Biomedicine on Display

Two weeks ago, I attended a one-day conference in Copenhagen entitled ”The City is the Machine: Sociological and Architectural Perspectives on Spaces of the City, Materiality and Sociality” (orig.: “Byen er maskinen: Sociologiske og arkitektoniske perspektiver på byens rum, materialitet og socialitet”).

The panel of speakers comprised two architects, a literary theorist and three sociologists, and unfortunately the debate didn’t succeed in escaping the foreseeable cliché-ridden divisions of scholarly disciplines. In his first sentence, an architect claimed he had never read a book in his life; it was followed by the small correction: “well, I’ve read one book in my life and that’s it”. It might have been an attempt at a joke (I think it was), yet an unproductive differentiation between ‘the practitioner’ (supposed to be the architect) and ‘the theorist’ (the social scientist) was settled. Personally, I do not see a point in making this division. It only makes it more difficult to reach a point where the interdisciplinary discussion can flourish.

The architects were speaking of the historical development of the city, how the size of the population has changed over time and how awareness of human life and architecture has been brought together during the last couple of decades.

The relationship between human life-world on the one hand and architecture on the other was in fact presented as yet another dichotomy which has been happily united and therefore has disappeared during the last decades. In fact this unification of materiality and life aspects was presented as a love story — thereby making a somewhat needless distinction between humans and the city; between life and matter. As I discussed with one of my colleagues: What will happen if we refrain from accepting such divisions?

The sociologists were speaking of experiences of public and private spheres, objects functioning as rites de passage, zones, in-between spaces, unfamiliarity and familiarity, density, diversity and liveability. Anni Greve from Roskilde University seemed to be engaged in an interesting research project on sanctuaries in Japan.

I was surprised by the most unsurprising speech: A textual reading of the city presented by Lilian Munk Rösing. I owe Munk Rösing my deepest respect in many fields – especially her dealing with literature, film, art and theatre. She’s a brilliant book reviewer, but maybe she should stick to literary debates? I was surprised by her interpretation (over-interpretation I might add) of the Copenhagen department store Magasin du Nord and the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen as representing the mother’s womb (the uterus) and a fling of the lacanian Real (a circumcision), respectively. I had and I still have to laugh when recalling Munk Rösings speech. Truly speaking I found the story entertaining, but it’s difficult to imagine that anybody could believe in such a traditional psychoanalytic reading of the city. I’m not sure if Rösing does (she might), but wouldn’t it be a simplistic world, if every phenomenon were causatively explainable just like that? If the world was simple and understandable, we wouldn’t keep striving for a still more accurate comprehension of what’s happening in our surroundings, would we?

”The fountain is placed on the street – not in the bedroom”. So the response from Henning Bech on Munk Rösings talk. Nothing more was said about that theme afterwards.

The final remarks were devoted to the problematization of the tendency within sociological research to follow and replicate all sorts of Grand Theory — the consequence being either to politicize the city or to explain the city and peoples’ behavior in lines of innate desires and the like.

Pointing at the immanent aesthetics found in the city, Bech described the city as the sexuality par excellence. Not in the sense of a pre-shaped sexuality like the libido, which Munk-Rösing discussed, but far more like a sexuality which is created and recreated by specific spaces and places in an ongoing process. This kind of sexuality has to do with sense perceptions, moods, atmospheres, lighting, distances etc. In the city, people aesthetisize with and (in particular) for each other. People play aesthetic tricks and games with their gender, race, age and so forth. In the search of these aspects of life, the ‘world’-term used by the late Heidegger was suggested as a source of inspiration.

For me there seems to be an analytical point in heading out on a phenomenological road. It seems to offer a sensitive approach to the presence of the world. Here no analytics are prescribed and no universals are to follow. The challenging task is to get closer to the lived life – life consisting of humans, materials and all the like. Everything is existing in one big mess. In one occurance which is to be experienced in all its differences, shapes, qualities and sensous materialities.

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize!

Just over 15 years ago, Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg spearheaded Dogme 95, a manifesto to purify the art of film-making.

