Abstract
Florence Chiew interviews Maurizio Meloni on his new book, Impressionable Biologies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics. The conversation reflects on a number of key themes and arguments in Meloni’s work, such as the use of the term ‘impressionability’ to explore longstanding ideas of the permeable body in constant flux in response to cosmological changes. This notion of the body-porous is one whose history Meloni traces back to ancient traditions and systems of medicine, such as humoralism. In this important book, Meloni makes a compelling argument for questioning the current emphasis on the novelty of biological plasticity as an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, and urges us to take a longer genealogical perspective to appreciate how histories of corporeal plasticity have always been part of deeply gendered, racialized and classed discourses in which social hierarchies have been made through physiological distinctions.
Florence Chiew: Congratulations on the publication of your new book, Impressionable Biologies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (2019). Perhaps we could begin by reflecting on the title of the book itself. ‘Impressionable’ is a wonderful and fitting term to describe our current fascination with ideas about plasticity and permeability, especially of the body, the biological, and boundaries of the self or the individual. What inspired your use of this term? Is impressionability the same thing as plasticity?
Maurizio Meloni: The ‘impressionability’ of biological material is for me a way to describe the experience of the ancient and early modern body: a body permeable and constantly under pressure from the biophysical environment, and hence requiring a number of techniques and regimes of vigilance to govern such anxious mutability. The non-modern phenomenology of the body is that of a physical entity that swells or retreats in response to cosmological changes, a body-porous: all Greek medical theory is a theory of poroi (from which the English adjective ‘porous’ derives), a theory of the ‘infinitely penetrable body’, as Ruth Padel (1992: 58) puts it. Impressionability well conveys, in my view, this notion of a body heavily engraved by the power of external factors, be they positions of stars, waters, or food. Impression comes from the Latin imprímo (in- +premō: to press in) and has obvious references to classical writing techniques: incising marks on wax tablets using a small pointed metal tool or sealing them with a metal stamp. Plato and Aristotle often referred to this metaphorical repertoire of marking a receiving surface to convey ideas of memory (Plato in the Theaetetus) or sense-perception (Aristotle in the De Anima). In both cases impressio is the word used by Latin translators to convey this sign-making process. It draws on a similar repertoire in Aristotle’s definition of plastic matter as ‘impressible’ matter in his Meteorology. Plasticity is for Aristotle a form of impressionability, the possession of a capacity of being soft enough to retain a shape without being too easily moulded, a definition that comes many centuries before William James’s derivative concept of plasticity as ‘semi-inertness’ – ‘the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once’ (1890: 105).
At the intersection of writing mechanisms and physical pressures, impressio then becomes a distinctive term of scholastic thinkers and writers in the Middle Age. It is used as a template for any form of ‘environmental’ influences from heavenly bodies onto inferior sublunary matter, including the earth, by authors like Robert Grosseteste, Dante, the father of Italian literature, Albert the Great or Saint Thomas. Two things are important to notice here. Firstly, there is more than sign-making in this notion of a pressure exerted on a wax-tablet; there is an obvious element of violence as recognized, for instance, in the Hippocratic treatise On Head Wounds (1999), where impression refers to the action of a weapon upon the bones (Latin translation, Part 7). Even more importantly, there is a strongly gendered dimension in the notions of cosmological influences or impressions on the sublunary world (the earth inhabited by humans). From Aristotle to several Arab commentators and the later scholastic tradition, the analogy between celestial influences as a paternal power and the receptive sublunary matter as a female is quite literal. Impression is the paternal power to make marks on the female matter, and hence give form to it. This dualism of plasticity is very fascinating. From its beginning, the experience of plasticity bifurcates in the active plastic power of the male semen on one side (plasticity as mastery and agency) and in the female unique receptivity to this informative power. I see this dissociation still operating today in a number of contemporary iterations between a dynamic, consumerist plasticity of giving form to the body (especially in the Global North) and plasticity as vulnerability to historical traumas or dangerous environmental influences (especially in the Global South and among vulnerable groups in the North).
FC: One of your most sustained arguments is that the notion of the plastic body is not as novel or radical as we might think from our vantage point of the 21st century. You tackle this in the book by carefully tracing a genealogy of plasticity back to ancient traditions and systems of medicine, such as humoralism, which you describe as a form of plasticity before plasticity. I find this very compelling as it evokes a deeper, more tangled sense of temporality and history and a way of thinking that questions the conventional view of the past as belonging to a time behind us. How has this way of reading the ‘old’ alongside the ‘new’, the past as inhering in the present, changed or challenged your engagement with scientific and medical evidence concerning the plastic body and, more generally, accounts of body-world relations?
