This chapter, and the two that follow it, can be read in a number of ways. First, and most obviously, they are histories of the science and politics of life and reproduction—especially in France, the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and the United States. Readers might also, though, prefer to read what follows as a retooled history of mass democracy—a history that takes embryonic material, human clones, and reproductive or replicating waste as case studies in contemporary democratic engagement. Indeed, one key, if implicit, theme that emerges over the following pages is that it is as useful to reframe boundless political thought in a discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific theory and practice as it was—in the previous chapter—to do so in light of recent scientific research. As the work of these eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century natural historians, natural philosophers, physicians, and laboratory scientists makes clear, the notion that unbounded thought, environmental life, and disembodied reproduction or growth might be better political models than human cognition and embodied human reproduction was not an invention of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, thinking as a variation on reproductive flourishing was central to much of the scientific and medical writing produced in these areas—even if this writing had to wait until the late twentieth century to be appreciated.
It needs to be repeated, however, that neither this earlier eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing, nor the later twentieth-century writing, on biological and informational processes as intellectual processes—on life as unbounded matter or data that think—was prominent in the natural sciences when, for example, Foucault wrote in the mid-twentieth century. Although the explosion of data and information is one symptom of biopolitical governance, more often than not—drawing on midcentury scientific and medical wisdom—the biological life that generated this data has been associated solely with sexually reproducing bodies that are for the most part only incidentally thinking, contemplating, or feeling (if not necessarily speaking) bodies. As much as replicating data, shifting material-information systems, and simultaneously physical and political life have been key to the work of mass democracy, in other words, they have also occupied, in most conventional political theory, separate spheres. In the mid-twentieth century, those who concerned themselves with life and reproduction were not, for the most part, those who concerned themselves with thought and contemplation.
But this mid-twentieth-century lack of interest in life as thought does not mean that the later twentieth-century resurgence of thought or contemplation within biology developed out of a literary vacuum. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the period that Foucault identified with the emergence of biopolitical modes of governance1—a number of natural scientists were also, if less influentially than their whole-organism-minded counterparts, describing life as a variation on noncognitive thought—and also thought as a variation on flourishing life. As a corollary, many of these same natural scientists were describing reproduction as an ongoing series of thought processes (rather than as a single, initiating moment of information transfer). Many of these writers were vocally unconvinced that the bounded, organized, complex, sexually reproducing body was the most useful reference point for discussions of what was alive and thinking—politically or physically.
Taking open systems—and, intriguingly, open systems that might result in human life as well as other life—as their starting point, these environment- or accumulation-concerned natural scientists can thus be read as precursors or contributors to a long-standing politics of life as thought. These writers make repeated references to human life as life no different from other life—to life as a continuum of intellectual processes that operate across assemblages, fields. or accumulations. They make varied, elaborate claims that it is both more ethical and more empirically valid to describe human life and human reproduction with reference to environmental life or reproduction than to insist that nonhuman life is always almost adhering to a human norm. And finally, rather than asking the thinking, living, open-ended systems that are their interest to conform to some conventional model of the embodied, self-aware, cognitive, bounded, sexually reproductive political person—far from congratulating the slime mold on its almost-rational or almost-psychological behavior—these eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century natural scientists observe no difference between the life, reproduction, and thought of organic or informational systems and the life, reproduction, and thought of rational, embodied, psychological persons.
There is, in short, an unmistakable collision between these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers and their late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century counterparts. And it is at the site of this collision that political theorists can, first, bring theories of mass democracy up to date with more recent trends in scientific research and, second, excavate an alternative, or additional, history of contemplative mass democracy. Indeed, the narrative that develops out of this writing unambiguously defines the thought at the center of mass democratic governance as intellectual if not necessarily cognitive—and the life and reproduction at the center of this governance as environmental if not necessarily organic. In the process, this history makes clear not only that life, reproduction, and thought are beginning to collapse into one another—as slime mold and Boundless Informant each envelop the world—but that these processes have always, historically, been inseparable. Most bluntly, of course, this writing demonstrates that we not only can introduce thought to the politics of life, but that we must reckon with a three-century-old tradition of doing so.
Again, though, the relevance of this reformulated theory and history of mass politics can be found only within a series of case studies that are calculated to leave readers unsettled—within a study of apparent Threats to Democracy. The embryonic material, human clones, and trash or waste that highlight the usefulness of an unbounded, intellectual mass politics, in other words, do so specifically because they upset both conventional liberal democratic ideals and traditional, human-centered interpretations of mass democracy. They work as case studies because they elude any framework of inquiry that does not take bacterial memory, cellular sensitivity, amoeboid decision making, algorithmic processing, and viral reproduction as its starting point. They are case studies, therefore, both in the effectiveness of political life as political thought and in the ineffectiveness of democracies that separate the two, and that are, as a result, always on the verge of crumbling into dust.
This chapter, on embryonic material, operates in the same realm—seeking, first, to disturb. It begins with a brief explanation of why embryonic material has, classically, posed a problem for democratic theory—or an exploration of how classic political theory has failed to cope simultaneously with thought and life. From there the chapter turns to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century medical and scientific writing from France, the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and the United States (with a brief, initial detour into classical Greece) that has taken embryonic material as a starting point for theorizing, first, life as thought and, second, reproduction as a thought activity. Having explored this literature, the chapter makes a case for the ongoing political relevance of these medical and scientific interpretations of both life and thought, especially as they play out across embryonic material and information. In general, the purpose of the chapter is not to provide a solution to the problem that the embryo poses to democratic theory so much as it is to demonstrate that the problem, such as it is, has never existed.
One of the aspects of embryonic development—and especially human embryonic development—that has most troubled democratic theorists over the centuries has been that embryos seem to bear as much resemblance to slime as they do to embodied agents or subjects. Cognition is not an obvious characteristic of embryos. Self-organized—or self-organizing—as they may be, embodiment also eludes them. And, despite the centuries-old rhetorical separation of woman-environment from embryo-organism—a separation that has prompted feminist challenges for at least the past hundred years2—embryos are, by definition, unviable as pure selves. They may be removed from women’s bodies, but they cannot be removed from gendered environments. Like slime and data, they are environments, they are contingent, and the decision making that governs their life is disassembled rather than organized—even as this decision making grants to embryos, like slime and data, an enormously, perhaps monstrously, successful growth.
An influential response to this problem—to this question of whether embryonic material ought to be described as slime or as an embodied subject—has been to play up the embryo’s potential completion. The embryo is a potential body, it is governed by a potential brain, and it must therefore possess the dignity of a potential life in and of itself. In the modern period, this impetus has led to the repeated reframing of the embryo as its own person—separate from a woman’s body—that has invited such sustained feminist criticism. This criticism is well taken—and this particular trend in writing on embryos is without question in need of a corrective. If anything, it is more powerful today than it was in the past.3
But this response to the troubling intermediary position between slime and person that the human embryo (and, by extension, other animal embryos) occupies has not been the sole response to the problem that the not-quite-organized embryo poses. A second collection of scientists and political theorists have considered the implications of the embryo as, in fact, slime and data. They have asked what life—and even political life—might be if it operates across an embryonic environment. The visual representation of the embryo (and the critical challenges to widespread ultrasound technology) that has been so key to the first trend in thinking about development has thus been absent from much of this work—or, if it has been present, it has played up the systemic rather than embodied qualities of this organic material.
Embryos, in this second set of analyses, for example, can involve themselves only in incomplete and comparative present contemplation, rather than in absolute or unitary future cognition. Embryonic material cannot be separated from its environment because it is, already, a thinking environment. And, to the extent that embryonic life or existence can be represented, it can be represented only as a system or accumulation—as a symbolic, algorithmic field—and never as, say, an image or a picture. The embryo in this alternative science and history of development is, in short, an environmental, informational variation on thinking life. It eludes the future—the deferred cognitive, bounded, body with dignity—altogether.
As much as these configurations and reconfigurations of embryonic material smack of the modern period—and of modern democratic theory, especially—however, many find their antecedents as early as classical Greek interpretations of life and existence (or, at the very least, as early as modern readings of this classical Greek writing). Indeed, a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century responses to the problem that the embryo posed to theories of life—and especially to theories of thinking life—in both Europe and West Asia explicitly invoked this classical Greek work on embryonic development. Although it is a bit of a detour in the modern history of mass democracy that this chapter is initiating, therefore, it makes sense to pause for a few pages to become acquainted with this ancient thought.
