Modern societies are fundamentally dependent on artificial cold — for food supply, medicine, computing, mobility, and energy production. Yet this constitutive relationship to refrigeration technology remains largely invisible to its beneficiaries: the infrastructure of cooling is hidden, its ecological and energetic costs unaccounted for. This article traces how cold was transformed, around 1900, from a dangerous limit-phenomenon at the edges of human experience into an invisible cultural precondition — and develops a philosophical concept adequate to this transformation: the folding of lifeworld time (Faltung der Lebensweltzeit).
The article first traces two parallel “races” at the turn of the twentieth century that mark the historical threshold of this transformation: polar expeditions seeking to conquer the Arctic and Antarctic, and the laboratory competition among low-temperature physicists to approach absolute zero. Both enterprises, driven by the logic of mastery over nature, produced the technical and symbolic conditions under which extreme cold could be domesticated and put to cultural use. A reading of superfluid helium — matter that near absolute zero defies gravity and escapes its containers — illustrates how phenomena at the threshold of cold challenge ordinary intuitions about substance, time, and flow, and prefigures the article’s central argument.
The theoretical core concerns the temporal logic of cryopreservation. Artificial cold does not merely preserve biological material; it suspends biological time while world-time continues unabated outside the cryostats. When cryopreserved material is reintroduced into living processes, two asynchronous temporal strands — a hibernated life-form and an aged environment — are folded into a shared present. Drawing on Hannah Landecker’s analysis of cellular biotechnologies, Niklas Luhmann’s theory of time, and Hans Blumenberg’s figure of the Zeitschere (the widening gap between lifespan and world-time), the article proposes cryogenic temporal folding as the characteristic temporal operation of modern cryogenic cultures. This operation takes effect across multiple levels simultaneously: at the molecular level of tissue transplantation and social egg-freezing, at the organismic level of hibernation research, and at the biospheric level of seed vaults and frozen zoos, where the reproductive potential of extinct or endangered species is held in suspension — decoupled from the evolutionary time of the ecosystems to which it would eventually be returned.
Crucially, temporal folding is not a neutral technical achievement but a practice saturated with unequal distributions of time and risk. The article closes by situating cryogenic temporal politics within a broader socio-ecological diagnosis: the global artificial cryosphere has grown continuously since 1900, while the natural cryosphere shrinks. Energy demand for cooling already accounts for 17% of global electricity consumption; projections suggest a fivefold increase by 2050, not yet accounting for the AI-driven surge in data-center cooling. The temporal gains secured by cryogenic infrastructure produce, in aggregate, an accelerating planetary time-deficit — distributed in conditions of radical global inequality. The cultural precondition of modern life is approaching its thermodynamic and ecological limit, and the time folded inward by cryogenic cultures is, in the end, borrowed from those who have the least of it.
Friedrich, A. (2024) “Kälte. Von einem Grenzphänomen des Lebens zu einer kulturellen Grundbedingung,” Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie, 18(2), pp. 100–119. https://doi.org/10.28937/9783787349487_8.