BOOK REVIEWS 579 Robert Mitchell. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Litera ture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. 320. $55Robert Mitchell initially frames Experimental Life in terms of an ongoing “vitalist turn” in the humanities and social sciences. While that formulation might sound surprising, by the book’s end “vitalism” seems able to encom pass not just literary scholars’ turn to the life sciences, but a number of turns—such as turns to media studies and affect theory—that are moving toward networks and other circulatory systems. Within Romantic studies, the book joins an increasingly rich body ofwork that sees Romantic litera ture and science as linked and mutually influential. Because of the notion of organic form, Romantic theories of life have long had a special rela tionship with theories of literature. However, like Denise Gigante’s Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (2009), Experimental Life explores a different side ofvitality, conceived not as the mark ofan autonomous, organic unity, but as a shifting, unbounded principle of excess for which Gigante’s key word is “monstrosity.” Mitchell’s insight is that this excessiveness was also a feature of experimental culture itself. As he explains in the introduction, “Three Eras ofExperimental Vitalism,” life’s recalcitrance as a concept—its tendency to overleap its own bounds—became a provocation to new questions and new experimental protocols. Mitchell’s coinage for this is “experimental vitalism,” which he opposes to the “theoretical vitalism,” or systematic theories of a life-force, customarily associated with the term. “Experimental vitalism,” in contrast, refers to a set of practices that the problem of “life” continually unsettles and reorients. Originally a central feature of Romantic-era discourse (Mitchell’s “first era of experimental vi talism”), this experimental impulse tracks forward through Bergson and Deleuze to the book’s own methodological commitment to the experi mental. Chapter one, “Romanticism, Art, and Experiments,” explains that com mitment by bringing a broad history of artistic innovation (from Lyrical Ballads to John Cage and Theodore Adorno) within the purview ofscience studies. In short, the book’s premise is that the stakes of“the experimental” will be clearer, first, if we attend to the influence artists have long had on the concept’s history; and second, if we make use of the full range of ap proaches to experiments now on offer in science studies. On the latter point, Mitchell helpfully identifies three main frameworks for understand ing experiments: epistemological approaches, which see experiments as producing true accounts of the world (e.g., Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific paradigms); sociological approaches, which focus on the socio political context of knowledge production (e.g., Steven Schapin and SiR, 54 (Winter 2015) 580 BOOK REVIEWS Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump); and “ontogenetic” ap proaches (most frequently associated with Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour), which focus on the new entities, assemblages, or “parliaments of things” experiments bring into being. Mitchell affiliates the book with that third mode of analysis: its provocative conclusion about Lyrical Ballads, for example, is that those famous poetic experiments do not seek truths about human nature after all, but rather play with scientific protocols to see what emerges, whether a novel poetic effect or “a new kind of social collective” (28). The next two chapters turn more directly to theories of life. Chapter two, “Suspended Animation and the Poetics of Trance,” links John Hunter’s research on suspended animation to moments in Keats and Shel ley’s poetry—Keatsian “slow time,” or the torpid vitality of “Mont Blanc”—which suspend the higher mental functions and strive for a poetics ofminimal or agentless sensation. “Life” and “sensation” may not be iden tical concepts, but part of the appeal of Mitchell’s readings is the way that they bring together those two strands of an ongoing discussion of agentless or subjectless Romanticism. Chapter three, “Life, Orientation, and Aban doned Experiments,” introduces into science studies the concept of the “abandoned experiment”: a subset of experiments that do not produce knowledge about life, but serve as crisis points that catalyze a broader reorientation of the experimentalist’s own life. In other words, abandon ing an experiment yields little in epistemological...