Speculative Spaces

As long as there have been modern laboratories, there have been lab imaginaries—the visions that lab denizens have of how they would like their spaces and practices to be perceived by those outside their communities, and of how they would like to believe their own spaces and practices function. This process of envisioning, sometimes presented quite literally as a “vision” or “mission statement,” is an unavoidable element of all lab spaces, from early science labs to contemporary hybrid labs. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, one of the works that define the field of science and technology studies, goes into significant detail about the importance of the imaginary to the emergence of the first modern experimental laboratories in the mid-seventeenth century; it also provides a solid set of ideas for how to discuss the imaginaries of more recent labs.

Experimental space was itself an imaginary solution to a range of social issues. Early experimentalists spent an enormous amount of time and energy publicizing “experimental spaces as useful: to identify problems in Restoration society to which the work of the experimental philosopher could provide the solutions.”11 More specifically, seventeenth-century experimentalists imagined themselves as the solution to the general problem of civil unrest: “They presented their own community as an ideal society where dispute could occur safely and where subversive errors were quickly corrected. Their ideal society was distinguished by the source of authority the experimenters recommended. . . . No isolated powerful individual authority should impose belief. The potency of knowledge came from nature, not from privileged persons” (298).

These experimental spaces and their scientists also employed a variety of techniques, many of which were literary in nature. Early writing about laboratories occurred in great volume and in a number of formats, from books, broadsides, pamphlets, and lectures to personal correspondence. The idea of the witnessing of experiments, and subsequent testimony from witnesses as to their merits, was central to the process by which a laboratory produced new knowledge in the form of “matters of fact” (39). While witnesses had to be fellow experimentalists of a certain moral standing, they did not actually need to be physically present if experimentalists could produce descriptive literature that would theoretically allow readers to reproduce the experiment, or even imagine reproducing it. In other words, the regulation of experience, conduct, and practice was and has always been part and parcel of the moral economy of labs and other spaces of knowledge production.12

One early key element of the lab imaginary is what Shapin and Schaffer call “virtual witnessing,” which is a technique that consists of “production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication” (60). In effect, the reader realizes the experiment in “the laboratory of the mind” (60). Because the audience for virtual witnessing is theoretically unlimited, it was, in the eyes of the experimentalists, “the most powerful technology for constituting matters of fact” (60). In order to create a degree of trust and assurance that would guarantee to the reader’s satisfaction that the experiment took place in the way it was described, Boyle and his colleagues would, for example, deliberately develop a verbose, ornate prose style “with appositive clauses piled on top of each other” as a way to provide context through a surfeit of information (63). As in later realist fiction, the extra details created a sense of verisimilitude in the reader. Another technique they employed was the use of highly detailed engravings rather than simple line diagrams to illustrate accounts of their experiments. These engravings provided a naturalistic representation of the objects in an experiment which in turn acted as reinforcement for “the imaginative witness provided by the words in the text” (61–62). Relaying the details of failed experiments as well as successful ones was also part of virtual witnessing as a technique. It “allayed anxieties” in aspiring experimentalists and reassured them that everyone makes mistakes; it also anticipated criticism from those who would argue that experimentalists cherry-picked their own results (64). The net result of these techniques was a powerful lab imaginary that allowed experimental natural philosophy to prevail during a historically precarious moment. Such an account is compelling for many reasons, but for this chapter it is especially relevant in that it describes how the lab imaginary emerges from cultural techniques that ground imaginaries in material practices.

In recent decades, increasing numbers of humanities and media institutions have pitched themselves as “labs” in a wide range of fields that do not traditionally utilize lab structures or methods, including (but far from limited to) fields such as design, fine arts, the digital humanities, and a media-archaeological reverse-engineering of technologies and cultural narratives about technology. The Paris-based artists Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt, who form the duo Bureau d’études, speak of a “laboratory planet,” which, besides designating the twentieth- and twenty-first-century science-military-entertainment-university complex as the defining planetary situation that installs infrastructures of power and technology, also refers to the laboratorization of knowledge in general.13 As we pointed out in our Introduction, we now imagine the world as a lab, and that imaginary is a huge part of the discourse we use to justify smart cities, contemporary university institutions like incubators, and hacklabs.14 Such processes often rely on a technique that Michał Krzyżanowski dubs the “prelegitimation of practice,” which we can adapt to describe the process by which institutions and people justify their actions by presenting their visions of what they might do with a lab, given the resources they are requesting. Even in a historical moment when we are so saturated with labs that it’s tempting to not use the term as a form of distinction at all, having a lab (or even wanting one) nevertheless lends an aura of legitimacy to a research agenda. Prelegitimation techniques can be difficult to spot precisely because they are drawn from “experience-like aspects” of social discourse about a given subject—and once again, lab discourse is all around us. Such prelegitimation practices can also be problematic because they play a significant role in creating a sense that the person employing these strategies is an expert.15