As Devin Henry writes, embryonic “self-organisation” was “particularly perplexing to the ancients,” and one way in which philosophers such as Alexander, Simplicius, and Aristotle worked through their bewilderment was to draw on technological explanatory models.4 Machines of various sorts became the analytical reference points that domesticated the embryo—that transformed it from the thing that divorced biological existence from intellectual existence to the thing from which all animals, and all men (sic), as thinking biological organisms, derived. As Henry continues, however, the type of technological model that could turn embryonic development into something comprehensible or contained varied considerably from philosopher to philosopher. Moreover, what, specifically, might constitute life, or thinking life, likewise varied drastically.5
In Alexander’s writing, for example, the primary question that demanded response was how something “devoid of reason” could “follow a ‘rational’ sequence in the sense of proceeding in an orderly and determinate manner for the sake of some end.”6 The problem that the embryo posed this particular theory of thinking life, in other words, was how something that could have no rational understanding of an end—no conscious investment in completion—could, nonetheless, operate in such a way that it seemed always to move toward this same completion. Alexander’s solution to this problem was to posit “automata” as models of embryonic development. “On this ‘relay’ model of development,” Henry writes, “each thing that comes into being is ‘naturally suited’ to produce the thing that comes after it, not according to reason or choice, but simply in virtue of its nature.”7 Each preceding developmental state, that is to say, was the condition for the developmental state that succeeded it. The machine or technology that could serve as a model for embryonic development was a machine that cascaded—whose organization depended not on a plan, but on increasingly complex responses to initiating conditions.
In order to resolve the confusion caused by the irrational rationality of the embryo, therefore, Alexander abandoned completion altogether. Finding or recovering a hidden goal or end that might motivate developing embryonic material was not his interest. On the contrary, by distributing thought as process over and across each stage of development—by situating thought in the move from one contingent stage to the next—Alexander removed the problem of the end, of completion, altogether from any consideration of thinking life. Thought by no means disappeared from life when rationality was sidelined. But what constituted thought changed drastically. Rather than thought manifesting itself in a goal achieved, thinking occurred throughout the developmental process, at each interval. Thinking life was always contingent and never quite finished. Although there was something that looked like an end to embryonic development, thinking life, as a process, was systemic and iterative, never absolute.
Henry juxtaposes and contrasts Alexander’s argument that “the specific path an embryo follows . . . is determined at each point along the way by the nature of the antecedent state” with interpretations proposed by other philosophers who were apparently less willing than Alexander to jettison completion.8 Simplicius, for example, argued that the embryo’s “path” is “‘anticipated’ by its nature at the start of development.”9 And this “anticipation,” Henry continues, results from a “principle inherited by an offspring,” which “is like a set of instructions or recipe for building the parent.”10 Unlike Alexander, in other words, Simplicius finds an “anticipation” of the end product at the initial moment of conception—an anticipation that is gradually fulfilled as embryonic material reaches its final, complete form. Simplicius’s analysis differs from that of Alexander, that is to say, because Alexander’s does not specify “beforehand . . . anything like a recipe or set of instructions.”11
Concerned with completion as Simplicius may have been, however, it was Aristotle’s theory of embryonic development, according to Henry, that was the most reliant of the three on the notion that there is some end, goal, or finished product presupposed at conception—that embryonic development is always rational. Indeed, bringing together Alexander’s notion of the developing embryo as a cascading mechanical automaton and Simplicius’s notion of the developing embryo as a machine subject to sets of instructions—positing, Henry writes, the embryo as “a pre-programmed automaton”12—Aristotle even suggests a protodivide between the rational brain thinking through the “instructions” and the inert material body that follows them. This interpretation of embryonic development, Henry concludes, is in fact very useful to Aristotle for a number of reasons that are worth exploring in detail:
First, the movements of a pre-programmed automaton are one and continuous in the required sense: all of its movements are generated by a single common source of motion inside the device itself (the computer programme). Second, the execution of a programme is precisely the kind of non-causal sequence of which development is said to be an instance: the movement of each part owes its existence to the execution of a single developmental programme and not to the agency of each other. Finally, a preprogrammed automaton would provide Aristotle with a much better spermatic model. In this case the nature in the male could be said to control the sperm’s movements, not by being in contact with it at the time, but by having programmed those movements into it at the start. Moreover, we do not encounter the problem of a “mechanized” sperm, since the internal motion that moves our modern automaton is not a causal sequence passing through a network of physical gears but the execution of a programme, which for Aristotle would be the actualisation a single potential for the whole ordered process.13
In short, then, Aristotle’s “programmed automaton” model of embryonic development seems to resuscitate rationality as the defining characteristic thinking life, and then to situate rationality in the male body that produces the sperm. Whereas Alexander’s thinking life was contingent, materially embedded, and always incomplete, Simplicius reintroduced absolute—if perhaps troublingly intuitive—thought in the form of “anticipation,” and then Aristotle managed to situate what is essentially a model of the rational, masculine brain that works on the inert, feminine body at the very moment of embryonic conception. The classical technological or mechanical model of embryonic development seems to lend itself as much to a narrow, cognitive, embodied definition of contemplative life as does the twentieth-century model of the potential human, possessing dignity and inhabiting the maternal environment.
And yet—it might be worthwhile to dwell a bit longer on Simplicius’s “anticipation” embedded in “recipes” or “instructions” and on Aristotle’s “computer program,” introduced via the rational, masculine sperm. There is, after all, nothing complete or absolute in a set of instructions any more than there is any rational grasp of a determined future outcome in the expectation that is anticipation. Recipes and instructions are sets of symbols. More particularly, they are symbolic processes that, in and of themselves, think through results.14 Instructions and recipes, that is to say, are no more capable of comprehending, rationally, an abstract final product than the contingent thought that occurs at each stage of the purely mechanical automaton’s development might be. A subject may well be able to read instructions as a metaphysical exercise, but to the extent that instructions do work, it is as themselves materialized symbols—a situation that is particularly clear in the embryo-as-recipe formulation.
Simplicius, therefore, despite himself, in fact seems to be defining thinking life in much the same way that Alexander is. There is, without question, a more clearly symbolic dimension to Simplicius’s interpretation, resting on “recipes,” than there is to Alexander’s. But these are symbols that, again, themselves, do work, as sets of instructions, as code. These are not symbols that exist to be read—to represent complete, abstract concepts or to transmit comprehensible messages from cognitive mind to cognitive mind. They are almost literally algorithms, and as such they are by definition iterative processes rather than coherent, absolute concepts. They have nothing to do with rational—or certainly psychological—communication.
They are algorithms, moreover, that arguably reach their least rational and most systemic or environmental manifestation in, again, likely despite himself, Aristotle’s work bringing together Alexander’s automaton and Simplicius’s instructions. The execution of the developmental program, indeed, like all computer programs, does not operate prior to, or on, matter, but through it. Aristotle’s model of embryonic development is thus very much computational in the contemporary sense of the term—but it is computational in that it assumes a total simultaneity of symbol and matter. The program becomes thought only as it executes, and it executes only as matter or machine. As a result, Aristotle’s interpretation of embryonic development—his response to the assault on thought that embryonic life seems to mount—perhaps more than Alexander’s, removes rationality from the equation. There is, without question, a contemplation permeating embryonic life in all three scenarios. But there is no possibility of cognition, no possibility of abstract comprehension. There are only relentlessly materialized symbols that, like viruses (or as viruses, given the role of the sperm that transmits the program), collapse life, thought, reproduction, and environment into a single process.
In the work of all three classical philosophers, then, it seems that cognition is marginal to theories of thinking life because of the mechanical and technological models on which they rely, not despite them—because each of these thinkers evokes computation in order to resolve the problem that the embryo poses to thinking life. Machines, and in particular computational machines, engage in contingent, embedded, relational, and nonabsolute thought by definition. They engage in thought processes. Although contemplation and intuition—in the form, perhaps, of anticipation—can remain very much aspects of this mechanical, environmental mode of thinking life, therefore, the separation of user from tool, subject from environment, self from other, and product from system cannot. And this is a conclusion that Alexander, Simplicius, and Aristotle all, perhaps unexpectedly, draw.
At the same time, of course, despite the gestures toward classical Greek thought, this early association between technology or machines and the potential life that was the embryo appears not to have survived into the modern period. The modern science of embryonic development—although still very much anxious about the disconnect between embryonic intellectual life and rational human thinking life—has concerned itself primarily with the embryo as a person: organic, embodied, and possessing dignity. In modern work, the embryo is always on the verge of embodiment, and therefore always on the verge of thought—as cognition. It is always embedded in the more conventional interpretation of Aristotle’s work.
There are, however, nonetheless clear traces, at least, of the machine, of the mechanical environment, and of the symbolic environment as mechanical environment surviving in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of embryonic life. Indeed, the initial move in scientific, medical, and political work concerned with embryonic life in the present—rather than with what embryos might become in the future—has been, familiarly, to bracket rationality, to discount the mind, to discount the brain, and yet to retain memory, sensitivity, decision making, and information processing as defining characteristics of life. These historical accounts of embryonic development as development, in fact, taken together, hint at an ongoing story of biopolitical life as intellectual life. They sketch a type of thought that is life because it is embedded in matter or data, because it is systemic, because it is always incomplete, and because it reaches its most intuitive moments when it encounters accidents, flaws, or glitches. They sketch living, thinking systems that resonate loudly across modern democratic politics as well as modern scientific research.
Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, whose mid-eighteenth-century writing on environmental life as a set of systems rather than as a set of subjects remains a centerpiece of scholarly writing in natural history, is a perfect figure with whom to initiate a search for resolutions to the embryonic threat. Over the course of his multivolume story of life and its animal, vegetable, and even mineral development, Buffon builds up a distinctive—and arguably also computational—theory of life as a mode of thought. On occasion, he explicitly disagrees with Aristotle and those influenced by Aristotle—positing, to provide just one example, a theory of “female semen”15 that situates the initiation of embryonic development as much in the female body as in the male. But, much like Aristotle, this apparent emphasis on a prime or principal author of embryonic development—a protorational energy, whether masculine or feminine, bent on a coherent end point or finished product—is more than counterbalanced by a repeated return to the contingent, incomplete, and environmental quality of embryonic development writ large.
Consider, for example, Buffon’s introductory discussion of the relationship between an egg—in this case a chicken’s egg—and a viable, living organism. An egg, Buffon writes, has a life and an organization, a growth and development, that it takes upon itself and directs on its own. It does not live, he continues, like an animal or like a plant—it is distinct from both. It organizes, always in the same way, and eventually it arrives at its perfection, which is the accomplishment of its form.16 According to Buffon, the egg contains its own completion—it is an absolute, and perhaps an abstract absolute. It is a materialization of rationality—and it thus seems to have little to do with the contingent thinking that even Aristotle at least suggested was an attribute of embryonic life. But then Buffon concludes this passage in an unexpected way. He writes that the egg is something that “one can easily consider as a part and a whole in and of itself.”17
Even while he plays on the theme of the embryo as potential life and potential thought, that is to say—and even while he associates life with completion or perfection, with absolute, rational thought—Buffon also undermines the possibility of completion or comprehension in ongoing embryonic life. Embryonic life, he states, is both potential plant or animal life and completely different from this plant or animal life. The embryo’s organization might very well lead to an animal life that, in turn, might be a foundation for the rational animal that is the living human. But this organization is also its own life and thought—a life and thought distinct from its future form. Because the embryo’s future perfection (a fully formed plant or a fully formed animal) differs in quality from its current, organizing existence—because its life as part is irreconcilable with its life as whole—the embryo thus, according to Buffon, demands consideration on its own terms. It is a mistake to address embryonic life solely as potential animal (or human) life. The existing, ongoing, present life of the organizing embryo in many ways trumps in importance its potential plant or animal life in Buffon’s work.
But what does this distinctive, embryonic life entail? According to Buffon, once again, the life peculiar to the embryo works and organizes itself—and hence, it thinks. Because it can never be categorized as whole or as part, however, it thinks only in contingent, environmental, systemic ways very much at odds with the absolute ideal to which it ostensibly aspires. The embryo is a disparate type of life that works, and therefore thinks, on its own terms. Indeed, in order to emphasize this point, Buffon repeatedly compares cognition as it plays out in the brain to fertilization and embryonic development as they play out not just in the womb, but across the body, and then across multiple bodies and environments. Moreover, throughout the course of these analogies, thought becomes increasingly contingent on living matter, while life becomes increasingly intellectual.
In making the case that viviparous organisms have eggs in the same way that oviparous organisms have eggs, for example, he writes that the womb itself conceives the fetus via “a type of contagion that the male liquor communicates to it.”18 In the same way that a magnet communicates magnetic qualities to iron, he explains further, the masculine contagion infects the womb and the entire female body.19 Moreover, in the same way that the brain conceives ideas, the womb conceives a fetus—and just as “the ideas that the brain conceives are similar to the images of the objects it receives through the senses, the fetus, which is the idea of the womb, resembles that which produces it.”20 Meanwhile, sperm, although “organized bodies,” are better described as “natural machines than as animals,”21 moving, as they do, like artificial automatons rather than like organisms, without rest,22 and above all, without “will.”23
This is an unexpected set of associations. Most pointedly, of course, in elaborating his theory of embryonic development as the product of “contagion,” Buffon makes clear, repeatedly and emphatically, that biological conception is an intellectual activity. Conceiving ideas and conceiving organic matter are, for him, the same process. Living matter and thinking cannot be dissociated from one another. In addition, however, the contagion that is thinking life is also similar to the communication of attractive qualities from mineral to mineral—and sperm, the organisms that seem most bent on an end point or goal, are without will because they are without rest, machines rather than animals.
The type of thought that organic conception entails, therefore, is not only indistinguishable from the matter through which it operates. It is also relational rather than absolute—it is contingent on matter interacting with matter, and it results in comparison rather than in abstraction. Moreover, this thinking life, when it is manifested in sperm, at least, is explicitly mechanical. Without end, without rest, this thought activity continues processing without any (rational) intention of reaching its end. This is a thought that operates throughout a simultaneously organic, mechanical, and computational system—a thought that is almost completely irrelevant to rational cognition situated in a mind or self-contained body.
Moreover, it is a type of thought that natural historians and embryologists describe in increasingly elaborate detail over the next few centuries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, J. B. Demangeon wrote in his comparative study of “generation” that the physical laws that guide embryonic development might be compared to those that govern the aggregation of “metals, salts, [and] earth.”24 From there, he compares “nervous fluid” with “spermatic fluid,” noting that although they are not the same, one might draw an analogy between the two, in that they both “vivify,” they both produce heat, force, liveliness, they both give off “subtle effluvia,” they both can be phosphorescent, and, above all, they both rely upon one another: one fluid cannot be exhausted without exhausting the other, each is secreted from the same source, almost “infinitely,” and the secretion of each—“sympathetic” with the other—is excellent evidence that “the organs of the body are like cogs in a machine, in which one cannot be harmed without the rest going haywire.”25
In short, the rules that govern organic life parallel the rules that govern the life of metals and other minerals, while the living fluid that produces life (spermatic fluid) is inseparable from the equally living fluid that produces thought and feeling. Moreover, the reference point for understanding this overlap, first, between organic and inorganic life and, second, between thought and life is not the rational mind. It is the rotation of cogs in a machine that is always on the verge of encountering a glitch (“going haywire”). Intellectual life is at the basis of “generation” here, just as it was at the basis of Buffon’s natural history—but, once again, this intellectual life is environmental, mechanical, and irrational. It is thought without cognition or psychology—thought through ever-circulating fluid and ever-growing matter and information.
This fascination with the interrelation between “nerves,” the “nervous system,” or “nervous fluid” and semen or developmental or generational fluids continued into the nineteenth century. Writing in 1846, for example, Auguste Duméril notes in his Evolution of the Foetus that whereas some commentators prefer to study all parts of a developing embryo simultaneously—thus addressing it as a whole—it is more effective to examine each part, or unit, in itself. He himself, he continues, prefers to start with the nervous system because the nervous system develops, he states, before any other part of the organism.26 Or, as G. A. DeLattre writes in 1863, nerves and the “cerebral-spinal axis” arise spontaneously, “where they are” in the body—physicians and scientists do not see them evolving.27 Each, however, is nonetheless foundational to the development of embryonic life.
Both of these studies separate “the nervous system” from other bodily systems, and both focus on this system as an active, organic, and open-ended environment (composed of fluids, points, and axes) rather than as a tool (like the brain-as-mind) in service to a discrete whole (like a self-contained embryonic body). Each study then associates this nervous system or environment (uniquely) with the beginnings or origins of development. Life and nervous thought in this way go together in these analyses—they are fundamental or original to one another—but, importantly, neither has anything to do with cognition. Thought and life are detached from tools of cognition or embodied wholes, and then they are associated unambiguously with flowing, working environments or accumulations of nerves, fluids, points, axes, and intersections.
Alongside this series of associations between the embryonic environment of thought and feeling and the elaboration of embryonic life, there is an equally emphatic set of studies that downplay the importance of the brain as the site of embodied cognition. Over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, in particular, commentators on development, life, and thought insisted that the brain was in many ways the least relevant organ to studies of thinking life. Some of these commentators were more careful than others, it is true. In describing “the origin of living beings” in 1889, for example, Félix Hément wrote that only the manifestations of thought are produced by brain matter. Whereas it is true, he explained, that thought requires a brain in the same way that measuring time requires a clock and in the same way that the creation of an animal requires an egg, it is not the case that the substance of the brain, the metal parts of the clock, or the yellow and white of the egg produce, alone, thought, time, or life. The most that a commentator might conclude about the relation between these tools and their manifestations, he writes, is that the manifestations cannot be produced without such tools.28
For Hément, in other words, the brain is both indispensable and insufficient to a discussion of thought. What makes the brain indispensable, however, is not that it is the seat of all thinking, but that it is composed of an accumulation of matter without which thought could not happen. The brain is key, in other words, not because its product—cognition—is greater than the sum of its parts. It is central to thought not because it represents an abstract, pure rationality or psychology that can transcend matter. On the contrary, Hément insists that the brain is simply a thing among other things. By comparing brain matter to the metal of a clock and the yellow and white of an egg, Hément evokes less a potential, final, dematerialized product, less a future rationality or psychology that might operate beyond the organ that initiates it than a present, and always present, collection of pieces that are already, in any case, thinking. The stuff inside the egg is already developing—just as the stuff that makes up the brain is already thinking. Hément writes, in fact, that when we put this matter together, the tool that we create is not a tool of thought, it is a tool for measuring thought in the same way that a clock is a tool for measuring time. No one would argue that thought ceases to exist in the absence of a brain any more than time ceases to exist in the absence of the clock. But similarly, no one can discount the materiality of thought any more than one can discount the materiality of development through the egg. Thought, in short, for Hément, is embedded in matter that is never quite yet put together.
