The past shall not begin: Frozen seeds,extended presents and the politics of reversibility

Introduction

In 2008 the first global seed bank, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), went into operation. Even before its opening, the SGSV had already attracted media attention and provoked all kinds of theological and eschatological parables. The SGSV quickly received the nickname ‘Doomsday Vault’ (Hopkin, 2007; Kinver, 2007) while some commentators spoke of a ‘Noah’s Ark’ (Jha, 2006) for plants. In fact, the purpose and location of this particular storage facility are reminiscent of an apocalyptic theme in a motion picture in which humanity tries to prepare itself for the end of the world. Built in the inhospitable environment of an Arctic desert on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, halfway between the mainland of Norway and the North Pole, the SGSV was designed to preserve the biodiversity of global agriculture and thus ensure global food security against future catastrophes. National plant research institutes and gene banks around the world working on the creation of useful new plant varieties have the opportunity to send copies of their variety collections to Spitsbergen and have them stored in the vault. In the event that the national collections are destroyed in the course of technical accidents, natural disasters or social upheavals, the vault offers the option to restore lost diversity and thus the possibility of genetic variety breeding on which modern agriculture so heavily depends. On the homepage of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, one of the main sources of finance for the SGSV, the task is clearly outlined: ‘The Vault is the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply, offering options for future generations to overcome the challenges of climate change and population growth. It will secure, for centuries, millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today. It is the final back up’ (Crop Trust, 2019).

Today, the SGSV is an important and integral part in the global governmental assemblage (Ong and Collier, 2005) of food security. Two of the most influential organizations in global agriculture policy, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), both emphasize the importance of the SGSV for the successful conservation of global seed diversity and encourage national gene banks to store their collections in the SGSV (FAO, 2010; CGIAR, 2018). Accordingly, since the opening of the vault the stock has been growing continuously. Close to one million different seed varieties from almost all countries in the world are stored in Svalbard, waiting until a catastrophic event might create the necessity for their reactivation. In fact, the ability of the SGSV to restore seed assortments was first called upon in 2015 when the International Institute for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas In Syria became the first gene bank to restore a large part of its collection with the help of the SGSV. As the civil war in Syria intensified and began to pose a serious threat to human life, the plant scientists decided to abandon the gene bank in Aleppo and move their headquarters to Lebanon, rebuilding its seed collection with stored copies from SGSV. This underlines the growing anchoring of the vault in the global dispositive of food security.

Although there has been increased social-scientific interest in gene banks and the socio-material practices of conservation in recent years (Alpsancar, 2016; Bowker, 2008; Heise, 2016; Kowal and Radin, 2017; Landecker, 2005; Peres, 2016; Radin, 2016; van Dooren, 2009), these technologies have received little attention from the perspective of critical security studies. ¹ This article tries to address this shortcoming by understanding the SGSV as a technology of security and highlighting the peculiar temporal politics the vault expresses. It is argued that the vault realizes what can be called a ‘politics of reversibility’ (Gehring, 2007: 429). Here, the term ‘politics of reversibility’ refers to a particular way of time-making that attempts to counter catastrophic events by creating the possibility of reversing the effects of these events. The vault does so by extending the present, creating a stretched duration in which an event never really becomes the past but persists as a quasi-past and thus remains accessible to change. Accordingly, reversibility should not be reduced solely to the factual act of reversing an event or eliminating its effects, such as rebuilding a city after an earthquake. Rather, reversibility refers to the chrono-political problem of establishing a specific temporal order in which possibilities are maintained and events can become reversible. As the article will show, the extension of the present and the possibility of reversibility are based on specific material-ordering practices. By spatially separating seeds from their material entanglements on the one hand, and suppressing the evolutionary potential of plants through the use of low temperature on the other, the duration of the present is expanded, allowing plant breeders and food security practitioners to keep up with the contingency and emergent capacity of life itself. In this sense, the SGSV is not only a technology for dealing with time in the form of uncertain futures but also of altering the temporal order itself by creating the possibility of reversibility.

The understanding of reversibility used here derives from the sociologist Niklas Luhmann (Luhmann, 1995, 2009b). Luhmann introduces the distinction between reversibility and irreversibility in his general theory of social systems and his reflections on the phenomenon of duration. According to Luhmann, social systems are characterized by the fact that they always operate in two presents at the same time. The first present can be described as the present of the irreversibly passing clock time, as a punctualized present that only serves as a point of switching the future into the past. The second present, on the other hand, is an enduring present that lasts and extends beyond the passing present of clock time. While in the first present every event irreversibly disappears into the past, the second present appears as an interval of duration in which possibilities can be kept open and previous changes can be treated as reversible. However, this second present, in which the possible lasts, is not a natural given form of time but itself an effect of socio-material practices. The actuality and the maintenance of a duration must be actively produced, because only in and through this time-space is it possible to undo an event, turning the creation of a duration into an inherently political endeavour.

