Doing Theory: Life, Ethics, And Force

Introduction: Doing Theory

"Theory is about whose lives matter and how."

—Stefan Helmreich

Daniela Gandorfer and Zulaikha Ayub:

In this Matterphorical issue, we want to think about the production of meaning in its inextricability from matter, with meaning understood not as representational (i.e. as a semiotic or symbolic quality or quantity), but rather as something constantly being carried (phora/ϕορά) "with," "after" or "between" (meta-/μετα-) semantic domains while also always traveling with or through an entanglement with matter—where "matter" is understood not as fixed substance, but, following Karen Barad's claim, as "substance in its intra-active becoming," as such "not situated in the world" but "worlding in its materiality."¹ We are concerned with those political, aesthetic, legal, social, technological, physical, and environmental entanglements that not only shape but are onto-epistemologically constitutive of processes of knowledge and meaning production and transmission.

We are interested, in other words, in theory—not only understood as a way of conceptualizing, but also as a mode of making sense of and sensing material-discursive practices. We assume neither a singular nor universal approach to theory, but rather seek modes that traverse disciplines, genres of analysis, and fields of knowledge. Doing theory, as we understand it, also means working collaboratively rather than under the assumption that ideas are the products of singular ingenious minds, products to be owned and defended by their authors, or to be articulated in intellectual and spatial isolation. We think, thus, not of 'theory' in the abstract, but of doing theory.

We wanted to talk with you because we have found your work helpful to us in that project. Across your anthropological work you have been interested in how scientists—in the life sciences, in oceanography, in acoustics, in social theory—make knowledge claims through tacking back and forth between concepts and practice. So, for example, in Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World; Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas; and Sounding the Limits of Life, you offer ethnographic accounts of communities of biologists who are investigating the limits of the category of 'life. Your research has centered on three cases: computational theoretical biologists, marine microbiologists, and astrobiologists. You investigate how scientists in each of these fields think about the limits of life: as an intellectual matter of framing an encompassing theory of the biological realm (as, e.g., in theories of "life" that have it as a genre of information processing or, instead, as an auto- or symbiopoietic unfolding), as an empirical matter of finding edge cases of vitality (as, e.g., in the deep sea, where bacteria use chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis), and as a practice of biotechnological intervention that may result in new biotic things that amplify what counts as "biology," as flesh and discipline. In addition to this work, you have also written on transformations in dominant scientific accountings of such concepts/phenomena as "sex/gender," "race," "culture," "seawater," "sound," and, recently, "waves."

But let us start with another concept/phenomenon you've examined: theory. Theory, you write in Sounding the Limits of Life, is "at once an abstraction as well as a thing in the world," which is why we might "think of theory neither as set above the empirical nor as simply deriving from it but, rather, as crossing the empirical transversely."² You suggest, too, that scholars and others might operate "athwart theory," "tacking back and forth between seeing theories as explanatory tools and taking them as phenomena to be examined."³ Theory, we infer from thinking with you, is in and of the world. And as such, it is inextricable from the forces involved in the making and becoming of world(s). Interestingly, your work often refers to forces—to forces of different kinds, including: motive forces⁴ ; human and non-human forces; social, political, and economic forces⁵ ; sociocultural forces; formatting forces⁶ ; structuring forces.⁷ But let's loop back before getting to the question of force: What is theory for you?

Stefan Helmreich:

First off, thanks so much for organizing this conversation. I've been...