An alternative strategy to building a sense of expertise and prestige is through what Thomas F. Gieryn calls “boundary work” in an article titled “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science.” For Gieryn, boundary work consists of “ideological efforts by scientists to distinguish their work and its products from non-intellectual scientific activities.”16 Boundary work is often subtle, because it doesn’t operate in a directly accusatory fashion. Instead, it involves attributing certain characteristics to science as an institution in order to identify other activities as nonscientific (782). What’s particularly intriguing about Gieryn’s argument is that the characteristics that boundary work attributes to science are not always consistent; they vary according to the perceived threat, and can even contradict each other (786). For example, in a discussion of the writings of the Victorian scientist John Tyndall, superintendent at the Royal Institution in London, Gieryn notes that Tyndall struggled to differentiate science from its foes in both religion and engineering in order to garner more public support:

The characteristics [Tyndall] attributed to science were different for each boundary: scientific knowledge is empirical when contrasted with the metaphysical knowledge of religion, but theoretical when contrasted with the common-sense, hands-on observations of mechanicians; science is justified by its practical utility when compared to the merely poetic contributions of religion, but science is justified by its nobler uses as a means of “pure” culture and discipline when compared to engineering. (787)

We have already noted the ambivalence of lab discourse in our chapters on lab space and lab people. Gieryn insists that this deep ambivalence is constitutive not only of labs but of science more generally: “Scientific knowledge is at once theoretical and empirical, pure and applied, objective and subjective, exact and estimative, democratic (open for all to confirm) and elitist (experts alone confirm), limitless and limited (to certain domains of knowledge)” (792). Scientists engaging in boundary work are therefore not being cynical, but they are employing an inherent structural feature of science to advance their interests.

The question that arises is, how do we engage in good-faith discussion about technological and research practice in media and design labs while acknowledging, on the one hand, that these are not just places of knowledge production but also places of recreation, imagination, and activism, and also, on the other hand, that science labs are not inherently any different?17 Such a question cannot be fully resolved in a single chapter, as it touches on the assumed tensions between regularity and unexpected outcomes, experimentation and standardization, creativity and routine, and other sorts of binaries that inform the techniques that culture uses to maintain the barrier between scientific and artistic activity. In order to avoid making assumptions about the legitimacy of various kinds of knowledge-producing activities (including creative ones), we need critical maps of laboratory practices that recognize the complexity of the issue.

Ambivalent Lab Imaginaries

Over the course of the twentieth century, laboratories became a core feature of engineering, chemical, and physical science activity, but also of business. As we have touched on throughout this book, Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory was a hub of creative engineering and business ventures, but it was also the much-discussed and -debated source of a particular lab imaginary (while the laboratory of Nikola Tesla became a parallel sort of mythological space, where a lone male “wizard” created technological marvels).18 The place of invention was a site of imagination whose connotations resonated with those of the studio (creativity) and the library (the history of knowledge production), but it also carried a distinct experimental heritage and a set of emergent business practices with it. Edison was a symptomatic figure, managing to be both an idealized lone genius and the busy manager of a collective of experts and facilities. Even before Menlo Park, Edison was acutely aware that this early version of a media lab would need sufficient infrastructure, calling for “every conceivable variety of Electric Apparatus, and any quantity of Chemicals for experimentation.”19 Quite aptly, like a commentary track to Edison, in fictional accounts such as Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), the emerging “lab imaginary” was also defined by the interplay between the obsessed genius of the inventor and the lab crammed full of apparatus, linking to our discussion in chapter 2: “Here and there about the room one might glimpse, atop the cluttered tables, various precision instruments, intricate and obscure gear-boxes, electrical apparatus, telescopes, mirrors, enormous magnets, retorts amid a tangle of tubes, flasks full of mysterious fluids, and slates scrawled over with equations.”20

It was not only the technical apparatus—imaginary and material—that defined the emerging tech lab. New forms of management techniques (see our discussion of management techniques in relation to the MIT Media Lab in chapter 4) and infrastructure also defined the emerging methods of twentieth-century science/engineering/media.21 Most people are familiar with Edison’s sobriquet “The Wizard of Menlo Park”; that aspect of his contribution to the lab imaginary—the inventor as possessor of near-magical powers—is clearly visible today in all forms of popular media. André Millard has written extensively on the techniques and practices that sustain the myth of Edison’s laboratory wizardry which may not be quite as exciting, but are at least as important.

