Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (5 page)

Finding food to support its body and using energy to repair itself, which occurs even at the DNA level, are typical operations of life. But what is life doing in its cosmic context? I would argue, and have, that the metabolic essence of life is to degrade gradients. Inanimate complex systems do this, but staying alive prolongs the process. I consider this a lucid, Greek-style idea. And there are facts to back it up.

Apoptosis, telomerase-based limits on cell divisions, and sugar- and insulin-mediated genetic mechanisms ensure aging-unto-death in most familiar species. But locusts, mayflies, and other organisms that “come unglued” (experience multiple failure of organs), dying within hours of reproduction, contrast greatly with long-lived ones like sharks, lobsters, and some turtles not known to age. (Sharks, who often devour their twins in utero, may not need to die, as they are exposed to so many death threats.)

That aging is under genetic control is attested to by the difference between Pacific and Atlantic salmon, the latter of which return upstream for another bout of egg laying. The energy connection here is that populations that grow too rapidly without moderating their growth run the risk of being wiped out by famines and epidemics.
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Death by aging, in other words, is not an accident but an adaptation. The important datum that near-starvation is the surest life-span extender in organisms as distant as apes and yeast (evolutionarily separated by some seven hundred million years) suggests that hunger acts as a signal to slow down aging programs, thereby increasing the chances of population and species-level survival. The modulation of aging in the face of environmental signals of scarcity is an example of physiological prudence among cells and compares favorably with conscious human attempts to moderate population growth.

In addition to the seeming genetic fetters on unrestricted growth in our own bodies, and in populations of aging animals, consider the actual work done by plants. We like to think our symbol making and technology make us superior, but plants are metabolically superior in that they can derive energy from oxygen, which they do at night when sunlight is not available as a source of energy. They can switch-hit like this because they also incorporate those former respiring bacteria, the mitochondria, into their cells along with the plastids, which we never got, making us worry about where to get the next meal.

And plants are far from inert. The average condensation and precipitation from soil and leaves in midlatitudes during the summer is about six millimeters per hectare. This production of latent heat via evaporation off of leaves is the energetic equivalent of some fifteen tons of dynamite per hectare. Rainstorms are far more energetic. Seeded by evapotranspiration from trees, rainstorms release the equivalent of many megatons of dynamite. But they do it stably. Competing with one another for access to the light that drives their evapotranspiration, trees disperse more energy more steadily than we do even with all our technology.
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We think we are smarter, but in the long term we haven’t proved ourselves to be. Indeed, we may be heating up the planet, which is a clear symptom of dysfunction in complex systems. Think of your laptop, overheating. Natural complex systems use energy and dissipate it elegantly and have learned to do so in stable ways over millions of years of evolutionary time. It is true that we are Promethean, gifted in our ability to locate and exploit energy gradients. It even happens in our own bodies, whose brains use 40 percent of our blood sugar to spin forth fancies of variable value. But the long-term thinking we pride ourselves on is not in evidence when you consider thermal satellite evidence that rainforests are the most efficient coolers of the planet. These biodiverse collectives naturally use energy, but they dissipate it away from their surface, and do so sustainably.

In
Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas,
Stefan Helmreich writes: “At the conclusion of
The Order of Things,
Foucault, in a phrasing that evokes Rachel Carson’s description of the seashore world, suggested that
man
may someday ‘be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’ He did not mean,” he adds, “that humanity might be wiped out by oceanic inundation—though such a literal reading is freshly thinkable . . . in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, and growing evidence of global warming. Rather, Foucault speculated that the
human
—that biological, language-bearing, laboring figure theorized by human sciences ranging from anatomy to anthropology to political economy—might not endure forever, just as archangels, warlocks, and savages are no longer so thick on the ground of our social imagination as once they were, and just as
race
as a biological category now wobbles between phantom and Frankenstein as it has been set afloat in a sea of genes.”
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I believe anthropology’s new engagement with the nonhuman may be another example of “the return of the scientific repressed,” but I believe it also represents increasing pressure on us to become more integrated into more biodiverse, energetically stable ecosystems. Populations tend to be most numerous in the generations prior to their collapse. Stem cells and pioneer species spread rapidly but become integrated in slower-growing adult organisms and ecosystems that optimize and sustain energy use. In this light, humanity as a whole seems to be ending the insular rapid-growth phase typical of immature thermodynamic living systems. This view provides a possible new positive interpretation of Franz Kafka’s witty lament, “There is hope, but not for us.”

