‘I Contain Multitudes’: Materials of Making Worlds.

Abstract

What makes a world? In the technologically-imbued imaginary of the twenty-first century, ‘world’ is too quickly reduced to the singular image of the Blue Marble—a global environment, floating, totalized and isolated, in space. But worlding can, and should be, understood as something messier, as temporally and spatially slippery—as a way of making and unmaking ideas of self/other, past/future, whole/part. Worlds, we suggest, are produced through interruption, regeneration, and (often unstable) imaginaries, and their making can be traced through ostensibly innocuous material.

In this panel, we ask how the microcosm formed by particular materials encapsulates wider understandings of what worlds and environments are, ought to, or could be. Starting from small, seemingly unworldly objects—a seed, a womb, a chunk of ice—we ask how various enclosed spheres are used to produce both tangible and epistemological worlds. Rather than simply abstracting isolated objects, we ask how they come to be animated in material and practical ecologies of sense- and world-making. From wombs to stars, through time trapped in ice cores and seeds trapped in freezers, this panel draws on a range of disciplinary approaches and distinct historical moments to present a cross-section of (re)productive world-making devices. By bringing together a set of objects which are rarely in conversation and that bridge traditional scientific categories (biology, botany, geology, and climatology), this panel highlights the productive power of world-making as an analytic. We argue that, whether organic or inorganic, age-old or new-born, human or non-human, objects can contain multitudes.

Discussant

• Lisa Messeri, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Nature Compressed, Nature Unfolded: Heterotopic Seed Banks - Anna-Katharina Laboissière, Ecole Normale Supérieure/Curtin University

• Making Monsters: The Maternal Body as an Environment in Eighteenth-Century Embryology - Sara Ray, University of Pennsylvania

• Refracted Worlds: Preserving Ice and Time in the Anthropocene. - Alexis Rider, University of Pennsylvania

• As Above, So Below: Astrology, Microprocessing, and the Making of Predictive Time - Rose Rowson, Brown University

Session Organizer

• Alexis Rider, University of Pennsylvania