit. The abstraction only works through formalisms, formalisms that are then rendered inaudible, out of earshot. This is not what Hecker is doing. He is not making timbre whole again. He is decomposing it, so its original cannot be retrieved. Hecker’s is not decomposition as Friedrich Engels understood it in his notes and fragments for his unfinished 1883 book, Dialectics of Nature, in which he wrote, “Decomposition in dead organic bodies . . . necessarily produces products that are more and more dead.”26 Hecker’s “Hinge*” and its kin are not dead. Neither, however, is Hecker’s decomposition kin to the sense of the word forwarded by the artist Jae Rhim Lee in describing her “Infinity Mushroom Burial 181

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Suit,” “a fitted body suit embroidered with thread that has been inoculated with mushroom mycelium,” which “facilitates the decomposition of the body, the remediation of industrial toxins and viruses in the body, and new plant growth.”27 Lee presents decomposition as generative of more life. Hecker’s is, rather, a chimeric decomposition, a remaking of audio to create novel sonic parts, parts that can reorganize sense and sensing, to in turn, perhaps, create chimeras in a more technological, artifactual sense.28 They create—­to return to the biotech chimeras with which this essay opened—­a genre of listening as biotechnology, a reengineering of the very life of sound.

182

LIFE, WATER, SOUND RESOUNDING

TO RE-­SOUND A QUESTION ANIMATING this volume: If life, water, and sound are at once abstractions as well as empirical phenomena, how do the formalisms and materials through which they are apprehended—­computer simulations of evolution, formulae for tracking the travel of tsunamis, cochlear implants—­ matter, both in everyday and in limit circumstances? As I hope has become clear, the material and formal structures through which life, water, and sound are known shape these objects as abstractions and empirical phenomena both. Abstractions such as life, water, and sound, I have suggested, become imaginable as such only through formalisms, systematic accounts—­mathematical, diagrammatic, simulational—­that seek to capture phenomena in the world so that these might be operated upon symbolically and conceptually. Recent calls in the humanities and social sciences to attend to “materiality”—­the stuff of the world as full of nonhuman, alinguistic agency1—­are, I maintain, impossible to entertain without first accepting (where one might rather historicize, or even contest) those formalisms that support such abstractions as, say, for life: reproduction, recombination, evolution; or, for water: purity, the freezing point, the variation of earthly tides; or, for sound: the notion of the wavelength, the decibel, or timbre. “Life” has come in and out of focus for scientists in this book through the visualizations of computer simulation, through wrangling with the question of what gives “form” to “life,” through classifying and reclassifying organisms, through Petri dish modelings of vital process, and through seeking to scale the life of single cells to the life of the global biosphere.2 These are all attempts to settle “life” into a set of forms through which it might be known, though each also changes what scientists will take as the relevant material or substance through which life might be recognized or modeled. In some cases, “life” is revealed quite explicitly as a paradoxically unsettled abstraction, a form that therefore has an unsettled material or empirical quality—­as with work in astrobiology, which seeks both to know and to remain agnostic about the ultimate definition of life. The abstraction of “water” finds itself maintained as well as undone in the essays here as scientists seek to model it virtually in Artificial Life simulations, 183

Life, Water, Sound Resounding

in models of tsunamis, or in Google Ocean. Water is mined for its symbolic affordances—­and therefore pushed to its conceptual limits—­as social theorists seek to call analogically upon water’s form and materiality to theorize a world of global “currents” and “flows.” Or as sound engineers seek to mimic water’s effects in audio media. “Sound” turns out to be an abstraction supported by such formalisms as accounts of its speed in different media (air, water), mappings of its vibratory form onto the technology of the cochlear implant, mathematical models of sound envelopes and timbre, and descriptions of its phenomenology as wavelike. And, as with “life” and “water,” “sound” is not what once it was. Take, as one recent example, the 2008 retrieval of sound from mid nineteenth-­century phonautograms, visual inscriptions of sound vibration meant to be seen, and not, at the time they were made, heard. The most noted example is an 1860 rendition of “Au Clair de la Lune,” which was etched as a vibratory tracing on soot-­covered paper—­a tracing made some seventeen years prior to Thomas Edison’s more famous audio playback of himself singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” What Patrick Feaster has called “paleospectrophonic” methods for “educing” sound from such phonautograms force the question of what a “sound recording” is and was (does the intention of the recordist matter?)—­and of what “sound” as an historical phenomenon could be.3 This last example also demonstrates that when abstractions are realized in particular media, the media make a difference to how the abstractions are understood. In “After Math,” the historian of science Stephanie Dick provides examples of how mathematical manipulation operates differently when it is managed as a sequential set of symbols on a page than when it is instantiated in the electromagnetic memory of a computer, a rematerialization accompanied by what she calls “reformalism.”4 To be sure, it is not that “material” as such, in some preformal way, forces one or another formal representation by necessity, but rather that forms change with the affordances of materials, themselves encountered and created, in an iterative spiral, to offer up particular formal properties.5 And so on, in crinkling interference patterns. One way to support my claim about how the formation, deformation, and reformation of abstraction and formalism guide perceptions of the material world would be to offer a series of close case studies in biology, marine science, and acoustics—­something akin to existing cultural historical studies of, say, the genetic “program,” the idea of the ocean current, or the notion of “loudness”—­ studies that show how the concept in question gathered persuasiveness and reality as well as, later, began to wobble or fall apart.6 Another way would be to offer something similar to those accounts anthropologists have delivered for such abstractions as “the family,” “the market,” or “the state,” which have zeroed in on changing definitions of marriage, mathematical models of derivative investment instruments, or the organization of national bureaucracies.7 The essays in Sounding the Limits of Life have sometimes taken a similar tack. But I 184

Life, Water, Sound Resounding

have also frequently favored another approach. Abstraction is based not only on those variously formatted and materialized formalisms that make assumptions explicit, operational, and organized; abstraction is also an everyday activity layered into the traffic of contingent human relations across a buzz of domains. And I have been particularly interested in those moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend. And this is why I have found sounding a useful analytic in unifying these essays. As I noted at the outset, sounding as fathoming, resounding, uttering, being heard, conveying impressions, suggesting analogies, repeating, and echoing is a good tool for getting at the empirical world, which is abloom with resonances and dissonances across domains. Sounding is also, I have intimated, an appropriate idiom for investigating that which is not yet fully known, that which people discover only through a kind of auditing that can change the very substance to which it listens, that can create new echoes, new reverberations. If theory, from the ancient Greek theorein, “to look,”8 is about looking at phenomena—­perhaps seeing them through formalisms or even looking at phenomena through one another—­sounding operates in a different register, producing reverberation, resonance, transduction. When I make that claim, I am keen not to be heard, however, as simply rescuing “sound” from obscurity, lifting it up from a status as some sort of slighted, inferior cousin to “sight”; that hierarchical ordering is a cliché, one that brings into the modern age medieval rankings of the senses that had vision closest to God, sound in second place, and the more earthly senses of touch, smell, and taste following behind (the last two involved putting parts of the world in one’s body, an invitation to sin . . .).9 As Veit Erlmann suggests in Reason and Resonance, there is a minor key Western tradition that has hearing and listening—­resonance—­as a path to reason.10 This is a tradition worth reanimating—­and tweaking. If the visual idiom of “reflection” posits that the mind is a mirror of the world, a Cartesian entity detached, objective, and apart, “resonance” suggests a participation in the world, a moving in sympathy, an empirically attuned embodiment. In other writing, I have called for replacing “reflexive” anthropology with “transductive” anthropology, an anthropology that listens through and across (and that also unwinds the ear-­centrism of much sound studies, positing vibration as only one vector of intersensory connection).11 Drawing from the media critic Jim Drobnik, it is important, too, to “listen awry,” paying attention to sound out-­of-­joint (acousmatic, educed, even violently disruptive) and to the odd auditory hallucination (a phenomenon not so uncommon; after all, unless you are a hearing person reading this aloud, you may be having one right this second).12 Watery meanings of sounding have also been important. I have kept them in mind to keep in awareness the fact that the medium through which one investigates things in the world is significant. When oceanographers seek to understand, say, deep-­sea organisms, they cannot do so without figuring out how 185

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fact and artifact often come conjoined in the data they collect; the medium of water needs to be theorized not just as an ambient surround, but also as a medium through which living and knowing happens.13 Much of this book seeks to do what could be called theory underwater, not merely theorizing underwater things, but subjecting theory to unfamiliar conditions as well—­of pressure, saturation, waterlogging—­seeing how it deforms as it merges with the medium it seeks to describe. What emerges from such an enterprise for such concepts as life, water, and sound? I think it reveals them to be not quite concepts at all. Compare what W.E.B. Du Bois, in his 1940 Dusk of Dawn, wrote of race: “Perhaps it is wrong to speak of it at all as ‘a concept,’ rather than as a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies.”14 To be sure, racial and racist social orders have often operated precisely through the making of concepts, categories, and types, often seeking to freeze “race” into a fixed thing that is available to governance, and more often than not into a principle for the hierarchical ordering of putatively distinct human groups that are imagined to differ in essence one from the other in forms bodily, perhaps biological. But as Du Bois saw, all this conceptual work was crosscut by contradiction, as definitions of race were subject to a “continuous change in the proofs and arguments advanced [;]  .  .  . The basis of race distinction was changed without explanation, without apology.”15 Though with different historical anchors—­and with, at least in many of these essays, a less fraught and terrifying politics (though not always)—­“life,” “water,” and “sound” are something like that: pointers to contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies that unfold in historical and political time. As “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry” suggests, biologists’ definitions of life have changed as theories of vitality and evolution have morphed, as biopolitics have brought different units—­cells, bodies, populations—­into governance, and as biologists have sought alternately to embrace and shun a metaphysics of life. As “Nature/Culture/ Seawater” argues, the forces, facts, and tendencies that make seawater what it is involve the shifting proofs and politics of ecologists, fishers, oil companies, and more. And, as “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies” observes, sound—­particularly reproduced sound (in phonographs, telephones, mp3s)—­has over the last century been shaped with deafness and disability as its conditioning, enabling, and marginalized Other, placing “hearing” within the contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies that have shaped what will count as abled and disabled bodies. Life, water, and sound, then, are both like and not like the three forces, facts, and tendencies tagged by the title of the anthropologist Franz Boas’s 1940 Race, Language, and Culture.16 Where those categories were all exclusively concerned with the “human,” the terms I treat here are by no means always coterminous with human bodies or processes. Sounding the Limits of Life can be read as a symptom of where some scholars are heading in anthropology today, taking on ahuman entities and phenomena as objects of anthropological investigation: multispecies collectives (including such untraditional subjects as insects, 186

Life, Water, Sound Resounding

fungi, microbes), water, air, oil, electricity, light, rocks, waves.17 Like the sound-­ studies scholar Douglas Kahn’s Noise Water Meat, which examines the place of water and flesh in modernist musical composition, this book is curious about the other-­than-­human substances that traverse cultural production. And like Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, which asks how boundaries between animal, machine, and human are being reconfigured by the life and information sciences, this book seeks to ask how the boundaries around bio-­ ecological and sensory objects like life, water, and sound have been breached. The reader may have noticed that this book’s essays, like the three-­worded titles of those books just described, often feature three parts or principles that either track, offer, or disturb a chronology or a classification. There is usually one in the three that does not fit, that demonstrates a crisis of thinking, a need to move beyond received categories. Though I have made “sound” a master term for this book, it is also the odd one out, the one that is not quite right, not quite centered. It is not meant as synthesis to a thesis of “life” and antithesis of “water,” but is perhaps a prosthesis for listening to them anew. . . . At stake in spotlighting abstractions and nonhuman phenomena is an attempt to make sense of how naturalcultural worlds are now being created. Marx had it that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-­selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”18 Not only should one no longer speak of “men” in a species-­generalizing mode, nor, of course, in that infuriating gender-­specific casting, but it seems, too, that it would be useful to amplify the kinds of circumstances, agents, and processes understood to be in the mix of world-­making. The Anthropocene, that new geobiopolitical term proposed to call attention to how anthropogenic processes are modulating the planet, is perhaps a term too anthropocentric. Sea-­level rise may make this the Hydrocene—­or it may push scientists away from the fetish of the Greek neologism altogether. Or even away from the fetish of articulate language. Think, then, of these pages not just as soundings—­nor of this epilogue as a simple re-­sounding—­but as an instance of listening backward through a kind of reverse reverb. Reverse reverb is an audio effect in which a reverberation, or echo, precedes or anticipates a sound to come. A less common name is preverberation. Preverberations can be produced in audio recordings using a simple trick: by recording a sound playing backward while adding an echo or reverberatory effect to it, and by then reversing the audio record of that process so that it sounds like the sound is heralded by its own echo (consult songs by Led Zeppelin, My Bloody Valentine, or Janelle Monáe for examples). The essays in Sounding the Limits of Life offer possible preverberations of how life, water, and sound may morph, conceptually and actually. In the age of transforming life forms, the rumble of rising sea levels and the premonitory sizzle of a warming planet may serve as a reminder that the problem of the twenty-­first century will be how to fashion a sounding line into the future, how to go about sounding the limits of life. 187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MANY AUDIENCES HAVE SOUNDED THE essays in this book for sense and seaworthiness. I acknowledge these interlocutors chapter by chapter. Several names appear more than once, indicating a generous and sustained engagement by colleagues and friends on many of the themes developed here. Most recently, for taking X-­ray eyes to the synthetic introduction, “Sounding Life, Water, Sound,” as well as to the epilogue, “Life, Water, Sound Resounding,” I thank Debbora Battaglia, Stephanie Dick, Graham Jones, David Kaiser, Heather Paxson, Tom Paxson, Sophia Roosth, Alma Steingart, and Jonathan Sterne. Chapter 1 was originally published as “What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies” in Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 671–­696, © 2011 by the University of Chicago Press. I am thankful to Donna Haraway, who first suggested lining up my three case studies of “limit biologies.” The essay grew from a paper for “Vitalism Revisited: History, Philosophy, Biology,” which was held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, Duke University, in March 2008. Barbara Herrnstein Smith extended the invitation to participate. The essay went through revision for a panel entitled “Extreme: Histories and Economies of Humanness Inside Outerspaces,” which was organized by Debbora Battaglia, Valerie Olson, and David Valentine for the 2009 meetings of the American Anthropological Association. A 2010 Distinguished Fellowship at Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study provided time for further rescripting, during which I benefitted from Marilyn Strathern’s careful reading of the argument. Other vital readers were Tim Choy, Joe Dumit, Cori Hayden, S. Lochlann Jain, Jake Kosek, Hannah Landecker, Hélène Mialet, Natasha Myers, Heather Paxson, and Sophia Roosth. The research on which the essay is based, going back to 1993, was funded by National Science Foundation grant SBR-­9312292 (1993) and by grant no. 6993 (2003) from the Wenner-­Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, as well as by Stanford University, New York University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chapter 2 first appeared as Stefan Helmreich and Sophia Roosth’s “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry,” in Representations 112 (2010): 27–­53, and my primary thanks goes to my coauthor Sophia Roosth, whose joining with me in this essay took it to a level I could not have attained on my own. We thank Jean 189

Acknowledgments

Day, Jürgen Fauth, Gisbert Helmreich, Sarah Jansen, David Jones, Evelyn Fox Keller, Hannah Landecker, Tim Lenoir, Vincent-­Antonin Lépinay, Rob Mitchell, Heather Paxson, Christian Reiss, Henning Schmidgen, Hillel Schwartz, Alma Steingart, and Martin Weiss. The historian Joan Steigerwald, who writes on German Romanticism in science, was an indispensable reader. “An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater,” which appeared in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, (edited by Jessica Riskin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, 321–­333, © 2007 by the University of Chicago Press) and was reworked as chapter 3, began as a 2003 conference paper at the Stanford Humanities Center. I thank Jessica Riskin for inviting this contribution and Timothy Lenoir and Heidi Voskuhl for key conference conversations. A version presented at a March 2009 conference, “Animation and Automation,” sponsored by the Centre for Screen Studies at the University of Manchester and the Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, helped me develop it further. For hospitality in that venue, I thank Lucy Suchman, Jackie Stacey, Adrian Mackenzie, and Vivian Sobchack. “Cetology Now: Formatting the Twenty-­First Century Whale” originally appeared as “Cetology Now: A Sketch for the Twenty-­First Century” in Melville Society Extracts 129 (2005): 10–­12. Wyn Kelley provided valuable guidance. “How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839–­2010” was originally commissioned by Sharon Ghamari-­Tabrizi for an ambitious, but ultimately unfinished, volume about the work of Donna Haraway. I have benefited, in reweavings, from comments from Eva Hayward, Heather Paxson, Sophia Roosth, and Malcolm Shick, as well as from an expert reading by the historian of reef science Alistair Sponsel. I am grateful to Katie King, who gathered some of the contributions for the Haraway volume on Party Writing for Donna Haraway, an online Webfestschrift (http://partywriting.blogspot.com/). For the version reproduced here, I add thanks to Margaret Wertheim, one of the founders of the Institute for Figuring, which has organized the crafting of the hyperbolic crochet coral reef. “Homo microbis: Species, Race, Sex, and the Human Microbiome” is a chimeric essay. It began as a response to a lecture by Dorion Sagan, “The Human Is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New ‘Facts of Life,’ ” presented at the 2011 meetings of the American Anthropological Association (Sagan’s lecture later appeared in Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). My reply first appeared in print as “Homo microbis: The Human Microbiome, Figural, Literal, Political,” in Thresholds 42 (2014): 52–­59. The present chapter revises that essay and fuses it with elements of “In a Word: Species,” in frieze d/e 6 (2012): 33. It also poaches a few paragraphs from S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” in Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–­575. I also incorporate pieces of a presentation from the 2013 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, entitled “Micro Multi Biology, with Notes on the Microbiome, Racialization, 190

Acknowledgments

and Reification.” That paper appeared at a panel organized by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock in honor of the tenth anniversary of Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2003). For comments on that piece, I thank Amber Benezra, Jonathan Kahn, Hannah Landecker, Jonathan Marks, and Alondra Nelson. “The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination,” in Grey Room 23, no. 4 (2006): 66–­95, had its genesis on a panel I convened at the 2002 meetings of the Society for Literature and Science, a panel entitled “Edging the Work of Hillel Schwartz into Science Studies.” I must thank the historian Hillel Schwartz for his unfailing goodwill toward my off-­kilter designs on his work. In addition to my other co-­panelists—­Richard Doyle, Heather Paxson, and Michael Witmore—­I thank Hugh Crawford, Erika Flesher, Dmitry Portnoy, Brain Rotman, and Jared Stark. I thank Joe Dumit and the participants in his “Information/Theory” seminar at MIT in spring 2004. I am grateful, too, to have discussed this paper at “New Forms of Life: Practices and Consequences of Envisioning Biological Processes,” a workshop organized in February 2005 by Sheila Jasanoff and Michael M. J. Fischer on behalf of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. “Nature/Culture/Seawater: Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization” is adapted from “Nature/Culture/Seawater,” in American Anthropologist 113, no. 1 (2011): 132–­144. It grew from an April 2010 presentation at the University of California, Berkeley’s Environmental Politics Colloquium. I thank Jake Kosek for the invitation and participants for comment, particularly Alastair Iles and John Gillis. The next draft became a plenary lecture, “Naturecultures,” at the 2010 meetings of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I thank Brad Weiss and Marisol de la Cadena for the invitation. A 2010 Distinguished Fellowship at Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study on the topic “Water” provided essential support. I particularly thank Ash Amin, Monica Grady, and Surajit Sarkar for conversations in Durham. On a next round of writing, Julie Olson and Pam Ballinger provided readings informed by maritime anthropology, and Heather Paxson and Bill Maurer made invaluable suggestions about the larger sea of anthropological theory. I thank Tom Boellstorff and the three anonymous reviewers for American Anthropologist. Chapter 9, “Time and the Tsunami: Indian Ocean, 2004,” originally appeared in the online journal Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 6(3): http://reconstruction.eserver.org/063/helmreich.shtml, in a special issue, “­Water: Resources & Discourses,” edited by Justin M. Scott Coe and W. Scott Howard. I thank these two scholars as well as Nikhil Anand, Gaurav Desai, Michael M. J. Fischer, Heather Paxson, and Ajantha Subramanian for commentary. Chapter 10, “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures,” appeared in a special issue, “The Image,” of Social Research (78, no. 4 [2011]: 1211–­1242). For appraisals of early drafts, I thank 191

Acknowledgments

Graham Jones, Christopher Kelty, Bill Maurer, Lisa Messeri, Heather Paxson, Tom Schilling, Philip Steinberg, and the special-­issue editor, Arien Mack. “Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science,” chapter 11, first appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Karin Bij­sterveld and Trevor Pinch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 151–­ 175, and is reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press, USA. I thank Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld as well as participants at the originating workshop. For further comment, I am grateful to Caitlin Berrigan, Douglas Kahn, Jeanine Olson, Tara Rodgers, Hillel Schwartz, Charles Stankovich, and Jana Winderen. Chapter 12, “Seashell Sound,” first appeared in Cabinet 48 (2013): 23–­29. Editor Sina Najafi provided guiding recommendations, as did Noel Jackson, Victor Luftig, Hillel Schwartz, Sophia Roosth, and Michael Rossi. Chapter 13 first appeared as Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich’s “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” in The Senses & Society 7, no. 1 (2012): 72–­86, and my first thanks go to my coauthor Michele Friedner, from whose writing and thinking on the politics of sensing I have learned enormously. We thank Frank Bechter, Don Brenneis, Graham Jones, Mara Mills, Heather Paxson, and The Senses & Society editor David Howes. “Chimeric Sensing” originally appeared in Florian Hecker: Chimerizations (New York: Primary Information, 2013), 9–­15, and I thank the composer Florian Hecker for inviting my contribution to this text, a set of observations on his experimental music. For further commentary, I thank Kieran Downes, Nick Seaver, and Peter Whincop. I am grateful to those faculty and staff at MIT who facilitated my interactions with Hecker: Ute Meta Bauer, Renée Green, Leila Kinney, and Meg Rotzel. Working and reworking all of the essays collected here would have been impossible without the expert attention of the editors of the Technology and Culture series at Princeton University Press, Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer, who helped me see the collection whole—­as did the Princeton editor Fred Appel, who asked difficult questions at the right moments. Two anonymous reviewers provided key reflections. I thank my research assistant, Clare Kim, who provided invaluable help with image permissions. The production team Princeton assigned to Sounding the Limits of Life—­Karen Fortgang, production editor; Dimitri Karetnikov, illustration manager; Amanda Weiss, designer; Juli­ ana Fidler, editorial assistant; Gail Schmitt, copy editor; and Maria DenBoer, indexer—­was spectacular in every way. This list above is still short many people essential to the writing and thinking of these pieces. In MIT Anthropology, I thank Manduhai Buyandelger, Jim Howe, Jean Jackson, Erica Caple James, Graham Jones, Amy Moran-­Thomas, Heather Paxson, Susan Silbey, and Christine Walley—­the best colleagues one could hope for. Michele Friedner, David Jaclin, Maria Vidart-­Delgado, Ben Wurgaft, and Emily Zeamer all had postdoctoral posts in MIT Anthropology 192

Acknowledgments

during the years this collection was coming together and each may discern their voices in it. I also thank the able administrators in MIT Anthropology: Amberly Steward, Irene Hartford, and Barbara Keller. Colleagues in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS) have been unfailingly generous in reading and conversation around the topics of Sounding the Limits of Life. I particularly thank Michael M. J. Fischer, David Kaiser, Clapperton Mavhunga, David Mindell, Natasha Schüll, Hanna Rose Shell, and Sherry Turkle. Karen Gardner, the academic administrator for STS, has been an essential lifeline in the larger graduate program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Farther afield at MIT, valued interlocutors on many of the themes developed here include Ian Condry, Deborah Fitzgerald, Mary Fuller, Diana Henderson, Noel Jackson, Caroline Jones, Anne McCants, John Picker, Shankar Raman, Harriet Ritvo, Abha Sur, and William Urrichio. I have had crucial conversations on the themes here with colleagues and friends in the wider world of anthropology, STS, and beyond. People not named above who demand my thanks include Samer Alatout, Pam Ballinger, Gillian Beer, Chris Boebel, Mario Biagioli, Tanja Bosak, Geoffrey Bowker, Janet Browne, Matei Candea, George Collier, Jane Collier, Beth Coleman, Carol Delaney, Bob Desjarlais, Virginia Dominguez, Joe Dumit, Paul Edwards, Ron Eglash, Arantza Etxeberria, Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, Rayvon Fouché, Joan Fujimura, Peter Galison, Ilana Gershon, Faye Ginsburg, Cristina Grasseni, Bridget Guaraci, Hugh Gusterson, Sherine Hamdy, John Hartigan, Cori Hayden, Deborah Heath, Linda Hogle, Wendy Jacob, Casper Bruun Jensen, Melody Jue, Douglas Kahn, Ernst Karel, Sarah Kember, Ali Kenner, Eleana Kim, Eben Kirksey, Eduardo Kohn, Linda Layne, Doreen Lee, Vincent-­Antonin Lépinay, Les Levidow, Margaret Lock, William Macauley, Emily Martin, Joseph Masco, Michael Montoya, Cris Moore, Lynn Morgan, Staffan Müller-­Wille, Robin Nagle, Diane Nelson, ­David Novak, Susan Oyama, Trevor Paglen, Gísli Pálsson, Anand Pandian, Véréna Paravel, Anne Pollock, Alain Pottage, Hugh Raffles, Ramya Rajagopalan, Dan Reichman, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Rayna Rapp, Tobias Rees, Elizabeth Roberts, Astrid Schrader, Dan Segal, Michael Silverstein, Sergio Sismondo, Levent Soysal, Nikolai Ssorin-­Chaikov, Nicole Starosielski, Mette Svendsen, Karen-­Sue Taussig, Stefan Timmermans, Niki Vermeulen, Kath Weston, Matthew Wolf-­ Meyer, and Charles Zerner. Without the thinking and work of a number of stellar students I have had over the years, this collection would be much hollower. I must especially thank Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, Sara Wylie, Lisa Messeri, Emily Mannix Wanderer, Xi Lin, Caterina Scaramelli, Nicole Labruto, and Grace Kim, all of who have helped me think anew about life, water, and sound. I have also been privileged to work with Neal Akatsuka, Caitlin Berrigan, Etienne Benson, David Bjarnason, Laurel Braitman, Marie Burks, Klara Capova, Stephanie Dick, Amah Edoh, Shreeharsh Kelkar, Wen-­Hua Kuo, Chihyung Jeon, Amy Johnson, Andres Lombana, Theresa MacPhail, Srikanth Mallavarapu, Burcu Mutlu, 193

Acknowledgments

Valerie Olson, Canay Özden-­Schilling, Tom Özden-­Schilling, Michael Rossi, Shira Shmuely, Hallam Stevens, Leandra Swanner, Sakari Tamminen, Michaela Thompson, Mitchell Whitelaw, and Lambert Williams. The MIT undergraduates Xan Chacko, Shahriar Kahn, and Caroline Rubin asked insightful questions about the fundamentals of anthropology that still have me scouting for answers. Sharp readers will have noted the repeated appearance in these acknowledgments of Heather Paxson. My colleague at MIT as well as my wife, she is my very best friend and collaborator in all things. Our son, Rufus Paxson Helmreich, has become our ever-­steadier coconspirator and confidant. My life with Heather and Rufus, buoyed as it is by their limitless love, keeps me sane, safe, and sound.

194

NOTES

SOUNDING LIFE, WATER, SOUND 1. For bark beetles eating trees in New Mexico, listen to David Dunn, The Sound of Light in Trees (Earthear, 2006) and read Hugh Raffles, “The Sound of Global Warming,” in Insectopedia (New York: Pantheon, 2010). On asthma, “The Asthma Files: A Collective Inquiry into Complex Conditions,” http://theasthmafiles.org/, accessed June 26, 2014. 2. On birdsong, Joeri Bruyninckx, “Sound Sterile: Making Scientific Field Recordings in Ornithology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 127–­150. On sound in scientific laboratories, Cyrus Mody, “The Sounds of Science: Listening to Laboratory Practice,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 30, no. 2 (2005): 175–­198, and Ernst Karel, Heard Laboratories (and/OAR, 2010). 3. On the history of stethoscopy, Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (New York: Zone, 2011), 202–­221. On contemporary stethoscopy, Tom Rice, “Sounding Bodies: Medical Students and the Acquisition of Stethoscopic Practice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 298–­319. On yeast sound, Sophia Roosth, “Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplasmic Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 332–­350. On fetal ultrasound, Lisa M. Mitchell and Eugenia Georges, “Baby’s First Picture: The Cyborg Fetus of Ultrasound Imaging,” in Cyborg Babies: From Techno-­Sex to Techno-­Tots, ed. Robbie Davis-­Floyd and Joseph Dumit (New York: Routledge, 1998), 105–­124. On ultrasound for zooplankton classification, Paul L. D. Roberts and Jules S. Jaffe, “Classification of Live, Untethered Zooplankton from Observations of Multiple-­Angle Scatter,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124, no. 2 (2008): 796–­802. The sound of different biologies also points to diverse sorts of biologists, having distinct trainings and tunings. 4. Hans Jenny, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration, 3rd ed. (Newmarket, NH: MACROmedia Publishing, 2001), 276. Jenny’s 2001 book combines and adds to Kymatik: Wellen und Schwingungen mit ihrer Struktur und Dynamik / Cymatics: The Structure and Dynamics of Waves and Vibrations (Basel, Switzerland: Basilius, 1967) and Kymatic/Cymatics: Wave Phenomena, Vibrational Effects,

195

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Harmonic Oscillations with Their Structure, Kinetics and Dynamics, vols. 1 and 2. (Basel, Switzerland: Basilius, 1974). 5. John Stuart Reid, “Cymatics–­The Trigger for Life?,” Cymascope: Sound Made Visible, http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/biology.html, accessed June 26, 2014. Reid continues: “The angular aspects of the earliest primitive life forms and organisms is strong evidence that sound was involved in the shaping process.” 6. On the making acoustic of astronomical data, see Alexandra Supper, “Sublime Frequencies: The Construction of Sublime Listening Experiences in the Sonification of Scientific Data,” Social Studies of Science 44, no. 1 (2014): 34–­58. For scholarship on sound in outer space, consult William R. Macauley, ed., “Sounds of Space,” special issue, Journal of Sonic Studies 8 (2014), http://sonicstudies.org/. 7. Merriam Webster, online dictionary, “sound,” verb 6 and verb 4, http://www.merriam -webster.com/dictionary/sound?show=0&t=1377023382, accessed June 26, 2014; and Online Etymology Dictionary, “sound,” v.2 and n.1, http://www.etymonline.com /index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=sound&searchmode=none, accessed June 26, 2014. 8. For an allied argument from comparative philology, consult Joshua Katz, “Saussure’s Anaphonie: Sounds Asunder,” in Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses, ed. Shane Butler and Alex Purves (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2013), 167–­184. 9. Nature editorial, “Meanings of ‘Life.’ ” Nature 447 (2007): 1031–­1032, at 1031. 10. Ibid., 1032. 11. Ibid. 12. Felisa Wolfe-­Simon, Jodi Switzer Blum, Thomas Kulp, Gweneth W. Gordon, Shelley E. Hoeft, Jennifer Pett-­Ridge, John Stolz, et al., “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic instead of Phosphorus,” Science 332, no. 6034 (2011): 1163–­1166, doi: 10.1126/science.1197258. 13. NASA News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery, December 2, 2010. 14. Tobias J. Erb, Patrick Kiefer, Bodo Hattendorf, Detlef Günther, and Julia Vorholt, “GFAJ-­1 is an Arsenate-­Resistant, Phosphate-­Dependent Organism,” Science 337, no. 6093 (2012): 467–­470, doi:10.1126/science.1218455. 15. Ed Yong, “Giant Viruses Open Pandora’s Box: Genome of Largest Viruses Yet Discovered Hints at ‘Fourth Domain’ of Life,” Nature (July 18, 2013), doi:10.1038 /nature.2013.13410. 16. Even so, there are today new conversations between anthropologists of biology and biological anthropologists centering around how to think critically about the making of knowledge about human genes, bodies, populations. See Tim Ingold and Gísli Pálsson, Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Jonathan Marks The Alternative Introduction to Biological Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Alan H. Goodman, “Bringing Culture into Human Biology and Biology Back into Anthropology,” Presidential Address: 106th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., November 28–­December 2, 2007. American Anthropologist 115, no. 3 (2013): 359–­373, doi:10.1111/aman.12022. 17. See endnotes 1 and 2 in Chapter 1, “What Was Life?,” for a beginning bibliography. 18. Stefan Helmreich, “After Culture: Reflections on the Apparition of Anthropology in Artificial Life, a Science of Simulation,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 4 (2001): 196

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

613–­628. Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 162. Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–­575. And see Eben Kirksey, ed., The Multispecies Salon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). On “bio-­objects,” see Niki Vermueulen, Sakari Tamminen, and Andrew Webster, eds., Bio-­Objects: Life in the 21st Century (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012). See, e.g., Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Appeals to a self-­ evident “material” world have haunted science studies before. Some readers may recall Harry Collins and Steven Yearley, “Epistemological Chicken,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 301–­326, and Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 343–­ 368. Collins and Yearley accused Callon and Latour, with their emphases on nonhuman agency, of smuggling in unreflexive realist and materialist stories about the world. I think Callon and Latour’s actor network meant, rather, to track how materiality as such emerged from practices of connection and association, rather than preexisting these. The philosopher Ian Hacking has experimented with the idea of “looping” kinds—­ kinds (his examples are historically emergent psychiatric categories) that, through social enunciation, come to be inhabited and experienced as real. Hacking posits that looping effects are particularly germane to human classifications of humans. See Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 351–­383. Much of Sounding the Limits of Life could be read as an argument for extending the looping analytic to non­ human phenomena. Hasok Chang, Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012). See also Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of “Stuff ” (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985). These works argue against philosophical claims that there exist essences outside signification. See Hilary Putnam, “Meaning and Reference,” Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973): 699–­711, which imagines that “H2O” has a presymbolic, unambiguous, relation to the word “water.” Jamie Linton, What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction (Van­couver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). Compare Eric Swyngedouw, “The Political Economy and Political Ecology of the Hydro-­social Cycle,” Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education 142 (2009): 56–­60, and ­Jamie Linton and Jessica Budds, “The Hydrosocial Cycle: Defining and Mobilizing a Relational-­ Dialectical Approach to Water,” Geoforum (2013): doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2013 .10.008. For bibliographic pointers to recent work in the anthropology of water, see Chapter 8, “Nature/Culture/Seawater.” Look also to Ben Orlove and Steve Caton, “Water Sustainability: Anthropological Approaches and Prospects,” Annual Review of 197

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Anthropology 39 (2010): 401–­415, and Kristen Hastrup, “Water and the Configuration of Social Worlds: An Anthropological Perspective,” Journal of Water Resources and Protection 5 (2013): 59–­66. Hastrup leads the Waterworlds research team at the University of Copenhagen, anthropologists who study melting ice, rising seas, and drying lands (http://waterworlds.ku.dk/about_waterworlds/, accessed May 26, 2014). For work on water as infrastructure, start with Ashley Carse, “Nature as Infrastucture: Making and Managing the Panama Canal Watershed,” Social Studies of Science 42, no. 4 (2012): 539–­563, and Lisa Björkman, “Un/known Waters: Navigating Everyday Risks of Infrastructural Breakdown in Mumbai,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 497–­517. Thanks to Caterina Scaramelli for essential conversations on water and anthropology. 27. See, e.g., Veronica Strang, The Meaning of Water (Oxford: Berg, 2004) for such a universalist view. See Veronica Strang, ed., Waterworlds: Anthropology in Fluid Environments (New York: Berghahn, forthcoming) for an approach that substantially revises Strang 2004. 28. On the multiple, Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 29. See Jessica Barnes, “Mixing Waters: The Reuse of Agricultural Drainage Water in Egypt,” Geoforum (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.11.019, accessed November 24, 2014. 30. Marilyn Strathern, After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 31. The version here does not include the ethnographic interludes of its original form; those stories appear in full in Alien Ocean. 32. Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 33. Seth Kim-­Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-­Cochlear Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2009), 137. 34. Michel Chion, “Un langage pour décrire les sons,” Programm-­Bulletin du G.R.M 16:39–­75, at 65. Translation in Jean-­Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. from the French by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Electronic composer Louis Barron, who with Bebe Barron in 1956, crafted the Theremin soundtrack for Forbidden Planet, proposed something like this when he described a sound made with a cybernetic circuit as “a living thing . . . crying out, expressing itself.” Quoted in Ted Greenwald, “The Self-­Destructing Modules behind the Revolutionary 1956 Soundtrack of Forbidden Planet,” Keyboard Magazine February 1986: 54–­65. Bebe Barron wrote that listening to one of her sound creations was like “watching a primitive life form come into existence and then fade away.” Quoted in Nicholas Laudadio, “What Dreams Sound Like: Forbidden Planet and the Electronic Musical Instrument,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 17, no. 4 349, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/What+dreams+sound+like%3a+ (2007): 334–­ Forbidden+Planet+and+the+electronic+musical...-a0218817918, accessed June 28, 2014. For more on the Barrons, see Christina Dunbar-­Hester, “Listening to Cyber­ netics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950–­1980,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35, no. 1 (2010): 113–­139. 198

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35. Tara Rodgers, “ ‘What, for Me, Constitutes Life in a Sound?’: Electronic Sounds as Lively and Differentiated Individuals,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 509–­530. 36. The bibliography is ballooning but looks something like this: Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966); Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977); Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-­Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–­1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Michael Bull and Les Back, eds, The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003); John Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Jim Drobnik, ed. Aural Cultures (Toronto, ON, YYZ Books, 2004); Veit Erlmann, ed., Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Jean-­François Augoyard and Henry Torgue, eds., Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (Montreal, QC: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2005); Aden Evens, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Alexander Weheyile, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-­Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Casey O’Callaghan, Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Pnina Avidar, Raviv Ganchrow, Julia Kursell, eds., “Immersed: Sound and Architecture,” special issue, OASE 78 (2009); Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone, 2010); Gustavus Stadler, ed., “The Politics of Recorded Sound,” special issue, Social Text 102 (2010); David Suisman and Susan Strasser, Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Tara Rodgers, Pink Noise: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (New York: Continuum, 2010); Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2010); Rey Chow and James A. Steintrager, eds., “The Sense of Sound,” special issue, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, nos. 2 & 3 (2011); Greg Goodale, Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (Urbana: University of Illinois 199

