Making futures by suspending life: Cryopreservation practices as technologies of anticipation

Abstract

A growing body of work has emerged in the past two decades in geography, sociology and STS that argues for the need to explore how different futures are enacted through socio-material assemblages. Within this research, the concept of anticipation plays a crucial role. Derived from the Latin “anticipare” (literally: taking care of something ahead of time), anticipation defines a mode of future-making that authorises actions in the here and now in the name of the future.

My guiding assumption is that in contemporary societies anticipation is becoming more and more bound up with concrete technoscientific practices that allow for the pursuit of some futures and “world-orders” (Andersson and Kemp 2021: 4), while others are suspended or even foreclosed. I will focus on cryopreservation practices that allow deep-freezing and storing organic material to reanimate it at some point in the future. I argue that cryotechnologies seek to provide solutions to a range of societal and political problems from preparing for collective threats such as ecological disasters to pre-empting individual risks such as loss of fertility.

As well as anticipating temporal pathways and horizons, cryopreservation practices engender new spatial configurations. The technological option of successfully freezing and thawing human and non-human biospecimens has fostered the development of a new archival apparatus, cryobanks, to store vital matter at low temperatures for long or (possibly) indefinite periods. The talk will attend to the power asymmetries and operational tensions involved in the enactment of cryopreservation practices to inquire which forms of life are to be protected, enhanced, or saved (and which are excluded, marginalised, or destroyed).