Living on buffered time: Toward another sociology of storage

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the role of storage for social time. While social theory has largely interpreted storage in spatial terms, a recent body of literature explores how cold storage technologies affect society's relationship with time. The ability to suspend life in ice, several scholars argue, leads to a new relationship with time: the future becomes malleable as frozen cells, tissues and seeds are options with which events can be reversed, action can be postponed, and the status quo can be preserved. However, a growing number of empirical studies of cold storage complicates this hypothesis, finding that these technologies are often used to accelerate action instead. The divergence, this article argues, can be understood by linking the assumptions underlying the suspension hypothesis to sociological concepts like value, expectations, and especially practice. It argues that under certain circumstances, storage is best understood as dynamic rather than static. Taking in things and releasing them at different rates, it acts as a form of buffer that can link social activity and flows of different speeds and rhythms without imposing a shared temporality on them. On these grounds, the article pleads for a broadened understanding of storage as a social technique that affects both space and time.

Few things are as ubiquitous as storage. Our homes are equipped with freezers, rain barrels, basements, and attics. Modern landscapes are interspersed with reservoirs, grain elevators, and water towers. Battery production and the levels of strategic oil reserves are matters of ecological importance and national security. Historians dig into archives, economists crawl databases, taxonomists flock to natural history museums. Whether to keep one's money in a bank account, in gold, in real estate, or under a mattress is a topic that can spell the fate of a dinner – as can a spoiled pack of milk or ground meat. Keeping things in store is far from a modern phenomenon, however: what we know about civilizations past we often have learned from the remnants and contents of their storage facilities: cellars, amphoras, wells, or sunken freight holds (Renfrew 2011).

Despite our reliance on countless forms of storage, however, it is especially the relationship between time and storage that social theory struggles with. Classical sociological, historical, and anthropological texts have highlighted how the emergence of storage technologies and practices changed how people formed bonds in and with space: granaries and reservoirs, they argue, led to a shift from nomadic to sedentary lifestyles; facilitating the rise of cities, trade networks, and civilizations, stores lastingly shaped the world's geography. In contrast, storage's impact on social time—the way we organize, distribute, or concentrate time (Adam 1990: 100–126)—has remained an under-explored topic.

The aim of this article, therefore, is to broaden sociological perspectives on storage with respect to time. Storage, I argue, has profound implications for how we relate to past, present, and future. This argument is developed by taking up a recent argument from theories of ultra-cold storage technologies used by biobanks in medicine, conservation biology, plant breeding, and other life sciences, inspired among others by Michel Foucault's (1978) work. So-called cryopreservation allows to freeze living cells, tissues, and fluids to later thaw them and use their properties to intervene in biological—and thereby social—processes. A rich literature in sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, among others, has argued that the ability to prepare for biopolitical eventualities affects our relationship with the present and future (Folkers 2019; Keck 2017; Kowal and Radin 2015). Connecting this ability to Niklas Luhmann's (1981) concept of the “extended present,” some scholars have put forward a particularly convincing formulation of cryopreservation's temporal effect: stored organic materials can be used to reverse events, thus conserving the present and delaying the advent of an undesired future (Lemke 2023a; Wolff 2021).

This option to reverse and defer has implications for the value of frozen materials in the future as assessed from the present, be it as insurance or as a continuous source of income. Cryopreservation and biobanks, several scholars have thus suggested, should be understood as part of a future-oriented capitalism that delays action in the present yet seeks to maximize stored value by holding on to it as long as possible (Breithoff and Harrison 2020; Friedrich 2020). However, while early studies of commercial biobanks indeed find that biobanking organizations follow this logic, more recent empirical work has pointed to storage practices that are not easily reconciled with it: rather than holding on to stored valuables, biobanks are getting rid of them, reducing their intake, or accelerating their present use (Beltrame and Hauskeller 2018; Beltrame 2020; Lafuente-Funes 2023; Liburkina 2023, 2024). Examining the findings of this literature, I discuss what limits or overrides the ability to store and thus maximize value indefinitely.

Beyond relativizing the idea of an extended present, these empirical studies also offer a novel perspective for understanding biobanks, cryopreservation, and storage practices in general. Their findings, I argue, shed light on the role of storage as a buffer. This buffer does not simply make up for unsuspected shortfalls of resources over time. More fundamentally, it constantly mediates between practices with different temporalities, making it possible to link them without subordinating them to a shared regime of time. To make this argument, I compare the use of high-tech freezing technologies in reproductive clinics (Lafuente-Funes 2023) with practice studies of mundane household refrigerators (Watkins 2008): in both cases, storage is used to decouple or rearrange the patterns and paces of practices that rely on each other. This principle of buffering can be found in the function of many different forms of storage and is key for connecting social flows in modern society. The article concludes with an outlook on the social study of storage, pleading for a renewed attention to the ways in which storage supports social activities, processes, and developments.

