Freezing lives, preserving humanism: cryonics and the promise of Dezoefication

ABSTRACT

Cryonics denotes research into and the practice of deep-freezing dead bodies for resuscitation in a technologically advanced future. This article discusses the technoscientific practice and rationality of cryonics, focusing on two aspects in particular: the ways in which conceptions of life and death and their relation are being reconfigured, and the cryonic understanding of personality and its relation to the body. It complements the range of topics discussed in the literature on cryonics by adopting a feminist perspective and placing particular emphasis on the importance of taking into consideration the materiality, processuality and relationality of life and death in the cryonic imaginary. The analysis draws on Rosi Braidotti’s adaptation of the conceptual pair of bios and zoe in order to demonstrate that cryonics is premised on the humanist separation of the human as a purely cultural being from ‘Nature’ as his materially determined other(s). The article argues that cryonics seeks to preserve not only individual lives, but also the increasingly challenged humanist conception of human life as exceptional, self-contained and independent of Nature. The notion of dezoefication is introduced to encapsulate the desire to disentangle the human from (his) nature. Finally, the analysis is complemented with Donna Haraway’s approach to a relational ontology, which emphasizes the vulnerability that is associated with relationality. It thus accounts for the humanist bias against relationality and the fear of death as ‘becoming other’, which are considered to be constitutive of techno-utopian projects such as cryonics.

KEYWORDS:

• Cryonics
• cryopreservation
• life and death
• bios and zoe
• feminist theory
• posthumanism
• Rosi Braidotti
• Donna Haraway

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Anastassija Kostan, Katharina Hoppe, Josef Barla and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this text as well as Gerard Holden for proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Franziska von Verschuer is a research associate at the Sociology Department at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. Her research interests include feminist theory and technoscience studies, science and technology studies, posthuman(ist) theory and the environmental humanities. Her current work focuses on environmental conservation technologies.

ORCID

Franziska von Verschuer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6293-8254

Notes

1 The term cryonics comes from the Greek κρύος (kryos) meaning cold. Cryonics is based on a technology called cryopreservation which denotes preservation of biological material at cryogenic temperature, i.e. at -196°C, which is the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

2 See http://alcor.org/AboutAlcor/membershipstats.html (accessed March 25, 2019).

3 See http://www.cryonics.org/ci-landing/member-statistics/ (accessed March 25, 2019).

4 http://kriorus.ru/en/about-us (accessed March 25, 2019).

5 http://oregoncryo.com/aboutOC.html (accessed March 25, 2019).

6 https://southerncryonics.com/ (accessed March 25, 2019).

7 http://kriorus.ru/en/story/KrioRus-and-NeuroDAO-fund-jointly-announce-inception-ICO-CryoGen (accessed March 25, 2019).

8 The same year, Evan Cooper, who later founded the world's first cryonics organization, also (pseudonymously) self-published a book on the same topic (Duhring 1962). However, he is much less well-known and influential even within the cryonics community.

9 Today, cryopreservation by vitrification is successfully applicable to single cells such as sperm and oocytes as well as to embryos, arteries and heart valves (Fahy, Wowk, and Wu 2006; Maffei, Brevini, and Gandolfi 2014), whereas research on the cryopreservation of complex tissues and organs is still in progress (Fahy et al. 2009; Kilbride et al. 2015).

10 http://alcor.org/Library/html/neuropreservationfaq.html (accessed March 21, 2019).

11 The common equation of mind with brain is also criticized by Elizabeth A. Wilson: ‘This gesture unnecessarily partitions the body into minded and unminded substance, and ties a theory of mind to all manner of problematic distinctions between reason and passion and male and female and cause and effect’ (2015, 148). Instead, she suggests extending the term ‘mind’ to other, non-brain physiological systems that are usually referred to as ‘the biological body’ (ibid.).

12 In a strict thermodynamic sense, cryogenic freezing does not actually induce stasis, i.e., arrest molecular movement altogether. It is based on the use of liquid nitrogen, which has a temperature of -196°C. Hugh Hixon (1985) argues that for the purposes of cryonic internment this is good enough, since 1 s at 37°C equals 24.628 million years at -196°C and thus on a human scale approximates cessation. Consequently, terms like stasis or cessation have to be understood as ideal types here.

