Biomedicine on Display

Martin Robbins of The Lay Scientist has posted this scathing and completely brilliant look at what most science journalism looks like. It is funny because it is true, as they say. Be sure to read the comments as well, some of them are comedy gold.

One of the mantras of museum discourse in the past decade has been that of digitalization. The future is digital, collections should be online, new digital medias define the frontiers of museum practice, and so on.

A quick glance at the Heritage Agency of Denmark’s list of supported projects in the past 10 years will confirm this state of things handedly – practically every single funded project is based on implementing new digital technology in the museums. The media is the message. The political and monetary winds have blown in the sails of the digital flagship.

But there is something philosophically backwards about this approach. It is an approach to museum practice constructed by digital immigrants, who believe that the medium itself carries some sort of intrinsic value. As Marc Prensky, who coined the digital native/digital immigrant distinction, writes:

Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants. The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past.

Many, if not most, of the digital museum-type projects seems to me to stuck in a phase of digital immigrants trying to wrap their traditional ideas around new forms of media. Sometimes such projects results in a happy marriage, but often they end up in a limbo: The digital immigrants do not use them, because their practices and interest are fundamentally tied to other forms of media, and the digital natives are not interested in them, because of their inherently flawed form and often miserably poor use of the digital media.

But there is another, more fundamental misunderstanding at work in the fascination with ‘the digital museum’: The future is not digital. Digital natives might inhabit a world in which digital media play a different role, but it is not a digital world. Philosopher and game designer Ian Bogost makes this point forcefully on his blog:

It’s not “the digital” that marks the future of the humanities, it’s what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs. The philosophy of tomorrow should not be digital democracy but a democracy of objects.

Museums have a unique position because they, literally, can display this democracy of objects. Time to lay the fetish of a digital museum to rest and get on with the business of showing the materiality of science, medicine and technology.

Engaging with objects is key to understanding knowledge production, but you wouldn’t necessarily get that impression from a lot of philosophy, cultural theory or sociology. More often that not, objects are either flatout ignored (as Bjørnar Olsen and others have argued) or seen as secondary by-products of immaterial knowledge structures.

This dismissive view on objects (which luckily is changing at a rapid pace) is, as Levi Bryant argues, perhaps also related to how philosophers and cultural theorists go about their daily business:

Philosophers are, above all, sedentary creatures. We read texts, debate, argue, yet seldom engage with materials. Where we do engage with materials– as in the case of cooking, gardening, or rock climbing –we seldom treat these activities as having philosophical significance where epistemology is concerned. This leads to a very passive discourse about representation and the giving of reasons. We think of knowledge, for example, as the ability to give reasons. Yet this largely ignores questions of how knowledge is produced. This way of thinking emerges, I think, from the privileged and sedentary lifestyle of the philosopher. When we cast about for examples of knowledge we look at a rock– just sitting there –and then ask “how do I know this rock?” Because we are sitting still and the rock is not being acted upon, we conclude that knowledge of the rock consists in being able to enumerate the properties that the rock has.

In the context of science communication, this is an absolutely vital point. We cannot stick to theories of knowledge production that removes the conclusions from experiment, the facts from the practice, or the knowledge production from the shuffling of objects and bodies in the laboratory.

Scientific knowledge production is more like cooking than thinking, and more like handling than thinking. It is only by acting upon objects that we know what their qualities are, what they can do, what sort of relations they can enter into, what sort of effects they can produce. This point is argued masterfully in this gem of an essay on materials from 1968.

Writing on a blog about the benefits of blogging might seem a bit superfluous, but here is a nice reminder of the possibilities that the social web can open.

The philosopher Levi Bryant, one of the central figures in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), recently wrote this blogpost on chance encounters and why blogging can be a vital tool in generating new spaces for new philosophical movements.