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

200

Press, 2011); Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing (London: Continuum, 2011); Schwartz, Making Noise; Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher, eds., Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012); Michael Goodard, Benjamin Halligan and Paul Hegarty, eds., Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise (London: Continuum, 2012); Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012); Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–­1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), David Cecchetto, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Greg Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle, eds., Sound Music Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-­Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds., Keywords in Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). I’ve left out many publications on music and sound art that can also be considered central. Mark Hansen, “Media Theory,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23, no. 2–­3 (2006): 297–­305, at 300. And compare Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). Natasha Myers, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). See, for example, Myra Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Jonathan Sterne and Tara Rodgers, “The Poetics of Signal Processing,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, no. 2 & 3 (2011): 31–­53, at 45. See Goodman, Sonic Warfare. For a history-­of-­science account of the life of one formalism, see David Kaiser, Drawing Things Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Related, but not identical, to the kinds of formalism examined by historians of science, are those associated with art and art history. See Sadia Shirazi, introduction to the special issue on formalisms, Thresholds 33(2007): 8–­9. New work in the history of mathematics is an intriguing place to look for scholars arguing that abstractions themselves—­whether they represent something “real” or not—­have material histories. See, e.g., Stephanie Dick, “AfterMath: The Work of Proof in the Age of Human-­Machine Collaboration,” Isis 102, no. 3 (2011), 494–­505, and Alma Steingart, “A Group Theory of Group Theory: Collaborative Mathematics and the ‘Uninvention’ of a 1000-­Page Proof,” Social Studies of Science 42, no. 2 (2012): 185–­213. I thank Alma Steingart for thinking with me on this topic. Steingart pointed to a useful reflection by mathematician Richard Courant, who wrote that, the “basic fact one must bear in mind [is] that the terms ‘concrete,’ ‘abstract,’ ‘individual,’ and ‘general’ have no stable or absolute meaning in mathematics. They refer primarily to a frame of mind, to a state of knowledge and to the character of mathematical substance. What is already absorbed as familiar, for example, is readily taken to be

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44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

concrete. The words ‘abstraction’ and ‘generalization’ describe not static situations or end results but dynamic processes directed from some concrete stratum to some ‘higher’ one.” Richard Courant, “Mathematics in the Modern World,” Scientific American 211, no. 3 (1964): 40–­49, at 44. The process philosopher Isabelle Stengers puts the matter in an exhortatory register: “We cannot think without abstractions: they cause us to think, they lure our feelings and affects. But our duty is to take care of our abstractions, never to bow down in front of what they are doing to us—­ especially when they demand that we heroically accept the sacrifices they entail, the insuperable dilemmas and contradictions in which they trap us.” “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism,” Subjectivity 22 (2008): 38–­59, at 50. Compare Casper Bruun Jensen, “Continuous Variations: The Conceptual and the Empirical in STS,” Science, Technology & Human Values 39, no. 2 (2014): 192–­213. In an argument resonant with the one I make here, Jensen posits that “a careful consideration of the making of ‘concepts’ out of the ‘empirical’ study shows that the two cannot be separated except post hoc” (197). Jensen’s notion of the “conceptual” overlaps with my word “abstraction,” a more form-­oriented way of putting things. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 13. And the color line has not been left behind. For a reading of the relation between climate change and the racialized geography of the United States see Deirdre Smith. “Why the Climate Movement Must Stand with Ferguson,” 350.org: http://350.org/how-racial-justice-is-integral-to-confronting-climate-crisis/, August 30, 2014, accessed January 8, 2015. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–­18. Donna Haraway, “SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble” (keynote talk, at Knowings and Knots, University of Alberta, Canada, March 24, 2014). If industrial humanity’s signature can now be read in the geological record, the fortunes of the “Anthropocene” as an increasingly hot keyword in anthropology can be charted by a look at the 2014 program of the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, which saw scores of appearances, up from zero in 2013 (see John Hartigan, “Multispecies vs Anthropocene,” Somatosphere, December 12, 2014, http://somatosphere.net/2014/12/multispecies-vs-anthropocene.html). In querying the attraction of the Anthropocene to scholars in critical natural and social sciences as well as in the humanities and arts, Haraway has been joined by several others committed to pointing out the not-­so-­hidden universalism, Eurocentrism, human exceptionalism, and—­at times—­androcentrism often animating the notion of the Anthropocene. See, e.g., Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 1–­18; Greg Garrard, Gary Handwerk, and Sabine Wilke, “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 149–­153; Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 1–­18; and Peter Sloterdijk, “The Anthropocene: A Process-­state on the Edge of Geohistory?,” in Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain | Vapor | Ray, ed. Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 257–­271. Look also to economist Kate Raworth’s October 16, 2014 tweet about the absence of women scientists 201

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on the Anthropocene Working Group: “The Anthropocene is bad enough. Spare us a Manthropocene,” https://twitter.com/KateRaworth/status/522993208650108930; consult http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/ for more about the working group. For a critical feminist rethinking of how the contemporary geo-­historical era might be imagined, see the program of the Anthropocene Feminism conference, held April 10–­12, 2014, at the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) at the University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee: http://c21uwm.com/anthro pocene/conference-videos/, keynoted by Elizabeth Povinelli’s “Four Figures of the Anthropocene.” And see Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), which names the “Anthrobscene” as the toxic material accompaniment of computational, tablet, and smartphone media culture, which, far from ushering the contemporary world into a “paperless” ecotopian sublime, fills the world with poisons consequent on producing, consuming, and discarding the devices that permit (some) people to make global assessments at all. 49. Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Lost World: Fossils of the Future,” New Yorker, December 23 and 30, 2013: 48–­56. 50. Timothy Morton, in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), suggests that processes like climate change are “hyperobjects,” entities that exist at scales beyond the capacities of everyday, embodied apprehensions. 51. American Institute of Physics, “Glaciers Sizzle as They Disappear into Warmer Water,” American Institute of Physics Newsroom, http://www.newswise.com/articles /glaciers-sizzle-as-they-disappear-into-warmer-water, accessed December 2, 2013.

CHAPTER 1: WHAT WAS LIFE? 1.

202

Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987); Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1992); Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Valerie Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Robbie Davis-­Floyd and Joseph Dumit, eds., Cyborg Babies: From Techno-­sex to Techno Tots (New York: Routledge, 1998); Sarah Franklin and Helena Ragoné, eds., Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Susan Kahn, Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Gay Becker, The Elusive Embryo: How Men and Women Approach New Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Linda Layne, Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America (New York: Routledge, 2002); Marcia Inhorn, Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2003); Heather Paxson, Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) and Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013);

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2.

Susan Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Sarah Franklin and Celia Roberts, Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Lisa Jean Moore, Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Lynn Morgan, Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Aditya Bharadwaj and Peter Glasner, Local Cells, Global Science: The Rise of Embryonic Stem Cell Research in India (London: Routledge, 2009); Rene Almeling, Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Michi Knecht, Maren Klotz, and Stefan Beck, eds., Reproductive Technologies as Global Form (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2012); Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Elizabeth Roberts, God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Carrie Friese, Cloning Wildlife: Zoos, Captivity, and the Future of Endangered Animals (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Tine M. Gammeltoft, Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Onco­ Mouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997); Peter J. Taylor, Saul E. Halfon, and Paul N. Edwards, eds., Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Paul Brodwin, ed., Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Margaret Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Cori Hayden, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee, eds., Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two-­Culture Divide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, eds., Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences (Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2003); Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cells Lines in Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Celia Lowe, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Leslie Sharp, Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) and The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral Thinking in Highly Experimental Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-­First Century (Prince­ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Gísli Pálsson, Anthropology and the New Genetics 203

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Sandra Banford, Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas, eds., Biosocialities, Genetics, and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities (London: Routledge, 2007); Beatriz de Costa and Kavita Philip, eds., Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) and Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Eduardo Kac, ed., Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-­Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson, eds., Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Mike Fortun, Promising Genomics: Iceland and Decode Genetics in a World of Speculation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008); Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier, eds., Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Karen-­Sue Taussig, Ordinary Genomes: Science, Citizenship, and Genetic Identities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Paul Atkinson, Peter Glasner, and Margaret Lock, eds., The Handbook of Genetics & Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era (London: Routledge, 2009); Martin Weiss, ed., Bios und Zoë: Die menschliche Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 2009); Aihwa Ong and Nancy Chen, eds., Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Ian Whitmarsh and David S. Jones, eds., What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Timothy Choy, Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Duana Fullwiley, The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Sheila Jasanoff, ed., Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Michael J. Montoya, Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the Genetics of Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Aslihan Sanal, New Organs within Us: Transplants and the Moral Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Sherine Hamdy, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Kaushik Sunder Rajan, ed., Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Niki Vermueulen, Sakari Tamminen, and Andrew Webster, eds., Bio-­Objects: Life in the 21st Century (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012); Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee, eds., Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Nadia Abu Al-­Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Stefan Sperling, Reasons of Conscience: The Bioethics Debate in Germany (Chicago: University of California Press, 2013); Kelly E. Happe, The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); 204

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Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 3. William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971); Lynn Nyhart, Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800–­1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-­Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), and Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Soraya de Chaderavian, Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Staffan Müller-­Wille and Hans-­ Jörg Rheinberger, eds., Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture 1500–­1870 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Philip Thurtle, The Emergence of Genetic Rationality (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008), Sophia Roosth, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 4. Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997) and Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information, Developmental Systems and Evolution, 2nd rev. exp. ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Robert Mitchell and Philip Thurtle, eds., Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (New York: Routledge 2003); Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), The Global Genome (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005), and After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke, eds., Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersection of Media, Bioscience, and Technology (­Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008); Robert Mitchell, Bioart and the Vitality of Media (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2010); Thierry Bardini, Junkware (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), Natasha Myers, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 5. Wittgenstein defined “form of life” in Philosophical Investigations as a frame of reference within which linguistic action becomes meaningful (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science have employed the term to describe scientific, religious, economic, and ethical worldviews. See e.g., Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Michael 205

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M. J. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 6. Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, Biologie, oder, Philosophie der lebenden Natur für Naturforscher und Aerzte (Göttingen, 1802), 16. See also Jean-­Baptiste Lamarck, Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants (Paris, 1802), for a parallel coinage of “biology.” 7. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944). Doyle, On Beyond Living; Keller, Refiguring Life; Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? See François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973) for a strong claim about life as a program. See Michael Murphy and Luke O’Neill, eds., What Is Life? The Next Fifty Years: Speculations on the Future of Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), a commemorative reflection on Schrödinger’s legacy. For a contrasting view of life from one of his contemporaries, see J.B.S. Haldane, What Is Life? (New York: Boni and Gaer, 1947). This book, from one of Britain’s most noted geneticists, argues that a clear view of life will come when biologists “adopt Marxism as a working hypothesis about how men behave and how changes, both in nature and in society, occur” (p. v). 8. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What Is Life? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 9. A mission statement and program for Cornell’s “Futures of Life: Acquiring and Creating Anticipatory Knowledge,” sponsored by the university’s Department of Science and Technology Studies, was once available at http://www.sts.cornell.edu /Workshop2007/index.htm. Berkeley’s “What’s Left of Life” conference was once documented at http://whatsleftoflife.org/. What’s left of these websites may be found in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/web/. 10. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Originally published as Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966). And see Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–­248. Foucault wrote, “Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history” (139). Recent writers on biotechnology are remixing this claim something like this: Scholars want to write accounts of biology in the early twenty-­first century; but they do not realize that biology is transforming, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for two hundred years is no longer valid. And that, if biology has been undone, there is a very simple reason for it: that life itself has been disassembled and revealed to be an effect, not an originary force. All that now exist are living things and their parts, which are viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by biotechnology. 11. Doyle, Wetwares, 21. 12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 143. Originally published as Histoire de la sexualité 206

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13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976). See also Roberto Esposito, “Totalitarianism or Biopolitics? Concerning a Philosophical Interpretation of the Twentieth Century,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4 (2008): 633–­644. Stefan Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Stefan Helmreich, “The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination,” Grey Room 23, no. 4 (2006): 66–­95. There are many other candidates for limit biologies, not all of them historically new. Take, for example, centuries-­old investigations into cryptobiosis, the process through which organisms (such as tardigrades) can deanimate—­fully stop their metabolic activity—­as they dry out or freeze, only to reanimate much later when conditions are right. Such biologies ask us to consider what tempo and cadence organic processes must possess to count as alive. See Sophia Roosth, “Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology,” Grey Room 57 (2014): 56–­81. For a history of the term “life form,” see chapter 2. Quoted in Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, 2. In a 2010 draft of “Modeling, Building, Writing: A History of Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems,” his 2012 Harvard University History of Science dissertation, Lambert Williams proposed the concept of “difformation” to describe “a divergence in form from, or lack of conformity with, some pre-­existing standard or reference point, practice, mode of institutionalization, or body of knowledge.” One might substitute his “difformation” for my deformation and experiment with the results. See Christopher G. Langton, ed., Artificial Life (Redwood City, CA: Addison-­Wesley, 1989). For secondary literature from the humanities and social sciences, see Claus Emmeche, The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging Science of Artificial Life (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Lars Risan, Artificial Life, A Technoscience Leaving Modernity? An Anthropology of Subjects and Objects (Cand polit. diss., University of Oslo, 1996); Doyle, On Beyond Living and Wetwares; Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature; Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine (London: Routledge, 1998); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Sarah Kember, Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (London: Routledge, 2003); Chris Kelty and Hannah Landecker. “A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-­systems, and Film,” Grey Room 17 (2004): 30–­63; Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Jessica Riskin, ed., Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 2008); Robert Geraci, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Christopher G. Langton, “Toward Artificial Life,” Whole Earth Review 58 (1988): 74–­79, at 74. Quoted in Kevin Kelly, “Designing Perpetual Novelty: Selected Notes from the Second Artificial Life Conference,” in Doing Science: The Reality Club, ed. John Brockman (New York: Prentice Hall Trade, 1991), 1. 207

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22. Tom Ray, “An Evolutionary Approach to Synthetic Biology: Zen and the Art of Creating Life,” Artificial Life 1, no. 1/2 (1994): 179–­210, at 183, emphasis added. 23. Ray, “An Evolutionary Approach,” 184. 24. Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information, 27. 25. See Carol Delaney, “The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate,” Man 21, no. 3 (1986): 494–­513. Such a reading aligns with Hayles’s interpretation of an Artificial Life program that was created by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a program that Hayles argued summoned imagery of a “male programmer mating with a female program to create progeny whose biomorphic diversity surpasses the father’s imagination.” See N. Katherine Hayles, “Narratives of Evolution and the Evolution of Narratives,” in Cooperation and Conflict in General Evolutionary Processes, ed. John Casti and Anders Karlqvist (New York: John Wiley & Sons 1994), 125. And see Stefan Helmreich, “The Historical and Epistemological Ground of von Neumann’s Theory of Self-­Reproducing Automata and Theory of Games,” in Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life, ed. Francisco Varela and Paul Bourgine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 385–­391. 26. Christopher G. Langton, “Artificial Life,” in Artificial Life, ed. Christopher G. Langton, (Redwood City, CA, 1989), 2. 27. See Geraci, Apocalyptic AI. 28. As I observed in Silicon Second Nature, while many people who imagined themselves part of this evolutionary vanguard were at the fringes of their professional fields, many also occupied positions of gender, race, class, and national privilege. Like some of today’s synthetic biologists who seek to immortalize themselves by transcribing their names into the DNA sequences of artifactual creatures, many Artificial Life scientists were white American men who fashioned themselves as revolutionary visionaries. Compare Roosth, Synthetic, on the scientists J. Craig Venter and George Church, both of whom explicitly seek to immortalize themselves in artificial genomes—­and both of whom have also taken to sporting white beards, which, regardless of their intentions, the popular press cannot help but point to as symbols of how these men might be “playing God,” where the God in question is the whiskered patriarchal figure of Judeo-­Christianity. 29. Karl Sims, “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition,” Artificial Life 1, no. 4 (1994): 353–­372. N. Katherine Hayles, in “Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 1 (1999): 1–­26, discusses how technically and narratively to parse the functioning of Sims’s program. While I agree with Hayles that an “adequate account of the simulation . . . requires expanding the boundaries of the system beyond the programs and computer to include the virtual world, the creator, and the viewer,” I disagree that this presses us to take on board a model of ourselves as part of a “distributed cognitive system” (6). I find this move reifies “cognition” on the very calculative model Sims uses to motivate his claim for the ontological status of his world. Far from attending to “what virtual creatures can teach us,” this gambit surrenders to their rhetoric. Chris Kelty and Hannah Landecker’s “A Theory of Animation,” which argues that Artificial Life models not only posit, but instantiate, theories of life, is more agnostic about the ultimate “nature” of life or cognition. I find compelling, too, Doyle’s argument in On Beyond Living that “what makes possible the substitution of the signs of life for life 208

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30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

is the reproducibility of ‘lifelike behavior,’ a reproducibility that ultimately points to the fact that A-­Life organisms are themselves reproductions, simulations cut off from any ‘essence’ of life” (122). More promising than chasing after an essence of “life itself ” may be attending to how “liveliness” is a narrative effect; see Natasha Myers, “Modeling Proteins, Making Scientists: An Ethnography of Pedagogy and Visual Cultures in Contemporary Structural Biology,” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. Stefan Helmreich, “ ‘Life is a Verb’: Inflections of Artificial Life in Cultural Context.” Artificial Life 13, no. 2 (2007): 189–­201 reviews secondary literature on Artificial Life and also suggests that the present tense transitivity of life-­as-­we-­know-­it and the modal compound conditional mood of life-­as-­it-­could-­be could be joined by a whole series of possible other conjugations of “life as a verb,” including the future progressive of life-­as-­it-­will-­be-­becoming. Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. from the French by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Marilyn Strathern, After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See, once again, the Nature editorial, “Meanings of ‘Life.’ ” Nature 447 (2007): 1031–­ 1032, which champions “Synthetic biology’s view of life as a molecular process” as an antidote to moral claims about the life status of embryos, but at the same time argues that “we might now be permitted to dismiss the idea that life is a precise scientific concept,” 1032. See Bill Curtsinger, Extreme Nature: Images from the World’s Edge (Pittsburg, CA: White Star, 2005); Mark Carwardine, Extreme Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). W. Ford Doolittle, “Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree,” Science 284 (1999): 2124–­2128, at 2128. Frederic Bushman, Lateral DNA Transfer: Mechanisms and Consequences (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2002), 2. For recent work on how “race” and singular racial identity as an imagined “biogenetic” category is fracturing in the days of genetic genealogy, as people search for “ancestrally informative” portions of DNA and find instead a maze of possible ancestral identifications, see Whitmarsh and Jones, eds., What’s the Use of Race; Wailoo, Nelson, and Lee, eds., Genetics and the Unsettled Past; Nadia Abu Al-­Haj, The Genealogical Science. Eric Bapteste, Yan Boucher, Jessica Leigh, and W. Ford Doolittle, “Phylogenetic Reconstruction and Lateral Gene Transfer,” Trends in Microbiology 12, no. 9 (2004): 406–­411, at 409. The authors argue that “a framework for natural classification should be based on a true understanding of historical processes,” though they also caution that “there might never be a perfectly natural classification” (409). See Miguel García-­Sancho, Biology, Computing, and the History of Molecular Sequencing: From Proteins to DNA, 1945–­2000 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Hallam Stevens, Life Out of Sequence: A Data-­Driven History of Bioinformatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Adrian Mackenzie, “Bringing Sequences to Life: How Bioinformatics Corporealizes Sequence Data,” New Genetics and Society 22, no. 3 (2003): 315–­332. For an 209

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42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 210

ethnographic account of how this instability shapes notions of the normal and pathological, see Carlo Caduff, “The Semiotics of Security: Infectious Disease Research and the Biopolitics of Informational Bodies in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 2 (2012): 333–­357. The phrase is from Brian Cantwell Smith, On the Origin of Objects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). This corroborates Haraway’s sense that, in the genomic age, “nature [has become] a genetic engineer that continually exchanges, modifies, and invents new genes across various barriers” (Modest_Witness, 225). For a cultural analysis of this practice, see Adrian Mackenzie, Claire Waterton, Rebecca Ellis, Emma K. Frow, Ruth McNally, Lawrence Busch, and Brian Wynne, “Classifying, Constructing, and Identifying Life: Standards as Transformations of ‘The Biological,’ ” Science, Technology, & Human Values 38, no. 5 (2013): 701–­702. Fernando de la Cruz and Julian Davies, “Horizontal Gene Transfer and the Origin of Species: Lessons from Bacteria,” Trends in Microbiology 8, no. 3 (2000): 128–­133, at 128. Venter, on Voice of America’s “Our World,” March 17, 2007, transcript at http:// www.voanews.com/content/a-13–2007–03–16-voa3–66542687/554255.html, accessed January 5, 2015. Sallie W. Chisholm “Prochlorococcus: How to Dominate the Oceans with 2000 Genes,” Biological Engineering Seminar Series, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 22 April 2004. Francisco Varela, Principles of Biological Autonomy. The North-­Holland Series in General Systems Research, Vol. 2 (New York: Elsevier North-­Holland, 1979), 13. One might also call it, following a recent coinage of Scott Gilbert, symbiopoiesis. See Scott F. Gilbert, Emily McDonald, Nicole Boyle, Nicholas Buttino, Lin Gyi, Mark Mai, Neelakantan Prakash, and James Robinson, “Symbiosis as a Source of Selectable Epigenetic Variation: Taking the Heat for the Big Guy,” Philosophical Trans­ actions of the Royal Society, B 365(1540)(2010): 671–­678. Robert D. Macelroy, “Some Comments on the Evolution of Extremophiles,” Biosystems 6 (1974): 74–­75. For analysis of this rhetorical move, see Stefan Helmreich, “Extraterrestrial Relativism,” in Debbora Battaglia, David Valentine, and Valerie Olson, eds., special section, “Extreme: Humans at Home in the Cosmos,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2012): 1127–­1141. David S. McKay, Simon Clemett, Kathie L. Thomas-­Keprta, and Everett K. Gibson, “The Classification of Biosignatures,” Abstract 12873, NASA Astrobiology Institute General Meeting, February 10–­12, 2003, Tempe, AZ, Astrobiology 2, no. 4 (2002): 625–­626. David J. Des Marais, Martin O. Harwit, Kenneth W. Jucks, James F. Kasting, Douglas N.C. Lin, Jonathan I. Lunine, et al., “Remote Sensing of Planetary Properties and Biosignatures on Extrasolar Terrestrial Planets,” Astrobiology 2, no. 2 (2002): 153–­181, at 154. David D. McKay, Everett K. Gibson, Jr., Kathie L. Thomas-­Keprta, Hojatollah Vali, Christopher S. Romanek, et al., “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001,” Science 273 (1996): 924–­930, at 928. McKay et al., “Search for Past Life on Mars,” 929.

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54. Baruch S. Blumberg, “The NASA Astrobiology Institute: Early History and Organization,” Astrobiology 2, no. 3 (2003): 463–­470, at 470. 55. Or, perhaps, revelation. The Vatican has taken a keen interest in astrobiology, with a Study Week on Astrobiology convened by the Pontifical Academy of Science in November 2009. The abductive charter of astrobiology also leaves it open to the possibility of hoaxes. For an intriguing argument on this score, read Sarah Kember, “Media, Mars and Metamorphosis,” Culture Machine 11 (2010): 31–­40. 56. Abduction need not refer only to cases from the future. Abduction can also refer to possible future knowledge of the past—­as, for example, about a revealed or repudiated ancestor. See Stefan Helmreich, “Induction, Deduction, Abduction, and the Logics of Race and Kinship: Commentary on Stephan Palmié’s “Genomics, Divination, ‘Racecraft,’  ” ” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (2007): 228–­230. 57. Paul Davies, “Searching for Multiple Origins of Life,” in Program, Study Week on Astrobiology, November 6–­10, 2009, Vatican City, 2009, 10. 58. Cooper, Life as Surplus. 59. Such an account would view “biological theory” as an effect of capital, much as Terry Eagleton saw “theory” as a cultural production of capital, though one that, as a fragment of “culture,” inherited a demand to be reflexive about its conditions of emergence. See Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Look to Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 723–­742, for a caution against claims of this sort. 60. See Valerie Olson, “The Ecobiopolitics of Space Medicine,” Medical Anthropology 29, no. 2 (2010): 170–­193. 61. W.J.T Mitchell, “The Rights of Things,” foreword to Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xiii. See also Mariam Fraser, Sarah Kember, and Celia Lury, “Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 1 (2005): 1–­14. 62. Eduardo Kac and Avital Ronell, Life Extreme: An Illustrated Guide to New Life (Cambridge, MA: Dis Voir, 2008), 13. 63. See Sophia Roosth, “Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication,” Science in Context 26, no. 1 (2013): 153–­171. 64. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). And see Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life for a claim about a contemporary crisis of meaning in the life sciences. 65. Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Rane Willerslev, “ ‘An Anthropological Concept of the Concept’: Reversibility among the Siberian Yukaghirs,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: 527–­544. See also Marilyn Strathern, “Sharing, Stealing and Borrowing Simultaneously,” in Ownership and Appropriation, ed. Veronica Strang and Mark Busse (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 23–­42. 66. Corsín Jiménez and Willerslev, “Anthropological Concept,” 538. Corsín Jiménez and Willerslev ask anthropologists to be mindful of their own definitional work: “We might do more justice to ethnography if we attend to its own moments of re-­description and look to how indigenous concepts find residency in their own accounts: from sexual seduction to love, to guile, and death, and so on. What is needed, then, is to open up within every conceptual description an ulterior space for future descriptions” (537). 211

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67. 68. 69. 70.

Ibid., 528. Ibid., 537. Ibid., 538. And no surprise that, faced with the implosion of their enterprise, Artificial Life scientists have lately claimed that they seek to embed their science within the larger study of “living technology.” See Mark A. Bedau, John S. McCaskill, Norman H. Packard, and Steen Rasmussen, “Living Technology: Exploiting Life’s Principles in Technology,” Artificial Life 16, no. 1 (2010): 89–­97. 71. Lock, Twice Dead; João Beihl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Adriana Petryna, When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Erica Caple James, Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Vinh-­Kim Nguyen, The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Joseph Dumit, Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Hamdy, Our Bodies Belong to God; Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Anne Pollock, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Rachel Prentice, Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); S. Lochlann Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Alice Street, Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastucture and Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Hospital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). For a multispecies account of the entanglement of biopolitics and necropolitics, see Emily Mannix Wanderer, “Biologies of Betrayal: Judas Goats and Sacrificial Mice on the Margins of Mexico,” Biosocieties 10, no. 1 (2015): 1–23. 72. Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 73. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). 74. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the State and Politics of Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 2000). 75. John Schad, “Epilogue: Coming Back to ‘Life’,” in Life.After.Theory, ed. Michael Payne and John Schad (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 172. 76. Schad, “Epilogue,” 175–­176. 77. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. from the Italian by Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). It may be worth revisiting Haraway’s claim that “biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics,” which unasks the question of how to “ground” life or theory. See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the

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Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–­182, at 150. 78. This does not mean that the quest for theory in the life sciences or in the humanities is over. While Peter Galison has argued that the sciences now look not for grand theory but for “specific theory” (keyed to disciplines, subfields, etc.; see Peter Galison, “Specific Theory,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 [2004]: 379–­383), astrobiology-­ minded cosmologists in 2010 leapt on beyond the universal into the metaversal: the physicists Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez argued in Scientific American that “multiple other universes—­each with its own laws of physics—­may have emerged from the same primordial vacuum that gave rise to ours” and “may contain intricate structures and perhaps even some forms of life,” suggesting that our universe might not be the only one uniquely suited to life (Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez, “Looking for Life in the Multiverse,” Scientific American 302, no. 1 [2010]: 42–­49, 42). And while W.J.T. Mitchell has suggested that we might be moving into a moment of “medium theory”—­theory calibrated to moderate claims, retreating from epochal pronouncements—­Derek Attridge and Jane Elliott’s Theory After ‘Theory’ continues to keep putting one foot after another to overcome limits. See W.J.T. Mitchell, “Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 324–­335, and Derek Attridge and Jane Elliott, eds., Theory After ‘Theory’ (London: Routledge, 2011). See also Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney, eds., “What’s the Difference? The Question of Theory,” special issue, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2010) and Grant Farred and Michael Hardt, eds., “Theory Now,” special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2011).

CHAPTER 2: LIFE FORMS 1. Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems and Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life, The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems (Washington, DC: National Research Council, 2007). 2. Ibid., viii. 3. Henri Focillon, La vie des formes (Presses Universitaires de France, 1934), trans. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler as The Life of Forms in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 34. 4. Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (1893–­ 1913), ed. the Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 299. See also Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 25. 5. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 15. 6. Stefan Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Sophia Roosth, “Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication,” Science in Context 26, no. 1 (2013): 153–­171, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

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7. We also do not address the Aristotelian roots of notions of form in biology. While Aristotle’s conception of living things as the result of the impressing of active masculine form onto passive feminine matter continues to haunt models of vitality, we hold, along with Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), originally published as Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966), that “life itself ” does not have an independent epistemological or ontological status in ancient natural philosophy. This is contrary to arguments in G.E.R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore, and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For an account of the changing and multivalent semantics of “life,” see C. S. Lewis, “Life,” in Studies in Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 269–­305, in which Lewis suggests that “life” is “a linguistic gadget, a tool whereby we can conveniently manipulate the subject matter of biology” (294). 8. Williams, Keywords, 19. 9. Ibid., 10. 10. Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon,” Essays in Criticism 29, no. 3 (1979): 205–­224, and William Empson, “Compacted Doctrines,” New York Review of Books 24, no. 17 (1977): 21–­22. 11. Skinner, “Idea,” 207. 12. Our project has close relations with that of Tobias Cheung, “From the Organism of a Body to the Body of an Organism: Occurrence and Meaning of the Word ‘Organism’ from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” The British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 3 (2006): 319–­339. Cheung charts how the word “organism,” which once referred to “a principle of order became a generic name for individuals as natural entities or living beings.” His essay “retraces the exact dates of the first appearances of a key term in the life sciences and of its usage in different discursive settings” (319). He follows the lead of Georges Canguilhem and Rainer Specht, who “focused on key terms in academic disciplines to reconstruct epistemological shifts” (320). 13. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd, eds., Keywords in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 4. 14. Empson, “Compacted Doctrines.” 15. Alan Durant, “Raymond Williams’s Keywords: Investigating Meanings ‘Offered, Felt for, Tested, Confirmed, Asserted, Qualified, Changed,’ ” Critical Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2006): 1–­26. 16. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “life-­form.” 17. While we seek at every turn to find the first and diagnostic uses of “life form,” we cannot hope to have ferreted out every instance. Furthermore, the reader will note that while we spend goodly space on the German Lebensform, once we move into the English “life form,” we do not continue tracing allied words in German, Danish, French, or other languages. While one may argue that English became the dominant tongue in biology from the nineteenth century on, tracking kindred terms in other languages would be instructive. With Raymond Williams, we note that “to do such comparative studies adequately would be an extraordinary international collaborative enterprise” (Keywords, 20).

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18. While the earliest found use of Lebensform appeared in the 1830s, analogous terms surfaced earlier, notably in the work of Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who in Zoonomia (London, 1794) and The Temple of Nature (London, 1803) used phrases such as “organic form,” “animal form,” “living forms,” and “forms of life” to champion Linnaean taxonomy and enunciate his theories of evolutionary transformism; in those theories, sexual reproduction was the “chef d’oeuvre, the masterpiece of nature” that drove transmissible modifications in morphology (Darwin, in Janet Browne, “Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and ‘The Loves of the Plants,’ ” Isis 80, no. 4 (1989): 593–­621, at 603). Goethe and Schilling read Zoonomia in German translation. However, Erasmus Darwin’s theory was properly neither deductive nor inductive, and in his writing he used “form” to refer to external changes shaped by internal forces and irritations: As LIFE discordant elements arrests, Rejects the noxious, and the pure digests; Combines with Heat the fluctuating mass, And gives a while solidity to gas; Organic forms with chemic changes strive; Live but to die, and die but to revive! Immortal matter braves the transient storm, Mounts from the wreck, unchanging but in form (Temple, 22). 19. “Das Erscheinen neuer Lebensformen ist demnach kein äußerliches Hinzutreten, sondern von innen her bestimmt und im Leben selbst begründet.” Karl Friedrich Burdach, Die Physiologie als Erfahrungwissenschaft, vol. 3 (1826–­1840) (Leipzig, 1838), 721. Translation ours. 20. A more Platonic world of ideal forms seems to be what novelist Christoph Wieland had in mind in his use of the word Lebensform in Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen (Leipzig, 1801): “Now, patterns of all possible life forms, animal or human, lay together in the lap of Lachesis [that one of the three fates who chooses life destinies for all beings], spread out upon the earth so that each could pick the most suitable” (260; Nunmehr werden Muster aller möglichen Lebensformen, thierischer und menschlicher, die im Schooss der Lachesis beysammen lagen, auf der Erde vor ihnen ausgebreitet, damit jede diejenige wähle, die ihr am besten ansteht). Translation by Martin Weiss. In this account, Lebensform signals a space of possibility— “all possible life forms”—­within which life may materialize, informed not by the material world but rather preordained in some transcendent arena. 21. Karl Friedrich Burdach, Über die Aufgabe der Morphologie (Leipzig, 1817), quoted in Joan Steigerwald, “Goethe’s Morphology: Urphänomene and Aesthetic Appraisal,” Journal of the History of Biology 35, no. 2 (2002): 291–­328, 318. 22. Burdach’s and Goethe’s morphology are not here meant to be representative of German Romantic biology or of Naturphilosophie in general. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and the Jena Romantic circle took a different approach to the study of living form. For them, form was merely the visible manifestation of life’s inner forces—­the product, not the productive impetus. Further, “the interconnected activity of fundamental forces that Schelling attempted to comprehend could not be made visible or objective in the manner of [Alexander von] Humboldt’s or Goethe’s portrayals of nature. Indeed, Schelling argued that knowledge of how nature is constructed from invisible forces was necessarily a speculative science” (Joan Steiger­ wald, “The Cultural Enframing of Nature: Environmental Histories during the

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Early German Romantic Period,” Environment and History 6 (2000): 451–­496, at 481). For a history of the notion of form within German morphological research, see Lynn Nyhart, Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities 1800–­1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), which argues that nineteenth-­century anatomy and zoology cultivated distinct approaches to (animal) form largely because of the demands of distinctive disciplinary questions. Nyhart’s story suggests that there were intellectual and institutional trends in morphology that stayed the arrival of any fully general theory of living form. Lebensform appears in the work of the physician Karl Eberhard Schelling, a proponent of theories of animal magnetism and a student of Goethe and Blumenbach. He used Lebensform in a book based on a thesis he wrote under the direction of Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Über das Leben und seine Erscheinung [On life and its manifestations], (Landshut, 1806): Such a relative indifference between the inner and outer life form of a heavenly body exists, shown by the outer, which appears to us to be the common gravitation of all organic and in-­organic bodies against a center; just as from the other perspective, the common centrifugal tendency, which expresses itself in the coherence of the organic and inorganic bodies.—­But now, specific weight and coherence  .  .  . are the conditions by which the various bodies contribute to the expression of the outer life form of a heavenly body, or to the independent movement of a heavenly body.—­Therefore, because they have inherited both conditions, the organic bodies must also contribute to the expression of the outer life form of a heavenly body. On the other hand, the exterior reflexes of life in nature must themselves contribute to the expression of the inner life form of the same [life], which is why in organic nature as well it must be possible to demonstrate a point at which the relative indifference of the inner and outer is reflected by the inner. This happens in perception [Anschauung], which is the expression of the inner life form of a heavenly body in the same way as independent movement is that of the outer. Namely, as long as the perception is non-­judgmental and pure-­objective, without interference of a subjectivity, it is equally the sensorium of outer and inner things in the interior, in the same way, on the other hand, as brute weight, which somewhat unthinkingly sweeps away with it the inner and outer reflexes of life (44–­45; trans­ lation ours). Karl Eberhard Schelling’s differentiation of inner and outer life forms is indebted to his older brother, Friedrich, who distinguished between the product and production of form. But whereas Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling managed the problem of apprehending the inner force of a life form by referring to Kant’s reflective judgment of organized bodies and to the formative act of the artist, Karl Eberhard Schelling here suggests that both inner and outer forms may be comprehended through objective perception, a claim more in line with Goethe’s approach. Philipp Franz Walther, a follower of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, gave the title “Von den Formen des Lebens” (On the forms of life) to a chapter of his Physiologie des Menschen mit durchgängiger Rücksicht auf die comparative Physiologie der 216

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Thiere (Physiology of human beings with general consideration to the comparative physiology of animals; Landshut, 1808); the book treats reproduction, irritability and sensibility in plants and animals. Franz Joseph Schelver, also a follower of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, in 1822 wrote Lebens-­und Formgeschichte der Pflanzenwelt (History of life and form of the plant world; referred to in Goethe’s Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft [Writings on Natural Science] vol. 9, sec. 1: 262–­ 263). Thanks to Joan Steigerwald for this information. 23. Timothy Lenoir, “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology,” Isis 71, no. 1 (1980): 77–­108, and Timothy Lenoir, “The Eternal Laws of Form: Morphotypes and the Conditions of Existence in Goethe’s Biological Thought,” in Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler (Boston: Reidel, 1987), 17–­28. See also James L. Larson, Interpreting Nature: The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 24. Joan Steigerwald, “Natural Purposes and the Reflecting Power of Judgment: The Problem of the Organism in Kant’s Critical Philosophy,” European Romantic Review 21, no. 3 (2010): 291–­308. 25. Lenoir, “Kant,” 77. See Johannes Müller, “Schlussbemerkungen über die Entwickelungsvariationen der thierischen und menschlichen Lebensformen auf der Erde,” in Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen (Coblenz, 1840), 768–­778. 26. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Ecosystems, Organisms, and Machines,” Bioscience 55, no. 12 (2005): 1069–­1074, 1070. 27. Steigerwald, “Goethe’s Morphology,” 292. 28. Ibid., 311. 29. Ibid., 308. Steigerwald differs from our interpretation here, arguing that the “a priori” at stake may be principles of judgment—­the moorings of a transcendental idealism—­rather than finally accessible archetypes. We thank Steigerwald for bearing with our sometimes-­heterodox readings. 30. The comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s 1781 theory of the Bildungstrieb (building-­drive) posited a formative impulse in organisms “responsible for reproduction, nourishment, and restoration of parts.” Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 219. Bildungstrieb was for Blumenbach “a teleological cause fully resident in nature” (Richards, Romantic Conception, 221). It was “a secondary cause yielding immediate effects and itself . . . the effect of some hidden primary cause” (ibid., 277). Blumenbach imparted to his many students, including Alexander von Humboldt, Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer, and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, a morphologically­inflected Kantian philosophy in which scientific observation and aesthetic judgment were often entangled. See Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 31. Theodor Ludwig Wilhelm Bischoff, “Über den Bau des Crocodil-­Herzens, besonders von Crocodilus lucius,” in Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin, 1–­12 (Berlin, 1836), 10. Translation by Gisbert Helmreich. 32. “Denn die gemeinschaftliche Rede umschlingt doch (freilich in einer Lebensform weniger als in der aändern) das ganze Volk, und was auf sie bei Einzelnen gewirkt ist, geht doch mittelbar auf Alle über.” Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander von 217

