Introduction

How can we interpret the actancy¹ and, eventually, the life of metals, following, for example, the laboratories of chemists? From a recurring point of view in these laboratories, molecules have ‘behaviours’. These behaviours are seen even as agencies, although without apprehension of consciousness or ‘animation’. Therefore, supposedly inanimate substances can have actancy in these scientific research contexts because they have anthropomorphised behaviours. Looking at the relationship between living beings and non-living from the point of view of chemistry confuses our ways of seeing processes.

In this sense, metal,² while not a living being, exhibits behaviours similar to those of living beings. Moreover, when we enter the molecular scale and the reflective perspective of chemistry, the opposition between living beings and non-living entities may not make as much sense. The behaviour of metals plays an essential part in planetary life, indicating that the relationship between metals and living beings is very relative to the levels and scale of the analysis. In other words, given a specific scale, there is no difference, and what happens to the metal is an integral part of the specific behaviours of a living being’s organism. Based on ex post facto anthropological research (Machado 2019; Machado 2023), we present examples from an inorganic chemistry laboratory and teaching chemistry experiences to discuss the above issues.

According to Almeida (2021), we need to overcome the contrast between radical relativism and scientific naturalism by reaching an agreement that acknowledges both the truth of the scientific consensus and the multiplicity of non-white worlds. Almeida speaks of an agreement between global and local sciences, admitting that local (ontological) sciences are not variations or encompassments of global sciences. Distinct and irreconcilable theories (or cosmogonies) can account for the same things (pragmatic truths) in specific contexts. Thus, multiple worlds can emerge from the same truth (facts, substances, processes). We are dealing with a specific ontology, which Almeida calls ‘scientific realism’. The ‘pragmatic truth’ refers to the place of a metal in the molecular world.

Chemistry and Anthropology

Chemistry is not a very popular subject in anthropology, even for the anthropology focused on studying the sciences. Generally, chemistry topics appear in anthropological literature through Science and Technology Studies (STS), in which they feature prominently, although always in a lower position than physics. In this field, a common theme is the question of chemists’ research strategies and their recourse to ‘inscribers’ (Latour 1990), which are less common in physical science. Chemists used paper-based tools to produce data (before computing became accessible) and three-dimensional models to represent chemical structures. This practice has fascinated researchers in the STS, even though three-dimensional computer simulations have replaced three-dimensional artefacts. This procedure reduces the material representations to the two dimensions of the computer screen, implying a new round of artifices that simulate three-dimensionality (Francoeur 2001).

On the other hand, physics and chemistry share the characteristic of the successive production of new acting entities—such as particles smaller than the atom—an unavoidable reference in STS (Stengers 1996; Woolgar & Latour 1997). The sociotechnical process of mutual production between new entities, the paraphernalia of new devices on variable scales, and the researchers themselves is fundamental in organising reflections on the forms of action and existence of science in the contemporary world. Even the capacity of chemistry to imagine and describe entities that ‘do not exist’.³ At the same time, the field of STS has been reflecting on how to make them actors in a sociotechnical network (Ramberg 2001).

The question of the three-dimensional strategy of analysing chemical structures used repeatedly by chemists has attracted the attention of anthropologists. Myers (2008), for example, produced a study on crystallographers and their three-dimensional models of proteins constructed using X-ray diffraction techniques. What draws the attention of Myers (2008), Ramberg (2001), and Francoeur (2001) are chemists’ learning strategies and imagination, who, when analysing the three-dimensional structures of molecules, transfer realities from the world of ‘paper’ (graphs and equations) to a world in three dimensions. In Myers’ case, what is emphasised is a bodily representation of the structures drawn on the computer, implying what she calls the ‘embodiment’ of the research technique in a bodily representation technique that is taught unconsciously in laboratories. These bodily representations would be essential in understanding the structures under investigation.⁴ Myers presents the possibility of a connection between the chemists’ bodies and the animation they imagine happening in the molecules of the proteins analysed in the laboratory studied: that is, the actance of proteins is embodied by chemists in the ways they talk about and teach their own research. The possibility of this passage, from molecule to body, is in itself a way of imagining the life of molecular structures.