The aim was to engage audiences more profoundly and make sure they weren’t distracted by over-production. The Dogme manifesto ruled out special effects, post-production changes and other tricks in order to focus on the story and the performances.

Since then, writers, theatre directors and other arts practitioners have all found inspiration in Dogme 95’s back-to-basics philosophy. Dogme has been criticised, as have some of the films made according to its rules, but as exhibition producers, this classic vow of chastity has inspired us as a way of guiding and sharpening the creative practice of making science, technology and medicine exhibitions.

These rules have been written and published with almost indecent speed. They are deliberately provocative prompts for further discussion. This manifesto is not a definitive set of working proposals, but a draft, which will no doubt be modified and sharpened through challenge and feedback.

And anyone who knows the institutions we are based at will be aware that the exhibitions we have presided over have often not followed one or more of these rules.

This manifesto is almost reference-free, but this does not mean we think the ideas are purely our own. There are vast bodies of literature on science communication, exhibition making, art history and museology; we have read some of this literature and been influenced by it. We also have learned much from the museums we have visited.

1. Exhibitions should be research-led, not a form of dissemination

Curators should use exhibitions to find things out (for themselves and for their visitors) and not just regurgitate what is already known. Good curators are inspired and imaginative researchers who find and then build on the investigations of experts and colleagues, juxtaposing varied understandings about their chosen topic. They add their own insights and gradually come up with new ideas and perspectives.

2. A scientist should always be involved in the exhibition, a technologist if it is about technology

Don’t shy away from drawing on real expertise in interpreting a topic or finding exhibits. But this is not to say that the aim of the exhibition is simply to give voice to the views of these experts. They are not, nor should they be encouraged to see themselves as, the curators, but it is vital that their perspectives are present in the final exhibition.

3. Be clear about exhibitions being “multi-authored”

Exhibitions emerge from curatorial collaborations between experts and designers. But a show’s funders, the institutional context and other stakeholders have a bearing on the final outcome; it should be possible for exhibition visitors to find out about these influences.

The project teams who make exhibitions deserve to be credited. Those responsible for the show not only need to take a bow, they also need to be held responsible for its contents and impact.

4. Use only original material

Exhibitions should engage audiences with original material rather than reproductions and props. If you cannot illustrate a topic with original artefacts, images and documents, ask yourself if an exhibition is the best way to make the point. Models, replicas and reproductions can be shown, but only if this is the point of showing them.

Reproductions of artworks should not be used, unless the work’s natural medium is “facsimile” – for example, digital photographs. The use of scientific and medical images raises complicated questions, such as what is the “original” format of a microscopic image of a cell?

Most scientific images today are minted as digital data, and their final appearance invariably owes much to enhancements and cropping. How this material should be displayed and labelled needs consideration. It is often better to leave it out all together.

5. Never show ready-made science

Focus on the processes of science: science in the making; the triumph of discovery; the frustration and blind alleys explored along the way. Also, look at the social and cultural processes of scientific ideas becoming accepted and embedded.

6. Jealously guard a place for mystery and wonder

Exhibitions provide opportunities to explore topics in ways that bring new light to sometimes forgotten or less-well understood aspects of medicine, science, technology and their histories. But this urge to demystify subjects should not be allowed to render exhibitions earnestly didactic.

Deliberately include some exhibits about which less, rather than more, is known – curious exhibits that just cannot completely be accounted for. Visitors should leave exhibitions wanting to find out more.

7. Reject most exhibition ideas

Exhibitions represent the meeting point between subjects and material culture, and can be approached from either end – themes or objects first, or a mixture of the two. But often, topics that seem promising will not be worth developing because there simply aren’t good enough objects with which to explore or support them.

Similarly, many areas of material culture end up just not being interesting enough to make a show about. Too often, exhibitions are made from empty ideas of stupid objects. It is worth searching for a topic and a set of objects that harmoniously amplify and mutually enrich each other.

