Stefan Helmreich, Sophia Roosth, and Michele Friedner
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691164809
- eISBN:
- 9781400873869
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691164809.003.0007
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter examines the project of astrobiology and its object, the “signature of life,” by drawing on the work of Hillel Schwartz, particularly his writing on time in Century's End, on duplication ...
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This chapter examines the project of astrobiology and its object, the “signature of life,” by drawing on the work of Hillel Schwartz, particularly his writing on time in Century's End, on duplication in The Culture of the Copy, and on signification in “De-Signing.” Schwartz's work can provide a fresh angle on the doublings, redoublings, definitions, and redefinitions at the heart of astrobiology's quest for extraterrestrial life. His crabwise approach offers provocative paratactical techniques for traversing the networks of association, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that support the concept of the signature of life. The chapter first considers the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), through the optic of Schwartz's writings on copying and his work on noise before discussing astrobiology's notion of the signature of life. It also offers suggestions for thwarting the overreaching of the theoretical impulse in both life sciences and humanities.Less
This chapter examines the project of astrobiology and its object, the “signature of life,” by drawing on the work of Hillel Schwartz, particularly his writing on time in Century's End, on duplication in The Culture of the Copy, and on signification in “De-Signing.” Schwartz's work can provide a fresh angle on the doublings, redoublings, definitions, and redefinitions at the heart of astrobiology's quest for extraterrestrial life. His crabwise approach offers provocative paratactical techniques for traversing the networks of association, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that support the concept of the signature of life. The chapter first considers the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), through the optic of Schwartz's writings on copying and his work on noise before discussing astrobiology's notion of the signature of life. It also offers suggestions for thwarting the overreaching of the theoretical impulse in both life sciences and humanities.
