I had wanted to offer a follow-up to my note of last week — my thought was to start with the image of RiffRaff, the galah outside Brisbane who gets CBD oil by way of palliative care for pancreative cancer, taking the eyedropper in her beak and use that as point of entry into tooling, the relationship we enter into with a prosthesis via ongoing contact, so that the tool serves to create an altered interface between body and world. See, I am putting this poorly — I can feel my powers at an ebb on this undeservedly mild late-winter morning, and I am simply not feeling, as the anthropologist Dell Hymes put it many years ago, the “breakthrough into performance” that characterizes oral narrative, including something written to be heard as if it had been spoken.
(One man who is feeling the breakthrough into performance this morning is Bill Callahan, whose 2022 LP YTI⅃AƎЯ I’m listening to at the moment—
I feel something coming on
A disease or a song
In my case it’s definitely not a song, though in view of the weather we’ve been having there’d be no excuse for its being a disease. Anyway, I urge you to give YTI⅃AƎЯ a listen at your earliest convenience.)
So just this once, I’m going to offer a version of something that has seen the light of day previously — a couple of you may have seen it in earlier form, and I ask your forgiveness. I offer it here by way of partly disclaiming it, so that next time I can move in a different direction.
In To Be Taught, If Fortunate (2019), Becky Chambers imagines crowdfunded space exploration, undertaken as an act of hope in the face of a dismal ecological and political situation on Earth. The journey from Earth to the planetary systems selected for investigation takes decades, that from one planet to the next years. The astronauts of the Open Cluster Aeronautics program spend these intervals in an induced metabolic torpor. At the start of every spell of prolonged travel, crew members apply transdermal drug delivery patches that instigate a cascade of epigenetic changes to allow them to function in the surface conditions particular to wherever they’re headed next: thickened, squamous skin for planets that get more solar radiation than we’re accustomed to on Earth, enhanced muscle mass for planets with greater-than-Earth gravity, and, uniformly, cutaneous photosynthetic capacities to supplement their limited on-board food-growing facilities.
Chambers’ protagonists call this strategy of body modification somaforming, and they contrast it with the terraforming that characterized an earlier generation’s vision of space exploration. Terrans, in the Open Cluster Aeronautics vision, are in space not to colonize new worlds but to satisfy an innate curiosity.
Contrast Chambers’ somaforming with the earthsuits that appear in Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock (2021). Stephenson’s earthsuits feature a reflective, moisture-wicking polypropylene body stocking that can be used on its own or combined with a sealed outer layer equipped with battery-powered refrigeration. They are essential in the deserts of West Texas and other places where, in Stephenson’s vision of the late 2030s, warm season daytime temperatures commonly exceed 45°C.
Thus, earthsuits and somaforming. The one is “technological” in the conventional sense: it entails coupling our bodies with a complex of stuff, as with a hammer, a pannier, a grindstone, or a cup. The other is a bit more difficult to categorize. No one today would balk at the assertion that somaforming is technological in the sense that it entails the extension of our bodily capacities via an extended chain of material procurement and manufacture—what archaeologists call an operatory chain. In this sense, somaforming represents a technological kind of thing just as vaccines do. At the same time, it feels a bit marked to refer to it as technological in the same way we would hammers or earthsuits. What makes the latter feel focally technological is that their use entails what ethologists call tooling, a continuing coupling of body and stuff that creates a new interface between the body-with-stuff and some kind of extrinsic object or patient of action. Vaccines and somaforming are technological, but to the extent they entail tooling, the tooling either represents an ephemeral rather than an abiding part of their use, or it remains at a remove from the scene of use.
Imagine now that over the next couple hundred years, humans adopt both earthsuits and somaforming and that ten thousand years from now archaeologists from a modestly more reflective society are sifting through the detritus of our time. What would they find? Earthsuits would leave a prominent signal in the archaeological record. That of somaforming, by contrast, would be easy to overlook unless it were supplemented by documentary records. Its tooling is archaeologically insignificant and its lasting effects archaeologically illegible. Say you were an archaeologist 10,000 years from now. What would you conclude about the human response to climate change?
