Space

When we write about the production of space, what we have in mind is the fabrication of differences, divisions, passages, anchors, movements, and positions, whether for resting or working, activity or observation. For Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, labs can emerge as a result of very subtle differential relations between kinds of space: “the spatial relation between office space and bench space is sufficient to distinguish the laboratory from other productive units.”23 At the same time, the lab is always articulated to different kinds of spaces that help to make sense out of what emerges from its operations. For example, the lab is never far from the office. In this sense, labs are as much a product of social dynamics as they are of stable architecture (which is not to say we are attempting to ignore the material dimensions of labs). The sense we have of the lab as a space is a product of relations between the people, objects, practices, institutional infrastructures, policies, and discourses that it brings together.24

One of the implications of the observation that labs emerge from relations is that a lab is as much a process as it is anything else. At the same time as they allow (or disallow) certain kinds of ongoing, compelling professional and social interactions to occur, labs are themselves always in process, which makes them attractive and frustrating by turn. As John Urry notes, despite all of the discursive claims about the lab being a neutral, static temple of reason, labs are affective and emotional.25 This affective and emotional register is another one of the connotations of “situated practice.” The process of producing a lab folds together various kinds of relations in order to encourage specific forms of space, time, and agency to emerge. Thus, returning to the images of the French language lab, we ask: what sort of space is emerging?

One of the first things to notice is the amount of staging that is occurring. The photographs are posed; seeing two versions together drives this point home. The images are not a record of everyday occurrences in the lab, captured without the notice of the lab’s occupants while they go about their business, nor are they a documentary record of an experiment in progress. Instead, a fairly large number of people, objects, and devices have been brought together artificially, in a relatively small area at the front of the room, in order to produce an image that conveys something meaningful about what, exactly, this lab does. Above all, the photographs strive to convey the sense that this lab is both heavily populated and busy. Everyone and everything is in the midst of doing something. Some people are operating machinery; some are assisting with the operation of machinery, while others observe those operations as they unfold. Three or four people are gazing directly at the camera while doing their work or observing others, drawing attention to the nature of their actions as a performance for remote witnesses.

The images, like the room itself, are designed for the process of instruction. This may be a lab, but it is also evidently a classroom. The people in the images are clustered around a teacher’s bench. Student writing desks are visible in the foreground, and blackboards and teaching charts (vowels on top, voiced and voiceless French stop-consonants below) are in the background. When experiments occur in this space, it is for the purpose of demonstration and communication of ideas about research techniques.

Staging happens in any lab because it is an attempt to convey the importance of what a laboratory space makes possible. As Thomas Gieryn argues, the laboratory is one of the most powerful contemporary versions of what he calls “truth-spots”—particular locations that are privileged sites for the production of truth and economic value through innovation. The Oracle at Delphi is one of Gieryn’s favorite examples from antiquity, but he also writes of the “ultra-clean” lab that Clair Patterson built in the 1950s to study what he suspected were increasing levels of lead in the biosphere. In order to make accurate measurements, the lab had to be free from all ambient contamination via the air, water, or the clothing and bodies of the lab’s occupants. Hypothesizing that the accumulation of polar ice over time might present a gradient measure of increasing levels of lead over time, he ventured to Antarctica to conduct a deep-core ice sample and created a “mobile truth-spot” to conduct measurements in situ.26 The lesson in this case is that the space of the lab is not fixed or permanent. It can and does extend its influence out into the world, in a variety of ways, and reconfigure itself or vanish entirely after its work is complete. Returning to our observation that a lab is a hybrid bundle of various kinds of aspects and relations, while a lab may be a specially designated place for the production of knowledge that can appear in the most unlikely locales, a lab is also a lab because of the performance of particular kinds of techniques. Likewise, the cultural techniques in question are the techniques of science in part because they are performed inside the lab. When and if people begin to perform other activities inside a lab, it may cease to be a lab.