CHAPTER 2

BATAILLE’S SUN AND THE ETHICAL ABYSS

Late-Night Thoughts on the Problem of an Affirmative Biopolitics

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY
of the rest of your strife. In thinking about ethics we come up against some of the most difficult problems. One person’s righteous indignation is another’s reactionary oppression. The citizen’s free speech can be the government’s hate speech. The model’s sexy furs are PETA’s incontrovertible evidence of animal slaughter. Your nice iPhone may entail child labor, environmental degradation, and a Chinese worker’s exploitation. Even the seemingly innocent sweep of a linoleum countertop may represent, from another level, microbial genocide. When this example was brought up before a roomful of students in Danville, Kentucky, in the context of a discussion of life’s extent in the context of, among other things, abortion, many in the class raised their hands when asked if they believed microorganisms were not alive. For a sperm and an egg cell, fertilized or not, do not look that different from many microbes. Do they have feelings? Is the male masturbator guilty of wanton destruction of human life? The vegetarian (and Adolf Hitler was one) may think eating meat is murder, but thinks nothing of flying to an environmental conference, thereby adding to global warming that may trigger a wholesale climate collapse. Still others would argue that wiping humankind off the face of the Earth in the long run may be just what the biosphere needs to keep going.

Somewhere Jacques Derrida writes that all of his work amounts to nothing but graffiti on the base of the monument that is the work of the rabbinical religious thinker Emmanuel Levinas. A friend of Maurice Blanchot and who at first admired Martin Heidegger, Levinas last century recognized that there is no possibility for a prescriptive ethics, a Mosaic tablet of writs set in stone that will guide us as to conduct, what is right to do, as we make our way through the ethical darkness. We need instead a descriptive ethics; we must engage with the other as other, falling without parachute through an abyss without bottom. The pointing finger has three fingers pointing back at the accuser. We have moral dyslexia. Who can guide us? For Levinas, it may be God, or what is left of him after Friedrich Nietzsche. We must be there with the face of the other, accountable, responsible to it. I read large sections of Levinas’s
Totality and Infinity,
and I thought this idea of grounding ethics in the face, before the face of the other, was a fascinating idea. I was in a rush to apply, to appropriate it. I did so, naively no doubt,
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to the face of Earth so that we might have ethical accountability toward the planet, our mother, the biogeochemical matrix from which the flesh of our body comes but also the environment we co-opt and infect in our nonstop proliferation. There is a cool painting that shows a lunar-landed astronaut, the blue Earth reflecting off his visor, obscuring and replacing his face. The Levinasian ethics of the face also seemed to touch on the lack of accountability in technowarfare, dropping bombs on those we don’t see, death at a distance. Recently, however, I learned (during a lecture by Cary Wolfe, the editor of the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series) that Levinas didn’t even consider animals to have a face. That was strange. Animals don’t have a face? Dogs have no faces? What kind of a face is this? And I’m no Bible scholar, but I can’t help think what I’ve heard—that, although God never shows his face in the Bible, there is a key passage in which he flashes his backside.

