Welcome to Whenever: Exploring Suspended Life in Cryopreservation Practices

Abstract

Cryopreservation practices have become increasingly important within contemporary life sciences in recent decades, opening up the perspective of modifying and modulating temporal pathways and developmental cycles. Exploring the concept of “suspended life,” this article first focuses on temporal liminality as cryopreservation practices operate by extending the present. I rely on Niklas Luhmann’s account of time, which advances the idea of an enduring present bound to the principle of reversibility. The second part of this article engages with the emergence of cryobanks. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “standing-reserve” (Bestand), I conceive of cryobanks as storing facilities that ensure the disposition of organic material. The third section discusses the advent of a “politics of suspension” based on the proliferation of cryogenic life in contemporary societies, which is defined by reversibility and disposition. The conclusion sums up the main argument and briefly points to the social and political repercussions of this mode of governing the future by prolonging the present.

During the second half of the twentieth century, cryopreservation practices became an expanding and successful branch of scientific research and a thriving field of technical application. Since the 1950s, they have been widely used to store plant and animal materials such as seeds or sperm by cooling them to subzero temperatures. More and more cell types, tissues, and whole microorganisms could be successfully frosted and thawed without apparent loss of vitality. One central area of research has been reproductive technologies. While cryogenic methods of gamete preservation and artificial insemination were initially developed for animal breeding, they were soon applied in human reproduction, too (Clarke 2007; Polge 2007; Wilmot 2007; Gosden 2011; Leibo 2004, 2013). Researchers announced the first birth of a human conceived with cryopreserved sperm as early as 1954 (Bunge, Keettel, and Sherman 1954). In contrast, it was only at the beginning of the new millennium that the cryopreservation of human oocytes became feasible (Gook 2011). However, the impact of cryobiology goes far beyond reproductive technologies affecting biomedical research, regenerative medicine, transplantation surgery, conservation biology, and biosecurity preparedness (Landecker 2007, 2010; Waldby 2008; Gottweis 2009; Chrulew 2011; Friese 2013; Swanson 2014; Lewis et al. 2016; Keck 2017).

Today, technologies of cryopreservation are an important infrastructural precondition for many medical applications and a crucial engine of bioscientific innovation. They provide the material preconditions for the longtime storage of DNA, tissues, and other bioprobes and are generating a vast array of new technoscientific options. As Landecker (2007) has shown in her pioneering historical work on culturing cells, cryopreservation has opened up the perspective of modifying and modulating temporal pathways and developmental cycles. The ability to arrest biological processes in order to reanimate them at some point in the future has profoundly transformed the terms of life. Cryobiology establishes a new regime of time that replaces linear by plastic temporalities, altering our understanding and experience of life (and death). Ultimately, cryopreservation practices bring into existence a new “form of life” (Helmreich and Roosth 2010; Helmreich 2011; see also Wittgenstein 1953). To denote this “unique biological state” (Crowe 1971, 570), in which metabolic activity is undetected without disappearing altogether, I have proposed the notion of “suspended life” (Lemke 2019). This term has a long tradition in the history of biology to describe the effects of low-temperature freezing of organisms and organic material (e.g., Brown and Escombe 1897; Le Conte 1901; for an overview, see Tirard 2010; Roosth 2014). ¹ “Suspended life” disturbs the conviction that the cessation of vital processes inevitably leads to death and captures the liminal ontological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. ² As I will show, this concept of a “third state of being” (Farman 2020, 125) beyond or between life and nonlife is essential for understanding how cryopreservation practices operate. It attends to the temporal and spatial liminalities they enact, producing ontological ambiguities and eroding existing categories of personhood, kinship, and property, generating “a sense of moral, social, and political suspense” (Hoeyer 2017, 211). ³

The argument unfolds as follows. The first part of this article focuses on temporal liminality, as cryopreservation practices enact suspended life by extending the present. I rely on Niklas Luhmann’s account of time, which advances the idea of an enduring present bound to the principle of reversibility. The second part engages with the emergence of cryobanks, which make it possible to store and distribute biospecimen to make them available for distant locations and different technoscientific projects. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “standing-reserve” (Bestand), I conceive of cryobanks as storing facilities that ensure the disposition of organic material. The third part discusses the advent of a “politics of suspension” based on the proliferation of cryogenic life in contemporary societies, which is defined by reversibility and disposition. The conclusion sums up the main argument and briefly points to the social and political repercussions of this mode of governing the future by prolonging the present.