Although this is an essential topic in this small field of study, we consider it less relevant given another dimension that Myers herself indicates when transcribing the speech of a chemist: ‘seeing what the structure is saying is difficult’ (Myers 2008: 165), or even, ‘you have to enter the structure to understand it’ (idem.: 187). These two passages give an idea of what interests us here: the recurrently expressed idea that structures are living entities, acting beings that, in a way, think, since to understand them, the researcher has to “enter the structure” in the sense of thinking like them. This sphere of chemical practice inscribes an action in these chemical structures. When we analyse the interactions between metal and living beings or the role of metal within living beings, we are intrigued by what could be perceived as a form of molecular animism.

Anthropologists analyse chemistry alongside other issues, especially the Anthropocene and its production of substances that radically affect the general environment or the health of humans and nonhumans. A relevant dimension in these studies is the notion of pharmakon, which Stengers (1996) took up and was explored by Kirksey (2017) and Shapiro and Kirksey (2017). Pharmakon is a substance that can be both a poison and a cure, in the Greek sense, from which our idea of a ‘drug’ is derived. Using pharmakon, Kirksey explored the limits of substances used in chemotherapy, from the industrial complexes of production to the practices of care applied to people with cancer. She highlights that the same companies that manufacture drugs to cure a particular ailment are also responsible for producing substances that lead to the development of cancers.

In these cases, the focus is also on what the drugs do to the body (such as cisplatin), thus also moving towards the ‘embodiment’ of these drugs. From a phenomenological point of view, the focus is on the effects of this sociotechnical network of pharmakon on the body, with changes in the physical senses. However, this field is embarking on a ‘chemo-ethnographical’ vision that goes beyond the body towards the sociotechnical networks that produce actants, or things—from Ingold’s (2012) perspective—by analysing chemical substances, which are usually toxic and produce new realities of destruction and desolation in the Anthropocene. Like in Tsing’s work (2015), these chemo-ethnographers analyse the emerging conditions of chemo-social lives. Thus, anthropologists are following new chemical species (reagents, enzymes, and many others) as they produce new ontologies, entities, and agents that emerge from molecular interactions in these new pharmakons of the capitalist world. Scholars like Roberts (2010) and Pandian (2016) have analysed the unintended consequences of producing new toxic realities, which can pollute water with pesticides and medicines.

One of the implications of this perspective, which concerns us here, is a discussion of ‘substance’” and how it implies, at the molecular levels that interest us, complexities, frictions, and unpredictability. Bennett (2010: 117) discusses the nature of these substances’ life and states that ‘in a sense, everything is alive’, even if in other dimensions and propensities. The existence of these other forms can be analysed by chemo-ethnography (Povinelli 2016).

Determining what life is or is not and how each of these dimensions converts into the other is remodelled by the perspective of pursuing chemical substances in the contemporary world. Authors such as Thacker (2005) and Abrahamsson et al. (2015) highlight how this analysis of substances in the capitalist world challenges the usual social imaginary, leading to an idea of matter (substance) concerning these sociotechnical universes. Sometimes living, sometimes dead, sometimes neither, sometimes lethal, sometimes remedies, sometimes transformations, sometimes decompositions, sometimes indecomposable compounds, sometimes producers of devastation, sometimes supporting new and unexpected communities. These processes are, in turn, reconfiguring our conditions for existing, knowing, and living in society.

Our goal, based on some examples of chemistry knowledge and its substances, is to understand the dimension of existence—based on the understanding of chemistry—of these substances in the production of life in our usual sense (that is, as organic animal species, we are alive). Considering the different scales and understanding molecular substances as actants, as chemists do, our understanding of life and nonlife will be scrambled. As Shapiro and Kirksey state:

Considering the full spectrum of dynamics among chemical species – processes of persistence, decay, ionisation, combustion, and sublimation, to name a few – requires moving beyond the bios/Thanatos divide and gazing into the realm of nonlife. (Shapiro & Kirksey 2017: 486)

The proposal here is not precisely chemo-ethnography in the sense of following substances ethnographically (and the worlds they produce). However, it has something similar in thinking about the different scales and complexities of the living entities, the non-living, and ‘things beyond’.⁵ However, we push beyond traditional proposals for the anthropology of laboratories by thinking about how chemists think about the substances that emerge from their benches and apparatus.

Metals on Other Scales

Now, we will investigate how chemists refer to metals at the molecular level (and other adjacent levels, such as proteins and cells). The following narrative is a discourse by chemistry practitioners on some basic knowledge about the role of metals in the body. We will use this narrative in two senses: one refers to the specific content of chemistry’s scientific knowledge or to a chemical cosmology of how the molecular world functions; the other refers to the form of the discourse as an indication of how, in this cosmology, the shuffle between the living entities and the non-living is complex.