8. Leave out as much as possible

Less is usually more in exhibitions. Visitors will remember and enjoy looking at 10 carefully chosen things more than a 100 that are reasonably well selected.

The most important aspect of an exhibition is its outer boundaries, which keep out the mass of distractions that lie beyond. In the digital era, a core value of a museum exhibition is that it makes its point through displaying a few selected original objects.

9. Embrace the showbusiness of exhibitions

Audiences come to exhibitions in their leisure time and deserve to be lifted out of themselves. They will respond to the drama of the best exhibits, displays, design, writing and lighting.

Make sure that all of this is done well and given the greatest polish. This will enhance the presence of the objects and the impact of the ideas. Don’t be ashamed to admit that making exhibitions is, in part, a matter of putting on a show.

10. Celebrate the ephemeral quality of exhibitions

Catalogues, web-presence and filmed versions of exhibitions can lengthen the shadows cast by exhibitions, but they will never come close to keeping alive the actual experience of visiting a show.

This is an important part of the magic of exhibitions. Like good pieces of theatre, they gain much of their energy by being around for a limited time and then disappearing. The fact that they are time-limited gives their makers a degree of freedom to experiment and be daring. Grasp it!

11. Make exhibitions true to the geography of their venues

The principle is that knowledge is “situated” – the context in which we contemplate and acquire it can seem as important as the ideas or facts themselves. Exhibition makers need to think hard about how to work with the “place” of an exhibition.

Consider what is lost in touring an exhibition where the subject becomes detached from the local context. The country, the city, the venue, the room, and the set and design of an exhibition, even the showcases and the orientation of individual objects – all have a bearing on the meanings that audiences derive from them.

12. Avoid artificial lighting

Use natural light where possible. Start with the light available and build up from it. If possible, reveal the windows and keep the doors open. Let the natural layout of the building be apparent, make it clear where you have introduced false walls. This will enable visitors to keep a sense of where they are.

And don’t fall into the trap of imagining that the background for an exhibition has either to be a neutral black box or a pristine white cube. Ideally, a show should look and feel very different on a midsummer morning to a winter evening.

13. Always involve more than one sense

It is impossible for visitors to turn off their non-visual senses in an exhibition – they will hear, touch and smell things no matter what. So make sure that some of the tactile, audio, or olfactory experiences of an exhibition are curated. Exhibitions work by teasing their visitors into thinking that they could get close enough to what they see to touch it, even while making sure they don’t.

But curators should think about how to introduce at least a few objects that visitors can touch. Never use artificial sounds or odours, but try hard to find ways to enhance the audio and olfactory qualities of the original objects, getting visitors to use their ears and noses.

14. Make exhibitions for inquisitive adults

If you aim at educationally under-achieving primary school children, it will be impossible to engage anyone else (and you are unlikely to engage even your target audience). Many children and teenagers are keenly attracted to adult culture, but very few adults see the attraction of young material.

Never make exhibitions for educational purposes – other media and methods are more effective. It’s also worth bearing in mind that exhibitions are, by their nature, a “childish” medium, bringing out playfulness in all of us. This should be encouraged, but to focus deliberately on young audiences reaps diminishing returns.

15. Remember that visitors ultimately make their own exhibitions

Some visitors might not be interested in reading what the curators write, while others might not look at many objects. Some will be interested in aspects of a topic that the curators might not have come across.

Because of this, when an exhibition opens, it is only ever the second or third draft of an idea that will, through revision, reach maybe its eighth or ninth incarnation by the time it closes.

Exhibitions should be alive, and change is a vital part of life. Even in the most “stable” shows, lights will need adjusting and labels redrafting. An exhibit might even have to be removed or replaced. More radically, some exhibitions should be deliberately half-finished, or set up so that updates can be added halfway through.

16. Make exhibitions the jumping off place for further engagement

Good exhibitions are the point of departure for a longer relationship. The value of exhibitions should only partly be judged by analysing how many people come, how long they spent in a show and what they think of it. On this basis alone, most exhibitions are foolishly expensive ventures, particularly in these cash-strapped times.