Luhmann, Time, and Reversibility: Cryopreservation as a Permanent Present

Suspended life refers to the prospect of interrupting and restarting metabolic processes, bringing the generation and growth of cells and tissues to a temporary halt––a “pause”––in order to allow storage for an indefinite period of time (at least in principle). Cryopreservation puts bodies or rather their material components “on hold.” The technological force at work does not operate on the “the plasticity of living matter” (Landecker 2007, 13) by transforming cellular functions or organic structures; rather, cryobiological plasticity paradoxically consists in the fact that temporal change is blocked and put “on ice.” Cryopreservation both arrests processes of life and defers death. It alters the matter and meaning of biology by preventing “natural cycles” from occurring.

In this sense, suspended life inaugurates a new temporal configuration that extends the present toward the future, opening up the option to postpone the “normal” course of development and decay. To better conceive of this “state of a potentially reversible death” (Neuman 2006, 260; emphasis in orig.; see also Tirard 2010, 100; Keilin 1959, 166), which combines the cessation of vital activities with the idea of a continuous present, I will mobilize some reflections on time and reversibility put forward by the sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann. ⁴

Taking up and revising the phenomenological concept of time ⁵ , Luhmann argues that we need to abandon the misleading metaphors of space and movement (e.g., flow, process, and stream) and provide a more convincing theoretical account of time. His argument is that the temporality of biological or social (or any) systems cannot be adequately grasped with the idea of a chronological order and a linear sequence of before and after. ⁶ For Luhmann, time is not given independently of and exterior to the operations of systems; rather, systems operate both in time and with time (Luhmann 1981, 137, 145). On the one hand, they only exist in their recursive operations, in the sequence of events that immediately and irrevocably transforms the present into a thing of the past. On the other hand, systems are also able to extend time horizons by keeping options open, for example by postponing decisions or delaying selections.

For Luhmann (1995), the present is not a temporal configuration between past and future but rather “lasts as long as it takes for something to become irreversible” (p. 78). His key distinction between reversibility and irreversibility is linked to the idea of a “duplication of the present” (Luhmann 1981, 142). ⁷ Luhmann (1981) introduces two forms of the present that coconstitute one another and are both simultaneously given: a “punctuated present” (p. 134), where events vanish as soon as they appear, and a “permanent present” (p. 141) in which change is suspended. The former is symbolized by the workings of the clock, which suggest the understanding of a “flow” of time. However, what we observe as temporal continuity, Luhmann (1995) stresses, is constituted by a structural discontinuity as it is grounded in the actual irreversibility of events (p. 78).

While this momentous present narrows down the horizon “between” the past and the future, Luhmann (1981) introduces another present that makes it possible to “stretch” (p. 141), the present: a “reserved time in which the possible endures” (p. 133). As the present is defined as “the time span between past and future in which a change becomes irreversible” (Luhmann 1995, 78), this time span might extend from a moment, a point in time, to a period, a zone that leaves room for maneuver “before” the present becomes the past. ⁸ The second present––the “specious present” (Luhmann 1981, 133; English in orig.)––postpones irreversibility and holds up alternatives, containing “in itself the possibility of prolonging or shortening the duration of openness, of determining its beginning and its end, of speeding it up or slowing it down” (Luhmann 1981, 133).

The second present cannot be reduced to or deduced from the first. It is characterized by the fact that it has not yet entered into the order of temporalized time. While in the first the course of events fades into the past and is irreversibly lost, the second represents a “locked time, in which something can be left as undecided, revocable, reserved” (Luhmann 1981, 134). As long as nothing irrevocable happens, the extended present continues, even if measurable time passes by. Thus, according to Luhmann, duration is not a chronological category but is rather defined by the practical option of reversibility. In this present, actors “suspend irreversibility (and thus time), i.e. assume a prolonged present” (Luhmann 1981, 135). This operation generates “a kind of limbo” [“eine Art Schwebezustand”], in which time comes to a halt and options are still open (Luhmann 1981, 135; see also Gehring 2007, 426; Wolff 2021, 81-84). ⁹