By framing the SGSV as a technology of security and taking up the chrono-political problem of reversibility, the article follows on from the productive international debate on temporality and security (Amoore, 2013; Anderson, 2010, 2017; Aradau and van Munster, 2011; Collier, 2008; Opitz and Tellmann, 2015). However, it offers a slight shift in perspective. The focus is less on the different epistemologies that are supposed to make specific uncertain futures knowable, actionable and controllable than on the socio-material practices that make time. In this sense, the article takes up the recent call to complement the current investigation of the ‘politics of truth’ with an investigation of the ‘politics of time’ (Opitz and Tellmann, 2015; Osborne, 2011) – understood as a politics ‘which takes the temporal structures of social practices as the specific objects of its transformative (or preservative) intent’ (Osborne, 2011: xii). Thus, creating reversibility can be understood as a chrono-political practice that seeks to control the ‘flow’ of time by altering the temporal structures of the socio-material world.

To unfold this argument the article proceeds in three steps. In the first part, Luhmann’s theory of the doubled present is delineated and the idea of the politics of reversibility is developed. This section introduces Luhmann’s theory of social time and explains why the problem of reversibility is not simply a problem of dealing with the past but of controlling the duration of the present. The second historical section shows how the loss of plant diversity in agriculture became a matter of concern for global food security, and goes on to reconstruct how the gene bank was established as a security technology to deal with the uncertainty of food provisioning and environmental futures. The third section addresses the specific functioning and materiality of the SGSV as a security technology and its capacity to alter the rhythm of evolutionary time. This section demonstrates that the collecting and freezing of seeds serves as a specific technique of extending the present. In this extended present, the event of biodiversity loss is kept in a loop, opening up the possibility of reversing that event.

Doubled present, duration, and (ir-)reversibility

In addition to the question of how society deals with threatening futures, social-scientific literature has recently become increasingly interested in how societies deal with currently unfolding disasters. This is particularly evident in debates on environmental security and what has become known as the Anthropocene. For example, Jamie Lorimer in his studies on wildlife management emphasizes that re-wilding measures are a form of biosecurity that focuses less on preparing for an uncertain future than on undoing the damage caused by an already prevailing catastrophe. Such measures ‘seek to reverse, restore or otherwise address deleterious existing transitions’ (Lorimer, 2017: 36). Instead of preventing a future, re-wilding and conservation measures are about reversing the past. However, the restoration of past states raises the time-theoretical question of their reverse-ability. How long can something be undone before the change is irrevocable? This problem already arises when dealing with sensitive ecosystems and their tipping points, but it is also evident when facing the extinction of animal and plant species. The following section therefore aims to explore the temporal structure of the phenomenon of reversibility and show that reversibility is less a problem of dealing with the past than a question of controlling the present.

To this end, it is helpful to take up the distinction of reversibility and irreversibility coined by Niklas Luhmann (Luhmann, 1995, 2009b). Luhmann uses this distinction in his wider theorizations of social temporality and his account of the phenomenon of duration. Here he is particularly interested in the question of how time is able to endure and elapse at the same time. How do systems stabilize in the world and retain possibilities for action and adaption against the background of the irreversible fading of time?

Luhmann addresses the problem of (ir-)reversibility by using a concept of a doubled present, which he borrows from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology but expands by using the theoretical resources of sociological functionalism and theories of complexity (Luhmann, 1995, 2009a, 2009b, 2012). According to this conception, every system always acts in two presents at the same time. The first present is defined as the distinction between past and future and reflects the temporal ontology underlying Luhmann’s systems theory. Biological entities, human consciousness, social systems and intelligent machines can only be understood as operative and thus temporalized systems. Every system exists only by means of recursive operations, by chaining one operative event (reproduction of life, thoughts, communication) to the next. These events are irreversible events that disappear into the past as soon as they appear and have to be replaced by new events, or the system ceases to exist. In modern societies this operative nature of being is represented by the time of the clock. ² At the beat of the clock the eventfulness and transience of the present becomes visible, and at the same time it makes clear that time periods can only be thought of as a chain of these inherently fading events. Seen in this way, the first present has to be understood as a punctualized present, a single dot in time at which the future irreversibly turns into the past. However, this punctualized present is not the only present out there. As Luhmann puts it:

There is also a reserved time in which the possible endures. It would be wrong or at least inadequate to say that this time is measured by [clocktime]. Clocktime is a measure of the time lost, but the duration contains in itself the possibility of prolonging or shortening a period of openness, of determining its beginning and its end, of speeding it up or slowing it down, in short: of negotiating with time about the duration of the duration. (Luhmann, 2009b: 151, my translation) ³

