Biomedicine on Display

As Science Daily reports, researcher from the University of Washington have developed a computer game that turns protein folding into a competitive sport. The free game is called Foldit, and will, perhaps, one day lead to the first Nobel Prize won by a gamer.

The game targets a huge problem for protein research, namely the vast number of possible protein combinations. Even with all the collected computer power on the planet at the moment, it would take several centuries to work through all the protein combinations and shapes of the 100.000 proteins in the body, so the idea behind the game is that the players can develop an intution for how proteins connect and use it to target specific medical problems.

Involving the general public in a project like this instead of leaving it to trained researchers is because a lot of what goes into protein folding has nothing to do with scientific knowledge, but is rather based on an intuition for shapes. One of the protein researchers behind the game admits thats his 13-year old son is faster at folding proteins than he is, and the developers hope to discover people with a natural knack for ’seeing’ protein shapes through the game.

This game a startling example both of how scientific practices are changing, and how protein research requires a unique set of skills that have to do with intuition, spatial awareness and a sense of physical shapes.

Yesterday, Camilla posted an excellent review of the recently opened “BODIES – the exhibition” (Edit: it is in fact “Bodies revealed” that is currently on display in Tivoli). I was lucky enough to see it as well, and I agree whole-heartedly with Camilla’s opinion of the exhibition. Like her, I was struck by how lacklustre the exhibition seemed compared to Body Worlds/Körperwelten, and it made me want to reiterate some points I made in an essay on Body Worlds some years ago (”Nocsce te ipsum - “Körperwelten” og den guddommelige krop”, Passepartout 18, Institut for Kunsthistorie, Århus Universitet, 2001).

In the essay, I pointed to the fact that Body Worlds draws much of its strength from its alignment with the anatomical tradition from the Renaissance. Without delving deeper into the argument, I argued that Body Worlds and the anatomical tradition from the Renaissance intersect at the point where anatomy becomes a form of knowledge of self, as part of the dicta of Nosce te ipsum – know thyself.

It touches upon the fact that knowledge of oneself and the world more generally isn’t just a matter of facts and logic, just as science isn’t only a matter of adding yet another millimetre to the yard stick of our accumulated knowledge. It is a matter of existential concern as well, a matter care for the world, ourselves and the people around us. Body Worlds is in a sense a way of wresting anatomical knowledge out of the clinical hands of modern science, as well as those who would tell us what to make of it, and instead show it in all its materiality as an existential mirror: this is you, too. Make of it what you will.

Body Worlds follows the Renaissance tradition in that it attempts to transcend the boundaries between experience and representation, between sensing and sense-making, between our knowledge of the world and our concern for ourselves – it perceives of its subject matter as inherently relevant for both sides of the dichotomies, and thus shifts the balance between experience and education.

The experience is the education, but what you learn is not written down in a curriculum. It is not a set of facts that needs to be processed (digested, perhaps), nor is the content of the experience fixed: it will mean something more or less different to the spectators, due to the mirroring nature of the bodies on display. What you learn is what you experience from standing face to face/body to body with the materiality of corporeal existence, literally stripped to the bone.

And because the exhibition refrains from a heavy-handed sort of pedagogic didactic, the viewer is left on her own to sense and make sense in whatever way their existential concerns brings them. There is no requirement to interpret the bodies on display from a fixed or correct ‘scientific’ viewpoint, and instead the fascination of the fleshy vehicle is given freer reins. Displaying the dead body, animated to life and not boxed away in pedagogic representations, awakens the existential sense of self. It opens for the possibility of an existentially relevant experience of a bodily character. Those sort of experiences are few and far between – and I found none of them in BODIES – the exhibition Bodies Revealed.

No, they obviously don’t. Their very not-doing-so is part of what makes them, well, things. But why, then, is parts of academia currently obsessed with a vocabulary that suggests they do all three things? Thomas suggested somewhat tongue-in-cheek on this blog that perhaps it has to do with a revival of fetishism. I’d like to venture another explanation.