Apparatus

Back in the French language lab, the cross-section diagram of a human head on the blackboard indicates that the focus of the research and teaching taking place here is also material and processual. What is of concern is not limited to the circulation of signs, as the linguistic charts alone might suggest. Rather, the object of investigation is the physiology of speech production, and the means of investigation is the process of producing analog audio recordings through interaction with the lab’s apparatus. For many viewers of these images, the presence of technological apparatus and the interaction of the people in the room is what will identify the space as a laboratory of some sort. But the lab’s apparatus is never passive decoration, or secondary to lab operations. The objects and phenomena studied in the lab “are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory” and this fact becomes most evident when key pieces of equipment break down or when new equipment appears.27

Laboratories are all about the specificity of their articulations. A laboratory is not just a particular bundle of technologies; where they are plugged in, so to speak, matters, as do the articulations of knowledge that enable that bundle, and the ones it enables in turn. As Latour and Woolgar put it, “the strength of the laboratory depends not so much on the availability of the apparatus, but on the presence of a particular configuration of machines specifically tailored for a particular task.”28 Having the right apparatus and keeping it running is not just vital for particular experiments, but for entire discursive systems. As Thomas Kuhn notes, scientific paradigms are partly maintained by a “multitude of commitments to preferred types of instrumentation and to the ways in which accepted instruments may legitimately be employed . . . As much as laws and theory, [instrumental commitments] provide scientists with rules of the game.”29 In this light, the emergence of hybrid labs and their unorthodox use of equipment becomes a sign of changing material, methodological, and metaphysical commitments in both the academy and our larger intellectual culture.

One way to describe some of the kinds of objects that can and do appear in contemporary hybrid labs, especially in media archaeology labs, is in terms of what Latour and Woolgar call “material dictionaries.”30 These are collections of objects, preprints, data sheets, and other aggregates of things that the denizens of labs need to keep ready-to-hand in order to do their work.31 A historical analog for these material dictionaries is research and teaching collections, especially collections of scientific instruments, which have a long and storied history that also differs from the oft-recurring reference to the archive in humanities theory.

In the left foreground of the images of the Middlebury French language lab, there are two wax recorder dictaphones (different but related models) from Alexander Graham Bell’s Dictaphone Corporation. A third dictaphone, on the instructor’s podium in the center of the image, has been rotated on its stand to make a different aspect of the machine visible and it is being used in playback mode for listening. Just like the lab’s occupants, its apparatus can also be staged. In image 4, both women students are listening to recordings; in image 5, the woman in the foreground is speaking into the horn.

Interestingly, there is a sort of media archaeology being portrayed here, as the people in these images are engaging with what was arguably already dead media.32 The machine with the large, dark drum on the right is probably one of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautographs, which were invented in 1857, almost half a century before the trademarking of the word “dictaphone” (which itself occurred several decades before this image was taken). Like a wax cylinder recorder, the phonautograph was an analog device for recording sound, but its inscriptions were intended for visual analysis rather than playback. As Jonathan Sterne has described, Scott, a typesetter, was interested in finding a way to literally transform sound into writing.33 The “phonautograms” the machine produced were part of the early modern “interest in the scientific use of graphic demonstration and automatic inscription instruments,” and part of the scientification of culture in general and humanities labs in particular.34

Consider also the range of tuning forks on the teaching podium, which were probably used in conjunction with the phonautograph. Tuning forks create a sound at a stable (and therefore verifiable) frequency. When recorded on the phonautograph, that sound was used to create a reference image to measure other inscriptions against. In speech research and linguistics, the machines would be replaced by sonograph machines and spectrographic analysis in several decades. The technique remains the same, but the apparatus changes as science equipment manufacturers sell new equipment to lab directors to add to their assemblage.

For Tony Bennett, museums and other hybrid lab-like spaces manipulate objects to make “new realities perceptible and available for mobilization in the shaping and reshaping of social relationships.”35 This is part of “the productive power of institutions.”36 In other words, objects in labs are about more than themselves because their importance lies in the relations they bear to each other, to the physical world, to the space in which they appear, to the people in those spaces, and to the institutions that position them.

