Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature by Robert Mitchell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature by Robert Mitchell Kristin M. Girten (bio) Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, 320pp. $55.00 cloth. It is now typical to disdain vitalism, if not for its lack of scientific rigor, then for its disregard for biological diversity or its anthropocentrism. However, in Experimental Life, Robert Mitchell challenges this impulse as he envisions a neo-vitalism that, rather than “affirm[ing] a transcendent principle of life that rules over matter or is contained within matter,” instead views life as “the ultimate value” (p. 220). Mitchell argues that such neo-vitalism has the potential to provide an effective foundation for an affirmative twenty-first-century biopolitics. Mitchell’s endorsement of an affirmative neo-vitalism is informed by his analysis of a diverse array of Romantic-era vitalist literary and scientific works. Over the past several decades, a growing body of scholarship has endeavored to show that, in spite of Romantic skepticism regarding scientific enthusiasm, many British authors of the Romantic period maintained a great affinity for science, and even took substantial inspiration from scientific practices. Experimental Life offers an important contribution to this ongoing endeavor. Reading Romantic-era literary works alongside contemporaneous scientific works through the framework of “experimental vitalism,” Mitchell develops a distinctively nuanced and suggestive analysis of key dynamic interchanges of science and literature in the era of Romanticism. His exploration demonstrates that a number of central Romantic authors sought vitality by adapting scientific experimentalism to literary contexts. Mitchell’s concept of experimental vitalism is central to his approach. He rightly acknowledges that “for much of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, the term ‘vitalism’ has functioned within the life sciences primarily as a gatekeeping term,” applied to those who fail to meet the high standards of a rigorous scientific approach (p. 5). However, as he also explains, there is a lack of scholarly consensus regarding how exactly vitalism should be defined. Mitchell coins the phrase experimental vitalism to “avoid both the ambiguity of, and the automatic gatekeeping function associated with, the more generic term ‘vitalism’” (p. 7). In doing so, he aims to cultivate greater historical and conceptual specificity. According to his definition, experimental vitalism refers to the “specific set of social and technical practices” associated with the “experimental life” that emerged through the work of fellows in the early Royal Society. It is distinguished by “a sense that life cannot be fully explained by current scientific concepts and assumptions” and a commitment to “develop[ing] experiments in order to provoke new questions and concepts about life and living beings,” and thus to “mak[e] more complex and nuanced our understanding of the nature of living beings’ potentials” (pp. 7–8; emphasis in original). [End Page 415] For many readers, Mitchell’s definition of vitalism may initially appear to take great, if not unwarranted, liberties. For instance, if there is one belief that most, if not all, scholars of vitalism associate with the term, it is the belief in a “superadded” substance. Superadded substance does not, or at least not explicitly, figure into Mitchell’s definition. In this respect, his explanation of experimental vitalism might be seen to risk opening up the definition of vitalism so far that the term loses its signifying capacity. However, as he goes on to employ the concept in his analysis of Romantic literature and science, he makes a convincing case for its legitimacy. Experimental Life demonstrates that, while the phrase experimental vitalism did not hold currency in the Romantic era, the beliefs and practices that it signifies did. In fact, Mitchell makes a convincing argument that it was a key distinguishing feature of the period, and that it informed a number of Romantic literary, as well as scientific, endeavors. Experimental Life is divided into six chapters. In the first, Mitchell provides an effective foundation for theorizing the complex relationship between artistic and scientific experimentation. He argues in this chapter that, with the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads, the Romantic era ushered in a new “perpetually provisional . . . network-image of Art” that helped establish experimental vitalism as a prerequisite for...