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).

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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 pertaining to the study of life and underscored the lack of a unified theory of life within the biological sciences, considering the period’s prevailing disciplinary 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 environment; 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

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 perspective, 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 relation 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 philosophical 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

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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 surroundings 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 knowledge.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 surroundings.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 historical 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 epistemologies 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-

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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 experimental 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 made plau- sible or even possible, the aim of this article is to understand their enduring power in current debates: What, in other words, is the historical location of the question concerning environmental knowledge in the present? As should become clear from the following, the current concern for the concept of the environment (and its attendant knowledge about surroundings) remains fundamentally bound up with its promise to unify a variety of heterogeneous factors under a common denominator. Like the neighboring terms milieu and Umwelt, the concept of environment provides an “argumentative resource,” which immediately suggests itself whenever one wants to explain certain influences and cannot make do with other relevant concepts.10 In the conceptual expansion of the environment, any concrete factors drawn together under its capacious roof have only played a subordinate role. One seemingly pedantic question of translation is crucial for any compar- ative study of concepts of surroundings: While the English term environment is closely related to the French milieu and the German Umwelt, the three terms are hardly equivalent. While they may often be used interchangeably (especially in translations), the practice of using one term in place of another, or even conflating all three, threatens to obscure each term’s specificity and historical semantics. These three terms signify three very different conceptions of what amounts to the same side of a two-sided concept, which, taken as a whole, has been described with terms like habitat, ecosystem, and biocenosis. To put it bluntly: a milieu is not an environment, and an environment is not an Umwelt. The etymology of milieu can be traced back to a family of French words for the “middle” and au milieu can be translated as “in the center.” According to Georges Canguilhem, the concept of milieu approximates “the metaphor of the line or the indefinitely extendable plane,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 being both continuous and homogeneous, with no definite shape or privi- leged position.”11 Unlike the concept of environment, whose association of surroundings always implies a center, the concept of milieu, understood as part of a decentralized space, can apply everywhere—which is why it could be used as a translation for Isaac Newton’s concepts of an omnipresent medium. In comparison to environmental terminology in English and French, the German term includes a greater role for a subject around whom a world is constructed, which becomes obvious in Jakob von Uexküll’s Kantian phrasing of the term.12 What these points of friction (and, in some cases, even ruptures) between the three terms show is that, despite any obvious continu- ity among these concepts and all of the repeated references to one another, there have been multiple traditions of thinking about surroundings.13 In general, the concepts of milieu, Umwelt, and environment all revolve around what Edgar Morin calls the “ecological relation,” but each concept formulates this relation in its own terms against its own historical background.14 What they have in common, as Morin points out, is the assumption that the autonomy of organisms is constituted, somewhat paradoxically, by their very dependence on their surroundings: Because organisms are autonomous, they are dependent on their surroundings; to become more independent, they require an influx of energy from their surroundings, which, in turn, makes them even more dependent on their surroundings. In different historical contexts, various attempts have been made to redesign this idiosyncratic form of autonomy predicated on dependency through the creation of techniques and technologies. Haldane’s experiments are only one early example of the transformation of surroundings into environments subject to technical design, which are now being modified by ambient technologies, including mobile media, ubiquitous computing, and the Internet of Things. In the course of these historical developments, environments have become primary objects of technical modification and control. The first consequences of this large-scale transformation, which Erich Hörl dubs “the environmentalitarian situation,” appear to have already been registered in physiological debates around 1900.15 In the first half of the twentieth century, various environments thus became objects of technical planning, ecological management, artistic experimentation, and biopolitical intervention. Organisms were no longer thought to adapt to their environments; their surroundings were now taken to adapt to the needs of organisms and thereby to influence them. This conceptual change had several immediate implica- tions. No longer regarded as secondary, environments themselves became primary objects of artificial and thus technical control—particularly in the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 holistic population ecologies of the turn of the century, which considered environments to be the inaccessible refuge of an anti-artificial nature.16 This conceptual reversal was possible, moreover, only because the two sides of the dyadic relationship (i.e., the organism and its environment) were recognized to be mutually constitutive, which also implied rethinking the causality of this relation through concepts of recursion and ultimately inaugurating the ecological connection of everything to everything else. In this sense, the environment was also conceived of as something subject to change. Hence, it gradually became clear, on the one hand, that there had always been techniques for altering the environment and, on the other hand, that new technologies of surroundings were emerging in architecture, infrastructure, and computer technology, which were making environments into objects of engineering.17 Haldane’s experimental and philosophical research can be seen as an exemplary manifestation of this historical transformation. Both on a practical and on a conceptual level, he demonstrates the potentials and impasses of investigating the dyadic reciprocity of surroundings, while at the same time laying down the foundations of a new mode of biopolitics that remains relevant today. Nevertheless, Haldane’s approach (which also resonates strongly with the editorial on “Life and Death”) should not necessarily be deemed “ecological” in the current sense, since his work remained more concerned with the physiological adaptation of organisms to the conditions of their surroundings, whereas the field of ecology was more occupied during this period with issues related to the composition of populations within their environments and questions about the food chains connecting them.18 The concept of the ecosystem, which was first coined by Arthur Tansley in 1935, would become the foundational concept of an ecology based on cybernetics and systems theory only after the Second World War, when studies of cycles and circuits, in terms of recursions and feedback loops, increased.19 Instead of providing a direct precursor to contemporary ecology, then, the fact that questions about the epistemology of surroundings were raised widely in physiology— but completely independently of ecology—during the first half of the twentieth century clarifies the persistence of these questions beyond the borders of the ecological sciences. Accordingly, Haldane conceived of the dyadic, reciprocally entangled, and equiprimordial relationship between the organism and its environment as both the solution to the long-standing conflict between vitalism and mechanism and as a unique problem for the field of biology, while at the same time pursuing research on the epistemology of surroundings in different environments of experimentation. Both of these aspects—the philosophical and the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 experimental—informed each other in the case of Haldane. Over the course of his career, Haldane would proceed systematically through every environment immediately accessible to him in Scotland and England and, with the period’s spirit of adventure, would even venture to remote environments in the United States to examine their physiological effects. Throughout his for- midable career, he would also pursue a philosophical concept of the living, which encompassed both organisms and their surroundings. Thanks to this perspective, Haldane’s works are particularly revealing for the context of physiological research in the first decades of the twentieth century. Within the framework of the field’s new institutional, theoretical, and experimental tendency, environments would quickly become technical conditions of possibility for the production of knowledge, whether in the form of objects of knowledge or the synthesizable spaces of its emergence.