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Humboldt, and Karl Heinrich Brandes, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s gesammelte Werke (Berlin, 1841), 529. Translation ours. 33. The historian of biology Joan Steigerwald (pers. comm., April 13, 2008) wrote that “the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Historical Dictionary of Philosophy) focuses entirely on the psychological, religious, philosophical and social uses of Lebensform, starting with Friedrich Schleiermacher (Psychol. Sämtl. Werke (1835–­ 64) 3: 6, 334f), then W. Wundt (Ethik 1886, 135f), and then moving on to 20th century figures.” This lineage of Lebensform takes us up to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953) used Lebensform—­ always translated as “form of life” in English—­to refer to a frame of reference within which linguistic action comes to have meaning. 34. Alexander von Humboldt, Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes (Paris, 1805), 54. Translated by Francesca Kern and Philippe Janvier in Foundations of Biogeography: Classic Papers with Commentaries, ed. M. Lomolino, D. Sax, and J. Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 35. Richards, Romantic Conception, 519. 36. Ibid., 520; see also Joan Steigerwald, “Figuring Nature, Figuring the (Fe)male: The Frontispiece to Humboldt’s Ideas Towards a Geography of Plants,” in Figuring it Out: Science, Gender and Visual Culture, ed. Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2006) on the relation of Humboldt’s ideas of plant form to Goethe’s. 37. Humboldt, Géographie, 56. Translated by Kern and Janvier. This sense of Lebensform conveys an intuition that what is being given form is matter. Lorenz Oken, a German Naturphilosoph who developed his theory of Physiophilosophie between 1802 and 1810, did not use Lebensformen in his work but hinted toward something like it repeatedly in fleshing out his notion of Urschleim, the fundamental substance that gives body to organic form. For example, in an English translation by Alfred Tulk: “Every Organic has issued out of mucus, is naught but mucus under different forms. Every Organic is again soluble in mucus; by which naught is meant, than that the formed mucus becomes one devoid of form.” Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy (London, 1847), 185. He wrote, too, that “the first organic forms, whether plants or animals, emerged from the shallow parts of the sea” (186). And, “so also in the succeeding forms of animal life the animal capsule or uterus originates” (355). Finally, “we can only perceive the forms of nature, because they all reside in ourselves, because we can create them” (461). Goethe promoted Oken as a professor at the University of Jena and attended Oken’s lectures, although Goethe and Oken’s relationship soured when both took credit for the vertebral theory of the skull. See Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 37. While writing Moby Dick, Herman Melville read Oken’s Elements of Physiophilosophy and inscribed a quotation from Oken’s book on the flyleaf of a copy of Moby-­Dick that he presented to a friend (see Jill Barnum, “Melville, Lorenz Oken, and Biology: Engaging the ‘Long Now,’” Leviathan 7, no. 2 (October 1) (2005): 41–­46, at 44). In Biology Takes Form, 1995, Lynn Nyhart wrote that “despite its strangeness to us, [the] view of development as the crucial link between the underlying, ideal order of living nature and the particular real-­world form of the individual organism 218

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provided a powerful set of assumptions for many life scientists in the first third or so of the nineteenth century, and continued to undergird the work of morphologists for decades thereafter” (43–­44). 38. “Die microscopischen Lebensformen des Südpol Meeres.” In the English edition, Lebensformen was translated as “animals,” so it is unlikely that Lebensformen found its way into English from this Humboldt text. A term more associated with Humboldt than Lebensform was Wuchsform (growth form). See Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse (Stuttgart, 1806). 39. “Diese Differenzirung oder Sonderung, diese stetig zunehmende Divergenz des menschlichen Charakters und der menschlichen Lebensform wird hervorgebracht durch die immer weiter gehende und tiefer greifende Arbeitstheilung der Individuen.” Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte: Gemeinverständliche wissenschaftliche (Berlin, 1868), 251, and Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin, 1866). Translation ours. 40. Quoted in William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function and Transformation (Cambridge, 1977), 161. 41. Richards, Tragic Sense, xviii. 42. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, Dei Welträthsel: Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie (Bonn, 1899). 43. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York, 1904). 44. Quoted in Richards, Tragic Sense, 119. 45. Quoted in ibid., 143. 46. See Ruth Rinard, “The Problem of the Organic Individual: Ernst Haeckel and the Development of the Biogenetic Law,” Journal of the History of Biology 14, no. 2 (1981): 249–­275. 47. Haeckel’s attention to symmetry, arrangement, and form strongly influenced Surrealist and Bauhaus artists, among them Ernst, Kandinsky, and Klee. Klee wrote that “form is the end, death. Form-­giving is movement, action. Form-­giving is life.” Quoted in Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 15. And “Starting from nature, the students will perhaps arrive at their own forms, and one day be themselves nature, construct like nature.” Quoted in Paul Rabinow, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 101. See also David Brody, “Ernst Haeckel and the Microbial Baroque,” Cabinet, no. 7 (Summer 2002): 25–­27. Klee’s demarcation of form and form-­giving hearkens back to Schelling and the Jena Romantics, who believed that “nature, in both its inorganic and organic forms, is that ‘middle’ [das Mittel] between productivity and product, between the free and the fixed, the middle that is ever in a state of formation” (Steigerwald, “Cultural Enframing,”483). Schelling and the Jena Romantics further claimed that the artistic sensibility could succeed where rational observation failed, spanning the gulf between life’s inner forces and outer manifestations by “comprehend[ing] how in natural products particular material is informed by a universal form” (484). The art connection suggests that another lineage for “life form” may be in life drawing. One touchstone for such a lineage may be Allan Harrison, “An Analysis of the Life-­ Form in Art,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 15, no. 2 (1875): 279–­350. 219

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48. Anonymous, “Electro-­Magnetism,” The New Age, Concordium Gazette, and Temperance Advocate 1, no. 16 (1844): 203–­205, at 204. 49. Anonymous, “Theories of Human Origin,” Anthropological Review 7, no. 24 (1869), 18. 50. When we wrote this article, the most recent entry for “life form” in the OED came in its second edition. Now, in 2015, the OED lists earlier mentions—­including some that we relayed to the editors as we wrote this essay. 51. Even if it is being argued against. In the late 1870s, Alexander Wilford Hall, a Methodist minister from New York, published The Problem of Human Life: Embracing the “Evolution of Sound” and “Evolution Evolved” (New York, 1878), in which he argued against both Darwinian theory and the wave theory of sound (see M.C.M. Wright, “A Short History of Bad Acoustics,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 120, no. 4 (2006): 1807–­1815). He wrote, “As the physical structure contains not only the different organs of the body but an almost infinite number and variety of separate molecules and units or real organic atoms, so the vital organism within each living creature contains not only the intrinsic life-­form of the specific being it inhabits but is a veritable microcosm or a little universe of life-­forms which include the intrinsic germs of all organic being wherever found” (Problem of Human Life, 415). Such a notion of natural history, in which the earliest organism had all future organisms latent within it, is a throwback to earlier articulations of “evolution” by such figures as the Dutch entomologist Jan Swammer­dam (Richards, Romantic Conception, 211). 52. On the last day of 1853, Charles Dickens asked about organisms to come in his poem “New Year’s Eve”: “In the dark yet lustrous Future / What life-­forms may be curl’d!” Charles Dickens, Household Words: A Weekly Journal, vol. 8. (London, 1854), 418. 53. The fact that Victorians routinely used “forms of life” and “organic forms” without once mentioning “life-­forms” reinforces our supposition that the English term was translated from German and that lebensformen and “life-­forms” did not emerge independently of one another. 54. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London, 1844), 149. 55. Adam Sedgwick, A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 5th ed. (Cambridge, 1850), clviii-­clix. 56. William Whewell, The Plurality of Worlds (Boston, 1855), 256. 57. John Hedley Brooke, “Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds: Observations on the Brewster-­Whewell Debate,” Annals of Science 34, no. 3 (1977): 221–­286. 58. David Brewster, More Worlds Than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian (London, 1854), 97. 59. Edward Higginson, Astro-­Theology; or The Religion of Astronomy (London, 1855), 80–­81. Higginson regularly used “forms of life” in his lectures to refer to organisms yet to be discovered. For example: “Surely we do not doubt the possibility of countless other forms of life, besides those with which we are actually acquainted!” (81) and, “The discriminating circumstances revealed through the recent wonderful improvements in the telescope, if they make it more difficult to conceive that certain globes in our system are inhabited by forms of life at all resembling those with which we are familiar, render it more difficult still to doubt it as regards those others which are proved to resemble our globe very nearly in the physical circumstances which specifically adapt it for human residence” (30). 220

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60. C. Lloyd Morgan, “Physiography,” American Naturalist 12, no. 10 (1878): 676. 61. Thomas Henry Huxley, Michael Foster, and Edwin Ray Lankester, The Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol. 3 (London, 1901), 521. 62. Alpheus S. Packard, “Life and Nature in Southern Labrador,” American Naturalist 19, no. 3 (1885): 269–­275, at 270, and “On Certain Factors of Evolution,” American Naturalist 22, no. 261 (1888): 808–­821, at 820. 63. Alpheus S. Packard, “The Philosophical Views of Agassiz,” American Naturalist 32, no. 375 (1898): 159–­164. 64. Louis Agassiz, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of America, vol. 1 (Boston, 1857), 134. 65. Richards, Romantic Conception, 532. Or, as Alfred Russel Wallace later argued, teleological forces acted on a multiplicity of possible life forms rather than upon a single species. Wallace wrote a letter to Arabella Buckley, Charles Lyell’s secretary, in March 1909 in which he said, “Another point I am becoming more and more impressed with is, a teleology of fundamental laws and forces rendering development of the infinity of life-­forms possible (and certain) in place of the old teleology applied to the production of each species.” Alfred Russel Wallace, in James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace Letters and Reminiscences, vol. 2 (London, 1916), 89–­90. 66. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London, 1859). Reprinted in Ernst Mayr, ed., On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 328. 67. Ibid., 484. And see Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-­Century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48, for a discussion of how this rhetorical swerve may have been meant to satisfy creationist readers. We here leave to the side discussions of life and form emanating from particularly religious (often Christian) traditions, which, if our framing were slightly different, would be instructive to track. Jakob Böhme’s 1621 De Signatura Rerum (translated into English as The Signature of All Things in the mid-­eighteenth century), a religious treatise on morality, sees a moral signature installed in each person: “as the vital Signature, that is, as the Form of Life is figured in the Time of the Fiat at the Conception, even so for its natural Spirit.” (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 11. The presence of the divine in various strains of vitalism (e.g., in the thinking of the Quaker mystic Anne Conway) may provide another history for the generation of ideas about life forms—­one relevant to contemporary New Age appropriations of particularly astrobiological speculation. 68. Christen Raunkiær, Planterigets Livsformer og deres Betydning for Geografien (København, 1907). 69. See William G. Smith, “Raunkiaer’s ‘Life-­Forms’ and Statistical Methods,” Journal of Ecology 1, no. 1 (1913): 16–­26. Raunkiær subsequently published this work in Danish (livsformen), French (types biologiques), and German (Lebensformen). Livsformer appeared in Danish prior to Raunkiær, however. Its earliest use in a biological context was as early as 1877, when C. J. Sehive wrote, “Boeck fremlagde Tegninger af mikroskopiske Organismer og gav en Udvikling angaaende disse elementaere Livsformer” (Boeck presented drawings of microscopic organisms and suggested a developmental sequence for these elementary life-­forms). Forhandlinger | Videnskabs-­Selskabet | Christiania (Christiania, 1877). Translation by 221

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Miriam Zeitzen. Ecological usage finds mid-­twentieth century advocacy in Adolf Remane, “Die Bedeutung der Lebensformtypen fur die Okologie,” Biologia Generalis 17 (1943): 164–­182, and Miklos F. D. Udvardy, “Notes on the Ecological Concepts of Habitat, Biotope and Niche,” Ecology 40, no. 4 (1959): 725–­728. 70. Quoted in Smith, “Raunkiaer’s ‘Life-­Forms,’ ”16. 71. Exemplary of this shift in meaning is the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s fanciful 1927 rumination on Jovian and Martian ecologies, which begins: “It is idle to guess the forms that life might take in conditions differing from those of our planet. . . . To avoid endless conjecture I shall assume that the required conditions of habitability are not unlike those on the earth, and that if such conditions obtain life will automatically make its appearance.” See Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), 170. 72. See Marc Mangel, ed., Classics of Theoretical Biology, part 1, special issue, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 52, no. 1/2 (1990): 1–­318. 73. D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917). Revised edition published as On Growth and Form: A New Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 5, 11. Thompson’s work differed from that of his contemporary, the French chemist Stéphane Leduc, who also sought to investigate similarities between the mechanics of physical things and organisms. Leduc believed that the abiotic generation of life forms at the nuclear level was possible through manipulating potassium nitrate, and that the making of life forms at the cellular level could be achieved through the proper play with metallic salts and alkaline silicates. He grew crystalline structures in the lab, “osmotic growths” he thought of as alive. According to Evelyn Fox Keller, Leduc “viewed the entire ensemble of functions that constitute life as itself ‘conditioned by form, that is, the external, internal and molecular forms of the living being.’ So extensive and so close were the resemblances he was able to observe that Leduc persuaded himself that here, in the forces of osmotic pressure, he had found the fundamental physical basis (or cause) of all of life’s most essential properties.” Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 28. Leduc’s critics said that Leduc was confusing analogies to living form with a theory of living form, and, indeed, the very notion of form with life itself. 74. Quoted in Keller, Making Sense, 64. 75. Keller, Making Sense, 61. This vision was, in its way, Goetheian. Keller writes that for Thompson, form evoked “both the aesthetic notion of ‘formal’ and the mathematical notion of ‘formalism,’ ” 54. 76. Thompson, On Growth and Form, 269. 77. C. H. Waddington, 1968. Towards a Theoretical Biology: An IUBS Symposium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 109. 78. Ibid., 111. 79. Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and Ricardo Uribe, “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model,” BioSystems 5 (1974): 187–­196. 80. Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 78. 81. Ibid., 87. 222

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82. Ibid., 176, 19. 83. Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-­Organization and Selection in Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 537. 84. See Doyle, Wetwares, 2003; For a review of concepts of life in primary and secondary literature on Artificial Life, see Stefan Helmreich, “ ‘Life is a Verb’: Inflections of Artificial Life in Cultural Context,” Artificial Life 13, no. 2 (2007): 189–­201. 85. Quoted in Kevin Kelly, “Designing Perpetual Novelty: Selected Notes from the Second Artificial Life Conference,” in Doing Science: The Reality Club, ed. John Brockman (New York: Prentice Hall Trade, 1991), 1. 86. Chris Langton, “Toward Artificial Life,” Whole Earth Review 58 (1988): 74–­79, at 74. 87. Quoted in Simple Rules . . . Complex Behavior, directed by Linda Feferman, (Santa Fe, NM, 1992), video, 13 min. See also Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmeyer, The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (Springer-­Verlag, New York, 1990). 88. Chris Langton, “What Is Artificial Life?,” the Digital Biology Project (2000), available at http:/www.biota.org/papers/cglalife.html. 89. www.jessesword.com/sf/view/12. 90. H. P. Lovecraft, The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), 114. While this is the earliest use of “life form” in science fiction literature we could identify, “form of life” did appear in Romantic and Victorian gothic fiction, as, for example, in Mary Shelley’s 1837 Falkner: “To the surgeon’s eye, a human body sometimes presents itself merely as a mass of bones, muscles, and arteries—­though that human body may contain a soul to emulate Shakespeare—­and thus there are moments when the wretched dissect the forms of life—­and contemplating only the outward semblance of events, wonder how so much power of misery, or the reverse, resides in what is after all but sleeping or waking.” Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 7 (London, 1996), 280–­281. See also Bram Stoker’s Dracula (London, 1897): “Despises the meaner forms of life altogether, though he dreads being haunted by their souls” (272). A use of “life form” preceding its appearance in science fiction appears in the writings of the late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­ century spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote about the coagulation of ectoplasm into anthropomorphisms: “It is conceivable that the thinner emanation of the clairvoyant would extend far further than the thick material ectoplasm, but have the same property of moulding itself into life, though the life forms would only be visible to the clairvoyant eye.” Arthur Conan Doyle, The Vital Message (New York, 1919), 150. Three years later, in 1922, Doyle would again employ the term to speculate on the origin of fairies. He summarized the theory of psychic researcher David Gow: “They are really life forms which have developed along some separate line of evolution, and which for some morphological reason have assumed human shape in the strange way in which Nature reproduces her types like the figures on the mandrake root or the frost ferns upon the window.” Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2006), 148–­149. 91. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, directed by Nicolas Meyer (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1982). From Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Del Rey/ Ballantine Books, 1979), 123: “ ‘Oh God,’ muttered Ford, slumped against a bulkhead. He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient 223

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life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.” Ursula K. Le Guin employs the acronym HILF—­high intelligence life forms—­in several of her novels and short stories, treating it as a category circumscribed both biologically and anthropologically. The titular protagonist of Rocannon’s World (New York: Ace Books, 1966) is “a hilfer, an ethnologist of the High Intelligence Life Forms” (17), a sort of interstellar salvage ethnographer who carries the “Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-­forms” (3; Le Guin uses “life form” and “life-­ form” interchangeably). Le Guin’s almost Humboldtian use of “life form” as congruent with both custom and morphology is unsurprising, as Le Guin, daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, often draws upon the ethnographic genre. As she explained in an interview with the Guardian: “Claude Levi-­Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind; so has Clifford Geertz,” “Chronicles of Earthsea” (2004), online http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/feb/09 /sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin. From Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-­Healer (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1969), 16: “‘What’s a crumble?’ he asked, when the robot monitor answered. . . . ‘On Rigel two it means a small life form which scuttles—­’ ” 92. See “Synthetic Biology,” http://syntheticbiology.org/, and, for social analysis, see, e.g., Roosth, “BioBricks” and Synthetic; Alain Pottage, “Too Much Ownership: Bio-­ prospecting in the Age of Synthetic Biology,” BioSocieties 1, no. 2 (2006): 137–­58; Luis Campos, “The BioBrick™ Road,” BioSocieties 7 (2012): 115–­139; Emma K. Frow, “Making Big Promises Come True? Articulating and Realizing Value in Synthetic Biology,” BioSocieties 8, no. 4 (2013): 432–­448. An earlier practice traveling under the name synthetic biology came from Stéphane Leduc who in 1912 published La Biologie Synthétique. 93. Dan Ferber, “Synthetic Biology: Microbes Made to Order,” Science 303, no. 5655 (2004): 158–­161, at 161. 94. Rick Weiss, “Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms,” Washington Post, Monday 17 December 2007: A01, and Annalee Newitz, “Mad Science Contest: Build a Lifeform and We’ll Send You to Hong Kong or Give You $1000” (2008), http://io9.com/5022316/mad-science-contest-build-a-lifeform-and-well-sendyou-to-hong-kong-or-give-you-1000, accessed November 24, 2014. 95. Thomas Laquer, “Form in Ashes,” Representations 104 (2008): 50–­72, at 51.

CHAPTER 3: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE, UNDERWATER 1. See Luis Campos, “That Was the Synthetic Biology That Was,” in Synthetic Biology: The Technoscience and Its Societal Consequences, ed. Markus Schmidt, Alexander Kelle, Agomoni Ganguli-­Mitra, Huib de Vriend (Springer, 2010), 5–­21, and Sophia Roosth, “Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication,” Science in Context 26, no. 1 (2013): 153–­171. 2. Christopher G. Langton, “Artificial Life,” in Artificial Life, ed. Christopher G. Langton (Redwood City, CA: Addison-­Wesley, 1989), 1–­47, at 19. 3. Ibid., 6–­9. And see Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003): 599–­633.

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4. Hans Moravec, “Human Culture: A Genetic Takeover Underway,” in Artificial Life, ed. Christopher G. Langton (Redwood City, CA: Addison-­Wesley, 1989), 167–­199, at 178. 5. J. Doyne Farmer and Alletta d’A. Belin, “Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution,” in Artificial Life II, ed. Christopher G. Langton, Charles Taylor, J. Doyne Farmer, and Steen Rasmussen (Redwood City, CA: Addison-­Wesley, 1992), 815–­840. 6. For Foucault on this matter, see chapter 1, note 10. 7. Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), 110–­123, at 113. Compare Müller-­Wille and Rheinberger’s concept of an “epistemic space”—­a zone where a term/concept eventually materializes. Their example is the epistemic space that shaped, but came before, the notion of “heredity.” See Staffan Müller-­Wille and Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, eds., Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–­1870 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 8. Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 9. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 138. Originally published as L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) and L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 10. Brian Cantwell Smith, On the Origin of Objects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 11. See Stefan Helmreich, “Artificial Life, Inc.: Darwin and Commodity Fetishism from Santa Fe to Silicon Valley,” Science as Culture 10, no. 4 (2001): 483–­504. 12. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 17. 13. Foucault, Archaeology, 140. 14. Nadia Abu El-­Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-­ Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 15. See David A. Mindell and Katherine Croff, “Deep Water, Archaeology and Technology Development,” MTS Journal 36, no. 3 (2002), 13–­20. 16. Claus Emmeche, The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging Science of Artificial Life, trans. from the Danish by Steven Sampson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Emmeche also plays on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), a discussion of how technology has both disturbed and remodeled pastoral ideals in U.S. American literature. 17. Peter Galison, “Computer Simulations and the Trading Zone,” in The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 118–­157, at 142–­143. 18. Ibid., 144. 19. Ibid., 156–­157. See also Stefan Helmreich, “The Word for World Is Computer: Simulating Second Natures in Artificial Life,” in Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on the Sciences of Complexity, ed. Norton Wise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 275–­300. 20. See Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations in the Life Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), for an argument about the “rhetorical software” such imagery has constituted.

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21. Demetri Terzopoulos, Xiaoyuan Tu, and Radek Grzeszczuk, “Artificial Fishes with Autonomous Locomotion, Perception, Behavior, and Learning in a Simulated Physical World,” in Artificial Life IV, ed. Rodney Brooks and Pattie Maes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 17–­27. 22. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 23. Walter Fontana, e-­mail to author at [email protected], April 15, 1994. 24. Karl Sims, “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition,” Artificial Life 1, no. 4 (1994): 353–­372. 25. This is a “lineage” that has been explored elsewhere—­sometimes in ways that assimilate the philosophical problems of Artificial Life to Artificial Intelligence, sometimes in ways attempting to distinguish them. See Elliott Sober, “Learning from Functionalism—­Prospects for Strong Artificial Life,” in Artificial Life II, ed. Christopher G. Langton, Charles Taylor, J. Doyne Farmer, Steen Rasmussen (Redwood City, CA: Addison-­Wesley, 1992), 749–­765, and Brian Keeley, “Against the Global Replacement: On the Application of the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Life,” in Artificial Life III, ed. Christopher G. Langton (Redwood City, CA: Addison-­Wesley, 1994), 569–­587. 26. Daniel Dennett, “Where Am I?” in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1978), 310–­23. 27. Ibid., from http://departments.oxy.edu/cogsci/courses/2000/cs101/etexts/where-am -i.html, accessed February 1, 2004. 28. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433–­460. 29. John Lilly, “A Feeling of Weirdness,” in Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins, ed. Joan McIntyre (Scribner’s Sons and Sierra Club Books, 1974), 71–­77, at 71. 30. Ibid., 71. 31. Dennett, “Where Am I?,” 312. 32. Lilly, “Weirdness,” 72. 33. Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 186. According to Doyle, The Online Hacker Jargon File defines “wetware” as “human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system’s hardware or software.” Doyle argues that “wetwares are inconceivable not because they sublimely exceed any reduction or representation but because they quite simply cannot be modeled in advance” (186). 34. N. Katherine Hayles, “Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations: Rethinking the Relation between the Beholder and the World,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward the Reinvention of Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 409–­425. 35. Respondent to e-­mail interview with author at [email protected], May 23, 1994. 36. Jessica Riskin, “Eighteenth-­Century Wetware,” Representations 83 (2003): 97–­125. 37. Riskin, “Defecating Duck,” 606. 38. Christopher G. Langton, “Toward Artificial Life,” Whole Earth Review 58 (1988): 74–­79, at 74.

226

Notes TO Chapter 4

39. Mario Biagioli, “Confabulating Jurassic Science,” in Late Editions 2: Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs, ed. George E. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 399–­431. 40. Cited in Biagioli, “Confabulating,” 409. 41. Biagioli, “Confabulating,” 426.

CHAPTER 4: CETOLOGY NOW 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

Herman Melville, Moby-­Dick, or The Whale, scholarly ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 137. Originally published in 1851 by Richard Bentley. Indeed, Samuel Otter, in Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), suggests that “in Moby-­Dick, Melville employs the whale’s massive corpus as the revealing stage on which to play out the tragedy and comedy of nineteenth-­century bodily investigation” (132). Otter argues that Melville’s cetology is a send-­up of the craniometry of nineteenth-­century racial science. Thus, “the cetology chapters do not reject the ‘scientific method,’ as several critics suggest” (133), but rather display its internal complexities and contradictions. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 134. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 137. I skip over the early-­and mid-­twentieth-­century history of whaling. This has been treated thoroughly in an epic history: D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Craig R. Smith and Amy R. Baco, “Ecology of Whale Falls at the Deep-­sea Floor,” Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review 41 (2003): 311–­354. C. S. Baker and S. R. Palumbi, “Which Whales Are Hunted? A Molecular Genetic Approach to Monitoring Whaling,” Science 265 (1994): 1538–­1539. See also F. Cipriano, and S. R. Palumbi, “Rapid Genotyping Techniques for Identification of Species and Stock Identity in Fresh, Frozen, Cooked and Canned Whale Products,” Report to the Scientific Committee, International Whaling Commission, 1999 (SC/51/O9). Christopher Moore, Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (New York: William Morrow, 2003), 97. Another, more population-­genetic—­and less digital—­ version of the whale can be found in Nancy Lord, Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths (New York: Counterpoint Press, 2003). In her account of the threats posed to a group of whales in Cook Inlet, Alaska, Lord emphasizes the genetic isolation of these creatures in order to underwrite in scientific language a tale of population decline and risk. Jim Harvey and Jenifer Hurley, “Whale-­Watching Sea Lions! SLEWTH: Sea Lions Exploring Whales and their Habitat,” http://slewths.mlml.calstate.edu/slewth/film. htm, accessed January 6, 2015. Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), xv. Originally published as Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966).

227

Notes TO Chapter 5

11. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 145. But it is difficult to stop. A whole treatise might be written on the CYBORG WHALE, perhaps beginning with Ian Watson’s science fiction The Jonah Kit (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), which imagines a cosmonaut’s mind resurrected (nowadays, this might be rendered as “downloaded”) into the body of a boy who lives in a whale.

CHAPTER 5: HOW LIKE A REEF 1. Donna Haraway and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (New York: Routledge, 2000). And see Donna Haraway, “Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole: An Ideology of Biological Expansion,” Knowledge in American Society, 1870–­1920, American Academy of Arts and Sciences symposium, June 1975. 2. Donna Haraway, Foreword to Women Writing Culture, ed. Gary A. Olson and Elizabeth Hirsch (Albany: State University of New York Press), x–­xii, at xi–­xii. 3. For recent work on Haraway’s writing strategies, consult Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 4. For the definitive dissertation on coral science, from the time of Cook to the days of nuclear testing, consult Alistair Sponsel, “Coral Reef Formation and the Sciences of Earth, Life, and Sea, c. 1770–­1952,” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2009. 5. Charles Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs: Being the First Part of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle, Under the Command of Capt. Fitzroy, R.N. During the Years 1832 to 1836 (London: Smith Elder and Co., 1842). 6. See David Dobbs, Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), for a discussion of Darwin’s debate with Alexander Agassiz about the origin of reefs. For a longer history of theory about reef formation, see David R. Stoddart, “Theory and Reality: The Success and Failure of the Deductive Method in Coral Reef Studies—­Darwin to Davis,” Earth Sciences History 13 (1994): 21–­34, and Sponsel, “Coral Reef Formation,” which contains a thorough bibliography on this topic. As Sponsel points out, the emphasis on reef formation and structure in the early days of reef science was in large measure due to the nautical concerns of the British Empire. British ship captains, crew, and their sponsors wished to avoid having ships run aground on the reefs that dotted the Pacific, an ocean into which the empire began expanding in the eighteenth century. One British navigator, Matthew Flinders, who from 1801 to 1803 followed up Captain Cook’s survey of the coast of Australia, described the architectural accomplishments of corals as a miniature of colonial building projects: “The care taken to work perpendicularly in the early stages, would mark a surprising instinct in these diminutive creatures. Their wall of coral, for the most part in situations where the winds are constant, being arrived at the surface, affords a shelter, to leeward of which their infant colonies may be safely sent forth” (quoted in Sponsel, 30–­31). 7. Quoted in Osha Gray Davidson, The Enchanted Braid: Coming to Terms with Nature on the Coral Reef (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998), 7. 8. Quoted in Gillian Feeley-­Harnik, “ ‘Communities of Blood’: The Natural History of Kinship in Nineteenth-­Century America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (1999): 215–­262, at 227. 228

Notes TO Chapter 5

9. Lewis Henry Morgan, “Essay on Geology,” 1841, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, 1840–­1881, Collection 2008–­21, Box 21, Folder 2, Rare Books, Special Collections & Preservation, University of Rochester Library, p. 20–­21. 10. Émile Durkheim, in framing his account of the division of labor in small-­scale societies (that is, in collectives without much social differentiation), compared individuals in these groups to polyps in colonial organisms. See Émile Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1893), 208–­209. 11. Alfred Kroeber, Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948), 255–­256. 12. Ibid., 256. 13. Haraway, “Foreword,” xi–­xii. 14. Or so the standard account holds. Sponsel, in “Coral Reef Formation,” argues that the Enewetak boring cannot be considered as having provided definitive evidence, full stop, in favor of Darwin’s theory. Enewetak was not “a sufficient test case for the formation of all reefs, or even, perhaps, all atolls. Thus [Enewetak] proved in retrospect not to have been a crucial experiment between different general theories of reef formation, but between the ideals of the general theory and the locally specific explanation” (8). 15. Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke, “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 241–­266. 16. Joseph Masco, “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-­Cold War New Mexico,” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2004): 517–­550, at 525. 17. Eva Hayward, “Fingeryeyes: Impressions of Cup Corals,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 577–­599. 18. Darwin reported a sojourn at low tide to visit outer corals with the aid of a “leaping pole” at Cocos (Keeling) Atoll in the Indian Ocean; quoted in Sponsel, “Coral Reef Formation,” 119. While this would suggest that Darwin never really got a proper view of living coral, Sponsel suggests that Darwin was able, using another instrument, to take his vision closer than most. He was able “to ‘see’ underwater by adopting the methods and perspective of the hydrographic surveyors on the Beagle. He studied the impressions made by different living corals upon an ‘arming’ of tallow in the concavity at the bottom of a sounding lead.” See Sponsel, “Coral Reef Formation,” chapter 2. 19. Davidson, Enchanted Braid, 55. 20. Ibid., 14. 21. Ibid., 17. 22. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 250. 23. See Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 24. Davidson, Enchanted Braid, 79. 25. Anne Fausto-­Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” The Sciences, March–­April 1993: 20–­24. 26. Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 229

Notes TO Chapter 5

27. Elizabeth Wilson, “Biologically Inspired Feminism,” Australian Feminist Studies 17, no. 39 (2002): 283–­285, at 284. 28. Hayward, “FingeryEyes,” 589. 29. Douglas H. Chadwick, “Coral in Peril,” National Geographic 195, no. 1 (1999): 30–­ 37, at 37. 30. See Davidson, Enchanted Braid. 31. See M. K. Kasim Moosa, S. Soeodihardjo, A. Nontji, A. Soegiarto, K. Romimohtarto, Sukarno, and Suharsono, eds., Proceedings of the Ninth International Coral Reef Symposium, Bali, Indonesia, October 23–­27, 2000 (Ministry of Environment, Indonesian Institute of Sciences and the International Society for Reef Studies, 2002). 32. See Davidson, Enchanted Braid. 33. On immutable mobiles, see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 34. See “Coral Reef Research Foundation,” http://www.coralreefresearchfoundation.org /index.html, accessed August 21, 2013. 35. Cori Hayden, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 36. Though coral-­as-­bone still makes an appearance from time to time. The Bio-­ Eye Orbital Implants website, which sells artificial eyes, poses coral as a “natural choice” for ocular implants: “The goal of a more natural appearance was finally achieved with the help of a natural material: ocean coral. A remarkable similarity was noticed between the porous structure of certain coral species and that of human bone. . . . The eye muscles can be attached directly to this implant, allowing it to move within the orbit—­just like the natural eye” (“Bio-­Eye® Orbital Implants,” http://www.ioi.com/patient/ha.html, accessed 21 August 2013). “Nature” is crucial to popular rhetoric: “The stony skeletons of corals seem to be far more natural for bone and eye implants than artificial substances such as glass. The chemical composition of the coral, secreted from the minerals of the sea, is nearly identical to the complex mineral arrays created by the human body” (Bill Belleville, “Healing from the Sea,” American Way, April 1, 1999: 88–­92, at 92). Here human kinship with the sea finds a link through the shared substance of hydroxyapatite, the complex calcium-­phosphate salt found in human bones and coral skeletons. Future medicine promises to reverse the logic of Shakespeare’s famous line from The Tempest: “of his bones are coral made,” as coral becomes an organ donor for humans. 37. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from a summary document produced by the Coral-­list, “Summary of Professional Exchanges on Coral Genomics,” www.coris .noaa.gov/exchanges/coralgenome/sup_digest.html, accessed August 21, 2013. 38. Cornelia Dean, “As the Seas Warm, Algae Help Some Coral Stand up to the Heat,” New York Times, December 21, 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/science/21cora .html, accessed November 24, 2014. On the other hand, another consideration “is the availability of zooxanthellae-­free tissues. DNA from the zooxanthellae is often amplified (and subsequently sequenced) in addition to the coral DNA, unless the tissue is free from zooxanthellae or the primers are specific to cnidarians. The symbiotic dinoflagellates have a genome size which is estimated to be 100 times larger than the coral genome, further complicating the effort.” 230

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39. Glenn Zorpette, “Bikini’s Nuclear Ghosts,” Scientific American Presents 9, no. 3 (1998): 24–­27, at 24. 40. See R. Daniel Kortschak, Gabrielle Samuel, Robert Saint, and David J. Miller, “EST Analysis of the Cnidarian Acropora millepora Reveals Extensive Gene Loss and Rapid Sequence Divergence in the Model Invertebrates,” Current Biology 13 (2003): 2190–­2195. 41. Donna Haraway, “Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture, Or It’s All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-­Century United States,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 2004), 321–­366. 42. The Institute for Figuring, “The Institute for Figuring,” http://www.theiff.org/, accessed November 24, 2014. 43. Patricia Cohen, “Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring along your Crochet Hook,” New York Times, March 8, 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/arts/design /04crochet.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss, accessed November 24, 2014. 44. The Institute for Figuring, “Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef: About the Project,” http://crochetcoralreef.org/about/, accessed November 24, 2014. 45. Ibid. 46. Cohen, “Want to Save . . .” 47. Roosth, pers. comm., September 2009. See Sophia Roosth, “Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication,” Science in Context 26, no. 1 (2013): 153–­171. 48. Donna Jeanne Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).