Don’t forget that, just occasionally, exhibitions can really change visitors’ lives and this is worth a lot. Effective exhibitions can also bring in new objects to museums, have an impact on recruitment, add to shop sales, improve the organisation’s reputation, and provide a context for corporate celebrations. There is a virtual avalanche of cultural capital that can flow from them: this should be valued from the start.

17. Don’t be afraid to bend, break or reinvent the rules

Our own Jan Eric Olsén has received 3.2 mill DKK (about 400.000 euro) from the Velux Foundation for a research project on the history of blindness, titled “Vision and touch: a material history of the world of blindness”.

Drawing on archival sources from the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired, as well as the big ophthalmological and blind-historical collections in Medical Museion, the project will explore the medical and cultural tension between vision and blindness:

The material objects used by the blind and by emphasising the importance of the sense of touch, the project will provide an alternative viewpoint to earlier historical accounts of blindness and its complex relation to vision. By shifting focus from the iconography of blindness to the material objects used by the blind and by emphasising the importance of the sense of touch, the project will provide an alternative view-point to earlier historical accounts of blindness and its complex relation to vision.

The increased digitalisation of science and technology is problematic for museums as institutions for the preservation of the material cultural heritage.

The reasons is that we usually think of digital information as something ‘immaterial’, a mere collection of zeros and ones that —as Jean-François Blanchette (Dept. of Information Studies, UCLA) points out—are considered “wholly independent from the particular media on which it resides (hard drive, network wires, optical disk, etc.) and the particular signal carrier which encode bits (magnetic polarities, voltages, or pulses of light)”.

But, suggests Blanchette, “however immaterial it might appear, information cannot exist outside of given instantiations in material forms”. Building on, among others, Philiip Agre’s Computation and human experience (1997), Blanchette discusses the material foundation of digital information:

It suggests that various factors, including the trope of immateriality, have obscured the physical constraints that obtain on the storage, circulation, and processing of digital information, resulting in inadequate theorization of this fundamental dimension of information systems. In fact, computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of materiality, and the computing professions devote much of their activity to the management of these constraints, as manifested in infrastructure software.

In Blanchette’s analysis computing is material through and through:

But this materiality is diffuse, parceled out and distributed throughout the entire computing ecosystem. It is always in subtle flux, structured by the persistence of modular decomposition, yet pressured to evolve as new materials emerge, requiring new trade-offs. This project thus argues that, in a very literal and fundamental sense, materiality is a key entry point for reading infrastructural change, for identifying opportunities for innovation that leverage such change, and for acquiring a deep understanding of the possibilities and constraints of computing. This understanding is not particularly provided by exposure to programming languages. Rather, it requires familiarity with the conflicts and compromises of standardization, with the principles of modularity and layering, and with a material history of computing that largely remains to be written.

In other words, this is food for thought for those of us who are interested in the materiality of contemporary computational biomedicine. Read the whole paper (submitted to the Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology) here.

(thanks to Haidy L. Geismar for the tip)

The implication of the theme — ‘Contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums’ — for this year’s biannual EAMHMS conference in Copenhagen last month is that it is difficult to exhibit the molecular level of the recent medical understanding of the body. How can we display such molecular and other tiny structures? And what metaphors and discourses do we use to describe a molecular understanding of the body?

The session “The molecular in the museum” discussed this problem. Jim Garretts, senior curator at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, suggested in his presentation that we work more closely together with researchers and research institutions, so as to allow the visitors to get an insight into practical medical science today. That way our abstract idea of things like the molecular is transformed into a more practice-based understanding of how the molecule functions in the body. Read Jim’s full abstract here.

After Jim’s presentation our own postdoc Adam Bencard put the idea of the molecular body into a larger philosophical perspective. He argued that there is a change in our understanding of the body, from a focus on genomics and the idea of life as text, towards proteomics and a focus on the materiality of being. This shift is interesting and profiting for museums because it puts the materiality of our exhibition objects, and the physical engagement with medical science that we provide, into focus. Read Adam’s full abstract here.