Luhmann’s understanding of a “doubled present” (Luhmann 1981, 137) and his structural account are crucial for the analysis of suspended life. The focus on reversibility sustains the cryobiological imaginary of a “kind of temporary death” (Neuman 2006, 260; emphasis in orig.). Long before Luhmann (1981) expressed his ideas on time, Basile Joseph Luyet and Marie Pierre Gehenio, two eminent cryopreservation scholars, had connected the principle of chronological time to the concept of an “enduring present” (p. 133). In their investigations on the effects of low temperatures on some organisms, they used the metaphor of an interrupted watch-time to account for a return to life or a regaining of vital activities from a seemingly dead organism: “An organism which resists extreme cold behaves like a watch which, though well wound, is stopped by some braking mechanism. This watch is in perfect condition as to its constructional features and it will start of its own accord as soon as the brake is removed” (Luyet and Gehenio 1940, 255). ¹⁰ Like many other researchers exploring forms of suspended life and linking them to the biological capacity of some organisms to resist hostile environmental conditions, Luyet and Gehenio endorsed an understanding of life that distinguishes a more fundamental structure from vital processes. This gave rise to a juxtaposition between manifested life on the one hand and potential or “latent life” on the other: “life is probably conditioned by some special structure which, at low temperatures, allows for a state of latent life and at higher temperatures furnishes the basic mechanism for vital activities; the destruction of this structure would induce death” (Luyet and Gehenio 1940, 256; see also Carrel 1910, 460; Crowe and Cooper 1971, 36). ¹¹

Suspended life not only denotes a biological state “when the metabolic activity of the organism comes reversibly to a stillstand” (Hinton 1968, 43) but could also be understood as a structural capacity of systems “to solve the problem of gaining time” (Luhmann 1995, 45). As Luhmann (1995) notes, systems are able to develop structures “to store up successful ‘experiences’ for reuse:”

The structures… react to the problem of time on the level of whenever. ¹² The simplest early forms of such mechanisms exist in systems that possess adequate complexity of their own for further development but can realize this prospect only in combination with a favorable environment. Their possibilities are, so to speak, shut down ¹³ until further notice and kept in store for a point in time when a chance combination of system and environment will give them the prospect of realizing themselves. (p. 45) ¹⁴

Here again, Luhmann’s account puts forward an understanding of reversibility and latency that sheds light on the workings of cryopreservation. In this perspective, systems gain (additional) time by suspending their operations until a more favorable constellation of system-environment relations arises. This mechanism captures well how cryotechnologies extend temporal horizons by slowing down and arresting metabolic processes, awaiting the “right” moment for thawing and putting to use the organic material kept until then in a state of suspension. By materially cooling down organic substances, cryotechnologies also symbolically freeze time, they shut down the vital activities of biospecimen to maintain them “on the level of whenever.” To further investigate the principle of “whenever,” we need to take into account an additional element: disposition, which plays a central role in Martin Heidegger’s account of modern technology.

Heidegger, Stock, and Disposition: Cryobanks as a Standing-Reserve

Heidegger’s concept of the “standing-reserve” (Bestand) helps to capture the intrications between the temporal and the spatial dimension of suspended life. As is well known, he argues in The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger 1977) that modern technology is characterized by its capacity to render nature a resource for human disposition. It operates as an “enframing” (Gestell) that makes things calculable and controllable, transforming natural entities into objects of technological manipulation and human ends. The enframing reduces nature to a depository of exploitable and extractable resources, disregarding their authenticity and otherness: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a future ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve (Bestand).” (Heidegger 1977, 17)

The German word combines the idea of a concrete stockpile and a material store for an uncertain future (the spatial meaning of Bestand) with the prospect of an enduring present that resists irreversibility (the temporal meaning of Bestand). Bestand on the one hand “denotes a store or supply as ‘standing by’,” and on the other hand, it also “carries the connotation of the verb bestehen with its dual meaning of to last and to undergo” (Heidegger 1977, 17, FN 17; see also Folkers 2019). ¹⁵ The term captures not only the permanency and persistence of objects, their continued presence, but also their availability and disposition. It is exactly the storability that makes up the standing-reserve; objects only become part of it insofar as they are ordered, regulated, and secured (see Heidegger 1977, 16).