Millard argues that Edison invented both industrial research and the method for managing a diversified business based on that research.22 What Millard means by “industrial research” is nearly identical to the process that would dominate work at Bell Labs and other industrial labs in the mid-twentieth century. Edison did not merely invent things and patent them; he labored to develop them into a “factory-ready prototype” and then manufacture them until he could sell the entire package to an interested business. His “invention factory” at Menlo Park produced a steady stream of prototypes, but it also innovated on his existing products in order to drive production costs down. This technique has had an enduring legacy. Mervin Kelly of Bell Labs would later aphorize the goal of continuous innovation in the lab as products that were “better, or cheaper, or both.”23 Later, Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo’s famed head of research and development, referred to this practice as “lateral thinking for withered technology,” a technique that allowed the company to produce startling degrees of commercial success, earning a reputation for innovation at the same time it was using cheap stock or obsolete components in its products.24

Before long, Edison was not just making consumer products but vertically integrating the entire manufacturing process, from extracting and refining raw materials to dedicating whole factories to the production of each new product.25 He was not so much inventing individual devices as he was inventing entire processes for producing them. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it early in the twentieth century, isolated technologies like the steam engine define the special advanced nature of modernity, but they also define the method itself: “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”26

In order to manage all this commercial activity, Edison formed TAE Inc. in 1910. TAE policy laid out a decentralized, multidivisional structure. It was intended to move decision making closer to the customer by giving middle managers the opportunity to exercise their special technical or marketing skills. As Millard notes in “Thomas Edison and the Theory and Practice of Innovation,” it created channels for their input within the organization, providing the timely information with which to better apply the engineering and manufacturing resources of TAE Inc. to a changing market situation (196). Once a general policy was in place, division managers had “as wide latitude as possible.” Though it’s not usually described in business literature, Millard notes that “Edison’s policy of diversification came two decades before those of Du Pont or General Motors,” and “his move to a divisional structure [March 15, 1915] precedes theirs by several years” (197).

The divisional structure of TAE was visionary, but that didn’t mean Edison ran it well. He is notorious “as the architect of some of America’s greatest business failures,” chiefly because he didn’t let the diversified structure do its work (191). As a result of frequently overruling the very manager he had hired to be independent, making decisions not to move into radio and electronic recording, and relying on his own decidedly conservative tastes in terms of media content, his organization backslid from “twentieth century enlightened management to nineteenth century capitalism” (197).

It’s intriguing that Edison managed to turn even his shortcomings as a businessman into an enduring part of the lab imaginary. After noting that Edison “attempted to downplay his role as a businessman by stressing the fact that he was an inventor who preferred to stay in his laboratory,” and that “he was forced into financing inventions and building factories because entrepreneurs were too timid to do the job,” Millard flatly states that “this story, like many others concocted by Edison, was simply untrue.” Rather, “it was part of his successful creation of an Edison myth and a ploy to keep him out of the litigation that invariably accompanied his business activities” (192). In other words, the fantasy of the scientist who is hopeless with practical matters like administrative tasks is not only part of the larger lab assemblage; it also sustains that assemblage in important ways, allowing it to avoid certain kinds of oversight. Though this strategy succeeded for a time, Millard notes that by the late 1920s there was a widening “gulf” between Edison’s wizardly image and the reality of his failing businesses (197). What remained in the lab imaginary for most of the twentieth century, and is arguably still present, was not the importance of a solid set of organizational principles but a certain kind of license that shields those engaged in pure research from the drudgery of practical concerns.

Because of Edison and Tesla, the lab imaginary thickened and spread. Lab discourse became an inextricable add-on to the experimental product itself. The institutionalization of labs across the twentieth century (from Bell Labs to Silicon Valley design labs, from PARC to various forms of MIT institutions, to the hacklab and creative lab scenes in Europe of the 1980s and 1990s) became crucial for the understanding of media innovation. The massive financial investment in many forms of labs, especially in the United States, ran parallel to the massive, hyperbolic rhetoric that many of the places gained with their products.