Just as Buffon’s analogy between the brain that conceives ideas and the womb that conceives embryos seems to isolate the brain as the organ of thought even while it eliminates any distinction between the two modes of conception, then, Hément’s set of associations between brain and egg, on the one hand, and brain and clock, on the other, devalues the brain as the seat of thought. The point of both analyses, separated by more than a century, is that readers cannot divorce organic conception from the conception of thought—and that, as a result, each must be described as the product of a wide-ranging system that is, in turn, part of an open-ended environment or accumulation. Each uses the brain as a starting point for a description of thought that ranges beyond discrete organic function—a description that includes entire, unbounded material and informational environments within the intellectual process.
Whereas Hément’s discounting of the brain as the seat of thought (and, in turn, life) was speculative, other commentators, writing in the same decades, were more emphatic. William Thierry Preyer, for example, born in England, writing in German, and translated extensively into French, played insistently on the theme of the brain’s relative lack of importance, first, to developing life and second, to the thought that characterizes this life. Departing from earlier writers in that he posits the circulation of the blood, rather than “nervous fluid,” as the embryo’s originary bodily function,29 he nonetheless finds in this function the same noncognitive living thought that Duméril and DeLattre had found in the circulation of nervous and, or as, spermatic fluid. More to the point, however, Preyer also describes in great detail the nonexistence—and eventually, the unimportance—of the brain to embryonic development, sensitivity, or intellect.
Initially, Preyer simply underlines (literally) the lack of “muscle fibers” and “nervous elements” in the early organization of the circulatory system. The first contractions of the heart, he writes, are of “extreme physiological importance” because they indicate an enormous amount of energy output when there is still no trace of muscles or nerves. The cells that constitute the heart move themselves by virtue of their own ability to contract, not because they are directed to do so by some external organ of cognition.30 Put differently, he continues a number of pages later, “it is notable that neither the brain nor the spinal cord is necessary to the movements of the heart,” a point that can be proved both by examining embryonic specimens in a laboratory setting and by considering the life of infants born without brains or developed respiratory systems.31 Preyer then dwells at some length on what readers might learn from the behavior of these anencephalic embryos, fetuses, and newborns—of particular interest to physiologists, he repeats, because they demonstrate the minimal importance of cerebral function to development and movement.32 Most interesting to Preyer himself is how such organisms can feel such threats as the lack of air or nutrition, despite their missing brains.33
Preyer addresses this question from a variety of directions in his study, conducting experiments on, among other things, the ability of embryos to feel pain, to smell, and to sleep or wake. His repeatedly drawn conclusion is that although these embryos can experience such states, they cannot think rationally about them—the brain-as-mind, once more, is unimportant to their intellectual existence. With regard to pain, for example, he writes that whereas peripheral sensory nerves can be influenced by an anesthetic, its internal application has quite “weak” results. The brain thus (again) does not play an appreciable role in sensing pain, and indeed, his readers might conclude that “the sensibility of the embryo manifests itself later than its motility.”34 As far as smell is concerned, he makes an intriguing point that since olfactory hallucinations are rare (unlike visual hallucinations), an embryo cannot smell. It can neither remember earlier smells nor have a sensation of smell (unlike, implicitly, sight).35 Finally, he argues that since a fetus has no sense of self—in the way that a person with a working brain has—the fetus cannot be said to sleep or to waken. It is in an intermediate, always quasi-sleeping state—a state, once more, that does not and cannot rely on mental cognition.36
Preyer’s argument here is complicated. While making an emphatic negative point—the brain-as-mind is irrelevant to embryonic, fetal, or for that matter neonatal development—his positive point is more elusive. He is, first of all, by no means suggesting that embryos lack any capacity for thought. He insists on the sensitivity of the embryos, fetuses, and newborns he studies, and in this book as well as his more influential Mental Development of the Child he makes an extended case for infant and prenatal thinking, but not cognition.37 But what might this thinking entail, if not cognition, if not psychology, and if not brain function? A clue might be found in the experiments he conducts and in the conclusions he draws from these experiments.
When he writes that sensibility manifests itself later than motility, for example, he does so against the backdrop of an experiment that indicated to him that whereas “peripheral” nervous function exists early on, an internal, central nervous coordinator of this function does not. Preyer’s point, therefore, is not that no nervous experience exists—merely that it is distributed throughout a developing system and is impossible to coordinate in aid of some rational or distinct abstract goal. Preyer is describing, in other words, a diffuse system of thought that is thought because it is loosely connected, nothing more than peripheral motor reactions. In the absence of a brain, in other words, motility is itself sensibility—thinking happens via movement, just as it does in a slime mold or an algorithm. The absence of self-awareness, in short, does not disqualify a system from thought or feeling in Preyer’s work, any more than it did in the work of Bray or Balazsi et al.
Consider, indeed, the interplay of scent, sight, sleep, and hallucination in the second two experiments that Preyer conducts. Once again, Preyer’s conclusion having completed these experiments is that embryos can neither smell nor be called “awake” because both olfactory sensitivity and wakefulness require, first, the ability to remember in narrative form, and second, the ability to distinguish, psychologically, between self and environment or other. Sight and quasi wakefulness (i.e., dreaming), however, and intriguingly, do not, according to Preyer, demand these psychological and rational prerequisites—and the evidence that Preyer marshals in support of this distinction is the well-documented existence of visual (but not olfactory) hallucinations. Embryos without brains and narrative memory can see but not smell, that is to say, because rational adult humans, despite their brains and their memories, occasionally hallucinate and dream.
To emphasize, however, Preyer is not asking his readers to assume, therefore, that dreaming and hallucination are not modes of thought. He merely wants us to remember that they are not modes of rational or psychological thought, and that they do nothing in aid of the constant transformation of memory into self-narrative that is at the heart of psychological existence. The fact that the embryo’s contemplative existence bears more than a passing resemblance to hallucination or dreaming, therefore, is evidence, for Preyer, of an alternative, equally viable—perhaps more viable—theory of thought as life. Put differently, just as motility becomes sensibility across embryonic systems—as it does across bacterial or computational systems—so too might motility become memory. What embryos lack, in other words—and what keeps them always quasi asleep (and unable to smell)—is not memory, not even working memory, but narrative memory. Embryos certainly do not remember in the psychological sense, Preyer seems to be saying, but (and again like bacteria or algorithms) their knowledge, contemplation, and movement may constitute a type of irrational, diffuse, environmental memory. Preyer’s insistence that his readers bracket the brain in their understanding of embryonic development, in short, opens the door to an evocative, alternative theory of embryonic thought.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, then, commentators remained open to developmental theories that assigned to embryos, fetuses, and newborns a contingent, environmental, unbounded, and arguably computational style of thought—emphatically irrational, frequently absent a brain, but nonetheless viable and, in every sense of the word, vital. This tradition continued into the twentieth century as well, even as students of development became aware that politically relevant thought—and especially the thought that went with political life—was being defined with increasing narrowness as actual or potential rational cognition. Indeed, an unexpected counterpoint to political and legal philosophies that assigned life to the embodied, self-contained, self-conscious, objective, active individual citizen was an elaborate theory of unbounded thought as unbounded life. To be clear: this counterpoint was by no means the erotic obliteration of the self in the face of a Romantic, environmental sublime—it had little to do with classic romanticism. On the contrary, there was no preexisting self to be obliterated, and the environment that itself thought was always lowly, comparative, in error, and incomplete.
