What Science Labs Do and Why Labs Matter

Operating a lab is a valuable activity in every respect because it involves the ability to make some kind of truth-claim. Even if implied and involved in various cultural and media imaginaries, labs fabricate realities. Consider Latour and Woolgar’s most concise descriptions of what a laboratory is and what it does:

Scientific activity is not “about nature,” it is a fierce fight to construct reality. The laboratory is the work and the set of productive forces, which makes construction possible. Every time a fragment stabilises, it is reintroduced into the laboratory, (in the guise of a machine, inscription device, skill, routine, prejudice, deduction, programme, and so on), and is used to increase the difference between statements.56

In this formulation, labs literally “make a difference.” Labs and lab-like spaces matter because they construct new “forces and realities” out of the objects they work with, and then “those who are empowered to act as their credible interpreters” mobilize these realities and forces in social programs.57 Science labs determine what counts as fact, as opposed to, say, artistic “truth,” which is often relative, multiple, paradoxical, and complex—ostensibly “higher” than fact but often less powerful in a modern context. So, we could also slightly change the wording of the passage from Latour and Woolgar to reflect on the other aspects of the humanities and media labs. Perhaps something like this:

Cultural and media (studies) activity is not “about culture,” it is a fierce fight to construct and deconstruct the material contexts of how culture comes about. The laboratory is the work and the set of productive forces, which makes construction and deconstruction possible. Every time a fragment stabilizes, it is reintroduced into the laboratory, (in the guise of a machine, inscription device, skill, routine, prejudice, habit, meaning, affect, and on), and is used to increase the difference between statements.

Before we move on to other labs that do this work of constructing and deconstructing technological worlds of culture, it’s worth reviewing the literature that describes what we know of the function of scientific labs.

One reason science labs themselves were historically neglected as an object of study is that laboratory practices and techniques have always differed in substantial ways from their official description. For this observation scholars of labs are indebted to Ludwik Fleck, a microbiologist and one of the first to think about the history and philosophy of science in a manner that also pays attention to practices. In On Historicizing Epistemology, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has the following to say about Fleck’s contribution:

The “living practice” of the natural sciences must be distinguished from their “official paper form.” It is differently structured, not proceeding as described in books of logic or in textbooks. The practice of the natural sciences in general “cannot be learned from any book,” it can only be found in and learned from the reality of the laboratory. With this demand, Fleck—himself both observer and participant in laboratory life—largely anticipated the sociology of the laboratory that would develop only in the last decades of the twentieth century.58

It wasn’t until the 1970s that science studies scholars like Latour and Woolgar, Karin Knorr Cetina, Stephen Shapin, Owen Hanaway, Andrew Pickering, and Ian Hacking began to really consider what science labs actually did as entities unto themselves; before that, the notion of “lab” and “experiment” were deeply commingled in the academic literature.

For our purposes, Knorr Cetina’s “The Couch, the Cathedral and the Laboratory” is an excellent place to start to understand how the practices of scientific activity have come to the fore and how they have been articulated through space, discourse, and the various combinations of materials and symbols that constitute the universe of a lab in a society. She argues that “far from being just the physical space in which experiments are conducted, laboratories have emerged as carrying a systematic ‘weight’ in our understanding of science” (114). For Knorr Cetina, labs make the difference that Latour and Woolgar mention through a process of “reconfiguration” (114, 116, 134). Inside a laboratory, it is possible to construct an order that upgrades “the ordinary and mundane components of social life” (134). Different areas of science accomplish their reconfigurations in a variety of ways that “are neither uniform nor consistent” (135). One type of lab uses a variety of technologies to create representations or simulations of real-world phenomena; a second type uses treatments and interventions to process partial versions of phenomena; a third type of lab works semiotically, with the “signatures of the events of interest to science,” employing a “language-transcending” set of technologies to derive significance from their work (123, 135).

Of these three types, the simulation lab may be most familiar to humanities scholars, and the most evanescent, because they can be everywhere and nowhere. Thanks to the ubiquity and power of software simulation, anywhere you can take a computer can become a lab, and any computer can be a lab of this type (123). Nevertheless, simulation labs have a long and honorable pre-computer history inside and outside of science; Knorr Cetina also includes war games and psychologists’ observation rooms with one-way mirrors in this category. In this model, the lab is a virtual space, a kind of stage that is only visible when an experiment is being conducted and is for most purposes coterminous with the experiment (125). The prevalence of this type of lab is perhaps one reason why the notion of the lab and the experiment were inextricable for so long.