Through space and time: Storage in social theory

Sociology, anthropology, and history have never been oblivious to storage and its significance for social life. Historical–anthropological accounts early on tried to make sense of its role for the development of societies. The storehouse, theorists like Weber (2019: 193, 366), Testart (1982), or Mann (1984) have argued, was the germ cell of agrarian societies and the early state: it accumulated agronomic surpluses, concentrated them in a central place, and allowed whoever ruled of this facility to redistribute wealth, thus serving as a source of political, epistemic, and economic power. On a smaller scale, especially in anthropology and archeology, there is also some attention to the reformatting and centering of family and farm life around storage facilities in agrarian societies, which translates the argument about state power into one about everyday life in early societies (Renfrew 2011: 287–307).

Here, storage is primarily examined with regard to its centrality to social life and as an accumulation of resources. As storage facilities occupy a fixed position in the landscape, Testart (1982) argues, people abandon seasonal migration in favor of a sedentary lifestyle in settlements around their growing, communal stores. ¹ In his discussion of hydraulic technologies like dams and reservoirs in East Asian agricultural history, Wittfogel (1957) develops a similar argument. The construction of such large-scale facilities raised yields above the levels of dry European fields but unlike the latter required cooperation beyond the small family. As a result, Wittfogel claims, Eastern societies built on irrigated agriculture (or stores that could take in water rather than harvests) developed distinct forms of governance that diverge from Western ones.

In this context, the distinction between containers, storage, and stockpiling warrants attention. Although interlinked, the terms differ in emphasis and conceptualization. There is a broad literature especially in material culture, science and technology studies, anthropology, and archeology (Bauer et al. 2020; Shyrock and Smail 2018) that centers on the container as its object. A container is a more or less closed object that can take in other objects, holding them together or shielding them from the outside world. ² The study of containers is highly informative for a sociology of storage. In singling out physical structures that erect a division between inside and outside, I would however argue, the term directs attention away from how these structures connect to, rather than shut out, social processes. A container can be understood as a standalone entity whereas storage should always include the routines, rationalities, and effects of putting things on the side and preserving them. In this sense, “storage” implies both a more social and temporal focus than the predominantly spatial category of “container.” Similarly, storage is not simply synonymous with stockpiling (Keck 2017: 123): the latter, as we will see, implies a narrower rationality and a specific temporal horizon. In contrast, storage is used here as an overarching term for a plurality of spatial, temporal, and social arrangements meant to preserve things.

A series of more recent works in social and economic history illustrates these differences well. They have offered a more dynamic picture of storage by exploring the emergence of mobile containers and stores in modern times. Over the course of the 19th century, Cronon (1991), Freidberg (2009), Rees (2013), and others point out, the emergence of artificial ice, rail-linked grain elevators, refrigerated trains, cooled cargo ships, and other nodal and mobile stores allowed to remake production, commerce, and consumption across the West. The rise of Chicago, chronicled so vividly by Cronon (1991), is the result of a new articulation of storage with other forms of infrastructure like railways and canals. Agricultural goods were now able to flow upstream, could be sold off-season and away from their place of origin, and were subjected to financial speculation on the future. While some goods are still stockpiled, storage emerges here not as a means of separating things from but connecting them to the world. And if stores are a source of spatial concentration of social life in the older historical–anthropological literature, they function as a force of its spatial expansion in this genre of economic historiography (Law 2012). Put on wheels or water and linked to railway tracks, they reconnect flows of resources that would otherwise be separated by geography.

Cryopower and time

Moreover, this literature links this spatial effect with an argument about social time: by means of cooled freight, fruit and vegetables can today be procured year-round from across the world (Freidberg 2009: 18–48; Schönach 2019). It is here that this body of scholarship connects to a number of recent works on the mechanisms and social significance of cooling technologies as a particular type of storage (Friedrich and Höhne 2016). Informed by fields as diverse as the history of technology (Landecker 2010; Radin 2017), medical anthropology (Keck 2017; Kowal and Radin 2015), governmentality and security studies (Folkers 2019; Keck 2017), the philosophy of life (Karafyllis 2020; Lemke 2023b), or science and technology studies, a flourishing literature has emerged in recent years that studies the role of cold storage practices and devices for society. ³

Among others, this scholarly interest in cold is owed to the rise of cryopreservation technologies like pharmaceutical freezers and liquid nitrogen tanks. These stores can produce extreme cold and have proliferated into various industries and realms of life (Radin 2017), especially in the form of biobanks, which can today be found in more and more medical and life science institutions (Aarden 2024; Liburkina 2024; Swanson 2014).

The temperatures at which these stores operate (usually between −80 and −196 °C) lead to a considerable slowing of cells’ physiological activity, down to a de facto arrest of life functions. If properly preserved and thawed, however, it is possible for this organic material to fully resume its function (Lemke 2023b), which lends itself to a growing range of applications (Radin 2017). For example, cryopreserved animal semen frozen decades ago continues to sire offspring today, even where a species’ population has already vanished (Nelson and O’Riordan 2024), and fertilized embryos can remain in the freezer long after their parents have divorced (Lafuente-Funes 2025). This challenges established notions like parenthood, extinction, or life, especially where they assume a particular order of time now drawn into question by cryopreservation.