CHAPTER 6: HOMO MICROBIS 1. Public Radio International, “Living on Earth,” March 30, 2007, http://www.loe.org /shows/shows.html?programID=07-P13–00013#feature5, accessed January 6, 2015. 2. “If ‘they’re us’ and ‘we’re them,’ ” observes Neil Badmington, “the opposition between the homely and unfamiliar can no longer hold, for the alien is no longer the wholly other.” Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (London: Routledge, 2004), 30. 3. Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 4. The Human Microbiome Project, Overview: http://commonfund.nih.gov/hmp/ overview.aspx, accessed July 11, 2014. One (or many?) could call this microbial, multiplied body—­with apologies to the social movement of the early 2010s—­ something like “Occupy Homo sapiens.” The Occupy movement’s slogan, “We are the 99%,” called people in the United States and globally to disidentify with that 1% of persons who hold a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth. Work such as Sagan’s exhorts humans to reenvision themselves as the 90 percent: the 90 percent microbial (“there are,” writes Sagan, “ten of ‘their’ cells in our body for every one of ‘ours’ ” [19]). The remaining 10 percent of putatively “human” cells have been, on Sagan’s view, overesteemed, dominating visions of human nature for too long. 5. Amber Benezra, Jospeh DeStefano, and Jeffrey L. Gordon, in “Anthropology of Microbes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 17 (2012): 231

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6378–­6381, call upon anthropologists—­biological and cultural both—­to join with human microbial ecologists to frame new questions about relations among humans and microbes, creating new definitions of bodies, communities, and health. 6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). Much earlier, in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx famously wrote of human “species being” as founded on the capacity for creativity and planning. 7. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949). Originally published as Homo Ludens: Proeve Eener Bepaling Van Het Spel-­Element Der Cultuur (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1938). 8. Although some of these terms really have multiple genealogies, they are primarily from, in order, the eighteenth-­century French naturalist Georges-­Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (later elaborated by the sociologist Émile Durkheim in the nineteenth century); the microeconomist Vilfredo Pareto; the eighteenth-­century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder; the continental philosopher Hans Jonas; the marine biologist Alister Hardy; the anthropologist William Montague Cobb; and the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman­. Other intriguing entries have included Homo amans (loving man, from the biologist Humberto Maturana), Homo demens (delusional man, from the philosopher Edgar Morin), Homo imitans (imitating man, coined by the psychologist Andrew Meltzoff), Homo inermis (helpless man, from the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach), and Homo loquax (man who won’t shut up . . . , from the science fiction author Walter M. Miller, Jr.). Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) offers Homo cyber as the cybernetically tuned human. 9. Elizabeth Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 10. Björk, “Virus,” Biophilia (Polydor 2777665, 2011). 11. Heather Paxson, “Post-­Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-­Milk Cheese in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 15–­47, at 17. 12. Brigitte Nerlich and Iina Hellsten, “Beyond the Human Genome: Microbes, Metaphors and What It Means to be Human in an Interconnected Post-­Genomic World,” New Genetics and Society 28, no. 1 (2009): 19–­36. 13. This argument is developed in Heather Paxson and Stefan Helmreich, “The P ­ erils and Promises of Microbial Abundance: Novel Natures and Model Ecosystems, from Artisanal Cheese to Alien Seas,” Social Studies of Science 44, no. 2 (2014): 165–­193. 14. Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice, 19. 15. Definition 5 a. of “literal,” Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view /Entry/109055?redirectedFrom=literal#eid, accessed April 18, 2013. 16. Folsome, quoted in Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice, 18. 17. OED, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109055?redirectedFrom=literal#eid. 18. American Anthropological Association, “Statement on ‘Race,’ ” May 17, 1998, http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm, accessed July 14, 2014. 19. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 20. Renato G. Mazzolini, “Las Castas: Interracial Crossing and Social Structure, 1770–­ 1835,” in Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 232

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1500–­1870, ed. Staffan Müller-­Wille and Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 105–­132. 21. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 22. See Luke K. Ursell, Jose C. Clemente, Jai Ram Rideout, Dirk Gevers, J. Gregory Caporaso, and Rob Knight, “The Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Diversity of Human-­Associated Microbiota in Key Body Sites,” Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 129, no. 5 (2012): 1204–­1208, at 1206–­1207. 23. J. Dennis Fortenberry, “The Uses of Race and Ethnicity in Human Microbiome Research,” Trends in Microbiology 21, no. 4 (2013): 165–­166, at 166. 24. Troy Duster, “The Molecular Reinscription of Race: Unanticipated Issues in Biotechnology and Forensic Science,” Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 4–­5 (2006): 427–­441. See also Duana Fullwiley, “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Racial Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice,” Science as Culture 16, no. 1 (2007): 1–­30. 25. Steven Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). And see Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, “Murderous Inclusions,” International Journal of Feminist Politics 15, no. 4 (2013): 445–­452. 26. http://farmingpathogens.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/are-our-microbiomes-racial/, accessed July 14, 2014. 27. See John Hartigan, ed., Anthropology and Race: Genes, Biology, and Culture (Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research Press, 2013) for an articulation of race as a biosocial fact that does not treat biology as the fixed substrate to culture’s flexibility. 28. Thanks to Jonathan Kahn for this phrase. And thanks to Alondra Nelson for her guidance as I worked through this analysis. 29. Thanks to Hannah Landecker for pointing this out. 30. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997), 146. 31. The answer to this question would require a whole course in feminist critiques of humanism as well as human biology. A quick sketch would recount how male qualities have often been assigned to the domain of “culture,” whereas female qualities have been restricted to the domain of “nature.” For one critical dissection of this history, keyed to how episodes in human evolution are narrated, see Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 32. Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice, 23. 33. See S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–­576, particularly at 559. 34. For one critique of the dangers of this conflation, see Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson, “Sex on the Brain: A Natural History of Rape and the Dubious Doctrines of Evolutionary Psychology,” in Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, ed. Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 180–­205. See also Stefan Helmreich, reply to Dame Gillian Beer’s “Late Darwin and the Problem of the Human,” On the Human, A Project of National Humanities Center, http://onthehuman.org/2010/06/late-darwin-and -the-problem-of-the-human/, accessed November 24, 2014. For a history of the conflation of sex with gender in the key of genomics, read Sarah S. Richardson, Sex 233

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Itself: The Search for Male & Female in the Human Genome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 35. Myra Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 100–­101. 36. Eva Hayward, “FingeryEyes: Impressions of Cup Corals,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 577–­599, n11. 37. Kath Weston, Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation, Studmuffins . . . (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 38. Kirksey and Helmreich, “Emergence,” 559. Eva Hayward, and Lindsay Kelley, “­TRANimalS: Theorizing the Trans-­in Zoontology,” a panel discussion presented at Society for Science, Literature, and Art, November 5–­8, 2009, Atlanta, GA. 39. Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice, 24. 40. Ibid. 41. Laura Fugazzola, Valentina Cirello, and Paolo Beck-­Peccoz, “Fetal Microchimerism as an Explanation of Disease,” Nature Reviews Endocrinology 7 (2011): 89–­97, at 89. 42. Aryn Martin, “Microchimerism in the Mother(land): Blurring the Borders of Body and Nation,” Body & Society 16, no. 3 (2010): 23–­50. Thanks to Lynn Morgan for alerting me to this work. 43. Ernst Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 120. 44. Ladelle McWhorter, “Enemy of the Species,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-­Sandilands and Bruce Erikson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 73–­101, at 91–­92. 45. Another definition of species—­as a kind of coin or money—­is germane to discussions in anthropology of “biocapital.” See Stefan Helmreich, “Species of Biocapital,” Science as Culture 17, no. 4. (2008): 463–­478. 46. Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

CHAPTER 7: THE SIGNATURE OF LIFE 1. Hillel Schwartz, Century’s End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siècle from the 990s through the 1990s (New York: Doubleday, 1990). 2. Kurd Lasswitz, Auf zwei Planeten (Weimar: Emil Felber, 1897). 3. David S. McKay, Everett K. Gibson Jr., Kathie L. Thomas-­Keprta, Hojatollah Vali, Christopher S. Romanek, Simon J. Clemett, Xavier D.F. Chillier, et al., “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001,” Science 273 (1996): 924–­930. 4. P. J. Boston, M. N. Spilde, D. E. Northup, L. A. Melim, D. S. Soroka, L. G. Kleina, K. H. Lavoie, et al., “Cave Biosignature Suites: Microbes, Minerals, and Mars,” Astrobiology 1, no. 1 (2001): 25–­56. 5. For further work on Mars, microbes, and the poles, see Bruce M. Jakosky, Kenneth Nealson, Corien Bakermans, Ruth E. Ley, and Michael T. Mellon, “Subfreezing Activity of Microorganisms and the Potential Habitability of Mars’ Polar Regions,” Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2003): 343–­350. To be sure, scientists have been looking for microbes on Mars since the Viking voyages of the 1970s. See Norman H. Horowitz, “The Search for Life on Mars,” Scientific American 287 (1977): 57–­58. 234

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6. Stephan Kempe and Jozef Kazmierczak, “Biogenesis and Early Life on Earth and Europa: Favored by an Alkaline Ocean?” Astrobiology 2, no. 1 (2002): 123–­130. See also Ricardo Cavicchioli, “Extremophiles and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life,” Astrobiology 2, no. 3 (2002): 281–­292. Europa has been a favorite site for science fiction speculation about extraterrestrial life, notably in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010. The tradition continues: see Sebastián Cordero, director, Europa Report (Wayfare Entertainment/Misher Films/Start Motion Pictures, 2013). 7. See Steven Dick, The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-­Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Baruch S. Blumberg, “The NASA Astrobiology Institute: Early History and Organization,” Astrobiology 3, no. 3 (2003): 464. On the early history of exobiology, see Audra J. Wolfe, “Germs in Space: Joshua Lederberg, Exobiology, and the Public Imagination, 1958–­1964,” Isis 93, no. 2 (2002): 183–­205, and Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick, The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 8. Monica Grady, Astrobiology (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2001), 81. 9. David J. Des Marais, Martin O. Harwit, Kenneth W. Jucks, James F. Kasting, Douglas N. C. Lin, Jonathan I. Lunine, Jean Schneider, et al., “Remote Sensing of Planetary Properties and Biosignatures on Extrasolar Terrestrial Planets,” Astrobiology 2, no. 2 (2002): 153–­181. 10. David S. McKay, Simon Clemett, Kathie Thomas-­Keprta, and Everett K. Gibson, “The Classification of Biosignatures” (abstract 12873), Astrobiology 2, no. 4 (2002): 625–­626. 11. Des Marais et al., “Remote Sensing,” 154. 12. McKay et al., “Classification,” 625. 13. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone, 1996). 14. Hillel Schwartz, “De-­Signing,” Critical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2001): 55–­65. 15. Another discussion of the uses of Schwartz’s copying work can be found in a 2002 issue of Cultural Analysis (vol. 3) on Copies/Reproduction/Seriality, http://ist-socrates .berkeley.edu/~caforum/volume3/vol3_toc.html, accessed September 13, 2013. 16. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 17. 17. Karen N. Werner, review of The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz, Social Problems Forum: The SSSP Newsletter, 29, no. 2 (1997), http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm /m/148/pageid/225, accessed January 9, 2006. 18. Schwartz, “De-­Signing,” 55. 19. See Sarah Franklin, “Life Itself,” paper prepared for the Detraditionalisation Conference, Centre for Cultural Values, Lancaster University, Lancaster, England, June 3, 1993. 20. Damien Neva, “Finding Terrestrial Intelligence in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (unpublished paper, New York University, 2001). A vast literature by SETI advocates seeks carefully to parse the philosophical and technological issues at stake; see Carl Sagan, The Demon-­Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997). For anthropological reflections on SETI, see Kathryn Denning, “Unpacking the Great Transmission Debate,” in Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 237–­252, and Klara Capova, “The Charming Science of the Other: An 235

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Ethnography of the Scientific Search for Life beyond Earth,” PhD diss., Durham University, United Kingdom, 2013. 21. For an example of how aliens might audit the sounds of Earth, listen to SETI-­X, Scrambles of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, Remixed by Extraterrestrials (Seeland Records 532, 2010). For commentary on this artifact, see Stefan Helm­ reich, “Remixing the Voyager Interstellar Record: Or, As Extraterrestrials Might Listen,” in “Sounds of Space,” ed. William R. Macauley, special issue, Journal of Sonic Studies 8 (2014), http://sonicstudies.org/, accessed January 8, 2015. 22. Hillel Schwartz, “The Indefensible Ear,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back, 487–­501 (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 489. 23. Hillel Schwartz, “Noise and Silence: The Soundscape of Spirituality,” paper presented at the Inter-­Religious Federation for World Peace, “Realizing the Ideal: The Responsibility of the World’s Religions” seminar, section IV: “Religion and the Ideal Environment,” Seoul, August 20–­27, 1995, http://www.nonoise.org/library/noisesil /noisesil.htm, accessed June 28, 2014. 24. Quoted in Dick, Biological Universe, 401. 25. Ibid., 440. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. The idea that the orbits of the planets generate a “music of the spheres” was articulated in 1619 by Johannes Kepler, who, building on Pythagoras, postulated that the planets’ distances from the sun corresponded to musical intervals, thereby disclosing a divine harmony. Like Kepler, Oliver and Billingham imagine correspondence between worlds as a matter of calibrating to the proper scale. 29. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 276. 30. Sebastian von Hoerner, “Universal Music?,” Psychology of Music 2, no. 2 (1974): 18–­28. 31. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Science: Goals,” http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/science/goals.html, accessed October 20, 2011; and NASA, “Mars Exploration: Science: Goal 1: Determine If Life Ever Arose on Mars,” http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/science/life/index.html, accessed October 20, 2011. 32. Des Marais et al., “Remote Sensing,” 156. 33. Grady, Astrobiology, 82. 34. For foundational thinking about the mathematics of chirality and of various kinds of symmetry more broadly, see Hermann Weyl, Symmetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952). On the chemistry of life, see Bruce Jakosky’s The Search for Life on Other Planets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 35. Des Marais et al., “Remote Sensing,” 154. 36. Ibid., 153. 37. Grady, Astrobiology, 82–­83. 38. McKay et al., “Classification,” 625; emphasis in original. 39. Ibid.; emphasis in original. 40. Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 45.

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41. See Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–­6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, and vols. 7 and 8, ed. Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1931–­1935, 1958). 42. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 219. 43. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Originally published as Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966). 44. See Marjorie Garber, Quotation Marks (New York: Routledge, 2003). 45. Thanks to Hillel Schwartz for this phrasing. 46. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 328. 47. David J. Des Marais, Louis J. Allamandola, Steven A. Benner, Alan P. Boss, David Deamer, Paul G. Falkowski, Jack D. Farmer, et al., “The NASA Astrobiology Roadmap,” Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2003): 219–­235. 48. David Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity! (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 184. 49. Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 196. For a complementary discussion of how cellular life-­as-­we-­know-­it gathered animacy through filmic and computer-­graphical animations, see Christopher Kelty and Hannah Landecker, “A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-­systems, and Film,” Grey Room 17 (2004): 30–­63. Like biosignatures, animations fold representational strategies into the logic of life itself. 50. Blumberg, “NASA Astrobiology Institute,” 467. 51. Quoted in David Grinspoon, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (New York: Ecco, 2003), 35. 52. Blumberg, “NASA Astrobiology Institute,” 470. 53. Quoted in Doyle, Wetwares, 25. 54. NASA, “Mars Exploration Program,” http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/science/life/, accessed October 11, 2011 (site discontinued). 55. Des Marais et al., “NASA Astrobiology Roadmap,” 234. 56. Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (CBS Records 96000, 1978). 57. Indeed, Derrida and Schwartz intersect at only one point in The Culture of the Copy: Schwartz’s entry for Derrida in his index reads “nary an appearance in the text” (Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 543). Derrida’s presence is an absence. 58. See Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 228–­266. 59. McKay et al., “Recognizing,” 625. 60. Schwartz, “De-­Signing,” 55. 61. Ibid., 57. 62. Ibid., 63–­64. 63. Foucault, The Order of Things, xv. 64. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). On torque, see Hillel Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century,” in Zone 6: Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (Ottawa, Canada: Bradbury T ­ amblyn and Boorne, 1992), 70–­126. See also Stefan Helmreich, “Torquing Things Out: Race and Classification, in Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s Sorting Things Out:

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Classifications and Its Consequences,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 28, no. 3 (2003): 435–­440. 65. Des Marais et al., “Remote Sensing,” 157. 66. Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 67. See Roger F. Knacke, “Possibilities for the Detection of Microbial Life on Extrasolar Planets,” Astrobiology 3 no. 3 (2003): 537. 68. Des Marais et al., “Remote Sensing,” 154. 69. See Doyle, On Beyond Living. On biochemical specificity and cryptography, see Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 70. NASA, “Mars Exploration”; emphasis added. 71. See Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1980). For a critique of autopoiesis that misses this point, see Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004). 72. McKay et al., “Recognizing.” See also Allan H. Treiman, “Submicron Magnetite Grains and Carbon Compounds in Martian Meteorite ALH84001: Inorganic, Abiotic Formation by Shock and Thermal Metamorphism,” Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2003): 369–­392. 73. A. Steele, J.K.W. Toporski, F. W. Westall, K. Thomas-­Keprta, E. K. Gibson, R, Avci, C. Whitby, et al., “The Microbiological Contamination of Meteorites: A Null Hypothesis,” paper presented at the First Astrobiology Science Conference, NASA Ames Research Center, Ames, Iowa, April 3–­5, 2000. 74. Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 325. 75. See George Coates Performance Works, “Wittgenstein on Mars,” https://web.archive .org/web/20000817094415/http://www.georgecoates.org/OnMars/, accessed January 22, 2015. 76. Kathie L. Thomas-­Keprta, Dennis Bazylinski, David S. McKay, Hojatollah Vali, Simon J. Clemett, Joseph Kirschvink, Susan J. Wentworth, et al., “Biogenic Magnetite Crystals in Martian Meteorite ALH84001” (abstract 12641), Astrobiology 2, no. 4 (2002): 606. 77. Jan Toporski and Andrew Steele, “The Relevance of Bacterial Biomarkers in Astrobiological Research: Setting a Standard” (abstract 12676), Astrobiology 2, no. 4 (2002): 608. 78. Sherry L. Cady, Jack D. Farmer, John P. Grotzinger, J. William Schopf, and Andrew Steele, “Morphological Biosignatures and the Search for Life on Mars,” Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2003): 352. The debate goes on, with some researchers supporting the biotic origin of ALH84001 with studies in biomineralization and others contesting biogenesis through work on nonbiological crystal morphology. The detection of analogous shapes through an appeal to amplification has thus been vigorously critiqued as the royal road to reading signs of life in ALH84001. 79. Markley, Dying Planet, 334. In Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming), the anthropologist Lisa Messeri follows planetary scientists on a kindred mission of analogy

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80.

81.

82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

between Earth and Mars as these researchers imagine portions of the Utah desert as “analogous” to Martian sites. Quoted in Markley, Dying Planet, 7. And see Markley for an excellent discussion of the analogical reasoning animating comparisons of Mars with Earth. Markley writes that “because it works by induction, a point-­by-­point comparison of observed characteristics or phenomena, analogical thinking has the potential to call into question the very principles that allow such comparisons to be made” (8). Michael C. Malin and Kenneth S. Edgett, “Evidence for Recent Ground Water Seepage and Surface Runoff on Mars,” Science 288 (2000): 2325–­2330. See also Michael D. Max and Stephen M. Clifford, “Initiation of Martian Outflow Channels: Related to the Dissociation of Gas Hydrate?” Geophysical Review Letters 28 (2001): 1787–­1790. Schwartz, “De-­Signing,” 60. Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 102. W. Charles Lamb, “Letter to Dr. Walter S. Adams, Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California, 7/26/28,” in No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again (Supplement to a Chain of Flowers, Volume 4, Number 7, Guide Leaflet Number 5), ed. Sarah Simmons (West Covina, CA: Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 1993). For a creationist interpretation of the imbalance of right-­and left-­handed compounds in biotic nature, see Jonathan Sarfati, “Origin of Life: The Chirality Problem,” Creation Ministries International, http://creation.com/origin-of-life-the-chirality -problem, accessed January 22, 2015. Patricio H. Figueredo, Ronald Greeley, Susanne Neuer, Louis Irwin, and Dirk Schulze-­Makuch, “Locating Potential Biosignatures on Europa from Surface Geology Observations,” Astrobiology 3, no. 4 (2003): 852. Figueredo et al., “Locating Potential Biosignatures,” 856. Krishan K. Khurana, Margaret G. Kivelson, and Christopher T. Russell, “Searching for Liquid Water in Europa by Using Surface Observatories,” Astrobiology 2, no. 1 (2002): 93–­103. Hillel Schwartz, “Hearing Aids: Sweet Nothings, or an Ear for an Ear,” in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 43–­59. J. Brad Dalton, Rakesh Mogul, Hiromi K. Kagawa, Suzanne L. Chan, and Corey S. Jamieson, “Near-­Infrared Detection of Potential Evidence for Microscopic Organisms on Europa,” Astrobiology 3, no. 3 (2003): 505. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “Calibration Targets,” http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa .gov/mission/spacecraft_instru_calibr.html, accessed July 1, 2014. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “Revealing Mars’ True Colors: Part Two” (28 January 2004), http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a13_20040128.html, accessed July 1, 2014. See Knacke, “Possibilities.” P.C.W. Davies, “Does Life’s Rapid Appearance Imply a Martian Origin?” Astrobiology 3, no. 4 (2003): 675. Davies, “Rapid Appearance,” 674–­675.

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96. Ibid., 678. The potential recognition that we earthlings may descend from alien microbes—­shuttled on meteorites from Mars, for example—­generates these days a positive excitement that is difficult to envision existing one hundred years ago, at least in the United States and Europe, when the possibility that “we” might be alien to ourselves—­or might contain “alien ancestry”—­was more popularly associated with fears (particularly among white Americans) about reversion and racial “degeneration.” 97. The spontaneity at play might look different from at least two of the examples Schwartz gives under this heading: roller coasters and mobile phones, both of which are the result of dense networks of calculation, engineering, and labor. We might read Schwartz as indicating, rather, the experience of users—­in which case such spontaneity depends on a simplification that erases the physical construction of such artifacts as Coney Island’s Cyclone and Nokia’s cell phones. 98. Grady, Astrobiology, 82. 99. Ibid., 91. 100. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 351. The happily running companions many people believe dogs to be may have a paw in the appeal of Mars Rovers and Beagles. 101. “Blur Call Sign,” “Beagle 2: Music on Earth,” http://beagle2.open.ac.uk/resources /blursignal.htm, accessed July 1, 2014. 102. See Doyle, On Beyond Living; and Stefan Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 103. Doyle, Wetwares, 20; emphasis in original. 104. Schwartz, “De-­Signing,” 63. 105. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 106. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 168. Originally published as vol. 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980). 107. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 172. 108. Ibid., 181. 109. Ibid., 190; emphasis in original. 110. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 81. Blumberg’s “The NASA Astrobiology Institute” is alive to this doubleness. Writing of “the question ‘What is life and how is it characterized?,’ ” Blumberg offers that “allied with this is an understanding of death: ‘When does life cease, and how can its effects be detected and measured in fossil remains and in the influences that life has on its environment that remain after the disappearance of the living material?’ ” (465). 111. De Man, “Autobiography,” 70. 112. A further discussion of defacement can be found in Bernadette Wegenstein’s “Getting Under the Skin, or, How Faces Have Become Obsolete,” Configurations 10, no. 2 (2002): 221–­259. Wegenstein argues that not only has faciality been dispersed across the skin—­Deleuze and Guattari’s argument—­but the interiority for which it stands has been allowed to inhabit a plurality of organs: “It is not necessarily behind faces that we expect the person to be revealed. Faces are becoming obsolete. . . . In 240

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short, any body part has the potential to become this special ‘window to the soul,’ ” (at 233–­234). We could say the same for “life” in astrobiology; it has migrated onto worlds other than Earth. 113. Werner, review of The Culture of the Copy. 114. Putting things this way demands an accounting of the rhetoric of vision—­a rhetoric, indeed, that suffuses Schwartz’s genres of “de-­signing.” More, however, I think it requires thinking about the sensory registers in which we pitch our metaphors, with which we think things through one another. 115. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 723–­742. 116. I ask, then, as Peter Galison put it, that “theory arrive  .  .  . in a more piecemeal way, with concepts as tools to disrupt texts, images, and experience.” Peter Galison, “Specific Theory,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 4 (2004): 380. 117. Markley, Dying Planet, 324. 118. See Doyle, On Beyond Living, 107. 119. Werner, review of The Culture of the Copy. 120. Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 178. 121. Hillel Schwartz, “Toys, Poise, and Noise: A Review of Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, by Gary Cross, Meetings, Manners and Civilization: The Development of Modern Meeting Behaviour, by Wilbert van Vree, and Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, by Douglas Kahn,” Journal of Unconventional History 11, no. 2 (2000): 110. 122. For a discussion of the metaphor of fluid mechanics in the work of Bruno Latour, see T. Hugh Crawford, “Networking the (Non) Human: Moby-­Dick, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour,” Configurations 5, no. 1 (1997): 1–­21. 123. Andrew Pickering, “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (1993): 559–­589. 124. Joseph Rouse, “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 74. 125. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd, “Introduction,” in Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–6, at 1–­2. 126. Bill Maurer, Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 7. The quotations are from Roy Wagner, An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 127. Schwartz, Century’s End, 212.

CHAPTER 8: NATURE/CULTURE/SEAWATER 1.

“Lévi-­Strauss commented . . . on the ubiquity of two kinds of water in South American myths, creative water of celestial origin and destructive water of terrestrial origin.” Eugenia Shanklin, “Exploding Lakes and Maleficent Water in Grassfields Legends and Myth,” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 39 (1989): 233–­246, at 234. For anthropologies of water symbolism, see Patricia Hidiroglou, 241

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

242

L’eau divine et sa symbolique. Essai d’anthropologie religieuse (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994); Steve Derné, “Feeling Water: Notes on the Sensory Construction of Time and Space in Banaras,” Man In India 78, nos. 1–­2 (1998): 1–­7; Inga Treitler and Douglas Midgett, “It’s About Water: Anthropological Perspectives on Water and Policy,” Human Organization 66, no. 2 (2007): 140–­149. Marilyn Strathern, “No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case,” in Nature, Culture and Gender, ed. Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 174–­222, at 181. See the entry on “culture” in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford, 1976). Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: Norton, 2003). David Knight, The Making of Modern Science: Science, Technology, Medicine and Modernity, 1789–­1914 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Neither is anthropology. National traditions (British, French, American, Japanese, Icelandic, Greek) inflect sea-­watery semiotics differently owing to maritime histories—­including practices of “overseas” fieldwork. See Aleksandar Bošković, ed., Other People’s Anthropologies: Ethnographic Practice on the Margins (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). For recent statements in the social sciences about water, consult, “In Focus: The Meaning of Water,” Anthropology News, February 2010; Ben Orlove and Steve Caton, “Water Sustainability: Anthropological Approaches and Prospects,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 401–­415; Jessica Barnes and Samer Alatout, “Water Worlds: Introduction to the Special Issue of Social Studies of Science,” Social Studies of Science 42, no. 4 (2012): 483–­488; David Kinkela, Teresa Meade, and Enrique Ochoa, eds., “Water: History, Power, Crisis,” special issue, Radical History Review 116 (2013); Frank Krause and Veronica Strang, introduction to “Living Water,” special issue, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 17, no. 2 (2013): 95–­102. Hugh Raffles, In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Hugh Raffles, in “ ‘Local Theory’: Nature and the Making of an Amazonian Place,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 3 (1999): 323–­360, suggests that amphibian anthropogenic landscapes such as those in the Amazon supersaturate categories of nature and culture, not because they exceed these categories, but because of how these categories call upon notions of liquid and solid. He writes of “flow, obstruction, viscosity, sedimentation, turbidity, currents” as theoretical prods, while also refraining from making these forms into once-­and-­for-­all qualities of water. In David McDermott Hughes’s “Third Nature: Making Space and Time in the Great Limpopo Conservation Area,” Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2005): 157–­184, readers learn about how the Zambezi River, flowing alternately through small pools and through rapids, marks out a racialized hydrography of local black subsistence labor and white “adrenaline tourism,” and readers also learn that the segmented flow of the Zambezi is entangled with the capacity that water has to carry sediment and sculpt riverscapes. But while Hughes claims, à la Strang, that this aqua-­territorializing power follows from the properties of water (“Water has properties and capacities that can effect change in the world, and some of these capacities are essential, rather than socially constructed”), he also pitches water as

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

a Latourian actant. Actants may emerge from multiplicities, from relations, but not from a priori ontologies. “Water,” to put a point on it, is never “pure,” never found free of other elements. See also Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2009); Stephanie Kane, Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010); Anne M. Rademacher, Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Caterina Scaramelli, “Making Sense of Water Quality: Multispecies Encounters on the Mystic River,” Worldviews 17 (2013): 151–­162; Anne Salmond, “Tears of Rangi: Water, Power, and People in New Zealand,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3 (2014): 285–­309; David Lipset, “Place in the Anthropocene: A Mangrove Lagoon in Papua New Guinea in the Time of Rising Sea-­Levels,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3 (2014): 215–­243; Naveeda Khan, “Dogs and Humans and What Earth Can Be: Filaments of Muslim Ecological Thought,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3 (2014): 245–­264. Benjamin Orlove, Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture in Lake Titicaca (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Boomgaard, Peter, ed., A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories (Kitlv Press, 2007). See J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). For a conversation between Lansing and me on computer models of irrigation, see Stefan Helmreich, “Digitizing ‘Development’: Balinese Water Temples, Complexity, and the Politics of Simulation,” Critique of Anthropology 19, no. 3 (1999): 249–­266; J. Stephen Lansing, “Foucault and the Water Temples: A Reply to Helmreich,” Critique of Anthropology 20, no. 3 (2000): 309–­318; Stefan Helmreich, “Power/Networks: A Rejoinder to Lansing,” Critique of Anthropology 20, no. 3 (2000): 319–­327. See also Anand Pandian, Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) and Christian Zlolniski, “Water Flowing North of the Border: Export Agriculture and Water Politics in a Rural Community in Baja California,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 565–­588. Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2005). Stuart McLean, “Black Goo: Forceful Encounters with Matter in Europe’s Muddy Margins,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 589–­619. McLean suggests that thinking through mud can be aided by literary, mythological, and artistic sources as well as philosophy—­think of Thales, Nietzsche, and Irigaray as philosophy machines. In a political economic key, McLean responds to the question of what it would mean to “take water as seriously as capitalism” by saying that so doing might “afford a provocation to think beyond or outside the human-­centered time-­ frame”—­an intriguing way to play with scale. The scale question also folds back toward the human; McLean reflects, “It has often been pointed out that the human body is itself composed largely of water. What would it mean to take this claim seriously? What would it mean to acknowledge that human beings, as anthropology’s foundational object of inquiry, are, to a large extent, ‘made of ’ water?” Water can help us scale away from the human, yes, but this does not escape our confronting how water has been conjured in science and sentiment before we seek to access its 243

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14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

244

materiality (this note as well as note 8 borrows prose from Stefan Helmreich, “Virtual Water,” Cultural Anthropology, virtual issue on Water, September 2010, http:// www.culanth.org/curated_collections/10-water, accessed November 24, 2014). To say nothing of drinking water, waste water, or bottled water! On bottled water, see Martha Kaplan, “Fijian Water in Fiji and New York: Local Politics and a Global Commodity,” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 4 (2007): 685–­706, and Martha Kaplan, “Lonely Drinking Fountains and Comforting Coolers: Paradoxes of Water Value and Ironies of Water Use,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 514–­541. Veronica Strang, “Common Senses: Water, Sensory Experience and the Generation of Meaning,” Journal of Material Culture 10, no. 1 (2005): 92–­120, at 98. Ibid., 97. Water is a similar theory machine for Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, although it operates from society to nature: “These North California Indians who lived by fishing for salmon in the Klamath river, would seem to have been obsessed by the behaviour of liquids, if their pollution rules can be said to express an obsession. They are careful not to mix good water with bad, not to urinate into rivers, not to mix sea and fresh water. . . . I insist that these rules cannot imply obsessional neuroses, and they cannot be interpreted unless the fluid formlessness of their highly competitive social life be taken into account.” Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Oxon: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1966), 158. Strang, “Common Senses,” 15. See Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 23–­25. See also chapter 7 of this volume. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1938), quoted in George W. Stocking, Jr. The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–­ 1911: A Franz Boas Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 42. Bill Maurer suggests that Boas’s invocation of sensations—­“a sensible realm, an empirical in the sense of evident to the human senses—­actually serves to make a theory machine that divides the quantitative from the qualitative” (pers. comm., July 21, 2010). Alexandra Lorini, “The Cultural Wilderness of Canadian Water in the Ethnography of Franz Boas,” Cromohs 3 (1998): 1–­7, http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/3_98/lorini .html, accessed June 28, 2014. Boas’s reflections on water as an encultured substance contrast with Durkheim, who naturalized water as preanalytic stuff: “Sensual representations are in a perpetual flux; they come after each other like the waves of a river, and even during the time that they last, they do not remain the same thing.” Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1915), 433. Originally published as Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912). Gísli Pálsson, Coastal Economies, Cultural Accounts: Human Ecology and Icelandic Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), xvii. Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). This view, supported by the legal making of the high seas (in Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius’s 1609 Mare Liberum [Freedom of the Seas]), has in European philosophy been leveraged into a claim about ocean ontology. Barthes

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“claimed that the sea ‘bears no message,’ not merely because of its power to reflect rather than contain a gamut of different meanings but because of its seeming absence of evidence.” Quoted in Nandita Batra and Vartan P. Messier, “The Multitudinous Seas: Matter and Metaphor,” in This Watery World: Humans and the Sea, ed. Vartan P. Messier and Nandita Batra (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 1–­19, at 4. Bachelard thought of water as “substantive nothingness” (quoted in ibid., 4). Mary Douglas quotes Mircea Eliade, from 1958, on water as a symbol of creative formlessness: “In water everything is ‘dissolved,’ every ‘form’ is broken up, everything that has happened ceases to exist; nothing that was before remains after immersion in water, not an outline, not a ‘sign,’ not an event” (Douglas, Purity and Danger, 162). 25. See Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), 12. On “people without history,” see Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 26. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 49 and 220. Many more examples can be found in Malinowski’s works. 27. Raymond Firth, We, the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), 29. 28. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Triste Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Penguin, 1995), 78, 88. Originally published as Triste Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). Although Lévi-­Strauss’s meditations on seascapes are often painterly, his narration of his ocean travels is fraught. He saw the sea as a path toward research in Brazil in the 1930s and as an escape from Vichy France to New York in the 1940s. Lévi-­Strauss pondered an ironic fantasy of the sea: “I saw myself going back to my wandering life—­but on the oceans this time, sharing the labours and the frugal repasts of a handful of seamen, sailing hither and yon on a clandestine vessel, sleeping on deck, and gaining in health and strength from the day-­long nearness of the sea” (24). 29. For a vision of water as theory’s other, see Stefan Helmreich, “The House of Kuhn, by the Water,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 5 (2012): 521–­526. 30. Malinowski, Argonauts, 4. 31. Quoted in Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 84. 32. Compare attempts to think with the sound of seawater, as in Charles Zerner’s “Sounding the Makassar Strait: The Poetics and Politics of an Indonesian Marine Environment,” in Culture and the Question of Rights: Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia, ed. Charles Zerner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 56–­108. Zerner explores how “calls” across water of fishermen in Sulawesi describe a soundscape that complicates the visual idiom within which state power has sought to contain the sea; Nigel Thrift, in “Space,” Theory, Culture, & Society: Problematizing Global Knowledge 23, nos. 2–­3 (2006): 139–­155, has suggested whale communication as a model for human communication: “What is interesting is the way in which human society is gradually gaining the same kind of capacity as whales: we are increasingly beings who can live with distant others as if they were close to” (143). 245

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33. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 103. 34. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-­Western Melanesia (London: Routledge, 1929), 106. 35. Catherine Lutz, “The Gender of Theory,” in Women Writing Culture, ed. Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 249–­265. 36. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (William Morrow and Company, 1928), 14. 37. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938). Melville Herskovits, in The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), staged the ocean as a space of history and resistance, writing of “salt-­water” Negroes—­people transported from Africa—­as agents of cultural transmission. Hurston mobilized two maritime images: the spyglass and the horizon. See Katherine Jacobs, “From ‘Spy-­Glass’ to ‘Horizon’: Tracking the Anthropological Gaze in Zora Neale Hurston,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 30, no. 3 (1997): 329–­360. 38. Henk Driessen, “A Janus-­Faced Sea: Contrasting Perceptions and Experiences of the Mediterranean,” Maritime Studies 3, no. 1 (2004): 41–­50, at 42. See also Naor Ben-­Yehoyada, “The Clandestine Central Mediterranean Passage,” Middle East Report 261 (2011): http://www.merip.org/mer/mer261/clandestine-central -mediterranean-passage, accessed January 8, 2015. 39. Ibid., 45. 40. Maritime anthropology offers ethnographies of fishing communities. See, for classic texts, Frederik Barth, Models of Social Organization (Royal Anthropological Institute: London, 1966); James M. Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988); John G. Butcher, The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004); Bela Gunda, ed., The Fishing Cultures of the World: Studies in Ethnology, Cultural Ecology and Folklore (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984); Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson, eds., The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), Bonnie J. McCay, Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law, and Ecology in New Jersey History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); Gísli Pálsson, Coastal Economies, Cultural Accounts: Human Ecology and Icelandic Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Torben A. Vestergaard, “The Fishermen and the Nation,” Maritime Anthropological Studies 3 (1990): 14–­34. Also important have been anthropological histories of seafaring. See Thomas Gladwin, East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Charles Frake, “Cognitive Maps of Time and Tide Among Medieval Seafarers,” Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, no. 2 (1985): 254–­270; Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On coastal tourism, see Jane Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jermey Boissevain and Tom Selwyn, eds. Contesting the Foreshore: Tourism, Society, and Politics on the Coast (Amsterdam University Press, 2004). Scholars have examined beliefs about fishing symbolism: e.g., John Cordell and Judith Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Identity and the Sea in Torres 246

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Strait,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1987): 15–­17. Such work has documented how fishing is structured around gender, race, class, and indigeneity. See Margaret C. Chapman, “Women’s Fishing in Oceania,” Human Ecology 15 (1987): 267–­289; Barbara Garrity-­Blake, The Fish Factory: Work and Meaning for Black and White Fishermen of the American Menhaden Industry (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994); Irene M. Kaplan, “Women Who Go to Sea: Working in the Commercial Fishing Industry,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 16 (1984): 491–­514; Olga Nieuwenhuys, “Invisible Nets: Women and Children in Kerala’s Fishing,” Maritime Anthropological Studies 2, no. 2 (1989): 174–­193; Siri Gerrard, “Quota Policy and Local Fishing: Gendered Practices and Perplexities,” Maritime Studies 6, no. 2 (2007): 53–­75; S. Søreng, “Fishing Rights Discourses in Norway: Indigenous versus Non-­indigenous Voices,” Maritime Studies 6, no. 2 (2007): 77–­99. Maritime anthropologists have tracked fishing alongside migration, trade, development, and environmentalist politics. See Niels Einarsson, “All Animals Are Equal But Some Are Cetaceans: Conservation and Culture Conflict,” in Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, ed. Kay Milton (London: Routledge, 1995), 73–­84; Serge Dedina, Saving the Grey Whale: People. Politics, and Conservation in Baja California (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); Theodore C. Bestor, “Supply-­Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 76–­95; Jane Nadel-­Klein, Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss along the Scottish Coast (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Rob van Ginkel, Coastal Cultures: An Anthropology of Fishing and Whaling (Het Spinhuis, 2008). I thank Pamela Ballinger, with whom I developed arguments on these topics for “Recasting Maritime Anthropology,” a panel we organized at the 101st Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, LA, November 20–­24, 2002. 41. See Barbara Poore, “Blue Lines: Water, Information, and Salmon in the Pacific Northwest.” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2003, as well as a special issue of Maritime Studies on “cyborg fish”: Jahn Peter Johnsen, Petter Holm, Peter Sinclair, and Dean Bavington, “Cyborg Fish: On Attempts to Make Fisheries Management Possible,” Maritime Studies 7, no. 2 (2008): 9–­34. For an account of how new kinds of marine biotechnology might be imagined—­both by social theorists and practitioners—­as continuous with older practices of fishing, see Stefan Helmreich, “A Tale of Three Seas: From Fishing through Aquaculture to Marine Biotechnology in the Life History Narrative of a Marine Biologist,” Maritime Studies 2, no. 2 (2003): 73–­94. 42. An early angle through which seawater was viewed anthropologically was as host to natural resources for human cultural enterprise. Lewis Henry Morgan named fishing as a skill marking humanity’s transition to the Middle Stage of Savagery, his logic being that fish required cooking to eat. See Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress From Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1877), 10. In 1906, Marcel Mauss documented coastal lifeways of the Inuit, reporting that Eskimo sociality was organized around summer and winter regimes and noting that “if a child is born during the summer, his first meal consists of soup made from some land animal, or from a river fish cooked in fresh water; the ‘winter’ child’s first meal is soup from some sea animal cooked in salt water.” Marcel Mauss with H. Beuchat, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology, trans. and with a foreword by James J. Fox (London: Routledge, 1979), 60. See also Alfred L. Kroeber, 247

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

“Fishing among the Indians of Northwestern California,” Anthropological Records 21 (1960): 1–­210. Gordon W. Hewes, “The Rubric ‘Fishing and Fisheries,’ ” American Anthropologist 50 (1948): 238–­246. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 58–­62. Raymond Firth, Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1946). Gísli Pálsson, “The Birth of the Aquarium: The Political Ecology of Icelandic Fishing,” in The Politics of Fishing, ed. Tim Gray (London: Macmillan, 1998), 209–­227. Christine Walley, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). See, for example, Radhika Gupta, “Changing Courses: A Comparative Analysis of Ethnographies of Maritime Communities in South Asia,” Maritime Studies 2, no. 2 (2003): 21–­38. Quoted in Pálsson, Coastal Economies, x. Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces (London: Sage, 2001), 60. See Jonathan Raban, ed., The Oxford Book of the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Susan Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 100. Nor are they monolithic, even within the so-­called West, as historians of the modern seaside have demonstrated. See Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside 1750–­1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker, The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth (New York: Penguin, 1998). Looking at “culture and nature underwater,” to borrow Susan Davis’s phrase, can demonstrate that there are many ways to parse watery realms. (Davis, Spectacular Nature, 53). Accounts of water as “naturally” common appear in anthropological discussions of hydropolitics. So, for example, in Paul Trawick’s discussion of the moral economy of water in an Andean village, he explains: The moral economy of water is a product of the unfolding of nature and culture together, of their mutual transformation. It is the outcome of a process whereby the human mind and spirit have expressed themselves within a material reality that is itself partly, but only partly, a social construction. It partly reflects necessity, the impact of material constraints, but it is also, in the final analysis, an expression of certain eternal elements of human desire and intent. In the Andes, this way of life and worldview emerged long ago in the sharing of water, and irrigation has helped to preserve it and hold it fast ever since. Paul Trawick, “The Moral Economy of Water: Equity and Antiquity in the Andean Commons,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 2 (2001): 361–­379, at 374.