MM: I do not mean here to fetishize older traditions but I do mean to challenge the modernistic emphasis on the uniqueness and novelty of biological plasticity today, not so much again at the level of science but of forms of life/living. The Greek and, in general, Mediterranean experience of the body in ancient times, is a good example of this ubiquity of plasticity. Even before Hippocratic medicine, notions of a body ‘without skin’ are present in the Homeric literature (Gavrylenko, 2012). Since the establishment of the Hippocratic corpus (5th to 4th century BC), this ontology of a dependent and relational body finds its synthesis in humoralism. In humoralism, the basic components of the body, the four humours, are always on the verge of instability and metamorphosis as they can ‘change into one another and […] arise and increase at every moment and season’ (Grant, 2000: 15). We know well how these tropes, mostly through the incorporation into Arabic and Muslim culture, came to shape, after the 9th century, views and practices of the body expanding up to India and the Malay peninsula, where its influence is still visible today. Analogies with the fluent body of Ayurveda (Langford, 2002), based on three humours, or dosha, would be obvious here, although they are outside the scope of my book. The phenomenology of the body (and of race and generation) in Western early modernity was similarly fluid. The rediscovery of humoralism through Latin translations since the 12th century was the platform for early modern Western medicine and offered the default view and practice of the body up to the definitive breakdown of Hippocratism in 19th-century Europe. Before the phenomenology of modern biomedicine emerged in Northern Europe in the final decades of the 19th century, there is virtually a global unity of corporeal plasticity across different cultural traditions.
What prompted me to look at a longue durée history of plasticity was the surprise when I realized how, unlike genetics, epigenetics is today recognized in many non-Western areas of the world – Russia, India or indigenous epistemologies in postcolonial areas – as somehow resonating with traditional body-world configurations. If, as I argue, the problem of how to live with a permeable body (rather than the actual mechanisms of plasticity) has a much deeper history to excavate, my book could be seen as a platform to conjoin the contemporary rise of epigenetics with earlier body-world configurations and epistemologies, thus undermining polarities between modernity and tradition, Western and Southern medicine. This approach, I believe, offers a strong corrective to the present over-identification with tropes and rhetoric of innovation (from personalized medicine to postgenomics) where the appropriation and resurfacing of past themes is simply forgotten or denied.
FC: Taking a genealogical perspective invariably raises the question of ‘where to begin’. I was curious as to how you settled on humoralist treatments of the body as your starting point for reflecting on an earlier form of plasticity. Were there different or even competing points of departure you might have chosen to piece together this ‘archaeology’ of ancient plasticity?
MM: My knowledge is situated, and I happily embrace my situatedness, hopefully to turn it into an advantage point from which to think our present in a more pluralistic way, unsettling some hegemonic viewpoints. I am a European scholar, and the classical European legacy of medical writings – Greek, Latin and early modern European books on the art of living – was the obvious reference in expanding the genealogy album of plasticity. Other authors may have found different perspectives in this family album – Arabic medicine, indigenous postcolonial cosmologies, Chinese medical astrology, or Ayurvedic notions of fluidity, for instance. This richness and plurality of the origin is an important defence against the intellectual uniformity which is mostly due to the increasing monolingualism (English as the exclusive language) of the academic community (Gordin, 2015). Monolingualism becomes a hubris when, for instance, it speaks of ‘science and society’ while actually thinking of just one society, the US or UK; or when it fails to access other linguistic traditions, thus proclaiming the uniqueness of contemporary experience (for instance the argument that techniques of corporeal plasticity are an outcome of reflexive modernity or neoliberalism); or, finally, when it indulges in abridged oversimplifications about our Western past from biopolitics to posthumanities debates.