Analysing the form is an ex post facto ethnography. Based on 20 years of one of the author’s laboratory experience, an ex post facto perspective (Machado 2019) discusses the possibility of constructing ethnographies after the fact (ex post facto), organised by memory—that is, the idea that it is possible to transform an event or series of events experienced in an ex-post ethnographic field. This perspective implies that during the event, it was not known that it was a period of ethnographic fieldwork, and only memory reconstructs the events and facts as an ex post facto ethnography. Thus, this paper’s data come from our experience and memory, transformed into an ex post facto ethnography (Machado 2019). It implies that the language of the description of chemical phenomena is an indication of the cosmologies implicit (or unconscious) in this specific scientific practice. Therefore, although all chemists will talk about the behaviour of molecules and how they ‘act’ and do things such as ‘move arms’, ‘pull things’, ‘pilot’, and ‘carry things’, not all of them will assume that these entities are, in some sense, alive. However, many would have doubts. In addition, many would say that they are alive in specific contexts and not in others. We will return to this in the following discussion. What follows next is a typical chemist’s account of the place of metals in the production of life. This narrative was constructed from an ex post facto anthropology of experiences in chemistry classrooms and inorganic chemistry laboratories.

These examples are not just instances of how chemistry is taught in classrooms and laboratories, but they are carefully chosen to highlight the ambiguities that arise in understanding the life of metals. We present these examples as a textbook narrative to show how future chemists are introduced to these ambiguities. The anthropological implication of these examples is to provoke thought about how the training of chemists can lead to an ambiguous understanding of the life of metals, a theme that permeates their professional experience.

To enter the world of metal chemistry, we first need to briefly discuss how we use the ideas of ‘agency’ and ‘actancy’. Latour defends the most traditional perspective in the STS field, circumscribed in the notion of an actant. An actant is a source of action that can be both human and nonhuman. It has efficacy and can do things, produce differences, have effects, and alter the course of events (Latour 2019). Following Latour’s point of view that there is little room for the invisible in science (which would be restricted to a mode of existence of illusions and ghosts), we can see in the chemists’ subjective perspectives about the action of metal a parallel to the ghostly mode of existence, right at the centre of the science of the smallest things. This subjectivity brings us to the essential ambiguity we want to explore in this text: that metal appears as a living being (with agency) for chemists at certain moments. At the same time, this life of metals is ambiguous because it does not extend to all situations and realities of metal as a substance. Rather than resolving a dilemma, we want to show that exposing this ambiguity tells us something about the perspective of life or nonlife in contemporary science.

In this article, we consistently use two notions of ‘living’. The first refers to things that we generally, in common sense, consider to be alive, such as beings with biological bodies. This is what we call living beings. The second notion, ‘living entities’, refers to things that can have action and active participation in the world but for which we do not imagine any conscious agency. We use these two categories as an explanatory resource throughout the text. In the end, we will scramble the ideas that relate to actancy, living, and non-living entities, based on the praxis of chemists, with the help of Bennett’s (2010) concept of vibrant matter.

The ex post facto narrative we will present below is not just a storytelling device but a powerful tool for capturing the subjectivity of chemists in action. It establishes a connection with Latour’s (2007) methodology of phenomenological reduction, which suggests that we can suspend static notions about the world to analyse the relationships between human and nonhuman actors when trying to understand the constitution of reality. This narrative allows us to explore more carefully the complex relationship between the actions of different elements in a social or sociotechnical network. We will see that the narrative implies a doubt about the notion of agency, which we will return to at the end of the article. We reserve the term agency for actions we presuppose that the actors are previously aware of, like the actions of humans. Actancy refers to actions that do not presuppose consciousness. In the case of chemists, we will see that the metal sometimes seems to have agency, at others, only actancy.

Implications of Chemical Cosmology

As we have seen above, there are two paths to follow in analysing the place of metal in the universe through chemistry: scientific discourse and scientific practice, on the one hand, and the discourse about it on the other. We will see that at the confluence of the two, a hesitation emerges that destabilises certain hegemonic conceptions of ‘living being’ and ‘non-living’, almost like a fracture in what Povinelli (2016: 4) calls ‘geontopower’: ‘rather a set of discourse, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife’.