After these two presentations followed a lively discussion with contributions from, among others, John Durant, Danny Birchall, Suzanne Anker, Morten Skydsgaard, and Thomas Schnalke.

(Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here).

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on our relationship with plastics in a hospital context, and would like to have Medical Museion as one of their research partners.

Ion showed us plastic dentures from the 1860s, a very realistic plastic arm with painted finger nails, and colourful plastic leg pads for children. Even though museums in general look down on plastics as an inauthentic material, we actually found a lot of objects in the collections, which partly or totally consist of some sort of plastic. The two plastic-lovers enjoyed the tour, even though Susan was a bit frustrated because of not being able to touch the displayed objects. The wonderful thing about plastics is that it can look exactly like any other material. But as Susan put it;”Once you touch, you know”.

Plastics are discount: Plastic is also an interesting material because it is highly used, but not very highly thought of. Unconsciously a lot of people today think of plastics as a discount material, as the fast, cheap unnatural solution. The wide range of functions that makes plastics so usable is the same feature that alienates it from us. One can make anything out of plastic, which means that plastic in itself is invisible and without identity. Plastic is, what it is made into. Alone it is formless, it is nothing. It is hard to develop a relationship to an thing made out of plastics, when one knows that there are a million plastic objects out there exactly like it.

Plastics are clean:  already from the mid 19th century the first synthetic materials began to appear and in the beginning of the 20^th century, Bakelite (phenol formaldehyde), which was used for electric apparatus like telephones and plugs, was invented. It was not until the 1960s that plastics became the most common material to use in almost all areas of human life. Susan and Marcia are focusing on plastics in a hospital context, because in hospitals one will find both plastic object of everyday use and highly specialized hospital objects in the same material. At the same time the many single use objects exemplifies the good aspects of plastic products, like good hygiene, and environmentally bad aspects like waste problems.

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.

I guess this quote encapsulates the notion of a current ‘material turn’:

There is the feeling that this is the moment in which understanding material culture, something central to humanity, its past and future, is being achieved at a level beyond anything that had previously been imagined

Says Daniel Miller in his blurb to the Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry and forthcoming on Oxford University Press in September. See the list of contents here.

The prepublished introduction, “Material Culture Studies: a reactionary view” gives an indication of the range of disciplinary backgrounds and topics treated. They call their approach ’reactionary´, because they are ”unpicking the culturalist uses of materials that developed during the 1980s and 1990s”; they want to present an alternative to “pure culturalism” and let things in again.

Accordingly the editors have invited contributors from four different diciplinary perspectives upon material things: archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies (STS), giving “a snapshot of the wide range of approaches to material things that emerge from putting distinctive methods into practice, and working within particular traditions of practice and enquiry”.

Yet they hesitate to call this edited volume a contribution to “a material turn that would replace the anthropocentric linguistic or cultural turn of the 1980s”. It is, they suggest, in the transdisciplinary reception of actor network theory “that the strongest possible model for what a ‘material turn’ would look like is developing”. However, such a material turn “would simply extend, through a rhetorical inversion, the cultural turn of the 1980s”.

Good point! In other words, they don’t find ”a new series of ‘turns’: turn upon turn” attractive, it would just “add up only to academic spin” (I couldn’t agree more).

None of the contributors seem to address the problems of materiality in science, technology and medical museums (let alone museums in general) directly. Nevertheless, I will expect this volume, in spite of being so heftily priced, to become obligatory reading for science, technology and medical museum scholars.

Let’s get back to the topic when it has been published.

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.

Instead of saying that we investigate an object, we often use the verb ‘inspect’. According to my dictionary, the ‘in-’ prefix is an intensifier and the ‘-spect’ suffix is derived from the Latin verb specere, meaning ‘to look at’, ‘to see’.

To ‘inspect’ then is more than just seeing or looking at something. It means to look intensely, carefully and closely.

This is of course what museum curators do all the time when they get new objects into the collections. They look carefully at the objects and often document the inspection by means of photography (or drawing or painting).