Central concepts that have emerged this debate are the notion of suspension (Lemke 2023a, 2023b; Wolff 2021) and those of cryopower and cryopolitics (Friedrich 2017), which are linked to Foucaultian arguments about biopower. Against the background of Foucault's concepts of biopower and biopolitics, and their immensely stimulating effect on social theory, this discourse on cryopreservation seeks a new formulation of the contemporary governance of individual and collective life. In this context, authors have put forward five ways in which they argue social time is remade by this form of storage: arresting biological time, making irreversible events and processes reversible, extending the present, postponing action, and orienting political imperatives and economic value toward the future. All five, I argue, offer important insights for a sociology of storage beyond the specific case of cryopreservation—even though, as we shall see, their implicit assumptions require qualification.

The arrest or suspension of life, as Kowal and Radin (2015) as well as Lemke (2023a, 2023b, 2024) call it, consists in a slowing of metabolic and chemical processes inside frozen cells, tissues, and fluids, down to a de-facto standstill (Lemke 2023b). As a result, these organic materials barely age—if at all—while cryopreserved. ⁴ What distinguishes this suspension from death is that it can be reversed: if properly thawed, a considerable share of the frozen materials will resume biological activity. The ability to suspend and resume (rather than simply abort) organic processes in cryopreservation has prompted a reformulation of Foucault's (1978: 138) definition of biopower as the “power to foster life or disallow it” to, in Friedrich's and Höhne's words, “make live and not let die” (Friedrich and Höhne 2016: 114; cf. Lemke 2023a: 138; Radin and Kowal 2017b: 63). Simultaneously, it undermines the idea of biological time as characterized by irreversibility and age (Adam 1990: 82, 89).

The retention of vital potential inside tanks and freezers also allows for their retrieval and use in the outside world to reverse undesired events. Wolff (2021) gives the example of frozen seed at the Svalbard Seed Vault, which he argues is meant to reverse plants' extinction through thawing and reintroduction. Similarly, Lemke (2023a) illustrates how first arresting and then reactivating the metabolism of oocytes on a biological level can be used to reverse the onset of infertility on a social level through reimplantation. The possibility of extending the reversal from the inside of the nitrogen tank to its outside highlights the sociological implication of this technology. ⁵ Both authors draw on Luhmann's (1981) theory of the present to formulate cryopreservation's impact on social time. Luhmann distinguishes two different forms of the present: that of restlessly progressing clock-time, marking the thin boundary between past and future, and that of a continuous present, which lasts as long as we can return to its state of affairs (Tang 2013). Whatever happens in this second present does not herald the beginning of the future as long as it can be reversed, that is, if it cannot establish a difference between “before” and “after” (Luhmann 1981: 141).

From this emerging ability to reverse biological and social time, two collective imperatives follow, it is argued. The first, as Chrulew (2017: 296–297), Wolff (2021: 81), and Lemke (2023a: 711–712) state, is to postpone action from the present to the future. Rather than addressing extinction and its causes here and now, plant and animal material should simply be collected and cryopreserved, to be thawed and rewilded only in the future. “Thus, the politics of suspension might contribute to tendencies to preserve the status quo by putting on hold necessary political and social transformations” (Lemke 2023a: 712). ⁶ Nevertheless, the future reappears as the temporal frame in which action will actually take place. Harrison (2017), Keck (2017), and Folkers (2019) describe the logic of stockpiling—putting aside vital resources and capacities for emergencies—as an imperative that results from the ability to store living entities, but also medicines, food, or protective equipment.

The implication is that the energy, money, and efforts expended in the present for setting aside and maintaining these storages is justified by their increased utility and value in a catastrophic future. What Keck, Harrison, and Folkers first and foremost describe as a political rationality is reformulated by Friedrich (2020) and others (Breithoff and Harrison 2020; Mitchell and Waldby 2010; Swanson 2014) as an economic one: since a body's oocytes are abundant (and therefore cheap) in the present but the time for a pregnancy is not right yet, their value will increase in the future when a person opts for a pregnancy but her body cannot produce egg cells anymore. Friedrich describes this relation between present and future as one between use and option value. Option value is the expected use value of frozen egg cells in the future, which can be weighed against their use value in the present. He goes on to note that the future user need not be the same person who deposited her eggs: biobanks, too, could put the materials they store to other uses in the future, becoming proprietors rather than mere custodians (Friedrich 2020: 344).

Here we encounter a classic theme in the social study of storage and valuation studies: the ability of storage techniques and technologies to produce alternative paths of actions in the future, thus affecting assessments of value in the present (Folkers 2019). Cronon's (1991: 97–147) history of grain elevators and their transformation of food into commodity futures, i.e., financial value, is likely the most classic example. ⁷ Storage allows an otherwise purely fictional expectation (Beckert 2016) to become an exercisable one. Even if the future use of stored objects, be it fertilizing an oocyte or the sale of grain, cannot yet be performed, valuation studies emphasize that it can already be priced by means of discounting and thus be juxtaposed with the value of using it today (Doganova 2024; Muniesa et al. 2017). Where this juxtaposition promises a higher value in the future than in the present, individuals and institutions are likely to utilize cold storage techniques to preserve options in the form of viable organic material (Friedrich 2020).