Bahaeddin Şakir, for example, a physician, a founding member of the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress, and later implicated in the Armenian genocide, framed a series of lectures on medical law, published in 1908, within a commentary on the tension between a legal or political establishment that demanded positive, coherent medical knowledge of life versus death and a medical establishment that remained open to unbounded reinterpretations of what, precisely, might constitute life or death. Şakir begins this discussion with his thoughts on the law of abortion—noting the importance of providing coherent and absolute specialist knowledge of embryonic development to lawyers and judges.38 He builds on this point by presenting readers of the lectures with precise information on how long (in hours and days) a fetus at various stages of development might “live” postabortion.39
In the midst of this clear-cut account of how and when an embryo or fetus might live or die, however, Şakir also introduces a number of complex—and not easily answered—questions about how and why specialists might determine life or death, and what role fetal or embryonic thought, especially, might play in these determinations. Like Preyer, for example, Şakir finds embryos with no brain or heart a productive arena for research into the broader question of embryonic life and thought.40 The examination of anencephalic fetuses, he writes, can prompt physicians to reconsider their narrowly defined interpretations of life and death. A fetus without a heart or head is considered “alive” by neither law nor medicine, he explains, but it is nonetheless worth questioning this assumption, “as scientists if not as lawyers.”41 Indeed, he continues, although neither the physicians associated with the law nor lawyers themselves consider “children” (atfal) born without a head to be living, and although specialists of embryonic development can speak with certainty on such matters to judges, it is difficult to be certain, as scientists, that some sign of viable life has not escaped one’s notice. Might it be worthwhile to explore, for example, the viability of a newborn child born with a brain “filled with water, soft like paste or dough, and embellished or traced with lines like tangled grass?” Şakir’s answer is that perhaps it is worthwhile: no matter how carefully an autopsy might be conducted, observers cannot be certain that evidence of life does not exist—and that such a child might in fact live or be alive.42
Şakir, in other words, implicitly criticizes both what he sees as the narrow definition of “life” accepted by a conventional, rights-based legal establishment and the corollary to this definition: the brain as the seat of both thought and life. Moreover, in order to question the efficacy of such a definition, Şakir presents his audience with an unusually evocative description of an apparently useless, putrefying brain in a “child” that might, nonetheless, be, or have been, alive. Associating the brain with liquid, with unformed or unfinished dough, with filigree, and with tangled grass, Şakir suggests—in an echo, to some extent, of Hément with his dismantled brain matter—the environmental or systemic potential of what lawyers and judges want to understand in binary, as a present or absent self-contained organ.
In addition, rather than informing his readers and listeners that the anencephalic brain is simply not there, as Preyer does, Şakir instead describes the brain as a different kind of matter. In this way, Şakir also unexpectedly prefigures Bray’s discussion of the relative autonomy of “nerve cell[s] in the brain.” A nerve cell in the brain, Bray writes, may in fact be no different from “a free-living cell,” given that it lives in “a rich and ever-changing broth of ions and neurotransmitters,” and has thus had “every opportunity . . . evolving over millennia to learn how to extract information from this chemical soup—to recognize important changes.”43 The conclusion readers are expected to draw from this comparison is, like the conclusions they are meant to draw from so much of Bray’s book, that every cell, even a cell that is part of a more complex organism, is a thinking quasi individual, engaging in intellectual behavior that, though imperfect, could lead after millennia of evolution to human cognition and human psychology.
But Bray’s point, like Şakir’s, is also more complex than this conclusion would suggest. Bray’s choice of comparison between nerve cells in the brain and free-living cells constitutes, after all, a rhetorical move as well as an analytical one. Its purpose is also to destabilize a reader’s preexisting association between thought, on the one hand, and the brain as a contained organ (of thought), on the other. It is to delink thought from embodied (human) existence. Like Bray’s connected, yet also diffuse, cellular environments that operate throughout the brain—and even the most rational brain—therefore, Şakir’s anencephalic brain is connected but diffuse, fluid like water, capable of a different sort of growth like dough, and networked or open-ended like filigree or tangled grass. The description of the dead brain that by no means suggests a dead or unthinking “child” is deliberately beautiful—this is a brain that, because it is not the seat of cognition or rationality, is a touchstone for an alternative theory of, once again, unbounded thought and unbounded life. Şakir’s unexpected departure from the Young Turks’ positivist embrace of rationality leads him to an echo of the theory of embryonic life and thought that the far more spiritually inclined Preyer reached thirty years before, and that the far more intellectually disciplined Bray reached a century later.
Is this thinking, reproducing matter, however, in any way relevant to democratic engagement or, especially, to democratic engagement that takes intellectual existence seriously? Remember, embryos are ordinarily understood to pose, if anything, a challenge to the politics of thinking life and thus to classic democratic theory. Moreover, the conventional response to this challenge has been either to posit the embryo as a potential, future rational, embodied citizen in order to protect thought as a democratic ideal or to jettison thought altogether in order to focus on the democratic quality of biological existence, health, and reproduction. Traditionally, the embryo has posed a threat to political theories that advocate thought as a prerequisite to democracy, and this threat has been met with a bifurcation of intellectual life and biological life. More to the point, perhaps, as of the nineteenth century, biological life seemed very much to be in the political ascendant, with thought bracketed or even eliminated altogether. Thought and reproduction, that is to say, have been seemingly at odds with one another over the past two centuries, and the notion that thinking might be identical to reproduction is as difficult to accept now as it was, apparently, in the mid-nineteenth century.
There has also been, however, as the previous pages have shown, at least one alternative response to the political problem posed by the embryo that is simultaneously slime and citizen—a response that deals with growing, processing embryonic material and information in and of itself, rather than as something potentially quite different. This alternative response has been to reconceive thought. A number of scholars over the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, again, presented their readers and audiences with a theory of life-as-thought, a theory very much removed from the dichotomy between vitality and intellect. This theory, once more, first, defined thought as incomplete, irrational, and ongoing rather than as absolute, rational, and aiming perpetually toward completion. Second, it located thought in the physical work and activity of developing embryonic material. The scholars advocating this alternative theory developed, in fact, a solution to the problem that embryos posed to political life as thinking life: intellectual existence and biological existence need not be in tension with one another, they posited, if intellectual existence is coterminous with biological existence. In this alternative set of stories, embryos were not a challenge to democratic engagement but a basis for it.
Reproduction is not identical to life, however, and the modern political emphasis on reproduction seems to make difficult any obvious resolution of the mass democratic tension between thought and vitality. Embryonic material itself may very well think, but its political value derives from the fact that it is an outcome of reproduction that, in turn, will ideally reproduce itself. Hence, the problem seems to remain: either the embryo is a potential, future, embodied citizen that can master its reproductive capacities via liberal thought (or choice) or the embryo is a collection of biological material, capable of flourishing but not of thinking. One can either try to find the potential discrete, thinking individual within the flourishing embryonic environment or one can address the embryo as undirected organic growth. The earlier dichotomy between an embryo that directed itself and an embryo that was directed—this dichotomy that dissipated when commentators eliminated “direction” from their definition of thought—in this way seems to reassert itself when the question becomes whether the embryo is an organism that can reproduce itself or an environment that is reproduced. Redefining thought, it seems, is not sufficient to resolving the democratic problem that the embryo poses.
Once more, though, the reappearance of this dichotomy between thought and life or between contemplation and biology when reproduction, in particular, is the issue at stake is not the end of intellectual variations on biopolitics. Indeed, a number of scholars responded to this iteration of the classic life-thought opposition by using the same rhetorical tools that had served them before. Thought already had been shifted from the potential or future brain of the embryo to the present embryonic environment. Now, reproduction, too, was redefined as an environmental process, a process of growth or accumulation rather than communication or data transfer. Removing reproduction from the potential or future body of the embryo, scholars, scientists, and commentators increasingly associated reproductive activity with open-ended, unbounded assemblages rather than with discrete, contained, present or future bodies. Embryos were neither the products of bodily reproduction nor future reproductive bodies themselves. Quite the contrary: embryonic environments, indistinct from wider organic and inorganic, material and informational, environments were understood to reproduce themselves.
And, as a result, the thinking that had already been associated with embryonic development became now also a function of embryonic reproduction. Throughout eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century literature, in fact, there appear a series of interconnected arguments concerning the intellectual qualities of not just life, but also of reproduction. First, for example, whole-versus-part distinctions became increasingly irrelevant to discussions of embryos—embryonic individualization, especially, losing meaning as organisms broadly defined were linked to unbounded cellular or molecular fields. Second, any line between an embryonic environment and its wider physical, material, or informational environment was eliminated. Third, it was only as embryonic environments reproduced themselves that, like viral environments, they were understood to think, process information, and remember—thinking and reproduction thus collapsing into one another. And finally, fourth, this embryonic, environmental thought-as-reproduction became distinctly political. Just as a multifaceted story of life-as-thought emerges in these three centuries of literature on embryos, in other words, so too does an equally rich story of reproduction-as-thought.
