Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World

Description

The social, political, and cultural consequences of attempts to cheat death by freezing life. As the planet warms and the polar ice caps melt, naturally occurring cold is a resource of growing scarcity. At the same time, energy-intensive cooling technologies are widely used as a means of preservation. Technologies of cryopreservation support global food chains, seed and blood banks, reproductive medicine, and even the preservation of cores of glacial ice used to study climate change. In many cases, these practices of freezing life are an attempt to cheat death. Cryopreservation has contributed to the transformation of markets, regimes of governance and ethics, and the very relationship between life and death. In Cryopolitics, experts from anthropology, history of science, environmental humanities, and indigenous studies make clear the political and cultural consequences of extending life and deferring death by technoscientific means. The contributors examine how and why low temperatures have been harnessed to defer individual death through freezing whole human bodies; to defer nonhuman species death by freezing tissue from endangered animals; to defer racial death by preserving biospecimens from indigenous people; and to defer large-scale human death through pandemic preparedness. The cryopolitical lens, emphasizing the roles of temperature and time, provokes new and important questions about living and dying in the twenty-first century. Contributors Warwick Anderson, Michael Bravo, Jonny Bunning, Matthew Chrulew, Soraya de Chadarevian, Alexander Friedrich, Klaus Hoeyer, Frédéric Keck, Eben Kirksey, Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, Deborah Bird Rose, Kim TallBear, Charis Thompson, David Turnbull, Thom van Dooren, Rebecca J. H. Woods Contents......Page 7 Acknowledgments......Page 9 Freezing Politics......Page 11 1 Introduction: The Politics of Low Temperature......Page 13 Description of Chapters......Page 24 Notes......Page 30 References......Page 31 Introduction......Page 37 From Inert Ice to Frozen States......Page 44 Dwelling in Frozen States......Page 48 Situating Cryopolitics Historically......Page 50 Reclaiming a Progressive Cryopolitics: Materialities, Temporalities, and Generative Capacities......Page 53 Conclusion: Reclaiming a Dynamic Cryopolitics of Home and Dwelling......Page 60 References......Page 62 Cryogenic Culture and Artificial Cryosphere......Page 69 Cryopower and Cryogenic Life......Page 71 Horizontal and Vertical Regimes of Artificial Cold......Page 74 Cryopolitics as Biopolitical Economy of Cold......Page 75 Notes......Page 76 References......Page 77 Freeze Frames: Life, Time, and Ice......Page 81 Technics of Freezing......Page 91 4 Ode to the Ice Bucket......Page 93 Notes......Page 97 References......Page 98 5 Nature and the Refrigerating Machine: The Politics and Production of Cold in the Nineteenth Century......Page 99 A Species of Steam Engine......Page 101 Artificial Arctics......Page 103 A Fleeting Commodity......Page 106 Imperial Appetites......Page 107 A Most Beneficial Application......Page 114 Conclusion......Page 118 Notes......Page 120 References......Page 122 Introduction: Frozen Corpses, Chilled Chickens......Page 127 Anthropology of Virus Hunters......Page 130 Storing Viral Samples......Page 134 Stockpiling Vaccines......Page 138 A Cold War Genealogy: Storing Oil, Stockpiling Weapons......Page 141 Notes......Page 147 References......Page 148 Freezing Ontologies......Page 153 Anthropocene......Page 155 Disruptions......Page 156 Time Ideology and Linearity......Page 157 The Elasticity of Time and the Long Transitive Moment......Page 159 Restoration and Apocalypse......Page 160 Messiah Envy......Page 162 Notes......Page 163 References......Page 164 8 Out of the Glacier into the Freezer: Ötzi the Iceman’s Disruptive Timings, Spacings, and Mobilities......Page 167 Notes......Page 181 References......Page 182 9 Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materia......Page 189 First Critique: Cryopreservation Is Implicated in the Colonial Appropriation of Indigenous Natural Resources......Page 191 Second Critique: Cryopreservation Aims to Preserve Indigenous DNA, but Is Predicated on Indigenous Death......Page 192 Third Critique: Genomic Indigeneity Is an Inadequate Form of Indigenous Resistance to the Death Narrative......Page 195 Indigenizing Interspecies Thinking......Page 197 What Is not New about the New Materialisms? An Indigenous Metaphysic Networked Sets of Social-Material Relations......Page 199 Life, Blood, and a Sacred Stone......Page 204 Learning to See the Others......Page 207 References......Page 209 Freezing Bodies......Page 213 10 Suspense: Reflections on the Cryopolitics of the Body......Page 215 Person and Thing: The Material Practices of Making Body Parts Exchangeable......Page 217 Self and Other: Enacting Boundaries with Cryopreservation......Page 219 Concluding Remarks......Page 221 References......Page 222 11 The Freezer Program: Value after Life......Page 225 History of Cryonics in Fiction and Fact......Page 230 Cryonics as History......Page 238 Realizing the Value of Cryonics......Page 241 Notes......Page 246 References......Page 249 12 The Frozen Archive, or Defrosting Derrida......Page 255 Spectral Commodities......Page 257 The Frozen Archive......Page 260 Defrosting Derrida......Page 262 References......Page 263 Freezing Species......Page 267 Introduction......Page 269 Ho‘awa: Seeds, Stasis, and the Promise of Vitality to Come......Page 273 ‘Alala: Birds and Frayed Relationalities......Page 277 Kahuli: Snails, Hope, and Loss......Page 282 Notes......Page 287 References......Page 289 14 Freezing the Ark: The Cryopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation......Page 293 The Frozen Ark Project......Page 294 The Biopolitics of Captive Breeding......Page 298 The Epistemology of the Postvital Life Sciences......Page 300 The Temporality of Cryopreservation......Page 302 The Cryopolitics of Frozen Zoos......Page 305 Questionable Futurology......Page 309 Notes......Page 311 References......Page 312 15 The Utopia for the Golden Frog of Panama......Page 317 The Year of the Frog (Panama, December 2008)......Page 318 Live Free or Die......Page 326 The Frog Fridge......Page 328 Capture and Escape......Page 332 Future Promise......Page 337 Notes......Page 339 References......Page 341 16 The Cryopolitics of Survival from the Cold War to the Present: A Fugue......Page 345 Notes......Page 349 References......Page 350 Contributors......Page 353 Index......Page 357