Although this second present is inherently coupled to the first, it cannot be reduced to it. The second present, or ‘specious present’ (Luhmann, 2009b: 151), is not characterized by a single event but constitutes a kind of expansive zone in which time does not pass, but rather endures. Both presents are always present at the same time, and it is their very difference that creates the impression of what is commonly described as the ‘movement’ or ‘flow’ of time (Luhmann, 1995: 79). According to Luhmann, it is a change in the world in which the difference between the two presences can be experienced, such as a sound, a movement or the ticking of a clock. While reading this paper one hears the clocktower and notices that one has already been reading for quite a while. Yet, the peculiarity of the second present is that it opens up leeway that seems to suspend the eventful course of time. In the space of duration the final completion of an action may be postponed or past events can even be reversed, despite the irreversible ticking of clocktime. Indeed, in the zone of the duration the past never really becomes the past. Instead, it appears as a quasi-past in the form of a ‘retrievable present’, which has not yet finally gone over into the actual stream of time and which one can return to and change (Gehring, 2007: 427). While the operative chaining of the first present constantly generates irreversible pasts, the second present is characterized by a rationality of accessibility that holds up alternatives and thus offers the possibility of an endless ‘recycling’ of the past (Stäheli, 2000: 88). Thus, in contrast to the past in the first present the past in the second present is not irreversible but reversible, as long as the second present endures. ⁴

Luhmann uses a few examples taken from everyday life to illustrate the link between the duration of the second present and the possibility of reversibility. A person who has forgotten his wallet can go back and get it, an offence can be reversed by an apology, a political matter is debated until late into the night (Luhmann, 1995: 79; 2009b: 150–152). These examples illustrate how, despite the irreversible ticking of clocktime, a zone of duration is constituted in time that allows decisions to be taken while alternatives are kept open and courses of action can be corrected. Conversely, this time-space can be closed as well, turning reversibility into irreversibility. The wallet is lost, the apology is given too late, a decision ends the debate. In other words there was a time-space for action, but with the irreversible caesura in the world this interval has closed, leaving ‘only [. . .] remembrance as a mode of reactualization of possibilities’ (Luhmann, 2009b: 150, my translation).

This concept of a continuing present in which events do not pass irreversibly but remain accessible can also be used to address the question of how modern society attempts to prevent the irreversible loss of biodiversity. To this end, however, some implicit aspects of Luhmann’s concept need to be more strongly emphasized.

First, there is the latent political dimension of reversibility (see also Gehring, 2007). As Luhmann’s examples illustrate, both duration and reversibility are neither simply present in the world nor do they take place in the minds of individuals. Rather, they are empirically determinable phenomena that are constituted in the course of socio-material practices. It is only through the relation of two or more entities that a temporally determinable duration in which reversibility is possible emerges. Yet, Luhmann underestimates the problems of power and time-politics that are at stake here. Since it is power that defines, spans and sustains a ‘field of possibilities’ (Foucault, 1982), the question arises: who actually determines how long the second present lasts? How long do spaces of possibility remain open and what closes them? If, as Luhmann writes, the systems involved in the situation can negotiate with time about the duration of the duration, it is fair to assume a ‘politics of reversibility’ (Gehring, 2007: 429).

However, secondly, this politics of reversibility is not limited to interactions, as Luhmann’s examples suggest. Rather, it can be assumed that other social systems such as organizations, global assemblages or modern society itself also operate in two presents and accordingly have the ability to keep the possibility for reversibility open. And in the same way they are confronted with an environment that constantly produces events and puts systems under pressure of irreversibility. In the case of modern society, this becomes particularly visible in the way it deals with nature and biodiversity loss. Each deceased species marks an irreversible event and threatens to close the window of time in which society can still react.

This raises the question of how society attempts to respond to the problem of irreversibility. Luhmann, tends to simply presume the ‘environmental’ and ‘infrastructural’ conditions of time. For him, time itself (the timeline of the first present) remains a material condition that is recognizable but ‘inaccessible’ to the systems (Luhmann, 2009b: 145, 150). Only the second present offers the space to adapt to the irreversibly passing time of ‘clocktime’. This is why, thirdly, a more materialistic reading of Luhmann is used here, which assumes that social systems like modern society not only have to deal with the material conditions of time, but also make them the subject of interventions. In fact, as will be shown below, modern society gains its possibilities for reversibility by manipulating the temporality of biological life at will.

The issue at stake here becomes understandable when one recalls that the temporality of biological life knows no reversibility (Luhmann, 2009b: 145; Prigogine and Stengers, 2017: 298). The rhythms and cycles of life are non-identical repetitions that do not return to previous states or update old ones (Adam, 2013: 70–90). This is particularly evident when one considers the process of evolution. Once evolutionary adaptations stabilize they are final in the sense that they can no longer be undone. Evolution ‘never returns to its earlier state. It can only remember and compare’ (Luhmann, 2012: 285). The same can be said about the event of extinction, for ‘extinction is loss; it is an end with no return’ (Rose, 2017: 146). In other words life, due to its emergent and eventful character, is constantly creating change in the world, confronting modern society with irreversible pasts. In the Anthropocene, this irreversibility has become a twofold security problem from the perspective of modern food security practitioners and environmentalists because the change of nature and the loss of agricultural diversity not only threaten the foundation of capitalist forms of food production but also the conditions of existence of human life. The biopolitical and chrono-political challenge therefore is what kind of security technologies can be used to stretch the temporal zone in which the evolutionary transformations and the extinction of life are no longer irreversible, but remain reversible and thus adaptable to the rhythms and time regimes of modern society.

