Toward an Historical Sociology of Cryonic Suspension: Origin Stories, Atrocity Tales, and Cold War Simulacra

• In Event: 236 - Regular Session. Cultural Studies

Abstract

This paper offers an interpretation of cryonic suspension, or “cryonics,” the curious practice preserving human corpses—and in some instances only human heads—by way of perfusing them with chemical protectants and gradually subjecting them, at the pronouncement of legal death, to extremely low temperatures (-360◦ F, -196◦ C), which are then controlled and maintained over the long term by liquid nitrogen filled “cryostats” or “dewars”—technological coffins of fiberglass and stainless steel. Drawing from a wealth of previously unutilized archival materials, I depart quite abruptly from existing treatments of cryonics and attend to the circumstances under which the practice emerged in the American 1960s. I develop the argument that cryonics is best understood as the product of an affinity between 1) the “failed” institutional containment of and ensuing cultural malaise surrounding death and dying during the American 1960s, and 2) during the same period, the popular embrace, undisciplined appropriation, and widespread circulation, throughout American culture broadly, of cybernetics, one of the dominant intellectual paradigms of Cold War America. In proceeding as such, I place the historical emergence of cryonic suspension into productive dialogue with cultural studies of science and technology and theorization about the institutional sequestration of death under western modernity, ultimately arriving at an interpretation of cryonic suspension as a simulacrum of Cold War technoscience; a death practice masquerading as the technoscience it simulates.

Author

• Grant Shoffstall, Williams College