In an extended analysis of “reproduction in general,” for example, Buffon begins by comparing the “perfection” of the germ of a plant to that of the fetus of an animal—with the latter differing from the former only in its greater development or complexity.44 From there, Buffon goes on to argue that life and liveliness are “physical properties” of all matter, regardless of how dispersed it is.45 Indeed, he writes, there is in nature “an infinite number of permanent organic elements, all of them alive,” whose substance is the same as that of organized beings, just as there is an infinite number of “inanimate/crude (“brute”) particles that resemble inanimate/crude (“brut”) bodies.”46 Even as it may take “millions of little cubes of accumulated salt to make a single grain of sea salt,” for example, it also takes “millions of organic elements to create a single germ that might contain one polyp.”47
As a result, just as one must “separate, break up, and dissolve a cube of sea salt to see, through crystallization, the small cubes of which it is made,” one must also separate the elements of a polyp to recognize the whole.48 Or, putting it in a different way, he writes that all living beings, no matter how complex, are composed of “active” and “living” “molecules,” and that animal and plant life, especially, is nothing more nor less than the product of the interaction of these “particular,” discrete, “tiny lives.”49 Before even getting to the main topic of this section of his work, “reproduction in general,” that is to say, Buffon insists that his readers recognize that “life,” regardless of how organized or complex it may be, is also diffuse, open-ended, and dependent on a system of disconnected bits of molecular “lives.” Moreover, “life,” especially as it relates to reproduction, is as relevant to mineral existence as it is to plant or animal existence—one cannot properly describe animal life without likewise describing plant and mineral life. Even as he repeatedly stresses “nature’s” organic rather than inorganic goal, therefore, the open-ended, diffuse, yet concrete quality of “life” writ large repeatedly leads Buffon back to something that might be called inorganic vitality. And it is this inorganic vitality that readers must keep in mind when they turn, he writes, to reproduction.
Having introduced his topic in this way, Buffon explores both its broader and its narrower implications. First, and perhaps most important to the theory of reproduction and thought that he is outlining, he argues that in nature, the “abstract” never exists—rather, everything operates in concrete relation to everything else. Indeed, despite an increasingly specialized taxonomic theory, a specialist cannot, he argues, even be certain that one organism or collection of inorganic particles is more “composed” than any other. On the contrary, organisms of all sorts, he argues, are the product of the relations that exist among all material particles. One can judge, therefore, only by appearances and by preconceived (human) ideas of what constitutes complexity or composition.50
Although scholars choose to draw lines among animals, plants, and minerals, Buffon continues—and although these same scholars, with reason, choose to rank organisms (and inorganic collections of particles) according to their greater or lesser adherence to an abstract model “animal,” or abstract model “plant”—therefore, such division, Buffon hints, is arbitrary. Such “lines of separation” simply do not exist “in nature,” he writes, even if they exist in human minds.51 Not only is the “life” that is particularly relevant to reproduction a life that operates across organic as well as inorganic environments rather than being situated in specific, complex, organized, biological bodies, in other words, it is also something that can only be alien to abstract, cognitive, human thought. If there is a thought that goes along with life, this thought is relational, concrete, and systemic.
Given this interpretation of life or liveliness as less the embodied result of a distinct act—reproduction—than a set of concrete, systemic, and environmental relations or operations, Buffon posits furthermore that the death that is ordinarily held up as the antithesis to reproduction also eludes such simple categorizations. He writes, for example, that there are beings that are not “plant,” “animal,” or “mineral”—beings that “infest” what are frequently the dead or dying bodies of these same plants, animals, and minerals—and that these beings are as much alive as the body they inhabit (and, in fact, become) might or might not be.52 It is, moreover, important, Buffon continues, to examine as closely as one can these “intermediate beings” of organized bodies that, without reproducing like animals and plants, nonetheless possess a type of life and movement—beings that, without being animals or plants, can enter into the “constitution” of one or the other.53 These are beings, in short, that according to Buffon’s analysis, are living because of death.
Moreover, if readers do examine such beings, he writes earlier on in the chapter, they will realize that reproduction or generation is nothing more than a change of form that operates via the coming together of particles—while the “destruction” of the “organized being” happens via the division of these particles.54 And so, although the proper division that a scholar ought to make when conceiving of matter is—given the diffuse quality of “life” and the arbitrariness of abstract taxonomies—between “living matter” and “dead matter” rather than between “organized matter” and “crude/brute matter,” even this division will quickly resolve itself into a spectrum. After all, Buffon concludes, the “principle substance” underlying the rocks, marble, sand, and dirt that one ordinarily describes as “brute/crude” is nothing less than the debris or waste of dead animals and plants.55 And thus Buffon returns to his fundamental point with reference to reproduction: the life relevant to reproduction is always systemic and environmental, inorganic as well as organic
Once again, what is worth emphasizing in this discussion of life as concrete rather than abstract, as environmental rather than embodied, and as present equally in inorganic “dead” things and organic “lively” things is that it all operates as a framework for describing reproduction. The implicit point that Buffon is making is that all reproduction, including human reproduction, is embedded in life as a thinking, processing environment, accumulation, or system. A few pages before telling his readers about the “lively molecules” that make up all organisms, for example, Buffon makes clear that even the animal or human womb is more embedded in environmental processes than it is contained by discrete bodies. More specifically, he writes that during pregnancy, the womb does not grow simply in volume, but also in mass, and that it thus has its own “type of life” or its own “vegetation or development.”56
The womb is therefore, to Buffon, “not simply a sack that is destined to receive semen and contain a fetus,” it is “not simply an ordinary extension of the body”; rather, its development is as much a variation on generation as the development of the fetus itself, or of any other animal or plant.57 In short, in other words, “this type of growth is a true development, an increase [accroissement]” that can happen “only via the intimate penetration of organic molecules that are analogous to the substance of this part.”58 Furthermore, and now with reference to the placenta, he continues that one cannot say that the placenta nourishes the animal any more than the animal nourishes the placenta—the two, rather, much like the fetus and the womb, grow and develop together, as a undifferentiated living system.59
Buffon’s insistence that the womb (and placenta) have a life of their own is not new—and it could easily be read as a continuation of the Aristotelian theory of feminine hysteria. These passages could serve simply as an additional underpinning to what is ordinarily read as a philosophy of embodied, rational masculinity that becomes coherent against the backdrop of an unruly, not-quite embodied femininity. But given the theory of life writ large that Buffon develops prior to introducing his interpretation of the work of the womb—this theory of all life as a distributed, environmental, molecular, concrete, relational, and not necessarily organic accumulation or system—it is difficult to maintain such a reading.
Buffon seems, if anything, unimpressed with all bodies—gendered male, gendered female, animal, plant, bacterial, or mineral. Although it is true that his focus on the womb rather than on a particular, whole female body very much discounts the potential for, say, pregnant women to act as embodied, rational political beings, his theory of life also seems to eliminate this possibility for everything else. There is no more room for masculine embodied citizens in his interpretation of life, reproduction, and thought than there is for feminine embodied citizens. Since embodiment, writ large, is the least important aspect of life to Buffon, his focus on what sort of life the womb, mapped onto the embryo, mapped onto the lively molecules that infuse it, might live seems to lose this protoliberal, patriarchal corollary.
Indeed, given that the growth of the womb and the nourishment of the placenta that are more than mere growth and more than mere nourishment—that are development and life—appear alongside his theory that the womb conceives the fetus in the same way that the brain conceives an idea, it appears that Buffon’s emphasis, if anything, is on the equality of all living matter. He has very little interest in describing the inability of certain female bodies to do things that other male bodies might be able to do. On the contrary, by addressing reproduction with reference, first, to the impossibility of finding discrete individuals that, in a contained way, might live, second to the spectrum from organic to inorganic, lively to dead, across which this systemic life might distribute itself, and third to organs of reproduction that, in fact, have as little to do with creating life as organs of thought have to do with creating ideas—both having everything to do with, themselves, living and thinking—Buffon seems to have radically redefined, outside of embodiment and subjectivity, both the biological and the political role of reproduction.
Specifically, he has suggested that reproduction is never, even among humans, the initiation of life but rather one of many activities or operations that shift or move living systems. Reproduction is an operation that reorganizes the elements of these systems and that reconfigures relations within these systems, but that in no way begins vitality—any more than death ends it. The reason that the womb conceives an embryo in the same way that a brain conceives an idea is that neither is a self-contained organ devoted to a single end or goal (reproduction or thinking). Rather, both are embedded within and diffused throughout systems that think as they live—whose thought operations are the operations of reproduction. Or, put differently, whereas before Buffon’s writing developed a theory of life as a system of concrete thought, here it highlights reproduction as one operation within this system. As Buffon emphasizes, one cannot disregard the activities of the tiniest living particles—and just as the biological virus quite specifically thinks as it replicates its information, as it reproduces, so too does any other element or collection of elements devoted to growth or flourishing.