13 Franklin and Lock (2003) similarly investigate biomedical rearticulations of life and death in terms of ‘animation and cessation’. According to them, with the ‘transformation of biology from the scientific study of being into a technology of doing, building, and engineering’ (ibid., 14), life and death no longer appear as (separate) states of being but as processual and interrelated practices. This reformulation further allows them to introduce a third condition that belongs to neither or both, namely that of suspension (ibid., 12). While this contribution is certainly instructive and relevant for the discussion of life, death and cryonic suspension in terms of motion and stasis rather than in the practical dimension of biotechnomedicine, which Franklin and Lock bring into focus, I am interested in the relation towards life and death, as I expound in the following.

14 In the following sections, I will show that the notion of total death is also contingent upon an anthropocentric understanding of living-dying as confined to an organism. From the perspective of a relational ontology, as developed by Braidotti and Haraway, total death is impossible since the biological process of living-dying continues after the disintegration of an organism.

15 Giorgio Agamben most famously employed the conceptual pair of bios and zoe in Homo Sacer (1998). By distinguishing between bare life (zoē) and political life (bios), he frames the way certain lives were made killable in the Third Reich. While Agamben’s work is certainly remarkable and important, Braidotti’s specific adaptation of the conceptual pair is what makes it especially useful for the argument at hand. The essential difference, as Judith Butler explains, is that ‘[f]or Agamben, bare life is effectively arelational, contrasted only with the sovereign power that lays it bare […]. For Braidotti, life is implicitly a matter of interconnection, so it is never quite isolated and shorn of social context in the way that Agamben supposes.’ (Butler 2014, 24)

16 One interesting fact to be mentioned here is that it is very common in the cryonics community that people also have their pets cryopreserved alongside them (see e.g. Best 2018). This does not subvert the idea of the human as essentially separate from his ‘natural others’, though. The pet is not an animal like the worm. Rather, it is a representative of domesticated nature – and even more so in its cryopreserved form (Lafontaine 2009, 301; see also Haraway 2003, 27).

17 Haraway uses the term ‘sympoiesis’ to describe a relational conception of the constitution of individuals whose emergence and existence are always embedded in a web of relations with other beings. This is a counter-concept to the notion of ‘autopoiesis’, which assumes that systems autonomously (re)produce themselves and which, according to Haraway, characterizes the dominant understanding of human life in the sciences (see Haraway 2016, 58–98).

18 The scholarly discussion of cryonics barely engages with the ways in which cryonicists address the issue of sexual reproduction or imagine procreation in the future. For occasional side notes on the topic, see Bernstein 2015, 773; Lafontaine 2010, 149; Romain 2010, 196.

19 ‘Man’ is often used as a synonym for the human; feminist authors like Braidotti and Haraway continue to do this, but they do it in order to illustrate the analysis that the humanist subject is a male one.

20 When the idea of ‘transhumanism’ first emerged, its proponents had societal improvements and spiritual advancements in mind. Since the 1970s, however, futurists have increasingly interpreted the transgression of human boundaries in terms of biology (see ibid.).

21 Haraway has dropped the notion of posthumanism in her later works since, as she argues, it is too easily appropriated by transhumanists who take posthumanism as a techno-enhanced new evolutionary stage (Gane and Haraway 2006, 140). Instead, she has introduced the notion of ‘companion species’ to encapsulate the heterogeneous yet radically co-constitutive relationality that is fundamental for her thinking (Haraway 2003; see also 2008, 164). This also enables her to ‘refuse human exceptionalism [however] without invoking posthumanism’ (2016, 13).

22 In light of her aim to develop a positive notion of zoe, Braidotti criticizes the emphasis that other thinkers who refer to the conceptual pair of bios and zoe place, in her view, ‘on death as the horizon for discussions about the limits of our understanding of the human’ (2008, 181). She explicitly objects to the conception of zoe proposed by Agamben, for whom zoe represents the constitutive vulnerability of the human subject (2013, 120–1). Katharina Hoppe (2017, 15–8) critically contrasts Braidotti’s position with the vulnerability-based conceptualization of life that Butler proposes.

23 Haraway herself criticizes this notion, on the grounds that it originates in the figure of the Anthropos. In doing so, it reproduces the idea of human exceptionalism and of a dualism of Nature and humanity in which the latter unilaterally acts upon the former (2016, 30). Instead, she proposes a whole bundle of alternative terms, such as Capitalocene or Plantationocene (see also Haraway 2015), which recognize more or something other than just ‘human agency’ as ‘the latest and most dangerous […] exterminating forces’ (2016, 2). Thus, she also intends to account for the fact that not all humans can be held equally responsible.