For Knorr Cetina, the second type of lab is when “laboratories come of age and are established as distinctive and separate entities” (127). This type of lab is a “workshop” or “processing environment” with its own goals, activities, personnel, and apparatus, which work together in carefully designed combinations to explore particular effects (127, 128). According to Ian Hacking, this confluence of forces is where laboratory science proper occurs, outside of those sciences “that are chiefly observational, classificatory, or historical”; for him, the laboratory “is a space for interfering under controllable and isolatable conditions with matter and energy, often done in museums . . . but seldom in archives.”59 As with the others who insist on the inscriptive quality of lab work, for Hacking, much of lab work “is about marks and the manipulation of marks.”60 In “The Couch, the Cathedral and the Laboratory,” Knorr Cetina is also careful to emphasize that this second type of lab is not sealed off from the world; it is a kind of hub or switching node, “a link between internal and external environments, a border in a wider traffic of objects and observations” (129). In the laboratory’s circulatory regime, people, objects, data, records, and even chunks of experiments constantly flow in and out as they are prepared, transformed and tested. This type of lab treats all natural objects as though they exist only in an endless series of transitory states, “decomposable entities from which effects can be extracted through appropriate treatment” (126). An analog version of these labs would be the French cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, together with the “observation circuit” between them that architects and artisans travelled to see how various changes affected the overall performance of the buildings over time: an instructive example precisely because its spatial quality is all about its relation to the larger outside world.

All sciences involve processing signs and producing texts, but in the third type of lab, “the construction of objects as signs shapes the whole technology of experimentation” (131). For Knorr Cetina, this third category would include both particle physics labs and the psychoanalyst’s office. In both cases, though experiments in such labs begin with signs, they “constantly transcend” the limitations of the symbolic, as they become, “with a certain likelihood, attached to events” that occur in laboratory experiments (131–132). In all three categories, labs serve as the infrastructure that enables experimentation with benches and apparatus, offices and computers, management and custodial staff, utilities, a physical address, and so on. But it is in the second and third categories that laboratories become “objects of work and attention over and above experiments” (128). In the case of these kinds of labs, scientists have to spend at least part of their time taking care of the lab, and at this point a stratification of labor and reward also becomes visible. On the low end of the spectrum, a whole class of people (custodial staff, lab monitors, etc.) become necessary, whose job is never to go near the actual experiments but simply to care for the lab and its apparatus. On the other end of the reward spectrum are lab directors and other personnel who have to spend an increasing amount of their time not doing science, but applying for grants, filling out expense reports, promoting the lab and its work, attending meetings, hiring new personnel, and so on. The foregoing, however, should not be dismissed as irrelevant. Ian Hacking considers this sort of work as part of the intellectual infrastructure that is part of what makes a lab possible.61 As many current examples in the media and humanities disciplines testify, labs tend to become associated with such leaders, and having a lab becomes a career goal for many ambitious academics.

As the lab becomes a distinct, permanent facility, experiments can become less so, dissolving into “experimental work” that runs continuously and in parallel.62 In hard science, experiments can re-emerge with a vengeance as “counterparts” of laboratories, becoming so large that they require entire international lab networks to run, and can, as a consequence, deplete entire fields of resources for anything else. At this point, the political nature of labs and experiments becomes impossible to ignore.63 They spread across multiple institutional and geographic sites and become, again, less identifiable only as one place. Knorr Cetina’s closing thoughts are about the deep imbrication of labs and the everyday; they are embedded in it and extend out into it.64

Latour and Woolgar also note the connection of labs to the spaces of everyday life while they articulate ways to start discussing the different disciplinary boundaries that are established through having a lab, as well as the boundaries that are established in having a text (not that labs and texts are necessarily separate entities). As they argue in Laboratory Life, there is nothing “special or mysterious” about the difference between the activity of social scientists (and humanists) and scientists; “both were engaged in craftwork; differences could be explained in terms of resource and investments, and without recourse to exotic qualities of the nature of the activity” (257). The major difference, at the end of the book, is that “they have a laboratory. We, on the other hand, have a text, this present text” (257). On the one hand, we are back to the power of the possession of space itself, whether it is on a laptop or in its own building, and the power of the claims that can be made because of the possession of that space. Small wonder that those outside the sciences have claimed the space of the lab as their own, whether for the necessities of symbolic power or, as is clear in some cases, for hosting specialist apparatuses. On the other hand, texts and inscription are part of even the most scientific of labs.