This argument is tightly coupled with assumptions about progress (Bird Rose 2017): a steady proliferation of possible technological uses for frozen materials will also increase their future use value, the proponents of cryopreservation expect (Harrison 2017; Radin 2017). Even where a specific type of cell or tissue does not currently have a use, the logic of suspension dictates that it should be preserved for a time when biotechnology can harvest its full potential (Breithoff and Harrison 2020a). In this interpretation, biobanking thus relies on two complementary assumptions about time in the biobank and time in society. In the former, time stands still; the hand of the cell's physiological clock does not move at all. Outside of the freezer, the relentless progress of science and technology works to the biobank's benefit: since use value will always be higher in the future than in the present, there is no downside risk to freezing life. ⁸

Consequently, the sociology of storage sketched by cryopreservation studies can be formulated as follows: forms of storage that promise to indefinitely preserve perishable valuables increase the latter's availability across time. An intervention into individual and collective life, feasible but undesirable today, might be needed tomorrow but no longer possible—unless the substances, materials, and potentials it relies upon can be retrieved from the freezer. What ultra-cold storage preserves, then, is not just materials but more generally a range of options for action, exercisable at any moment in time. If these options are expressed in and connected to present and future commercial value, their present value (i.e., exercising them today) should be expected to fall short of their future one (using them later); hence Lemke's (2023a) worry that the present is neglected in favor of a future that might never come. By extension, and somewhat contrary to a widespread concern with acceleration in the sociology of time (Rosa 2013; Wajcman 2015), near-perfect storage therefore decelerates action and modifies temporal horizons, pushing them toward a far future.

Multiple regimes of time and value

On these premises, we should find a close link between technologies and practices of storage on the one hand and a suspension of action in the present, an orientation toward the future, and speculative forms of valuation on the other. Empirical studies of biobanks and their ultra-cold storage facilities have however produced a contradictory picture. Although often informed by the same assumptions as the more theoretical-leaning accounts discussed above, they find that organizational realities all too often disagree with the logics of suspension, deferral, and future value. Since they also put practices center stage in their analysis, I want to take these studies and their findings as a point of departure for re-evaluating assumptions about storage and time.

While there is no universally agreed definition of practice (Nicolini 2017), the advantage of the term is its processual connotation: it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize and describe practice without reference to different temporal patterns, dynamics, and regimes (Shove 2017: 165). Putting practice center stage, I hope, thus helps to localize, temporalize, and relate the rationalities at play in storage, rather than taking them as pre-existing. “The contribution of a practice approach is to uncover that behind all the apparently durable features of our world there is always the work and effort of someone” (Nicolini 2012: 3). ⁹ Accordingly, I will be foregrounding the patterns of activity and temporal horizons that guide people and organizations dealing with cold-stored valuables in the empirical accounts cited here—and how these temporalities diverge from the perpetual deferral of the future.

Early studies of commercial biobanks storing umbilical cord blood (UCB) by Martin, Brown and Turner (2008) confirm the theory of suspended time and deferred future. Drawing from company survey data, they conclude that privately stored cord blood “a highly profitable source of revenue” (Martin et al. 2008: 136). Taking money in the present, commercial cord blood banks promise their customers speculative medical value in the future: although the need for and the medical possibility of treatment are not there yet, it is not unlikely that they will emerge over time. Hence, these banks claim, it would be unwise not to purchase such a “biological insurance” (Martin et al. 2008: 139). This is in contrast to public cord blood banks, Brown (2005) argues, which are oriented toward providing stem cells to others in the present. The authors accuse biobanking companies of selling hope, or rather doubtful promises, to their customers. This fuels an economy of expectations, which typically thrives in its early stages but suffers setbacks when these expectations prove to be overblown.

Ethnographically studying commercial cell banks in Europe one and a half decades later, Liburkina however finds that many of them have abandoned this business model. Although their cell samples are still in store, their value has decreased for biobanks—at least relative to other income streams. Banks storing cells for autologous treatment, Liburkina (2023) explains, have run out of expectations: prospective customers (and biobanks themselves) are no longer optimistic that the regenerative potential of their frozen cells will manifest during their lifetimes. Hence they shy away from repeatedly paying a considerable sum for doubtful benefits. Meanwhile, biobanks are left with an illiquid infrastructure of freezers and nitrogen tanks that can no longer be sustained by dwindling hopes and the revenues they once channeled. In search of new sources of income, they are thus abandoning the promissory business model postulated by Friedrich (2020) and described by Martin, Brown and Turner (2008). Some are trying to escape the decline of expectations by reducing costs through mergers and acquisitions, while others increasingly fill their facilities with more tangible value for much shorter times: freezers and tanks are rented out to third parties who store medical and pharmaceutical samples for different uses against a fee (Liburkina 2023).

Others find that while logics of preparedness, assetization, and suspension can be found in private and public biobanks, they do not reign supreme. Beltrame (2020) notes that Italian public cord blood banks are moving away from a broad logic of general preparedness to a focus on high clinical quality and fewer samples. Delvenne, Macq and Parotte (2023) identify at least three different economic regimes in their ethnography of a Belgian hospital biobank: gift, commodity, and asset. In another study from Spain, Argudo-Portal (2025) explores a tension among practitioners between cold storage and an alternative model that predominantly relies on fresh T-cells from donors’ bodies, a so-called “walking biobank.” Availability and specificity in the present, rather than waiting value, she stresses, are key to this debate among practitioners. And Lafuente-Funes (2023), studying the practices of cryopreservation in commercial fertility clinics in Spain, reports that more effective freezing technologies and protocols have led to less, not more embryos being stored in in-house biobanks, and for shorter timespans.