John Scott Haldane and the Physiology of Surroundings By the 1920s, neither vitalism (the view that a vital energy is the spark of life and that living organisms are fundamentally different from nonliving objects) nor mechanism (the contrary view that life can be reduced to the material properties of inanimate bodies) seemed capable of explaining the current state of knowledge about biological processes, considering nearly a century’s worth of findings in embryology, organic chemistry, and developmental biology. To the extent that vitalism was thought to increase the number of unexplained principles, mechanism was charged with reducing everything to the laws of physics. For a physiologist like Haldane, who came from an aristocratic family in Scotland and was trained in the philosophically oriented study of biology in Edinburgh, the way out of this impasse required accounting for environments, provided that they could be given more robust philosophical and experimental foundations. “Vitalism in any form has the same fundamental defect as the mechanistic theory of life,” Haldane would write in The Philosophical Basis of Biology (1931), a collection of lectures that would posthumously become a testament to his influential theory of organicism. “It assumes that a living organism and its environment can be separated in observation and thought, when they cannot be separated.”20 Haldane’s foundational statement crystallized many of the considerations that had accompanied his physiological research on respiratory processes and the circulatory system for almost half a century. In one of his first publications, which appeared in the philosophy journal Mind under the title “Life and Mechanism” (1884), Haldane described the environment as an intrinsic condition of life, rather than merely another extrinsic factor affecting living beings, thereby outlining the position he

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 would develop throughout his career: “The parts of an organism and its surroundings thus form a system, any one of the parts of which constantly acts on the rest, but only does so, qua part of the system, in so far as they at the same time act on it.”21 In subsequent years, Haldane would formulate this principle even more succinctly, drawing a distinction, on the basis of Claude Bernard’s authoritative work, between a milieu intérieur and a milieu exté- rieur, which were both entangled with the organism in a dyadic structure: “An organism and its environment are one, just as the parts and activities of the organism are one, in the sense that though we can distinguish them we cannot separate them unaltered and consequently cannot understand or investigate them apart from the rest.”22 Haldane’s position, expressed in slightly different terms in each of these three quotations drawn from three different periods of his long career, was that biological processes cannot be understood adequately if they are located in the organism alone. Instead of presupposing a mystical notion of vital forces or reducing the organic to mechanical processes, Haldane’s highly controversial concept of life was based on the dyadic entanglement of organisms and environments. For Haldane, this dyad was the starting point for modern biology’s claim to supremacy among the sciences on account of its perceived ability to get to the bottom of life, which was taken to be the most fundamental phenomenon in the universe. In this sense, modern physiology would develop into an environmental science in parallel to, but largely independent of, ecology. Accordingly, Haldane’s central desideratum was the formulation of a new logic that would be capable of explaining the complex relationship between organisms and environments in terms of mutual interaction: In being made to react on the surroundings the organism is determined by its own influence acting through the surroundings. The surroundings acting on the organism are therefore at the same time acted on by it. . . . The two stand to one another, not in the relation of cause and effect, but in that of reciprocity.23 That is, the traditional concept of causality seemed unable to account for the relation between organisms and environments. In contrast to the machine, the organism can reintegrate whatever it emits into its surroundings back into its own continued existence: “The surroundings, in fact, are so acted on as to be caused to direct to the organism a supply of potential energy sufficient to make up for what has been spent.”24 Burrowing earthworms—in the famous example that Haldane cites from Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (1881)—tunnel through the earth because their constitution allows

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 them to receive nutrition through this behavior, and they receive nutrition from the earth because they burrow through it and thus adapt to their surroundings in a specific manner.25 For Haldane, the classical concept of causality, which had been particularly successful in physics, no longer provided a sufficient explanation for these kinds of reciprocal relationships. At the same time, there are only vague hints about Haldane’s new way of thinking about reciprocity in the early essay on “Life and Mechanism,” which admittedly appeared when the fledging philosopher was only twenty-four years old and quickly received sharp criticism for its lack of precision in another essay published in the same periodical by one of the field’s veterans, William James.26 Over the next fifty years, however, Haldane would better articulate his conception of the reciprocal relation between organisms and their surroundings, which still anchors contemporary thinking about environments in biology and informs an accompanying biopolitics rooted in the discipline’s orientation toward organicism. In my analysis, the formation of organicism, seen through Haldane’s seminal articulation, proceeded at three main levels, which can be described in ontological, methodological, and experimental terms. On an ontological level, Haldane’s rejection of the traditional explanatory models of vitalism and mechanism was based on their inability to take an organism’s surroundings into account and, by extension, their tendency to separate the living from the nonliving, which served to undermine the priv- ileged position of organicist biology. To become the dominant scientific discipline, modern biology would need to reconceive the organism, no longer as existing in isolation but essentially surrounded by an environment. This reorientation of the discipline, for which Haldane was only the most prominent example, rapidly gained political potential due to its twofold promise to end the long-standing controversy over vitalism and mechanism and to create a new view of the world more appropriate to the diverse social, political, and scientific fault lines of the interwar period.27 For Haldane, the common treatment of organisms in isolation from their surroundings failed to grasp that what is called “life” occurs only in a reciprocal relation: “The life of an organism must be regarded as an objective active unity which embraces its environment, and manifests itself not merely in the mutual relations between the parts of the organism itself, but also between the organism and its environment.”28 Though clearly inspired by holism, Haldane differentiated his approach from others through the introduction of two different wholes: the “parts of the organism itself,” which need to be differentiated from the environment in order to be distinguishable from it; and the “active unity” in the reciprocal relation between the organism and its environment.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 While the organism and its external environment together form a whole, its internal environment provides its autonomous totality. Even inside the organism, the internal environment forms another kind of external surroundings in reference to the organism’s organs. This internal environment is surrounded, in turn, by the external environment in such a way that the organism can no longer be thought of in isolation. In this respect, Haldane’s dyadic conception of the organism and its environment pushed the parallel relationship described by Claude Bernard in terms of a milieu intérieur and a milieu extérieur toward a much stronger center.29 The relative novelty of Haldane’s approach, which also characterized the anonymous editorial in Nature and other contemporaneous articulations of organicism, consisted in refusing to oppose the organism to its environment in the otherwise seemingly straightforward terms of the organic and the inorganic.30 Were a science of life to regard environments as something inorganic and thus separate from life, it would return all too quickly to the study of the isolated organism. Rather than explaining the organic in mechanistic terms according to the laws of the inorganic or attributing to the organic a force of its own, Haldane canceled out the presumed relation between the organic and the inorganic through an emphasis on their mutual entanglement, so that any attempt to draw a distinction between them would appear meaningless. For Haldane, both were “life.” In retrospect, his main conceptual innovation can be said to have been decoupling the distinction between the living and the nonliving from the distinction between the organic and the inorganic. This decoupling is the basis of his experimental approach to what can be called environmental control. If the living consists of the relation of organism and environment and is not restricted to the organic, then the living can be investigated by manipulating the environments of organisms. Along with these ontological revisions to the status of the living, Haldane’s novel way of thinking about surroundings also required a new methodology, a new logic of reciprocity, which would eventually be reformulated in the mid-twentieth century in terms of feedback and homeostasis. Once again, these new methodological tools would all operate on the basis of the reciprocity between organisms and environments. With a concept of self- organization only hinted at in his philosophical texts but exemplified in his physiological writings, Haldane attempted to explain the emergence of the stability that guarantees life through a process of exchange based on a “dynamic balance between the disturbing and the restorative activities.”31 For Haldane, the emergence of this dynamic equilibrium needed to be investigated in a different manner than the mechanical stability of fixed compo- nents, since it cannot be based on any presupposed order of nature. If all of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 an organism’s processes are directed toward its maintenance in some environment, then mechanistic explanations of the organism alone would hardly be sufficient. According to Haldane, the exchange between organisms and environments is a functional, purposeful process, which characterizes life alone and, consequently, can be understood only in organicist terms. Though Haldane himself lacked the terminology to describe this kind of dynamic stability, the conceptual gap would soon be filled with the physiological concept of homeostasis. Developed by Walter B. Cannon with explicit reference to Haldane’s work, the concept of homeostasis would find many appli- cations in cybernetics, which tended to trace the functional purposefulness of a living being back to its organization and thereby make it operational for various purposes.32

