Labs as Hybrids

Bruno Latour offers one of the key reference points for the academic analysis of the contemporary research laboratory. In “Give Me A Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” he writes, “people want to establish elsewhere conclusions as certain as those reached in the laboratory.”5 Because Latour sees the laboratory as “a moment in a series of displacements that makes a complete shambles out of the inside/outside and the macro/micro dichotomies,” the means to this end is obvious.6 Even for scientists, leaving the lab entails losing the power that has been accrued within its hallowed walls, so there is only one way to retain that power. Latour turns it into an exhortation: “If this means transforming society into a vast laboratory, then do it.”7 Still, in the wake of phenomena like the Design Lab clothing line, it’s entirely possible to imagine Latour muttering through his palm, “No, not like that.” The truth of what you desire is often the inverse of what you expect.

One way of thinking about hybrid labs, then, is in the negative. A hybrid lab might be any lab that could give rise to someone saying, “Okay, but that’s not really a lab.” (We talk about this in more detail in chapter 5, on Lab Imaginaries; Thomas Gieryn calls this technique of exclusion “boundary work”.) The blunt exercise of authority in order to exclude something from the realm of “real labs” is a good reason to look at that thing more closely. In these pages, you’ll find séance rooms, apothecaries, home economics labs with human babies living in them, factories, city streets, hackerspaces, industrial laboratories, language labs, railway cars, medieval abbots’ kitchens, laptop networks, basements full of moribund technological devices, performance spaces, wartime radiation labs, artists’ studios, mule wagons, media labs, machine shops, marine biology labs, university closets and various other hybrids all busily producing knowledge via a range of orthodox and idiosyncratic techniques.

How do we get to the point where we can say something useful about what, exactly, these odd new spaces are that insist on their status as labs? A crucial entry point is the recognition that the lab is a way of understanding recurring forms of power and experimentality, not just as a part of the history of science and as a series of tropes that appear in contemporary discourses about labs in the arts, humanities, and culture at large. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour provides some hints, especially when he is discussing Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump. For Latour, what Shapin and Schaffer’s book describes is “the Modern Constitution”—a division of powers between Politics and Science, where “Boyle is creating a political discourse from which politics is to be excluded [i.e. modern laboratory science], while Hobbes is imagining a scientific politics from which experimental science has to be excluded.”8 From Latour’s perspective, this arrangement characterized modern life for the better part of three centuries, but something interesting begins to happen toward the end of the millennium. The two discourses begin to move closer to each other and modern certainties begin to crumble.9 Latour’s explanation for this shift is subtle: what characterizes modernity, he argues, is not the ascension of humanism, rationalism, industrialization, and the sciences, but a bicameral set of practices that appear to be distinct in order to operate, but are in fact deeply imbricated.10 The first set of practices, which Latour calls “translation,” correspond to the production of networks, and have to do with the production and proliferation of hybrid forms; the second, which he calls “purification,” produce “the modern critical stance” and regulate the division between the human and everything else.11 It is not that hybrid forms did not exist during modernity, but that the very practices that produced and circulated them with increasing efficiency also necessarily denied their existence.

One of the ongoing tasks for media history, media archaeology, the digital humanities, science studies, and related fields is not only to chart and describe new hybrid forms, but to re-examine what we believe we know of the historical record for evidence that this hybridization was always taking place. In other words, this task involves studying the multiple genealogies of labs that demonstrate conflicting forms of practice and values, imaginaries and infrastructures. It is also more about building a richer sense of what the lab is than it is about merely looking at recent forms of laboratories as they appear in media, art, and humanities.

However, as laboratory discourse became increasingly imbricated in the description of various forms of everyday practice, beyond the hybrid objects coming out of labs, labs themselves have also become hybrids . . . and perhaps always were. This is different than observing that, say, artists can and do talk about their studios as labs, or that scientists might imagine (and write about) themselves as poets or artists, or even that a lab might occasionally have a writer or an artist in residence.12 Such practices do not conform to strict borders between art, science, and the humanities. One premise of Siegfried Zielinski’s studies of the deep time of the media and variantology, for example, is that science and poetry have always been entangled.13 The history of the last century is the history of people pointing to the blurry area between art and science, from both sides of the divide. Marxism is a philosophy that, since Marx himself, has insisted on its status as a science.14 Since the dawn of the twentieth century, practitioners of Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics have used its rigorous close observation to lead to absurd conclusions and problems that don’t require resolutions.15 The Bauhaus was a major source of modern aesthetic sensibility, but it was also deeply rooted in the tradition of logical positivism.16 The history of film and film research is full of early examples of laboratories measuring the human body as a physical and emotional, affective entity: Hugo Münsterberg’s early twentieth century Harvard laboratory is a case in point.17 Later, in the context of bioart and technological culture, groups such as the Critical Art Ensemble mobilized a potent mixture of performance, critical theory, and scientific method for aesthetic and political ends.

But as Latour, C. P. Snow, Isabelle Stengers and many others have observed, a division has always been maintained that ensures that, in the dichotomy between science and culture, the sciences always maintain the superior role. This division was established and maintained through modern forms of governmentality that are still very much in effect. Governments create institutions that bestow power onto regulatory bodies, which create policy instruments that outline the approved use of that power in particular locations, according to specific practices. At the same time, hybrid practices continually emerge outside and around the officially approved ones, sometimes feeding back into the system and altering official practice, sometimes creating rogue or alternative practices, sometimes fizzling out entirely.

We are interested in labs, both orthodox and hybrid, because they are specific spaces in which the process of production takes place—hence our subtitle.18 In labs, a particular kind of situated practice occurs, and we want to open the question of how knowledge is produced via these practices, while also taking their infrastructures, architectonics, and intellectual furnishings into account.19 Isabelle Stengers poses the intriguing question of whether it might be possible to invent a kind of scientific practice not through the development of new forms of lab apparatus, but through a different kind of relation to the lab and its equipment by way of “the positive, practical invention of scientific authors who address themselves to nature without waiting for it to confer on them the power of judging.”20 Thus, we are also curious about a related question: what kinds of authors and other subjects do hybrid laboratories produce, and what kinds of statements are they capable of making? Assessing this question requires the creation of a heuristic that will allow us to take an inventory of a heterogeneous range of hybrid lab spaces and their associated practices. We begin describing this framework by way of the following case study on an early twentieth century French language lab.