The multiplicity of storage practices and valuation rationalities has been noted before, especially by Hauskeller and Beltrame (Beltrame and Hauskeller 2018; Hauskeller and Beltrame 2016a, 2016b). They cast doubt on the idea that biobanking can be reduced to dichotomies such as public/private, commodity/asset, or redistribution/profit. Instead, biobanks should be understood as the manifestation of intersecting institutional, economic, and technological logics, they argue (Beltrame and Hauskeller 2018). Practice does not simply reveal, enact, or actualize a pre-existing logic; nor should we expect every type of cell, tissue, or stored valuable to adhere to the same economic regime. What requires explanation, still, is how such different rationalities, which appear contradictory in theory, can co-exist in practice. How can storage infrastructure that should incentivize long-term storage and speculative valuation facilitate an acceleration of throughput and an orientation to value in the present?

Back to the present

Beltrame's (2020) and Liburkina's (2023) studies of cell cryopreservation are instructive here. They shed light on why biobanks, whether public or private, shy away from making full use of their theoretical storage capacities. Describing how cord blood biobanks shift their strategies from broad or future-oriented to selective or present-focused storage, both point to the costs of storage.

UCB collection and banking is costly. The personnel performing collection must be trained; collected UCB has to be shipped to a biobank; testing and processing involve costly procedures, machineries and reagents; and, finally, cryopreservation is highly energy consuming as it requires freezers, liquid nitrogen, cryoprotectants, freezing bags, metal canisters and “a validated system to monitor and record the temperature continuously”. (Beltrame 2020: 692)

These costs are a drain on cold-stored assets: electricity, cooling agents, maintenance, administration, and other inputs required for upholding the power to suspend life eat into the optional value of cord blood. On the other side, this optional value is not stable. While storage costs remain high, Liburkina (2023) points out, customers’ expectations—and thus willingness to pay—have dwindled as medical progress has failed to keep up with the lofty promises of biobanks’ business strategies.

To the terms put forward by theories of suspension and future value, we can thus add two more factors: the costs of storage, which have to be put against future value, and the dynamics of such future value itself. Storage costs here present themselves as recurring monetary, energetic, and practical efforts. For biobanks, they are a baseline against which they evaluate their activities: in what relation does future yield stand to present expenses? In Martin et al.'s (2008) account, these recurring expenses are covered by recurring storage fees that clients pay for storing their cord blood.

However, as Liburkina (2023) points out, the willingness to repeatedly pay such fees is linked to the expectation of future autologous treatments that will materialize within a patient's lifetime. Over the last three decades, the advent of these treatments has been continually pushed further to the future, a pattern already criticized by Martin et al. (2008). However, while delaying the benefits of storage is still presented as a sustainable business strategy by them, Liburkina concludes that commercial cord blood banks have run out of expectations: the number of parents willing to buy into the promises of storage can no longer make up for its costs. Like Argudo-Portal and Domènech (2022), Liburkina argues that this is a wider trend: biobanks “increasingly reject the logics of the politics of suspension in favor of immediate usefulness” (Liburkina 2024: 6).

While theories of suspension have emphasized the conservative aspects of storage, they have largely neglected the temporality of storage infrastructure, which constantly needs to be sustained if it is not supposed to fail. The moment the lights go out in a biobank, future value is destroyed. Humans and machines have to work together to keep samples suspended. And although the suspension hypothesis rightly emphasizes the possibilities of suspending biological time inside the tank, this suspension does not simply extend to social time outside it. Present and future values of samples remain linked throughout storage, and a shift on one end also leads to readjustments on the other. Conserved samples are still exposed to history—their value depends both on recurring activities in the present as well as the tangible progress of technology and the patience of its beneficiaries. In Adam's (1990: 30) terms, this means that there is not just time in storage, storage is also in time. The suspension hypothesis held true when Martin et al. (2008) were investigating biobanks’ strategies, but other logics seem to have meanwhile superseded or replaced it: the imperative of austerity (Beltrame 2020); the need for specificity (Argudo-Portal 2025; Beltrame 2020); reorientation from promises to services (Liburkina 2023).

From conservation to acceleration

These empirical insights require revising the logic of suspension. What they highlight are the conditions suspension hinges on (patience, low costs, sustained expectations) as well as the limits it reaches once these conditions are no longer met. Overall, however, storage is still depicted as facilitating a regime of suspension, only that there are other, conflicting regimes that co-govern biobanking practice. In Beltrame's (2020) account, for example, it is a new rationale of cost-efficiency and austerity that leads to shifts in sample storage. A re-orientation toward the present and a shortening of storage terms could also be seen as part of an overarching acceleration of society, which eventually swallows “islands of deceleration” (Rosa 2013: 83), even if they otherwise comply with capitalist logics. This would leave us with an “intrinsic” logic of storage in modern or capitalist societies and a number of “extrinsic” forces that interfere with or override it.