Environments of Experimentation Haldane’s ontological and methodological interventions went hand in hand with his experimental study of environments through their regulation, modification, and, ultimately, control. Throughout his career, Haldane would work through the philosophical and technical possibilities for modifying various surroundings, which had only recently become environments of experimentation proper by virtue of being explored, conquered, and, above all, technically or technologically controlled. The tops of mountains, the bottom of the sea, the depths of the earth, the heights of the planetary atmosphere— the environments providing the sites for Haldane’s physiological research had all previously proven to be either too remote or too dangerous for human occupation. In Haldane’s own experiments, their experimental production and practical, technical design were closely connected to his methodological approach, and, in connection with his ontological assumptions, remain part of a contemporary form of biopolitics that attempts to control the bodies of (mainly male and white) human beings and, finally, (still on a relatively small-scale) populations by regulating environments and designing life as a hygiene project. Haldane’s decisive positioning at the margins of the powerful philosophical currents of his time is based at least partly on his lifelong preoccupation with physiological environments and artificial atmospheres. In this sense, his experimental research exemplifies Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of “environmental inversion” (Umwelt-Umkehrung).33 According to Sloterdijk, the ecological turn toward surroundings was fueled by the First World War, especially the “environmental terrorism” of gas warfare: “With the phenomenon of gas warfare, the fact of the living organism’s immersion in a breathable milieu arrives at the level of formal representation, bringing the climatic and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 atmospheric conditions pertaining to human life to a new level of explication.”34 While Sloterdijk locates the formative moment for “the discovery of the ‘environment’ . . . in the trenches of World War I,” partly on account of his lack of historical precision regarding the establishment of ecological knowledge, the longer trajectory of Haldane’s research (notwithstanding his own brief contributions to the design of gas masks) provides a crucial reminder of other historical sources for the emergence of an ecological perspective on surroundings.35 Long before the “environmental terrorism” of the First World War there were explicit concepts and practices for dealing with surroundings in mining, diving, aviation, mountaineering, fire safety, and many other fields. The widespread treatment of these surroundings as potentially dangerous to human beings made it possible for researchers to explore the limits of organic adaptability and technological enhancement and to design alternative environments. Haldane, who often worked on projects supported by these industries, would systematically explore the interdepen- dence of organisms and environments over the course of his career, often seeking out opportunities to venture into unfamiliar environments using the most advanced technologies of the time. From an early age, Haldane gained fame for his research on respiration and, in subsequent years, would repeatedly use these studies as examples of both the unavoidable entanglement of organisms with their environments and the importance of maintaining a stable internal environment.36 For Haldane, the reciprocity between the organism and its environment was nowhere more evident than in the process of respiration: What other phenomenon would make it more immediately obvious that an organism without an environment is no longer alive? At the risk of oversimplifying, Haldane’s physiological research can be said to have focused on the biological regulation processes that allow organisms to adapt to different and changing environments in order to maintain their stability and thus to survive.37 Significantly, moreover, these biological processes of regulation were open to experiments that would make it possible to explain how the organism functions as such. Contrary to what his idealistic philosophy may suggest, Haldane understood himself as a downright experimenter who would not shy away from dangerous experiments, whether in the laboratory or in the field, and would even be willing to conduct tests on himself and his son, J.B.S. Haldane, who later became famous for his work in epigenetics. The physiologist’s wide range of experiments, which can be outlined only briefly in this article, cannot be understood apart from his conceptual reorientation of biology toward organicism. Rather, Haldane’s philosophy of surroundings and his experimental research in organicist biology form two sides of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 same coin: they both depended on the experimental control and modification of lived environments. At the end of the nineteenth century, Haldane was the first to develop bio- chemical terminology for describing the fact that the rate of respiration and the uptake of oxygen into the bloodstream are both controlled by the carbon dioxide content of the air being inhaled into the lungs. According to Haldane’s thesis, carbon dioxide has an effect, through its pH-level in the bloodstream, on the regulation of the neurons in the brain that control the rate of respiration. His research in this area described the “feedback” between respiratory rate and physical activity due to the chemical properties of blood, albeit without using this exact terminology. To examine the bloodstream’s internal environment, Haldane would introduce substances in one part of the body and then, after the blood had passed through the entire organism, take a sample to compare what chemical changes had been produced by the internal environment. While this procedure made it possible for Haldane to examine the influence of the internal environment on circulatory systems entangled with the external environment, the possibility of determining the precise influence of the external environment would require its modification and control or the comparison of organisms passing through different environments. During his early appointment as demonstrator in physiology at University College, Dundee, in the 1880s, Haldane discovered exceptionally high con- centrations of carbon dioxide in the city’s slums.38 In 1886, he also climbed down into the sewage system under the Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the House of Commons, in order to determine the cause of the unpleasant odors in the parliament building.39 Before the First World War, Haldane investigated the effects of mixed air composition using a sealed steel chamber at his laboratory in Oxford, where he had by then become professor of metallurgy, gases, liquids, and respirations. In successive trials, he would enclose goats, dogs, and eventually even himself in this two-square-meter chamber, nicknamed “the coffin,” shrouding them in different atmospheres, as if in an atmospherium.40 For further experiments, Haldane used another steel chamber at the Lister Institute in London and a pneumatic chamber in Berlin.41 Each of these pressure chambers was hermetically sealed from the outside world, which made it possible not only to vary the air pressure but also to modify its composition. As a result, Haldane was able to simulate high-altitude conditions on site and to experiment on physiological reactions to low air pressure, the cold, and low oxygen content. Haldane’s experiments on the modification of atmospheric composition continued a decades-long study, inaugurated in 1887, of the catastrophic