By the nineteenth century, variations on this theme of reproduction as thought had begun to appear in a number of venues, often in the work of scholars and commentators who, in other ways, were at methodological odds with one another. Consider, for example, historian Nick Hopwood’s discussion of the nineteenth-century controversy concerning mechanical models of embryonic growth. Hopwood begins with a thoughtful, extended analysis of the overlap between embryology and mechanical engineering, in which scholars seeking respectability for what were seen as “crude” mechanical models, “represented,” say “the nervous system as a telegraph, the eye as a photometer, and the ear as a tuning-fork interrupter with attached resonators.”60 From there, Hopwood describes the unexpected eventual success of such campaigns—noting that tools such as the microtome, as they made cutting increasingly thin slices of specimens possible, seemed to give the embryo over to mechanical representation. Such tools, he writes, were key to the “reorientation of the objects of research from living organisms in their environments to the internal topography of fixed and sectioned specimens.”61
No longer “crude,” in other words, modeling became central to the study of embryos—and for a number of decades, scientists capable of, first, observing fixed, detailed, sectioned specimens and, second, re-creating or modeling these specimens or sections of specimens, even according to engineering models, were apparently winning the argument. Despite the (to some, damaging) “loss of the capacity to visualize whole organisms,” that is to say, despite the related “loss of an appreciation for how [these organisms] functioned in environments,” and despite the fact that sectioning seemed to “alienat[e] [students of embryology] from life,”62 sectioning, observing, and modeling became among the more respectable means of defining and interpreting embryonic development. By the 1960s, one anatomist, Erich Blechschmidt, had “filled a room in his institute with a collection of fifty plastic embryos, on average 1.8 m tall, and each reconstructed from thousands of serial sections.”63
But later on in the twentieth century, Hopwood continues, accepted best practice among embryologists shifted yet again. Indeed, “Until recently,” he writes, “a theory-dominated historiography conspired with experimentalist condescension toward the work of visualizing form to hide plastic reconstruction from view.”64 Even this quite recent shift, however, has been subject to challenge. As Hopwood concludes, “Developmental biologists interested in the mechanisms of embryogenesis can hardly fail to notice how much of their time is now spent inventing new and often computerized means of visualizing intricate patterns in two dimensions and, increasingly, in three.”65 There is thus, according to Hopwood, a direct link between contemporary work in developmental biology and the work of nineteenth-century embryologists whose practice of making “the form of the embryonic body tangible in the first place” helped to persuade them “of the importance of mechanical principles in its development.”66
This is a fascinating narrative—and a narrative that seems to rest, once again, on a tension, if a productive tension, between two incompatible modes of describing and representing reproductive life. On the one hand, there are those concerned with, apparently, the body as an implicitly unthinking machine in parts, with the developing embryo as something that can be isolated, observed, divided, fixed, immobilized, modeled, and turned mechanical. On the other hand, there are the opponents of this approach—those concerned both explicitly and implicitly with something called “life” and something called “the environment.” These nonmechanistically inclined scholars are theorists rather than engineers. Rather than isolating, sectioning, and necessarily killing their specimens, they ask how these specimens operate, think, and live as wholes. They are concerned with embodied life and its relation to life-giving environments. Once again, it would seem that these two approaches are destined always to rise and fall in inverse relation to one another—as one is in the ascendant, the other must necessarily be in eclipse.
But are these two approaches as opposed to one another as they appear to be? Is the one really about dead, isolated, unthinking machines and the other really about live, embodied, contemplative organisms? One way to approach these questions is to return to a debate in the field of biotechnology that has appeared already in the book. Hannah Landecker, recall, critiqued the recent commodification of “biologicals” for laboratory consumption in much the same way that whole-organism-minded embryologists criticized their “engineering” counterparts. Once again, the problem with young scientists purchasing their materials rather than growing them whole, as Landecker explained it, was that these scientists became alienated from “life”—from the organism as a whole, operating within its natural environment. As Landecker put it, new scientists in the biotech industry took on in this way, and perhaps disturbingly, the perspective of the parasite or virus that they were ostensibly seeking to control. The important distinctions between body and environment, between whole and part, and—perhaps most important for the purposes of this chapter—between life as thought and life as reproduction fell apart when the purchase of biologicals became widespread.
Once again, though, this shift does not necessarily suggest an unproductive set of scientific techniques. Indeed, if one returns to Hopwood’s narrative, and if one observes this story of two techniques in constant tension with one another from, precisely, the perspective of the parasite, perhaps what presents itself is not an opposition, but a mutually reinforcing story of reproductive life as thought. Perhaps, that is to say, the mechanical engineers were also environmentalists. And perhaps it is only by reading the two stories together that commentators can find the informational as intellectual reproductive life at the heart of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century embryology.
The move, for example, from taking specific, self-contained machines—say, tuning forks—as a model for the development of an embryonic part to stocking entire rooms with ever-thinner slices of specimens in order to describe the general operation of embryonic development resembles nothing so much as the move that happened across the same 150 years from embedding computational thought in a single, discrete mechanical operation to distributing it across a room of switches. Blechschmidt’s mid-twentieth-century room-sized embryo—this embryo that is both distributed and contained—this embryo that seems so gratuitously divided and unraveled while also controlled and fixed, is the organic equivalent of a Turing machine. It is as environmental as the ostensibly natural environments within which the nonmechanistically inclined liked to place their, again, ostensibly more living, organisms, but it is also mechanical and informational. It is about the coming together of life, thought, information, and operation.
Or, put differently, unlike the natural environment/natural organism model, the model suggested in the room-sized embryo—as both organism and operation—does not ignore reproduction. By insisting on the simultaneity of machine, organism, information, and environment, on the simultaneity of parts and on the absence of a whole, the room-sized embryo model does not reduce reproduction to the mysterious, occult moment that initiates the process that one can understand—growth or flourishing. On the contrary, by emphasizing the constant play of information across these material systems, it keeps reproduction in motion as, once more, an operation that repeatedly shifts fields of matter and thought.
The room-sized embryo in slices, in other words, is in many ways a logical conclusion to Hément’s egg—each is both mill and store, both set of instructions and source of information or vitality to replicate. But the room-sized embryo in slices is also, like its contemporary, the room-sized computer, a combination of machine, information, and thought. By refusing to separate embryo from environment, by turning the embryo itself into an environment, it holds out the possibility of a biopolitics that is intellectual as well as reproductive—a biopolitics that makes difficult, if not impossible, any argument between those who seem to work with dead things and those who seem to work with live things. Life and thought, together, operate throughout and across these environmental systems.
But what about these later twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century discussions of embryonic development, life, and thought? Are they as conducive to alternative interpretations of embryonic life as a mode of incomplete, informational, open-ended, accidental, and present rather than future thought as their eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century counterparts seem to have been? One place to look for an answer to these questions is, once more, in the debate concerning the relationship between mature cerebral plasticity and embryonic plasticity that Prochiantz’s work reopened.67 Indeed, Prochiantz’s work, in particular, seemed to have revivified these earlier conversations about the mutability, rather than fixity, of the brain and embryo as thinking matter.
As Rees, observing Prochiantz’s lab, has noted, for example, Prochiantz’s conclusions in the late 1980s struck the neuroscience community as “simply impossible.”68 In particular, Prochiantz’s observation, that homeoproteins—molecules that before had been “associated exclusively with embryogenesis”—not only appeared in the adult brain but also could cross cellular membranes within the brain, was difficult to accept.69 Among the implications of such a description were that “embryogenetic processes” might continue “in the mature nervous system,” that “new neurons could emerge or that old ones could change their form or the form of their connections,” that “new synapses could grow,” and that plasticity rather than fixity might be “the main feature of the [mature] brain.”70
More broadly, Prochiantz’s work implied that the apparent early twentieth-century triumph of geneticists or theorists of “mechanistic” development—those who claimed that “development is merely a mechanical, physicochemical realization of preformed traits embedded in genes”—over biologists or “experimental embryologists,” who described development as “an ‘undetermined’ and ‘open’ process that cannot be reduced to any kind of deterministic preformationist concept,” had been grossly overstated.71 Rather, “Plastic reasoning,” as Rees puts it, “opened up the possibility of thinking . . . the nervous system as an emergent form, a form in formation, with homeoproteins as the key to ceaseless formation processes.”72
Even more fundamental, or fundamentally disturbing, to existing neuroscientific (and political) theory, Prochiantz’s work reconceived, Rees writes, what it meant to be human. After first, linking “thought”—the characteristic that apparently differentiates humans from all other organisms—directly to the “embryological processes” that so many other nonhuman, and even nonanimal, things undergo, Prochiantz went on to suggest a striking corollary:
If human evolution is due to the emergence of adult cerebral plasticity, and if this plasticity is due to the continued expression of homeotic genes in the mature nervous system, then . . . the event that makes all of us human [is] the nonautonomous transfer of homeoproteins in the adult brain.73
Just as Buffon, Demangeon, Duméril, Hément, DeLattre, Preyer, and Şakir had insisted upon a unique relationship between embryonic development and thought, contemplation, or sensitivity, in other words, so too did Prochiantz. And just as these earlier commentators thereby shattered existing theories of what it meant to exist politically, as a human being, so too did Prochiantz. Prochiantz’s work changed what it meant to be human, and therefore what it meant to be political. For, as Rees concludes this section of his argument, “Where once fixity reigned, now plasticity rules. Where once the basic feature of the neurological human was its relative immutability, it is now its openness toward the future, its capacity for ongoing adaptation.”74 Where once the defining characteristic of human thought was its discrete, abstract, and generalizing ability to reach a fixed goal, now it was its open-ended, unbounded, incomplete, dependent, and frequently random processing.
