What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits
of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how
contemporary scientists--biologists, oceanographers, and audio
engineers--are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and
sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and
formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology,
rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these
phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points,
breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and
virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences,
marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich
follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the
way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities
as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater,
extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He
develops a new notion of "sounding"--as investigating, fathoming,
listening--to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking
meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a
time of global change and climate crisis. Sounding the Limits of
Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they
once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under
dynamic revision.
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