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

325 Pages·2015·5.15 MB·English

by  Stefan Helmreich

SOUNDING THE LIMITS OF LIFE
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 var-
ied 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
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
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,
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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 vii
Sounding Life, Water, Sound 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 173
Life, Water, Sound Resounding 183
Acknowledgments 189
Notes 195
Index 283
vi
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-d ub 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 popula-
tions of zooplankton in the ocean.3
The watery media through which such apprehensions arrive—b lood and
muscle, brothy stews in Petri dishes, the sea—s uggest 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 ab-
stract rendering of such vibration]). Jenny thought that examining cymatic pat-
terns 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’ embry-
ology 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