The remainder of the article argues that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is such a technology of reversibility. It serves as a vault to safeguard the genetic diversity of crops against extinction and maintain the evolutionary potential for modern agriculture. Against the background of the reading of Luhmann presented here, the SGSV can be understood as a techno-scientific means of prolonging the second present and maintaining the possibility of reversibility for modern society against the background of the irreversible dynamics of biological life, a technique of ‘biopolitical immunization seeking to secure [. . .] the immemorial dynamism of evolution’ (Chrulew, 2017: 287). As will be shown later, storing and freezing seeds is intended to suspend the irreversible force of life, which opens up the possibility of reversing unwanted transformations in nature such as the extinction of species. However, before this argument is fully developed, it is helpful to reconstruct historically how the evolutionary capacity and thus the temporality of seeds and plant genes became food security issues in the first place and how the politics of reversibility was established as a security measure to deal with the problem of biodiversity loss. This is the topic of the next section.

Securing circulation by preserving the virtual

The emergence of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as a technology to secure crop diversity must be read against the background of a more comprehensive politicization and scientification of evolutionary processes of plants dating back to the late 19th century. While the systematic global collection of useful plants has a longer history that can be traced back at least to the 16th century and the ‘Columbian Exchange’ (Crosby, 2003, 2015), the collection of seed varieties is intertwined with the birth of genetics. Two developments can be highlighted in this context (Flitner, 1995, 2003). One is the (re-)discovery of Mendel’s theory of heredity, which made various traits of plants technically available for breeding. The other is the publication of Nikolai I. Vavilov’s work on the ‘centers of origin of cultivated plants’ in 1926 (see Vavilov, 2009). The Russian biologist Vavilov identified several regions on the globe in which the variety of cultivated plants was particularly great, thus providing ‘a global roadmap to track down those geographical areas where plant hunters would most likely find interesting materials for breeding purposes’ (Flitner, 2003: 176). Both Mendel’s theory of heredity and Vavilov’s ‘plant geography’ changed the scientific and political view of cultivated plants because they implied that a plant organism can be broken down into its various characteristics (size, growth rate, temperature tolerance, pest resistance, etc.) and that the favoured characteristics could be selectively collected and reassembled in a new variety. Even though breeders have created new varieties by crossing and selection for millennia, the genetic gaze promised a more systematic and standardized creation of useful plants (DeLanda, 1997: 162f).

Accordingly, the genetic view of the plant paved the way for modern agriculture because it allowed plant breeders to design high-performance varieties with faster growth rates and higher yields. After the introduction of chemical fertilizers in the 1850s had already significantly boosted food production in Western Europe, the new plants were now seen as another important building block in ensuring national food production. Countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States undertook collection expeditions to the gene centres described by Vavilov (which were mainly located on the continents of Africa, South America and Asia) in order to collect ‘plant resources’ with special traits and thus further optimize domestic plant breeding (Flitner, 2003). However, the dark side of an agriculture concentrated on a few high-performance varieties became apparent to contemporary observers early on. For example, in 1914 German agronomist Erwin Baur pointed to the increasing loss of genetic diversity and framed this process as a direct threat to Germany’s economic prosperity and national food sovereignty. In Baur’s view, the loss of diversity would result in a loss of opportunities for plant breeding and consequently hinder the ability of the nation to further improve domestic agriculture (Baur, 1914). The heavy concentration on optimized varieties led to an increasing displacement of lower yielding varieties that were, even though not cultivated themselves, indispensable for further breeding due to their singular genetic characteristics. So, in an unforeseen reflexive loop, geneticized agriculture suddenly seemed to undermine its own foundations by cannibalizing the genetic basis of its success. Inspired by the work of Vavilov, Baur saw the solution to the loss of diversity in the systematic collection and conservation of seeds in national seed banks. Since high-performance plants were considered to be the only viable way of guaranteeing national food security, the logical consequence seemed to be to preserve diversity outside its natural habitat and thus make it available for future breeding.

Baur’s propagation of the gene bank foreshadowed the central role the conservation of the genetic diversity of seeds was about to play in future food security policy. Since the loss of diversity was seen as unavoidable collateral damage caused by a necessary modernization process, the gene bank appeared as a kind of prosthesis that would protect the established system of agricultural production against its inherent tendency towards self-consumption. This logic is worked out in detail by Helen Anne Curry in her historical account of the implementation of the Mexican Agricultural Program by the Rockefeller Foundation (Curry, 2017), which turned out to be the laboratory for what would become known two decades later as the Green Revolution (see also Harwood, 2012). In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation signed an agreement with the Mexican government to modernize Mexican agriculture by implementing new, higher-yielding varieties. But soon this endeavour created a crucial dilemma for plant breeders: if the desired maize breeding programmes were to succeed, the genetic variety would drastically dwindle as there would be no farmers left growing the old varieties. Since there was seen to be no alternative to the increase in productivity, and any increase in productivity would thin out genetic diversity, securing the old varieties outside their natural environment and relocating them to gene banks appeared to be the only possible solution. Again, the gene bank marked a ‘crucial addition to the technologies of industrial agricultural production, one that lessened the perceived risks inherent in the un-diverse landscapes of industrial monocrop agriculture’ (Curry, 2017: 86).