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 mining accidents that routinely afflicted the mining regions in southern England. In order to find better ways to deal with the dire underground environmental conditions, Haldane’s on-site research focused on the conditions of the air in Welsh mines and in London’s sewage facilities. One of Haldane’s first measures, as a frequent visitor to the mines, was to use canaries as indicators of air quality, since they quickly showed symptoms caused by toxic gases.42 If a dead canary was found lying on the floor of its cage in the tunnel, the air’s carbon monoxide content could be said to be approaching a limit that would also be hazardous to human beings. On the basis of chemical reactions in the lungs of injured miners, along with the results of numerous experiments on himself, Haldane showed how toxic gases in mines can be detected in advance. In the context of these experiments, he developed compressed-oxygen respirators, which would also be used by the fire department. Consequently, Haldane became the director of the mining-industry-financed Mining Research Laboratory in Doncaster in 1913 and Professor of Physiology in Birmingham starting in 1921.43 From the depths of the mines, Haldane would turn to the heights of the mountains, exploring the possibilities of mountaineering without the use of additional oxygen or breathing masks. In 1911, he traveled to a height of almost 4,000 meters at Pikes Peak in Colorado and observed the effects of the mountain air on the oxygen intake of mountaineers (and himself), both at rest and in motion, for a six- week period.44 A narrow-gauge rail- road on the mountain, which created rapid changes in altitude, made it possible to observe the rapid pressure changes necessary for studying the effects of the mountain air. During the First World War, the knowledge about surroundings generated by Haldane’s experiments would provide a brief escape from the “environmental terrorism” of gas warfare and the destruction of military environments. After the fatal events on the Ypres front in April 1915, Haldane was recruited by the British military for the nation’s

Right: Equipment for Mount Everest expeditions, 1922. From Robert H. Davis, Breathing in Irrespirable Atmospheres (1953). Opposite: The experimental subject (to the right) carries a Douglas bag, which allows him to collect samples of respiratory air. From Yandell Henderson, Adventures in Respiration (1938).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 Medical Research Committee. At the time, the British army’s only gas masks, which were made of cotton wrapped in gauze and produced in the millions in a first reaction to gas warfare, were mostly unusable, because they were dry, ineffective, and impossible to use when wet. After some risky research behind the front line, Haldane arranged for the replacement of these gas masks with newer models and the purchase of dedicated respirators for the soldiers. He even provided a recommendation for administering first aid, in the event of unexpected gas attacks, by stuffing straw and either chlorine- neutralizing soil or a cloth moistened with urine into an open glass bottle, through which the afflicted soldiers might breathe.45 While Haldane’s military equipment quickly became obsolete, his decompression table remains in use today and continues to save many divers’ lives thanks to its representation of the maximum length and depth of dives without the danger of gas bubbles forming in the blood.46 Eventually, the British navy would even establish the safety limit for deep-water dives on the basis of a world record set by Guybon Damant, a military diver and surgeon who worked with Haldane and in one deep-sea dive reached a depth of sixty-two meters. To aid divers in the transition from one underwater environment to another, physiologist Leonard Hill, who cooperated with Haldane, even considered installing an entire decompression chamber underwater and bringing it back up to the surface with the diver inside.47 Haldane’s own proposal for a diving suit consisted of heavy steel shoes, a rubber suit, and a copper helmet. Using this model, Damant’s team managed to salvage around five million pounds worth of gold from the wreck of the SS Laurentic, which had sunk to a depth of forty meters during the First World War.48 During the interwar period, Haldane continued to find new environments for experiments, not only underwater but in the air. Following up on an idea presented in his book Respiration (1922), he helped American engineer and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 balloonist Mark Ridge design a pressure-resistant space suit in 1933. In contrast to the diving suit, the space suit, which was laboratory tested for heights of up to 30,000 meters, required much greater attention to thermal- and radiation-shielding. Shortly after Haldane’s death in 1936, Italian pilot Mario Pezzi would achieve a then-record height of 17,000 meters wearing the suit, and this at a time when cockpits still did not form their own closed environments.49 The wide-reaching consequences of Haldane’s improvised respirators, gas masks, diving suits, and space suits ranged from decreasing environmental destruction to increasing the chances of survival in hostile environments. His approach to understanding life through the dyadic entanglement of organisms and environments not only made it possible to understand the maintenance of life through its dependence on the nonliving but to turn this knowledge into practice. The primary aim of Haldane’s compression tables and his various devices for measuring atmospheric changes was to detect and neutralize environmental hazards to the (male and white) organism. In the artificial atmosphere of his laboratory, Haldane would observe the effects of transferring pilots, divers, soldiers, miners, and mountaineers from one atmospheric composition to another. To survive in each of these environments, the organism under study would be equipped with suits, masks, or other techniques and technologies— a cyborg avant la lettre.50 In a pressure chamber, the artificial production of the environment appeared just as possible as that of the organism itself. Every factor of the physiological process under study, whether in the organism or in the environment, was to become a technical vari- able, which could be controlled and used to modify the regula- tive circulatory systems under investigation. For Haldane, regulation was both an object of scientific investigation and an instrument of research into the reciprocity between the organism and the environment. As a figure who crossed mul-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 tiple boundaries between both the adaptation of organisms to environments and that of environments to organisms, Haldane pushed the fundamental ecological idea of the dyadic entanglement of the organism with its environment to new limits, not only in theory but in practice. Instead of making direct interventions in organisms themselves, Haldane’s research suggested an indirect, slightly more circuitous path for controlling and modifying organisms through the technical design of their environments as media of circulation. His experiments tested reciprocal dependence by exposing an organism to various environments or by observing changes to environments caused by the processes of organisms themselves. While the environment, as exemplified by Haldane’s early research, has since become a medium of experimentation, it has taken on a double form, as both an ambient medium and an experimental medium, which has made it into an object of interest for knowledge. This epistemic change also made the dyadic relation between surroundings and what they surround productive in a new sense: The environment can appear to have an effect on the organism only because it is as much bound to the organism as the organism is to the environment—that is, in the words of historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, as both a “technical thing” and an “epistemic thing.” Environmental knowledge cannot be separated from the environments of knowledge. In Rheinberger’s approach, a “technical thing” provides the material framework for the appearance of vague objects of epistemic interest known as “epistemic things” and thereby creates specific conditions within any experimental system.51 There is no knowledge—and this is Rheinberger’s central intervention —that is not dependent on the conditions of its production, whether practices, techniques, tools, or, one might add, surroundings themselves. Epistemic things (i.e., objects of knowledge dependent on the question being asked) are produced through technical things (i.e., sedimented material