In Povinelli’s reading, geontopower has surpassed Foucault’s idea of biopower in contemporary capitalism because the latter concept can no longer explain contemporary power formations. For our purposes here, it is enough to emphasise that this idea is hegemonic in contemporary global capitalism and determines our imaginary of what is or is not alive. This hegemonic form is inhabited by figures and metaphors that the author explores to make her point. We are interested in the figure of the ‘carbon imaginary’, or the idea that life only occurs in ‘existents’ (or ‘actors’ or ‘things’) based on carbon (the chemical substance). These would be beings that are born, grow, reproduce, and die.¹⁴

The author chooses the term ‘existents’ precisely to get away from the imagery of carbon, advocating that other things, beings, organisms, and substances can be seen from other angles. In the scenario of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis, the distinctions between life and nonlife have become less evident. Trying to think about the multiplicity of ontologies and, therefore, of imaginations about ‘existing’, the author criticises ‘geontopower’. Povinelli emphasises that science produces a mixture of life and nonlife:

The same techniques that allow the natural sciences to distinguish between categories of life also demonstrate not merely the interdependent entanglements of Life and Nonlife but the irrelevance of their separation. Animals and minerals, plants and animals, and photoautotrophs and chemoheterotrophs are extimates – each is external to the other only if the scale of our perception is confined to the skin, to a set of epidermal enclosures. (Povinelli 2016: 42)

The way to think about the interpenetration between life and nonlife is precisely by resorting to scale: changes in scale end up challenging the imaginary of carbon. Returning to our example from the previous section, we see that the scientific discourse of chemistry is constructed primarily from a radical change of scale, entering the universe of the incredibly small (up to the uncertainties of the quantum world).

Thus, the description of iron elucidates that it acts in human respiration, capturing oxygen from the air we breathe in specific proteins, being carried around our body by others, and then released in different parts by yet other proteins. We also analyse the different forms that iron takes in the body depending on the scale at which we look (whether as a loose chemical species or as part of proteins, outside or inside cells, all these different size scales). All the variations in iron in the body, which change according to the number of electrons it carries at each stage of its various journeys, indicate that iron is doing things that keep us alive. The tiny 0.040-nanometre slope of iron in haemoglobin is single-handedly responsible for the possibility of breathing.

The action of an ‘existent’—or ‘actants’, in Latour or Bennet’s words (2010: 112–113), or Ingold’s ‘things’ (2012)—on a nanometre scale is responsible for the possibility of existence from the perspective of another existent, a human delimited by the contours of its ‘last membrane’, our skin. Moreover, between these two scales, there are an infinite number of scales on which different existents operate in a human body regularly and, according to carbon’s imagery, keep it alive. However, are these other existents alive? Are they living entities? When operating within our organism, is iron a living entity, or is it a non-living one operating to maintain the life of what we consider to be genuinely alive (the body, the being of carbon)?

Looking at the other metals we mentioned earlier, we could extend our reflections: Is platinum mechanically introduced into the human body to fight cancer (an existent in itself that struggles to exist against the body that circumscribes it), a non-living existent that acts and allies itself with the organism in the struggle for life, or is it a living entity existent that makes its agendas within a context in which it is placed, attacking tumour cells and healthy cells indiscriminately? Is ruthenium a lifeless substance that works as a body transit agent, blocking cancer cell circulation and preventing metastasis? Or is it a substance that acts according to its chemical nature, combining with other related substances? Does zinc, in its DNA transcription actions, which are fundamental for carrying out various functions in the body, carry out a plan, play a code, and produce an activity characteristic of a living being? Or is it a molecular machine that, in its nonlife, operates processes that make life possible on other scales?

The nature of the practice of chemists, who work on very different scales, produces a shuffling of the notion of life and nonlife. If someone asks a chemist whether iron is alive in human respiration, the answer may be ‘yes’. Or a ‘no’ or a ‘maybe’. However, the answer will always come after a hesitation. This hesitation results from a fracture that the practice of chemistry introduces into the geontopower and imaginary of carbon. Operating on scales where carbon organisms can only be a context of existence, what happens in these contexts looks like a deliberate action (agency). Iron certainly seems alive. However, the hesitation comes precisely from the hegemonic power of the separation between living beings and non-living that geontopower establishes.

