Modest biocultural hope: Interview with anthropologist Stefan Helmreich

April 28, 2016
Author Neringa Černiauskaitė

Alien-squid-1024x576Stefan Helmreich received his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and prior to coming to MIT held fellowships at Cornell, Rutgers, and NYU. His research examines the works and lives of biologists thinking through the limits of “life” as a category of analysis. His book Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009) is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea, and oceans outside national sovereignty. This book charts how marine microbes are entangled with debates about the origin of life, climate change, property in the ocean commons, and the possibility of life on other worlds. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998) is an earlier ethnographic book of computer modelling in the life sciences. Helmreich’s newest research concerns the cultural circulation of such abstractions as “water”, “sound”, and “waves”.

Stefan Helmreich was invited by Margarida Mendes and Jennifer Teets to their event series The World in Which We Occur, which was part of the XII Baltic Triennial, and which took place over the telephone.  Stefan Helmreich was part of the event titled Molecular Colonialism in the Reign of Microorganisms.

Neringa Černiauskaitė: In your text ‘What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies’, you analyse how the notion of life has been contested, expanded and limited. With the contemporary scientific engineering and research of space in mind, how far do you think the category of life can be stretched, or are there some limits to this in the end?

Stefan Helmreich: The notion of “life” as a scientific concept is quite recent, really only coming into focus with the rise of the discipline of biology. In that time, “life” has been stretched from a concept meant to have its address in individual organisms to one that embraces species (think of Darwin) and populations (think of the modern synthesis in genetics) and, most recently, one that encompasses the planetary biosphere (think of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis). What looks like it might be next is an extension of the ambit of life to the whole solar system. The recent announcement by NASA, that scientists at the organisation have discovered signs of water on the planet Mars may see “life” newly characterised as something that has our solar system (at least) as its proper context. Are there limits to how far this can go? Probably not! Can it slip out beyond organic materials to include “life” made of inorganic materials? Of course! I don’t see any limits in-principle, because I think that in many ways this is not a philosophical question, but rather one in historical epistemology, how and whether different communities of concern have investments in extending or limiting the definition. However, that is what will probably keep the definition fenced in, keeping it from reaching up to encompass everything.

In the case of synthetic biology, for example, the notion of life gains a completely new meaning and significance. Humans can not only tweak life forms, they can also engineer and design them. How could anthropology respond to this new turning-point in the category of life?

Anthropology has already been responding, largely by questioning its own disciplinary investments in the division between “nature” and “culture,” between the born and the made. Donna Haraway was one of the earliest theorists to notice and theorise how the boundaries between the natural and artificial were being breached. She retooled the term “cyborg” to name such crossings. She was followed by Paul Rabinow, whose notion of “biosociality” tried to name this cultural and practical remaking of nature and by Marilyn Strathern, who examined how so much anthropology had already imagined “culture” as the condition “natural” to human enterprise.

What are the political implications and repercussions of ‘framing’ life?

There could be many! They range all the way from thinking about end-of-life care, or definitions of brain death, to the proper measure of species diversity in ecosystems and much more. A range of anthropologists have written ethnographies on just this topic, looking around the world at such forms like Indonesian valuations of biodiversity, Islamic opinions on organ donation in Egypt, reproductive technology interventions in Ecuador, among others.

How could we think of such repercussions in relation to future colonisations of space?

One way to think new thoughts about such an enterprise might be to question the idiom of “colonialism” in the first place. To what extent might the journey of some humans to the Moon or Mars replay colonial projects of settlement or resource extraction? Maybe quite closely, but it may also turn out to be quite different from that of the past. Definitions of life will likely be more immediately about maintaining life as a metabolism rather than defining it in some more abstract sense. They will pertain to the outer space travel of humans and to their accompanying microbes, plants, and animals which will also travel along with them.

What is life for you as an anthropologist? Is it a constantly contested ‘becoming’?

I’m interested, as I suggest in my new book of essays, Sounding the Limits of Life, in how the category of “life” is under conceptual stress as scientists seek out new instances of it, or try to create it in the laboratory. So, yes, it is a contested and transforming concept.

In contemporary philosophy and theory, there has been a visible turning point from the linguistic and the discursive to the material reality. This shift is also obvious in the discipline of anthropology.  However, what interests me in your work is that you seem to ‘combine’ the linguistic and discursive with material, to reveal their mesh-ups and assemblages. You show how abstractions or notions materialise by directly shaping physical reality. How did you arrive at this notion? Why do you find it important to keep speaking about the significance of how reality took shape in a more discursive way, rather than diving more directly into material layers of reality?

I am sceptical that we academics can — though our varieties of language or other tools of representation — capture some outside-human-sociality account of the world. I’m struck again and again by claims within much new-materialist writing that the “material” world is made up of flowing matter and energy … they are 19th century categories, not universal substances and realities! I worry that there is some form of hidden science worship contained within new materialism.

Why did you choose to study waves and the work of oceanographers in particular? What is it about the categorisation of waves that you are able to relate to the Anthropocene?

I’m interested in waves as kinds of “nonhumans,” to use current terminology from scientific studies. But I’m also interested in how waves are objects described with respect to very human-scaled concerns, like coastal infrastructure, for example. The travel and movements of waves are interesting to ocean and marine scientists at large, partly because of the social worlds that are shaped by them. Whether there is an Anthropocene connection here is an open question. I write a bit more about this in my Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture from 2014:

http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau4.3.016

In your paper, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies in Ethnography’ written together with S. Eben Kirksey, you state that anthropology has entered a new stage of research: multispecies ethnography.  In the era of the Anthropocene, this stage seems to offer, in your words, ‘modest biocultural hope’. How do you see these new kinds of research fields as having positive and transformative potential?

I’m of several minds about this. Yes, it is true that pluralising accounts of these kinds of agents at work in the world moving on and beyond human stories, can offer new ways of thinking and being. But at the same time, these agents are so numerous that whether they have some kind of sum-total of “positive transformative potential” seems to be asking too much. Ultimately, we don’t know where these stories will lead.

Do you think art(ists) could play some role in here too? If so, what role could it play and how?

Yes, absolutely. I think that artistic practice offers different ways into querying relations among humans and their companions, as well as other stranger species … Some types of “design fiction,” for example — in which artists produce uncanny and strange objects that transgress normative boundaries between the organic and inorganic — can serve as prods to think and act beyond a more settled common sense.