But by emphasizing Prochiantz’s assault on existing theories of what it means to be human, is Rees perhaps missing an additional, equally vital, implication of Prochiantz’s work? After all, it does seem that Prochiantz, like his predecessors, is effectively marginalizing the brain-as-mind even as he is using it as a starting point for his analysis. By describing it not as a self-contained, fixed organ of cognition, but as a mass of living, thinking, dispersed matter, a cellular environment with strikingly permeable cellular membranes traversed by molecules that were always thought to be the sort to stay put, as an open-ended organic system that, importantly, is best mapped onto the equally open-ended embryonic system of anything but rational cognition, he, too, seems to be suggesting that thought is less the work of the brain than of a constantly operating (and indeed malfunctioning) accumulation or assemblage.
And just as this devaluing of cognition blurred or eliminated the line between what had been a purely human contemplative life and the contemplative life of other organisms, environments, or inorganic processes—between, essentially, thinking humans and thinking bacteria or thinking information processes—in the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twenty-century embryological writing, so too, it seems, does the work of Prochiantz. Yes, that is to say, Prochiantz’s research resonates beyond the field of neuroscience—there are clear political or philosophical challenges embedded in his work. But this is not so much because he and his team redefined what it meant to be human; on the contrary, it is because they redefined the type of thought that used to relegate politics to a purely human sphere. By demonstrating that human thought is, at best, a variation on open-ended embryonic growth, they have posited that human cognition is for the most part a sideshow in the infinitely more vital work of unbounded thought. The brain is a good place to look for this alternative mode of thinking life—but this is only because the brain, plastic as it is, maps so well onto, or seeps so well into, other, extended, systems of thought.
Indeed, the relative triviality of both the brain-as-mind and the human as possessor of such a mind leads, unexpectedly, perhaps, back to Aristotle, Alexander, and Simplicius. Once again, Rees frames Prochiantz’s work within the two-century-old conflict between mechanistic models of thought and (or as) development and plastic models of thought and development—with Prochiantz launching a surprisingly effective set of arguments in favor of the latter. Models that draw on machines or technology suggest fixed, determined ends, he, like Henry, implies, and these models are always at odds with the contingent, iterative models that emphasize plasticity. But, just as Aristotle’s conclusions regarding embryonic development can be read as a synchronization of machine or technology and chaotic processing—as computational—so too can Prochiantz’s.
The concrete matter that thinks as it does work, that evolves and contemplates as it makes mistakes, that is always growing, shrinking, and changing is nothing if not mechanical—especially when remembering, as Demangeon did, the productive, even while irrational, capacity of machines to go “haywire.” Granting to machines their informational, cascading, and dysfunctional iterative qualities, in other words, leaves mechanistic models anything but deterministic. And indeed, in this way Prochiantz’s writing can be read as, itself, one further iteration of a well-established scholarly tradition that recognizes the radically inclusive character not just of life but of thought, a tradition that seeks out intellectual life not just in human brains, not just in human bodies, but in the molecules that work through cellular and informational environments, an intellectual life that emerges not just in complex organisms, but also in the cells that reproduce themselves across and beyond these organisms, and an intellectual life that appears just as clearly in the inorganic, mechanical processes that sometimes mimic or model organic processing, but that have their own, unique work to do.
More pointedly, this story of environmental, organic, and also inorganic thinking life—of life that is mechanical and indeterminate—is also a story of a similarly inclusive political life. After all, with the possible exception of Preyer, none of the scholars who contributed to this broadly sketched story of life-as-thought—this story of a biopolitics of thought that manifests itself, among other places, in embryonic development—was an enemy of Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment political engagement. None doubted the validity of some variation on modern, rational, democratic engagement. On the contrary, it was the blending of modern political or biopolitical mores and modern research into the simultaneity of life and thought that granted to their interventions—deliberate or not—its political and democratic punch.
It is because Şakir was so deeply invested in the positivist state-building initiated by the Young Turks that his oddly evocative conflation of what sounds quite a lot like Darwin’s heath75 and the anencephalic newborn’s brain resonates. His point is that there is room even in this most rational and objective—sometimes troublingly so—of political structures for open-ended, contingent models of life and thought. Similarly, it is because Hément also served as inspector general of French public instruction that his description of the brain as a collection of operating, developing stuff—stuff that may or may not come together as a complete organ—carried with it its political implications. Schools molded children into rational, self-conscious, disciplined individual citizens—into discrete political subjects. But political belonging, it seemed, need not necessarily rely on individualization or subjectivity. The environmental matter that never quite came together into a whole was also thinking, also intellectual, and also, if implicitly, participating in French democracy.
The embryo, therefore, yes, did pose a seemingly insurmountable challenge to political theories of life—and thinking life—in a variety of historical and geographical contexts. But the easy response to this challenge—describing the embryo as pure potential, as potential life, potential thought, and potential embodied, rational citizen with rights—was by no means the only response that appeared over the millennia. Alongside stories that relegated the embryo to the role of problem or prologue to proper human political engagement appeared equally insistent, and frequently more haunting, stories of the embryo in the, or its, present rather than future—of the embryo as embryo, never quite complete, never quite whole, but always working, developing, and thinking. Taken together, these stories not only contributed an important counterpoint to the more vocal narrative of embodied political subjectivity, but also rescued reflection, meditation, memory, sensitivity, and a sense of the present from the trash heap of political or biopolitical history.
Or, as Rees’s reading of Prochiantz implies, there is a virtue to approaching the embryo as a model rather than as something to be modeled. There is an ethical as well as a scientific value in asking not how or whether embryonic material might think, but how or whether thinking can be embryonic—in locating embryogenesis quite specifically in what had been the fixed and, to biopolitical theory, already largely irrelevant, organ of cognition. It was only by taking the embryo as a model for thought that scientists such as Prochiantz were able to reconfigure not just neuroscientific research paradigms, but also democratic theory. And it has only been by mapping the brain onto the developing embryo that scholars over the past three centuries—if not the past two millennia—have been able to explore the muted but vitally important affirmative qualities of the politics of life. It is only by conflating thought and development that scholars have been able to demonstrate that matter and information can be intellectual as well as reproductive—and that reproducing matter is thinking matter.
Although historical scholarship on embryology and fetal development is only one place, of many, to begin a history of this alternative mass democracy—this history of life as thought, but not necessarily as organic thought—it is also, at least in some ways, a uniquely valuable field in which to undertake such an endeavor. The egg, the embryo, and the fetus have—more than many other material and informational formulations—traditionally posed radical challenges to what are otherwise intuitively acceptable definitions of both political life and political thought. Embryos are a difficulty for democratic theorists. But starting with embryonic material makes sense because it is uncomfortable—because it unsettles.
This does not mean, of course, that conventional, human-centered political theory has not risen to the challenge posed by the embryo. Over the centuries a number of responses to embryonic uncertainty have been floated. Once again, though, ordinarily, the responses to these challenges—responses that remain remarkably consistent throughout the classical, early modern, and modern periods—have addressed the political threats posed by embryonic life by highlighting embryonic potential. By always situating the embryo in the future, by always assuming a single, reproductive moment in the past, and by always ignoring the messy present, these responses have managed to fit the embryo nicely into stories of life either as thought or as organic flourishing. Conventional political theory can thus argue either that life is potential rationality or that life is potential reproduction, and, depending on its ideological commitment, it can invest embryonic material with such life or not.
As this chapter has demonstrated, however, this move, influential as it has been, is not the only move characteristic of modern work on life and embryos. Embedded within the varied, and sometimes deliberately antagonistic, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century texts that make up the scientific and political narrative of the embryo is also a well-articulated alternative to this future-oriented approach. Within this literature are repeated reconceptions of what embryonic thought—and thus embryonic life—entails. Evacuating rationality—the search for defined goals, abstraction, and completeness—from their definitions of thought, students of embryology, relying on a variety of methods, instead favored a definition of thought that invoked the incomplete, the irrational, the operational, and the endless. By reconceiving thought in this way, these researchers began to situate thinking life in an ongoing set of unbounded environmental operations, rather than in a discrete and finite, if always potential, body. The apparent dichotomy between biological life and thinking life—this dichotomy that ostensibly could be resolved only in the future—in this way evaporated.
Moreover, having reconceived life and thought in this way, a path was cleared not only for a new theory of political existence as thinking existence, but for a theory of reproductive activity as a thought operation. With the virus, bacterium, or slime as an implicit if not explicit model, with embryonic life as environmental life, reproduction ceased to be a single, initiating act, and instead became an ongoing set of systemic operations. Once rationality had ceased to be the key quality of thought, once thought became embedded, material, and contingent, describing organic operations like reproduction as thought operations—conflating information transfer with material growth—became not only possible, but necessary. Or, put differently, addressing reproduction as an infinite computational function became, in every sense of the word, natural. Historical work in the field of embryology has thus, perhaps unexpectedly, set up a solid foundation for the flourishing of both life and thought in the contemporary democratic public sphere.