Instead, I want to follow William'’s (2018) argument against a determinist understanding of storage infrastructure here, not only in biobanks but in storage more generally. Like scholars have argued that new storage infrastructure in the 19th and 20th centuries allowed to decouple natural and economic processes and to accelerate the production and sale of commodities, I want to show how practices that conflict with the logic of suspension can nevertheless be understood through the terms of storage. In comparing high-tech medical cryopreservation and mundane cold storage practices in households, we can see how acceleration can be a consequence of the ability to conserve things.

In her ethnography of cryopreservation in Spanish fertility clinics, Lafuente-Funes (2023) investigates how vitrification, a fast-freezing, highly reliable technique for cryopreserving egg cells and embryos, has impacted routines of practitioners and strategies of in-house biobanks. In line with the assumptions of cryopreservation theories, vitrification and subsequent thawing of embryos yield pregnancy rates almost identical to those of unfrozen cells. The process is simpler, quicker, and more reliable than slow freezing, which requires specialized freezing machines. Lafuente-Funes's most notable finding, however, is that clinics otherwise employ the possibility to suspend life to shorten storage times. Clinics use vitrified embryos over much shorter spans of time than slow-frozen ones, although the technology would in theory allow for storing them for much longer.

Since it is easy to employ, fast, and highly flexible, reproductive clinics use vitrification to bridge the window of time between extraction and subsequent in-vitro fertilization of egg cells on the one hand and their implantation into a recipient's body on the other. Before vitrification, egg extraction, fertilization, and reimplantation had to occur simultaneously: slow freezing has a significant negative effect on the viability of cells. In accordance with a logic of preparedness, the risks of freezing prompted clinics to implant at least one non-frozen embryo and store the other ones as a back-up in case of a failed pregnancy. This necessitated that donor, clinic staff, and recipient gathered in the same place at the same time, which was often difficult to schedule and synchronize with women's fertility cycles. The uncertain prospects of a pregnancy with a previously frozen embryo also motivated clinics to implant more than one embryo per cycle to ensure at least one successful pregnancy, regularly leading to complicated multiple pregnancies. Improved preservation, Lafuente-Funes (2023: 769) argues, is used by clinics “to act in the present. […] embryos are not frozen for indefinite periods, but to create a specific short-term window to optimize a particular IVF project”.

When viewed from the premises of the suspension hypothesis, Lafuente-Funes's finding may appear counter-intuitive; yet it is a widespread and typical use of storage. It is best grasped by comparing medical cryopreservation to more mundane forms of cold storage: household fridges and freezers. Ubiquitous in households across the developed world, refrigeration machines operating above and below 0 °C have received comparatively sparse attention by social theory. Nevertheless, there exists insightful empirical work on their role for practice (Bird and Jensen 2022; Freidberg 2009; Hand and Shove 2007; Marshall 2022; Shove and Southerton 2000; Watkins 2008) that allows us to understand both temperate and low-temperature storage. Consumer refrigerators and freezers rely on the same technical principles as cryopreservation, that is, the withdrawal of thermal energy from a closed container through use of heat pumps and the cold produced by evaporation. This slows metabolic processes inside the container, even if it cannot halt them altogether. Fridges and freezers allow their users to manage the growth of decomposing microorganisms, in turn extending the storage life of meat, milk, or vegetables. As such, they have become an integral part of modern food culture (Bird and Jensen 2022; Friedrich and Höhne 2016; Rees 2013).

Initially used by housewives to store large batches of freshly prepared food for later consumption, freezers later contained larger amounts of store-bought staples like bread, peas, or milk—alongside ready-made, frequently consumed food like lasagna or frozen pizza that would not last long at higher temperatures, Shove and Southerton (2000) write. Their account thus finds a mix of preparedness and open futures, and another food regime inside the freezer. The latter becomes clearer when we turn to the refrigerator, where the first, stockpiling regime of storage is largely absent. The use of these devices by their owners, as Watkins (2008) shows, is indeed very similar to the way Spanish fertility clinics employ vitrification.

Among other things, Watkins highlights the fridge's contribution to practices by studying its absence: how did people shop before they had refrigerators? And what happens if they—for whatever reason—get rid of them? One effect of fridgeless life is that people have to synchronize their food shopping with their meals. What sounds like a trivial task requires extensive planning and organizing: since food needs to be consumed very shortly after purchase, shopping has to take place close to cooking, both spatially and temporally (Watkins 2008: 213–219). In Sorokin's and Merton's (1937) terms, the social times of both practices, characterized by the events of food procurement and eating, once shared a common rhythm. With fridges, however, people were able to decouple acquisition and consumption of food. Cold storage made it possible to buy groceries less often than meals had to be prepared.