55. See McCay and Acheson, Question of the Commons; Julia Olson, “Seeding Nature, Ceding Culture: Redefining the Boundaries of the Marine Commons through Spatial Management and GIS,” Geoforum 41, no. 2 (2010): 293–­303. 248

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56. Pálsson, Coastal Economies, 154. 57. John Cordell and Margaret A. McKean, “Sea Tenure in Bahia, Brazil,” in Making the Commons Work: Theory, Practice, and Policy, ed. David Feeny (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1992), 183–­206, at 183. 58. Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 158. 59. Maritime anthropology also contests the idea that the ocean is naturally dangerous: “Historian Marcus Rediker has argued in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1989) that we distort ‘the reality of life at sea by concentrating on the struggle of man and nature,’ which effectively obscures the role of exploitation and economic pressures in seafarers’ lives.” Penny McCall Howard, “Working the Ground: Life and Death at Sea,” Anthropology News 51, no. 2 (2010): 9, 11, at 9. 60. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 61. See, e.g., Paulla A. Ebron, “Enchanted Memories of Regional Difference in African American Culture,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 1 (1998): 94–­105. 62. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4. For one argument about what this sort of theory machine might leave out—­perhaps Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean Afrodiasporas and other Black Oceans, see Stefan Helmreich, “Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy’s Concept of Diaspora,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 2, no. 2 (1992): 243–­249. 63. For a few social histories tuned to the space of the ocean, see Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–­1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Daniel Finamore, ed., Maritime History as World History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean  (New York: Routledge, 2004); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal, eds., Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social and Political Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010); John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London; Reaktion Books, 2011); Peter N. Miller, ed., The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Jon Anderson and Kimberly Peters, eds., Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014); Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). A new anthropology of ports is also in the making. See, e.g., Carolyn Nordstrom, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Brenda Chaflin, “Recasting Maritime Governance in Ghana: The Neo-­Developmental State and the Port of Tema,” Journal of Modern African Studies 48, no. 4 (2010): 573–­598. 64. See. e.g., Walley, Rough Waters; Enseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South—­Literary and Cultural Perspectives,” Social Dynamics: A Journal of the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town 33, no. 2 (2007): 3–­32; Jatin Dua, “A Sea of Trade and a Sea of Fish: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean,” Journal of East African Studies 7, no. 2 (2013): 353–­370; Guarav Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, 249

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and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Abdul Sheriff and Enseng Ho, eds., The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (London: Hurst, 2014). 65. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Vijay Naidu, Eric Waddell, and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, USP, 1993); Chris Connery, “The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 284–­311; Subramani, “The Oceanic Imaginary,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 1 (2001): 149–­162. 66. Ho, Graves, 102. 67. “Oceanization” has a natural science meaning: “The conversion of continental crust into the much thinner and petrologically distinct oceanic crust” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2008). I would not suggest that social scientists develop their own unitary definition of “oceanization.” Indeed, even in oceanography, the properties assigned to seawater are not fully generalizable but, rather, are particular to oceans on Earth: currents are motored by wind, modulated by the planet’s rotation, and organized into loops called gyres; circulations refer to the three-­dimensional conveyance of water across hemispheres based on temperature and saltiness; tides depend on the moon. 68. John Kurien, “People and the Sea: A ‘Tropical-­majority’ World Perspective,” Maritime Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 9–­26. 69. Ferdnand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). Originally published as La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II (Paris: Colin, 1949). Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). 70. Compare Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–­44. 71. Pamela Ballinger, “Watery Spaces, Globalizing Places: Ownership and Access in Postsocialist Croatia,” in European Responses to Globalization, ed. Janet Laible and Henri J. Barkey, vol. 88 of Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis (Emerald Group Publishing, 2006), 153–­157, at 154–­155. For further analytics of flow, see Anna Tsing, “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2000): 327–­360, and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Others have thought through sea creatures. Bill Maurer, “A Fish Story: Rethinking Globalization on Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands,” American Ethnologist 27, no. 3 (2000): 670–­701, posed capital as akin to killifish, marshy creatures whose embryonic development can halt and recommence, depending on the presence of salt water. Maurer troubled stories of steady circulation in global capitalism. Compare Corinne Hayden, “Suspended Animation: A Brine Shrimp Essay,” in Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, ed. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2003), 193–­225.

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72. Iain Chambers, “Maritime Criticism and Lessons from the Sea,” Insights 3, no. 9 (2010), https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/insights/volume3/article9/, accessed November 24, 2014. 73. Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands.” See also Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Compare Boellstorff in The Gay Archipelago, who writes, “For gay and lesbi Indonesians, the self is not that which moves from island to island; it is the water itself, lapping up on multiple shores at the same time.” Tom Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 211. Compare Helmreich, Alien Ocean, on Hawaiian archipelagic identity. 74. Chris Connery, “The Oceanic Feeling,” 289. 75. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 1. 76. René ten Bos, “Towards an Amphibious Anthropology: Water and Peter Sloterdijk,” Environment and Planning D-­Society & Space 27, no. 1 (2009): 73–­86, at 85. 77. Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 99. 78. Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities and Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 79. Jamie Linton, What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). 80. Ann Game, “Time, Space, Memory, with Reference to Bachelard,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 192–­208, at 192. 81. Edna Keah Garrison, “Are We on a Wavelength Yet? On Feminist Oceanography, Radios, and Third Wave Feminism,” in Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement, ed. Jo Reger (New York: Routledge, 2005), 237–­256. And see Lynn Spigel, “Theorizing the Bachelorette: ‘Waves’ of Feminist Media Studies,” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1209–­1221. 82. Alison Wylie, “Afterword: On Waves,” in Feminist Anthropology: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Pamela Geller and Miranda Stockett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 167–­176, at 173. 83. Celia Lowe, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 92. 84. Or think of the work of Nikhil Anand, who, in “Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 542–­564, uses the notion of “pressure” to theorize the socialnatural mix of politics, pumps, and pipes that organize what he calls the “hydraulic citizenship” of the centers and margins of Mumbai. 85. Orlove and Caton, “Water Sustainability.” 86. Ibid., 402. 87. Ibid., 403. 88. Hasok Chang, Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012). See also Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of “Stuff ” (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985) and David Philip Miller, Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-­Century “Water Controversy” (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004).

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89. David Bond, “Governing Disaster: The Political Life of the Environment during the BP Oil Spill,” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2013): 694–­715. 90. And look to Robert Muckel, “Thinking about Marine Debris,” Anthropology News, August 2012, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556–3502.2012.53602 .x/pdf, for an archaeological position paper calling for an assessment of the translocal impact of radioactive debris moving across the Pacific from Japan’s March 2011 tsunami. On models of climate and associated oceanic events, see Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Another example that could be elaborated here would be the disastrous civic planning and politics that permitted the waters consequent to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina to drown or otherwise cause the deaths of at least 1833 people in Louisiana. Shaped by racialized and racist city planning, the infrastuctural failure of the levees in New Orleans hit African American neighborhoods hardest, an outcome that requires an analysis that looks at how the formalisms of city and hydraulic planning can encode and/or be calibrated to ruling assumptions about which places and people are worth protecting. See J. Anthony Paredes, “Introduction to ‘The Impact of the Hurricanes of 2005 on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of the United States,’ ” American Anthropologist 108, no. 4 (2006): 637–­642. 91. See http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/05/08/labb/ (accessed September 17, 2010) for an Internet map of the oil spill generated by environmental justice group Louisiana Bucket Brigade. 92. Illich, H2O, 4. 93. See Arturo Escobar, “After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology,” Current Anthropology 40, no. 1 (1999): 1–­16. It is not clear to me that treating water as an “actor” in the sense encouraged by some posthumanism is the way to go here. Jessica S. Lehman, in “Relating to the Sea: Enlivening the Ocean as an Actor in Eastern Sri Lanka,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2013): 485–­ 501, offers an intriguing narrative in which seawater is an actor—­though one of the difficulties of this approach, ironically, turns out to be that “the ocean” is treated as a category before the analysis gets underway. 94. This phrasing plays with Lévi-­Straussian ideas but also invokes words of Donna Haraway’s. In The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway wrote, “Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with.” Donna Haraway, A Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Other­ness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003), 5.

CHAPTER 9: TIME AND THE TSUNAMI 1. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2004). 2. Amitav Ghosh, “Overlapping Faults,” The Hindu, January 11, 2005: 11. 3. Dennis Smith, “When Nature’s Wrath Is History’s Reminder,” New York Times, December 28, 2004. 4. Warren Hoge, “U.N. Urges Expansion of Tsunami Warning System to Indian Ocean,” New York Times, December 30, 2004. 5. Andrew C. Revkin, “How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly,” New York Times, December 31, 2004. 252

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

New York Times editorial, “Sounding the Alarm,” December 28, 2004. In some outlets, there was talk not just of human response, but of nonhuman animal response, of how animals—­elephants, dogs, flamingos—­may have tuned in to the vibration of the earthquake prior to the arrival of the consequent tsunami. See Maryann Mott, “Did Animals Sense Tsunami Was Coming?” National Geographic News, January 4, 2005, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0104_050104_tsunami _animals.html, accessed July 1, 2014. Michele Kayal and Matthew L. Wald, “At Warning Center, Alert for Quake, None for a Tsunami,” New York Times, December 28, 2004. John Schwartz, “Blogs Provide Raw Details from Scene of the Disaster,” New York Times, December 28, 2004. Editorial, “Are We Stingy? Yes,” New York Times, December 30, 2004. Amitav Ghosh, “No Aid Needed,” The Hindu, January 12, 2005: 11. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Ghosh, “Overlapping Faults,” 11. In anthropology, the Andamans have been positioned in a complex relation to historical time. A. R. Radcliffe-­Brown did his first ethnographic fieldwork in the archipelago, from 1906 to 1908, at a time when it still housed the British India penal colony. This culminated in A. R. Radcliffe-­Brown, The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). He bemoaned the fact that he could not see an “authentic” Andamanese society in full function, and sought to recreate the social history of Great Andaman through interviews with a key informant about the way things used to be. See Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1983). This search for and construction of a more pristine and primitive time of the other became a hallmark of later ethnological work, which sought to describe the indigenous Andamanese, Jarawas, and Shompen as throwbacks to an earlier stage of human evolution. Kath Weston has written instructively on how such descriptions were inseparable from the British project to settle “nomadic” Andamanese in “Homes,” a practice that made of these local people a parallel incarcerated population in the archipelago. See Kath Weston, “Escape from the Andamans: Tracking, Offshore Incarceration, and Ethnology in the Back of Beyond,” in Central Sites, Peripheral Visions: Cultural and Institutional Crossings in the History of Anthropology, ed. Richard Handler (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 41–­68. In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, such stories were reanimated, as news agencies like the BBC reported that “Tsunami folklore ‘saved islanders,’ ” that the indigenous Andaman peoples had age-­old wisdom linking oceanic phenomena—­the receding of sea waters—­to survival strategies. Kai Friese, writing in an Outlook India piece on January 16, critiqued such accounts with polemical pique: Anthropology is alive and well, in the islands and it’s having a field day in the news. The Indian Express on Sunday gave us a double-­page spread with a field guide to “the tribes and their survival tricks”. The Great Andamanese “whose strongest physical characteristics are distinctly Negroid”; the Jarawas who “look at heavenly bodies and can decipher what is to come”; the Shompen, “the only primitive tribe of the islands with 253

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Mongoloid features”, and so on. (Kai Friese, “Tsunami: Ten Little Niggers—­Or Are They Little Indians? The Great Andaman Tribal Circus Continues,” Outlook India, January 16, 2005; removed from website by end of January). 14. On real time, consult Kath Weston, Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (New York: Routledge, 2002), as well as Annelise Riles, “Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological Knowledge,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 (2004): 392–­405. See also Kath Weston, interviewed by Stefan Helmreich, “Kath Weston’s Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age,” Body & Society 12, no. 3 (2006): 103–­121. 15. Weston, “Escape from the Andamans.” 16. The immense history of life and politics on the coasts of the Indian Ocean is far beyond what this essay can put its toe into. Omnivorous readers are referred to Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 17. Sanjay Banerjee, “Could the NIO Have Done Better?,” The Times of India, January 8, 2005, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/984611.cms, accessed November 24, 2014. 18. National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India, “NIO and the Tsunami,” http://drs .nio.org/jsp/niotsunami.jsp, accessed January 20, 2005. 19. The Sagar Kanya began to deliver preliminary reports in early February. According to the Deccan Herald, “an area in Port Blair may have sunk by a metre while Andaman Island appears to have been twisted.” Also reported were the destruction of young coral reefs near the Andamans and the inundation of farmland by saltwater. 20. Staff Reporter, “Rs 30 Crore Earmarked to Develop Early Warning Systems for Tsunami,” Nahvind Times, January 20, 2005, 1, 14. 21. For a devastating personal account of the tsunami, see Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (New York: Vintage, 2013). 22. Maria L. Assad, “Time and Uncertainty: A Metaphorical Equation,” KronoScope 3, no. 2 (2003): 185–­197. See also Sandra B. Rosenthal, “Scientific Time and Temporal Experience: Pragmatism’s Contribution to the Search for a Synthesis,” KronoScope 2, no. 2 (2002): 167–­183. 23. The fastening of scientific sentiments about objectivity to ideas about geological time was only one calibration of science to society evident during my visit to NIO. Fisheries scientists (not much in evidence at the meeting but present on the margins) think of their science as having immediate implications for social and political management—­and, with fish populations subject to influences ranging from tidal to climatic forces, consider oscillating ocean time central to their work and, indeed, inextricable from the entangled temporalities of local, national, and international maritime politics. Scientists working in marine biotechnology (the use of marine organisms as raw materials for bioengineered products), meanwhile, see their work keyed to the temporality of local and global capitalism (local, in connection with national priorities around aquaculture or the bioremediation of coastal pollution; global, in connection with pharmaceutical production and marketing). NIO’s entry into biotech, subsidized by India’s Department of Biotechnology, provides these scientists with an idiom for thinking of “science” as keeping pace with a speedy, 254

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marketized “society,” especially as India moves from a state-­socialist model of science funding to a vision of the nation as a corporatized state player in global technology markets. See Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) and Kaushik Sunder Rajan, “Subjects of Speculation: Emergent Life Sciences and Market Logics in the United States and India,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 1 (2005): 19–­30. Oscillating ocean time is less important here than the boom and bust cycles of capitalism. Depending, then, on the particular sciences at issue (e.g., geology, biology, biotech) and the social and political institutional conditions supporting those sciences, a wide variety of temporal relationships between “science” and “society” can obtain. 24. Corresponding members are Australia, Austria, Brazil, Italy, Denmark, Iceland, Mexico, Mauritius, Morocco, New Zealand, the Philippines, Russia, Spain, Sweden, South Africa, and Switzerland. 25. Researchers at NIO were concerned to get their graduate students postings in Europe and the United States and to make sure that Indian scientists were on board American, Japanese, and French research vessels doing science in the Indian Ocean. Such signs of Indian national sentiment as materialized at the meeting did not sit well with non-­Indian conferees. During a discussion about whether the Indian Ocean region should have its own working group within InterRidge or whether existing groups devoted to biology or geology should share it, one French scientist opined that research groups “should be thematic rather than geographical. A geographical focus means that local people will dominate and you won’t always get the best people to do the best science that way.” This uncharitable estimation was given a sharper (and offensive) point when this researcher concluded by saying, “It’s a bad joke, but I would not like to have an Indian reservation in the Indian Ocean.” A Japanese scientist, dealing with questions of national ocean access far more diplomatically, paired a geological question with a political one, moving discussion to the specifics of the Andaman back arc basin, where aftershocks had been occurring. He said, “I have two questions for Indian scientists: 1. What is unique about the Andaman back arc basin? and 2. What is the chance of international science teams investigating the Andaman system, since there are lots of political restrictions on going there at the moment?” The head of the Indian Ridge program, Kamesh Raju, offered seismic specifics and speculated that international scientific access to the Andamans might be eased in the aftermath of the tsunami. 26. Indeed, India’s place on the timeline of “development” was in part popularly imagined through the country’s response to natural disaster, which, at least as far as Tamil Nadu was concerned, was widely seen as evidencing a speedy, efficient, industrialized nation. As a point of comparison, think back to the lackluster response of the American government to Hurricane Katrina, which was widely characterized as incompetent, even “third world” in its execution. Thanks to Ajantha Subramanian for this observation. 27. Ghosh, “Overlapping Faults.” 28. Ghosh, Hungry Tide, 224. 29. Amitav Ghosh, “The Town by the Sea,” The Hindu, January 13, 2005: 11. 30. Ibid. 31. For an ethnographic account, written years later, of the effects of the tsunami on senses of time in a small Indian fishing village in Tamil Nadu, see Frida Hastrup, 255

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Weathering the World: Recovery in the Wake of the Tsunami in a Tamil Fishing Village (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011). Hastrup reports on how people in Tharangambadi have used the phrase “tsunami time”—­not “as a representation of a precise or past point in history,” but rather as an “invocation of their general and comprehensive situation . . . [to refer] to both continuous structures and changing practices” (131), to speak both of crises of context and of ongoing projects of endurance and survival.

CHAPTER 10: FROM SPACESHIP EARTH TO GOOGLE OCEAN 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

256

Jason Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography,” New Media and Society 12, no. 6 (2010): 869–­888. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). Kenneth Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” in Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, ed. Henry Ed Jarrett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), 3–­14; Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). Boulding, “Spaceship Earth,” 3. Yaakov Jerome Garb, “The Use and Misuse of the Whole Earth Image,” Whole Earth Review (March 1985): 18–­25; Dennis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-­ World, Whole-­Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no. 2 (1994): 270–­294; Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order,” in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray, with Heidi J. Figueroa-­Sarriera and Steven Mentor (New York: Routledge, 1995), xi–­xx; Sheila Jasanoff, “Image and Imagination: The Formation of Global Environmental Consciousness,” in Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, ed. Clark A. Miller and Paul Edwards (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 309–­337; Volker M. Welter, “From Disc to Sphere,” Cabinet 40 (2011): 19–­25; Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 602–­630. Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Lisa Messeri, “Apollo’s Temple: New Perspectives for Old Images,” paper for History of Science 287: Heidegger and Technology, Harvard University, 2008. See Lazier, “Earthrise,” for a definitive reading of Heidegger’s—­and Arendt’s—­ response to the image of Earth from the void of space. Jasanoff, “Image,” 335. Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 282. In his 1956 book, The Image, Kenneth Boulding was interested in these older meanings of icon, writing of his analytic endeavor, “I will even venture to give the ‘science’ a name—­Eiconics—­hoping thereby to endow it in the minds of my readers with some of the prestige of classical antiquity. I run some risk perhaps of having my new science confused with the study of icons. A little confusion, however, and the subtle overtones of half-­remembered associations are all part of the magic of

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the name.” Kenneth Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 148. 12. Frank Borman and James Lovell, “We Felt Content, Cozy and Never Got Bored,” Life (January 14, 1966): 68–­72, at 70. 13. Insofar as this world floats in space as a kind of ocean, this “Spaceship” might more properly be understood as a submarine, an entity whose distinction from its outside is a differential, not an absolute. Not Spaceship Earth, but Submersible Ocean. Earth is at once a ship and, as Carl Sagan put it, “the shore of the cosmic ocean.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 2. On space as an “ecology,” see Valerie  Olson, “Political Ecology in the Extreme: Asteroid Activism and the Making of an Environmental Solar System,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2012): 1027–­1044. 14. Haraway, “Cyborgs and Symbionts,” 174. 15. James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2009). 16. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: TimesBooks, 2010). 17. Lazier, “Earthrise.” 18. Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 19. Google Earth, initially named Earth Viewer, was acquired by the Google corporation from a company called Keyhole, Inc. and rebranded in 2005. 20. Welter, “From Disc to Sphere,” 25. 21. Arjun Appadurai, call for papers for Social Research: An International Quarterly 78, no. 4 (2011), in an e-­mail received from Arien Mack, June 2, 2010. And compare Stefan Helmreich, “From Polavision to Gaga Glasses,” Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art about Lady Gaga, http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/2011/02/from -polavision-to-gaga-glasses.html, accessed November 24, 2014. 22. Spaceship Earth represented the planet as “home.” Google Earth allows one to play with the representation from “home” (armchair travel becomes even more the default mode with Google Moon and Google Mars, now bundled with Google Earth). 23. Farman, “Mapping,” 872. 24. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 8. 25. See Irene K. Fischer, Geodesy? What’s That? My Personal Involvement in the Age-­Old Quest for the Size and Shape of the Earth, with a Running Commentary on Life in a Government Research Office (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005). 26. Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 27. Chun, Programmed Visions, 17. 28. “Software’s temporality . . . is converted in part to spatiality, process in time conceived in terms of a process in space” (Chun, Programmed Visions, 3). 29. Ibid., 15. 30. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 31. Strassler, Refracted Visions, 284.

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32. From The Commens Peirce Dictionary, http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens /terms/diagram.html, accessed November 24, 2014. One might be more playful and call it a calligram, a decorative arrangement of letters, taking the shape of the thing that the letters spell out—­though a calligram made of icons, indexes, and symbols. On calligrams, see Alain Pottage and Brad Sherman, Figures of Invention: A History of Modern Patent Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 33. On the radical-­rebus, another sometimes-­paratactical mode of representation, see Bill Maurer and Sylvia J. Martin, “Accidents of Equity and the Aesthetics of Chinese Offshore Incorporation,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 3 (2012): 527–­544. 34. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/4434916/Google-Ocean-launched -as-extension-of-Google-Earth-to-map-the-seabed.html, accessed November 24, 2014. 35. http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1276087 #Post1276087, accessed November 24, 2014. 36. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/gec-our-oceansseas/hnflvN nbdq4/kc8IdpYDFh4J / 37. One reader of this paper suggested that view might be appropriate for whales, which could use sound to gather just this transparent kind of apprehension, in an auditory register. I do not think that is right. On that model, Google Ocean for whales would still be missing the fact that sensing can only reach so far into the environment. 38. Sabine Höhler, “Depth Records and Ocean Volumes: Ocean Profiling by Sounding Technology, 1850–­1930,” History and Technology 18, no. 2 (2002): 119–­54, at 119. 39. Farman, “Mapping,” 875. Compare Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007). 40. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 183–­201. 41. The Maldives, of course, is an island chain in actual danger of disappearing beneath the sea. See chapter 8. 42. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/earth/thread?tid=2d8ad21c0d9ab80e &hl=en, accessed November 24, 2014. 43. Farman, “Mapping,” 870. 44. Ibid., 873. 45. Adrian Myers, “Camp Delta, Google Earth and the Ethics of Remote Sensing in Archaeology,” World Archaeology 42, no. 3 (2010): 455–­467. 46. Ibid., 455. 47. For an ethnography of the world’s system of submarine cables, see Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 48. For an ethnography of the trash vortex, see Kimberley de Wolff, “Gyre Plastic: Science, Circulation and the Matter of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2014. 49. Kim Fortun, “From Bhopal to the Informating of Environmentalism: Risk Communication in Historical Perspective” (Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments), Osiris, 2nd ser., 19 (2004): 283–­296. 50. Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997). 258

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51. Also of a piece with Digital Ocean is the National Science Foundation–­funded Ocean Genome Legacy project, which is “dedicated to creating a global biobank housing the DNA blueprints (genomes) of a broad cross-­section of the endangered organisms of the sea.” Here the planet Earth is its own watery archive: “These materials have value as raw materials for research, as seeds for reconstitution of biological entities and functions, and as information sources and references for ecological and conservation studies” (http://www.oglf.org/About.htm; site discontinued). 52. Google Earth also features a “historical imagery” slider, which permits going into the past and viewing old satellite photos. Google Ocean features one old topographical map of the seafloor, the Marie Tharp Historical Map. How about fleeting and temporary marine geographies? An overlay in one upgrade to Google Earth shows a false-­color model of the March 2011 Japan Tsunami; the Tsunami Forecast Maximum Amplitude displays “computed tsunami amplitude in cm during 24 hours of wave propagation.” “Tohoku (East Coast of Honshu) Tsunami, March 11, 2011, Main Event Page,” NOAA Center for Tsunami Research, http://nctr.pmel .noaa.gov/honshu20110311/, accessed January 8, 2014. 53. From The Commens Peirce Dictionary: http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens /terms/graphexis.html, accessed November 24, 2014. 54. Bill Maurer (pers. comm., September 4, 2011) points out that “Peirce was also writing in a world where the boundaries of the public were newly opened up by the end of the Civil War, yet where—­Gilded Age—­massive privatizations, railroads, and so forth were taking place.” 55. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Originally published as Mille plateaux, vol. 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980). 56. Victor F. Lenzen, “Charles S. Peirce as Mathematical Geodesist,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 8, no. 2 (1972): 90–­105. 57. Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 165. 58. Perhaps revisiting some of the thinking Peirce did during his day job as a geodesist can help us think about what is missing here. Peirce himself saw gravity as a law, not a quality, a representation of a regularity, not a condition of possibility. See David A. Pharies, Charles S. Peirce and the Linguistic Sign (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1985), 12. But what if we inverted Peirce’s logic and treated gravity as a quality, a kind of thickness that inhabits the material-­semiotic world? This could amplify the place of materiality in the Peircian tool kit. Materiality already matters for thinking, for example, of the indexical, impressed, quality of a photograph—­and it does so in a way that depends on a conception of materiality as composed of a physical structure—­one that in turn depends for its sensibility on the meaning assigned to it (the materiality of photographic media only becomes important as indexical stuff if we believe that it captures “images”; the materiality of beach sand only becomes important as indexical stuff if we believe that footprints are good-­enough signs of feet). 59. Avatars in the online virtual world of Second Life can choose to do without “gravity,” a sign of this world’s status as fantasy. See Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2008), 96. 259

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60. Reflecting on the contingency and alien character of being in the world, Peirce once asked, “Why was I born in the nineteenth century on Earth rather than on Mars a thousand years ago?” Quoted in Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 336.

CHAPTER 11: UNDERWATER MUSIC 1. This essay is not a history of underwater sound, which historians of oceanography and acoustics have already delivered. Sabine Höhler, in “Depth Records and Ocean Volumes: Ocean Profiling by Sounding Technology, 1850–­1930,” History and Technology 18, no. 2 (2002): 119–­154, describes a shift from sounding the sea with metal ropes to sounding with reflected sound, a practice that turned the ocean into a three-­dimensional volume. 2. Cousteau, Jacques, with Frédéric Dumas. The Silent World (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953). 3. James M. Long, “ ‘Absolute’ Calm Two Miles Down,” San Diego Evening Tribune (October 1, 1953), quoted in Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (New York: Zone, 2011), endnote page 287, notes to pages 729–­730; endnotes available only in digital form, on Zone website: http://www.zonebooks.org /titles/SCHW_MAK.html, accessed November 24, 2014. 4. Quoted in Victoria A. Kaharl, Water Baby: The Story of Alvin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), viii. 5. Douglas Kahn, in Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), calls such evocation “programmatic, depicted, or discursive water” (245). 6. Wagner linked water and music: “If rhythm and melody are the shores on which music touches and fertilizes the two continents of the arts that share its origin, then sound is its liquid, innate element; but the immeasurable extent of this liquid is the sea of harmony” (quoted in Kahn, Noise Water Meat, 246). This chapter leaves aside evocations of sea creatures, such as Camille Saint-­Saëns’s Aquarium movement in his 1886 Le Carnaval des Animaux, or Edward MacDowell’s 1898 Nautilus in Sea Pieces. See Malcolm Shick, “Siren Song,” Chamber Musings: Newsletter of the Chamber Music Society of the Maine Center for the Arts 4, no. 2 (2007): 1, 3–­4. 7. David B. Knight, Landscapes in Music: Space, Place, and Time in the World’s Great Music (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 58. Toru Takemitsu’s “I Hear the Water Dreaming” from 1987 evokes water in its Debussy-­styled sound and also formally, through an E-­flat–­E–­A motif that—­spelled in German as Es-­E-­A—­ transliterates the word “sea.” 8. See Jacques-­Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle, directors, Le Monde du Silence (FSJYC Production/REquins Associés/Société Filmad/Titanus, 1956). Cousteau’s TV show, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, was soundtracked by Walter Scarf, who sought evocative music for animal subjects. For a special on sea elephants, “the music had a wonderful reedy quality, the same as the sea elephants, but with added feeling.” Quoted in Jack G. Shaheen, “The Documentary of Art: ‘The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,’ ” Journal of Popular Culture 21, no. 1 (1987): 93–­101, at 96. Cousteau’s editors made modifications: “the sounds of the manatees in The 260

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Forgotten Mermaids were too abrasive so the music editor rearranged several notes to help soften the manatee munches” (99). 9. See Karen Chen, “Water Reflection upon Four Piano Works—­Liszt, Debussy, Ravel, and Griffes,” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2008, on “tremolos to describe the shimmering effects of light on a still water surface; ascending and descending arpeggiated figures and glissandi to depict the undulating of waves” (6). 10. See www.filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=59157&forumID=1 &archive=0 (accessed November 24, 2014). “Films have taught us that underwater sounds (are) muffled, echoing, and bubbly. In actuality water is alive with high frequencies, but a bright sounding recording tends to come off as less realistic.” Darren Blondin, “Recording Underwater Ambiences,” October 15, 2007, www.dblondin .com/101507.html, accessed November 24, 2014. 11. Though an earlier—­mechanical—­precedent is the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo’s “gurgler” (gorgogliatore), an intonarumori (noisemaker) described in his 1913 Art of Noises manifesto, which called for nonrepresentational sounds—­splashing, sirens—­in composition. More satirically, Spike Jones’s 1948 “William Tell Overture” features gargling. In experimental composition, Francisco Lopez’s 1993 Azoic Zone, with pieces such as “A Vibrational Trip from Bathyal to Hadal Zones,” sounds sourced from hydrophonic recordings, but it is merely timbrally evocative of them. 12. The indie band Yo La Tengo, re-­soundtracking Painlevé in 2002’s The Sounds of Science (Egon Records 07) retains burbly emphases. 13. Vladimir Bogdanov, All Music Guide: The Definitive Guide to Popular Music, 4th ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: Backbeat, 2001), 105. 14. Dominic Priore, Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece (London: Sanctuary, 2007), 72. 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_music, accessed July 2, 2014. “Wetness” is now taken as such an obvious term that even a sober book on architectural acoustics contains index entries such as “reverberation, excess creates aural soup” and “reverberation, soup and mud.” Barry Blesser and Linda-­Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 428. See Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–­1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005). 16. David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound, and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995), 116. Compare Julian Henriques, “Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 451–­480. 17. Listen to Parliament’s 1978 “Aqua Boogie” for more drowning sounds from the black Atlantic. Compare Sun Ra’s vision of a black utopia in outer space. For more, see Ben Williams, “Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age,” in Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, ed. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 154–­176. 18. On FreeSound, a database for sound effects, an MP3 entitled “under_alien_ocean” is described as “beneath alien waves, its [sic] liquid, but it ain’t water . . . oh and its [sic] from 1950.” www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=14260, accessed November 24, 2014. 19. Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 247. Henry Cowell “used ‘8 Rice Bowls’ tuned to no definite 261

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pitch using water for Ostinato Pianissimo (For Percussion Band) (1934)” (Kahn, Noise, 248). South India’s Jalatarangam (“water waves”) is a carnatic instrument that uses bowls filled with water. Steven Feld describes flowing water in songs about the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea in the liner notes of Voices of the Rainforest: A Day in the Life of the Kaluli People (Rykodisc, 1991). Satie wrote satirically on the move from evocative to invocative: “The hydrographic engineers tell us that all the waterfalls of the earth, whatever their social standing might be, yield a low F, clearly audible, upon which it so happens is built a perfect chord in C Major. . . . The Water Company is elated: it is going to install carefully calibrated conduits in all the concert halls to offer musicians an entire chromatic scale of little cascades” (quoted in Kahn, Noise, 247). Satie would not have been surprised when “Cage composed . . . Water Walk: For Solo Television Performer (1959). . . . The water-­related instructions and properties . . . include a bathtub of water, an operating pressure cooker, a supply of ice cubes, a garden sprinkling can, a soda siphon” (Kahn, 250). 20. Kahn, Noise Water Meat, 242. 21. “Aldous Huxley . . . in ‘Water Music’ (1920), anticipated the importance of dripping water in Fluxus and, later, in chaos theory: ‘Drip drop, drip drap drep drop. So it goes on, this water melody forever without an end. Inconclusive, inconsequent, formless, it is always on the point of deviating into sense and form’ ” (Kahn, Noise Water Meat, 252). 22. Ibid., 251. 23. Consult Alan Dunn and Jess Young, eds., Music for the Williamson Tunnels: A Collection of the Sound of Dripping Water (Arts Council, England, 2008). Christian Marclay’s 1990 “Bottled Water” is an installation consisting of bottles filled with tape containing the sound of dripping water. The “hydraulophone” uses streams of water in a flutelike apparatus: http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/02/17/ontario-science -centre-hydraulophone-musical-keyboard-water-fountain/, accessed July 2, 2014. 24. Cyrus C. M. Mody, “The Sounds of Science: Listening to Laboratory Practice,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 30, no. 2 (2005): 175–­198. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 635–­648. 25. Francis Hauksbee, “An Account of an Experiment Touching the Propagation of Sound through Water,” Philosophical Transactions 26 (1708): 371–­372, at 372. On acoustics experiments at Lake Geneva in 1826, see Jean-­Daniel Colladon, “Experiments on the Velocity of Sound in Water,” in Acoustics: Historical and Philosophical Development, trans. and ed. R. Bruce Lindsay (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson, and Ross, 1973), 194–­201. Originally published in Souvenirs et Mémoires: Autobiographie de Jean-­Daniel Colladon (Geneva: Aubert-­Schuchardt, 1893). 26. James Hamilton-­Paterson, The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds (New York: Random, 1992), 114–­115. 27. Consult http://www.hnsa.org/resources/historic-naval-sound-and-video/sound-in -the-sea/, an archive of Navy training sounds. 28. Schwartz, Making Noise, 718. Alistair Sponsel, in “The Musique Concrète of Nature: Underwater Listening and the Acousmatic Predicament,” a paper delivered on August 20, 2014 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science, has pointed to how mid-­twentieth-­century worries about unknown sounds in the sea were contemporaneous with the theorization 262

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of “acousmatic” sound (sound of unclear origin) by modernist composer Pierre Schaeffer. On acousmata, read Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 29. Susan Schlee, The Edge of an Unfamiliar World: A History of Oceanography (New York: Dutton, 1973), 246. 30. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–­1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 31. See Columbus O’D. Iselin and Maurice Ewing, Sound Transmission in Sea Water: A Preliminary Report (Woods Hole, MA: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for the National Defense Research Committee, 1941). 32. Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-­Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 33. See Virginia Madsen, “The Call of the Wild,” in Uncertain Ground: Essays between Art and Nature, ed. Martin Thomas (Art Gallery of NSW: Sydney, 1999), 29–­43, at 33. 34. Kahn, Noise Water Meat, 249–­250. See also Thomas S. Hines, “Then Not Yet ‘Cage’: The Los Angeles Years, 1912–­1938,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 65–­99, at 90. 35. Quoted in Kahn, Noise Water Meat, 249–­250. 36. Differences between freshwater and seawater are consequential, too. 37. Simon Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 26. 38. Ibid., 26. 39. Thompson, Soundscape. 40. On laboratories as producing inscriptions, see Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1986). 41. Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-­Century England,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), 479–­504. 42. Daniel Charles, “Singing Waves: Notes on Michel Redolfi’s Underwater Music,” Contemporary Music Review 8, no. 1 (1993): 57–­69, at 60. 43. “Daniel Harris Music: New Music for New Listeners,” http://danielharrismusic .com/Underwater_Music_I.html, accessed July 2, 2014. 44. Compare Alan Silvestri’s 1989 soundtrack for The Abyss, which uses “electronic pinging and underwater clanging effects” (Filmtracks: Modern Soundtrack Reviews, www.filmtracks.com/titles/abyss.html, accessed November 24, 2014). 45. Charles, “Singing Waves,” 63. 46. Quoted in ibid., 63. 47. Ibid. 48. Christine James, “Sonar Technology and Shifts in Environmental Ethics,” Essays in Philosophy: A Biannual Journal 6, no. 1 (2005): commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/view content.cgi?article=1172&context=eip, accessed November 24, 2014. 49. Compare the use of whale songs to frighten seals away from Lincolnshire river fish stocks: “To drive the seal family back into the North Sea, the National Rivers Authority have been playing recordings of killer-­whale songs under the surface of the Glen.” The Times, Oct. 31, 1994, quoted in Toop, Ocean of Sound, 3. 263

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50. Charles, “Singing Waves,” 67. 51. See Stefan Helmreich, “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 4 (2007): 621–­641, on how transduction bolsters perceptions of “presence” in submersibles. Compare Sophia Roosth, “Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplasmic Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 332–­350, on transduction in sonocytology, listening to cellular life. For an earlier use, to capture the physical power of reggae sound systems, see Julian Henriques, “Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 451–­480. For a sound studies keyword entry, see Stefan Helmreich, “Transduction,” in Keywords in Sound Studies, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 222–­231. 52. Charles, “Singing Waves,”63. 53. Listen also to Erik DeLuca’s “The Deep Seascape: The Sonic Sea,” which “explores the underwater soundscape of South Florida”: www.erikdeluca.com/, accessed November 24, 2014. 54. Lisa Blanning, “Wet Sounds,” Wire 296 (2008): 81. 55. On sound art, see Brandon Labelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2006) and Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York: Rizzoli, 2007). 56. So dimensional has the underwater world become that the artist Bill Fontana imagines the transplant of a watery soundscape—­as in his 1994 Ile Sonore, transposing sound from the beaches of Normandy to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, making the “white noise of the sea” surround a traffic island (Madsen, “The Call of the Wild,” 29). 57. Wet Sounds, “2008 Listening Gallery, Slavek Kwi, Sonofon,” http://www.wetsounds .co.uk/, accessed October 8, 2011. 58. Wet Sounds, “2008 Listening Gallery, Klaus Osterwaldt, Donatus Subaqua,” http:// www.wetsounds.co.uk/, accessed October 8, 2011. 59. Wet Sounds, “2008 Listening Gallery, Amie Slavin, Wave Play,” http://www.wet sounds.co.uk/, accessed October 8, 2011. “There has been a long-­standing association of water and sound in observational acoustics from antiquity through Chaucer to Helmholtz and beyond, with the sound of a stone hitting water producing a visual counterpart, which was then mapped back onto the invisible movements of sound waves” (Kahn, Noise, 246). See also Tara Rodgers, “Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in Audio-­Technical Discourse,” in Philosophy After Irigaray, ed. Mary Rawlinson, Danae Mcleod, and Sara McNamara (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, forthcoming). The correspondence between water and sound waves is at the heart of cymatics, which employs sound vibration to generate patterns in watery substrates. See the introduction to this book. See also Alexander Lauterwasser, Water Sound Images (Newmarket, NH: MACROmedia, 2006). 60. Wet Sounds, “2008 Listening Gallery, Disinformation, Ghost Shells,” http://www .wetsounds.co.uk/, accessed October 8, 2011. U. Motschmann, K. Sauer, and K. Baumgaertel, “Whistler Wave Amplitude Oscillation and Frequency Modulation in the Magnetospheric Cavity,” Astrophysics and Space Science 105, no. 2 (1984): 373–­377.

