Helmreich

__Water/Life__

Helmreich, posits the possibility that “the ocean, as it becomes a site in which links between genealogy and evolution are denatured, could become a solvent aiding a near-future gaia-social liquefaction of the human, //anthropos//” (352). I am intrigued by the possible implications of a shifting notion of life as genes to a focus on water. Could this lead to more ‘gaia-oriented’ thinking. As Hillary Clinton puts it, ‘Seventy-one percent of our planet is ocean, and seventy-one percent of our body is salt water…. There is this extraordinary connection between who we are as human beings and what happens in this magnificent body of water’ (quoted in Helmreich, p. 354, n. 23). If we thought of our bodies as microcosms of the earth, might our kinship relationship with the environment become less dysfunctional? Perhaps as genes have provided ‘the substance that gathers together //all// living organisms on earth’ (341), water might be the material-semiotic substance that reveals the tightly woven nature of living and non-living entities (gaia).

__Anthropology__

Reading some anthropologists of science, it is not immediately obvious what is ‘ethnographic’ or ‘anthropological’ about their research or writing (Landecker, I would argue, is an example). Helmreich’s disciplinary training, on the other hand, shines through. In addition to explicitly guiding the reader through his the ethnographic process, anthropological sensitivities to particularity, materiality, and context appear to have informed some of Helmreich’s more interesting questions. For example: “was water as life dissolving information as life” (345)? He writes that he “was curious if attention to lateral gene transfer would swing emphasis back to genetic //material//, and I wondered whether it might turn out that for many of the organisms that trade genes… the particular properties of the water they inhabit will turn out to be important for such transfer.” Rather than seeing water as universal and static, Helmreich is interested in genetic information’s ‘local substantiation in particular organisms in particular circumstances, such as variously hot or cold, differently pressured, and diversely salty water’ (346). Helmreich is doing what any anthropologist worth his or her weight in water must do: maintain exquisite attention to //context.//

It should be noted that Helmreich does not claim that his attention to context should be contrasted with scientists’ contextual ignorance. Throughout his paper he recognizes differences in subdisciplines of biology and draws attention to points of agreement and theoretical ‘kinship’ with some scientists.

__Denaturing the nature of ‘nature,’ and the role of ‘interests’__

Only by moving away from static conceptions of nature and privileged notions of individual, human subjectivity, can we account for the exceedingly complex ecologies that characterize contemporary biopolitics.

The effects of denaturalizing our concept of ’nature’ could be extremely far-reaching. Helmreich writes that ‘Reading such kinship customs onto the organic world, Darwin effectively naturalized and universalized them, suggesting through a now commonplace epistemological reversal that such practices were themselves emanations of a natural logic organizing all relatedness’ (340). But as we shift away from seeing ‘nature’ as linear, universal, and lacking agency, imbricated notions of kinship, race, life, humanity, etc. will necessarily be rethought.

The question is, who gets to this rethinking of such biopolitical concepts? One obvious answer is the scientists who are at the ‘forefront’ of research on genetics, gene transfer, etc. But, to paraphrase E.F. Keller, funny things can happen on the way to the ‘holy grail.’ Helmreich writes that bioinformatics – the very framework that informationalized and ‘disembodied’ our concept of life – also provides the tools for taking apart this view of the ‘//dematerialized// genome’ and revealing the rhizomatic, messy, nature of life and kinship. Better understandings of ‘the particular materialities of so-called genetic information’ have been enabled by bioinformatics even as these new understandings undermine ‘an abstract understanding of ‘information’ – as a formal, quantifiable property of a message of program’ (344). While the tree of life has always been a complex web, ‘bioinformatics seemed to be //allowing// lateral gene transfer to become visible. It was not water, but, ironically, information – computationally rendered and instantiated – that was being used to denature abstract notions of genetic information’ (345).

As Virginia Eubanks asked at a colloquium, is this really a case of scientists twirling their evil moustaches while plotting their evil design? While some scientists, especially bioinformaticians, may ‘benefit’ from a disembodied view of life (see my response on Willet talk **LINK**), a more charitable engagement with biology (as advocated by Wilson and Grosz **LINK**), in this case microbial biologists, illuminates some of the limits to an analysis based on identifying ‘interests.’

Helmreich writes that “bioinformaticians who take genetic data and build phylogenies based on treating information as an abstract entity risk floating free of the contingencies of the physical world.” He cites Doyle here (somewhat ironically – many bioinformaticians would likely characterize Doyle one who ‘floats’ rather freely) and what appear to be two other social scientists, but he also could have likely cited various scientific papers by microbial biologists that make similar critiques of the reductionist nature of some claims that have been made based on bioinformatics. Dr. Doolittle, for example, stated that ‘it’s not so much that recent work on extremophilic microbes and lateral gene transfer has //materialized// the genome. We [microbial biologists] knew genes were material all along’ (345).

