'Anticipating and suspending: the chronopolitics of cryopreservation' by Thomas Lemke in (2024) BioSocieties comments
The article brings together two disparate and so far largely disconnected bodies of research: the critical analysis of cryopreservation technologies and the debate on modes of anticipation. It starts with a short review of the state of the research on the concept of cryopolitics. In the next part I will suggest two revisions. I will problematize the idea of latent life and the focus on potentialities that have been central to the research on cryopolitics so far, proposing to shift the analytic frame to suspended life on the one hand and to modes of anticipation on the other. I argue that cryopreservation practices are part of contemporary technologies of anticipation. They are linked to a politics of suspension by mobilizing a liminal biological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. This seeks to avert and/or enable distinctive futures by extending temporal horizons and keeping vital processes in limbo. ...
In the past ten years, a number of STS scholars have proposed the term “cryopolitics” or “cryopower” to capture the profound socio-material changes introduced by technologies producing low temperatures (Friedrich and Höhne 2014; Kowal and Radin 2015; Radin 2017; Friedrich 2017).Footnote 1 The notion seeks to address the radical and ongoing transformation of temporal trajectories and spatial configurations in contemporary societies engendered by cryopreservation practices. In this understanding, cryobiological processes fundamentally affect the politics of life in the twenty-first century. They undermine conventional understandings of life and give rise to novel modes of controlling, enhancing and processing organic matter.
This article seeks to explore and further advance the “cryopolitical account” (Peres 2019, p. 77) by connecting it to the debate on modes of anticipation. This growing literature has emerged in the past two decades in STS and beyond, arguing for the need to explore how different futures are enacted through socio-material assemblages (Adams et al. 2009; Anderson 2010; Alvial-Palavicino 2015; Poli 2017; Davis and Groves 2019). Bringing together these so far largely disconnected bodies of research, I propose the concept of a politics of suspension. It builds on the idea of cryopolitics but shifts the analytic focus to the chronopolitical strategies enacted by cryopreservation and cryobanking practices that modify and mould the order of time to accommodate future events.
I start with a short review of the state of the debate on cryopolitics. The next part suggests two revisions. It problematizes the idea of “latent life” as well as the focus on potentialities that have been central to the literature so far, proposing to shift the analytic frame to “suspended life” on the one hand and to modes of anticipation on the other. I argue that cryopreservation practices are linked to a politics of suspension by mobilizing a liminal biological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. They are an integral part of contemporary technologies of anticipation as they seek to avert and/or enable distinctive futures by extending temporal horizons and keeping vital processes in limbo.
Reassessing cryopolitics: a brief review of the debate
The term cryopolitics was first introduced almost twenty years ago by Michael Bravo and Gareth Rees to draw attention to the increasing geostrategic importance of the Arctic region as melting polar sea ice opens up new political conflicts over material resources (Bravo and Rees 2006; Haverluk 2007; Bravo 2017). In the past decade, however, scholars have proposed a more comprehensive understanding of the term that directly follows Foucault’s analytics of biopolitics. Friedrich and Höhne (2014) and Kowal and Radin (2015; Radin and Kowal 2017) have argued that cryopolitics is an extension of the Foucauldian concept. Foucault famously contrasts biopower with sovereign power. While the latter is characterized by taking life or letting live, the former operates by technologies that foster life or let die (Foucault 2003, p. 241). Cryopolitics marks an important intensification of the biopolitical problem space as it is organized around the imperative to “make live and not let die” (Friedrich and Höhne 2014, p. 2, emphasis in orig.; Kowal and Radin 2015; Friedrich 2017; Radin and Kowal 2017).Footnote 2 Thus, cryopolitics is defined by interrupting processes of development and decay, opening up a “unique biological state between life and death” (Neuman 2006, p. 260).