Infrastructure

Spatial relations and descriptions of apparatus alone will not solve the problem of what a lab is. Artists can have labs and scientists have offices; in some cases, their spaces and equipment can be indistinguishable from each other. What matters is how these spaces and practices are articulated by discourse to particular institutions that authorize them.

The objects in the images of the French language lab, and the lab space itself, are also components of a much larger assemblage of institutional and disciplinary infrastructures that allow certain activities to take place. One of these infrastructural assemblages consists of the relations between commercial brands. Much earlier than the current Makerbot brandscapes of hybrid labs, the prominent labels on the machines for Bell’s Dictaphone Company are a reminder that the technological machinery in this image are also commodities. Brands are also part of the environment of making, and through them, the media commodities in this room are part of a network of intercommunicating things that extends far beyond the bounds of the image and the room.37

As Susan Leigh Star points out in “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” the common notion of infrastructure as a system of technological substrates that is basically invisible until you need it to perform makes clear two of the properties she assigns to infrastructure, namely, embeddedness and transparency.38 But infrastructure also has other characteristics, some of which only become apparent when it breaks down. Infrastructure is always built on top of something else: an installed base, like the infrastructure of the classroom itself, in the case of our French language lab. Its scope extends beyond single sites and local conventions of practice, and, though it ostensibly embodies professional and technical standards, it can and does cause conflicts for those used to doing things differently in another context.39 In order for any work in the room to be meaningful to anyone beyond its walls, there needs to be a community of people using the same devices in similar ways for similar ends. Infrastructural scale expands out from the lab in both directions, to the macro and the micro. The larger system that makes it possible to communicate research results and publicize the lab’s existence and activities, from the institution itself down to the documents that it produces and circulates, is also relevant. For example, we know from the Middlebury College archives that the school authorized the existence of a College Press Club, an organization peopled by undergraduates under faculty supervision that served as the official news bureau for the college, produced the newspaper that circulates the image, and so on.

In short, considering infrastructure is important because it leads toward an analysis of the institutions that defined, designed, and created that infrastructure in the first place. For Bernhard Siegert, such an analysis is a crucial step that transforms a history of material technology into a history of technology as media; the study has to serve “as a reference system for the analysis of bureaucratic or scientific data processing.”40 What such an approach enables, for Siegert, is the realization that the human and the nonhuman always already have been mixed together inextricably. Modernization, scientification, and militarization do not “dehumanize” a previously whole and sovereign subject. Institutions and their infrastructures manage their various complex mixtures of human and nonhuman components as they see fit, all of which provides the necessary context for the aspect of our model.

People

We could observe the design and construction of lab equipment on a minute level, obtain and operate or fabricate models of the equipment and then measure signal quality, but the only way to make sense out of why different choices occur in a lab is via their cultural articulations, which assign value to particular techniques at a given time for reasons that are as discursive as they are technical. In other words, a focus on infrastructure and technology will inevitably return to people, practices, and techniques, as long as they aren’t fetishized as the center of the analysis. People are as much (or more) products of labs as they are producers of them. Labs operate to train and refine their denizens into different kinds of subjects that are all part of the hybrid assemblage, but with varying degrees of power and agency.41

In our French Language lab images, archival records indicate that the named figures in this particular collective include the following (left to right): Gaston Louis Malécot; 2 female students holding receivers to their ears; Marc Denkinger (rear); Renee Perrot; 2 male students; Marcel Vigneron. All of the named figures were faculty at Middlebury and their vitae are easily locatable online via the institution’s online databases; the students are identified solely by their station. This is a reminder that, as in any other location, there are gender and power relations at work, shaping knowledge production, including who is identified as what kind of subject, and how they are identified. As such, inside any lab, people interact with the infrastructure in ways prescribed by those power relations. Students interact with the equipment; faculty and staff observe, correct, and coach the students, helping them to perfect their technique. That is, bodies are disciplined to make them amenable to the functioning of the infrastructure, according to existing standards and protocols. The lab is an operative, recursive chain of techniques that applies to bodies as much as technologies.