But sometimes curators investigate objects through other senses than vision. For example, they may touch and smell the objects, sometimes deliberately, or at least accidentally in the course of looking at it. They may even taste it.

In these cases, the verb ‘inspect’ is obviously insufficient, even misleading. For example, when I handle or finger an object to investigate its texture, its temperature, its dry-/wetness and its soft-/hardness, I obviously don’t ‘inspect’ it. I may do so in parallel with the handling and fingering, but the primary activity (handling, fingering) is not covered by the verb ‘inspect’.

Speaking in terms of ‘inspection’ when one listens, touches, smells or tastes an object intensely and carefully is an instance of what is sometimes called the ‘hegemony of the visual’. The unique experience of other senses are reduced to that of vision.

What verbs can be used for listening, touch, smell or taste objects intensely?

My dictionary doesn’t have any intensified synonyms of any of these sensory activites. One has to use phrases like ‘intense smelling’, ‘attentive listening’, ‘intensive touching’.

‘Intense touching’ has unintended erotic rather than curatorial connotations. So what about ‘inhapt’ (from Greek hapto, I grasp; cf. haptics) as a straightly curatorial term?

‘Inhapt’ isn’t in the OED and is also a clumsy combination of Latin and Greek. But it’s new and sounds nice: “I’m going to inhapt the new collection of plastic syringes today”.

As this blog, among others, have claimed for some time, a ‘material turn’ is currently being added to the seemingly never-ending row of ’turns’ in the humanities and social sciences. An increasing number of scholars are switching their attention to materiality, material objects and material artefacts.

History, philosophy and social studies of science and technology are no exceptions. Forty years ago, the classic interest in the theoretical and conceptual development of science and technology was supplemented by studies of changing social practices; twenty years ago, studies of visualisation and images in science and technology came to the forefront; now, intellectual interest is increasingly invested in material objects.

If the notion of a ‘material turn’ in the history, philosophy and social studies of science and technology is supposed to be more than a superficial terminological redressing, however, it needs to take the material properties of objects ‘as such’ seriously. This is in fact more radical than it sounds. Because much of what has so far been understood as studies of material objects in science and technology has been by proxy only, i.e., textual description of objects or images of objects or, even worse, textual descriptions of images of objects.

Rarely, however, have the physical objects themselves been put into the center of immediate scholarly attention; furthermore, the emerging ubiquity of digitalised texts and images has added to the tendency of an ever-increasing de-centering material objects ‘as such’; it is only museum curators that have insisted on the direct handling and investigation of scientific and technological objects, unmediated by digital textualisation and visualisation.

Sherry Turkle is one of those scholars who does not want to reduce material objects to what is googlifiable. In a series of three small books, published on MIT Press (Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008), and The Inner History of Devices (2008), Turkle summarises decades of interest in her own and others’ emotional fascination with and attachment to objects (a fourth volume has been published as well, but I haven’t read it yet). She argues that we are way too distracted by our digital dreams and that we should instead pay more attention to developing our passionate relationship with material things, be they everyday, scientific or technological objects.

Not least for educational reasons. Turkle suggests we have gone too far in believing that digitalisation and simulations will help solve the crisis in science and technology education, and advocates interaction with pre-digital physical objects as an alternative route for recruiting science and technology students. Playing with real physical things rather than playing computer games.

To many, this may sound nostalgic, even reactionary. But Turkle is not a romantic anti-digitalisation freak. As professor in social studies of science and technology at MIT, having decades of research into computer interaction and internet identity behind her, Turkle is eminently placed to evaluate the pros and cons of interacting with scientific and technological objects via the screen versus by close-up and personal inspection.

Evocative Objects contains 34 short autobiographical essays by scientists, artists, designers and humanities scholars, who tell stories about how everyday, scientific and technological objects have been powerful companions in their daily life experience. For example, technology writer Annalee Newitz writes about her laptop (her “irreplaceable … brain prosthesis”) and philosopher Robert P. Crease pays homage to Foucault’s pendulum, what he calls a “deep object”: “a thing that “guides and disciplines curiosity and fascination into interaction and self-transformation”.