Opposite: Diving dress, 1908. From A.E. Boycott, G.C.C. Damant, and John Scott Haldane, “The Prevention of Compressed-Air Illness,” Journal of Hygiene 8, no. 3 (1908). Left: Protective suit for pilots, before World War II. From Robert H. Davis, Breathing in Irrespirable Atmospheres (1953).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 arrangements). In Rheinberger’s words, “The experimental conditions ‘contain’ the scientific objects in the double sense of this expression: they embed them, and through that very embracement, they restrict and constrain them.”52 Rheinberger’s methodological distinction between the objects of knowledge and the material conditions of their production collapses in the case of Haldane’s research, which made the environment itself into the object of research, rather than merely the surroundings for the production of knowledge. The controlled environment might then be more accurately described, in analogy to a microscopic slide preparation or organs placed in an alcohol solution, as a “material analytic” that, following Rheinberger, produces the properties of the object being researched within the experimental system, understood as a medium, and thereby itself becomes an object of investigation.53 In this sense, knowledge of surroundings always appears in a double form: The environment alternates between being a technical thing and an epistemic thing, because surroundings are always reciprocally connected with whatever they surround. In Haldane’s experiments, the production of knowledge about surroundings was instructive for the production of knowledge about what they surrounded. The reciprocity of surroundings also implied the interchangeability of the two sides of Haldane’s experiments, since changes to the organism (e.g., the consumption of oxygen, emissions of carbon dioxide, and thus modifications to the atmosphere within the sealed steel chamber) also meant changes to the environment. While the environment, as a technical thing, creates the very conditions of possibility for it to become an epistemic thing, the study of the environment, as an epistemic thing, presupposes the environment’s ability to be synthesized and, by extension, its status as a technical thing. Pressure chambers and gas masks, space suits and respiration devices—these things are not merely technical equipment for adapting to volatile environments. In controlled experiments, they also serve to make the environment itself into a technical thing subject to artificial production. The environment can become an epistemic thing— that is, a proper object of research—only if it can be controlled, modified, and synthesized. Once again, the epistemological particularity of knowledge about surroundings comes into play, since things can be studied only in their surroundings and surroundings only in terms of the things they surround. For this reason, there was never a clear distinction in physiological research between the object of research and the means of that research: What surrounds something and what is surrounded by something else can always change and especially depend on the observer’s perspective. At the same

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 time, early explorations of the epistemology of surroundings made the dependent relationships of regulation and reciprocity more recognizable for subsequent work on recursion. Beyond the results of their own experiments, they provided evidence of a feedback loop between the position of the observer and the object of observation. If experimenters are part of their environments, they, as organisms themselves, must also be counted among the elements of the living that provide their objects of research. This very inte- gration of the observer into what is being observed is what ecology would soon work out with the concept of the ecosystem. The figure of the observer, so prominent in the second half of the twentieth century, has one of its epistemological foci here, which will have to be set aside for future research. Ultimately, this general description of the epistemology of surroundings should encompass Haldane’s theoretical position on an abstract level. His long-standing thesis that the key to unlocking knowledge of life could be found in the ineluctable entanglement of organisms and environments was based on the latter’s openness to technical and technological control. As early as 1884, Haldane expressed this thesis in the period’s terms: “The organism is thus no more determined by the surroundings than it at the same time determines them.”54 The one could be understood only by taking the other into account. Together, the organism and its surroundings form an entangled whole, a form of organization that, in the holistic sense, is more than the sum of its parts. If the whole is taken to consist of both organisms within environments and the environments surrounding those organisms, then everything can have an effect on everything else, because there is no point at which the one would end and the other begin. However, controlling these effects did not occur through direct interventions in either organisms or environments but rather through indirect regulations of the reciprocal relation between them. According to Georges Canguilhem, regulation refers, in physiological terms, to an organism’s ability to maintain internal stability under changing external conditions.55 According to Haldane’s own tried-and-true methods, it thus meant modifying the processes of circulation through minor interventions, identifying distur- bances and blockages in circulatory flows, and, ultimately, exerting indirect power on the organism in its surroundings. According to Michel Foucault’s description of biopolitics, moreover, any form of power whose aim consists in controlling circulations and understands “circulation in the very broad sense of movement, exchange, and contact, as a form of dispersion, and also as form of distribution” is necessarily a force in the medium of the environment.56 “The milieu, then, will be that in which circulation is carried out.”57 The body being surrounded by experimental environments, the subject of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 Haldane’s experiments, was invariably a white male body, which simultaneously belonged to the workers, soldiers, and subalterns who were already afflicted by the conditions in the mines, who were already accustomed to climbing mountains, or whose military posts at the front already tested their endurance and resilience. Haldane’s design of their surroundings, which was always his primary concern, standardized these bodies (or entire populations) in order to increase productivity. Beyond increasing the chances of survival, the optimization of surroundings generally serves to make bodies stronger, more resilient, and more enduring. However, every body has its own specific needs, which are influenced by age, physique, gender, clothing, stature, preferences, and many other factors. The bodies of the subjects involved in Haldane’s experiments were typically strong, male, and white, in contrast to the multiplicity of bodies on the battlefield or in mines, each with his or her own metabolism and unique relations to her or his environment. This multiplicity remains invisible in Haldane’s experimental research. In this respect, his environmental design procedures can be understood as a precursor to the contemporary form of biopolitics that standard- izes bodies through the design of their environments, thereby effectively making them into organisms and increasing the chances not only of their own survival but of their productivity, their effectiveness, and their fitness for work.