There are also people who are vitally important to the operation of the lab despite their absence from these images, and those absences are also telling. For example, where are the lab technicians? As William E. Burns describes, early lab spaces, like the Royal Society’s public experimental spaces, had already developed knowledge production systems that required the stratification of subjects as part of their knowledge production processes. Unlike private laboratories, where scientists and natural philosophers could develop and practice their work without fear of failure, public experimental spaces were designed for the performance of tried and tested experiments before witnesses. “Such viewers were expected to be male and upper class, or else their witnessing would have little weight. By contrast, the artisanal-class lab technicians employed by Boyle and other wealthy natural philosophers were expected to be as invisible as possible, except when receiving blame for an experiment gone wrong.”42 Even today, it is all too common for the technical knowledge and industry of the technicians who maintain the lab space, set up experiments, and log results to have their efforts attributed to the professors or to “the lab” in general. The photographer of the French language lab is also part of this apparatus and played a considerable role in shaping how the lab is depicted here. Like the others who work closely with the infrastructure, it is all too easy to forget their presence. Paradoxically, this erasure is due in part to their technical proficiency.

The Imaginary

Counterintuitive as it might first seem, the concept of the imaginary is very helpful in terms of determining how labs function. This is true of both the conventional Lacanian usage of the term and its more specialized media-archaeological usage.

After Lacan, Slavoj Žižek writes of the Imaginary as the realm of fantasy, which serves as a kind of psychic wallpaper, covering over the cracks and traumas of lived experience in order to provide a consistent sense of reality.43 In this sense, we can think of the Lab Imaginary as the various sustaining cultural mythologies of laboratory life, both those in media representations of the lab (for example, Frankenstein’s iconic “mad scientist” lab in James Whale’s Frankenstein, with its Tesla coils and chains and dials and buttons, or Walter White’s meth labs in Breaking Bad—the makeshift one in the RV and the humming stainless-steel factory under the laundromat both loom large right now) and the nonfiction, ideological myths that constitute our sense of the lab in culture at large (the biological lab, the nuclear test facility, food labs and consumer testing labs, and the list goes on).

There also is the more specialized sense of the term imaginary that media archaeology uses, which is closer to our own usage in this book. Imaginaries of media relate to the many ways uses and materialities, functions and contexts of media are not merely real and actual, but fabulated and created in various discursive practices from dreams to consumer branding. Siegfried Zielinski groups imaginary media into three broad classes: the untimely, which was designed and realized either too early or too late for the historical moment in which it would be appropriate; the conceptual, which only ever appeared on as ideas on paper; and the impossible, which are entirely symbolic machines that convey meanings with real impact, but could not actually be built.44 In this usage, “imaginary media” becomes a kind of shorthand for discussing these “not quite real” forms of media that are not only emerging from science labs, but being employed in novel and unforeseen ways in labs across the disciplines, including the humanities.45

Many of the instruments produced by Hugo Münsterberg, the German philosopher and psychologist that William James invited to direct the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in 1892, are imaginary in the media-archaeological sense. Giuliana Bruno has written in detail about Münsterberg’s lab at Harvard in a way that demonstrates the deep interrelations between the imaginary, lab space, apparatus, people, and infrastructure. Münsterberg’s instruments, she writes, “palpably rendered new worlds thinkable, representable, designing a shareable, common space of knowledge and even crafting a space of imaginary circulation between science and the arts.”46 In this early hybrid laboratory, Münsterberg crafted apparatus that demonstrated the roles of optical physiology, memory, and imagination in the production of emotion, with a particular interest in the function of film, which he, and Friedrich Kittler after him, identifies as the imaginary media technology par excellence.47 Crucially, Münsterberg was also interested in the larger cultural imaginary, and circulated his instruments themselves and image catalogs of his instruments to disseminate his ideas and create international scientific congresses for like-minded researchers.48 In that spirit, some of his apparatus continues to circulate, like his model of the horopter (horizon of vision), seen here at the Lab Cult exhibition in Montreal in 2019, over a century after its manufacture. Bruno concludes with the observation that, because of such circulation, Münsterberg’s instruments helped people to imagine “modern ways to inhabit sensible worlds and mobilize mental space”; their materiality conveyed a “graphic design of mental life,” which migrated to cinema, turning “experiments into experience.”49

