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

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 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

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

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CONTENTS

Sound

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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

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 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 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. 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 life¹⁵—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.

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 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, 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 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

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 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.

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 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 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.