Terry Eagleton noted some years ago with his usual acerbic wit that the theoretical interest in the body during 1980s and 1990s were a way of ‘having ones deconstructive cake and eating it too.’ They both let the student wriggle under the physical effects of reading about sex, death and medicine, while simultaneously explaining such effects away into the mists of discourse. Using the ’things that talk’-terminology has, I believe, to do with having ones consciousness and language-centred cake and eating too.

Letting the things become actors and intentionalities allow for the maintaining of a variety of scholarly tools and languages, while still appearing to do something new. Thus, rather than exploring the presence and effects of things as things, they are turned into something which we, as academics, can relate to immediately through our training, our languages and our perspectives on the world.

To me, it seems parallel to what happened with the body in a lot of recent body theory (which I have written about elsewhere) – the work of Judith Butler springs to mind as an example – in which the problem of the body and materiality is raised specifically, but then it is subsequently, through philosophical tinkering, made into a subset of problems about language and consciousness. Thus, materiality is seemingly both explained and explained away, and analytical business continues as usual.

I was struck by this parallel to the recent ‘things that talk’-terminology when I read Lorraine Daston otherwise elegant essay ‘The Glass Flowers’ in the anthology Things That Talk. She uses 29 pages of her 31 page essay to describe in wonderful detail the historical and scientific layers of meaning surrounding a collection of glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. And then on the last two pages she wonders if not the appearance of the things themselves might also have something to do with people’s attraction and attachment to them – “They have in common with other hallowed things a kind of real presence,” as she writes.

This seems to me to be a most unevenly distribution of historical analysis and explanatory potential. Might it not in fact be the case that the objects themselves, because of their shape, size, colour, their materials, the craftsmanship and the effects they have on us as they appear, are equally, if not more, important in explaining their existence and importance in the history of science?

By claiming that things talk scholars today can maintain a certain set of institutionally and traditionally enshrined ideas, while seemingly engaging with a new agenda. It is business as usual on a new subject matter, which still holds out the promise of being something different.

The question, really, boils down to what sort of history-writing we consider to be important. What kind of history would we get if we took the appearance and presence the glass flowers have as an analytical starting point, rather than an anecdotal endpoint? We’re pretty good with conscious actors, but rather less so with material presences, so where would such an emphasis lead us?

Personally, I think an emphasis on things (or bodies) should raise new questions, rather than asking old questions of new subject matters. It seems as if something is changing and we’re trying to appropriate it into something more familiar. But then again, that is part of the change itself, I suppose.

In a recent special issue of Archaeological Dialogues anthropologist Tim Ingold raises some very interesting issues about the recent theoretical emphasis on materiality. He takes as a starting point for his essay “Materials against materiality” the paradox that the ever-growing literature on materiality and material culture rarely has anything to say about materials, i.e. about the actual components of the material world. In fact, he notes that most materiality studies are more concerned with the ruminations of philosophers and theorists than they are with the tangible stuffs that craftsmen work with. He recounts with dismay a conference session on materiality, which were, as he writes:

Overflowing with references to the works of currently fashionable social and cultural theorists, and expounded in a language of grotesque impenetrability on the relations between materiality and a host of other, similarly unfathomable qualities, including agency, intentionality, functionality, sociality, spatiality, semiosis, spirituality and embodiment. Not one of the presenters, however, was able to say what materiality actually means, nor did any of them even mention materials or their properties.

Ingold touches on a sore point in materiality studies (I’m terrible guilty of this myself, having written an entire phd-thesis on theories of embodiment). Have vague, important-sounding, ill-defined concepts like materiality or embodiment become a real obstacle to inquiry into the world around us and our relationship to it? What are the historiographical developments that have led academia to focus on the material world in this particular round-about (or even upside-down) way?

Ingolds essay is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in materiality studies. Just remember to find a largish stone and have a pail of water ready before you start (Ingold has some unusual instructions for the reader).