Speculative realism (SR), the new philosophical umbrella which Bryant’s work falls under, is an almost entirely internet-born phenomenon. In the post, Bryant wonders about the randomness of new connections and raises a central issue about why blogging and participating in discussions on the internet can generate new energy:

The internet, and blogosphere in particular, created a common place that allowed these strange entities of SR and OOO to become a little more real, a little more substantial, a little more existent. Through these discussions and the medium that’s allowed these discussions to take place, new lines of thought, new problematics, new questions, and new positions have emerged.

Bryant raises the very real issue that most of the time, the articles we spend most of our time writing generates almost no response at all. Only a handful of people read them and more often than not, they sink to the bottom like stones, serving little purpose aside from filling up ones CV and as statistical evidence to the administrators that something is actually being done. But blogs can help build contacts and networks in a much more immediate way. And open for new opportunities as well.

These [relationships with other researchers on the web] lead to collaborative projects, intellectual growth and enrichment, further articles, opportunities for conference presentations, and so on. Participation in electronic media increases your likelihood of being read and allows you to meet other researchers that you would never otherwise meet. All of this is a way of encouraging readers to participate, to explore ideas even when they end up going nowhere, and to avoid seeing participation here as something secondary to your academic work.

What exactly will come of these new forms of life being generated by the new media is still blurry. But taking ones ideas and research into the public domain and seeing what new connections it sparks is surely worthwhile.

The RSA – the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce – have a wonderful series of animated lectures which are worth checking out. One of them is based on the American writer Daniel Pink’s work on motivation.

The video seems to me to raise a fundamental issue in science communication, namely that the tried and true stick-and-carror-methods (if you eat too much fatty food, you’ll die) often have little effect because they employ the worst forms of motivation.

The awe-inspiringly active philosopher Graham Harman recently wrote a blog post on Thomas Metzinger’s book The Ego Tunnel, in which the author interviews neurophysiologist Wolf Singer. Metzinger asks Singer why he is interested in philosophy, to which he replies that he believes neurophysiology can solve the problems of philosophy.

This view — that the neuroscience will soon scientifically settle once and for all the questions of consciousness, culture and meaning — is surprisingly common in today’s overhyped neuro-culture and is a problem all on its own. But there is another issue in Singer’s view, which has to do with the role that he assigns to philosophy — and even to the humanities more generally — which is that of an ethics department. The argument goes that the neurosciences produce a lot of “profound ethical issues”, which will require ethical debate.

Thus, the old stomping grounds of the humanities — culture and meaning — are being overtaken by the new neuro-overlords, who claim to be able to explain these phenomena scientifically, and the tiny reservation given to the humanities is that of ethics.

But we should not so readily herd ourselves into this encampment. Observing that human phenomena have neural correlates or that our actions have evolutionary roots do nothing to place them in our lives, in the felt experience of the world. To counter this extensive neuro-reductionism, we need, I think, a new material existentialism. Philosophers and cultural theorists never should have accepted the role of primarily engaging with culture and meaning. As Harman says, we “have to get out there and deal with the stones, trees, dust, and sunlight, or we are going to end up as Wolf Singer’s ethics panel.” We have to reacquire the material world as a subject of study and reassemble our position in it.

In a museum setting, this reacquiring and reassembling is done quite literally. Employing a materialist perspective in the museum means not focusing so intently on what scientific developments might ‘mean’ or what the possible (ethical) ‘consequences’ might be. Instead, we should openly embrace materialism and show the complex relations that objects and humans, as part of the same material spectrum, enter in to — a line of thinking that is currently being outlined in a number of philosophical works, such as Jane Bennets Vibrant Matter or Graham Harman’s The Prince of Networks. The object-based practices involved in museum activity offer a unique position from which to speak about the materiality of human existential experience. And what we can see from that unique vantage point is a field that cannot and should not be reduced to a discussion of possible ethical problems arising from the ‘real’ work of neuroscientists.

The ongoing battle between university administrators and teaching staff is in the process of claiming another victim. The well-renowned Department of Philosophy at Middlesex University is being closed down, much to the dismay and disbelief of staff, students and philosophers across the world. You can read much more about the debacle here, here and here. Below is an open letter which adresses some of the issues at stake and raises more general extremely relevant questions.

Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy

Enemy of doxa, corrupter of youth, promulgator of discomfiting intuitions. That philosophy is unpalatable to the powers that be: this is not news to Socrates and his comrades.

Today it is no philosopher in particular, but philosophy itself that is ordered to drink the hemlock, sentenced to death for corrupting the capacity of what used to be called “the University” to turn greater profits. Philosophy is convicted of impiety before capital.

The present situation at Middlesex University makes the stakes excruciatingly clear. Even “excellence”—the preferred contemporary replacement for such antiquities as learning, knowledge, or thinking—is no longer enough. Even the “ranking” of a program is no matter, nor is its contribution to the reputation of the institution. Nor does it suffice that a program should sustain itself financially, or generate revenue. The operative question is simply: could more revenue be generated through its elimination? Could one, for example, restructure enrollment so as to swell Work Based Learning programs that draw lucrative funding from corporate sponsors? Could one get away with simply reallocating external grant funding already secured by the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (reportedly some £1 million through 2016) while eliminating the expense of actually running the Center? According to administrative logic, neither the international reputation of Middlesex Philosophy nor its financial solvency have any bearing upon the verdict that it makes “no measurable contribution” to the University. According to the calculus of greed and exploitation—the calculus of capital—philosophy at Middlesex, as Alex Williams rightly puts it, is worth more dead than alive.

What lessons are we to draw from this example? And what sort of a response might those lessons entail?

We might insist that philosophy is essential to the university—that only an institution which includes it answers to an acceptable vision of what the university should be. And we might then demand of wayward administrators the reversal of an “irrational” or “unethical” decision: the restoration of philosophy to its proper place at the core of any university worthy of the name. Or, on the other hand, we might find in the termination of philosophy the expression of an essential truth about the university’s role as a modern institution: to reproduce the relation between capital and labor—through the production of cultural capital when convenient, through the excision of cultural mediation when expedient.

The era of such expediency is everywhere upon us. Discussions of “The Crisis of the Humanities” proliferate at a dizzying pace. How can we proffer more compelling accounts of “what it is that we do” to administrators looking askance at abstruse investigations no longer even regarded as charming? Can we compete on a level playing field with the verifiable results of science and engineering by drawing up lists of our recent “discoveries”? Can we compete with the profit margins of private business schools embedded in public universities by insisting upon our invaluable contributions to civil society, our production of a thoughtful citizenry? How can we account for the worth of our teaching by metrics that calculate the value of programs according to higher, rather than lower, student/instructor ratios? How can we justify our existence, our form-of-life, in short, amid the unchecked reign of bureaucrats whose moral compass is neither the novel nor the Nicomachean Ethics but the consulting firm?

To its immeasurable credit, the response of Middlesex Philosophy offers an alternative to both indignant pleading and professionalized handwringing: concrete resistance.

The students, staff, and faculty at Middlesex have opted to intervene in “the crisis of the humanities” by taking a common space of thought and practice with the determination to hold it. What inspires is the escalation of their radicalism in response to administrative obstinacy. First they occupied a boardroom to protest the cancellation of a meeting, seeking a proper explanation for the closure of their program. The next day they took the entire building, demanding a reversal of the decision. Today a red and black flag flies over the barricaded Mansion House at Middlesex, and thinkers from around the UK and continental Europe are travelling to the occupied Trent Park campus to participate in an open program of art, philosophy, and politics events called Transversal Space.

This sequence is a prolegomena to any future philosophy.

We cannot rely upon the goodwill of administrators and their consulting firms to uphold the grand tradition of the Academy, nor to offer wild-life preserves for modes of critical reflection that assuredly do not serve the interests of their species. We will not secure “the future of the humanities” by the authority of the better argument nor through appeals to a higher good than goods. If the very capacity for philosophical activity is to survive, then by any means necessary we will have to make it unprofitable to destroy the time and space of resolutely unproductive thought. What Middlesex augurs is that the 21st century is a time in which the material conditions of any possible thinking will have to be constructed, expropriated, and defended by common force.

