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John Scott Haldane's Physiology And Steel chamber at Lister Institute, 1908. From A.E. Boycott and John Scott Haldane, “The Effects of Low Atmospheric Pressures on Respiration,” Journal of Physiology 37, no. 5 (1908). 6 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00268 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 Environments of Experimentation and Epistemologies of Surroundings: John Scott Haldane’s Physiology and Biopolitics of the Living FLORIAN SPRENGER TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY ERIK BORN In 1928, the editors of Nature summarized centuries worth of speculation on “the meaning and source of life” and summarily dismissed all of “those— fewer now than a century ago—who drew a sharp line of distinction between the living and the non-living, between the inorganic and the organic world.”1 Presented under the weighty title “Life and Death,” the anonymous editorial appealed to recent developments in chemistry, physics, and biology pertain- ing to the study of life and underscored the lack of a unified theory of life within the biological sciences, considering the period’s prevailing discipli- nary debates about vitalism and mechanism. If the organic could no longer be taken, in the editors’ opinion, to differ from the inorganic in terms of the former’s presumed animation with a vital force, and a purely mechanical explanation of life with reference to the latter no longer provided a satisfac- tory explanation of the “origin of life,” then the possibility of escaping from these deadlocked positions depended on the adoption of a relatively novel conceptual framework.2 The fundamental distinction between the living and the non-living is that whilst it is possible to isolate the phenomena of the inorganic world, it is impossible to consider a living organism apart from its envi- ronment; it is, in fact, its reactions and adaptations to changes in its surroundings which distinguish the living from the inanimate and form the basis of the science of biology.3 According to this programmatic definition, the organism was henceforth to be understood only through its relations with its environment, whether in the exchange of matter and energy necessary for survival, the evolutionary Grey Room 75, Spring 2019, pp. 6–35. © 2019 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 relations of adaptation, or other kinds of interrelated interdependency. In a prominent platform, the editorial on “Life and Death” articulated a program for the biological sciences, which would no longer treat organisms as isolated beings and instead focus on their relations of mutual exchange with their surroundings, while also accounting for organic substances, more generally, in terms of their energetic dependencies on their environments. Instead of analyzing the forms, genesis, and structures of the organism, the biological sciences were increasingly turning toward research dedicated to the dependence of living beings on their environments. From this new per- spective, organic substances (and the organisms composed of them) could be said to generate their own survival through their very adaptation to their environments. The editor’s new program for the biological sciences hinged on a crucial analogy to the mechanical: Whereas an “inorganic machine . simply fails to run, when the supply of fuel gives out,” which would mean that it remains independent of its surroundings because of its ability to function within various environments, “the machine of the cell”—that is, the proper object of biology—“does not simply remain . in statu quo, like a run-down machine; it disintegrates.”4 In one sense, then, living things remain dependent on their environments in that they will die as soon as their rela- tion to their surroundings is severed. In another sense, however, living things are independent of their environments in that they have the ability to move freely within them. Hence, the editors called for a new definition of the living in terms of the reciprocal relation between organic objects and their inorganic environments; that is, a relation in which every change on one of the two sides results in changes on the other side. In subsequent years, this kind of organicist approach to physiology would repeatedly seek the key to unlocking the secrets of nature through the production of knowledge about this reciprocal relationship between surroundings and, for lack of a better term, whatever they surrounded.5 As should become particularly evident through the following analysis of the work of Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860–1936), commonly credited as the first biologist to use the term organicism in English, the philo- sophical movement’s influential interpretation of physiological processes with a focus on the organization of the living remained closely connected throughout the first decades of the twentieth century to experimental and theoretical explorations of surroundings of the living. Hence, organicist physiology was fundamentally geared toward the production of forms of knowledge of surroundings [Umgebungswissen] that could be generated through the technical and experimental modification of environments.6 As this subdiscipline of biology gradually abandoned its understanding of the 8 Grey Room 75 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 isolated organism, it also negotiated the organism’s dependence on its sur- roundings in a relation of reciprocal exchange and its evolutionary ability to adapt to various environments. On the basis of this new relational knowledge about surroundings, organicist physiology would gradually formulate noth- ing less than a new concept of life. At the same time, the emergence of a new biopolitics that regulated the circulatory flows of matter and energy among organisms, populations, and environments eventually provided an experimental site for testing the viability of this new physiological knowl- edge.7 Today, the main instrument of this biopolitics can be easily recognized in the form of designing artificial environments and the subsequent normal- ization of surrounded bodies. For the purposes of the present article, however, Haldane’s historical work still lends itself extremely well to the examination of our contemporary biopolitical-epistemological complex because of its close connections between philosophical considerations and experimental procedures.8 Among Haldane’s contemporaries in the biological sciences, the concept of stability (and thus the continuation of life) was commonly discussed, according to Evelyn Fox-Keller’s historical research, as the result of something more than the internal organization of living beings whose own stability also required accounting for the external organization of their sur- roundings.9 Accordingly, there were many different concepts in modern physiology for what I am grouping together under the historical epistemology of surroundings: milieu, Umwelt, environment, and other specific coinages for conceptions of surroundings each raised their own questions about the relationship between the external surroundings and the internal surrounded, about the demarcation of any particular surrounding, and finally about whether anything might exist beyond surroundings and itself surround the surroundings. In the years since, there have been attempts in diverse histor- ical constellations to clarify both the influence of surroundings on what they surround and the determination of things by their surroundings. The historical processes of grasping the relationship between things and their surroundings proceeded through several historical stages devoted to restruc- turing the causality of this relationship, which would eventually be concep- tualized as ecological under the strong influence of systems theory and cybernetics after the Second World War. Today, this relation is subject to a redesign through the medial interpenetration of ambient technology. From a historical perspective, therefore, we can now observe how various episte- mologies of surroundings provided orientation for twentieth-century physiologists and ecologists toward their respective contexts, their implicit metaphysics, or their explicit political interests. Over the years, the knowl- Sprenger | Environments of Experimentation and Epistemologies of Surroundings 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 edge of surroundings generated in these fields was also framed by experi- mental systems, media dispositifs, and technical equipment, and thus obeyed certain disciplinary rules, which can be derived from the history of the biological sciences and were influenced further by background research as well the respective technologies involved in each research process. In spite of these differences, the diverse ecologies of the twentieth century were all eventually confronted with the virulent problem of the observer: They needed to address the questions of whether the interaction between things and their surroundings can even be observed, or whether the observer would intervene in the observed in such a manner that any observation would be decoupled from the observer. Hence, many of these historical epistemologies of surroundings also negotiated the conditions of possibility for knowledge about surroundings per se. In examining what historical concepts of surroundings were
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