Just to limit myself to this last point. What I could see in Impressionable Biologies through a longue durée history of human physiology is that many of these oversimplifications about our Western past are problematic. It is a problematic claim that political and ontological dualism has been mainstream in body-world configurations in the West; or that a somatic view of ‘mental health’ is a recent discovery due to changes in psychiatry or neuroscience; or that human exceptionalism or the nature/culture dichotomy has been uncontested and hegemonic in Western views. Looking at things from the more humble history of physiological and medical treatises, things look quite different. Just take as an example human exceptionalism. We need to remember here that humoralism, as the key view of the Western body before modern biomedicine, was deeply invested in botanic analogy: the term humour comes from botanical observations: humour (ikmas or chumos in Greek) referred to the juice or life-giving moisture that nourishes a plant in soil. Hence the notion, popular until early modern political theorists like Bodin, that humans (and human races) as plants would change with a change of place (1962 [1576]). Montaigne also claimed of people that, although there are significant factors of influence beyond places, ‘like plants, they will assume new characteristics when they migrate’ (Glacken, 1967: 450). The analogy between human physiology and botany was not scandalous but rather obvious, as was the penetrability of the individual and political body to cosmological influences of all kinds (stars, moon, airs, seasons), notions well in vogue up to the late 18th century (it is the case of medical astrology) if not beyond: humans were undoubtedly pieces of their natural landscape in humoralism. There was dualism in Western ideas too, of course, and ideas of biological fixedness and corporeal boundedness have become mainstream since the last three decades of the 19th century.
This is, if you like, the problem of my book: not so much making sense of current beliefs in plasticity, which I see as the default position globally in body-world configurations, but addressing how a certain number of white, Northern European men, mostly of Protestant background, come to equate biology with stability and lack of porousness since the last few decades of the 19th century. To cite Marx in the Grundrisse: it is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation […] but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and their active existence. (Marx, 1973: 489)
FC: In the second half of the book, you focus your attention on the rise of postgenomic research (of which epigenetics is a key example) and discuss the different ways that notions of the ‘environment’ and ‘experience’ are being rediscovered as fundamental rather than peripheral or irrelevant to an alternative ontology of the genome and biological matter. In recent years, this shift in interest in the social and the environmental as causative factors for human biology and health has certainly attracted the attention of many scholars in the critical humanities and social sciences. Among those you mention are prominent names like Evelyn Fox Keller, Nikolas Rose, Hannah Landecker and Margaret Lock. Could you say something about how you think your book provides a timely opportunity for those of us working at the intersection of the biological and social sciences to engage critically but also generously with the contemporary research agendas of the life sciences? What sorts of conversations and debates do you think the book might open up?
MM: Well, I think my book is just one among many emerging contributions on what is called ‘biosocial research’ and ‘biosocial entanglement’ (for instance: Lock, 2015; Frost, 2016; Youdell and Lindley, 2018), which reflects awareness of a multi-causal and multi-level co-determination of social and biological matter, challenging neat boundaries between what lies beyond and within the skin. With this shift I think a whole new landscape of ethical and sociological quandaries is rapidly unfolding with important implications in terms of knowledge production and unsettling boundaries between disciplines, particularly a number of binary oppositions that were forged during the last century. What happens, for instance, to the distinction between the natural and the social sciences if, as some epigeneticists claim, biological heredity includes social exposures and environmental effects; if, as works in microbiomics are highlighting, cultural factors are no longer above the skin but in the gut, the bones, or the genes through the effects of lifestyle, diet, and other forms of ‘exposures’? What happens to debates on race (is race a genetic reality or a social construction?) if social events (exposure to racism for instance) are deemed to have significant genetic effects at least at the level of gene expression (Kuzawa and Sweet, 2009)? Finally, what happens to the cherished myth that taking the side of nurture is more progressive than endorsing the stability of traits (innateness) when we are rediscovering how powerful the notion of environmental effects was until the 19th century to propagate racialist or even eugenic discourses (pathogenic environments as a cause of racial or social biological inferiority)? For me these are all questions that require a collective rather than individual (or individualistic) analysis, some form of institutional endeavour across the natural/social science divide, through the creation of research networks and centres that look at these issues in a multi-scaled and multi-sited way. What matters is paying attention to the pluralism of biosocial research, both in its different historical iterations and in its contemporary geographic variations across the Global North and South.
This is the direction that interests me now: ‘conjugating’ (Anderson, 2009) knowledge and ethical visions of the body generated by the latest advancements in epigenetics and microbiomics with views and practices of the body in areas that have been less exposed to the modern biomedical imagination. As part of an Australian Research Council grant project, I plan to look at the resonance between an epigenetics model of plasticity and notions that have persisted stubbornly like maternal impressions, the connection between food and mood, and even the inheritance of acquired characters, in areas as different as Australia, South Africa and India. I aim to study how epigenetic findings are often read as a vindication of indigenous knowledge and find legitimation, unlike genetics, from ‘below’, so to speak, and sometimes even from the minority groups at whom policy intervention is aimed (see, for indigenous Australia, Warin et al., 2019)
FC: The question of ethics – as you put it, ‘how to live with a permeable body’ – is a theme that emerges throughout your book, though much more explicitly in the final chapter where you unpack the complexity of current thinking around notions of genetic responsibility, historical trauma, and ‘molecular suffering’. I was given pause by a statement you made in relation to the experience of plasticity as one’s deep entanglement with histories and milieu; you write that ‘there is no reset button at each generation’. This seems to me a rather profound insight. Do you have any thoughts on how this view of entanglement – as ontologically prior – might encourage us to think differently about what it means to assume an ethical position or perspective? What implications does it have for contemporary debates on, for instance, human agency?