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61. The 2009 Wet Sounds festival promised “deep listening” (a term coined by Pauline Oliveros in 1991 and that referred less to water than to a mode of attention). See Jennifer Allan, “Wet Sounds,” Wire 307 (2009): 77. Sound artists continue to organize festivals of underwater audio. “Hydrophonia,” “a festival of hydrophone sound art dedicated to raising public awareness of ocean noise” has been held in 2009 and 2010 in Italy and Spain. See http://hydrophonia.com/, accessed July 2, 2014. 62. www.julianasnapper.com, accessed September 2009 (site discontinued). New website is now at www.julianasnapper.org and no longer contains this exact quotation. 63. Ibid. 64. And in tourist sites such as Florida’s Weeki Wachee mermaid attraction, though women there only pretend to sing in the giant fish tank in which they perform. One wonders whether in future they will use an apparatus for talking under water. See Richie Stachowski, “Device for Talking Under Water,” U.S. Patent #5877460, March 2, 1999. 65. Rodgers, “Toward a Feminist Epistemology.” For an expert reading of Snapper’s body of work, consult Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening,” Senses & Society 6, no. 2 (2011): 133–­155. 66. “You Who Will Emerge from the Flood—­Juliana Snapper interview about her underwater opera at Victoria Baths,” The Shrieking Violet (blog), May 14, 2009, http:// theshriekingviolets.blogspot.com/2009/05/you-who-will-emerge-from-flood -juliana.html, accessed January 7, 2015. 67. Leber and Chesworth, quoted in Linda Kouvaras, “Toilets, Tears, and Transcendence: The Postmodern (Dis-­)Placement of, and in, Two Water-­Based Examples of Australian Sound Art,” Transforming Cultures eJournal 4, no. 1 (2009): 94–­107, at 101; epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/TfC/article/download/1062 /1201, accessed November 24, 2014. 68. www.julianasnapper.com, accessed September 2009 (site discontinued). New website is now at www.julianasnapper.org and no longer contains this exact quotation. 69. Touch, “Tone 36: Jana Winderen, Heated: Live in Japan,” “Reviews,” White Line [UK], http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/catalogue/tone_36_jana_winderen_heated_l .html, accessed January 7, 2015. 70. Jana Winderen, “Releases,” Heated: Live in Japan, http://www.janawinderen.com /releases/heated_live_in_japan_cd_availa.html#.VIeVrWcU4tU, accessed January 7, 2015. 71. Touch, “Tone 36: Jana Winderen.” 72. Toop, Ocean of Sound, 280. 73. See Michael Stocker, “Ocean Bio-­Acoustics and Noise Pollution: Fish, Mollusks, and Other Sea Animals’ Use of Sound, and the Impact of Anthropogenic Noise on the Marine Acoustic Environment,” Soundscape: Journal of Acoustic Ecology 3, no. 2/4, no. 1 (2002/2003): 16–­29. The Duke University biologist Sheila Patek leads a laboratory studying lobster and shrimp sound and hearing: http://pateklab.biology .duke.edu/home, accessed July 2, 2014. 74. Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 323–­324. 75. Quoted in David Ingram, “ ‘A Balance That You Can Hear’: Deep Ecology, ‘Serious Listening,’ and the Soundscape Recordings of David Dunn,” European Journal of American Culture 25, no. 2 (2006): 123–­38, at 129.

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76. “Sonic Antarctica | Andrea Polli,” http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=342, accessed January 7, 2015. 77. Alexandra Supper, “The Search for the ‘Killer Application’: Drawing the Boundaries around the Sonification of Data,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 249–­270. 78. Compare Paul D. “DJ Spooky” Miller’s Sinfonia Antarctica, which uses field recordings to “capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms, [which] reflect a changing and even vanishing environment under duress” (http://djspooky.com /art/terra_nova.php, accessed July 2, 2014). Miller’s piece is an homage to Ralph Vaughn Williams’s 1952 Sinfonia Antarctica, which evokes the austral landscape with orchestral arrangements. Miller suggested that his sinfonia will bypass “metaphor” and “go to Antarctica and record the sound of the continent” (ibid.). Compare, also, Peter Cusack’s 2003 recording, Baikal Ice, which contains hydrophonic recordings of the springtime sound of ice thawing at Siberia’s Lake Baikal. 79. Charles Stankievech, “The DEW Project,” http://www.stankievech.net/dwn/Stan kievech-DEW-306090–2009.pdf, accessed January 7, 2015. 80. Ibid. 81. Charles Stankievech, The DEW Project, on Rhizome, http://rhizome.org/profiles /charlesstankievech/, accessed January 7, 2015. 82. “PALAOA—­What does the Southern Ocean sound like?,” http://www.awi.de/en /news/background/palaoa_what_does_the_southern_ocean_sound_like/, accessed January, 8, 2015. James, “Sonar Technology,” charts the rise of noninvasive sonar in concert with environmental movements. 83. http://www.awi.de/en/go/livestream, accessed January 8, 2015. 84. Garry Kilworth’s science fiction story “White Noise” tells of a haunted undersea cable station. Characters find that the deep retains noises from ages past because (in a fabulous piece of SF logic), “ ‘Cold, dense water is less likely to disperse or be infiltrated by warm currents. The circular currents weave their way intact around the ocean floor like blind worms.’ ‘And they retain sound patterns . . .’ ‘Like magnetic tape.’ ” Garry Kilworth, “White Noise,” Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, vol. 3, ed. Ellen Datlow (New York: St Martin’s, 1990), 508–­516, at 513. The main characters, listening in on a microphone attached to a deep-­sea cable beneath the Red Sea, hear Moses leading his people out of Egypt. 85. Walter Munk, Peter Worcester, and Carl Wunsch, Ocean Acoustic Tomography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

MUSIC/DISCOGRAPHY/CASSETTEOGRAPHY/PLAYLIST DETAILS FOR CHAPTER 11: UNDERWATER MUSIC EVOKING Barry, John. 1977. The Deep (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). Casablanca Records, CAL 2018. Vinyl recording. Berlioz, Hector. 1844. Le Corsaire, op. 21.

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Bridge, Frank. 1911. The Sea, H. 100. Carpenter, John Alden. 1914. “The Lake” (Adventures in a Perambulator, no. 4). Crackle. 2008. Heavy Water. Slowfoot SLO CD007. Compact disc. Debussy, Claude. 1903–­1905. “Jeux de vagues” (La Mer, L. 109, no. 2). ———. 1910. “La cathédrale engloutie” (Préludes [Book 1], L. 117, no. 10). Drexciya. 1997. “Aquabon (Remix).” On The Quest. Submerge SVE-­7. Vinyl recording. http://www.press.princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/4-Ch-11-Underwater-Music -evoking-Aquabon-remix.mp3 Elgar, Edward. 1899. Sea Pictures, op. 37. Giant Squid. 2006. Metridium Fields. The End Records TE076. Golijov, Osvaldo. 1996, rev. 2004. Oceana. Deutsche Grammophon 477 6426, 2007. Compact disc. Hovhaness, Alan. 1970. And God Created Great Whales, op. 229. Ligeti, György. 1961. Atmosphères. Liszt, Franz. 1877. “Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este” (Années de Pèlerinage: Troisième Année, S. 163, no. 4). Lopez, Francisco. 1993. Azoic Zone. Geometrik GR-­003, 2003. Compact disc. MacDowell, Edward. 1898. Sea Pieces, op. 55. Montgomery, Will. 2008. “Submarine.” www.touchradio.org.uk/touch_radio_36 .html. Morley, Angela (credited as Stott, Walter). 1969. Captain Nemo and the Underwater City. Rereleased by Film Score Monthly vol., 12, no. 8, 2009. Compact disc. Parliament. 1978. “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop).” Casablanca Records, NDB 20147. Vinyl recording, 12”, single sided. Ravel, Maurice. 1901. “Jeux d’eau,” M. 30. ———. 1908. “Ondine” (Gaspard de la Nuit, M. 55, no.1). http://www.press.princeton .edu/audio/helmreich/2-Ch-11-Underwater-Music-evoking-Gaspard-de-la-Nuit -Ondine.m4a Ritchie, Anthony. 1993. Underwater Music. Russolo, Luigi. 1913. “Gorgogliatore.” On Musica Futurista: The Art of Noises 1909–­ 1935. Salon Recordings LTMCD 2401, 2004. Compact disc. Saint-­Saëns, Camille. 1886. “Aquarium” (Le Carnaval des Animaux, no. 7). http:// www.press.princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/1-Ch-11-Underwater-Music-evoking -Carnival-of-the-Animals-VII-Aquarium.mp3 Satie, Erik. 1913. Embryons desséchés. Schafer, R. Murray. 1971. Miniwanka—­Moments of Water. ———. 1978. String Quartet no. 2, Waves. Schoenburg, Arnold. 1909. “Farben” (Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, no. 3). Sibelius, Jean. 1914. The Oceanides, op. 73. Slotek. 1999. Hydrophonic. WordSound WSCD031. Compact disc. Smith, Paul J. 1954. 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Motion picture soundtrack reissued by Walt Disney Records/Intrada D001415702, 2011. Compact disc. Takemitsu, Toru. 1987. I Hear the Water Dreaming. Ussachevsky, Vladimir. 1951. “Underwater Waltz.” Vaughan Williams, Ralph. 1903–­1908. A Sea Symphony (Symphony no.1). Waterjuice. 2001. Hydrophonic. Vaporvent vv001. Compact disc.

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Xela. 2006. The Dead Sea. Type TYPE018. Compact disc. Yo La Tengo. 2002. The Sounds of the Sounds of Science. Egon Records, Egon 07. Compact disc. Ziporyn, Evan, with I Wayan Wija and Bang on a Can All-­Stars. 2003. “Ocean.” On Shadowbang. Cantaloupe Music CA21015. Compact disc. http://www.press .princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/3-Ch-11-Underwater-Music-evoking-Ocean.m4a INVOKING Brecht, George. 1959. Drip Music. Cage, John. 1952. Water Music. Cage, John, and Lou Harrison. 1941. “Double Music.” Cisneros, George. 1981. “Music for Dripping Water.” On Music for the Williamson Tunnels: A Collection of the Sound of Dripping Water, ed. Alan Dunn and Jess Young. Arts Council, England, 2008. Compact disc. http://www.press.princeton .edu/audio/helmreich/6-Ch-11-Underwater-Music-invoking-Music-for -Dripping-Water.mp3 Cowell, Henry. 1934. Ostinato Pianissimo. DJ Spooky. 2009. Sinfonia Antarctica. www.djspooky.com/art/terra_nova.php. Feld, Steven. 2006. Suikinkutsu: A Japanese Underground Water Zither. VoxLox 106, Earth Ear. Compact disc. Feld, Steven, ed. 1991. “Relaxing by the Creek.” On Voices of the Rainforest: A Day in the Life of the Kaluli People. Rykodisc RCD 10173. Compact disc. Le Caine, Hugh. 1955. “Dripsody: An Etude for Variable Speed Recorder.” Lockwood, Annea. 1989. A Sound Map of the Hudson River. Lovely Music, Ltd. LCD 2081. Compact disc. Ono, Yoko. 1963. “Water Piece.” ———. 1971. “Toilet Piece.” http://www.press.princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/5-Ch -11-Underwater-Music-invoking-Flushometer-after-Yoko-Ono-Toilet-Piece.m4a Satie, Erik. 1917. “Prestidigitateur Chinois” (Parade [Ballet Réaliste sur un Thème de Jean Cocteau], no. 2). Spandau Ballet. 1982. “Innocence and Science.” On Diamond. Chrysalis CDL 1353. Compact disc. SOAKING Blackburn, Philip. 2007. “Symphony in Sea.” http://www.philipblackburn.com/Com positions.html. Dunn, David. 1992. “Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond.” On Angels and Insects. Nonsequitur/¿What Next? Recordings, WN0009. Compact disc. Harris, Yolande. 2009. Now Stripe Time. DNK Amsterdam: A Concert Series for New Live Electronic and Acoustic Music, September 14. http://www.yolande harris.net/. Humid, Bob. 2006. “It’s Warm Besides the Submarine Cables.” On Second Wind Phenomenon. Suburban Trash Industries STI022. Vinyl recording. Polli, Andrea. 2009. Sonic Antarctica. Gruenrekorder Gruen 064. Compact disc.

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Redolfi, Michel. 1989. Sonic Waters #2 (Underwater Music) 1983–­1989. Hat ART, Hat ART CD 6026. Compact disc. Sauvage, Tomoko. 2009. Ombrophilia. Either/OAR either/3. Compact disc. Snapper, Juliana. 2008–­2010. Five Fathoms Opera Project. www.julianasnapper.org. http://www.press.princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/7-Ch-11-Underwater-Music -soaking-Dear-Blorkra-from-You-Who-Will-Emerge-from-the-Flood.mp3 Stankievech, Charles. 2009. The DEW Project, Dawson City, Yukon Territory: www .stankievech.net/projects/DEW/stream/index.html. Winderen, Jana. 2009a. Heated: Live in Japan. Touch TONE 36. Compact disc. http:// www.press.princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/8-Ch-11-Underwater-Music-soaking -Heated-Pt-1.m4a ———. 2009b. The Noisiest Guys on the Planet. Ash International ASH 8.1. Cassette. ———. 2009c. Submerged. Touch TONE 36DS. File, AAC.

CHAPTER 12: SEASHELL SOUND 1. Amelia B. Welby, Poems, by Amelia (Boston: A. Tompkins, Cornhill, 1845), 21. 2. Rudolph John Bodmer, The Book of Wonders (New York: Presbrey Syndicate, 1915), 79. Bodmer’s book was described on its title page as giving “plain and simple answers to the thousands of everyday questions that are asked and which all should be able to, but cannot answer.” 3. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 33. 4. Jennifer E. Lawson, Hands-­On Science and Technology: Sound, Physical Science (Winnipeg: Portage & Main Press, 2001), 39. 5. See www.omg-facts.com/view/Facts/13. 6. Robert E. C. Stearns, “Ethno-­Conchology: A Study of Primitive Money,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution 1887, part 2, p. 297. 7. The ethno-­conchology I trace here is thus limited, and sound created by blowing though shells is a major absence. Take, too, some Southern black American traditions, which use shells to mark graves. A woman from St. Simons Island, Georgia, noted: “The shells stand for the sea. The sea brought us, the sea shall take us back. So the shells upon our graves stand for water, the means of glory and the land of demise.” William S. Pollitzer, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1999), 184. In another context, the audio designer Pietro Desiato in 2007 proposed a memory project for graves sited in Malmö, Sweden, that would use seashells outfitted with internal digital audio recorders as repositories for visitors’ words of remembrance. See Pietro Desiato, “Memorie: Supporting the Practices of Memory in the Graveyard” (master’s thesis, School of Arts and Communication, Interaction Design Master Thesis, 2007), http://dspace. mah.se/bitstream/handle/2043/6350/Memorie.pdf, accessed January 21, 2015. 8. William Wordsworth, The Prelude of Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem (London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1850). Wordsworth’s 1814 Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael Jaye (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), continues the theme:

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I have seen A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground, applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-­lipped shell; To which, in silence hushed, his very soul Listened intensely; and his countenance soon Brightened with joy; for from within were heard Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed Mysterious union with its native sea. 9. Spiral shells were new in Romantic poetry, displacing scalloped shells (which had been employed as sounding boards for lyres): “The seashell indicates the emergence of a new image of poetic voice as that which releases powers trapped in nature and in objects by breathing in (inspiring) voice as pneuma or spirit. . . . [But] . . . the voice or music which is projected from a seashell is not an original, external sound, but a series of echoes . . . the shell transforms these sounds by submitting them to the transforming acoustic of its resonating cavities, whether these belong to a seashell or to the Romantic poet.” Theresa M. Kelley, “Proteus and Romantic Allegory,” English Literary History 49, no. 3 (1982): 623–­652, at 636. Welby’s poem, with its shell moving from “lute” to “breathing,” may exemplify the shift from pre-­Romantic to Romantic. 10. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Elizabeth Luther Cary (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 123. http://www.press .princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/9-Ch-12-Seashell-Sound-The-Sea-Limits.mp3. More lips, this time from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn! While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings . . . See his “The Chambered Nautilus,” in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1857), 111. The echo image appears in wider European worlds, for instance, in J. H. van Lennep’s report on Dutch folklore, Notes and Queries, 2nd ser., vol. 10 (July–­December 1860), 184: The shell, when put to child-­like ears, Yet murmurs of its bygone years, In echoes of the sea 11. Charles Henry Webb, Vagrom Verse (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1889), 27. Compare Stephen Crane’s “What says the sea, little shell?” in Souvenirs and a Medley (Aurora, NY: Roycroft Printing Shop, 1896). 12. Dension Olmsted, An Introduction to Natural Philosophy: Designed as a Textbook for the Use of the Students in Yale College, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Hezekiah Howe & Company, 1835), 78. 13. John Ayrton Paris, Sports and Amusements for the Juvenile Philosopher (Middletown, CT: E. Hunt and Company, 1836), 168.

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14. Robert Kemp Philp, The Reason Why: A Careful Collection of Many Hundreds of Reasons for Things Which, Though Generally Believed, Are Imperfectly Understood (London: Houlston and Wright, 1857), 133. 15. Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis, 3rd. ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895). Originally published as Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1863). On vibrations as the persisting voices of the dead, see Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 16. For an analysis of this story, see Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (London: Continuum, 2012). 17. Benjamin Hathaway, Art-­Life, and Other Poems (Chicago: S.C. Griggs & Company, 1878), 46–­48. 18. William Quarmby, The Song of the Sea-­shell, and Other Poems and Songs (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1867). 19. E. W. Bäärnhielm, The Icicle, and Other Poems (Portsmouth, NH: printed for the author, 1891), 24. 20. Susan Gubar, “The Echoing Spell of H.D.’s Trilogy,” in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 301. 21. In Lowell’s 1888 “With a Sea-­Shell,” a lover deputizes a seashell as his voice: “Shell, whose lips, than mine more cold, Might with Dian’s ear make bold, Seek my Lady’s.” The shell is masculine, though the beloved’s ear—­an “archway, pearly-­pink”—­is a feminine double of the shell. James Russell Lowell, “With a Sea-­Shell,” in The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, ed. Horace E. Scudder (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), 411. 22. Avanelle W. Holmes, “A Beautiful Life,” in The Ladies Repository: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Literature and Religion, ed. Rev. I. W. Wiley, vol. 31 (Cincinnati: Hitchcock and Walden, 1871), 279. 23. Gabriele Falloppio, Observationes anatomicae (Venice: Marco Antonio Ulmo and Gratioso Perchachino, 1561). 24. Tara Rodgers, “Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in Audio-­Technical Discourse,” in Philosophy After Irigaray, ed. Mary Rawlinson, Danae Mcleod, and Sara McNamara (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, forthcoming). 25. Quoted in Rodgers, ibid. 26. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 98. 27. Robert Ryder, “Walter Benjamin’s Shell-­Shock: Sounding the Acoustical Unconscious,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5, no. 2 (2007): 135–­155. 28. Thanks to Hillel Schwartz for this parsing, as well as for reports from his research into the biographical details of many of poets I quote here, details that often point to lives filled with mourning and loss. 29. Eugene Lee-­Hamilton, The New Medusa, and Other Poems (London: Elliot Stock, 1882), 119. 30. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 231. http://www.press .princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/10-Ch-12-Seashell-Sound-Ulysses-from-Ch

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-11-Sirens-lines-934-989.mp3. The poet Winfield Townley Scott in 1937 fused the blood-­in-­the-­ears account with then contemporary radio imagery: My changing blood that hoards This constant sound of sea, That raging in its course Keeps fleshless breath in me, Sings nothing till this shell—­ Wound for wave music—­takes The radiant miracle Broadcast in ethered wakes . . . —­Winfield Townley Scott, “Blood and Seashell,” Poetry 50,no. 4 (1937): 188 31. James Tyson, Manual of Physical Diagnosis (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., 1893), 134. The figurative swirls into the literal in 1995 with a stethoscope head “constructed from a sea shell having a relatively broad, generally circular aperture defining a sound chamber opening, said chamber having a naturally polished, sound reflecting, interior surface.” D. B. Katz, US Patent 5,420,382, 30 May 1995. See Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (New York: Zone Books, 2011) for a definitive history of stethoscopy. 32. Advertisement for “Dr. Spencer’s Improved Binaural Stethoscope,” The Practitioner: A Journal of Therapeutics and Public Health 36, no. 3 (1886). 33. Medical professionals argue that one’s blood cannot be heard from within: “The ear filters out or minimizes these sounds. Thus, for instance, the auditory ossicles (the malleus, incus, and stapes) are separated by fluid-­filled membranes that reduce bone-­conducted vibration. Sounds from inside the body are screened out so as to make the outside world audible. Ackerman suggests that, were this not to occur, even the sound of a person’s own blood flow ‘would be as deafening as sitting in a lawn chair next to a waterfall.’ ” See Tim Rice, “Sounding Bodies: Medical Students and the Acquisition of Stethoscopic Perspectives,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 304. 34. And which can have modernist poet H.D. write, mythically, at one moment There is a spell, for instance In every sea-­shell. —­“The Walls Do Not Fall,” 1944 and, more acoustically, at another, He heard, as it were, the echo Of an echo in the shell 35. Bill G. Aldridge, Science Interactions, vol. 1 (New York: Glencoe/ Macmillan/ McGraw-­Hill, 1993), 109. 36. Susan Amerikaner, Bailey Kennedy, and Kathie Sweeney, Gifted and Talented, Questions and Answers: Super Edition for Ages 4–­6 (Chicago: Lowell House, 2000), 126.

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37. Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973), 224. Sagan gets weirder: “But is this really true? Has this been studied? Has anyone attempted to decode the message being sounded by the seashell? I do not intend this example as literally true, but rather as an allegory. Somewhere on earth there may be the equivalent of the seashell communications channel. The message from the stars may be here already.” 38. Elizabeth S. Olson, “Direct Measurement of Intra-­Cochlear Pressure Waves,” Nature 402 no.6761 (1999): 526–­529. 39. See www.faqkids.com/410-seashells-sound-ocean.html. 40. John Cage, A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 134. 41. Douglas Kahn, “The Art of Anechoic Perception in Postwar America.” Lecture presented at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, March 30, 2005. A 2003 poem has the writer losing her hearing, listening to sounds generated by her wounded ear: “ocean sounds/the sound a seashell makes when you put it/to your ear.” See Sheryl St. Germain, “Tinnitus,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 31, nos. 1 & 2 (2003): 181–­183.

CHAPTER 13: SOUND STUDIES MEETS DEAF STUDIES 1. Consult, for example, R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977), 3–­12. Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone, 2010); David W. Samuels, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello, “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 329–­345. 2. Harlan Lane, Richard Pillard, and Ulf Hedberg, The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Paddy Ladd, Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003); H-­ Dirksen L. Bauman, “Audism: Exploring the Metaphysics of Oppression,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 9, no. 2 (2004): 239–­46; H-­Dirksen L. Bauman, “Introduction: Listening to Deaf Studies,” in Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, ed. H-­Dirksen L. Bauman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1–­32. 3. By “sound studies,” we mean the interdisciplinary field of inquiry that has emerged at the intersection of cultural history, anthropology of music/speech/ sound, science and technology studies, and media theory—­inquiry dedicated to examining how humans give social significance to sound, whether experienced in small-­scale, face-­to-­face communities of practice or in distributed, highly mediated networks linked together by technologies of sound reproduction and relay. For founding texts, consult Bull and Back, eds., Auditory Culture Reader; Viet Erl­ mann, ed., Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004). By “Deaf studies,” we mean the academic and activist field inaugurated with the publishing of James Woodward, “Implications for Sociolinguistic Research among the Deaf,” Sign Language Studies 1(1972): 1–­7. Woodward wrote

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about the importance of research on the linguistic, social, and cultural aspects of Deaf communities. Deaf studies has largely been a Western-­centered discipline, closely joined with the teaching of sign language, especially at such institutions as Gallaudet University in the United States and Bristol University in the United Kingdom. 4. Bruce Johnson, “Hamlet: Voice, Music, Sound,” Pop Music 24, no. 2 (2005): 257–­267. 5. George Veditz, Proceedings of the Ninth Convention of the National Association of the Deaf and the Third World’s Congress of the Deaf, 1910 (Philadelphia, PA: Philocophus Press, 1912), 30. Also consult Lakshmi Fjord, “ ‘Voices Offstage’: How Vision Has Become a Symbol to Resist in an Audiology Lab in the U.S.,” Visual Anthropology Review 1999–­2000 15, no. 2 (1999): 121–­138, for an anthropological report on how many Deaf communities locate themselves within the larger social world by defining themselves in opposition to the hearing world and to hearing; focusing on vision and visuality becomes a trope of resistance. 6. Ari Kelman, “Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies,” Senses & Society 5, no. 2 (2010): 212–­234, at 230. 7. Elizabeth Keating and R. Neill Hadder, “Sensory Impairment,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 115–­129, at 119. 8. Lois Bragg, ed., Deaf World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook (New York: NYU Press, 2001). Sterne, Audible Past; Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (New York: Zone, 2011). 9. Mara Mills, “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information,” Social Text 102 (2010): 35–­58. 10. Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994). For a timeline of American race politics in Deaf struggles, see the history of the National Black Deaf Advocates: http://www .nbda.org/content/history 11. For scholarship on international d/Deaf politics, consult Karen Nakamura, Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005) and Leila Monaghan, Constance Schmaling, Karen Nakamura, and Graham  H. Turner, eds., Many Ways to Be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2003). Note that deaf politics outside the USA often do not follow identity or cultural models; indeed, the question of what constitutes a deaf “politics” or “public” in non-­Western contexts is one with which social scientists and deaf studies scholars struggle. In response to the hegemony of the concepts of Deaf culture and identity within Western deaf worlds, Ladd (Understanding Deaf Culture) put forth the concept of “deafhood” as a more inclusive category. Our section on “articulation,” below, attempts to foreground work that analyzes different ways of relating to deaf and hearing others as well as to family, community, and nation. 12. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: NYU Press, 2006); Michele Friedner, “Biopower, Biosociality, and Community Formation: How Biopower Is Constitutive of the Deaf Community,” Sign Language Studies 10, no. 3 (2010): 336–­347. Compare Julia Miele Rodas, “On Blindness,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 3, no. 2 (2009): 115–­130, at 129, on the varieties of “blindnesses” and the ways that “blindness is always a mediated experience, informed, even defined, by language and culture.” 274

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13. John Gumperz, “Types of Linguistic Communities,” Anthropological Linguistics 4, no. 1 (1962): 28–­40. 14. This article is an exploratory effort, based upon our reading of key works within sound and Deaf studies. We hope our theoretical ruminations are useful to future ethnography. 15. Frank Bechter, “Of Deaf Lives: Convert Culture and the Dialogic of ASL Storytelling,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009. 16. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 17. Hilde Haualand, “Sound and Belonging: What Is a Community?” in Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, ed. H-­Dirksen L. Bauman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 111–­125. 18. See Ben Bahan, “On the Formation of the Visual Variety of the Human Race,” in Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, ed. H-­Dirksen L. Bauman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 83–­99. 19. Also see Lane, Pillard, and Hedberg, People of the Eye. 20. “Visual Language and Visual Learning,” Gallaudet University, http://vl2.gallaudet .edu/, accessed July 1, 2014. 21. Consult Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis, “Doing Anthropology in Sound,” American Ethnologist 31 no. 4 (2004): 461–­474. 22. Cf. Steven Connor, “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 153–­172. Look also for Sophia Roosth, “Nineteen Hertz and Below: An Infrasonic History of the Twentieth Century,” paper presented at Sonic Skills Expert Meeting: Sound and Listening in Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1920s to Now. Maastricht University, January 2014. 23. “Waves and Signs, a conference and workshop on low-­frequency vibration with a performance and dance party; A project by Wendy Jacob with students and faculty from MIT and Gallaudet University,” http://cavs.mit.edu/artists.html?id=264,734, accessed July 14, 2014. 24. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 25. Shelley Trower, “Vibratory Movements,” Senses & Society 3, no. 2 (2008): 133–­136, at 133. 26. Ibid., 135. 27. Our argument here departs from such universalizing psychoanalytic approaches as those advocated by Didier Anzieu and Edith Lecourt, who developed the notion of the “sonorous envelope” to describe motherly sounds surrounding a baby, sounds they held to be essential for ego development. See Edith Lecourt, “The Musical Envelope,” in Psychic Envelopes, ed. Didier Anzieu, trans. Daphne Briggs (London: Karnac Books, 1990), 211–­235. 28. And there are of course d/Deaf people who utilize hearing aids, cochlear implants, and/or residual hearing who have the experience of “hearing” music. See Michael Chorost, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). 29. Compare Stefan Helmreich, “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography,” American Ethnologist 275

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34, no. 4 (2007): 621–­641, on the making of self “presence” through transductive processes that, when they operate seamlessly, become invisible, inaudible, intactile supports for imagined “unmediated” experience. 30. Stuart Blume, The Artificial Ear: Cochlear Implants and the Culture of Deafness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). 31. Mara Mills, “Do Signals Have Politics? Inscribing Abilities in Cochlear Implants,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 320–­346. 32. Chorost, Rebuilt. And see Michael Chorost, “My Bionic Quest for Bolero,” Wired 13, no. 11 (2005): 144–­159. 33. Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (New York: Free Press, 2011). Interestingly, as Laura Maudlin, “Precarious Plasticity: Neuropolitics, Cochlear Implants, and the Redefinition of Deafness,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 39, no. 1 (2014): 130–­153 suggests, there are new definitions of “deafness” in the making that seek to move emphasis from the apparatus of hearing (the ear, the implant) to attention to neural processing, a shift that might align in unexpected ways with Chorost’s emphasis on the “mind.” 34. Marilys Guillemin, Lynn Gillam, and Alison Brookes, “Technologies, Deafness, and Critical Compromise,” Disability Studies Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2005), www.dsq -sds.org/article/view/587/764, accessed June 20, 2011. 35. In this sense, we may be “de-­signing” sign (see chapter 7). On articulation, see Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, ed. UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–­345. 36. Speech and sign share another feature: they are both ephemeral. And they are contemporaneous in their development; we do not wish here to align our approach with speculations that speech “evolves” from gesture. 37. Steven Feld, “Acoustemologies,” paper presented at “The Elusive: Listening,” at Sensing the Unseen, a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, October 22, 2010. For more about senses just out of reach, look to Stefan Helmreich, Heather Paxson, and Emily Zeamer, “Sensing the Unseen: An Infraduction,” Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice, http://sensatejournal.com/2012/04/sensing -the-unseen-2–0/, accessed November 24, 2014. 38. Richard Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism and Silence among Seventeenth Century Quakers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 39. Michele Friedner, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). 40. Frank Bechter, “Of Deaf Lives: Convert Culture and the Dialogic of ASL Storytelling,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009. 41. Karen Nakamura, Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 42. Shifra Kisch, “ ‘Deaf Discourse’: The Social Construction of Deafness in a Bedouin Community,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2008): 283–­313. 43. Annelies Kusters, “Deaf Utopias? Reviewing the Sociocultural Literature on the World’s ‘Martha’s Vineyard’ Situations,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 15, no. 1 (2009): 3–­16. 276

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44. Also consult Richard Senghas and Leila Monaghan, “Signs of their Times: Deaf Communities and the Culture of Language,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 69–­ 97, for an overview of ethnographic work on sign language and Deaf cultural practices. 45. Frank Bechter, “The Deaf Convert Culture and Its Lessons for Deaf Theory,” in Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, ed. H-­Dirksen L. Bauman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 60–­80; Friedner, “Biopower.” 46. Theresa B. Smith, Guidelines: Practical Tips for Working & Socializing with Deaf-­ Blind People (Silver Spring, MD: Linstock Press, 1994); Terra Edwards, “Sensing the Rhythms of Everyday Life: Temporal Integration and Tactile Translation in the Seattle Deaf-­Blind Community,” Language in Society 4, no. 1 (2012): 29–­71. 47. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 191. 48. Ibid., 198. 49. George Veditz, Proceedings of the Ninth Convention of the National Association of the Deaf and the Third World’s Congress of the Deaf, 1910 (Philadelphia, PA: Philocophus Press, 1912), 30.

