The Pre-emergence of Hybrid Labs

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. What is really happening when someone points at a space that has not previously been considered a lab and asserts, “This is a lab”? The performative quality of this act—using the word “lab” and all of its attendant connotations to coordinate vast sets of relations between institutions, discourses, people, objects, texts, and practices—comes out in many different contexts and creates effects at many different scales. Such an act of naming can shift entire economies, restructure major cultural institutions like universities, change the nature of the work academics do, and alter many other forms of personal experience, public, and private. This process is ongoing, and its lasting effects are far from predictable.

Shifts between traditional humanities spaces (libraries, seminars, lecture halls), artistic and design studios and the plethora of labs in the sciences can be tracked historically, as a particular modern form of hybridity with a very intensive transformation witnessed across the past decades, and as a theoretically and thematically insightful way to read modern institutional change, including universities. The question of whether it is helpful to think about studios or other forms of hybrid labs as labs involves the extent to which the term helps us to consider how they produce and deploy new types of objecthood and subjecthood that can help scholars to enrich their own fields, or to solve certain kinds of practical problems outside the lab (what Hacking calls “mission-oriented” work).73

Raymond Williams’ notion of the pre-emergent is also helpful at this juncture. Perhaps the most useful way to talk about hybrid lab forms that seem to be particularly successful at the current moment, such as media labs, digital humanities labs, maker spaces, and research-creation labs, is as pre-emergent paradigms. Williams cautions that understanding emergent culture requires seeing beyond immediate practice to new forms, or adaptations of existing ones. This shift in perspective requires a certain hesitancy on our part. Rather than immediately pronouncing that hybrid labs are here to stay, and that they function in a specific manner, we need to think carefully about these forms in terms of their relations to dominant paradigms (science labs proper) and residual ones (the lab also has a deep time).74

Even in terms of the dominant understanding of how science labs function, Ian Hacking and Thomas Kuhn offer some relief from the feeling of imposter syndrome that those working in contemporary hybrid labs might experience. One of the strengths—and limitations—of scientific laboratories and their attendant methods is how they restrict relations with the outside world in order to solve the problems at hand. In “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” Hacking contends “that as a laboratory science matures, it develops a body of types of theory and types of apparatus and types of analysis that are mutually adjusted to each other . . . ‘a closed system’ that is essentially irrefutable.”75 Labs and their theories verify themselves, but for Hacking, this has little or nothing to do with the production of truth. In other words, the various research problems and techniques that scientists undertake do not occur under the sign of total comprehension of some theoretical “fully discoverable set of rules and assumptions.” Instead, they relate by “resemblance and modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question already recognizes.”76 What Hacking means is that scientists themselves use the models that they acquire through (textual) research, “often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms.”77

This process of taking up models without fully considering how they achieved their prominent status is not all that different formally from something like contemporary computer and videogame console modding culture, where it’s possible to learn a set of operations and techniques on, say, YouTube, and employ them step by step without understanding anything more about basic electronics theory. As Kuhn writes, for many people, “neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research.”78 Nevertheless, the problem for scholars is different. The general public doesn’t have to theorize their own work, but we do. The homeostasis that Kuhn and Hacking describe allows labs to accomplish certain kinds of work, but it also forecloses on others. Perhaps some of the leakiness and heterodoxy of hybrid labs is helpful in this respect. As Kuhn notes, both artists and scientists must be able to function “in a world out of joint.”79

The “why hybrid labs?” question may not be as pressing as it seems; their existence is a fait accompli. However, at the very least, we would like to reframe the question in terms of how these labs work. Objects, practices, and tools inside labs may retain their names across the divide of a paradigm shift, but they will not mean the same thing as they will be articulated differently, in different relationships. Transfiguration and knowledge transfer are key to understanding why labs are appearing in the humanities and arts. Kuhn reminds us that this is not the same as saying that practitioners in hybrid labs can make truth claims about whatever they please (perhaps a corrective to the worst excesses of reader response theory). “But in some areas they see different things [than the sciences], and they see them in different relations to one another.”80

Our thinking about hybrid labs in this preliminary way has revealed an object that is still very much in process. Accordingly, due to the nature of the object of study as historically dynamic, there is a pressing need for a certain methodological and theoretical eclecticism. As Latour notes, there is a real division between “scholars studying organizations, institutions, public policy on the one hand, and people studying micronegotiations inside scientific disciplines on the other.”81 We want to begin to break this division down, so we will be looking at the categories of the extended lab we have just outlined—space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, the imaginary, and technique—in a series of chapters designed to demonstrate how each of these aspects contributes to a broader understanding of what hybrid labs are and how they function in current iterations of lab discourse. The rest of this book will continue to outline key aspects of labs as performances, labs as (constituted by) technologies, discourses of making and experimenting, and, among other topics, the institutional transformations of which labs in universities are a part. As we pointed out when we described why we chose to develop a heuristic rather than conduct a survey, there is more to be covered. We can only barely touch on the topics of hacklabs, fablabs, and bioart labs, and our notes on makerspaces originate from a particular university perspective that may not be shared by the denizens of such labs. We offer THE LAB BOOK and the extended laboratory model as a platform for further investigations, and as a catalyst for continuing research that demands both more specific historical takes and perspectives that differ from our own.