MM: What I am trying to say in this book is that there is a historical detour, from the late 19th century to our days, in which something like a ‘biological liberalism’ and perhaps even ‘physiological liberalism’ was created (see Cohen, 2009), an idealized, self-contained and defended entity that one could clearly separate from the external environment (controlled by the inner environment), the body as a technology of freedom. Importantly, debates on biological heredity were deeply influenced by this transition. According to the emerging doctrine of the continuity of the germ-plasm at the end of the 19th century (upon which genetics capitalized), what we may call biological individuality was now deemed to come to the world ‘pure and uncontaminated […] by the surroundings and life history of parents’ (Benjamin Kidd, quoted in Crook, 1994; see Meloni, 2016). This body of biological integrity, unique individuality, and (relative) non-environmental interference has become overturned in the last decades by a renewed perception of corporeal sensitivity and vulnerability to exposures from the biophysical environments and sociocultural experiences at the level of the brain, genome expression and even biological heredity. The ubiquitous toxicity of life in the Anthropocene (Davies, 2018) requires somehow the appreciation of a different body than the liberal fiction of an autonomous sovereign, based on the liberal notion of non-interference (which I transfer from the political to the physiological level). Impressionable Biologies offers the idea of a biology for toxic times, if you like, a time in which the whole biophysical system emerges as deeply and devastatingly imprinted by the weight of human-made activities. My understanding is that this renewed appreciation of corporeal openness since the early 21st century goes beyond 20th-century understandings of physiological sensitivity to stressors (Jackson, 2015) and is well rendered by postgenomic metaphors of full absorption into places (Solomon, 2016; Roberts, 2017) in which the boundaries between body/self and the external world are made totally uncertain. As I argue in my book, this is not quite the same as saying that bodies and environment ‘interact’. In postgenomics the environment takes a more prominent power: it is no longer a mere container for gene expression but is an increasingly productive resource and bioactive force (Landecker, 2011). Even in terms of biovalues, postgenomics introduces a different logic that makes not just DNA sequences alone but the ‘whole spatial and temporal contexts and circumstances surrounding DNA’ a source of biocapital (Stallins et al., 2016).
I am probably escaping the ethical implications, and for a reason. I struggle to address ethical issues directly and prefer, rather than answering in a prescriptive fashion, to take a longer genealogical perspective that highlights particularly how histories of corporeal plasticity have always been part of deeply gendered, racialized and classed discourses in which social hierarchies were made through physiological distinctions. However, to come to your question, certainly the awareness of an extreme openness of the body makes ethical questions more difficult, if not different and certainly less straightforward than classical biological liberalism would want with its view of a neat nature-nurture distinction. I remain ambivalent on the meaning of this current retreat of biological liberalism or modernism (Gilbert et al., 2012) and re-emergence of views of a permeable body. To expand on your quote of ‘no (biological) reset button at each generation’, I can see the importance of a cosmopolitical ethics of responsibility in an age of recognized stratigraphic effects of human action (Zalasiewicz and Freedman, 2009; Hendrickx and Van Hoyweghen, 2018). What each of us is leaving behind (carbon emissions, waste) remains imprinted on the earth’s strata and, according to epigeneticists (lifestyle, toxic exposures, etc.), also on the bodies and the genomes of future generations. No doubt a biology of impressionable bodies and multigenerational effects can resonate well with such an ethics of taking care of the burden of our footprint in the Anthropocene. At the same time, there is a moralizing and potentially blaming effect in the epigenetic synchronization of social behaviours and biological effects that was much less obvious with genetics. This has become very visible around the greater risk perceived on the maternal body in epigenetics, and the ‘traumatized’ bodies of vulnerable populations, inciting to new and more pervasive forms of intervention just because biology is no longer timeless but plastic and therefore changeable to a certain degree in specific critical windows during the lifetime (Guthman and Mansfield, 2013). As you suggest, what we can gain from my book is that when it comes to biological plasticity, a seemingly obvious alignment between views of the body and progressive or emancipatory policies has to be put into question given how the longer history of corporeal plasticity has yielded to very different, even competing, perspectives across time and space.