CHAPTER 14: CHIMERIC SENSING 1. See Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997). 2. Anne Rose, “The Representation of the Chimaera,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 54, no. 1 (1934): 21–­25. 3. Lynn Margulis, ed., Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 4. Lynn Margulis, Celeste A. Asikainen, and Wolfgang E. Krumbein, eds., Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 4. 5. An online positing of the audio for “Hinge*” can be found here: http://www.muzu .tv/hecker/hinge-jlb-version-music-video/2184806/, accessed July 14, 2014. http:// www.press.princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/11-Ch-14-Chimeric-Sensing-Hinge -JLB-Version.mp3 6. Ad copy for Hecker, Articulação (Editions Mego, 180, 2014), http://editionsmego .com/release/eMEGO-180, accessed July 14, 2014. 7. Recall from “Sounding Life, Water, Sound,” the discussion of Tara Rodgers, “ ‘What, For Me, Constitutes Life in a Sound?’: Electronic Sounds as Lively and Differentiated Individuals,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 509–­530. 8. Zachary M. Smith, Bertrand Delgutte, and Andrew J. Oxenham, “Chimaeric Sounds Reveal Dichotomies in Auditory Perception,” Nature 416 (2002): 87–­90, at 87. 9. Peter Frampton, Frampton Comes Alive! (A&M/ Polygram Records, 1976). 10. American National Standards Institute, American Standard Acoustical Terminology (New York: American Standards Institute, 1960), 45. 11. On the emergence of the idea of timbre, read Emily I. Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 12. J. Gordon Holt, “Taxonomy of Hi-­Fi Sound,” Stereophile 3, no. 4 (1971): 5. Thanks to Kieran Downes for drawing my attention to this chart. 13. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Über die physiologischen Ursachen der musikalischen Harmonie,” lecture given in Bonn, 1857, trans. as “On the Physiological Causes of

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Harmony in Music,” in Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 46–­75, at 58. 14. William Sethares, Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (London: Springer, 2010). 15. In Albert Bregman and Stephen McAdams, “Hearing Musical Streams,” Computer Music Journal 3 no. 4 (1979), 26–­43, the authors wrote that “timbre tends to be the psychoacoustician’s multidimensional waste-­basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or loudness, including short-­term spectral changes such as onset transients, long-­term spectra, those dynamic qualities which a musician would term ‘texture,’ and so on” (34). See also Albert S. Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 16. Smith et al., “Chimeric Sounds.” 17. Consult Stuart Blume, The Artificial Ear: Cochlear Implants and the Culture of Deafness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Michael Chorost, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). 18. A variety of cochlear implant sound simulators can be found online. 19. Mara Mills, “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information,” Social Text 28, no. 1 (2010): 35–­58. 20. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–­182, at 150. 21. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 65. Originally published as De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). 22. Gilles Châtelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics (Springer, 1999), also employs the notion of the hinge: “We will hunt out the hingeing point at which principles become unstable, we will seek out the constructed symmetrizing devices and reveal the less expected dissymmetry that orients a more radical project” (10). Reza Negarestani reported that this was his way toward the figure of the hinge; as he commented to Hecker in an e-­mail, “Fortunately the reference was not to Derrida!” (in Negarestani e-­mail to Hecker, forwarded to Stefan Helmreich on November 22, 2012). 23. Hillel Schwartz, in Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (New York: Zone, 2011), offered the recipe of appending prepositions to the word “listening.” Thus listening to, with, or through . . . 24. Kailash Patil, Daniel Pressnitzer, Shihab Shamma, and Mounya Elhilali, “Music in Our Ears: The Biological Bases of Musical Timbre Perception,” PLOS Computational Biology 8, no. 11 (2012): 1–­16. 25. Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 19, 54. 26. Friedrich Engels, Dialektik der Natur, unfinished, 1883; published as Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1934). 27. Jae Rhim Lee, “N=0=Infinity: The Infinity Burial Suit,” 2007, on seamless.sigtronica .org, http://seamless.sigtronica.org/projects.html, accessed July 14, 2014. 28. Jonathan Sterne might describe Hecker’s work using a neologism he has proposed—­ “decompositionism . . . where all sound and noise is potentially useful and possible to organize” (126). Thanks to Nick Seaver for thinking with me on this point. 278

Notes TO Life, Water, Sound Resounding

LIFE, WATER, SOUND RESOUNDING 1. A couple of works in the new materialism that I worry take the physical world too much in terms of canonical science are Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 2. Examples from the wider world of biology could be given: “Life” is captured for cellular biologists as they diagram the form of the Krebs cycle (a chemical reaction in cells that makes energy out of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates) or of meiosis (the division of cells into sperm and eggs). “Life” can be captured for population biologists through the mathematical formalism of the Hardy-­Weinberg equilibrium (a hypothetical state in which gene frequencies remain constant in a population). 3. Patrick Feaster, Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio: 980–­1980. Atlanta, GA: Dust-­to-­Digital, 2012). And see Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Akiyama, “The Recording That Never Wanted to Be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 544–­560. More recent paleospectrophonic work has rendered nineteenth-­century graphs of heartbeats into sound. See Ron Cowen, “The Echoes of Hearts Long Silenced,” New York Times, December 15, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/science/the-echoes-of -hearts-long-silenced.html?_r=0, accessed January 21, 2015. 4. Stephanie Dick, “After Math: (Re)configuring Minds, Computers, and Proof in the Postwar United States.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014. 5. Consult Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), which reports on how different computer systems, for example, differently handle the “rounding off ” of numbers depending how their storage is organized—­a formal/material decision that examples the process I point to here. 6. See, for example, Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), which tracks how the abstraction of the “gene” as hereditary particle moved from a theoretical speculation to a material substantiation (in DNA) to, recently, a concept no longer able to capture the complexity toward which it pointed. On ocean currents, see Eric L. Mills, The Fluid Envelope of Our Planet: How the Study of Ocean Currents Became a Science (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2009). On loudness, Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (New York, Faber and Faber, 2009). 7. See, e.g., Jane Collier, Michele Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako, “Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views,” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Throne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982); Vincent Antonin Lépinay, Codes of Finance: Engineering Derivatives in a Global Bank (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–­1967 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 8. A lovely elaboration of this etymological connection can be found in James Hamilton-­Paterson, The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds (New York: Random House, 1992). 279

Notes TO Life, Water, Sound Resounding

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

280

Sterne, Audible Past; Steven Connor, “The Menagerie of the Senses,” lecture delivered at the sixth Synapsis Conference, I cinque sensi (per tacer del sesto), Bertinoro, Italy, September 1, 2005, http://stevenconnor.com/lectures.html, accessed November 24, 2014. Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010). For an example of sonic anthropology that operates something like this, listen to Argus Carlyle and Rupert Cox, Air Pressure (Greuenrekorder, 2012), field recordings of aircraft flying over farms next to Tokyo’s Narita airport. For a less human-­ centered recording, Ernst Karel, Heard Laboratories (and/OAR, 2010). Jim Drobnik, “Listening Awry,” in Aural Cultures, ed. Jim Drobnik (Toronto, ON, YYZ Books, 2004), 9–­15. Compare “medium-­specific theory” in Melody Jue, “Proteus and the Digital: Scalar Transformations of Seawater’s Materiality in Ocean Animations,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 2 (2014): 245–­260. Jue extends her thinking about water as media to consider watery life (particularly the vampire squid) as media; see Melody Jue, “Vampire Squid Media,” Grey Room 57 (2014): 82–­105. Compare also the notion of “underwater media,” in Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 2015). W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), 133. Ibid., 99. Franz Boas, Race, Language, and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1940). The multispecies ethnography bibliography has grown vast, but some key data points are Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003) and When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Celia Lowe, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2007); Eduardo Kohn, “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 3–­ 24 and How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Heather Paxson, “Post-­Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-­Milk Cheese in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 15–­47; Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Timothy Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael J. Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing, “A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake Worlds,” American Ethnologist 36, no. 2 (2009): 380–­403; Marie Paldam Folker, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, and Lene Koch, “Lifeworlds of the Pig: Towards a Cartography of Porcine/Human Entanglements,” in Investigating Human/Animal Relations in Science, Culture and Work, ed. Tora Holmberg (Uppsala: Centrum för Genusvetenskap, Uppsala Univaersitet, 2009), 142–­153; Matei Candea, “ ‘I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat’ ” Engagement and Detachment in Human-­Animal Relations,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 2 (2010): 241–­258; essays by Eva Hayward, Augustin Fuentes, Jake Kosek, and Celia Lowe in S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, eds., “Multispecies Ethnography,” special issue, Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010);

CREDITS FOR LINKED MUSIC FILES

Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia (New York: Pantheon, 2010); Hoon Song, Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a Deindustrialized America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); essays in Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar, eds., “Interspecies,” special issue, Social Text 29, no. 1 (2011); Laura A. Ogden, Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); essays in “Knowing Insects,” special issue, Science as Culture 22, no. 1 (2013); Alex M. Nading, Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); John Hartigan, Jr., Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); essays in “Critical Perspectives on Multispecies Ethnography,” special issue, Critique of Anthropology 34, no. 1 (2014); Natasha Myers, “Conversations on Plant Sensing: Notes from the Field,” NatureCulture 03 (forthcoming). For ahuman entities on beyond the biological, see, on air, Timothy Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” in Ecologies of Comparison (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); on oil, Andrea Behrends, Stephen Reyna, and Gunther Schlee, eds., Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); on electricity, Dominic Boyer, “Energopower: An Introduction,” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2014): 309–­334, and Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Electricity Habit (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); on rocks, Elizabeth Ferry, Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the US-­Mexico Border (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) and Hugh Raffles, “Twenty-­Five Years Is a Long Time,” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 3 (2012): 526–­534; on waves, Stefan Helmreich, “Waves: An Anthropology of Scientific Things,” Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, Department of Anthropology, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, October 22–­24, 2014, transcript in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3 (2014): 265–­284. 18. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, excerpted in The Marx-­ Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), 594–­ 617, at 595.

CREDITS FOR LINKED MUSIC FILES The music files identified below can be accessed via the Princeton University Press website (www.press.princeton.edu/audio/helmreich/). They can also be found by clicking on the relevant links in the endnotes. Saint-Saëns, Camille. 1886. “Aquarium” (Le Carnaval des Animaux, no. 7), as recorded on Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, performing Camille Saint-Saëns and Benjamin Britten. The Carnival of the Animals/The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Columbia Masterworks MS 6368, 1962. Vinyl. Ravel, Maurice. 1908. “Ondine” (Gaspard de la Nuit, M. 55, no.1), as performed by Richard Walker at the Capp Street Community Music Center, San Francisco, 1955. Ziporyn, Evan, with I Wayan Wija and Bang on a Can All-Stars. 2003. “Ocean.” On Shadowbang. Cantaloupe Music CA21015. Compact disc. Used with the kind permission of Evan Ziporyn. 281

CREDITS FOR LINKED MUSIC FILES

Drexciya. 1997. “Aquabon (Remix).” On The Quest. Submerge SVE-7. Vinyl recording. Used with the kind permission of Tresor Records GmbH. Kim, Clare and Stefan Helmreich. 2015. “Flushometer, after Yoko Ono’s ‘Toilet Piece’.” Cisneros, George. 1981. “Music for Dripping Water.” On Music for the Williamson Tunnels: A Collection of the Sound of Dripping Water, ed. Alan Dunn and Jess Young. Arts Council, England, 2008. Compact disc. Used with the kind permission of George Cisneros. Snapper, Juliana and Andrew Infanti. 2009. “Dear Blorkra,” from  You Who Will Emerge from the Flood. Music, libretto, and piano by Andrew Infanti; voice, Juliana Snapper. Used with the kind permission of Juliana Snapper. Winderen, Jana. 2009. “Heated, Part 1.” On Heated: Live in Japan. Touch TONE 36. Compact disc. Used with the kind permission of Jana Winderen (www.jana winderen.com) and Touch (www.touch33.net). Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. 1849–1855. “The Sea-Limits.” Read by Peter Orr on The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Argo, 1967. Joyce, James. 1922. Ulysses, Ch 11 Sirens, lines 934–989, as read by Donal Donnelly on Ulysses (Audiobook). Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 2004. Used with the kind permission of Recorded Books. Hecker, Florian. 2014. “Hinge* (JLB Version).” Libretto by Reza Negarestani; voice Joan La Barbara. On Articulação. Editions Mego, 180. Used with the kind permission of Editions Mego.

282

INDEX

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), 139 abduction, 15, 20, 32, 80, 81, 84, 211n56 abductive reasoning, 20, 80–­81 abstraction, x, xi, xvi, xx–­xxi, 24, 181, 183, 185, 187; in anthropology, 184; in Artificial Life, 4–­5, 8, 32; deformation of, x, 184–­185; form as, 12, 25; life as, xx, 8, 34, 65, 74, 178, 183; as process, xxi, 200n43; scientific abstraction, x, 74; sound as, xx, 137, 184; theory as, 97; timbre as, 178, 181; water as, xvi, xx, 102, 183–­184 “Account of an Experiment Touching upon the Propagation of Sound through Water” (Hauksbee), 140 Adams, Douglas, 33 aesthetics, 23–­25, 34, 60, 63, 98, 122; and abstraction, 23, 33; modernist aesthetics, 140; and technique, 60, 138–­139, 148, 153 Agassiz, Alexander, 228n6 Agassiz, Louis, 23, 28–­29 algae, 52, 56, 58 Alien Ocean (Helmreich), xiii, xv, 3, 136 Amazing Stories, 32–­33 American Beaver and His Works, The (L. H. Morgan), 50 American Naturalist, The, 26, 28 amino acids, 46; left-­handed amino acids, 15 ammonia, 19 anaerobes, 12 Anand, Nikhil, on “hydraulic citizenship,” 251n84 Ancient Society (L. H. Morgan), 51 And God Created Whales (Hovhaness, 1970), 142 Andaman Islands, 106–­107, 109, 113, 114; anthropology in, 253–­254n13; penal colony in, 115

animal magnetism, 26 Anthropocene, xxi–­xxii, 72, 187, 201–­202n48 “Anthropological Concept” (Jiménez and Willerslev), 211n66 Anthropological Review, 26 anthropology, xiii, 1, 49, 52; and Artificial Life, xiv, 4–­8, 32, 35; of astrobiology, 12–­15, 93; beyond the human, 186, 279n17; biological anthropologists, 196n16; of biology, xiii, 1, 196n16; of biomedicine, 17; and coral, 50–­52; and the colonial imagination of Andaman Islands, 109; history of, 94–­100, 103–­ 105; maritime anthropology, 96, 99–­100, 246n40; 249n59; multispecies anthropology, xiv, xv, 71, 171, 186, 280n17; and oceanic origin stories for, 97–­99; “post-­reflexive anthropology,” 92–­93; and race, 66; reflexive anthropology, 185; of science, xi, xiii; of sound, 171, 185, 279n11; symbolic anthropology, 38, 95; transductive anthropology, 185; of water, xvi, 94–­96, 197n26, 243n13 Anzieu, Didier, on “sonorous envelope,” 275n27 Appius Claudius Caecus, 63 “Aquaoperas” (Snapper and Oleson), 149 Aquazone™, 39 Archaea, xii, 9 archaeologies, 37–­38 archaeology: deepwater archaeology, 43; of knowledge, xiv–­xv, 37; underwater archaeology, 38, 43, 49 Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault), 36–­37 archetypes, 24, 26, 30, 217n29; vertebrate archetypes, 28, 29 Arctic Ocean, sea ice cover of, 127 “Are Our Microbiomes Racial?” (R. Wallace), 67 Arendt, Hannah, 63

283

Index Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski), 97–­98 arsenic, xii “Artificial Fishes with Autonomous Locomotion, Perception, Behavior, and Learning in a Simulated World” (Terzopoulos, Tu, and Grzeszczuk), 39 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 40–­42; as “ancestral” to Artificial Life, 40, 226n25 Artificial Life, xiv, 4, 12, 32, 35, 40, 208n25; abstraction of, 4–­5, 8, 32; “common ancestors” of, 35; and computer code as genetic code, 5, 10–­11; history of, 35–­36; and information, 5–­6; and “living technology,” 212n70; performance of, 6–­8, 40; polyvalent concept of, 37; roots of, 36; simulations and, x, 4, 7–­8, 32, 38–­40; 183–­184, 208–­209n29; vacillation between strong and weak claims in, 42–­43. See also waterworlds, artificial “Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution” (Farmer and Belin), 36 Artificial Life Conference (1987), 35–­36 Assad, Maria, 113 astrobiological classification through Schwartz’s “de-­signs,” 82–­83; amplifying, 84–­85; defacing, 89–­90; displacing, 83; glare, 86–­87; simplifying, 83–­84; spontaneity, 87–­88, 240n97; surfeit, 88–­89; transparency, 85–­86 astrobiologists, 4, 13; life forms as defined by, 14–­15 astrobiology, xii, xiii, 12–­15, 74, 81, 91; anthropology of, 93; Blumberg’s view of, 79–­80; dependence of on “abduction,” 15; interest of the Vatican in, 211n55; quest of to find extraterrestrial life, 75; and the “signature of life” (biosignatures), 77–­81. See also astrobiological classification through Schwartz’s “de-­signs” Astrobiology, 73–­74 Astrobiology Institute, 12–­13, 240n110 Astrobiology Roadmap (NASA), 80 Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 74 Astro-­Theology; or the Religion of Astronomy (Higginson), 28, 220n59 athwart theory, 90–­93, 96–­97, 103–­105 Atlantic Ocean, 98, 101, 156 automata: Early Modern, 36; materials used in the construction of by the Jaquet-­Droz family, 42; self-­producing automata, 35 “Automaton-­Ear, The” (McLandburgh), 15

284

Bäärnhielm, E. W., 159, 163 bacteria, xii, 2, 9, 14, 62, 84; filamentous bacteria, 13; gender-­or sex-­bending bacteria, 69; oxygen-­respiring bacteria, 173; Wolbachia bacteria, 69 Badmington, Neil, 231n2 Baer, Karl Ernst von, 28 Baikal Ice (Cusack), 266n78 Ballinger, Pamela, 101 barnacles, 55 Barron, Bebe, 198n34 Barron, Louis, 198n34 Barry, John, 139 bathymetry, 113 Baudrillard, Jean, 8 Bauman, Zygmunt, 96, 171; on liquid modernity, 102 Beagle 2 lander, 88 Bechter, Frank, 166 Belin, Alletta d’A., 36 Bell, Alexander Graham, 165, 180 Bell, Jim, 87 Benjamin, Walter, 160–­161 Bergson, Henri, 63 Berlioz, Hector, 139 Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Rediker), 249n59 Biagioli, Mario, 43 Bikini Island, 52; coral reefs surrounding, 59 Bildungstrieb (building-­drive) theory, 217n30 Billingham, John, 76 bioastronomy, 74 “biobricks,” 20 biodiversity, 2, 16; in coral reefs, 56–­57, 59; in Indonesia, 103 biogenetic engineering, 16 biological anthropology, xiii biological species concept, 9–­10, 30, 70 biological theory, 3, 30, 34, 84, 90, 211n59 Biologie (Treviranus), 4 biology, ix, 1–­2, 4, 9, 13, 37, 52, 65, 70, 72, 175; absence of a theory for, 17–­18, 32; Aristotelian notions of form in, 214n7; aspiring to universal theory or representation of, xii, 5, 6, 9, 13, 16, 30–­32, 74, 80, 88–­89; and classification, 9, 44, 65–­66; and disciplinary origins/history of, 2, 36, 206n10; and early Darwinism, 26–­30; and ecological context, 12; evolutionary biology, 22, 70, 173; in German language traditions, 23–­26; limits of, 27; as lived experience, 17, 52; marine,

Index 8, 48;marine microbiology, xiii, 8–­12, 45; reproductive biology, xiii; sound of, ix; synthetic biology, xi–­xii, 16, 20, 33, 209n34; and the technical activity of apprehending signs of life, ix, 44, 61; theoretical biology, 4, 30–­32; twentieth-­century biology, 6; as ungrounded, 8. See also limit biologies Biology Takes Form (Nyhart), 218–­219n37 bio-­objects, xv Biophilia (Björk), 64 biopolitics, 4, 9, 15, 65, 212–­213n77; microbiopolitics, 64 biosecurity, 16 biosignatures, 4, 74, 77–­81; Category I, II, and III biosignatures, 78; definition of, 77; direct and remote signatures, 77–­78; “language” of, 79 biotechnology, xii, 11, 182, 206n10; marine biotechnology, 254–­255n23 bioterrorism, 16 Bischoff, Theodor, 24 Björk, 64 Black Atlantic, the, 101 “Blood and Seashell” (Scott), 271n30 Blue Marble photo (1972 [taken by Apollo 17]), 117, 124 Blue Planet (2001), 130 Blumberg, Baruch, 14; on astrobiology, 79–­80 Blumenbach, Friedrich, 217n30 Boas, Franz, xvii, 51, 186, 244nn21–­22; on the color of seawater, 96, 97 Bodmer, Rudolph, 155–­156 Böhme, Jakob, 221n67 Bond, David, 104 Book of Wonders (Bodmer), 155, 156 Borman, Frank, 121 Bose, Sugata, 178 botany, 29 Botswana, cancer in, 17 “Bottled Water” (Marclay), 262n23 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncalus), 41–­42 Boulding, Kenneth, 117, 256–­257n11 Bowker, Geoffrey, 82 “brain in a vat” thought experiment, 40–­41 Brand, Stewart, 120 Braudel, Fernand, 101 Brecht, George, 76 Burdach, Karl Friedrich, 23 Burke, Edmund, 121 Bush, George W., 109 Butler, Judith, 17

Cage, John, 140, 142–­143, 149, 163; modernism of, 153 calligram, 258n32 Cameron, James, 130 Campylobacter jejuni, 65, 66 Candida albicans, 65, 66 Canguilhem, Georges, 214n12 Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969), 139 carbon compounds, organic, 14 Carnot, Sadi, 95 Carson, Rachel, 52 Caton, Steve, 103–­104 “Cave Biosignature Suites: Microbes, Minerals, and Mars” (Boston et al.), 74 Census of Marine Life, 127, 131 Center for Advanced Visual Studies (MIT), 167 Century’s End (Schwartz), 73–­74, 75 cetology, 44–­45 Chambers, Robert, 27, 28 “Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond” (Dunn), 151–­152 Charles, Daniel, 146–­147 Châtelet, Gilles, 278n22 chemosynthesis, 8, 74 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, 17 Chesworth, David, 149–­150 Cheung, Tobias, 214n12 “Chimaeric Sounds Reveal Dichotomies in Auditory Perception” (Z. Smith, Delgutte, and Oxenham), 175 chimeras, 173; and the ambigram example, 174; auditory chimeras, 174–­175, 176, 178; biological chimerism, 174, 178; and decomposition, 181–­182; and timbre as chimeric, 176, 178, 180–­181, 277n15 Chimeras and Consciousness (Margulis, ­Asikainen, and Krumbein), 173 China, 109, 126 chirality. See “handedness” Chisholm, Penny, 11 chloroplasts, 173, 175 Chorost, Michael, 170 Chun, Wendy, 125–­126 Church, George, 208n28 Clarke, Arthur C., 121 Coates, George, 84 Cold War, the, xviii, 2, 117, 130, 138, 142, 153 colonialism, 52, 66, 91, 97–­98, 100, 109, 120 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead), 98

285

Index “Common Senses: Water, Sensory Experience and the Generation of Meaning” (Strang), 96 computers, 37, 279n5; computer monitors, screens, graphics, 7, 37, 38–­39, 116, 124, 133–­134; computer simulations, x, 3–­4, 32, 38–­40, 75, 108, 112, 183, 208n29; as entities that can harbor life, 4, 32, 37–­39, 42; as generating and not simply transmitting visual knowledge, 7, 40, 126 “seeing” life in, 7, 39; “Concluding Remarks on the Variations of Development in Animal and Human Life Forms on Earth” (Müller), 23 Configurations, 92 “Contribution to the Understanding of the Color of Water” (Boas), 97 Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of America (L. Agassiz), 28–­29 Convoluta roscoffensis, 65, 66 Cooper, Melinda, 15 Coral Genome Project, 57–­59, 61 Coral Reef Research Foundation (CRRF), 57 coral reefs, xv; Acropora arabia as a candidate for DNA sequencing, 59; and calcium carbonate, 56; coral animalcules, 51; coral biodiversity, 57, 59; and coral bleaching, 56; coral scaffolding and the U.S. military, 51–­ 52; corals as animals that live in “colonies,” 53–­54; defenses of against predators, 57; degradation of, 56–­57; formation of, 49–­50, 228n6, 229n14; hard corals, 53; marine research on cup corals (Balanophyllia elegans), 52, 55–­56; as mutable immobiles, 57; and the problem of the scientific classification of coral, 49–­50; recovery of coral reefs surrounding Bikini Island, 59; the reef-­building lobe coral (Porites lobata) as a candidate for DNA sequencing, 58–­59; and a sequenced coral genome, 57–­58; sex and reproduction of corals, 54–­55; shifting focus of scientific figurations of coral worlds, 52; use of architectural language in descriptions of reef structures, 52–­53; use of coral for ocular implants, 230n36; and zooxanthellae, 53, 230n38. See also coral reefs, figure/figurations of coral reefs, figure/figurations of, 48–­49, 55–­56; figuration work and coral genomics, 59; figurations of as examples of the production of the inorganic through organic activity, 51; figurations of as monitors of planetary health, 57; figurations of moving from

286

opacity to visibility to readability, 60–­61; shifts in figurations of, 57 Corsín Jiménez, Alberto, 16 Cosmic Apprentice (D. Sagan), 64 Courant, Richard, 200–­201n43 Cousteau, Jacques, 52, 130, 138, 139 Cowell, Henry, 261–­262n19 Crider, Summer, 168 Crochet Coral Reef Project, 60–­61 crocheting, 60; hyperbolic crochet, 60 Crystal, Fabrics, and Fields (Haraway), 61 culture, x, xiv, xv, 1, 25, 51, 81, 94–­96, 99–­101, 104, 165, 180 Culture of the Copy, The (Schwartz), 75, 79, 89 Cusack, Peter, 266n78 Cuvier, Georges, 28, 44 cyanobacteria, 173 cybernetic sensibilities, xiv, 2, 6, 151, 170, 180, 198n34 Cybernetics (Weiner), 81 cyborgs, 48, 151, 166, 169–­170, 180–­181, 228n11, 247n41 cymatics, ix Dalton, J. Brad, 87 Darwin, Charles, 9, 25, 26, 26–­27, 95; on coral reefs, 49–­50, 60, 228n6, 229n14, 229n18; on succession in the forms of life, 29; view of “forms” in the theory of evolution as species, 30 Darwin, Erasmus, 215n18 Daston, Lorraine, on “biographies of scientific objects,” 36 Davidson, Osha, 52–­53, 54 Davies, Julian, 11 Davies, Paul, 87 Dawkins, Richard, 208n25 de Bono, Edward, 90 de la Cruz, Fernando, 11 de Man, Paul, 89 De Signatura Rerum (Böhme), 221n67 Deaf Eye for the Hearing Guy (blog), 166 “deaf futurists,” 166, 170 Deaf Pride movement, 165 Deaf studies. See sound studies and Deaf studies Deaf World as Eye See It (blog), 166 Debussy, Claude, 139, 142 decomposition, 181–­182 Deep, The (1977), 139 “Deep-­Sea Cables, The” (Kipling), 138

Index Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill, 104 defacement, 240–­241n112 Defacement (Taussig), 89 Deleuze, Gilles, 89; rhizome concept of, 135–­136 Delibes, Léo, 149 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 98 Dennett, Daniel, 40–­41 Derrida, Jacques, 79, 122 “De-­Signing” (Schwartz), 75, 81–­82, 85–­86, 91 Des Marais, David, 13, 74, 77, 83–­84 Deutsches Wörterbuch (Grimm and Grimm), 23 “diagram of forces,” 31 Dialectics of Nature (Engels), 181 Dick, Philip K., 33 Dick, Stephanie, on “reformalism,” 184 Dickens, Charles, 220n52 Die Physiologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft (Physiology as a Science of Practical Experience [Burdach]), 23 Die Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe [Haeckel]), 26 Digital Ocean Project, 133 “digital organisms,” 5–­6, 38–­40 discourse, etymology and definition of, 108 Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, 152–­153 Distant Early Warning (DEW) Project (Stankie­vech), 152–­153 “dividuality,” 54 DNA, 2, 6, 46–­47, 69, 83–­84, 230n38; coral DNA, 58; microbial DNA, 9; purine and pyrimidine bases of, 46; synthetic DNA, 33 “Do You Feel Like We Do” (Frampton), 175 Doctors without Borders, 17 “Does Life’s Rapid Appearance Imply a Martian Origin?” (P. Davies), 87–­88 dolphins. See bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncalus) Donatus Subaqua (Osterwaldt), 148 Doolittle, Ford, 9–­10 Double Music (Cage and Harrison, 1941), 142 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 223n90 Doyle, Richard, 2, 42, 88, 89, 208–­209n29, 226n33 Drexciya, 139 Driessen, Henk, 98–­99 Drip Music (Brecht), 76 “Dripsody: An Etude for Variable Speed Recorder” (Le Caine, 1955), 140 Drobnik, Jim, 185 Du Bois, W.E.B., xxi, 186

Dumit, Joseph, 86 Dunn, David, 151–­152 “Dunwich Horror, The” (Lovecraft), 33 Durant, Alan, 21 Durkheim, Émile, 229n10; on water, 244n22 Dusk of Dawn (Du Bois), 186 Duster, Tony, 67 Dying Planet (Markley), 84 Eaarth (McKibben), 122 Eagleton, Terry, 211n59 Earth, 116; compared to Mars, 73–­74, 85, 87–­88, 90; in cosmic ecology, 4, 14, 15, 19, 32, 73, 80; as Gaia, 11, 12, 56, 122–­123; as globe, 11–­12, 116–­117, 124–­125, 136; as a global organism, 11; as home, 119, 121, 136; as host to life extreme and otherwise, 3, 13, 15; as landing site for extraterrestrial life, 4, 13, 88; as monstrous, xxii; ocean Earth, 123, 152; origin of life on, 9; photos taken of from spacecraft, 117, 119–­120; photos taken of from spacecraft that appear as “earth at sea” or “ocean earth,” 121–­124; possibility of life having originated more than once on, 15; post-­apocalyptic, 122–­123; shape of, 136; wholeness quality of, 120. See also Google Earth; Spaceship Earth; Whole Earth Earthrise photo (1968 [taken by Apollo 8]), 117 ecopolitics, 12 Eddington, Arthur, 22n71 Edison, Thomas, 165, 184 Eggers, Dave, 79 “Eighteen-­Century Wetwares” (Riskin), 42 Einstein, Albert, 95 electron microscopy, 13, 84 Elements of Physiophilosophy (Oken), 218–­219n37 embryology, ix, 30–­31 Emmeche, Claus, 38 Empson, William, 21 Enchanted Braid, The (Davidson), 52 Enewetak Atoll, 51–­52, 229n14 Engels, Friedrich, 181 environmentalism, “informating of,” 133 “epigenetic landscapes,” 31 Erlmann, Veit, 185 Error and the Academic Self (Lerer), 91 “Essay on the Geography of Plants” (A. von Humboldt), 25 “Essay on Geology” (L. H. Morgan), 50 “ethno-­conchology,” 156, 269n7

287

Index Eucarya, xii Europa, 74, 86–­87 European cultural history, imagination, and practice, xi, xiv, xxi, 94, 97–­98, 102, 156 European Space Agency (ESA), 88 evolution, theory of, 27, 28; evolution of genetic information, 36; view of “forms” as species in, 30 Evolution’s Rainbow (Roughgarden), 55 exobiology, 74 extraterrestrial life, 75; and atmospheric noise, 76–­77; direct signatures of, 13; and the “fingerprint of life” definition, 13; the “plurality of worlds” debate concerning, 27–­28; remote signatures of, 13; and the search for indices/ traces of, 13; water as an indication of, 13, 76 extremes. See limits/extremes extremophiles, 8, 12; as analogues to extraterrestrial life, 13 Falloppio, Gabriele, 160 Farman, Jason, 130–­131, 132 Farmer, J. Doyne, 36 Fausto-­Sterling, Anne, 55 Feaster, Patrick, 184 “Feeling of Weirdness, A” (Lilly), 41–­42 Feld, Steven, 171, 261–­262n19 feminism, 49, 60, 103, 149–­150, 201–­202n48; “biologically inspired feminism,” 55, 63 fetal microchimerism, 69–­70 Figueredo, Patricio H., 86 figures and figuration in biology, xv, 48–­49, 51, 55, 57, 59–­61, 62, 65–­66, 72, 173; figurative language, 49, 91 Firth, Raymond, 96, 98, 99 fish locomotion, computer simulations of, 39–­40 fishing/fishing communities, 99, 100, 107, 247n41, 247–­248n42, 254–­255n23 Flinders, Matthew, 228n6 Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (Moore), 46 Fluxus art movement, 140 Focillon, Henri, 19 Folsome, Clair, 65 Fontana, Bill, 264n56 Fontana, Walter, 39 form, x, xiv, xvi, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 19; and Artificial Life, 6, 8; the construction of living form, 33–­34; expressions of faith in, 14; life premised on self-­organized form, 31–­32;

288

“secret” of, 31; as the shadow of life, 16–­17; universalization of form in life form, 4, 32–­33. See also form(s) of life; life form (or life-­form) “Form in Ashes” (Laqueur), 34 formalisms, xx, 5, 10, 31, 34, 113, 135, 145, 170, 177, 181, 183, 184–­185; materialized formalisms, 185 form(s) of life, xiv, 1–­4, 8, 9, 11: as organisms yet to be discovered, 220n59; use of the term “forms of life” among Victorian thinkers, 27, 220n53, 223n90; use of the term “forms of life” during the “plurality of worlds” debate, 27–­28; Wittgenstein’s definition of, 205–­206n5 Fortenberry, J. Dennis, 67 Fortun, Kim, 133 Foucault, Michel, xiv, 3, 9, 36–­37, 65, 79, 82, 99; on biology and history, 206n10 “Fountains of the Villa d’Este” (Liszt, 1877), 139 Frampton, Peter, 175–­176 Franklin, Benjamin, 63 Franklin, Sarah, 70 Friedner, Michele, xx, 171 Frisch, Max, 63 Fugazzola, Laura, 69 Fuller, Buckminster, 117; geodesic dome of, 135–­136 “Futures of Life” conference (2007), 2 Galileo spacecraft, 86 Galison, Peter, xvii, 38, 213n78, 241n116; concept of the “theory machine,” 95 Garden in the Machine, The (Emmeche), 38 Garrison, Edna Keah, 103 gender, 55–­56, 63, 138, 149, 150, 154, 165, 187; and the “binary ontologies of sex-­gender,” 69; as “fixed,” 63; gender roles and sexuality, 56, 69; gender-­bending bacteria, 69; politics of, 68–­70; and race, 66–­68, 70, 246–­247n40. See also transgender “Gender of Theory, The” (Lutz), 98 genealogy/genealogies, 9, 12, 30, 36–­37; for Artificial Life, 36 gene transfer: and the interruption of “natural classification,” 9–­10; lateral gene transfer, xix, 3, 9 General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), 131 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms [Haeckel]), 25

Index genes, 1, 7, 9, 10–­12, 36, 46, 55, 58, 66, 69, 83, 196n16, 210n43; and breast cancer, 173; coral genes, 59; “gene fetishism,” 68; “incompatibility genes,” 69; as informational instructions for making organisms, 6; jellyfish genes, 69; mixing of, 3; whale genes, 46. See also gene transfer genesis, 36–­37 genetic code, 5, 7 genetic engineering, 11; nature as a genetic engineer, 210n43 genetic programming, 7, 40 genome(s), 66, 259n51; coral genomes, xv; ­human genomes, 62, 85; microbial ­genomics, 67 genomics, xiii, 17, 45, 57, 59–­60, 67; the “­genomic age,” 210n43 geodesy, 128, 136 Geographic Information System (GIS), 124 geology, xxi, 13, 26–­27, 28, 34, 49, 50–­52, 74, 80, 89, 106–­107, 111–­115, 201n48, 254n23, 255n25 German Romanticism, 23, 29, 215–­217n22 Ghosh, Amitav, 106–­107, 109, 114–­115 Gilroy, Paul, 96, 101 globalization, xvii, 96, 101, 102 globe, the, as an eco-­object, 117 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 23; on archetypes, 24, 26; on the laws behind pure forms (Urformen), 24; on morphology, 24 Goodeve, Thyrza Nichols, 48 Goodman, Steve, 167, 172 Goodwin, Brian, 31–­32 Google Earth, 116, 124–­127, 257n19, 257n22; and the Chinese government, 126; “historical imagery” feature of, 259n52; as a mixture of representational forms, 126–­127; role of politics in, 130–­131; use of geodesy by to organize its coordinate system, 136 Google Earth Community, 128, 132 Google Ocean, 116, 127–­136, 184, 258n37; connection of Google Earth politics to, 130–­ 131; criticism of concerning seafloor upgrade models for, 131–­132; as an existential graph, 133–­134; founding of on topographical maps/models of the seafloor, 127–­129; high bandwidth required for, 132–­133; and maritime activism, 133; representation of water as fully transparent, 129; sources of the visual representations used in, 132; specific islands reportedly displaced by upgrade

models for, 132; and visual representations of the deep, 129–­130 Google Ocean BBS, 129, 131 Gordon Assumption, The (Leber and Chesworth), 149–­150 Grady, Monica, 77, 78, 88 Grant, Robert, 49 gravity, 7, 129, 136, 259nn58–­59 Great Britain, 117 Grimm, Jakob, 23 Grimm, Wilhelm, 23 Guattari, Félix, 89; rhizome concept of, 135–­136 Gubar, Susan, 159 Gupta, Harsh, 112 “gurgler,” the, 261n11 H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (Illich), 104 Hacking, Ian, 197n23 Hadow, Pen, 127 Haeckel, Ernst, 23, 219n47; on art forms in nature, 26; criticism of Darwin, 26; on ontogeny, 26; popularity and influence of his writings, 25–­26, 219n47; use of the term Lebensform, 25, 26 Hallam, Steven, 11 hallucination, drug induced and otherwise, 37, 143, 185 Hamon, Genevieve, 139 “handedness,” 78; among amino acids and sugars, 15 Handelsman, Jo, 62 Haraway, Donna, xv, 48–­49, 51, 53–­54, 122, 180, 201–­202n48; 210n43; on the Anthropocene, xxi–­xxii; on biopolitics and cyborg politics, 212–­213n77; and figuration, 48–­49; on “gene fetishism,” 68; on the “god trick,” 131; on metaphor and scientific theory, 61; on techniques for figuring human difference, 60 Hardy-­Weinberg equilibrium, 278n2 Harris, Daniel, 145–­146 Harrison, Lou, 142 Hastrup, Frida, 255–­256n31 Hathaway, Benjamin, 159 Hauksbee, Francis, 140 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 102 Hayden, Cori, 57 Hayward, Eva, 52, 69; essay of on cup corals (Balanophyllia elegans), 55–­56