IF NATURE IS AMORAL and religion offers us no reliable moral code, where do we go for our ethics? In reaching for an affirmative biopolitics, I want to talk about the productivity of the agon and make a few probably unpopular comments about what we call war and the general climate from which it comes. I believe we are in a dysfunctional relationship with Big Brother, and it is nonconsensual. But I don’t agree that the strife that prevents an affirmative biopolitics can be laid simply at the foot of mononaturalism, as Bruno Latour argues, or that its roots are simply human.
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On the other hand, I think that facing the deep roots of what emerges as violence in the human realm can help us understand if not address it, and that this has a Spinozistic–Madame Curie virtue beyond activism. Curie said that nothing in life is to be feared, only understood; Spinoza argued that, with free will an illusion, true freedom lies on the way of knowledge.

It is true that contingent human history shapes what we take to be universal scientific knowledge, but this contingent human history also reflects the larger thermo-cosmic evolutionary situation in which we are embedded. I live in a world in my head in the world, said Paul Valéry. We dwell in a nature circumscribed by culture inside nature. Whether that second nature is also inside culture I’ll leave for you to decide.

I WANT TO MENTION quickly what I think is the basis of the ethical problem of life on Earth. It is twofold. First, sensing, sensation, including the avoidance cues of pain, which we may assume is among the oldest phenomenologically detectable signals, correlates with living beings. Second, Earth is essentially a materially closed thermodynamic system. Like other natural complex thermodynamic systems, material cycles as energy flows, and the system, if possible, grows to use up available resources. Microbes have mastered complete recycling of chemical elements in ecosystems. But if we look at evolutionary history, there comes a time when organisms developed the potential to consider themselves individual selves. I would provisionally locate this potential chronologically with the Ediacaran fauna, among the first organisms to have heads. These beings lived earlier than the trilobites. They may not have been animals at all, but symbiotic organisms living with algae in their tissues. But either they or the animals that followed them recognized each other as gradients. This set up an ethical crisis. Animals not only devour each other—“meat” is the name of that gradient—but their perception and intelligence allowed them to hunt. This is the same awareness that would ultimately allow us to know we harm others to feed, and that someday we will die.

Thus somewhere in the evolutionary history of animals, after they diverged from fungi some seven hundred million years ago—and according to James Watson, 40 percent of yeast proteins are still homologous to ours—there came a point where, with their sensory organs concentrated at one end, they recognized their fellows as a rich energy gradient. Of course they didn’t at first realize, as we vegetarian, vegan, Jainist, and pepperoni pizza eaters do, that those fellows were feeling beings like themselves. But this primordial carnophagy, as Derrida calls it, set up the conditions for an ethical crisis from which we still have not recovered.

We come from a long line of naturally self-centered ancestors. As Alan Watts, the greatest popularizer of Eastern philosophy we have ever had in the West, puts it, the “shape alone is stable. The substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other.” The tubes “put things in at one end and let them out at the other. . . . [This] both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. [But this part isn’t true, as I will explain.] So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube.”

All this seems “marvelously futile,” says Watts, adding that it is “more marvelous than futile.”
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Watts is right, although it is actually a bit worse from an ethical standpoint because his assumption that the tubes must wear out turns out to be wrong. In fact, they are killed off by what we could call an “inside job”: multiple redundant systems, working from deep within the genome, ensure that organisms die by aging in many species, including us. Genetic assassins—to use colorful language—include apoptosis (programmed cell death), telomere shortening, and glucose-mediated mechanisms that ensure we age relatively quickly if we are well fed.
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Of course to say “assassin” and “inside job” is to beg the biopolitical question. For example, Ed Cohen in
A Body Worth Defending
excavates the political roots of the seemingly self-evident idea of the biological idea of immunity. And he does a splendid job, beginning his book with the striking image of Élie Metchnikoff, who introduced the term
immunity
into biology. One day Metchnikoff, when his “family had gone to a circus to see some extraordinary performing apes, remained alone with [his] microscope, observing the life in the mobile cells of a transparent star-fish larva [at which point] a new thought suddenly flashed across [his] brain.”