Turkle concludes that “we live our lives in the middle of things” and indicates that true cross-disciplinarity between scientists, philosophers and artists becomes possible by focusing on objects which makes us able “to find common ground in everyday experience”.

The major part of the second book in the series (Falling for Science) is devoted to 51 even shorter autobiographical essays written by Turkle’s MIT students over the last 25 years, spanning from everyday things like radios, stuffed bunnies and sand castles to lasers, computers and vacuum tubes. The former student writings are supplemented by eight essays by senior researchers and designers, who were asked to look back to their childhood years to identify an object of ultimate importance for their future careers.

The Inner History of Devices, finally, is collection of twelwe reports written by scholars associated with MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, led by Turkle. Based on interviews with people about how they feel about important objects, like prosthetic eyes, cardiac defibrillators and dialysis machines, they are seen by Turkle as ‘intimate ethnographies’ infused with the self-reflective “sensibilities of the clinician and the memoirist”.

Together these 100+ essays give a rich insight into the wide range of possibilities for how scientific, and especially technological, objects enter into our emotional lives and help us think. In Turkle’s understanding, objects bring together intellect and emotion: “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (Evocative Objects, p. 5).

By focusing on how scientists, engineers and designers engage concretely, personally and affectively with objects, Turkle introduces a healthy common-sensical approach to the ‘material turn’ in the history, philosophy and social studies of science and technology. She carries her assorted theoretical background (some French structuralism, some Piaget, a pinch of Freud, and especially Lacanian psychoanalytical thinking) lightly: The many concrete cases largely speak for themselves, giving the reader a feeling of being close to the authors’ actual cognitive and emotional experience.

I have two problems with these otherwise delightful and edifying collections. First, one of the consequences of Turkle’s psychoanalytic leanings is that the material objects tend to be reduced to mere props in the narrative unity of the subjects, whereas the particular materiality of the objects themselves tends to be under-examined. These books are then, slightly paradoxically, better at explaining the life of the inquiring mind than they are at examining the materiality of life.

Second — although I devoured the 900 pages in one long uninterrupted reading session — I ended asking myself whether the immediate experiential feel reflects the authors’ actual experiences or to what extent these are post hoc reconstructions. For example, in her essay ‘Microscope’ (Falling for Science, pp. 220-6), neurobiologist Susan Hockfield (presently MIT President) claims how, from early age, she “wanted to see inside things”, magnified them and took them apart. But I cannot see how this ‘memory’ gives the reader (or Hockfield herself) any clues to understanding her later scientific career. It’s either banal (what kid doesn’t like taking things apart to see what’s inside?) or a standard trope for scientific autobiographies (a neuromicroscopist ought to have such a childhood).

This points to a pervasive problem in the three volumes under review. Autobiographical memories and witness reports are notoriously unreliable. It’s difficult to say whether all these delightful stories about childhoods full of Lego bricks (the popular Danish toy bricks loom large in these retrospective accounts), bubbles, card decks and Atari computers stem from memories generated in childhood or whether they are the result of later fantasies, free associations and cultural expectations.

But maybe it doesn’t really matter. The question of their veracity doesn’t add or subtract to the charm and power of seduction inherent in these stories. So even if there weren’t any evocative objects in the childhoods of the authors of these essays, they and their editor have surely produced a great set of evocative stories, which may help historians of science and technology intensify the current ‘material turn’.

Here’s the introduction to a talk titled ‘Cultures of Meaning and Cultures of Presence: The use of material objects in the history of science, medicine and technology’ that I gave at the Museo da Ciencia da Universidade Lisboa two weeks ago (see flyer here and resumé in Portuguese here); the images are from the web and for general illustration only:

Before I went into history of science and medicine (and then medical museology), I took a Masters in chemistry, zoology and historical geology (major).

Today, when I look back on my student years at a distance, I realise these disciplines were very much about the handling of tangible material stuff, involving all five senses. Chemistry, zoology and geology students were not just thinking about or viewing the world — we were also listening to it, smelling, tasting and touching it.

