II: Engaging

How does a body shape its dynamic engagement with the world in which it is immersed? In what ways are bodies physical manifestations of those dynamic engagements? What is the relation of an active body to agency, learning, and noetic experience? The essays in this section take up these questions, each utilizing a unique perspective on environmentally embedded deployments and transformations of the body, from gene expression to reading pleasure.

Attentive Bodies: Epigenetic Processes and Concepts of Human Being

Samantha Frost

The patterned logic of epigenetic processes suggests that they are a non-neurological means by which bodies pay attention to the world. This possibility disrupts some of the central categories that thinkers in the West have used for conceptualizing embodied subjectivity.

Epigenetics research shows that bodies are responsive genetically to experiences of their environments, which is to say that the ways our bodies grow and function are deeply and durably susceptible to the places we live and to our modes of living. While epigenetic processes unfold as biochemical changes in molecules and cells, research shows that the factors that provoke them are not only the biochemistry of nutrition and toxins but also and sometimes more profoundly the effects of living with racial and sexual discrimination and economic deprivation. Consequently, when epigenetic processes change how our bodies use genes, they infuse the very matter of biological life with the effects of social and political life, shaping not just how bodies work but how they develop, grow, and persist over time. Understandably, epigenetic processes transform medical and scientific accounts of biology and health. But in showing how the material dimensions of biological bodies are socially and politically formed - and thus in showing that there is no moment in which a biological body could be said to be pure or unformed by social and political life - epigenetic processes also demand theoretical work on some of the fundamental concepts in the history of Western thought. They demand that we consider what epigenetic processes mean for our understanding of what human beings are and of how humans live in their worlds.

Maurizio Meloni (2019, this volume) observes that the notion that biologies are “impressionable” has historical precedent in the

Hippocratic and humoral traditions of medicine. Here, different facets of the natural, climatic, nutritional, and built environment were considered to affect the development of health and personality. What is distinctive in the re-emergence of impressionable biologies today is that in epigenetic processes, the body is not passively subject to its environment but instead is actively engaged in its own responsive transformations. Georges Canguilhem (2008(1965]) observes that in recent history, bodily phenotypes - or historically specific living bodies - have been considered as changeable in the course of engaging with the vagaries of the lived environment: famine, climate, disease, or conflict might affect the health and function of phenotypic bodies. In contrast, the genotype - bodies considered as repositories of genetic code - was thought to be protected from all these, preserving the instructions for the construction of a new, unalloyed body each generation. But as Lappe and Landecker (2015) explain, epigenetics research suggests that experiences of unequal social relations, nutrition, toxins, poverty, and other forms of stress affect the shape and structure of chromatin, which is the conglomeration of proteins and macromolecules that bind DNA together and makes genes accessible or inaccessible to transcription. Epigenetic processes transform chromatin so profoundly that the genome can no longer be conceived as a timeless sourcebook for the making of each generation. As Lappe and Landecker remark, “time and history have come into the genome itself” (p. 117).

It is clear that the forms of marking, memory, and biological adjustment that are seen in epigenetic processes require a conceptual reworking of the relationship between genomes, bodies, and environments. Here, I argue that if we trace the logic of the unfolding of epigenetic transformations, they seem to evince both anticipation and intentionality. The anticipatory and intentional characteristics of epigenetic processes suggest, in turn, that we might conceive of epigenetic processes as a form of paying attention.

Zaneta Thayer and Christopher Kuzawa (2011) argue that epigenetic processes mark living bodies’ experiences, forming a kind of memory. For example, nutritional stress in neonatal and early postnatal life can provoke epigenetic transformations that affect metabolic health later in life as well as in subsequent generations. Likewise, psychosocial stress in the form of workplace and social inequality or extreme duress (as in the experience of Holocaust survivors) provoke epigenetic transformations that affect stress physiology and health for several generations. Christopher Kuzawa and

Elizabeth Sweet (2009, cited in Thayer & Kuzawa, 2011) similarly observe that the stresses generated by chronic daily experiences of racism provoke epigenetic processes that change biological systems so that those that deal with stress are highly sensitive and those that enhance immunity are depressed. They argue that this combination of transformations helps explain the heightened vulnerability to cardiovascular disease observed in African American communities.