289

Index H.D., 272n34 Heated (Winderen, 2008), 151 Hecker, Florian, xx, 174–­175, 178, 180, 181 Heidegger, Martin, 117, 119 Helmholtz, Hermann von, xviii, 23, 158, 178 hematite, 87 Henry, Pierre, 139, 142 Hero of Alexandria, 36 Higginson, Edward, 220n59 Hindu, The (Ghosh), 109 “Hinge*” (Hecker), 175, 178, 180 Hird, Myra, 69 History of the Modern Fact, A (Poovey), 37 Ho, Enseng, 101 Hoerner, Sebastian von, 77 Höhler, Sabine, 129–­130 Holt, J. Gordon, 176, 178 homunculi, 36 Hopkins Marine Station (Stanford University), 46 Hovhaness, Alan, 142 “How to Dominate the Oceans with 2000 Genes” (Chisholm), 11 How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (Goodwin), 31–­32 How Like a Leaf (Haraway), 48–­49 Hoyle, Fred, 88 Huizinga, Johan, 63 human beings (Homo sapiens), renaming of, 62–­64, 65; as Homo amans (loving man), 232n8; as Homo demens (delusional man), 232n8; as Homo duplex (divided man), 63; as Homo economicus (rational man), 63; as Homo faber (making man), 63; as Homo imitans (imitating man), 232n8; as Homo inermis (helpless man), 232n8; as Homo ludens (playing man), 63; as Homo microbis (microbial man), xv, 62, 63, 65–­66, 71; as Homo pictor (aesthetically minded man), 63; as Homo religiosus (religious man), 63; as Homo sanguinus (warlike man), 63; as Homo socius (social man), 63; and the absence of Femina sapiens, 68, 233n31 human bodies, microbial components of, 62, 65 “Human Is More Than Human, The” (D. ­Sagan), 62 Humboldt, Alexander von, 24–­25, 29, 219n38; on the discrimination of form as an aesthetic task, 25; influence of on Darwin, 25; on plants, 25; use of the term Lebensform, 25

290

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 24–­25 Humphries, Tom, 166 Hungry Tide, The (Ghosh), 106, 114, 115 Hurley, Jenifer, 46–­47 Hurricane Katrina, 131, 150, 252n90, 255n26 Hurston, Zora Neale, 98; maritime images used by, 246n37 Huxley, Aldous, 262n21 Huxley, T. H., 28 “hydraulic citizenship,” 251n84 Hydrocene, possibility of, 187 hydrophytes, 22 hydrothermal vents, 3, 8, 9, 45, 74, 130 hyperthermophilic organisms, 87–­88 Illich, Ivan, 104 Image, The (Boulding), 256–­257n11 immersive participant-­observation, 52 indexical signs, 83, 116, 119–­120, 126–­127, 133, 142 India, 106, 110, 113, 255n26 Indian Department of Ocean Development, 114 Indian Ocean, 58, 94, 101, 106, 108, 112, 255n25 Indian Ocean tsunami, 106–­107, 253n6, 255–­ 256n31; criticism of India’s National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) in the aftermath of, 110–­111; and geological time, 107, 111, 113, 115; holistic/long-­term view of, 112; international and national response to, 109–­ 111; and oscillating ocean time, 107–­108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 254–­255n23; role of politicians and scientists in the prediction of, 108–­109; temporality of, 107–­110, 113–­115 India’s National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), 106, 107, 255n25; criticism of, 110–­111 Indonesia, 56, 106, 108, 109; biodiversity in, 103 “Infinity Mushroom Burial Suit” (Lee), 182 information (in information theoretic sense), xiv, 5–­6, 13, 36, 61, 78, 84, 151, 181, 187 Ingold, Tim, 99–­100 Insectopedia (Raffles), 152 Institute for Figuring (IFF), 60 “Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Diversity of Human-­Associated Microbiota in Key Body Sites, The” (Ursell et al.), 66 interpretative relations, 12, 40, 42, 43, 83–­84, 90, 120, 129

Index InterRidge conference, 107, 110, 111, 112, 115, 255n25 InterRidge organization, members of, 113–­114, 255n24 isomorphisms, 34 isotopes, 78, 88 “Janus-­Faced Sea, A” (Driessen), 98–­99 Jasanoff, Sheila, 119, 120 Java Sea, 56 Jeans, James, 160, 162 Jenaer Literatur-­Zeitung, 23 Jenkins, Alejandro, 213n78 Jenny, Hans, ix Jiménez, Corsín, 211n66 Johnson, Bruce, 165 Johnson, Lyndon, 117 Jonah Kit, The (Watson), 228n11 Joyce, James, 161 Jue, Melody, 279–­280n13 Kac, Eduardo, 16 Kahn, Douglas, 140, 187; on “submerged women,” 149 Kant, Immanuel, on aesthetic judgment and the conception of form, 23–­24 Karakotsios, Ken, 6 Kauffman, Stuart, 32 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 21, 31, 92, 222n73; on the Kantian organism, 24 Kelley, Lindsay, 69 Kelman, Ari, 165 Kelty, Chris, 208–­209n29 Kepler, Johannes, 236n28 keywords: as “search” words in the age of ­Google, 21; utility of to historians and ­philosophers of science, 21 Keywords (R. Williams), 20 Keywords in Evolutionary Biology (Keller and Lloyd), 92 Kilworth, Garry, 266n84 Kingsley, Charles, 138 Kipling, Rudyard, 138 Knacke, Roger F., 87 Knapp, Steven, 90 knowledge, “underwater archaeology” of, 43 Kohler, Anna, 178 Kosmos (A. von Humboldt), 25 Kouvaras, Linda, 150 Kroeber, Alfred, 51

KronoScope, 113 Kuhn, Thomas, 84 Kurien, John, 101 Kurzweil, Ray, 6 La Barbara, Joan, 178 labor, political economy of, 37, 131 Lafleur, Laurence, 74 Lakmé (Delibes), 149 Lamb, W. Charles, 86 Landecker, Hannah, 208–­209n29 Langton, Chris, 5, 32, 35; definition of life by, 42 language, xi, 92, 165, 171; as a crucible in which ideas/concepts take shape, 21; and the risks of etymological reductionism, 36 Laporte, Roger, 180 Laqueur, Thomas, 34 Lasswitz, Kurd, 73 Last Dinosaur, The (W.J.T. Mitchell), 15–­16 “lateral thinking,” 90–­91 Latour, Bruno, 57 Lawson, Jennifer, 156 Le Caine, Hugh, 140 Le Guin, Ursula K., 33; use of the acronym HILF (high intelligence life forms) by, 223–­224n91 Lebensform, 21, 22–­23, 23–­26, 214n17, 218–­219n37; and the aesthetics of life, 24; analogous terms to, 215n18; definitions of, 23; extended notion of as custom or habit to the organic world, 25; transformation of into English as “life form” or “life-­form,” 28–­29 Leber, Sonia, 149–­150 Lecourt, Edith, 275n27 Leduc, Stéphane, 222n73 Lee, Jae Rhim, 181, 182 Lee-­Hamilton, Eugene, 161, 162 Lerer, Seth, 91 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 96; meditations on seascapes, 245n28 life, x, xii–­xiii, xiv, 1, 183, 278n2; the “alien ancestry” of terrestrial life, 88, 240n96; as allopoietic, 12; as autopoietic, 12; Des Marais’s definition of, 83; indices of, 13, 78; information dynamics of, 6; Langton’s definition of, 42; life as defined by astrobiologists, 14–­15; living systems as distributed events, 88; as a minimal measurement of nutritional health, 17; as premised on self-­organized form, 31–­ 32; relation of to water, ix; repositioning in

291

Index life (continued) astrobiological discourse of what life could be, 14; as a scientific object, 2; shuttling between the level of the gene and the level of the globe, 11; synthesis of, 10; what is life? xi–­xvi. See also biology; life forms (or life-­ forms); shadow of life Life in Crisis (Redfield), 17 Life Exposed (Petryna), 17 Life Extreme (Kac and Avital), 16 life form (or life-­form), 1–­2, 11–­12, 19, 32, 214n17, 221n65; as abstraction, 12, 20; attempts to make new life forms using “biobricks,” 20; the concept of life form suggesting the existence of other life forms, 19; construction of, 33–­34; Darwin’s view of, 29; diversity and unity of, 31; the “form” in life form, 12; framing of by conceptual commitments, 30; microbial life forms, 12; multiple meanings of as fundamental to its prevalence in the life sciences, 21; patterns of life forms, 215n20; technical meaning of in botany, 29; view of from deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning, 20. See also Lebensform; life form (or life-­form), historical transformation of as a space of possibility within which life might take shape life form (or life-­form), historical transformation of as a space of possibility within which life might take shape, 19–­20, 28–­29, 223n90, 223–­224n91; definitions of “life-­ form” (hyphenated version) in the OED, 22, 30; earliest published instance of the term “life form” in English, 26; and examination of the keyword “life form,” 20–­23; and German biology of the Romanic period, 23, 215–­217n22; increasingly common use of the term “life form” in English, 26–­27; “life-­ form” (hyphenated version) as an attempt to retain its German origin, 29; loss of its foundation in living material, 31; physical circumstances that may condition the space in which life forms manifest, 23; as the subject of Darwinian attention, 29–­30; use of “life-­form” (hyphenated) in science fiction, 33. See also form(s) of life Life of Forms in Art, The (Focillon), 19 Life.After.Theory (Schad), 18 Lilly, John, 41–­42, 143 limit biologies, xiii, 18, 207n16; three limit biologies, 3–­4, 16

292

limits/extremes, 15–­16; definition of, 16–­17 Linnaeus, Carl, 44, 49 Linton, Jamie, 102 Liszt, Franz, 139 literal, the, literality, and literalization (versus the figurative), xv, 44, 49, 55, 65–­66, 83, 91, 143 Livingston, Julie, 17 Lloyd, Elisabeth, 21, 92 “Locating Potential Biosignatures on Europa from Surface Geology Observations” (Figueredo), 86 Lockwood, Annea, 140 Long Marine Laboratory, 52 “looping kinds,” 197n23 Lord, Nancy, 227n8 Lorini, Alexandra, 97 Los Alamos National Laboratories, 36, 38 Love Life of the Octopus, The (1965), 139 Lovecraft, H. P., xxii, 33; use of the term “life form” by, 223n90 Lovelock, James, 122 Löw, Rabbi, Golem of, 36 Lowe, Celia, 103 Lutz, Catherine, 98 Mackay, Robin, 175 Mafia Island, 99 magnetite, 14 Maldives, the, 94, 104 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 96, 97–­98, 99 Malle, Louis, 139 Mann, Thomas, 1 “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography” (Farman), 131 Marclay, Christian, 262n23 Margulis, Lynn, xx, 2, 8, 173, 178; work of with the spirochete bacterium, 175 marine invertebrates, 48 marine microbiology, 8–­12; and fieldwork among marine biologists, 8–­9 “marine snow,” 45 Markley, David, 84, 90, 239n80 Marriot, McKim, 54 Mars, 13, 73–­74; compared to Earth, 73–­74, 85, 87–­88, 90; habitability of, 87–­88; research concerning, 85 Martian meteorite ALH84001, 13–­14, 78; controversy concerning, 84–­85, 90, 238n78 Martin, Ayrn, 70 “Martineau and Organ” (Morley, 1969), 139

Index Marx, Karl, 63 Masco, Joseph, 52 materialist relativism, 12 materiality, 33, 183, 184, 197n22, 259n58; of the DNA molecule, 84; as form, 104, 184; of water, xvi, 94, 96, 102, 103–­104, 184, 243–­244n13 mathematics, 30–­31, 38, 60, 148, 184 Maudlin, Laura, 275–­276n33 Maurer, Bill, 92–­93, 244n21, 259n54 Mauss, Marcel, 247–­248n42 Mayr, Ernst, 70 McCulloch, Warren, 35 McEvoy, Arthur, 100 McGhie, Viveca, 71 McKay, David, 13, 78 McKibben, Bill, 122, 133 McLandburgh, Florence, 158 McLean, Stuart, 243–­244n13 McWhorter, Ladelle, 70 Mead, Margaret, 96, 98 “Meanings of ‘Life’ ” (Nature editorial), xi, 2, 209n34 Melville, Herman, 44, 45, 47, 227n2 Messeri, Lisa, 238–­239n79 metaphor, and scientific theory, xix, 6, 46, 56, 61, 65, 70, 101, 140, 178 metaphysics, Western, 6 metazoans, 12 meteorites. See Martian meteorite ALH84001 methane, 13, 19, 78 Michaels, Walter Benn, 90 microbes, xii; ascendancy of in public health, 64–­65; “bar-­coding” of, 11; earthly microbes, 74; endosymbiotic microbes, 45; extremophilic microbes, 8, 12, 13, 74; in human bodies, 62–­72; marine microbes, xiii, 8–­12; microbe GFAJ-­1, xii microbiologists, xii, xix, 2, 8–­9, 11–­12, 62 microbiology, xiii, 9, 13; marine microbiology, 8–­12 microbiomania, 65 microbiome, 65, 68; and racial categories, 66–­68; and sex/gender, 68–­69 Microbiome Face Cast (McGhie), 71 microbiopolitics, 64 microbiota, 67 Mills, Mara, 165 Mindell, David, 43 Minsky, Marvin, 35 Mintz, Sidney, 101

Mitchell, Maria, 80 Mitchell, W.J.T., 15–­16, 213n78 mitochondria, 173, 175 Moby-­Dick (Melville), 44, 45, 47, 227n2 modernity: diagrammatic modernity, 141; double-­edged modernity, 156; “liquid” ­modernity, 102; soundscape of, 141, 145 Mono Lake, xii Monte Carlo methods, 38 Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, 8–­9 Moore, Christopher, 46 Moravec, Hans, 36, 37 Morgan, C. Lloyd, 28 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 50, 247–­248n42; on coral and coral islands, 50–­51 Morley, Angela, 139 Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, 46 Müller, Johannes, 24, 28; conception of Lebensform, 23 Museum of Jurassic Technology, 43 “Music in Our Ears: The Biological Bases of Musical Timbre Perception” (Patil et al.), 181 “music of the spheres,” 76, 236n28 “Musique Concrète of Nature: Underwater Listening and the Acousmatic Predicament” (Schwartz), 262–­263n28 mutation, 31 Myers, Adrian, 132 Myers, Natasha, xix nanobes, 14 NASA, 12, 74, 80, 84; on Pancam calibration, 87 National Autonomous University of Mexico, 57 National Cancer Institute (NCI), 57 National Geospatial-­Intelligence Agency, 131 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, 131 National Research Council, 32, 33 natural history, 22, 220n51, 206n10 natural kinds, xvi natural selection, 5, 7, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31 nature: “after nature,” 8, 15; deep nature, 107, 163; “extreme nature,” 8, 15; as a genetic engineer, 210n43; geometry of, 30; as ground or other to culture, 1, 51, 94–­96, 99, 101, 104, 165, 180; as ground to “life,” familiar and unfamiliar, 16, 55, 64; ideas concerning imported into computer simulations of Artificial Life, 38; and “mutant ecologies,” 52; “normal nature,” 15; philosophy of, 15–­16; sea as hypernature, 99–­100

293

Index Nature, xi–­xii, 2 “Nature of Culture, The” (Kroeber), 51 “Nature, Its Man and His Goat (Enigmata of Natural and Cultural Chimeras)” (­Negarestani), 178, 180 Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation), 25–­26 “Near-­Infrared Detection of Potential Evidence for Microscopic Organisms on Europa” (Dalton et al.), 87 Negarestani, Reza, 175, 178, 278n22 Neuhaus, Max, 143, 145 Neumann, John von, 35 neural net-­like models, 35 new materialism, xv, 183, 197n22, 278n1 New Orleans, racist city planning in, 252n90 New York Times, 108, 111 Nicobar Islands, 109 Noise Water Meat (Kahn), 140, 187 Noisiest Guys on the Planet, The (Winderen), 151 nuclear testing, 51–­52; and the mismanagement of nuclear fallout, 52 Nyhart, Lynn, 218–­219n37 objects, xvi, xx, 2, 31, 36–­38, 65, 89, 95–­96, 116; as abstractions and empirical phenomena, 183; computational objects, 37–­38, 125; sound objects, xviii, 147; virtual objects, 116, 124 Ocean Genome Legacy, 259n51 Ocean Microbial Genome Survey, 11 Ocean of Sound (Toop), 151 Ocean Voyages Institute, 133 Oceania, as a “sea of islands,” 102 oceanization, 96, 101–­103, 250n67 oceanography, feminist, 103 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 180 Oken, Lorenz, 218–­219n37 Oleson, Jeanine, 149 Oliver, Bernard, 76 On Beyond Living (Doyle), 208–­209n29 On Growth and Form (Thompson), 222n73 On the Origin of Objects (B. C. Smith), 37 On the Origin of Species (C. Darwin), 27, 29 On the Sensations of Tone (H. von Helmholtz), 158 OncoMouse, 173 Ono, Yoko, 140 ontogeny, 6, 26 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller), 117

294

Opportunity (NASA rover), 74, 77, 85, 87 OrbView-­2 spacecraft, 123 organisms, x, xv, xx, 1, 11, 24, 46, 51, 65, 173, 175, 214n12, 220n51; Agassiz’s theory of, 28–­29; artificial/Artificial Life organisms, xi, 208–­209n29; as chimeras, 173–­175; “digital organisms,” 5–­6, 38, 40; extreme organisms, x, 8–­12; Goodwin’s view of, 32; hyperthermophilic organisms, 87–­88; Kantian organism, 24; as localized agents, 88; marine organisms, 254–­255n23; microorganisms, 45, 62, 64, 90; model organisms, 59; as objects, 31; sound as an organism, xix; superorganisms, 65, 152; universal phylogenetic tree of organisms, 9; virtual organisms, 7; See also forms of life, as organisms yet to be discovered Origins of Order, The (Kauffman), 32 Origins of Sociable Life, The (Hird), 69 Orlove, Benjamin, 103–­104 Osterwaldt, Klaus, 148 “Ostinato Pianissimo” (Cowell), 261–­262n19 Owen, Richard, and the theory of vertebrate archetypes, 28 Oxenham, Andrew J., 175 Oyama, Susan, 6 ozone, 13, 78 Pacific Basin, 98, 108; and the “South Sea pastoral,” 98 Pacific Ocean, 52, 58–­59, 97, 101–­102, 107, 133, 228n6 Pacific trash vortex, 133, 258n48 Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, 108 Packard, Alpheus: on L. Agassiz’s theory of organisms, 28–­29; use of the term “life-­ forms” by, 28 Padden, Carol, 166 Painlevé, Jean, 139 Palau, 57 Pálsson, Gisli, 97, 100; on the “birth of the aquarium,” 99 Palumbi, Stephen, 46 panspermia, 88 Papert, Seymour, 35 Paracelsus, 36 “Parade” (Satie, 1918), 140 Paris, John Ayrton, 157 Patil, Kailash, 181 Paxson, Heather, 64, 65 Payne, Roger, 142

Index Peirce, Charles Sanders, xviii, 116, 119, 127, 136, 259n54, 260n60; on abduction, 15, 20, 80; on the existential graph, 134–­135; on gravity, 259n58; on indices of life, 13, 78 “perceptrons,” 35 PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean (PALAOA), 153 Persian Gulf, 58 Petryna, Adriana, 17 Philippines, the, 56 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 84 photographs, 127; and color correction, 87; and the “ideology of indexicality,” 127 photosynthesis, 53 phylogenesis, 10 physics, 5, 23, 30, 31, 32; Newtonian physics, 7 phytogeography, 33 Piccard, Auguste, 138 Piccard, Jacques, 138 Pickering, Andrew, 91 Pitts, Walter, 35 Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Messeri), 238–­239n79 Planterigets Livsformer of deres Betydning for Geografien (Raunkiaer), 29 “plurality of worlds” debate, 27–­28 Pneumatics (Hero of Alexandria), 36 Polli, Andrea, 152 PolyWorld, 6 Poovey, Mary, 37 “Precarious Plasticity: Neuropolitics, Cochlear Implants, and the Redefinition of Deafness” (Maudlin), 275–­276n33 preverberation, xiv, xxii, 187 Problem of Human Life, The: Embracing the “Evolution of Sound” and “Evolution Evolved” (Hall), 220n51 Prochlorococcus bacterium, 11–­12 prosopopeia, as genre of figuration seen in the signature of life, 89 Protestantism, Calvinist, 34 Quarmby, William, 159, 163 race, xxi, 9, 66–­67, 186, 209n38; as a biosocial fact, 233n27; and “the molecular reinscription of race,” 67; race purity as social illusion, 70; racialization as a dynamic system, 66–­68; and racism, 52, 66–­68; “Statement on Race” (American Anthropological Association), 66. See also New Orleans, racist city planning in

Race, Language, and Culture (Boas), 186 “radioactive colonialism,” 52 Raffles, Hugh, 152, 242–­243n8 random-­access memory (RAM), 5 Ratu Kidul, 127 Raunkiaer, Christen, 22; credit given to for bringing “life-­form” into common usage, 29 Ravel, Maurice, 139, 142 Ray, Tom: on the “body” of a digital organism, 6; on digital life, 5; “Tierra” system of, 5–­6 reality, 90, 131, 194 Reason and Resonance (Erlmann), 185 Rebuilt (Chorost), 170 rebus and reverse-­rebus, 127 “Recent Seismic Event off Sumatra, The” (Singh), 112 Red Sea, 58 “Re-­Defining Music Through a Deaf Lens” (Crider), 168 Redfield, Peter, 17, 83 Rediker, Marcus, 249n59 Redolfi, Michel, 145–­147, 151, 153 reefs. See coral reefs Refracted Visions (Strassler), 126–­127 Reid, John Stuart, ix relational ontologies, 171 relativism. See materialist relativism “Remote Sensing of Planetary Properties and Biosignatures on Extrasolar Terrestrial ­Planets” (Des Marais et al.), 77 remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), 43 Render Me, Gender Me (Weston), 69 Representations, 34 reproductive technology, 1, 16 “Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies” (Kelman), 165 Richards, Robert, 25, 29 Riskin, Jessica, 42 Rodgers, Tara, xviii, xix, 160 Romanticism, 79; German Romanticism, 23, 29, 215–­217n22; music of, 138, 139 Ronell, Avital, 16 Roosth, Sophia, 61, 208n28 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 157, 163, 270n10 Rough Waters (Walley), 99 Roughgarden, Joan, 55 Rouse, Joseph, 92 Russolo, Luigi, 261n11 Rutherford, Ernest, 141 Ryder, Robert, 160

295

Index Sagan, Carl, 76, 162, 257n13, 272n37 Sagan, Dorion, 2, 8, 62, 64, 231n4; on consciousness as a subjective phenomenon, 178; on the “nonhuman,” 71–­72; on the transformation of insect species because of Wolbachia bacteria, 68–­69 Sagar Kanya, 106, 111, 114, 254n19 Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity, 4, 35 Sargasso Sea, 11 Satie, Erik, 139, 140, 261–­262n19 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 78 Schad, John, 18 Schafer, R. Murray, 139 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 215–­217n22 Schelling, Karl Eberhard, 215–­217n22 Schevill, William, 142 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 24, 63 Schizophyllum commune, 69 Schoenberg, Arnold, 139 Schrödinger, Erwin, 2, 6, 8 Schwartz, Hillel, 73–­74, 75, 76, 79, 85, 89, 141; approach of to history, analyzed, 90–­93; on the eight types of “De-­sign,” 81–­82, 241n114 Science, xii, 13, 33 Science Fiction Citation project, 32–­33 Science Interactions (Aldridge), 162 Science & Music (Jeans), 160 Scott, Winfield Townley, 271n30 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 131 Sea Islands, 101 “Sea-­Limits, The” (Rossetti), 157 sea lions, 46–­47 seafaring, 97–­98; and the sea as a blank space between nation-­states, 97, 244–­245n24 Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI), 13, 74–­ 75, 76–­77, 78, 81 “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001” (McKay), 13–­14 “Sea-­Shell Murmurs” (Lee-­Hamilton), 161, 162 seashell sound, xx, 155–­156; Benjamin’s allegory of, 160–­161; as blood music, 161–­ 163, 271–­272n31, 272n33; and ear-­seashell analogies, 160; as the primordial murmurings of the universe, 160–­161; as the result of vibration and wave mechanics, 157–­158; speaking shells, 156–­157; and spiral shells, 269–­270n9; and spiritualism, 158–­159; as worldly echoes, 160

296

“Sea-­shells” (Hathaway), 159 Sea-­viewing Wide Field-­of-­view-­Sensor (­SeaWiFS), 123 Sedgwick, Adam, 27 sex/sexuality, 9, 55, 70–­71, 86, 149–­150, 154, 165 Sexual Life of Savages, The (Malinowski), 98 shadow of life: and the absence of a theory of biology, 17–­18; as death, 17 Shelley, Mary, 223n90 Shetye, S. R., 110, 112 Siegel, Deborah, 103 “Signature Event Context” (Derrida), 79 Silent World, The (Cousteau [book]), 52, 138 Silent World, The (Cousteau and Malle [film, 1956]), 139, 260–­261n8 silicon, 37 Silicon Second Nature (Helmreich), 3, 208n28 Sims, Karl, 6–­7, 40, 208–­209n29 Sinfonia Antarctica (Miller), 266n78 Sinfonia Antarctica (V. Williams), 266n78 Singh, Satish, 112, 113–­114 “Situated Knowledge” (Haraway), 131 Skinner, Quentin, 21 Slavin, Amie, 148 SLEWTH (Sea Lions Exploring Whales and Their Habitat), 46 Sloterdijk, Peter, 96, 102 Smith, Brian Cantwell, and the theory of ontology-­in-­the-­wild, 37 Smith, Paul J., 139 Smith, Zachary, 175 Snapper, Juliana, 148–­149, 150, 154; critique of canonical mermaid models by, 149; as a modern-­day mermaid, 149 social constructions, 104 social constructivism, 51 SONAR (SOund NAvigation Ranging), x, 38, 45, 129, 141, 143, 153 “Song of the Sea-­Shell, The” (Bäärnhielm), 159 “Song of the Sea-­Shell, The” (Quarmby), 159 Songs of the Humpback Whale (Payne, 1970), 142 Sonic Antarctica (Polli), scientific-­political point of, 152 Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Goodman), 167 “Sonic Waters” (Redolfi), 146 Sonic Waters Safety System (SWSS), 145 sonocentrism, 164 “sonorous envelope,” the, 275n27 Souls of Black Folks, The (Du Bois), xxi

Index sound, x–­xi, xviii–­xx, xxii, 220n51; as an abstraction, 184; as an organism, xix; “paleo­ spectrophonic” methods for “educing” sound, 184. See also seashell sound; sounding (concept); underwater music sound studies and Deaf studies, 164–­166, 273n3; and cochlear implants, 169–­170; and the concept of “unsound,” 172; cyborg sound and utopian/dystopian visions, 169–­170; and Deaf jokes, 164, 166; and the deaf music camp, 166–­167; and the “deaf rave” movement, 169; and Deaf-­Blind communication, 172; and inferred sound/informed vision, 166–­167; and infrasound/vibration, 167–­ 169; and new definitions of “deafness,” 275–­ 276n33; reliance of on the divide between hearing and seeing, 165; and sign language, 171–­172, 276n36; and “sonic virtuality,” 172; and the “sound barrier” between the deaf and the hearing, 166 SOUNDERs (Surface Observatories for ­UNDErground Remote-­sensing), 86 sounding (concept), x–­xi, xxii, 185; watery meanings of, 185–­186 Sounding the Limits of Life (Helmreich), x Space in the Tropics (Redfield), 83 Spaceship Earth, 117, 119–­124, 125, 132, 257n13, 257n22 Spaceship Earth-­Ocean, 124 Spaceship Ocean, 133 Specht, Rainer, 214n12 species, x, 1, 9, 25, 71–­72, 234n45; and the concept of the biological species, 70; and the concept of phylotype, 10; evolutionary development of, 10; as forms, 30; Linnaean naming convention, 65; need for a revised definition of, 70–­71; as philosophical “kind,” xvi; stability and instability of concept, 9–­ 10, 70–­71; the “species turn” in humanities and social science, xv; as type specimen, 58–­59 “speech communities,” 166 Spirit (NASA rover), 74, 77, 85, 87 Sponsel, Alistair, 228n6, 229n14, 229n18, 262–­263n28 Sri Lanka, 106, 108, 113 Stankievech, Charles, 152–­153 Star, Susan Leigh, 82 Star Trek, “slash fiction” version of, 133 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), 33, 223–­224n91

“Statement on Race” (American Anthropological Association), 66 Stearns, Robert E. C., 156 Steigerwald, Joan, 24, 217n29 Steinberg, Philip, 97 Steingart, Alma, 200–­201n43 stereoisomers, 78 Sterne, Jonathan, xix, 156, 181 Stoker, Bram, 223n90 Strang, Veronica, 96 Strassler, Karen, 120, 126–­127 Strathern, Marilyn, xvii, 8, 15, 54; on Western “nature-­culture constructs,” 94 Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, The (C. Darwin), 49–­50 Struve, Otto, 74 Submarine Signal Company, 141 Subramanian, Ajantha, 100, 110 sugar, 78, 101; right-­handed sugars, 15 sulfides, 14; and whalebone decomposition, 45 sulfuric acid, 19 symbiogenesis, 173, 175 symbiopoiesis, 210n48 Synthetic (Roosth), 208n28 Tanzania, 99 Taussig, Michael, 89, 98, 102 technology, 3, 51, 68, 100, 147, 170; life as, 3, 212n70; reproductive technology, 1, 16; of sound reproduction and relay, x, 43, 137, 145–­147, 151, 165, 169–­170, 180–­181; of vision, 39, 123, 132. See also biotechnology Temple of Nature, The (E. Darwin), 215n18 ten Bos, René, 102 territorialization, 100 Terzopoulos, Demetri, 39, 40, 42 Tesla, Nikola, 76 Thailand, 106, 108 theory, xiv, 17–­18, 89, 90–­93, 241n116; “against theory” (Knapp and Michaels), 90; and aesthetic judgment, 23, 26; “athwart theory,” 90–­93, 96–­97, 103–­105; biological theory, 3, 17, 27, 29–­30, 31, 34, 173, 211n59; and the concept of life, 17–­18; as a cultural production of capital, 211n59; and etymology, 18, 90, 97, 185; and experiment, 38; feminist theory, 103; gender of, 98; information theory, 78, 84; “medium theory,” 213n78; “medium-­specific theory,” 279–­280n13; of ontology, 37; quest for in the life sciences and humanities, 213n78; the sea as material

297

Index theory (continued) for the formation of, 102; social theory, 20, 96, 102–­104; “theory machine” definition, 95; theory underwater, 186 “Theory of Animation, A” (Kelty and Landecker), 208–­209n29 therophytes, 22 Thompson, D’Arcy, 30–­31, 222n73; on families of animal forces, 31 Thompson, Emily, 141 “Tierra,” 5–­6 time, 75, 107–­108; geological time, 107, 111, 113, 115; national time, 114; not fully possible to sort the past and future, xxii, 91, 114; oscillating ocean time, 107–­108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 254–­255n23; real time, 7, 39, 126; real time and the Other, 109–­110; social time, 112, 115; and sound, xviii, xix, 151; symbolism of day and night, 99; time of the Other, 108, 109; uncertainty as other to time, 113 Time Machine, The (Wells), 67 “Time and Uncertainty” (Assad), 113 Titan, methane lakes of, 14 Titov, Vasily V., 108 “To a Sea-­Shell” (Welby), 155 “Toilet Piece” (Ono, 1971), 140 Tolkien, J.R.R., 91 Toop, David, 139, 151 “Towards an Amphibious Anthropology” (ten Bos), 102 “Towards a Theoretical Biology” (symposium [1968]), 31 Toxoplasma gondii, 65, 66 “tranimals,” 69 transgender, 55, 69 Traweek, Sharon, xiv Trawick, Paul, 248n54 Trends in Microbology (de la Cruz and ­Davies), 11 Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold, 2 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-­Strauss), 98, 245n28 Trobriands, the, 97 Trower, Shelley, 167–­168 tsunamis. See Indian Ocean tsunami Turing, Alan, 41 Two Planets (Lasswitz), 73 Ulysses (Joyce), 161 underwater music, 137–­138, 264n56; of Cage and Neuhaus, 142–­143, 145; and conducting transduction, 145–­147; and the emergent

298

mind of the pond, 151–­152; and film, 261n10; and queering the mermaid, 148–­150; and the sound recordings of Winderen, 151; submarine noises, 140–­142; under the Arctic Ocean, 152–­154; whale songs, 142. See also under­ water music, modes of; Wet Sounds festival Underwater Music (Neuhaus, 1976–­1978), 143 underwater music, modes of: evoking mode, 138, 139, 153; invoking mode, 138, 140, 153; soaking mode, 138, 142, 153; symbolic mode, 142 “Underwater Waltz” (Ussachevsky, 1951), 139 Union Territories of the Andamans and ­Nicobars, 109 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), 56 United States, xi, xxi, 28, 51–­52, 101; biological kinship categories in, 60; and racial categories, 66–­67 “Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture” (Haraway), 60 “Universal Music” (von Hoerner), 77 universal phylogenetic tree of organisms (tree of life), 9 universes, multiple, 213n78 universes, virtual, 5, 7, 38 University of Arizona, 57 University of Hawaii, 9 U.S. Navy, 131 utopian heterotopias, 135–­136 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 126 Vanishing Face of Gaia, The: A Final Warning (Lovelock), 122 Varela, Francisco, 12, 31 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 36 Veditz, George, 165, 166, 172 Venter, J. Craig, 33, 208n28 vertebrates, generalized archetype of, 29 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers), 27 viruses, xii, xix, 9, 42, 62, 64, 182 Visual Language and Visual Learning Center (Gallaudet University), 166 vitalism, xii, 15, 23; German materialist vitalism, 23, 38 vitality, xvii, 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 37, 77, 82–­83, 88, 93, 120, 152, 178, 186; and Artificial Life, 42–­43; experiential character of, 178; and textuality, 6 Voyage of the Beagle (C. Darwin), 50

Index Waddington, C. H., 31 Wagner, Richard, 260n6 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 221n65 Wallace, Rob, 67, 68 Walley, Christine, 99 “Walls Do Not Fall, The” (H.D.), 272n34 Walther, Philipp Franz, 215–­217n22 War of the Worlds (1978 rock-­opera version), 80 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 73, 74 water, x, xvi–­xviii, 87, 241–­242n1, 242–­243n8, 243–­244n13; abstraction of, xx, 183–­184; as an actor, 252n93; Boas’s view of, 244n22; the color of seawater, 96, 97–­99; and computer simulations, 39–­40; differing views of in the natural and social sciences, 95–­96; diversity of, 96; Durkheim’s view of, 244n22; fluid ontology of, 100; the “form of water,” 96, 102, 103, 104; as an indication of extraterrestrial life, 13; materiality of, xvi, 94, 96, 102, 103–­104, 184, 243–­244n13; moral economy of, 248n54; as nature, 94–­95; nature of, 145; relation of life to water, ix, 78; and social theory, 96, 100; as symbol and substance in anthropological theory, 95; symbolic affordances of, 184; as a “theory machine,” 95, 98, 99, 100, 104–­105, 244n17; water metaphors, 103, 244–­245n24; wateriness, 40, 43; watery meanings of sounding, 185–­186. See also oceanization “Water Music” (Cage, 1952), 140 “Water Music” (Huxley), 262n21 “Water Piece” (Ono, 1963), 140 Water Whistle (Neuhaus, 1971–­1974), 143 Water-­Babies, The (Kingsley), 138 waterworlds, artificial, 38–­40 Watson, Ian, 228n11 “Wave Play” (Slavin), 148 waves, analogies between sound and water, xix, 148, 155, 158, 160, 162; electromagnetic, 76, 89; of feminism, 103; as feminized flux, 149; Indian Ocean tsunami and, 106–­109, 113; and low frequency vibration, 167–­168; and sound, xviii, xix, 141, 143, 148, 155, 158, 178, 180, 184; as waveforms, xviii, xix, 175; wave-­ particle duality, 174 Waves (String Quartet No. 2 [Murray, 1978]), 139 Wayne, Jeff, 80 We the Tikopia (Firth), 98 Weathering the World: Recovery in the Wake of the Tsunami in a Tamil Fishing Village (Hastrup), 255–­256n31

Webb, Charles Henry, 157 Weeki Wachee mermaid attraction, 265n64 Welby, Amelia, 155, 163 Wells, H. G., 67, 73 Welter, Volker, 125 Wertheim, Christine, 60 Wertheim, Margaret, 60 Weston, Kath, 69, 110 Wet Sounds festival, 147–­148, 264nn59–­60, 265n61 “wetness,” 42 “wetwares,” 42, 226n33 whales, 227n8; the analog whale, 45–­46; the cyborg whale, 228n11; decomposition of whalebone lipids and the production of sulfides, 45; the digital whale, 46; industrial whaling, 45; the simulated whale, 46–­47; whale fall, 45; whale songs, 142, 263n49. See also cetology What Color Is the Sacred? (Taussig), 98 What Is Life? (Haldane), 206n7 What Is Life? (Margulis and Sagan), 2 What Is Life? (Schrödinger), 2 What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction (Linton), 102 Whatmore, Sarah, 100 What’s Left of Theory? (Butler, Guillory, and Thomas), 17 When Nature Goes Public (Hayden), 57 “Where Am I?” (Dennett), 40–­41 Whewell, William, 27, 28 “White Noise” (Kilworth), 266n84 Whitehead, Alfred North, 68 Whole Earth, 117, 119; as an icon, 119–­120 Whole Earth Catalog, and the Earthrise cover photo of, 117, 119–­120 Wiener, Norbert, 81, 180 Wild Profusion (Lowe), 103 Willerslev, Rane, 16, 211n66 Williams, Lambert, on “difformation,” 207n18 Williams, Raymond, 20–­21, 214n17 Williams, Vaughn, 266n78 Wilson, Elizabeth, 56, 63 Winderen, Jana, 151 “With a Nantucket Shell” (Webb), 157 “With a Sea-­Shell” (Lowell), 271n21 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 84, 205–­206n5 Wittgenstein: On Mars (Coates), 84 Wolbachia bacteria, 69 Wolfe-­Simon, Felisa, xii Women Writing Culture (Olson and Hirsch), 48 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 8, 48

299

Index Woodward, James, 165 Wordsworth, William, 156–­157, 162, 269n8 World Geodetic System (1984), 136 World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (Chorost), 170 Yaeger, Larry, 6 “Year Zero: Faciality” (Deleuze and Guattari), 89 You Shall Know Our Velocity (Eggers), 79

300

You Who Will Emerge from the Flood (Infanti and Snapper), 148 Yukaghirs, hunting economies of, 16–­17 Zahnle, Kevin, 85 Zambezi River, 242–­243n8 Zerner, Charles, 245n32 Zoonomia (E. Darwin), 215n18 zooplankton, ix zooxanthellae, 53, 58, 230n38