What is more, food could be bought days, sometimes weeks in advance, often in great quantities that would subsequently find their way onto the fridge shelves. From there, consumers would take them, not in bulk, but piece by piece to consume them before the eventual depletion of the fridge forced them to return to the supermarket. It would be too simplistic to say that the refrigerator itself changed patterns of time (Saturday shopping vs daily purchases), volume (bulk purchase vs piecemeal), and space (long trips to faraway stores). On many levels, private and business life were remade over the 20th century. But the fridge became one prerequisite for these changing patterns to work in practice: whereas the rhythm of shopping slowed down, the rhythm of eating could in turn accelerate and decelerate according to dietary needs. People could take a quick snack from the fridge in between lunch and dinner or skip a meal without having to worry that their food would spoil.

Buffering time

Even where we are generally exposed to acceleration and a shortage of time, fridges and other storage technologies thus allow us to accelerate practices at different speeds, or make acceleration felt less, as one of Southerton's informants points out:

We spend much more of our time buying things and wanting things and trying to earn the money so that we can, but also we don’t have to go to the supermarket all the time because we have things like fridges and freezers, and cars, washing machines and even like going to the cinema where we can watch movies at home now, they all save us time as well. (Southerton 2020: 100)

In slowing the biological time of their contents, fridges, freezers, and liquid nitrogen tanks modify social time in a way that allows certain activities to proceed at their own pace. This is, I argue, a general effect of the proliferation of storage through society: social time, whether it is otherwise accelerated, decelerated, or kept at a steady pace, can be buffered.

“Buffering” has been used by Folkers (2019) and Liburkina (2024), among others, to describe how stockpiles compensate for a sudden shortfall of goods. It usually refers to a mechanism that can dampen or smoothen unexpected or unpredictable fluctuations of a good about the time axis. In referring to fridges and nitrogen tanks as buffers, however, I am concerned with their effect along the time axis: commonly occurring changes in speed and rhythm. This effect of storage is best explained by Kasper's and Schramm's (2023) study of the use of water containers and batteries by residents of Nairobi.

Water and electricity, the two most important utilities in the city, are subject to recurring outages. Its inhabitants adapt to the unreliable provision of both by maintaining decentralized storage infrastructures that can serve as a back-up when municipal services suddenly stop working. For a short span of time at least, electrical devices can thus keep on running and families can continue to wash and cook even during an outage. Nairobians still notice when an outage occurs but need not let it disrupt their daily routines altogether: they can carry on as usual for as long as their impromptu stores last. In other words, the rhythm of daily activities becomes relatively independent of the rhythms of water and electricity flows. While Nairobians’ storage devices still rely on the provision of both utilities, they translate their irregular availability into at least a steady trickle, predictable across time.

Kasper and Schramm describe the occurrence of outages and buffering as irregular but not unexpected. Moving from irregular backup to routine practices, fridges allow us to understand buffering as desired normality. They take in the contents of the weekly purchase at once and release them at a different interval and in smaller partitions. Similarly, vitrification has turned nitrogen tanks from stockpiles into buffers in Spanish fertility clinics. The fact that they so reliably take in and release viable embryos makes it possible to decouple what before had to take place in synch—donation, fertilization, and implantation.

We can tell buffers like the ones described by Folkers (2019) or Kasper and Schramm (2023) from the ones studied by Watkins (2008) and Lafuente-Funes (2023) by their location in the flows of practices, goods, and processes. The former are “standby” buffers, located parallel to the flow of social activity, which is rerouted through these stores when its regular trajectory is interrupted. The latter, in contrast, regularly channel the flows they buffer and are in constant use. Despite these differences, the effect of using vitrification in clinics and fridges in households is comparable to that of emergency batteries and water tanks: social time, despite its divergences, is smoothed and maintained instead of being interrupted.

Buffering is based on certain stores’ ability to take in contents at varying rates and to release them at constant ones. Where practices are mediated by the circulation of goods, objects, or things, and where stores can alter the temporality embedded in them, they allow different rhythms to co-exist. A wide range of storage types can fulfill the function of such a buffer. Reservoirs take in peaks of precipitation and level them, leading to diverging flow rates of water up- and downstream. Electric car batteries do not just store energy for a road trip, they also mediate between the patterns of energy production and consumption. Perhaps the most familiar application of buffering is online streaming, where dedicated memory units allow to view videos at constant frame rates, rather than at the variable download speed of one's connection (Alexander 2017).

As different as these stores’ architecture and their contexts are, their effect on time is comparable. For them to work, however, the scaling up and down of the temporalities embedded in stored contents must be both reliable and flexible. Where stores as buffers are lacking or failing, the burden of synchronization falls back on people: households without a fridge (Watkins 2008), truckers who need to “run on time” (Hopkins 2022), or egg donors, recipients, and clinicians who go out of their way to meet in the same place at the same time (Lafuente-Funes 2023). Where stores do their work, however, they offer one answer to a key puzzle of the sociology of time: the simultaneous coexistence of different rhythms, horizons, and velocities of time (Adam 1995: 12–42; Jordheim and Ytreberg 2021; Luhmann 2005: 92–125).

Conclusion: Past and future of a sociology of storage

In this article, my aim was to draw attention to what I believe is a fruitful and useful social theory of storage and time. Critical theories of cryopreservation from sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and related fields have rightly pointed out that novel storage technologies first and foremost challenge our understanding of biological time and our relationship with present and future. The hypothesis, developed in this context, which argues that the suspension of biological time also leads to a suspension of action and thus a freezing of social time, is at first intuitive. But against the background of empirical studies of biobanking practice, it requires modification: cold storage facilities accelerate the present as much as they slow it down.