Now, although epigenetic processes can be helpfully conceived as a kind of memory of experience, if we follow the patterned logic of those processes, they can also be seen as a kind of anticipation. Epigenetic processes shape the ways genes are used to build and rebuild bodies on a daily basis. When they prompt bodies to rebuild to be more sensitively responsive to the stresses of experiencing racism (for instance), the transformations in gene use they promote are not an effect of recovery from the past experience (as in the case of a scar, for instance). Instead, in making stress response systems more highly sensitive, epigenetic processes are preparing the body to be ready for further experience of racism. In preparing the body to be ready, epigenetic processes functionally anticipate a recurrence of the experiences that prompted them.

This figuration of epigenetic processes as not just a form of memory (a record of the past) but also anticipatory (concerned with the future) brings to the foreground another feature, which is their intentionality. The concept of intentionality in philosophy is used to denote that a claim, a thought, or a perception is “about” an object. For example, one might describe my action of swatting a fly as intentional because my arm moves vis-à-vis the fly buzzing irritatingly by my head. In other words, the action is “about” the fly. In the case of epigenetic processes, we could say that they exhibit a mediated form of intentionality, but intentionality nonetheless. When epigenetic processes enable a body to prepare to experience something again, they exhibit the functional presumption (the anticipation) that the experience will happen again. This functional presumption concerns the conditions of the world that generate the experience; it is a presumption that previously experienced conditions in the world will repeat or recur. So, epigenetic processes are intentional in that they are about the world of experience. This “aboutness” is a mediated form of intentionality in that epigenetic processes are prompted not directly by experience but instead by the body’s response to its experience - its response to its response to the world. But nonetheless, it is a form of intentionality.

This combination of anticipation and intentionality is important because it suggests that living bodies are not passively receiving inputs about the material and social conditions of existence. According to the logic of epigenetic processes laid out here, in anticipating a future experience in a specific futural form of the world, bodies are paying attention to the world at a molecular and cellular level. Indeed, this is the main claim of this essay: Epigenetic processes are a means by which bodies pay attention to the world. And significantly, even though epigenetic processes may be shaped by perception, self-reflection, and imagination - as claimed by Bradley Turnwald and colleagues (2019) - the form of paying attention that they appear to embody is not managed by the neurological system. That is to say, epigenetic processes appear to be a non-neurological form of attention. It is difficult to give imaginative or conceptual form to a kind of attention that is not managed by the neurological system: How to think it? Indeed, what is theoretically fascinating is that this form of attention suggests that the matter of the body is generating meaning, is making meaning of the world in ways that have generally been reserved for complex neurological systems and creatures capable of linguistic representation.

In sum, as molecular scale attentive responses to experiences of the social and material world, epigenetic processes represent a complete disruption of the long-standing distinction between the raw, material, animal processes of the body oriented only towards survival and the purportedly more elevated processes bound up with taste and aesthetics, habit, movement, acculturation, thought, and language. In disrupting this distinction between matter and meaning - a distinction at the very foundation of Western thought - epigenetic processes also throw into disarray a host of other categorical distinctions that have organized thinking about people and politics in the Western political tradition. Cause and effect, active and passive, subject and object, subjective and objective: All of these distinctions rest on the distinction between matter and meaning, and they scaffold the ways that people in the West think about what makes humans human and what makes political life distinct from natural life. If we can trace out the successive conceptual disruptions that are provoked by our increasing knowledge of epigenetic processes, we may develop concepts that defamiliarize our understanding of democratic political cultures and that point to unexpected possibilities for political transformation.

For Sources and Further Reading

Canguilhem, G. (2008(1965]). Knowledge of life (S. Geroulanos & D. Ginsburg, Trans.). New York: Fordham University Press (Original work published in 1965).

Fox, M., Thayer, Z. M., & Wadhwa, P. (2017). Acculturation and health: The moderating role of sociocultural context. American Anthropologist, 119(3), 405-421.

Frost, S. (2016). Biocultural creatures: Towards a new theory of the human. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lappe, M., & Landecker, H. (2015). How the genome got a lifespan. New Genetics and Society, 34(2), 152-176.

Meloni, M. (2019). Impressionable biologies: From the archeology of plasticity to the sociology of epigenetics. New York: Routledge.

Thayer, Z. M., & Kuzawa, C. W. (2011). Biological memories of past environments: Epigenetic pathways to health disparities. Epigenetics, 6(1), 798-803.

Turnwald. B.. Parker Goyer, J., Boles, D. Z., Silder, A., Delp, S. L., & Crum, A. J. (2019). Learning one’s genetic risk changes physiology independent of actual genetic risk. Nature Human Behavior, 3,48-56.