This hesitation between the everyday practical experience of chemistry and the hegemonic cosmology of geontopower allows us to understand the second part of the equation we promised in the previous section: the discourse about what happens on these nanometre scales is completely animistic. Chemists narrate everything molecules do in terms of action, such as making, transporting, pulling, removing, and stealing. All these actions are narrated from a perspective in which the ‘existents’ act consciously in a particular dimension.

This anthropomorphisation of the nanometric life of molecules is not a mere accident or even a vice of language; it is a radical effect of the practical experience of chemistry at other scales. Everything occurs there in an apprehension that existents are carrying out actions that scientists must unravel. The way chemists narrate these molecules is an unconscious expression of the confusion that life and nonlife acquire on this scale. Is iron alive? Wait for a second of hesitation: it may be or not.

In the scientific practice of chemistry, this hesitation can be tamed by the imaginary of carbon and its rigid determinations of life and nonlife. This fracture can occur frequently to avoid the anthropomorphisation of molecules, as often occurs in master’s and doctoral courses. However, the ways of narrating the practice and the scientific-cosmological knowledge itself derived from this practice, as we saw in the previous section, are thoroughly impregnated with a conception of the life of molecules, which muddles the established divisions and always causes this hesitation, which unites scientific knowledge and a nonconscious idea of these molecular existents as living entities.

It is intriguing to consider that even in the realm of philosophy of science, the concept of entity can be broadened to include atoms, as in Whitehead’s philosophy (Armour 2010: 932–933). Whitehead’s notion of system (entity as system) offers a compelling way to transcend the boundaries that science sets between life and nonlife. This perspective, however, is intertwined with Whitehead’s theological viewpoint, where he posits that ‘everything that exists has feelings’ (idem., 2010: 938). Thinking along the lines of Whitehead, it is not a stretch to envision the ‘life’ of metals. Whitehead’s entities, such as metals, ‘inherit previous circumstances by “deciding” to persevere, in a new way, in being’ (Latour 1995: 14).

Hartshorne, one of Whitehead’s disciples, taking processualism further, argued that everything has an ‘agentic reality’ (Oppermann 2017: 284) based on what he called ‘inherent creativity’. It would be an idea that all material entities would produce transformations (which he defined from his concept of creativity). Thus, the idea that metals at atomic levels can be ‘alive’, as happens here in the discourse of chemists, is a discussion that ran throughout the 20th century, especially in philosophy. Inspired by Whitehead, the process philosophy indicated this possibility based on a metaphysics in which God, Creativity, or other definitions of a general force animated all matter. Hartshorne imagined that any entity possessed some degree of memory. This perspective influenced Latour’s (2007) actor-network theory, especially in the dimension of the imbrication between entities.¹⁵ New materialism is also influenced by these perspectives (as in ecocriticism, for example), imagining an agency for all matter, treated as a ‘narrative’ agency. This perspective derives from what Cobb called the ‘dynamic world of interrelated activities’ (1988: 109), in other words, from a notion of agency marked by the correlation between entities and not by the idea of consciousness. Thus, ‘If agency functions this way, it must be composed of multiple interacting entities including the most elementary units of matter that experience the world in various degrees of creative becoming’ (Oppermann 2017: 288).

Nevertheless, these perspectives support Colebrook’s criticism of Latour, who, in her view, ultimately articulates his argument around an idea that leads to the conception that humans are separate and isolated entities (the ‘we’ of ‘we have never been modern’). For Colebrook, agency emerges from a broad web of relationships of which humans are only a part (Colebrook 2017, Van den Berg 2016).¹⁶ What chemists are doing, in our analysis, by hesitating between the life and death of metals, is, from this perspective, also questioning which ‘we’ serves as the reference point for examining the molecular world.

These metaphysical perspectives, therefore, do not propose that matter, such as atoms, possesses consciousness, but rather some form of ‘experience’. Our narrative here is not metaphysical. Beyond the actancy of these materials (which is referred to by different names in these philosophies, including various conceptions of ‘agency’), we are ethnographically exploring the capacity of chemists to consider metals as agents with consciousness, a concept we term ‘chemical animism’, akin to other anthropological narratives about animism (Descola 2014). This possibility is often dismissed by a geontopower who views it as a misleading ‘anthropomorphisation’. However, our focus is on revealing fractures in the geontopower based on the hesitations and ambiguities of chemists in their cosmologies about the matter. In essence, within the scientific discourse on matter, uncertainties exist about the relationship between living and non-living entities that challenge the dominant effect of geontopower.