Although the loss of genetic resources was recognized early in the 20th century as a problem that needed to be solved, it was not seen as an environmental or planetary issue at that time. The focus continued to be on securing national prosperity or on geopolitical issues. For instance, in Nazi Germany seed collection was part of the infamous politics of Lebensraum (living space), ⁵ while in the post-war period the United States saw the implementation of high-performance plants as part of a general global development policy designed to curb the global spread of communism (Perkins, 1997; Flitner, 2003). But in the wake of the emerging ecological debates in the 1960s and 1970s the environmental aspect began to emerge. During the Technical Meeting on Plant Exploitation and Introduction of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in 1961 and the subsequent conference in 1967 (FAO, 1961, 1967), the loss of genetic diversity in agriculture was discussed as an increasingly global environmental issue for the first time and was linked to a wider range of future contingencies including global food security, poverty, and world peace (see also Frankel and Bennett, 1970). The process of genetic erosion, as it was now called, proved to be a problem because it undermined the ability to respond to uncertain futures. Pest resistance to chemicals, increasing droughts and a growing world population were all seen as incalculable future contingencies that could only be adequately addressed with the help of new plant varieties (Fenzi and Bonneuil, 2016: 75). At the same time genetic erosion was seen as a natural concomitant of a continuously developing agriculture which was said to be needed to feed a growing world population and realize global development programmes (Harlan, 1974 quoted in Flitner and Heins, 2002: 329). The collection of unproductive landraces was therefore presented as the only way to secure the ‘evolutionary potential’ (Frankel, 1974) of the plants and thus reconcile the two opposed poles of securing the well-being of the population and genetic diversity (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2017: 75; Peres, 2016; van Dooren, 2009).

Accordingly, the FAO and the CGIAR, established in 1971, supported the building of national gene banks, especially in the so-called ‘developing countries’. This support ranged from financial and technological support to knowledge transfer and the definition of gene bank standards for sustainable ex situ conservation. ⁶ The expansion of the gene bank received a further boost with the onset of ecological debates in the 1980s and 1990s and the increasing sensitivity to the loss of biodiversity in general. In this context, the loss of plant genetic resources no longer appeared as a problem of food supply alone but also as an acute threat to entire ecosystems and the biosphere. The collection of biodiversity in gene banks became a planetary problem, which was also reflected in the implementation of a number of legal agreements and ‘soft laws’ such as the International Biodiversity Convention adopted in 1992 and the International Treaty of Plant Genetic Resources in 2001. As legal ‘infrastructure’, they marked the last important building block for the establishment of a ‘global assemblage’ (Ong and Collier, 2005) of ex situ plant conservation.

Today there are more than 1700 national gene banks worldwide, and their collection activities are mostly governed by FAO and CGIAR. The gene banks have become ‘vital’ (Collier and Lakoff, 2015) in a twofold sense. On the one hand, they appear as the necessary supplement of an industrial agriculture that relies on growth while continuously destroying its own foundations. The conservation infrastructure is thus a central element in the global security apparatus of food production, because it aims to secure the evolutionary capacity of life itself. On the other hand, the banks are increasingly coming to the fore as indispensable technologies of a new earth policy (Fenzi and Bonneuil, 2016). In the face of a new climate regime, plant genetic resources appear not only as a guarantee of a continuous supply of food, but also as indispensable elements for the stabilization of larger ecosystems (Rockström et al., 2009). Thus, the conservation of plants in gene banks no longer serves only to secure economic prosperity and national food self-sufficiency. Rather, the conservation of biodiversity in agriculture is a central element of endeavours to stabilize the earth system as a whole in the Anthropocene (Rockström et al., 2017).