Latour describes the power of the laboratory in terms of its scale-shifting abilities. The lab gathers its special powers from its ability to scale the connections from its experiments to the outside world. Latour discusses the particular ability of labs to take advantage of scale in terms of Louis Pasteur’s nineteenth-century microbe farming and its massive social consequences. Developing techniques to manipulate temporality and recursion is key. The powers of the lab reside “in the special construction of laboratories in a manner which reverses the scale of phenomena so as to make things readable, and then accelerates the frequency of trials, allowing many mistakes to be made and registered.”27 Latour’s discussion attends specifically to the particular situations of that scientific practice and its relevance for issues of health, farms, animals, and more—a whole bundle of material and narrative factors emerge from his work. As he elaborates, the laboratory’s apparent containment by way of a notion of inside/outside is relevant because “the laboratory positions itself precisely so as to reproduce inside its walls an event that seems to be happening only outside.”28

Both the material experiments and the imaginary of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labs already involved massive back-and-forth scalar operations. These shifts in scale included bridging the assumed separation between science and the social world, as Latour acknowledges, but also other sorts of complex shifts. Consider, for example, how the scientific authority of representation and practice was entangled with parapsychological practices, and vice versa. As Eric Kluitenberg observes in his work on Edison and Tesla and their respective interests in the occult, “the dividing line between inventiveness and the imaginary is ambiguous and often porous.”29 Kluitenberg admits that it’s entirely possible that the two “wizards” were engaged in an arms race of occult discourse, exploiting the general fuzzy understanding of the difference between science and magic by making “bogus claims that spurred the public imagination, referencing the supernatural with their costly technical ventures.”30 But with Edison in particular, Kluitenberg ends on an almost tragic note, seeing Edison’s “appropriation of the language of scientific rationality” for mediumistic purposes as part of an understandable desire to avoid the finality of death.31 This, too, is a kind of imaginary boundary work. However, the attempt to apply lab discourse to an irrational object does not necessarily make the object more rational; lab discourse can even cause further occult discourse to proliferate. In other words, the wider cultural context of inventing invention was full of both real and imaginary machines, from occult labs to the wildly imaginative ones such as Edison’s and Tesla’s. As Ghislain Thibault argues, it is necessary to understand that from the parascientific to the other spectrum of invention, visual inscription techniques and similar forms of technical demonstration were there to provide public scientific legitimacy.32

In many cases, the authority of lab discourse has been deployed to legitimize or prelegitimize the practices of parapsychology. As in the case of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s parapsychological laboratory, these sites were also self-nominated labs. In many ways, the discourse around such spaces reveals key traits of what the lab was imagined—and thus constructed—to be around 1900: it needed apparatuses that register facts beyond the fallible human observer; it trained the experimental subject according to right protocols; it established a discourse about objects of experimental knowledge that can then circulate; and it attempted to stabilize the disciplines through such infrastructural arrangements of technologies and people.33 This does not mean von Schrenck-Notzing was successful, but the way that the parapsychological lab performed its own view of scientific space and discourse is worth considering in some detail.

Case Study: Hybrid Spaces of Experimentation and Parapsychology

Hybrid spaces of experimentation and parapsychology offer another entry point into twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century lab imaginaries. In 1942, almost a century after the Fox sisters kicked off the first wave of modern spiritualism with their knockings and rappings, and some fifty years after the “Ghost Baron” von Schrenck-Notzing’s lab, the life’s work of Thomas Glendenning Hamilton, a prominent scientific and public figure in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was published in a book with the ponderous title Intention and Survival: Psychical Research Studies and the Bearing of Intentional Actions by Trance Personalities on the Problem of Human Survival.34 Hamilton was a member of the surgical staff at Winnipeg General Hospital, a faculty member at the University of Manitoba, president of the Manitoba Medical Association, and a member of the Manitoba Legislative Association from 1915 to 1920—the epitome of good citizenship and scientific rationality. From 1918 to his death in 1935, Hamilton’s chief interest was spiritualism.

An entire hauntological book could be written about Hamilton, as he generated an extraordinary amount of documentation—more than thirteen hundred notes and seven hundred images—now gathered in the Hamilton Family fonds at the University of Manitoba.35 In Intention and Survival, lab discourse shapes the reader’s sense of the proceedings throughout: séances are “experiments” (2–11 passim) and participants are “experimenters” (14–215 passim); supernatural entities are “communicators” (1–5 passim). When the various mediums begin to exude viscous substances in much the way a camera exudes developed film, it’s overwhelmingly described as “teleplasm” rather than “ectoplasm,” with the prefix “tele-” emphasizing its role as a literal medium for communication over a distance, likely to include “simulacra” (embedded photographic images) (5–53 passim).

Teleplasm is an impossible hybrid object, a physical manifestation of the medium but also something unearthly, intended to be seen rather than touched.36 Handling it, the Hamiltons suggest, might cause the medium who exudes it to suffer “nervous shock,” which places an “ethical responsibility” on the “sincere investigator.” The potential of such a nervous shock produces a significant gap in the empiricism that guided these experimenters, where superstition trumps scientific method, because the interdiction in Intention and Survival is absolute: “It marks one of the boundaries of his experimental technique” (9).