Thus, the standing-reserve is more than a simple stock or a situated repository: it does not denote a collection of individual entities (and their specific features and qualities) but rather signals a systematic orderability of things, a ubiquitous and omnipresent availability. It defines a general disposition––a “standing on call” (Rouse 1985, 81)––that is suspended from a concrete temporal dynamics or spatial locations. The standing-reserve is an ordered potentiality where “objects are things waiting to be consumed whenever and wherever they are needed” (Rivers 2019, 3; see also Folkers 2017, 2019). Heidegger illustrates this central aspect of modern technology with the example of the difference between the windmill and the hydroelectric plant. While the former “does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it” (Heidegger 1977, 14), the latter transforms the river into a “water power supplier” (Heidegger 1977, 16) that makes it possible to save and distribute the energy provided by nature where and when it is required. ¹⁶

While Heidegger’s arguments and also the examples he puts forward to discuss the standing-reserve are modeled on physical science, ¹⁷ it is possible and indeed necessary to displace this analytic focus if we want to investigate how biology in general and cryobiology in particular renders living things intelligible and controllable. ¹⁸ Heidegger formulated the concepts of the standing-reserve and enframing in the midtwentieth century to account for the impact of nuclear energy and contemporary physics, fearing that nature was about to become a “gigantic gasoline station, an energy source of modern technology and industry” (Heidegger [1959] 1966, 50). Today, nature also risks being transformed into an enormous vital bank, a comprehensive biological depository available for energetic purposes but also for other forms of technoscientific experimentation and exploitation.

The technological option of successfully freezing and thawing human and nonhuman organic material has fostered the development of a new archival apparatus to store vital matter at low temperatures for long or (possibly) indefinite periods of time: cryobanks. By reassembling “natural” specimen that differ in size and provenance and by arresting metabolic activities to prevent the specimen growing or perishing, these repositories now resemble “a kind of immortal, artificial body” (Parry 2004, 403). Cryobanks are controlled, long-term, and secure depositories of vital resources for scientific research, commercial interests, and technological practices and an intimate entanglement of past, present, and future temporalities. Cryopreservation venues have become an important component of the transformation of bits of bodies into forms of biological capital that are at the same time epistemic reservoirs and economic resources (Sunder Rajan 2006; Waldby and Mitchell 2006; Cooper 2008; see also Lemke 2012). ¹⁹

These “frozen archives” (Anderson 2015) play a central role in the contemporary cryogenic regime. The term “bank” in this context is more than a metaphor (see Swanson 2014); it indicates that these collections transgress archival work and historical documentation. ²⁰ Cryobanks function as a standing-reserve, as they are simultaneously repositories of stored biomaterial and active sites where it is processed for future use. However, they also enact a technological liminality that goes beyond Heidegger’s original understanding of the Bestand. Cryobanks resemble electronic devices and material infrastructures on standby, being neither completely on nor ultimately off. They operate in a “sleep mode,” ²¹ representing a dynamic standstill, always ready to be reactivated, a liminal “state of ‘in|activity’ that indicates readiness without immediate engagement” (Kemmer et al. 2021, 1). Like technical objects operating in a standby mode, the cryobiological interruption of vital activities depends on constant energy flows to guarantee the motionless state of suspension in the freezers and tanks. ²²

As already noted, the range of cryobanks is not limited to human material but also encompasses archives that cryopreserve gametes, tissue, or DNA of nonhuman animals and plants. In recent decades, the accelerating extinction of species has led to an enormous effort to collect and store specimen, relying on cryotechnological procedures. The aim is to preserve biodiversity by deep-freezing organic material of endangered or extinct species. These “frozen zoos” (Corley-Smith and Brandhorst 1999; Lanza, Dresser, and Damiani 2000) are more than sites of conservation, since they also provide the material resources for the potential resurrection of extinct species. In the future, they might engage in strategies of reanimation––known as “resurrection biology” (O’Connor 2015) or “de-extinction science” (Shapiro 2015)––to “bring back to life” species that are already extinct, using reproductive and genetic technologies (e.g., embryo transfer, intergenic surrogacy, and cloning); (Friese 2009, 2013; Chrulew 2011; Fletcher 2014; Saragusty et al. 2016; Roosth 2017, 150-72). ²³

Just as cryopreservation is characterized by the temporal state of a continuous present, cryobanks enact spatial liminality, being simultaneously in the world and outside it. As Thom van Dooren (2007) has pointed out, they are located outside the world, or constitute a complementary or alternative world, because they preserve and safeguard precious and perishable goods (gametes, DNA of endangered or extinct animals and plants, human remains, etc.) that would not exist by themselves without cryopreservation technologies. At the same time, they are an integral part of the world in that their establishment is motivated by a desire to provide specific solutions to a vast array of mundane problems, from the preservation of biodiversity to the prolongation of fertility and the maintenance of health. Furthermore, it is precisely the cryopreservation of specimen in controlled and centralized settings that allows for their proliferation and dissemination through space and time as “immutable mobiles” (Latour 1983; see Anderson 2015, 380; Breithoff and Harrison 2020, 37-55).