As the scientist described his finding, “It struck me that similar cells might serve
in the defense of the organism against
intruders . . . I said to myself that if my supposition was true, a splinter introduced into the body of a star fish larva, devoid of blood vessels or a nervous system, should soon be surrounded by mobile cells as is to be observed in a man who runs a splinter into his finger. This was no sooner said than done.

“There was a small garden to our dwelling . . . [and] I fetched from it a few rose thorns and introduced them at once under the skin of the beautiful star-fish larvae as transparent as water.

“I was too excited to sleep that night in the expectation of the results of my experiment, and very early the next morning I ascertained that it had fully succeeded.”
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COHEN CORRECTLY POINTS OUT that Derrida before he died tended to speak of 9/11 in terms of global autoimmunity. Cohen criticizes Derrida for conflating immunity and autoimmunity, but as I read, it occurred to me that this conflation may reflect our own geopolitical confusion. Whether or not Derrida was aware of insufficiently investigated physical anomalies on September 11, 2001, his conflating immunity and autoimmunity acts like an unwritten Wiki entry that can absorb future discourse. Speaking plainly, if 9/11 is indeed a false flag (one of many and not necessarily the most recent in a long military history), then Derrida’s “conflation” is quite cagey.
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Immunity would refer to the rapid spread of national security control apparatuses in the global body politic, whereas autoimmunity would refer to the purposeful introduction of terror, a state crime against democracy, to initiate a global response.
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As I read I also worried about what we might call Foucauldianism or even Foucaultitus (pronounce it how you like)—the tendency to pore through documents and identify a concept or reality with its historical introduction into texts. Sex began in such and such a century, immunity evolved in the court system, and so on.

As Cohen relentlessly pushed for the political, social, and cultural roots of this seemingly innocent concept of immunity for almost three-hundred-plus pages, I kept asking myself, yes, but if the starfish, and we, are not in some sense immune, what would you call it? What is the transparent starfish larva doing with its mobile cells extracting the rose thorn if not being in some sense immune to them?

THERE IS OBVIOUSLY SOMETHING to be said for this modern form of scholasticism, as it forces us to disinter concepts we take for granted. However, I believe Alfred North Whitehead had it right when he credited a deep strain not of conceptual gymnastics but of “anti-intellectualism” to the brilliance of science.
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The excesses of Aristotelian scholasticism served as a counterexample, helping scientists leave the musty room of involuting ideas with no love lost, as they stepped forward with just the Greek genius for bold lucid speculation, into the fresh air of nonhuman things, which they measured and observed. . . . A good example, of course, is Metchnikoff himself boldly applying the juridical concept of immunity to starfish larvae, and finding that it worked.

By book’s end, however, Cohen answered, or acknowledged, my question. He discussed AIDs as an insufficiently problematized diagnosis, one dependent on the very notion of immunity, which provides the “I” in the middle of both AIDS and HIV. “Might biological
community,
” he writes, “enable us to appreciate healing. . . . There may be more to immunity than we currently know, or are indeed even capable of knowing, so long as we remain infected by the biopolitical perspectives that it defensively defines as the apotheosis of the modern body.”
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Here it is worth a return to Margaret McFall-Ngai’s startling but sensible surmise that the immune system, appearing first in marine metazoans surrounded by seawater infused with one hundred million microbes per liter, started by not weeding out or destroying pathogens but engaging the most helpful symbionts
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—producing, as Cohen suggests, a community.

STILL AND ALL THE SAME, metacaspases, T cells, nitrogen oxide, telomere rationing, apoptosis, and thymic involution (which progressively weakens the immune system) seem part of cell regimes that not only shape and protect but eventually kill the body via aging. While Latour recommends a constructivism in working for world peace because naturalism has been tried already, and didn’t work, this recommendation runs the risk of derailing the sort of critical thinking necessary to see the depths of problems before beginning to fabricate novel solutions. We don’t have to be mononaturalists to see that culture is grounded in a nature or that nature is not our organic fairy godmother.