The Surroundings of the Present Beyond the significance of Haldane’s ontological, methodological, and experimental innovations for their own historical period, the entanglement of organisms and environments also suggests one last step into the present. Today, we find ourselves in a situation—in the words of Erich Hörl, a “technological condition”—in which smart, spatially distributed, and environmental technologies such as ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, and the Internet of Things, but also smartphones, drones, and automated cars have started to permeate our homes, our cities, and our habitats.58 Over the past decade alone, many of our surroundings have become sites of technological control in the form of environmental agents that are capable of registering information about their surroundings. Having been miniaturized and integrated into everyday objects, environmental media tend to migrate into their surroundings and collect data, distribute energy, or coordinate movements—all part of our current “environmental condition.”59 These environmental technologies are deeply embedded into ecological knowledge and operate on the basis of the relationality of surroundings. Environments are never given, but artifacts of environmental design, environmental manage-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 ment, and environmental engineering—and they are the center of the biopolitics of the present. If we refuse to take the concept of the environment as an irreducible given and as self-evident, we will need to continue to work out the epistemologies of surroundings in the context of its conceptual history. The spaces in which mobile networked devices are able to move around can be understood as surrounding spaces, as both calculated and calculating environments. In these environments, as in all digital networks, every object has an unambiguous address or identifier with which it can be located in relation to other objects. In cellular networks, which will serve as an example of this transformation, the virtual topology of address spaces is created by the constant registration of relational movements that can then be projected onto the geographical spaces in which devices are able to move.60 In this movement, positional data are acquired that in turn constitute this environment as a relational space of addresses. In this kind of technically modulated environment, it is no longer possible to distinguish between objects of knowledge and their technical infrastructures—between “epistemic” and “technical” things. As populations move through these spaces using mobile media or other devices, they simultaneously generate knowledge and represent objects of knowledge. The biopolitics of these surroundings, in Foucault’s sense, consists in “making possible, guaranteeing, and ensuring circulations,” in modifying the environment as a space for the circulation of information and objects in such manner that the environment can then influence whatever it surrounds.61 “In a word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life.”62 As a security dispositif, this biopolitics “aims to establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” and thus responds to blockages of circulation, which could potentially create a tendency among the population, understood as a multiplicity, toward devia- tions, imbalances, and unpredictable crises.63 Modeling environments as spaces of circulation makes it possible to extrapolate from particular series and thus to make interventions in the future through minimal regulations that attempt to minimize the uncertainty of future events through both planning and the predication of a space of security. The emergence of this dispositif of security, in Foucault’s analysis, went hand in hand with the appearance of the population and corresponding forms of population knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century. To continue Foucault’s analysis, it would eventually be combined with ecological knowledge. By the mid-twentieth century at the latest, this knowledge would

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 have at its disposal both robust concepts of circulation and adept methods for its regulation—in short, epistemologies of surroundings, which enabled the governance of populations through their environments. As Haldane’s experiments have shown, the starting point for this new form of biopolitics was not the direct transformation of individual organisms but indirect interventions at the level of the causes of phenomena and their conditions of possibility; that is, the influence exerted on the living by its surroundings. In this sense, “environmental control” should not be taken to mean the regulation of circulation through the application of external forces but making seemingly minor interventions on an ecological basis; that is, optimizing the conditions of possibility for circulation in terms of a system’s relations, inter- actions, and cycles. In the biopolitics of designing environments, then and now, ecological knowledge constitutes a contemporary form of governmental knowledge that focuses on circulation and operates in the medium of the environment. In recent years, the space around us has become an environment for distributing flows of information and energy that no longer draw distinctions among technical actors, human actors, and nonhuman actors. Today, the fusion of human bodies with new techniques and technologies no longer occurs at the level of externalized tools. It involves cognitive and sensory abilities, which are not only implemented in machines but are used to mon- itor their surroundings.64 In this context, it makes sense to read the urgent state of the current field against that described nearly a century ago in the editorial on “Life and Death.” At the time, there were calls to abandon the distinction between the organic world and the inorganic world, in light of findings in organic chemistry about the origin of life and possibilities for the artificial production of organisms, in favor of a new understanding of life as an interplay of the organism and its environment.65 To the editors of Nature, this new understanding of life seemed capable of resolving the long-standing stalemate between mechanism and vitalism: the organic appeared to differ from the inorganic only in terms of its adaptation to its environment.66 In a remarkable conceptual transfer, the editors introduced the analogy between an organic and an inorganic machine discussed above, which locates the concept of the mechanical outside the distinction between the organic and the inorganic. While “the machine of the cell” remains dynamically entangled with its environment through their ecological relations and dies in the absence of such reciprocity, an “inorganic machine” may remain dependent on its environment for its supply of energy but should be considered to be decoupled from its environment in structural terms. When an “inorganic machine” runs out of energy, it does not “die” (i.e., does not become dead