Against the background of this increasing political relevance of the gene banks, it is not surprising that their vulnerability has also increasingly come to the fore in recent years. The concern about the gene banks was fuelled by disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which made the plant conservationists realize ‘that there is no such thing as a safe location, and that almost everywhere in the world is vulnerable in some way’ (Fowler, 2014: 141). Accordingly, there were calls for a redundancy structure for the global network of gene banks, which would hold duplicates of the collected material in stock. This led to the construction of the SGSV. Norway’s National Gene Bank had been using an abandoned coal mine on Spitsbergen since the 1980s to store duplicates of its collection in the event of a catastrophe affecting the gene bank. That is why Svalbard was soon identified as the ideal place for plant conservationists to set up an international gene bank. The permafrost on Svalbard provides a natural cooling system that would preserve the seeds for about 20 years even without technical support systems. The International Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 guarantees all signatories unrestricted access to this area and at the same time prohibits military fortification (Qvenild, 2008). Financed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent fund to support international plant conservation efforts, and managed by the Norwegian government, the SGSV is now the first international seed bank to act as the sole security backup for the world’s gene banks. Gene banks from all over the world have the opportunity to send their collections of seeds to Spitsbergen and have them stored in the vault. In the event of a disaster, these copies can then be requested again to rebuild the original assortment. This makes the SGSV a special technology because it does not focus on plant research but on the capacity ‘to revert over and over again to some level of crop diversity, like programming an ‘undo’ command for the world’ (Gan, 2015: 120). Since every variety might hold the evolutionary potential to circumvent future threats to agriculture, maintaining this potentiality becomes a biopolitical ‘matter of concern’ (Latour, 2005). Or, as Cary Fowler, head of the SGSV, frankly puts it: ‘[o]ur human civilization would truly decline and fall without agricultural diversity’ (Fowler, 2014: 145).

Frozen seeds, extended presents and the politics of reversibility

As shown in the last section, the origin of the SGSV is associated with a more extensive politicization of plant life and attempts to secure the continuity of agriculture against the ‘reflexive risks’ of modernity (Beck, 1992). While the basic idea of national gene banks was to preserve evolutionary diversity for agricultural breeding and thereby guarantee the adaptability of modern food production to future contingencies, the function of the SGSV is first of all to serve as a backup providing the global collection dispositive with the necessary redundancy. As a gene bank for gene banks, the SGSV safeguards the ‘recoverability of the recoverability’ of lost plants by providing a permanent presence of the conserved biodiversity. But how does the SGSV ensure that the present remains available and does not disappear irreversibly into the past?

In order to answer these questions, one has to turn to the material-ordering techniques of the SGSV. These techniques are crucial because they create the material conditions for the practice of reversibility. As Andreas Folkers (2019) has shown recently in his work on stocks, one of the central problems in creating stocks and backups is the transformation of materiality into a ‘standing reserve’ (Heidegger, 2013) that lasts and can be reckoned with in the future. According to this perspective, materiality must be altered in a certain way so that it can survive through time and will remain present at an unknown time in the future (Folkers, 2019). For the SGSV, the problem of creating a standing reserve arises with particular force because of the specific ontology of the stored material. In contrast to biodiversity databases, which focus on archiving digital information from different species (Bowker, 2008: 107–136; Heise, 2016: 55–86), the SGSV actually stores living material. This turns the practice of archiving into a particularly tricky endeavour. In order to be able to preserve the plant’s genetic information for future reversibility, it must be ensured that the plant will retain exactly the same genetic characteristics as on the day of its conservation. Ontologically speaking, the problem is that a plant is not in a state of being but in a state of becoming (Gan, 2017b; Folkers, 2017). Plants are not stable entities, but highly variable ones that are constantly changing. As long as plants remain in their natural habitat they maintain complex interrelationships with their environment and maintain the capacity for evolution. In the course of evolution the identity of the plant is continuously transformed. Oddly, of all things, it is this evolutionary capacity that poses special challenges for the archivists of genetic plant information. The evolutionary biologist Ruaraidh S. Hamilton, who works at the renowned International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which has stored copies of its seed collection in the SGSV as well, summarizes the problem as follows:

If you go and measure the characteristics of a variety and 10 years later you come back and that material has changed, because it has adapted, that information you have collected in the first place is no longer relevant. Whereas when you put them into these collections [Global Seed Vault, L.W.] and stop their evolution, you can record their characteristics and you can come back anytime in the future. It’s like a time machine. (Ruaraidh S. Hamilton in Konrad et al., 2016, min 07:47-08:12)

Hamilton’s words indicate the fundamental problem of temporalities that the SGSV seeks to address. Plants follow a peculiar time of their own, which can differ significantly from the time horizon and rhythms of plant science and modern society. While conservationists aim to synchronize the rhythms of the plant and the social rhythms of society, the plant has the capacity to evade this undertaking by evolutionary adaption. This adaptation can be carried out in different ways, for example by ‘genetic drift, unconscious selection, contamination (unwanted pollen flow, undesired mixing of seed lots)’ (McCouch et al., 2012: 411). But regardless of the reason, adaptation marks a change in time and closes the former present in which reversibility was possible. For conservationists, evolutionary adaption (or extinction for that matter) means that they are confronted with a temporal shift in the form of a new present in which certain breeding options that could have become valuable in the future have been irrevocably lost. So the goal of gene banks in general, and the SGSV in particular, is to prevent plants from ‘deciding’ when a present irreversibly ends by controlling their process of evolutionary adaption.

