Tracing Hawking: On the Metaphysics of Distributed Subjectivity

A review of Hélène Mialet, Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Cited in the text as hi.

During a weeklong visit to Hong Kong in the summer of 2006, Stephen Hawking made a startling recommendation concerning humanity’s continued presence in the universe: “It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” the ap quotes. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”¹ For a few weeks Hawking enjoyed a surge of attention from news media, and in the years since then he has troubled the popular press two or three more times with similar climacterics over our existential sustainability.² Indeed, when “one of the most brilliant minds of a generation”³ expresses doubts about the duration of humanity’s tenure in the solar system, our globalized media apparatuses turn ponderously over the details: What is “sudden global warming”? How do we consider “dangers we have not yet thought of”? Yet, perhaps, only in Hélène Mialet’s Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject does Hawking’s recommendation—“spread out into space”—recognize its dual significance. For it is not only humanity’s proliferation of distinct homeostatic bodies, one finds, that preoccupies Hawking—bodies that, in his purview, must spread out to reduce the odds of global extinction. Rather, this desire is but one in many that evidences the diffusive properties of an imminent subjectivity seeking to disseminate itself across time and space. In her diligent anthropological inquiry into how Hawking mobilizes his environment to shift between “Hawking,” the scientist, and “hawking,” the celebrity genius, Mialet establishes a metaphysics of subjectivity in which one’s actor-network, with almost organismic precocity, “spreads out into space” so as to both naturalize and obliterate the singularity of the individual.

What this review calls Mialet’s “metaphysics of subjectivity” is not the same as Heidegger’s eponymous construction—which, as Derrida notes, depends on a humanistic conception of “Spirit” (Geist) in its anticipation of the subject.⁴ Nor is it exactly, though it perhaps more closely resembles, Nietzsche’s “absolute subjectity of the body, of impulsions and affects: the unconditioned subjectity of the will to power” (os, 73). Instead, Mialet’s anthropological ethnology of Hawking as subject tracks his bodily and extra-bodily processes to allow for a diffusion of subjectivity that becomes and exceeds “Hawking.” But as an interdisciplinary project that aligns itself with practices as sundry as science studies, anthropology, and even, sometimes, critical theory, Hawking Incorporated performs some of the diffusive yet unifying processes it explores in the individual: it asks, as Mario Biagioli suggests science studies as a discipline must, “how science works,” but it also asks how Hawking as image, network, and (importantly) human works to perform science; and asks, moreover, how a reader—in this case the ethnologist—can come to generate an account of so many types of knowledge production.⁵

But before we discuss how Mialet reconfigures disciplinary models, we must ask, what, in Hawking Incorporated, are the diffusive properties of Hawking’s subjectivity, and how do they trouble our notion of the individual? In the nearly fifty years following Hawking’s development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), he has gradually lost mobility in each of his major muscle groups. Moreover, since an emergency tracheotomy in 1985, he has found himself unable to “speak,” necessitating the innovation of a host of communication technologies that give him the synthesized voice by and through which we know him today. But rather than rendering him illegible, Mialet argues, these limitations on his movement and elocution have amplified the extent to which his subjectivity is both present and extended: “The machine does not dehumanize the man,” she says, “but it multiplies his subjectivity” (hi, 87). Indeed, across...