general, recent biomed, Museion concept, displays/exhibits
The ephemeral culture of biomedicine
I think it would be worthwhile to think a little more about ephemera in a contemporary biomedical context (cf. yesterday’s post + Jessica’s and Mike’s comments to it).
The term ‘ephemera’ (n. pl. of ephêmeros = short-lived) is often used by collectors for documents that were produced for the moment and not for long shelf-life: posters, recipes, advertisements, pamphlets, postcards, stamps, labels, etc. Ephemera have always been favourite objects of collectors; e.g., in a medical history context the William H. Helfand collection of proprietary health pamphlets and his collection of pharmaceutical trade cards are famous, and have been shown in several temporary displays, e.g. the exhibition ‘Here Today, Here Tomorrow … Varieties of Medical Ephemera’ at the National Library of Medicine in 1995.
Biomedical material culture also has its durables and its ephemera. A hundred (or even just fifty) years ago, most laboratory utensils were constructed from durable materials and were made to last. One was supposed to wash them, sterilize them and use them over and over again. Our collections are filled with such durables, made of brass, glass, stainless steel, hardwood, ceramics, etc.
Today’s laboratories, on the other hand, are filled with short-lived things made of plastic to be used for the moment. Lots of disposable plastic items: cups and caps, centrifuge tubes, suction catheters, syringes, culture flasks, cover slips, urine collection bags, vials, gloves, petri dishes, etc. etc., to be used once and then thrown out. To the extent that contemporary biomedicine could be described as an ephemeral culture.
To the material ephemerality of the lab could be added a documentary ephemerality, for example in the form of web-based electronic publications instead of books and bound journal volumes. And even the laboratory itself is becoming ephemeral and disposable: whereas the traditional lab has concrete walls, floors, benches and centrifuges, lab-on-a-chip technology represents the ultimate ephemeralization of the biomedical lab space (Richard Buckminster Fuller seems to have used the term ‘ephemeralization‘ in a somewhat different sense).
So I would like to see a collection and exhibition of biomedical ephemera — not of tradecards and pamphlets, but of Eppendorf tubes and plastic tubings mixed with lab websites and felt-tip pens.
07 Dec 2007 Thomas
Ephemera certainly is an intriguing aspect of biomedicine. The term no doubt says something essential about the materials employed in the labs and clinics of today, not to mention the curatorial problems that software poses, recently discussed here on the blogg. The term is also used though to describe the psychological effect that certain objects have on our minds. Thus seen, it has more to do with the temporality of being than with the momentary quality of certain materials. A while ago, I read Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s essay Esthetique de l’éhpémère (Editions Galilée, 2003) hoping to find some suggestions as to how ephemera could be applied as an analytical tool in contemporary biomedical culture. According to Buci-Glucksmann, we live in a culture of flux and global instability rather than in one of stable objects and permanence. Todays mediascapes have yielded a new type of post-ephemeral image, what Buci-Glucksmann terms “images-flux”, that is the bits of instant presence that make up the images on our electronic screens , the digital equivalent to the plastic fugitives of the biolab, I suppose. In this regard, digital images and plastic tubes are materials that are intrinsically ephemeral. But, following Buci-Glucksmann, they’re also materials that are tied to the present in a certain sense, given the definition of the ephemeral as an intensified form of temporality that makes us sense ourselves as glimpses between “being” and “non-being”. This notion of ephemera goes of course back to cultures of Renaissance and Baroque Europe. For sure, these remarks can’t do justice to the complexity of Buci-Glucksmann’s essay. However, applied to biomedical culture, I wonder how one should think the relationship between material ephemera and temporal ephemera. Does plastic and digital ephemera really prompt notions of Tempus fugit or should we rather think this relation in other ways?
(So, blog posts are temporally ephemeral too, then?)
Otherwise I’m not sure I understand the relation between material and temporal ephemera? Adam, is this parallel to the relation between material and temporal presence?
Th