The only person other than Hamilton who was present throughout all of the experiments was Lillian Hamilton, his wife, who “took notes occasionally and did much of the secretarial work involved in the maintenance and analysis of records” (25). In addition to Lillian Hamilton’s notes (handwritten and in subsequent typewritten transcripts), “From time to time special scrutineers and observers submitted signed reports and on several occasions each individual present made a witnessed statement which covered all the pertinent facts of the occasion” (38)—a process reminiscent of Shapin and Schaffer’s real and virtual witnessing. Other “non-psychic participants” lent their scientific, technical, and academic authority to the group: Mr. H. A. Reed, “a telephonic engineer holding a very responsible position with the provincial telephone system”; Dr. J. A. Hamilton, T. G. Hamilton’s brother; and “Miss Ada Turner, M.A., head of the English Department of one of the larger secondary schools of the city” (25).

The mediums require special mention because they are hybrids, somewhere in between being a participant and being part of the lab apparatus. Intention and Survival claims that the four mediums who worked with the group over the years—Mary M. (or Mrs. Marshall); Mercedes (Mrs. Samuel Marshall, Mary M.’s sister-in-law); Ewan (“whose name we have been requested to withhold for personal reasons, is a man of university training in one of the professions”); and Elizabeth M. (Mrs. Poole)—“did not hold any specific conscious intention towards the production of teleplasm” (26, 30, 31, 92, 26). The ambivalence of the mediums is reflected in the convention of them all having two names (a mundane name and a medium name), but Ewan was also explicitly skeptical of this own abilities: “He very consciously and actively maintained a hypercritical attitude towards his own and other trance products, professing doubt in their intrinsic value and heaping ironic derision upon many of the more bizarre effects” (30). The group refers to the entities that manifest themselves through the mediums as “controls,” imposing scientific legitimacy over cultural squeamishness.37 Likewise, the nonpsychic experimenters “controlled” the medium by inspecting their upper body, then holding their hands “in order to satisfy themselves that no substance was on or near these parts at that time and that, further, by the fact of the vigilant control which they exercised, no substance could have been placed on or near those parts by normal physical means” (37).

A specially prepared hybrid laboratory/séance room on the second floor of Hamilton’s home produced hundreds of photographs to accompany Lillian Hamilton’s notes.38 The cultural techniques the researchers employed fall somewhere between spiritualism and science: Intention and Survival notes that “singing during séances was regularly practiced. Apart from an imagined loss of dignity in scientific investigation this technique is perfectly admissible” (24). The séance room/lab’s windows were boarded over, and the room was locked between experiments and barred from the inside during séances (34). The furniture was simple, but the lab apparatus was not. It’s instructive to compare the three different extant records of this space, because the print description and the architectural “view and plan” of the séance room each leave very different impressions than the photograph of it.

The print descriptions of the setup that appear in various places, like much lab discourse, describes the equipment in passive voice to remove any sense of subjective agency—“The battery of cameras included a number using 5 x 7-inch plates; two stereoscopic cameras; one camera fitted with a wide-angle lens and another equipped with a quartz lens” (34). In the fonds there are multiple typed, numbered lists specifying camera makes, models, and capabilities. Likewise, the two-dimensional plan provides names and locations of participants (who are also part of the lab apparatus) as well as locations and descriptions of the photographic apparatus, the phonograph, the three flash devices and their trigger, ventilation, and so on (35). The plate showing “Arrangement of cameras,” on the other hand, presents a haphazard arrangement of a motley assortment of photographic devices that raises more questions than it answers (36).

The statement that “development of the plates was ordinarily done by Dr. Hamilton” raises eyebrows, as does Intention and Survival’s rhetorical question about how the participants knew where to focus the various cameras: “How did we know where to focus the cameras, and in the second place, when to release the flashlight? Astonishing as it may seem, days, weeks, and sometimes months in advance we were informed by the leading trance entity at what point the coming phenomena would in all likelihood appear” (34, 23).

The lab discourse of Intention and Survival presents all of the preceding as incontrovertible evidence that Hamilton’s production of matters of fact adhered to the most scrupulous scientific criteria. The text would have it that the sum total of research material that Hamilton and his associates produced is nothing more or less than thick description:

The internal evidence borne by the teleplasms themselves, the complexity of the group mediumship, the nature and reactions of the trance states all indicate that we are here dealing with a mass of facts so inextricably interlocked and so impossible to simulate, that to suggest fraud as an explanation is simply to show a bias against the theoretically unacceptable instead of a favor for the descriptive, empirical truth. (33)