Studies of practice point to factors beyond the degree of conservation that a sociology of storage needs to consider: costs, the entanglement of value, the active management of different scales and speeds of time, assumptions about technological progress, and the half-life of expectations. That stored things are suspended in time does not mean they are free-floating—they remain subject to social forces. Some of these forces, such as speculations on the future, are evident from the outset. Others, like the durability of expectations or the reliability of progress, become apparent only over time or in hindsight. The various studies that have sought to understand cryopreservation today point toward an intensification, acceleration, and re-orientation of biobanking toward the present. In the cases they studied, technological progress in cryopreservation has not resulted in suspended action but in a more elaborate management of present temporalities.

The re-orientation toward the present, I have however argued, is not only owed to such “external” factors and their continued entanglement with the things “inside” the store. Much like the original suspension hypothesis tried to, we can also understand it as something that is facilitated by storage itself. The acceleration of donation, fertilization, and implantation of egg cells that Lafuente-Funes (2023) has noted can be understood in the same terms as the decoupling of grocery shopping and food preparation as detailed by consumer culture studies (Shove and Southerton 2000; Watkins 2008). Here, storage acts as a buffer. Its ability to conserve things is not extensified but intensified, bridging what would otherwise be a temporal divergence in rhythms and timing.

The ubiquity of buffering stores, be it as routine or precautionary use, points to the social significance of storage as an element in the social management of time. Buffering allows us to understand the use of cryopreservation beyond a cryopolitics of freezing the present: it is key to organizing and connecting the uninterrupted flows of practice in the here and now. It is thus one way of reconciling a generalized imperative to accelerate practices, processes, and activities (Rosa 2013; Wajcman 2015) with the fact that each of them needs to operate in its own particular time.

As many of the classics of sociology and other social sciences have pointed out, storage makes social space: it shifts collective life from nomadic to sedentary patterns; it concentrates and reroutes trade networks, it allows to connect the different geographies of the world so that they form a globe. The same, I wanted to show in this article, can be said about social time, whether it is stretched and conserved or shortened and accelerated. Just like we cannot take space as given or Cartesian, we cannot assume that time is Newtonian and external to society (Adam 1990).

Two lessons can be drawn from the divergence between the theories and the practices of cold storage. One is that the former, like the latter, are time-bound: the suspension hypothesis holds well for Martin et al.'s (2008) study of cord blood biobanking but it struggles to fully comprehend the changes in contemporary cryopreservation practices. To an extent, these trends are owed to the limited durability of the future: cells, tissues, and fluids can be preserved for decades in freezers and liquid nitrogen tanks—collective expectations cannot. This has implications for the value of present money as much as for the value of future technology: Where the relationship between current expenditures for storage and future benefits shifts, so do time horizons and the ability to repeatedly postpone the advent of therapies and applications. Theories of storage, this is a commonplace, thus benefit from regular juxtaposition and recalibration with the empirical realities of storage.

There is, I would however argue, not just an imperative to put theories to the test of time. We can also ask of theories to reflect on their own temporality. When we speak of the power, value, or technologies of storage, we are well-advised, too, to think about the historical junctions, cycles, and half-lives of our key terms from the very beginning and not simply leave this job to empirical enquiry. In this spirit, I have sought to qualify the concepts offered by theories of cryopower and suspension: how long can valuables be preserved before they turn into something else? And what happens when the temporal horizons of storage shorten, lengthen, or interact with other rhythms? I hope this will make it easier for others to do the same to my own terms, especially since I think that the significance of storage for society is not limited to the concepts of space and time: as theories of cryopreservation have pointed out, key sociological concepts like power, politics, life, or value require reexamining in the face of new forms of storage (Radin and Kowal 2017a).

Early sociological theory was drawn to storage due to its centrality to ancient civilizations. The first cities, the rules of agricultural life, the political trajectories of different parts of the world, it argued, could not be understood without reference to storage. In modern times, it seems storage has become a backdrop. As stores have shifted from the center to the periphery of collective life, and people from agriculture to service and industries, sociology has struggled to put forward a similarly strong argument about storage and contemporary societies. In leaving behind the rigid, slow, and static social order of pre-modern life, storage and its conservative force have lost their place, we might think.

Philosophical, anthropological, historical, and sociological studies of cryopreservation have made a case for the continuing importance of storage and the inertia it introduces to practices, organizations, and society. This article has in turn highlighted the dynamism that of cold storage practices in biobanks and beyond. Taken together, I hope, these arguments shed some light on how social life is both changed and maintained through storage. In becoming attentive to the significance of different forms of storage, sociology and other disciplines will not only enrich their sense of what holds society together. From the scaling-up and diffusion of battery capacities to distribute energy (White-Nockleby 2022) to moving our data from hard drives to clouds (Croker 2020) to the construction of stationary and mobile stores that allow commodities to circulate (Quet 2022), they will equally be able to give their own answers to the challenges of our time. That storage has moved from the center to the peripheries of social life also means that it is all around us: there are stores everywhere for those with eyes to see.