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 matter). It ceases to function, but it can always be switched back on at any moment. What would this machine analogy mean, then, today when the technologies that surround us operate both through ecological relations and on them? The reciprocal relation between organisms and environments, which formed the basis for Haldane’s definition of life, also informed his creation of artificial environments, which synthesized the conditions of possibility for life and enabled him to explore the adaptation of physiological processes to various environments. At present, this same relation is being redesigned by various techniques and technologies. Machines no longer take center stage in their surroundings; environments are becoming machines. In the process, these “inorganic machines” have figured in ecological relations primarily on the side of surroundings, since they operate at the level of circulation, create environments, and represent instruments for regulating governability. However, we still need to reconsider the concept of the living, which was first called for in the early twentieth century to address the reciprocal relation between organisms and environments and, by the mid-twentieth century, would already find technical implementation through the recursive feedback loops of cybernetics. At this point, it is helpful to return to Edgar Morin’s notion of ecological relations. With reference to Claude Bernard, Morin underlines the fact that organisms constitute their autonomy through their dependency on their surroundings. Organisms require constant flows of energy and matter from their environments in order to sustain their existence and free themselves from the restraints of their surroundings. Autonomy, as Morin argues, is a relation of dependence. In the same sense, the autonomy of environmental technologies is conditioned by their dependency on infrastructures of energy and information. The environmental relation that forms the basis of their autonomy is a relation of infrastructural in-dependence. In this sense, such machines are able to adapt to the constantly changing and fluctuating conditions of their environment without losing their inner organization. To corre- spond to the complexity of its environment, such a machine not only has to recursively feed back its own status into its operations. It also has to integrate the effects of its own conditions on the environment into its relation with the environment. “Environmental machines” that are neither “organic” nor “inorganic” machines operate on the basis of this complex in-dependence of ecological relations. More than half a century later, the concept of life needs to be expanded even further to account for the biopolitical dimension of ecological relations, and any study of specific environmental technologies still needs to account

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 for the technical penetration of every imaginable contemporary environment. Whether they are organic or inorganic, biological or technical, we can no longer think of a life without environments—or of machines without environments. Nonetheless, environments give life only to specific and normal- ized forms of the living and foster autonomy only through adaptation.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 Notes This extended and edited translation is based on “Experimentelle environments und Epistemologien des Umgebens: John Scott Haldanes Physiologie des Lebendigen,” in Milieu: Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne, ed. Florian Huber and Christina Wessely (Munich: Fink, 2017), 49–70.

1. “Life and Death,” Nature 122, no. 3075 (6 October 1928): 501. 2. “Life and Death,” 503. 3. “Life and Death,” 501. 4. “Life and Death,” 503. 5. [In German, there is a neater symmetry in the concept of surroundings (die Umgebung) between “the surroundings” (das Umgebende) and “the surrounded” (das Umgebene), which the author develops throughout this article.—Trans.] 6. On Umgebungswissen, see Christina Wessely, “Watery Milieus,” in this issue of Grey Room. On the prehistory of these episodes, see Tobias Cheung, “From the Organism of a Body to the Body of an Organism: Occurrence and Meaning of the Word ‘Organism’ from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 3 (2006): 319–39. Cheung describes the emergence of a concept of the autonomous organism between 1780 and 1860, which was based on the inner/outer distinction and culminated in Claude Bernard’s concept of the milieu intérieur. 7. In his lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault explicitly associated the emergence of biopolitics with nineteenth-century theories of milieu, but he addressed the history of these concepts only at the margins of the lectures. The present article can be understood as an explication of Foucault’s thesis, culminating in a biopolitical perspective on the production of artificial environments through the regulation of circulation. For Foucault’s treatment of milieu, see Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 244–45; and Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 20–23. 8. J.S. Haldane (John Scott Haldane, 1860–1936) should not be confused with his son, J.B.S. Haldane (John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, 1892–1964), one of the founders of mathematical population genetics whose numerous works on genetics, eugenics, and emigration to space deserve their own critical attention. 9. Evelyn Fox-Keller, “Organisms, Machines, and Thunderstorms: A History of Self- Organization,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 1 (2008): 45–75. Before the rise of cybernetics, as Fox-Keller shows, the concept of self-generation also served to differen- tiate a living system from a nonliving system, because the sense of life in a living system could be understood only in terms of its interaction with its environment. For further overviews of precybernetic concepts of self-regulation, especially Antoine Laurent Lavoisier’s seminal description of regulation as a bond between a living being’s autonomy and determination, see E.F. Adolph, “Early Concepts of Physiological Regulations,” Physiological Review 41 (1961): 737–70; and Georges Canguilhem, “La formation du concept de régulation biologique aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” in Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie (Paris:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 Vrin, 1977), 81–99. 10. The concept of an “argumentative resource” is taken from Geoffrey N. Cantor, “The Theological Significance of Ethers,” in Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740–1900, ed. Geoffrey N. Cantor and M.J.S. Hodge (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 135–56. 11. Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” Grey Room, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 6–31. 12. See Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 13. For a more detailed description of these differences, see Florian Sprenger, “Zwischen Umwelt und milieu: Zur Begriffsgeschichte von environment in der Evolutionstheorie,” Forum interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 3, no. 2 (2014): 7–18. An English translation of this paper will be published in a forthcoming volume on “Medium/Environment,” edited by Weihong Bao and Jacob Gaboury. 14. Edgar Morin, The Nature of Nature, vol. 1 of Method: Towards a Study of Humankind [La méthode 1: La nature de la nature, 1977], trans. J.L. Roland Bélanger (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 201–3. 15. Erich Hörl, “The Environmentalitarian Situation,” Cultural Politics 14, no. 2 (2018): 153–73. 16. For a paradigmatic case of this kind of holistic population ecology, see Stephen Forbes, “The Lake as a Microcosm,” Bulletin of the Scientific Association (Peoria, IL) 1, no. 1 (1887): 77–87. 17. For sources registering these larger transformations, see, for instance, Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); and Marshall McLuhan, “At the Moment of Sputnik the Planet Became a Global Theater in Which There Are No Spectators but Only Actors,” Journal of Communication 24 (1974): 48–58. 18. For an indication of the state of the field, see Frederic E. Clements, Plant Succession: An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1916). 19. See Arthur G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, no. 3 (1935): 284–307. 20. John Scott Haldane, The Philosophical Basis of Biology (London: Doubleday, Doran, 1931), 31. 21. John Scott Haldane, “Life and Mechanism,” Mind 9, no. 33 (1884): 33; emphasis in original. In this early essay, published about thirty years after Herbert Spencer established the concept of environment, the term environment is used for surroundings in only a few passages. In his later work, Haldane would eventually abandon the concept of systems, though he never provided any indication of the origins of this term. 22. John Scott Haldane, Organism and Environment as Illustrated by the Physiology of Breathing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 99. 23. Haldane, “Life and Mechanism,” 33. 24. Haldane, “Life and Mechanism,” 28. 25. Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881). 26. See William James, “Absolutism and Empiricism,” Mind 9, no. 34 (1884): 281–86.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 27. See Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 28. John Scott Haldane, The Philosophy of a Biologist (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1935), 149. 29. See Claude Bernard, Lectures on the Phenomena of Life Common to Animals and Plants [Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux, 1878–1879], trans. Hebbel E. Hoff, Roger Guillemin, and Lucienne Guillemin (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1974). 30. For a similar but still contrasting organicist position, which was developed contempo- raneously in an attempt to explain life solely from the organic development of cells, see E.S. Russell, The Interpretation of Development and Heredity (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1930). 31. John Scott Haldane, Respiration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 383. 32. See Walter B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W.W. Norton, 1932). 33. Peter Sloterdijk, Foams, vol. 3 of Spheres, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 457. See also Eva Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, no. 73 (Fall 2018): 6–25. 34. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 17, 23. Conceptually, Sloterdijk’s multilingual books can be highly problematic, since he often uses terms like Umwelt, milieu, and environment synonymously. 35. Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 18. 36. See, for instance, Haldane, Organism and Environment, 93. 37. See Garland E. Allen, “J.S. Haldane: The Development of the Idea of Control Mechanisms in Respiration,” Journal for the History of Medicine 22, no. 4 (1967): 392–412. 38. See J.G. Priestley, “The Regulation of the Lung-Ventilation,” Journal of Physiology 9, no. 3–4 (1905): 225–66. Compare John B. West, “Centenary of the Anglo-American High-Altitude Expedition to Pikes Peak,” Experimental Physiology 97, no. 1 (2011): 1–9. 39. See Thomas Carnelley and John Scott Haldane, “The Air of Sewers,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 42 (1887): 501–22. 40. For a detailed account of these experiments, see A.E. Boycott, G.C.C. Damant, and J.S. Haldane, “The Prevention of Compressed-Air Illness,” Journal of Hygiene 8, no. 3 (1908): 342–443. 41. See A.E. Boycott and J.S. Haldane, “The Effects of Low Atmospheric Pressures on Respiration,” Journal of Physiology 37, no. 5 (1908): 355–77. 42. For this and the following biographical overview, see Steve Sturdy, “Biology as Social Theory: John Scott Haldane and Physiological Regulation,” British Journal for the History of Science 21, no. 1 (1988): 315–40; and Martin Goodman, Suffer and Survive: The Extreme Life of J.S. Haldane (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007). 43. Because of his unconventional and provocative writings, Haldane never held a perma- nent professorship. The finances for his research came largely from industrial funds for applied research. For an account of this moment in Haldane’s career, see Alexander von Lünen, “Under the Waves, above the Clouds: A History of the Pressure Suit” (Ph.D. disserta- tion, TU Darmstadt, 2008), 56. 44. See West, “Centenary of the Anglo-American High-Altitude Expedition to Pikes Peak.” Compare C. Gordan Douglas et al., “Physiological Observations Made on Pike’s Peak, Colorado, with Special Reference to Adaptation to Low Barometric Pressures,” Philosophical