However, Hamilton’s practice was already an atavism. As Daniel Wojcik points out, most scholarly accounts of this form of spirit photography see it as having drawn to a close by the 1930s “because of the exposés of fraudulent photographers, the overall demise in Spiritualism and materialization phenomena, an increase in photographic literacy, and the seeming banality of such images.”39 From a twenty-first-century perspective, the question is not whether the images that Hamilton and his fellow experimenters produced look quaint when compared to AI-generated deep fakes, but about how this hybrid lab generated materials and discourse that perpetuated a long-standing aspect of the lab imaginary. The assemblage of lab imaginary, space, apparatus, people, technique, and discourse at work in this case was potent enough that even long after the heyday of spirit photography, it was able to produce things that looked much like matters of fact to many of Hamilton’s contemporaries.40

Case Study: Bell Labs, A Factory for Ideas

The lab imaginary, then, has always been unevenly distributed, with some parts of it lagging behind the times and others oriented toward distant futures. In terms of the latter, consider a very different sort of a lab that was operating during the same period that Hamilton was photographing teleplasms. It’s impossible to think about mid-twentieth-century North American labs and the lab imaginary without mentioning Bell Labs, which institutionalized the media lab form at a national level and set a standard for “big media science” for decades. As Jon Gertner details in The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, traces of its vast and impressive infrastructural legacy are still omnipresent in the United States (339). Its influence on the imaginary of today’s hybrid labs also remains strong.

It’s easy to understand on a commonsense level that Bell Labs played a significant role in the development of the imaginary of networked computing. What’s eye-opening is the way the discourse of creativity was cemented into the lab imaginary at the point of its commercialization. At Bell Labs, Gertner writes, “the men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what [lab president Mervin] Kelly once called ‘an institute of creative technology.’ . . . They were paid for their imaginative abilities” (3). In line with Peter Galison and Caroline Jones’s thesis about both modern laboratory and studio taking the factory as their common model, Gertner takes science fiction writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation that while Bell’s main laboratory looked like a factory, it was “a factory for ideas,” as the title for his book indicates.41 Within the walls of Bell’s various buildings, creativity took the form of “basic research.” Much university lab research is “basic” in the sense that it is not instrumental in nature, but that surprises no one. At Bell Labs, basic research was suddenly, startlingly visible against the backdrop of applied research, “which was defined as the kind of investigation done with a specific product or goal in mind” (28–29). Successful applied research led to the development, manufacture, and widespread implementation of new products, which was the mission for the lab. In the sense that Kelly and his successors at Bell defined the term, though, “basic research” was more than research without any immediate application. It was also a set of specific policy decisions and techniques that were as romantic as they were effective because they permitted a kind of work that was, on paper, totally outside the organization’s mandate (28–29).

Gertner situates Kelly’s use of the term “basic research” in reference to lab policies that he formulated around the work behaviors of Kelly’s colleague Clinton J. Davisson (28–29). Gertner writes that Davisson “was allowed” to eschew any sort of service commitment in the form of management work or teamwork. Either on his own or as part of a small informal team, at an “unhurried” pace, he pursued “only projects that aroused his interest” with apparently little regard for the larger mission of the lab to serve the business interests of the phone company (30). Perhaps the most famous beneficiary of this basic research policy was Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory. Gertner notes that, even long after the publication of Shannon’s field-defining work, “he was categorized, still, as a scientist. But it seemed obvious that he had the temperament and sensibility of an artist” (145). Not only was Shannon allowed the rare privilege of working with his office door closed, but after 1955 he spent much of his time building toys and games and pursuing hobbies like juggling and unicycle riding (132, 319–25). In interviews, Shannon gave Bell Labs as an institution a significant amount of credit for the formation of his most famous work, but as Gertner notes, in this environment he had almost no incentive to publish in his later years (153, 321).

It’s no coincidence that Shannon’s eccentric period occurs during what we now think of as the “Mad Men” moment in U.S. popular culture. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank quotes the following excerpt from one of the various pamphlets and chapbooks by advertising executive Bill Bernbach, the “ideologue of disorder” who was one of the inspirations for Don Draper and company: “Even among the scientists, men who are regarded as worshippers of facts, the real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.”42 This idea of the formerly sober businessman or scientist as a rebellious romantic poet was eminently salable. It’s not that Bell Labs was unable to capitalize on Shannon’s later, quirkier activities. Objects like his toy mouse, Theseus, and the accompanying labyrinth that it navigated paid off in huge amounts of positive press for the lab in a way that information theory itself never produced. Even today, it continues to circulate as an object of public interest, at exhibitions like the Lab Cult show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Too often, intellectual history has been structured around the figure of the quirky male inventor, without either accounting for his privilege or allowing for the space to discuss the broader constitution of people and labs.43

