Einzelprojekte

The (Un-)Bounded Elementary Organism: Visions of the Continuity of Life in the 'Dark Age' of Physical Chemistry

During the first three tumultuous decades of the twentieth century, many important biologists, physicists, and chemists began to think of the living cell not as a bounded object, but rather as a more or less differentiated region of a continuous physical and chemical system. Contrary to intuition, experience, and microscopic vision, this boundary-less state was supposedly a rational explication of thermodynamics and scientific measurement, whereby quantifiable gradients of chemical substances trumped ‘crude’ visual evidence of clear borders. As biologists explored the implications of the physical chemistry of soft matter, some articulated a vision of life that was formally indistinguishable from its non-living milieu. This period, which biochemist Marcel Florkin once called ‘The Dark Age of Biocolloidology’, joins a growing number of scientific movements that science studies scholars have recognized as seeking to dissolve or unsee the boundaries between environments, organisms, and their parts. Besides the currently popular interest in the epigenome, microbiome, and the toxicity of environments, historians of science and science studies scholars have previously found cases of un-bounding in conceptions of immunity, the milieu intérieur, the vital agency of non-human actors, and wild and urbanized ecologies.

As a genre, this kind of barrier-free thinking has been a perpetual underdog, the nonconformist in a sea of more rigid and reductive doctrines. This project pursues two questions: What were the conceptual and instrumental developments that drove this boundary-less, gradated vision of life? Are there cultural or metaphysical reasons why boundaries between organisms and their environments seem more intuitive, despite our theoretical convictions to the contrary? This project will explore the many episodes in the history of ideas when boundaries between a life form and its environment becomes weakened or eliminated entirely—examining their generic similarities, and how they deviate or err from prevailing notions of bodies and milieus.

Quelle der Beschreibung: Information des Anbieters

Forschungsgebiete

Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften/Cultural Studies, Literatur und Naturwissenschaften

Links

Ansprechpartner

Einrichtungen

ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry

Verknüpfte Ressourcen

Projekte und Forschung

ERRANS environ/s ICI Focus 2018-20

Institutionen

ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Datum der Veröffentlichung: 03.06.2019
Letzte Änderung: 03.06.2019