In this understanding, cryopolitics serves as a “theoretical frame brought into existence by the practice of freezing” (Kowal and Radin 2015, p. 68). It does not work as a conceptual alternative to the classical understanding of biopolitics but rather represents “a mode of Foucault’s biopolitics” (8ibid.; Friedrich and Höhne 2016; Radin and Kowal 2017). While this reading stresses continuity and consistency, the concept of cryopolitics also significantly enlarges the original understanding of biopolitics. In line with empirical insights and theoretical propositions by STS scholars and many other researchers investigating the impact of contemporary biosciences, the analytics of cryopolitics is marked by three important extensions. First, it shifts the focus of investigation beyond the disciplining of the individual body and the regulation of the population—the “two poles of development” (Foucault 1978, p. 139; 2003) in Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics. Cryopolitics opens up the analytic frame to include the control and enhancement of biological matter. Beyond the individual body of a human subject and the collective body of the population, it includes “bits and pieces from human bodies” (Hoeyer 2017, p. 207) such as gametes, tissue or DNA. Secondly, the concept of cryopolitics undermines any attempt to restrict biopolitics to “the vital characteristics of human existence” (Rabinow and Rose 2006, pp. 197–98; Rose 2007). Rather, it attends to the “totality of life” (Friedrich and Höhne 2014, p. 38; Friedrich 2020a, p. 247) and the multiple ways in which biopolitical mechanisms also affect nonhuman species, seeking to govern animal and plant life (Haraway 2008; Friese 2013; Wolfe 2013; see also Lemke 2021). Third, while the colonial legacy of biopolitics only plays a minor role in Foucault’s work, the analytics of cryopolitics often engages with colonial and racialized rationalities underpinning cryopreservation practices. One important area of research has been the International Biological Program (IBP) that ran from the 1960s through to the mid-1970s. Using mechanical laboratory freezers and techniques of cold storage, the anthropologists, biologists and physicians involved in the program collected hundreds of thousands of blood samples from indigenous communities in many countries, whose peoples were considered to be both unchanged by civilization processes and threatened by extinction. These collections were assembled in order to determine biological traits of individuals and populations often conceived of as ‘primitive’ to promote knowledge for the future of mankind. However, as TallBear notes, this research initiative (as well as many others with similar objectives) that claims to preserve indigenous DNA for the study of human diversity “is predicated on indigenous death” (TallBear 2017, p. 182; Radin 2013; Kowal et al. 2013; Kowal and Radin 2015; Radin 2017).
In the past decade, the concept of cryopolitics has attracted a lot of academic interest, especially after the publication of an edited volume on the subject by Radin and Kowal (2017). Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World contained a number of important contributions covering topics such as biosecurity (Keck 2017), global food chains (Friedrich 2017) and species conservation (van Dooren 2017; Chrulew 2017; Kirksey 2017). In the wake of this seminal publication, the “cryopolitical analytic” (Radin and Kowal 2017, p. 4) was fruitfully extended to other relevant research fields. It has been used to analyse the control of temperature in urban spaces (Höhne 2018), to investigate the governance of frozen seeds repositories (Peres 2019), to assess the impact of cryogenic technologies in reproductive policies in Scandinavian countries (Kroløkke et al. 2019), to study the practices of egg cell freezing and the potential use of cryopreserved oocytes for biomedical research (Friedrich 2020b), to follow resurrection projects in Russia that seek to bring the mammoth back to life (Wrigley 2021), and to trace the technoscientific networks of human milk donation and banking in Spain (Romero-Bachiller and Santoro 2023).
The “cryopolitical framework” (Kroløkke 2019, p. 541; Peres 2019, p. 84) often puts forward two fundamental and interconnected claims. Firstly, cryopolitics is characterized by “the perpetual deferral of death” (Kowal and Radin 2015, p. 68; see also Radin and Kowal 2017, p. 7) and draws on a state of “latent life” (Friedrich and Höhne 2014; Kowal and Radin 2015; Radin 2017; Kroløkke 2019; Romero-Bachiller and Santoro 2023). According to this reading cryopreservation practices make it possible to store organic material by cooling it to sub-zero temperatures for an indefinite period of time, resulting in a “life without death” (Kowal and Radin 2015, p. 69, emphasis in orig.). Secondly, the concept of cryopolitics designates the “potential of life or life forms that had been redirected in time through the use of low temperature” (Radin 2017, p. 4; 2013; see also Friedrich 2020b, p. 340). In this understanding, cryopreservation practices store potentialities available for future use, opening up scientific or medical perspectives as well as commercial options.
In the following, I propose a two-fold analytical shift to clarify and complement the original reading of cryopolitics. First of all, I will argue that in order to conceive the mode of operation of cryopreservation practices, “suspension” is more appropriate than “latency”. In contrast to “latent life”, “suspended life” accounts for the deferral of both death and life and better captures the liminal biological state of frozen organic material. Building on and extending the existing debate on cryopolitics, I seek to offer a conceptual clarification that suggests shifting the analytic focus from latency to “suspended life” (Lemke 2022). The idea of suspension in cryopreservation practices has been fruitfully explored before in conceptual reflections (Hoeyer 2017) as well as in empirical studies (Romero-Bachiller and Santoro 2023), but so far it has not been consistently distinguished from the notion of latency and its chronopolitical dimensions still lack a systematic consideration. Secondly, I suggest situating cryopreservation practices within the current “regime of anticipation” (Adams et al. 2009; Mackenzie 2013; see also Dolez et al. 2019). Analysing how cryotechnologies are mobilized within anticipatory rationalities displaces the promissory focus on potential with a practical interest in addressing future concerns and catastrophic risks.