Beyond the pressing questions of race, gender, sex, and class, lab denizens in general have retained the reputation for eccentricity that characterizes stories about the Bell Labs pure research employees, and the activities of many hybrid labs (particularly those that don’t make effective use of the codeswitching umbrella we touch on in the Introduction and in chapter 4) may remain bemusing to outsiders. But, returning to Gertner’s book, other, more salutary aspects of the Bell Labs imaginary have persisted in how we think about labs today. One such idea is the belief that interdisciplinary teams create better conditions for research than individuals or small specialized teams (33, 79). Another has to do with the questions of when and where we expect laboratory research to pay off—as well as for whom and on what scale. The Bell Labs imaginary had a distinct temporality to it, oriented “not only for the near term but for a future far, far away” (19). Of course, the spirit of “inventing the future” becomes the central line in the MIT Media Lab brand. At a moment when research results and “impact” are gaining greater currency by the day as a measure of intellectual efficacy, it’s good to remember that the interests of the market (even the scholarly market) in immediately tangible results don’t necessarily align with the public interest. From the time of Theodore Vail, its first president (1907), Bell Labs not only imagined its research questions in decades instead of years but merged “the idea of technological leadership with a broad civic vision” (20). Perhaps the emerging world of hybrid labs will help to restore our sense of the public good in research culture.

Lab Discourse and the Californian Ideology

As we have argued so far, the output of labs is a thick network of objects, practices, people, discourses, and fantasies that has material impact across the cultural field. Imaginaries persist on multiple levels, and one of them is how they entangle with material infrastructures. In other words, imaginaries manifest as collective representations or values, but they also affect how the world takes shape. At the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the lab imaginary continues to shift, morphing from enclosed idea factories into entire geographies of ideas, like Silicon Valley and Richard Florida’s “creative cities,” and into even larger and more dispersed networks of ideas.44 These institutions and assemblages continue to articulate versions of the technocultural imaginary that structure our everyday habits of thought and discourse.

The language of networking and connectivity is everywhere in contemporary culture, from philosophy to business manuals, and has been for some time. It’s worth considering what happened to the lab imaginary in particular when it was hybridized by an entrepreneurial media lab discourse that emphasizes networks as a structuring principle. Though this process occurred in many places more or less during the same era, California played a special role. As a result, even in the 1960s, popular discourse positioned the state itself as a kind of laboratory. For example, one of the most famous and often-repeated lines from photographer Dennis Stock’s recently republished 1968 photo book California Trip is “Our future is being determined in the lab out West.”45

Almost thirty years later, in 1995, in a prescient article titled “The Californian Ideology,” Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron delineated the current dominant version of the lab imaginary at the moment of its emergence. For Barbrook and Cameron, the Californian Ideology is the “hybrid faith” of the digital era, a potent mix of “the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” soldered together by a shared “profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.”46 It was written in an attempt to understand the “lived experience” of the fixed-term contract workers who have always comprised the tech sector’s labor pool.47 Briefly, the Californian Ideology promises that digital tech will simultaneously give everyone a shot at becoming a successful entrepreneur and dissolve the checks and balances of the state, replacing the latter with “unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software” in a barely regulated market.48 As such, even though it evokes hippie ideals of emancipation, there is a marked “rightwards drift” in the Californian Ideology, away from the ideal of the public good toward radical individualism.49 The Californian Ideology argument is sympathetic with Evgeny Morozov’s discussions about solutionism (see chapter 4) as well as David Golumbia’s argument about how “computationalism” and the core belief that “computers empower users” is enormously useful to governments, corporations, schools, and other institutions that wield power and shape individuals.50

Labs (especially media labs) play a significant role in the development and propagation of the Californian Ideology. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism provides the best account of this process. Turner argues that hippies and other members of the 1960s counterculture “imagined themselves as part of a massive, geographically distributed, generational experiment. The world was their laboratory.” With the drugs, computers, stereos, and the other new technologies and gadgets available to consumer society, the counterculture of this era believed they could act as both researchers and their own objects of study, usurping the world-saving project that the military-industrial complex had begun long before.51 Turner further argues that since the 1960s “the knowledge-based principles of production, the organizational styles, and the information technologies of the military research laboratory have in fact proliferated” precisely because of the counterculture, which stripped them of their ominous ambience and re-presented them as something like a force of nature.52