Cryobanks operate as a standing-reserve, enacting life by suspending biological entities from their “genuine” natural habitat or “original” ecological system. They are nodal points in a global cryogenic network that allows frozen specimen to travel to various destinations to be mobilized for diverse objectives. The creation of a transportation infrastructure by means of refrigerators and freezing devices has enabled the storage and transfer of animal and plant material from the Global South to northern industrial countries for biomedical and pharmaceutical research; it has made possible comprehensive research programs in human biology that collect specimen from indigenous peoples around the world; and it has provided the material foundation for the global circulation of gametes for transnational reproductive practices (Flitner 1995; Knecht, Klotz, and Beck 2012; Kowal and Radin 2015; Radin 2017).

Elements of a Politics of Suspension

To capture the profound sociomaterial changes introduced by cryotechnological practices, some scholars have recently proposed the term “cryopolitics.” While the notion originates in debates on the geostrategic significance of the Arctic region in the light of global warming and the dwindling of natural resources in other climatic areas (Bravo and Rees 2006; Haverluk 2007; Bravo 2017), its current usage addresses the complex strategies of generating, regulating, and processing suspended life. Friedrich and Höhne (2014) as well as Kowal and Radin (2015, 2017) have claimed that cryopolitics represents an important extension of the classical concept of biopolitics put forward by Foucault. While “biopower” is characterized by technologies that foster life or let die, as opposed to sovereignty that takes life or lets live (Foucault 2003, 241), cryopolitics operates by the principle to “make live and not let die” (Friedrich and Höhne 2014; Kowal and Radin 2015; Friedrich 2017; Radin and Kowal 2017). Thus, cryopolitics is defined by strategies that seek to arrest processes of decay and dying, establishing a new form of life by exposing organisms (or rather bits of their bodies) to a new onto-political regime. While it also targets processes of life, cryopolitics shifts the focus of intervention beyond the two biopolitical poles of the individual and the population that Foucault (1978, 2003) identified to include the vitality of “body parts” (see Hacking 2002) such as gametes, tissue, or DNA. Furthermore, cryopolitics attends to the way in which biopower permanently transgresses the human-nonhuman species divide and addresses the government of animal and plant life (Haraway 2008; Friese 2013; Wolfe 2013; see also Lemke 2021).

I would like to advance this theoretical proposition further by exploring the dimensions of a “politics of suspension” that both reserves time to keep options open and conceives of cryopreserved organic material as a standing-reserve. ²⁴ To flesh out its distinctive mode of operation, it is helpful to contrast “suspended life” with Agamben’s (1998) notion of “bare life.” The latter designates a human being who can be killed with impunity after being banned from the politico-legal community and reduced to the status of mere physical existence. “Suspended life” radicalizes the “nakedness” of life forms, dissociating it from the network of biological, ecological, and social interactions it originated from. But “suspended life” also differs from “bare life” in that it defines a form of life that is not exposed to death at all; rather, it is not allowed to die, being kept in limbo between life and death. Therefore, death no longer signifies the ultimate limit of biopolitical interventions and strategies but becomes mobilized itself by cryobiological practices to preserve, promote, and extend life (see also Friese 2009; Colombino and Giaccaria 2016; Friedrich 2016).

The politics of suspension enacts temporal and ontological liminality, and the enduring present described by Luhmann materializes in the standing-reserve identified by Heidegger that combines strategies of preservation and an apparatus of “bioavailability” (Cohen 2005). The suppression of the temporality of life and the interruption of metabolic activities is the precondition for reversibility and disposition. The politics of suspension is based on a structural understanding of life that significantly differs from processual ontologies and remaps the border between life and nonlife. As I have shown, both Luhmann and Heidegger endorse the idea of a structured order that is governed by the principle of “whenever.” While for Luhmann the difference between process and structure mirrors the distinction between irreversibility and reversibility, Heidegger (1977) stresses the generative as well as the stabilizing effects of enframing as a “mode of ordering” (p. 20) that arranges its elements to make them available for human disposition.