Final Considerations

According to Bennett (2010), modernity presupposes the passivity of things, which is seen as inert. In contrast, she advocates a ‘vibrant matter’ in which things have a certain vitality:

By “vitality”, I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. (Bennett 2010: VII)

Things are actants, a category she takes from Latour to defend a radical form of the ‘actancy’ of things. Bennett’s concept of actancy, which includes ‘quasi-agency’, significantly extends Latour’s ideas. This perspective proposes to view human and nonhuman actors on a more horizontal plane than usual, a concept we have explored in this text. Bennett’s actancy, therefore, is a form of ‘quasi-agency’. We further our exploration of Bennett’s argument by claiming that the cosmology of chemists produces an ambiguity that allows us to see metals as alive at certain moments, as bearers of agency, although this idea generates doubts at other times. Thus, we underscore the agency of nonhuman things, in this case, metals, and the relevance of this discussion in our academic discourse.¹⁷

However, to reinforce this argument, we also explored other scales, specifically physical scales. Other authors use different time scales, such as the case cited by De Landa (2021): In an incredibly extended time perspective of millions of years, we would see that soft living beings (without rigid structures) predominated until 5000 million years ago. At some point, certain conglomerates of life underwent mineralisation, and a new mineral form emerged within the soft bodies: bones. It is as if minerals used living tissue to spread around the world. Therefore, in the long term, minerals can be seen as the active power, and beings with bones (including humans) can serve as a product of this activity.

Thus, testing other scales, characteristic par excellence of chemical science, opens up gaps or fractures in modern thought’s static conceptions of life and death (Povinelli’s geontopower or Ingold’s hylemorphism). It is interesting to put chemistry at the centre of the debate regarding its critical potential for hegemonic conceptions to see the hesitation and ambiguity it produces. On the other hand, chemical science itself, captured by the capitalist industry, is responsible for the proliferation of actants in our world by producing new entities (all with a pharmakon character), such as medicines, agrotoxins, various polymers, and gases of all kinds, that are responsible for shaping a world (Gaia) affected by humans on unprecedented scales (Anthropocene).

Today, fish change sex in certain places due to water contamination by the human use of contraceptives, which are excreted in urine (Tyler, Stumper & Jobling 1997), and the excretion of methamphetamines by humans in aquatic beds produces populations of addicted fish (Horký et al. 2021). These new ‘assemblages’ connecting human and nonhuman forms considered alive with forms of matter seen as inert are characteristic of the Anthropocene, causing unpredictable effects. However, a consistent part of these effects is the transformation of Gaia into a reality that is increasingly hostile to humans (and thousands of other species).

Considering the vitality of supposedly inert things, such as metals, can indicate a less invasive way of dealing with them. While everything is inert and dead, everything is available to humans for transformation. Considering the vitality of things from a political point of view, we can call into question this state of affairs, governed by geontopolitics, which disposes of the world and its existents in favour of the political-economic projects of liberal capitalism. As Bennett states:

Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. (Bennett 2010: IX)

This paper, following the knowledge produced by chemists and the way they relate to it—the way that the discourse on this practice denounces—sought to investigate the vitality of metals within human bodies. We saw that everything in the chemistry ontology points to the life of metals within our bodies. In addition, vitality intrinsic to the substances themselves is not coordinated by a vital principle external to the substances (such as a soul or creativity).

We ask chemists if iron outside the body is alive. The answer tends to be ‘no’. In an iron rod, this substance would be dead. Dead in contrast to the same substance inside the body, where it seems alive because it does thousands of things in a hectic daily life. The contrast is encompassed by the hegemonic living entities/non-living contrast of a human scale: iron does things and lives inside a living body. Inside a ‘dead thing’, even if the iron does things, it is dead (the iron continues to exchange electrons with the world, rusting). This perspective, which encompasses the human scale, generates hesitation and ambiguity that did not exist on the nanometre scale. We then ask the chemists about the iron that leaks out of the body when we bleed: Is it any different from the iron that was inside the body? Does it die when we bleed? The answer is a hesitation and a ‘no’. The iron remains the same, doing the same things: two questions and two contradictory answers. Alive and not alive, the metal is the hesitation and ambiguity of chemistry.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.