Let’s return for a moment to the phonautogram in the French language lab. Scott’s agenda for the phonautogram was deeply imaginary in that he wanted to establish that it was possible to produce a form of writing that bore a direct, indexical relationship to sound. For the subjects of these photos, the imaginary motives for using it and the other bits of apparatus on display could have been any one of a range of possibilities: historical interest; teaching method; creating a general air of scientificity in the lab; demonstrating the difference between an indexical analog image of sound and the phonetic notation on the classroom charts; or many other things, depending on for whom the photographer (and ultimately the institution itself, in commissioning and circulating the lab photographs) is performing. Long before media archaeology emerged as theory and method that investigates the persistence of old media in contemporary media cultural practices and discourses, ostensibly “obsolete” media had its place in the lab environment, making other kinds of arguments than the ones for which it had originally been intended. The photographs remind us, then, that there is a long and honorable tradition of scrounging equipment for labs.50 Moreover, teaching laboratories are often associated with research collections of scientific instruments. Obsolete equipment from an instrument collection can be used to introduce students to fundamental lab techniques at little or no risk or cost.

Technique

As Jonathan Sterne describes, technique “connotes a connection among practice, technology, and instrumental reason: it is a form of ‘reasoned production,’ ‘a way of revealing,’ a ‘means with a set of rules for the game.’ Under the sign of modernity, technique carries a special value and a special valence—it is connected with rationality. Technique brings mechanics to bear on spontaneity.”51 And, as Latour and Woolgar note, laboratory practices extend outside the lab in many areas of culture, even if they ultimately depend on the lab for their existence.52 Learning lab work, then, involves being trained in specific operative chains that can be formalized under the more general heading of a technique, and the deployment of that technique in a specific space is part of what makes a lab into a lab.53

However, Sterne’s The Audible Past provides ample evidence that a seemingly natural practice such as listening is both technical and culturally constructed. Labs train us from ear to hand, from making to thinking, speaking to listening. Learning to speak for recording and learning to hear recordings involves a chain of operations that configures machines to work in concert with other people and other machines, including things like setting reference tones with tuning forks, learning to rotate recording cylinders and drums at the correct speed, reading waveforms, and transcribing recorded sounds into orthographic notation. The collecting and processing of data involves other techniques: gathering inscribed surfaces, establishing grounds for comparison, transforming linear data into numeric form, processing and charting it, and so on.

Our discussion above mostly concerns the symbolic content of the images of the French language lab. However, the production of images is also technical, which reveals another aspect of how the imagery and imaginaries of labs are produced. Again, the two French language lab photographs serve as a helpful tool for thinking about current labs. We have two different versions of this image, and the differences between them point to the way in which a photograph is always staged for particular audiences to produce particular connotations. First, the figures in the images are tightly packed into a single corner of the room and arranged so that the viewer can see them demonstrating and practicing the activities that apparently take place in the lab on a routine basis. In both the photographic print (image 4) and the halftone image (image 5), the woman in the center of the composition (identified as Renee Perrot) is blurry. In the halftone, which was prepared for use in the campus paper, she is not facing the camera at all. The other notable difference is that the unidentified female student seated behind the front dictaphone is speaking into the tube in the photograph and listening to it in the halftone. The blue pencil crop marks on the halftone image indicate a further operation in the editing and production process. There is nothing disingenuous here; the goal of the overall process of photography in this instance is to produce a sense of the lab as a busy space, where significant and serious acts of student training (and perhaps intellectual discovery) occur. In this particular case, we see an active use of electromechanical recording technologies in a scientific exploration of the topic of language use. There is also a strong sense of conviviality here. These people are enjoying their investigations, or at least, the production of an image of their investigations. The fact that we can see the artifice gives us a sense in miniature of how the feeling of labs as a space of richly generative activity was produced on a larger scale and imbedded itself in the cultural imaginary.