It is exactly this structural concept of life that has governed cryobiological research and practices in the past century. Cryobiologists have advanced the “hypothesis that the force which controls the vital activities requires a special structure of matter, and that, when the structure is maintained, the protoplasm is alive, though it might not be active” (Luyet and Gehenio 1940, 255; emphasis in orig.; Roosth 2014, 66-67). In this perspective, suspended life is more (or rather: less) than vital activities as it depends on a material structure that ensures continuity by disrupting metabolic processes. To be more precise, it is exactly the absence of metabolic activities that conditions the presence of life––an inert life without (apparent) changes. Thus, suspended life lacks all signs of (what we knew as) life: it is a “life, not itself” (Roosth 2014, 56).

Suspended life inaugurates a new form of governing the present that consists of two essential and entangled elements. First, the politics of suspension goes beyond conventional technologies of collecting and storing organic material as it explicitly includes the fictive and speculative dimension of a standing-reserve. It not only assembles and preserves “cryofacts” (Friedrich 2020, 329) for contemporary usages but also mobilizes and explores purposes “as yet unknown” (Radin 2017, 55). These “cryofictions” are characterized by indeterminacy and contingency––“on call for a further ordering” (Heidegger 1977, 17)––necessarily suspending fixed programs, concrete plans and definite objectives: “[T]he permanent present… requires underdeterminedness, openness, reversibility; because what is irreversibly determined is already no longer present” (Luhmann 1981, 142). Thus, the idea of whenever embraces prospective “favorable” constellations, future imaginaries, and promissory alignments of means and objectives (Friedrich and Hubig 2018; Friedrich 2020).

Secondly, the politics of suspension also differs from rationalities of prevention and preparedness as it does not react to an uncertain future, seeking to adapt or to accommodate to it, but rather acts directly on temporal horizons by extending the present. The principle of whenever brings the question of power to the fore, articulating the prospect of “negotiating with time about the duration of the duration” (Luhmann 1981, 133). Given the option to (not) prolong the present and to delay irreversibility, this mode of power affects not only the consumption of time but also its production (Gehring 2007, 428). Instead of anticipating future processes, the politics of suspension keeps events in limbo, postponing (or not) decisions on the concrete “when” of the “whenever” and determining when the present is due to become the past: “To keep options reversible does not mean anticipating the future in the present, but a disposition [“Disposition”] in the present that allows it to both pass away and to continue” (Luhmann 1981, 137; emphasis in orig.; see also 1981, 132).

An instructive example of this politics of suspension is provided by Leon Wolff in his study of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), which serves as backup for a large number of plant research institutes and agricultural gene banks around the world. Wolff argues that this planetary seed bank stretches the duration of the present to address the danger of extinction and other catastrophic events. In the light of climate change and biodiversity loss, “the aim of the SGSV is to extend the period in which action can be taken and events and mistakes can be corrected.…it opens up a space in which the events of loss and extinction are not permanent” (Wolff 2021, 90). Thus, the SGSV does not prevent or prepare for the imminent disaster as such but seeks to ensure that the damage will be reversible. Instead of dealing with uncertain futures, it rather transforms temporal pathways by interrupting the evolutionary trajectories of the assembled seeds and suspending the relational network with their material environments. ²⁵

This exemplary case study also illustrates the ambivalences of a politics of suspension. While it mobilizes suspended life to expand the duration of the present, it might also delay essential changes or postpone necessary decisions. Analyzing the increasing institutionalization of frozen zoos, Chrulew (2011, 2017) has observed a strange dynamics of securing and destroying. The accelerating disappearance of species and the hitherto unprecedented flurry of collecting and deep freezing biological material are not isolated phenomena where one simply follows the other. Rather, there seems to be a complementary, even complicit relationship between the two. Instead of breaking away from the patterns of global production and consumption that have led to the ecological crisis and environmental destruction, the proliferation of frozen zoos risks preserving and expanding them. The diversity of plants and animals is not being protected in a way that ensures their existence and survival “in vivo.” Rather, the focus is on securing the disposition of suspended life that can be stripped of its natural environment, technically processed, preserved, and transferred to other contexts. Thus, the politics of suspension might contribute to tendencies to preserve the status quo by putting on hold necessary political and social transformations.