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character 203 (1911): 185–318. 45. See Robert H. Davis, Breathing in Irrespirable Atmospheres (London: Saint Catherines Press, 1953), 217. 46. Boycott, Damant, and Haldane, “The Prevention of Compressed-Air Illness.” Compare John L. Phillips, The Bends: Compressed Air in the History of Science, Diving, and Engineering (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 120–21. 47. See John S. Haldane et al., Report of a Committee Appointed by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to Consider and Report upon the Conditions of Deep-Water Diving (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1907), 54. 48. For a detailed account of this adventurous mission, see Robert H. Davis, Deep Diving and Submarine Operations: A Manual for Deep Sea Divers and Compressed Air Workers (Cwmbran, Wales: Siebe Gorman, 1981), 358. Compare Alf O. Brubakk and Michael A. Lang, “J.S. Haldane, the First Environmental Physiologist,” in The Future of Diving: 100 Years of Haldane and Beyond, ed. Michael A. Lang and Alf O. Brubakk (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2009), 7. 49. See Davis, Deep Diving and Submarine Operations, 102–4. For more-detailed descrip- tions of all of these experiments, see Lünen, “Under the Waves.” 50. In 1960, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used the concept of the cyborg to describe the technorganic armament of the human in “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics (September 1960): 26–27, 74–76. This episode was developed further by Donna Haraway, whose doctoral thesis on embryology also touches on Haldane. See Donna Jeanne Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976): 21–23, 36–38. 51. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 29. 52. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, 29. 53. See Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Objekt und Repräsentation,” in Mit dem Auge Denken, ed. Bettina Heintz and Jörg Huber (Munich: Fink, 2001), 59. 54. Haldane, “Life and Mechanism,” 33. 55. See Canguilhem, “La formation du concept de régulation biologique.” 56. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 64. 57. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 21. 58. See Erich Hörl, “The Technological Condition,” Parrhesia 22 (2015): 1–15; Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian, and Danny Cohen, “The Internet of Things,” Scientific American 291, no. 4 (2004): 76–81; and Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” in “Communications, Computers, and Networks,” special issue, Scientific American 265, no. 3 (1991): 94–104. 59. Mark B.N. Hansen, “Ubiquitous Sensation: Towards an Atmospheric, Collective, and Microtemporal Model of Media,” in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Ulrik Ekman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 84. 60. For a more detailed discussion of cellular networks, see Florian Sprenger, “The Network Is Not the Territory: On Capturing Mobile Media,” New Media and Society 21, no. 1 (January 2019): 77–96.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00268 by guest on 29 September 2021 61. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 29. Foucault develops his concept of biopolitics on the basis of the term milieu, which implies a different epistemology of the surrounding than would environment but nonetheless designates a space of circulation. These differences could be developed in further research, which would also need to account for the development of Foucault’s thought over time. 62. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 246. 63. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 249. 64. See N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 65. An example of the artificial production of organisms is Hans Spemann’s work on grafting the cells of different organisms onto each other, thereby blurring the boundary between the living and the nonliving. 66. On the concept of “active matter,” which has recently given new life to historical debates about these distinctions between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the nonliving, see Skylar Tibbits, ed., Active Matter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

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