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Short abstract:

Cells are technologies of making life: isolated, manipulated and frozen in the lab, they are eventually re-embedded in custom-tailored environments. Based on ethnographic research on cell cryopreservation, this paper draws explores the management and maintenance of cells and milieus as biopolitics.

Long abstract:

Cells do not exist as separate and discernable entities, unless they are isolated and maintained as such in the laboratory. In this artificial environment, cells are manipulated in ways that enact them as technologies through purification, modification and reprogramming (Landecker 2007). Ultimately, these activities aim at releasing cells back into society to remake other forms and relations of life: by scaling back up to tissues and organisms, by merging with and transforming bodies. The success of this reintroduction relies on particular environments, custom-tailored to accommodate and integrate the cell. These contexts substitute for the bodies, microbiomes, and fluids the cells originated from; they resemble but are not identical to them. In this paper, we draw attention to the life cycles of cells from extraction, isolation and manipulation to cryopreservation, release and reintegration. In particular, we want to draw attention to the environments that are supposed to re-embed cells after thawing. To stabilize cellular life, they must constantly absorb, supplement and balance it. Hence, we argue that the ability of governing life through cells relies on the ongoing management, maintenance, and readjustment of hosting milieus just as much as it does depend on biotechnologies and laboratories. Drawing from ethnographic research on cell cryopreservation, we point out how governing life through cells requires a double movement: the isolation and reduction of cells for and through freezing, and the preparation of environments in which this transformation is undone. From this empirical vantage point, we reassess the contemporary significance and limits of cellular biopower.