Another example of this “conservative” tendency of the politics of suspension is the freezing of oocytes, which was initially offered to women facing cancer treatment or other fertility-impairing conditions. Today, it is increasingly being performed for nonmedical reasons. Such “social” egg freezing targets healthy young women planning their reproductive futures (Martin 2010; Shkedi-Rafid and Hashiloni-Dolev 2011; Argyle, Harper, and Davies 2016; Waldby 2019; Van de Wiel 2020a). Practices of egg freezing intersect with different temporalities and modes of future-making that seek to govern reproductive processes and bodily futures. Instead of changing gender relations in society and accommodating working conditions for women and couples with children, the debate focuses on the idea of an individual “biological clock” that needs to be synchronized and aligned with professional life (Van de Wiel 2015, 2020a). Although some commentators argue that egg freezing increases women’s reproductive choices, the empirical data suggest a quite different interpretation. While the standing-reserve of cryopreserved oocytes has significantly expanded in recent years, only a very small percentage of it is actually used by the women for their own fertility treatment. Analyzing the existing research literature on this topic, Friedrich shows that many women who undergo “social freezing” don’t postpone an intended pregnancy but seek to keep their options open for a biological-related child as they currently lack a suitable partner willing to act as a parent. In this light, oocyte cryopreservation “would serve more as a sort of ‘decidability assurance’ rather than as a ‘fertility insurance’” (Friedrich 2020, 335). Instead of exercising choice, the women in question safeguard their possible options to avoid the fear of regret and future self-blame (Baldwin 2018). Thus, the matter and meaning of “(in)fertility” and “pregnant bodies-to-be” as well as societal expectations are significantly transformed by the suspended life of oocytes.

Conclusion

The technological proliferation of cryopreserved organic material in many different societal fields such as reproductive and regenerative technologies, biomedical research, transplantation surgery, conservation biology, and biosecurity preparedness has transformed the concepts of life and death, health and illness, (in)fertility, and biodiversity. I have argued in this article that cryopreservation practices bring into existence a new form of life––suspended life––that is defined by a liminal state of the in-between or neither-nor. It extends the present by reserving time and suppressing metabolic processes, delaying change and ensuring reversibility. Rather than engaging with embodied, situated, and finite living entities, suspended life enacts disembodied and decontextualized organic material or genetic information, making it available for different purposes and future usages. Thus, the technomaterial emergence of suspended life has molded temporal pathways and horizons to extend the present and engendered new spatial configurations and forms of disposition.

Suspended life also makes possible a new form of politics in which life and death no longer serve as clear-cut and fixed categories but become flexible operators, depending on structural variables and preparing the ground for a liminal “interrupted life” (Anderson 2015, 379). As we have seen, the politics of suspension gives rise to a specific mode of future-making by prolonging the present and ensuring disposition. It helps to keep temporal horizons open and offers additional technological options for dealing with individual uncertainties and collective risks. However, given its (potential) social and political repercussions, it seems critical to rethink the principle of reversibility and the option of disposition.

Taking up a theme developed by the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel 2312, Haraway (2016) has suggested the label “the Great Dithering” (p. 144; see Robinson 2012) to denounce our contemporary political and social inaction in the light of the massive ecological crisis and climatic challenges. ²⁶ In this constellation, the politics of suspension feeds fantasies of ultimate biological control suggesting that that extinction is not forever but always at disposal for reanimation. It promises to revert past extinctions to address the existential threats of the present. Following this imagination, de-extinction scientists and paleoecologists dream of restoring ancient ecosystems and resurrecting extinct species to respond to the climate crisis. As enormous amounts of carbon sequestered in the Arctic permafrost are currently thawing, releasing it into the atmosphere, and thus further contributing to global warming, they suggest populating a natural reserve in the Siberian tundra with herds of woolly mammoths and other large herbivores as their grassing habits and body weight help to expose the ground to colder temperatures that prevent ice from melting (Church and Regis 2012, 133-50; Roosth 2017, 167-70; Zimmer 2021).

It may seem quite ironic to propose to revive extinct animals of the ice age to fight anthropogenic global warming today. However, it is questionable whether this idea of resurrecting the past will effectively respond to the profound and urgent need to take action. To avert catastrophic climate change, it is vital to suspend the principle of “whenever” to effectively care for humans and nonhumans currently alive and threatened by environmental and other risks.