Turner’s entire book is deeply relevant to our interests here, but we want to draw particular attention to his work on the role of the MIT Radiation Laboratory because of its importance for the aspects of the lab imaginary that inspired the 1960s counterculture and fed directly into the Californian Ideology. The Rad Lab was founded in 1940 as part of the U.S. war effort, not as a single space but as “a collection of interlinked research projects housed together at MIT.” Its many engineers, mathematicians, scientists, designers, and government planners worked together on radar, navigation, and antiaircraft gun-aiming technologies. Like the basic research sections of Bell Labs, “the Rad Lab was a site of flexible, collaborative work and a distinctly nonhierarchical management style,” even though it was housed within and supported by several large bureaucracies. Turner notes that “entrepreneurship and collaboration were the norm, and independence of mind was strongly encouraged”; specialists became competent generalists, capable of designing and building as well as theorizing. Unlike the privileged basic researchers at Bell, though, Rad Lab denizens did their share of administrative and infrastructural work: even the scientists “had to become entrepreneurs, assembling networks of technologists, funders, and administrators to see their projects through.”53 Because of the power and success of this type of lab discourse, by the early twenty-first century people in many university labs had come to speak of themselves as entrepreneurs.

The University Lab after Entrepreneurship

As the lab imaginary began to absorb the Californian Ideology and related ideas, university discourse as a whole also changed. Many universities have shifted from imagining themselves as custodians of historical knowledge to being incubators for start-ups and fashioners of the entrepreneurs that fill them. That process brings with it serious implications not only for academic researchers but for the public audience for their research.

Brian Holmes argues that the entrepreneurial professor and its close companion, the university as a serious player in the business world, have their relative beginnings in the 1970s, with the development of a specific research technique, followed by a piece of legislation that formalized the policy decisions proceeding from that invention. Holmes writes that “the archaeology of the public university’s ruin” dates to 1973, when the Cohen-Boyer method of gene-splicing technique was invented at Stanford University and was subsequently privatized by the institution’s patent administrator. The combination of the invention of a primary research technique with the huge amount of money the patent netted ($300 million over seventeen years) guaranteed that university patent offices would become a significant component of research infrastructure in the decades that followed and that the amount of university research flowing directly into the public domain would begin to decrease.54 On the level of law and policy, Holmes argues that the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act functions as “something like the genetic code of the corporate university,” because it codified “the increasingly prevalent practice of patenting and commercializing publicly funded research,” making the transfer of technology between the university and industry easier than ever before.55

The corporate university is also the entrepreneurial university that links closely with industries and constantly aims to lower the threshold of collaboration with external (commercial) partners. Indeed, the prototypical nature of the New American University (the Arizona Model), as Crow describes it, emphasizes networking and connectivity as core elements in the current neoliberal innovation discourse:

Along with cutting-edge research, universities that aspire to have broad impact are marked by a very high degree of connectivity, both internal and external. Such an ecosystem of networked connectivity creates many pathways for people to move ideas from conception to reality. When all of the elements are working together, one perceives a well-rounded innovation infrastructure, and the university becomes part of a larger ecology of innovation.56

The production of both infrastructure and imaginaries of connected, co-working, collaborative, and industry-friendly staff and faculty is part of the modus operandi of this discourse. Another striking aspect of the Arizona Model’s imaginary is its vanguardism, which echoes traits we discussed in relation to the MIT Media Lab (see chapter 4). Crow and Dabars rail against “filiopietism”—a scornful neologism they coined to describe the homogeneity that they believe results from the university’s “excessive veneration of tradition.”57 Instead, they consistently position their model as the epitome of an institutional avant-garde because of its commitment to innovation.58 Many commentators over the last several decades, including Lev Manovich, have noted that this insistence on the production of difference and individuality is the way in which we are all now exactly the same.59 Manovich argues that it’s a consumer reaction that appears as a result of emerging networked forms of culture. Because the Arizona Model imagines itself in precisely this way, it’s hardly surprising that it would make such a claim.

One of the problems that faces any hybrid lab attempting to do something other than business as usual is that what used to be the model of resistance has become the very model of control. The truth of interdisciplinarity is also the dismantling of departments and disciplinary priorities. Further, the fetishization of innovation has done substantial damage to the traditional functions of the university as memory institution and producer of citizens rather than employees.

But all is not doom and gloom. Galison notes that the intense process of hybridization in the Rad Lab also produced its own lab discourses consisting of “local, shared sets of practices and terms, a ‘trading language’ aimed at solving problems in the borderland. . . . As the interdiscipline grows, the pidgin becomes a creole; that is, a language rich enough to allow someone to grow up within.”60 And, as Turner observes, just as the Rad Lab trading language helped to produce entire new fields outside its own research, like cybernetics, this book is itself part of the trading language of hybrid lab discourse in its early stages. Though we too might be infected by the Californian Ideology, we are not determined by it.61