This points us to the spatial and temporal rearrangements of plants carried out in the SGSV, which are crucial for the successful conservation of seeds. The first step is to interrupt the evolutionary capacity of the plant by the act of territorialization. In her accounts of the temporality of rice, Elaine Gan (Gan, 2017a, 2017b) refers to the special de-territorialized forms of relationships that plants maintain in their natural environment. They are nomadic, cognitive creatures that always co-exist in connection with other living beings, overlap with these beings and form an existence of ‘in-betweenness’. The boundaries of a plant’s identity can never be clearly defined, since it is part of a complex ecosystem that is constantly changing. Precisely these multiple interdependencies are deliberately interrupted in the gene bank conservation project. As Suzana Alpsancar (2016) shows, the conservation, digitalization and archiving of plants is only possible if one separates the plant from its natural environment. In addition, the seeds must be dried and packed in an airtight way so that they are not spoiled by fungal growth or contaminated by pollen (see FAO, 2014; NordGen, 2010). However, once isolated the plants cannot survive long outside their natural environment. Rather, the preserved seedlings must be replanted at regular intervals, i.e. repeatedly de-territorialized. Most gene banks therefore maintain small fields of cultivation close to the facility where the archived seedlings can be sown. Against this background, it is already clear that it is a pretty demanding endeavour to turn plants into a ‘standing reserve’. Although plants actually can be removed physically from their habitat, they can only survive there for a limited period of time.

This is where the second step of the plant’s material reorganization comes into play – the transformation of its temporality. This is particularly important for storage practice in the SGSV, since the vault has to guarantee the availability and genetic identity of the plant material for an indefinite period of time. In contrast to national gene banks and research centres, however, it has no docked ecosystem through which the archived seedlings can regularly migrate. Thus, the seedlings stored in the vault lack the possibility of exchange with their natural environment, which they need for their liveliness. This problem is counteracted by using low temperatures as a means of material and temporal alteration. While national gene banks use artificial cooling techniques such as liquid-nitrogen-based cryopreservation, the SGSV is located 1300 km south of the North Pole, 150 meters underground and embedded in an old coal mine. This special geological-climatic location means that the reservoir is surrounded by permafrost all year round. Additional compressors inside the storage facility cool the air further and thus provide a year-round room temperature of -18 degrees Celsius. This specific temperature mark is no coincidence. Below the critical threshold of -18°C, all metabolic processes of the plant are considerably slowed down. Thus, the techno-natural cold environment allows the seed to remain in a state of quasi-inactivity for up to 150 years and to be thawed and put to use again at any time during this period.

Consequently, the ‘tinkering with temperature’ (Gan, 2015: 121) supplements the special practice of territorialization with a temporal ‘disciplining’ of the plant. The cold minimizes entropy and transforms the unstable becoming of the plant into a state close to being. ⁷ Michel Serres’ remark that stocks are places where ‘time is frozen’ (Serres, 2016: 179) can be taken literally in this case. The recalcitrant and unpredictable processes of life are ‘suspended’ (Hayden, 2003; Hoyer, 2017; Lemke, 2019) or ‘arrested’ (Chrulew, 2017) to transform the plants into a manageable stock that remains permanently available and can be relied upon in the future (see also Elbe et al., 2014; Folkers, 2019; Keck, 2017).

The spatial decontextualization and the temporal manipulation of plants thus prove to be material prerequisites for the politics of reversibility. By means of the spatial separation of the plant from its multiple entanglements and the suppression of all metabolic processes by the act of cooling, the plant is deprived of its world-making capacity and transformed into an almost-passive object. In this way, a period of time opens up for the plant conservators and growers, ‘an extended delay through which modern science and industry might learn to catch up with the speed of environmental changes that they had previously, perhaps inadvertently, triggered’ (Gan, 2015: 120). Because the frozen seeds no longer change and produce no irreversibility, the present continues, allowing plant breeders to return to the plants and reverse (or induce) evolutionary transformations in the world.

However, one should not attribute the duration of the second present to the frozen plant. Plants neither experience duration in the sense of an interweaving of two presents, nor are they able to update earlier evolutionary states. Even cooling does not change this, since it merely suspends the irreversibility of life. The cold only slows down the life process, but does not allow a way back into the past. The problem of duration and the second present can therefore only be posed in relation to the temporalities of modern society in this context. It is only for modern society that the possibility and necessity of maintaining reversibility and avoiding irreversibility becomes a matter of environmental security. However, this does not mean that plants are only the passive background of social processes. They have to be seen as active agents which, due to their ontology of becoming, put modern society under the time pressure of irreversibility. In fact, in the face of the irrevocable loss of life, society becomes aware of its own liveliness, irreversibility and material entanglements that are now expressed in the term ‘Anthropocene’. Plant freezing, therefore, can be understood as the material prerequisite for modern society to inhibit the material agency of the plants and extend the duration of the second present. Once frozen, the plants involved in the situation cannot ‘do’ anything irreversible, and modern society is able to buy a little more time to adjust to the transformations of the Anthropocene.