Kant’s project, at the core of critical modernity, was to banish dogmatism by accounting for the conditions of any possible understanding. But now it is not critical reflection but rather the dogmatic operations of capital that pose the question quid juris? to philosophy. To subject Kant’s critical idealism to a materialist inversion, today, is to recognize that the conditions of any possible philosophical reflection—reflection upon conditions of possible understanding, or anything else—will depend upon material powers of resistance, the construction of times, spaces, and forms of life capable of holding their own against the vacuity of philosophy’s erasure.

“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The present crisis of the relation of philosophy to capital means that philosophers will have to change the world in order to interpret it. It is not that philosophy will be obviated by the real movement of history, the coming-into-being of communism, but rather that communization is now the pre-condition of any possible philosophy.

“In the sphere of this faculty you can determine either everything or nothing,” writes Kant in the preface to the Prolegomena. From California, to Puerto Rico, to London, to Zagreb, to Greece: We Want Everything.

Nathan Brown
English
University of California, Davis

Marija Cetinić
Comparative Literature
University of Southern California

Gopal Balakrishnan
History of Consciounsess
University of California, Santa Cruz

Aaron Benanav
History
University of California, Los Angeles

Jasper Bernes
English
University of California, Berkeley

Chris Chen
English
University of California, Berkeley

Joshua Clover
English
University of California, Davis

Maya Gonzalez
History of Consciousness
University of California, Santa Cruz

Timothy Kreiner
English
University of California, Davis

Laura Martin
History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Evan Calder Williams
Literature
University of California, Santa Cruz

Anette Stenslund, our new prospective Ph.D.-student, and I attended the Conference Art and Identity, hosted by the Danish Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Among the speakers were prominent names like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Mark Johnson and Andrew Bowie – quite a line-up for a Danish conference.

All in all, it was a great experience with both stimulating lectures and interesting discussions. There was a general consensus amongst the speakers about the need for embracing aesthetics, embodiment, presence and the non-reductive nature of experience as the starting points for a new philosophy of subjectivity.

Personally, I am in complete agreement with this approach (as evidenced by my dissertation). The cynic in me, however, could not help feeling that general agreement (at the conference and in the humanities in general) about embodiment as the foundational aspects of a new philosophy of subjectivity made it seem like the interest in embodiment had somehow jumped the shark. Perhaps aesthetics is a more fruitful way of approaching a new philosophy of experience, particularly in a museum setting like ours.

Anyway, rather than attempting to summarize the talks, I will just post some one-liners from my notes on the talks, on the topics of aesthetics and meaning.

On aesthetics:

• Aesthetics is becoming aware of the sensuous reality of everyday experience

• Aesthetics is overcoming the pragmatic nature of the everyday

• The felt sense of the world is foundational, not epiphenomenal to consciousness

• Abstraction is run on the machinery of perception

• We do not yet have an adequate language or resources for explaining the role of aesthetics in meaning

• Aesthetics is human meaning that goes beneath language into the depths of our engagement with the world

• Aesthetics is founded on the opacity of ourselves to our self

• The problem of aesthetics is the problem of subjectivity

On meaning:

• We are in the death throes of the modern dream of objectivity and the last gasps of the ontological intertwining of meaning and consciousness/language

• Meaning emerges from structures, qualities and the felt direction of embodied experience

• Meaning is tied to sensory-motor processes that have structure and emotional valence

• Abstract concepts are metaphorical extensions of sensory-moslund, our tor processes

• The deepest insight is non-conceptual

I just finished an application for a 2-year postdoc position with The Danish Council for Independent Research, entitled ‘Materializing life – protein science and philosophy in the post-genomic age’. The project aims to combine studies of protein research with recent philosophical thinking on materiality, and should hopefully be a way of developing some of the ideas that motivated this blog alongside my philosophical interests. Here is an abstract:

Postgenomic molecular biology seems to be moving into a new phase, one in which protein research features prominently. This project will engage with this fundamental shift in the life sciences which has been gaining momentum since the start of the new millennium, and which will likely come to change the frontiers of biomedicine for the foreseeable future. Through the efforts of protein researchers, life itself is becoming increasingly materialized, and these new developments have important consequences for how we understand the natural world and what it means to be human. By integrating current philosophical debates about the nature of materiality and the structure of the world around us with the changes in the post-genomic life sciences, the project aims to expand and contextualize the meanings and importance of the new knowledge gained about the proteome and protein interaction. These developments have, as it will be argued, strong parallels within philosophy and the humanities more generally, where new theoretical formations seize upon materiality and substance, abandoning a previous paradigm centred on language, codes, symbols and information. Understanding the world of proteins means making sense of them as physically and spatially located structures – it is this materialization of life itself that the project will engage with. Through a fully interdisciplinary approach, it will examine how the change from an informational to a substantive, morphological biomedicine will impact our ideas about life itself.

Another object-oriented conference is coming up, this one organised by CRESC (Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) at the University of Manchester. The list of speakers looks very promising (I’d particularly like to hear Graham Harman, as his work on object-philosophy is extremely intriguing). Here is an excerpt from the conference description:

As contemporary social theorists continue to signal the need to reconfigure our deliberations on the social through attention to practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the affective dimensions of human sociality, this conference takes as its focus the objects and values which find themselves at centre stage. And we ask, in the context of nearly two decades of diverse disciplinary approaches to these issues, what matters about objects? How are they inflecting our understandings of technology, of expertise, and of social change? How has a focus on objects reconfigured our understandings of how values inflect the ways in which people make relations, create social worlds, and construct conceptual categories? How have objects become integral to human enthusiasms and energies, to transformational ambition, or to the transmission of values across time and space? How do objects move between ordinary and extraordinary states, shade in and out of significance, manifest instability and uncertainty? How do moral and material values attach to objects as they move in space and time? What dimensions do they inhabit and/or reveal?

More details can be found here.

Thomas wrote a post yesterday on medical board games, which got me reminiscing about medical computer games. There is a long history of medical computer games, particularly within the simulation genre. Most noteworthy is the now extinct Bullfrog Productions’ wickedly funny Theme Hospital, which was published in 1997 by Electronic Arts. The game is a darkly humorous simulation, in which the player has to build a hospital, manage staff and attract patients. A similar game is the recently published Hospital Tycoon, published in 2007 by Codemasters.

Another sub-genre of medical games emerged from Japan with the succes of Trauma Centre: Under the Knife, released for the Nintendo DS in 2005. The game is a roleplaying game set in 2018, and features the struggle against a man-made disease called GUILT (Gangliated Utrophin Immuno Latency Toxin), which is distributed by a terrorist organization. The protagonist is a young surgeon, who learns he is a descendant of Asclepius, no less. The gameplay consists of a series of increasingly difficult operations (you can see what the gameplay looks like here), which the player has to complete to advance the story. The game has since spawned a number of follow-ups and clones.

Another series of games that deserve a special mention is the Life and Death-series, which dates back to the early years of DOS-gaming. Check out what a digitalised interactive brain surgery looked like in 1990 here.

There are a number of other medical games, but my personal favorite medically themed game (well, sort of medically themed) is the fantastic Psychonauts from 2005, in which the player has to delve into the psyches of a group of kids to stop a villain from tampering with their minds. A truly original and brilliant game, by any standards.

I have no doubt that we will see more medically themed games in the future, and particularly games along the lines of the protein-folding game Foldit (which has been mentioned on this blog before). Everyone, including scientists, are increasingly realising the co-creative potential of the participatory web, and there will no doubt be a rush to explore this potential.

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).