Lab Discourse, or, Life is a Lab

The lab is deeply imbricated in all aspects of contemporary culture. Consider some examples.

Bartenders have been modern since the mid-nineteenth century, writing about themselves as “mixologists” to add an air of scholarly scientificity to the process of concocting cocktails. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, hipster bartenders interested in reviving some of the more elaborate old recipes from the last two centuries picked up this moniker with renewed vigor, taking a scientific-historical approach to the process of making a fancy drink (David Wondrich’s Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl and Darcy O’Neil’s Fix the Pumps are exemplary in this respect; O’Neil, a trained chemist, works as both a university research technologist and a bartender).1 This contemporary combination of lab culture and mixology means that it’s not uncommon to find bars with the word “lab” or with lab metaphors embedded somewhere in their name or branding.

Cosmetics is another area where the appearance of scientific metaphors (especially ones from chemistry) makes a certain amount of sense. During the writing of this book, one of the things we came across was the Lab Series of men’s cosmetics. As with bartending, there is a basic connection between the cosmetics industry and organic chemistry, so the comparison makes a sort of sense. Here’s a short passage from their website:

We believe life is a Lab—one in which bold moves, big ideas, and innovation through experimentation rules the day. Since 1987, we’ve been formulating high-tech, high-performance products in our Lab—so you have the confidence to go out and make the most of yours.

As one of the original, men’s only skincare brands, we understand the difference between men’s and women’s skin. Each and every one of our cutting-edge formulas is tried, tested, and tailored to suit the specific needs of guys across the globe. Now in over 30 countries, we’re committed to continually perfecting, improving, and innovating the ideal regimen-for men, who, like us, have a true passion for progress.2

Not only is the ideology of progress alive and well here, but life itself has been subsumed to technological advance and its apparatus: Life is a Lab. There are echoes of this belief everywhere, in universities, in government, and in the private sector.

Because discourses of scientificity and creativity coincide in contemporary post-Fordist branding, the lab is also a style . . . or an anti-style. Lab Series is one thing, but what are we to make of the Design Lab clothing line of The Hudson Bay Company (in Canada) and Lord & Taylor (in the US)?

Launched in spring 2015 for “style-conscious millennials,” Design Lab is not just a rapid-fire, amorphous, and affordable series of clothes organized according to vaguely historical “key trends” aimed at the desirable Millennial demographic (“Athletic Allure,” “Seventies Style,” “Woodstock Redux,” and so on). It is also a specific place, “a new young contemporary destination in store.”3 What is remarkable about Design Lab, though, is that there is no sign of the trappings of laboratories whatsoever in its displays, imagery, or promotional materials. There are no white lab coats, no safety goggles, no clipboards, no flasks, no beakers, Tesla coils, or scientific instrumentation in evidence. Nothing in the design of the typeface suggests scientificity; there is only a vague invocation of modernity. Recently, cult generic design chain Muji followed suit, with its own “Muji Labo” line, equally bereft of the traditional furniture of the lab:

The semiotics in both cases are those of a kind of anti-advertising that is no-nonsense and, well, clinical . . . but even this connotation is muted. Like a Cheshire Cat, the lab has vanished from Design Lab and Muji Labo, and all that is left is its ostensible pure product: a word so rational that it need not even flaunt its rationality with vulgar imagery.

The idea of the lab is more than a metaphor. Throughout this book, we use the phrase “lab discourse” to describe how “lab” serves as a kind of pragmatic persuasion, ordering, and organization of material and discursive regimes, invoking an entire network of power relations that determine what is and is not possible to say or do within a space designated as a lab.4 The lab not only marks a space and a genealogy, it also performs and reproduces its assumptions about those histories. “Laboratory” becomes an operative term. It does not simply signify, but operates in various institutional ways, in different conceptual contexts, and across historical periods to denote and connote what a lab should be, what a lab must be, and what a lab might be. The lab, as a term, is an operational organization of space as much as the references, histories, and uses that include and exclude based on preference. Parts of this discourse are normative and regulatory, parts negotiated, and parts contestatory or oppositional. Every time the word “lab” is applied to a new kind of hybrid space, the entire network jostles around in an attempt to accommodate or reject this new usage.