Seen in this light, the aim of the SGSV is to extend the period in which action can be taken and events and mistakes can be corrected. By extending the second present it opens up a space in which the events of loss and extinction are not permanent. Instead, every ‘past’ event remains in a kind of transitional state, quasi-past but still accessible – despite the passing of (clock-)time. Once a crop variety is lost in the wild or in the course of the destruction of a gene bank, the SGSV ensures that the world portfolio of plant genes can be restored and future options are maintained. It creates a timeless time by preventing irreversible changes in the world of crop diversity. In the words of Thom van Dooren, the SGSV is driven ‘by the desire to keep species present, to prevent the kind of exit from the world that is extinction’ (van Dooren, 2017: 264). Thus, it aims to prevent the present from becoming a past and to ensure the continuity of the present. The present shall last while the past shall not begin.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to broaden the current debate on temporalities in critical security research by looking at a hitherto rather neglected field of inquiry. Using Luhmann’s concept of the doubled present and SGSV as a case study it has demonstrated how an extended present is created in which events remain in limbo and can thus be reversed. If a plant variety deceases or is lost through the destruction of a gene bank, this event does not appear as irrevocably past but rather as a retrievable and reversible present. Therefore, as a security technology the SGSV is not only a tool for dealing with time, but also a machine that changes and generates time. The isolation and freezing of plant seeds has the goal of slowing down the irreversible time of life, creating the material prerequisite for the extension of the duration in which events remain reversible. By enacting this particular form of temporal politics, plant scientists and food security practitioners hope to be able to keep up with the changing natural conditions in the Anthropocene and ensure that the damage already occurring does not become irreversible.

In addition, the findings of this article highlight some similarities and differences between the politics of reversibility and other security rationalities such as pre-emption, precaution and preparedness, which are currently being debated in critical security studies. At first glance, the functioning of the SGSV seems to assemble some elements of the rationality of precaution. The aim of the precautionary principle is firstly to take action before a catastrophic event occurs and secondly to avoid the irreversible damage that this event could cause (Anderson, 2010). However, the politics of reversibility seems to twist this principle to some extent. This becomes clear when one considers the historical context in which the agricultural gene banks emerged. From the outset, one of their key functions was to mitigate what were considered the necessary side effects of industrial agriculture by ensuring their reversibility. The gene bank was the answer to a catastrophe that is known to be unfolding, and which was once thought to be inevitable if agricultural yields were to be increased. So, if the core of the precautionary principle is generally to prevent damage even under conditions of insufficient knowledge, the politics of reversibility foregoes this avoidance and instead delays the possibility of intervention to the very end. Put differently, the ‘precaution’ exercised here does prevent upcoming damage, but ensures that the damage is not permanent. The damage is acceptable as long as it remains reversible.

Precisely this view of disasters as unavoidable events is therefore more reminiscent of practices of preparedness (Anderson, 2010; Collier and Lakoff, 2008, 2015). The similarity of the SGSV to other forms of stockpiling also underlines its link to the calculation of preparedness. As a seed stockpile, the SGSV serves primarily as a redundancy structure for the critical network of gene banks. It is a security backup in case one of the gene banks is destroyed. But here, too, the politics of reversibility further pushes back the temporal point of intervention. While stocks are intended to help bridge the interruption of circulation in the course of a disaster by providing medicine, food or energy provision (Folkers, 2019; Keck, 2017), the SGSV aims at the timeline after the catastrophic event. This can also be seen from the fact that in the event of a disaster, the SGSV would be completely unsuitable both as a plant breeding facility and as a food production site. Its sole purpose is to restore the world’s seed portfolio. The SGSV is therefore not a technology for preparing for a future present, but for a future past (Radin, 2016) – a past that will then still be reversible.

The politics of reversibility thus seems to be the logical from of security politics at a time where the catastrophe is no longer waiting in the future but is already present. If damage to the planet such as the extinction of species – for whatever reason – is unavoidable and has already occurred, technologies such as the SGSV promise to postpone irreversibility. They augur the possibility that global agricultural systems tipped into disaster can be restored at any time in the future. But despite the promise of an unlimited restorability, focusing on the reversibility of biodiversity with the help of gene banks and the SGSV remains a delicate game. Although plants can be isolated from the diverse relationships they usually maintain, they still remain dependent on an intact environment for replanting. Without a viable environment, conserved life cannot be released again because life only thrives in a complex network (Gan, 2017b: 96–100). Against this background, technologies such as the SGSV seem to follow a modernist-reductionist paradigm of conservation that seems completely unsuitable to respond to the complex problems of the Anthropocene. Still, it would be premature to reject the bank altogether because of its problematic tendencies. Confronted with the frightening speed at which biodiversity is being lost, the question can no longer be whether to bank or not to bank. Rather, the question must be how to ‘bank well’ (van Dooren, 2009: 388). To this end it would not only be important to include the various agricultural communities of the world and their perspectives on nature beyond the perspectives of the global north, but gene bank conservation should also be embedded in a larger context of environmental conservation and cultural relationships. If such a project can be achieved, seed banks and the politics of reversibility could become one of the arts of living on a damaged planet.