Elizabeth Grosz wrote that we need to recognize ‘the covered-over debt that knowledges, epistemologies, methodologies – that is, various practices of knowledge-production – owe to that which conditions and incites knowledge: the real, the outside, materiality, things, forces, events, that which preexist knowledge production, signification, or representation and constrains and limits, as well as provokes and engenders, the production of knowledges, including the natural sciences… ‘The real,’ ‘being,’ ‘materiality,’ ‘nature,’ those terms usually associated with the unchanging, must themselves be opened up to their immaterial or extramaterial virtualities or becomings, to the temporal forces of endless change…’ (Grosz, 5).

Helmreich writes precisely about this ‘real,’ outside’ materiality and how it provides the – Following Deleuze – ‘active field’ on which knowledge is differentiated. He writes that ‘the scrambling of the biogenetic phylogenetic signal that these creatures enact has implications for the integrity of Darwin’s link between geneaology and taxonomy,’ biopolitics, and what Agamben has called ‘bare life.’ This attention to materiality is a strength of the better STS scholarship being produced. Genomics and transgenics are constrained and enabled by the workings of the material world (both living and nonliving) and, in turn, constrable ‘different biopolitical constellations’ (341).

Still, while attention to materiality problematizes analysis of technoscience that reduce complex assemblages to ‘interests,’ it remains necessary for scholars interested in social justice to maintain attention to the distributions of burdens and benefits, risks and rewards. Thus, in addition to materiality, Helmreich maintains attention to the role of symbols, economics, and ‘property imaginaries.’ He addresses the “link between the symbolics of the sea and the political economy of the wealthy,” writing that “it is rich countries that will look for unique boutique compounds in the deep, not poorer nations, for which marine biotechnology is often associated with more low-tech aquaculture” (350).

Helmreich’s wide attention to how global processes interact with and affect local practices is in line with what Fischer sees as the characteristics of contemporary and germane anthropological studies of science.

In addition to ‘processes’ (actions, behavior), Helmreich is attuned to the underlying ideologies (world-views, ontologies) that guide knowledge production and our action in-the-world. He writes: “This redefinition of ‘life’ as a network of salty fluid provides a trope for connecting local organisms to global systems – a trope that may be increasingly prevalent in discussions of what kinds of ‘biology’ texture contemporary shape-shifting, gene-swapping biopolitics” (352).

__Questions:__

I would like to go over the mechanisms by which ‘microbes shuffled genetic information back and forth with their contemporaries, moving genes laterally (within generations), not just vertically (‘down’ generations), an activity mixing up their own and others’ genealogies, making it difficult to arrive at a root for the tree of life’ (341).

“I argue that if ‘sex’ was the pivot point of classical biopolitics, tying together both individuals and populations as well as subjects and states, ‘transfer’ will be the logic and practice through which genomic assemblages will be networked to social and political formations.” (342). Who’s writing the History of Sexuality for gene transfer and what stories would they use to illustrate this new formulation of biopolitics? Would this History even be possible, given the current-to-future-oriented view taken by Helmreich? What would an abductive geneology of biopolitics look like, given the unraveling of the very concept of ‘genealogy’?

If kinship is to be thought of in terms of ‘transfer,’ what are some of the best examples of information exchange between ‘alien’ disciplines? How might STS be deterritorialized? What fora might foster the productive miscegenation of diffracted knowledge production practices? What monstrosities might we want to engineer through the proliferation of difference and self-overcoming? Specifically, has there been useful lateral information transfer between organizations like, say, the Union of Concerned Scientists and 4S? (((A possible partial answer on p. 623, n. 11: Heath’s “Bodies, Antibodies, and Modest Interventions” (1997) and here: Rabinow’s “American Moderns: On Science and Scientists” (1999).)))

Perhaps the above questions are constrained by notions of kinship based on “heterosexually enabled recombination of units of informatic inheritance” (Helmreich 2001, 618). In that case, other tropes might be useful to think with, such as the complex vectors by which memes are spread, strategies of informational transfer based on grassroots notions of messages echoing throughout a given informational ecology, or Deleuzian production of monstrosities by ‘buggering.’ Regardless, self-referential masturbatory disciplinary scholarship could become far more generative by opening up to others, and Helmreich (2001) is instructive for this opening to new relationships.

__Writing/Reading Strategies__

Shifting figure and ground (mentioned with respect to gene transfer being seen as the signal and not only as ‘noise, p. 353 n. 13) is a useful conceptual tool.

It can be useful to trace ideas, languages, material across different domains. Haraway, for example, writes about why she loves to use biological metaphors in her writing. Helmreich (2001) uses Alife to think about culture. “When I spoke with Artificial Life scientists, then, filtering their words through my idea of culture, we generated diffracting patterns of culture” (619).

Where there has been a predominance of visual metaphors, it might be useful to think with aural, biological, tactile, or other ‘metaphors.’ Taking this further, metaphors, it seems, have had a monopoly. What other textual strategies might be useful to think with?

Exercising this aptitude to speak in different languages is also useful because messages may be crafted more particularly for specific audiences, as illustrated by Langton’s ‘interventions’ in which he ‘employed a concept of culture recognizable to both sides’ (620).