This is not a hypothetical question. Long before he became known among normal people, Joseph Henrich made his name in evolutionary anthropology with a 2004 paper proposing a demographic explanation for certain remarkable facts about the history of human presence in Tasmania, observed both in the archaeological record and in firsthand observations by early participants in the European expropriation of Australia. Tasmanians, it transpired, despite living in a cold oceanic climate, wore no tailored clothing and made practically no dietary use of finfish. For Henrich and a number of other observers, these facts suggest a maladaptive contraction of the Tasmanian toolkit, attributable, in the hypothesis outlined in his 2004 paper, to demographic isolation: once the Bass Sill had flooded and Tasmania was cut off from the rest of Australia, Tasmanians lacked an adequate reservoir of skilled models to maintain the technological culture that had seen them through the late Pleistocene. They fell off the “demographic treadmill”. Here is how Henrich puts it in his 2004 paper:
Among Fuegians [the peoples of what is today southernmost Chile, like the Tasmanians an iconic “most primitive” people], crafting bone-tipped arrows involved a 14-step process, seven different tools (four of which were specially crafted solely for making arrows), four types of wood (which all required straightening procedures), and six other materials. … In contrast, the Tasmanian technique of diving for crustaceans (which was exclusively women’s work) probably requires both the development of substantial physical skills and lots of practice, but seems less likely to benefit from observing particularly skilled models. Such risky diving techniques are not, to my knowledge, used by other cold-climate foragers, and may have evolved in the absence of more complex food-procurement technologies.
There is so much going on in this passage, including tool fetishism and the disparagement of “women’s work” (can you imagine anyone parenthetically observing that some practice was “exclusively men’s work”, as if that should temper our interest in it?). But I want to draw attention to the final sentence. In fact, we have ample evidence of apnea diving as a subsistence practice among cold-climate foragers, including two closely related traditions, that of the haenyeo of Jeju Island, Korea, and the ama-san of Japan (in both cases, “sea women”), that are still in practice. Cold-water breath-hold diving exemplifies somaforming at its finest, and as anyone who has tried to become a cold-water swimmer later in life can tell you, it demands not just physical courage but the exercise of skill, not to say the support of skilled models, comparable to that of learning a tool-making craft.
Physiologically, cold-water apnea diving represents one of the most extreme instances of somatic plasticity in the history of humanity. As you would expect, breath-hold divers exhibit enhanced vital capacity—the volume of air they can take in with a breath—and enhanced mobility in the thoracic cage. But these pale in comparison to the thermoregulatory conditioning they exhibit. Haenyeo working prior to the introduction of wetsuits in the late 1970s were found to have peripheral tissue insulative capacities superior to those recorded among Inuit. This was not due to subcutaneous fat deposits—in fact, haenyeo tended to be leaner than nondiving controls. Rather, they seem to have exhibited a combination of vasoconstrictive adaptation and enhanced brown adipose tissue thermogenesis.
More broadly, apnea diving presents formidable challenges physiological and biomechanical. These include pressure: every ten meters of submersion below sea level introduces an additional burden of pressure comparable to atmospheric pressure, so at twenty meters you experience three times the pressure on the thoracic wall and eardrums than you would at the surface. Barotraumas of descent include pulmonary edema, alveolar bleeding, and atalectasis (lung collapse). These have been observed in single-bout dives as shallow as thirty meters, and evidence of pulmonary edema from prolonged surface swimming suggests that the repeated-dive pattern typical of ama and haenyeo would incur a heightened risk of edema even at relatively shallow depths. Ascent carries its own dangers, as the rapid depressurization of the lungs reduces the partial pressure of oxygen, creating a risk of hypoxia and loss of consciousness. Hypoxia of ascent is compounded by alternobaric vertigo, in which asymmetric changes in pressure in the middle ear between the two sides of the head can cause loss of awareness of one’s rotational orientation.
None of this is to say that tooling is “less interesting” or “less sophisticated” than the kinds of tool use where the tool itself is ephemeral. There’s a reason this newsletter is called STUFF, and it’s not because I find the stuff-mediated dimension of our strategies for keeping body and spirit intact distasteful. If anything, I’m coming to feel that my suspicion of stuff grows out of my own clumsiness. This is something I feel whenever I pick up needle and thread, for instance, and while it has been years since I picked up a guitar, I feel a trace of it just listening to Bill Callahan — an absence of facility, a difficulty articulating my body to those mobile components of the world that we use to satisfy our needs. But this edition has gone on way too long as is, so these thoughts will have to wait. If you’ve read this far, I thank you.