After a few weeks of observing Roger Guillemin’s lab at the Salk Institute, Latour and Woolgar infamously note that “the laboratory began to take on the appearance of a system of literary inscription” (52). Perhaps in an effort to defamiliarize this inscription process through humor, Latour and Woolgar describe the life in this laboratory as involving a “strange mania for inscription,” noting the “proliferation of files, documents, and dictionaries” around the lab space and its immediate environs (48). Science, like the humanities, is deeply textual in nature, at least at one point in its chain of operations (to refer back to the vocabulary of cultural techniques). It stands to reason that scientists, like other academics, do a lot of writing because text is still the most efficient medium for research communication. But what is the nature of the writing that inscribes more than just alphabetic utterances and even becomes more akin to the work of technical media? One of the most relevant aspects of Latour and Woolgar’s formulation for us is that in science studies, writing is always deeply material and relational. It requires a range of types of “inscription devices,” which Latour and Woolgar define as “any item of apparatus or particular configuration of such items which can transform a material substance into a figure or diagram which is directly usable by one of the members of the office space” (51). In other words, the apparatus for inscription involves a particular combination of machines, apparatus, and technicians (58).

Somewhat counter-intuitively, what makes a given inscription device valuable is not whether it turns abstract ideas into tangible results, but rather how quickly it allows its users to move from “craftwork to ideas” (69). This formulation gives us yet another way to think about the presence of various technologies in humanities labs as mediating relations between machines, humans, materials, from hands-on to conceptual work. In our earlier example of the phonautograph in the French language lab, its job is not so much to produce a mark that will be read by other machines or humans, but to make students think about sound as a continuous material phenomena that can be recorded, measured, studied, translated, and discussed by others in the field and by interested members of other publics.

In order to answer the question of how scientific writing differs from other kinds, Latour and Woolgar refer to the work of Thomas Kuhn (54). The answer they produce is that the difference between scientific writing and other kinds of writing has nothing to do with the essential quality of the writing. This distinction is a result of scientists locating themselves with a paradigm, or, to follow on Roland Barthes, a “mythology”; Latour and Woolgar eventually settle on “culture” “to refer to the set of arguments and beliefs to which there is a constant appeal in daily life and which is the object of all passions, fears, and respect” (5). In The Mangle of Practice, Andrew Pickering concurs: “the most direct route toward a posthuman analysis of practice is to acknowledge a role for nonhuman—or material, as I will say—agency in science.”65 Pickering proceeds to argue for the semiotic as a primary axis of analysis because it treats things and people symmetrically.66 As this definition makes clear, material technologies are articulated to specific techniques employed in a particular space by particular people in order to produce a form of knowledge recognizable by that group. Problems arise when we assume that it’s easy to translate between communities (including a general public).

What holds scientific communities together in the first place, then, is discursive: a shared belief in what Kuhn called a paradigm.67 Though Kuhn would never say this, the function of paradigms is largely ideological or disciplinary. The study of particular paradigms in school, along with their rules and standards, prepares people for group membership; it is largely involuntary in that you get what your instructors give you. Paradigms and disciplines are constantly performed and repeated. This is not to say change is impossible. Kuhn writes that, when a new paradigm does emerge out of some anomaly that normal science can’t account for, its successful reception also involves a lot of textual work: the formation of professional societies, the establishment of new journals, and calls for inclusion in curricula.68 Latour and Woolgar proceed along similar lines, observing that, when labs do manage to constitute a fact, it is then incorporated into a textbook or becomes the condition for the production of a piece of equipment.69 This last operation is important because it is precisely the creation of standard textbooks that allows scientists to continue their “normal” (esoteric) research and rely on the classroom and its literature to do the interpellating.70

Carolyn Marvin contends that technical communities are deeply textual in that they gather around “authoritative texts and their designated interpreters.” Much of the authority of community members derives from grammatical/symbolic functions; “the proper naming of persons, gadgets and concepts in their electrical contexts and relations [is] among the most important performative indicators of technological literacy.”71 Textual cues are also a primary device for identifying outsiders and enemies. If you take its productive and interpretive communities into account, research communication is always partially an exercise in border policing—“who is inside and outside, who may speak, and who has authority and may be believed.”72 As we will see later in this book, humanities and media labs have long been engaged in this border skirmish with the sciences. What really differs (or what differed historically) is the status of the knowledge that the humanities, arts and sciences produce, with or without their own labs.