Chemistry was (at least when I was a student) about reactions between palpable chemical substances; it involved handling glassware and physical measuring instruments; lots of stuff was pretty smelly, we were constantly exposed to the sounds of boiling liquids and suction pumps; experiencing glowing heat and freezing cold were parts of the daily experience in the lab.

Zoology was very material too. We observed birds in the field, collected insects and marine animals, killed and dissected them, made microscopical thin sections and grinded organs down to cells and molecular extracts. Animal beings weren’t just genomic code — they were sometimes smelly, often noisy, always tangible. 

Historical geology, finally, was about handling real stones, minerals and sediments with axes, spades, knives and brushes. We spent weeks in the  field working outcrops and long hours in the lab afterwards, sorting out physical fossil specimens.

After this undergraduate immersion in the material world of science, I started in a PhD-programme in biochemistry at Karolinska Institute. I collected blood from animals which I had killed with my own hands, stood in the lab’s cold room for hours purifying blood proteins, degraded them with chemicals, separated the fragments in chromatography columns which I had packed myself, and then handled different kinds of lab glassware and measuring instruments to elucidate their amino acid sequences. The protein laboratory was a very physical place with lots of machines and chemicals — and again it involved all the senses.

So science was a very material and sensory practice. And if I hadn’t been confronted with its potentially deadly consequences — one day I swallowed a radioactively labelled substance by mistake (always remember to use a pipette bulb!) — I might have become a real scientist.

Instead, I left science to pursue my high school philosophical interests — what is classification? what’s a concept? what’s the relation between a name, a concept and reality? what’s stuff made of? (all classical epistemological and ontological questions) — took courses in philosophy of science and history of ideas, and then started a new PhD project on the historiography of 20th century science, more precisely the historiography of ecology.

The history and philosophy of science was, I realise now, an entirely different experience. Instead of manipulating and being surrounded by material objects, I found myself sitting at a desk, reading old scientific papers and books. I visited archives to look for handwritten documents and interviewed elderly scientists about their past.

In other words, history and philosophy of science was a world of words and texts (written or spoken). There were actually no material objects in my new disciplinary identity, except for the pulp the texts were written on.

Shifting from PhD-studies of the historiography of ecology to postdoc studies of the historiography of immunology, didn’t change my textual practice. True, I sometimes met practicing immunologists in conferences about the history and philosophy of immunology, but these meetings still revolved around texts and words. People read conference papers based on readings of other texts. Again — text, text, text.

My own research practice was also totally text-based. I spent eight years of my life going through the huge archive of a contemporary immunologist, and spent hundreds of hours talking with him. And when I visited his former colleagues to interview them, we talked and inspected documents and photographs together. We never went to their labs to handle a piece of immunological lab equipment together.

It was as if the material and sensory world of science which I had been so thoroughly immersed in on a daily basis when I was a student totally disappeared when I entered history and philosophy of science. From a world of stuff, smells, sounds, tastes and manual touch I had stepped into a world of disembodied text.

What is most remarkable, now when I look back on it, is that I wasn’t at all aware of the gulf that separated the material and sensuous world of science, and the textual and disembodied world of history and philosophy of science. It was as if I had lost the ability to experience the material and sensory qualities of the laboratory, as if I saw the world of science through the textual spectacles of history and philosophy of science. To the extent that when, occasionally, I visited laboratories, I only ‘saw’ papers, inscriptions and documents, maybe a few images here and there.
[..]

(thanks to Martha Lourenco at the Museu da Ciencia da Universidade Lisboa for inviting me to give the talk — this post contains the introduction only, the rest needs revision before being put online).

Recently I announced a quiz to get more information about a historical syringe that a couple of friends had bought for me. This quiz was far from easy since we had no information on the syringe whatsoever. Medical Museion’s guest researcher and former chief physician Sven Erik Hansen was the first to make a suggestion on our Danish blog — he thought it might had been be used to treat haemorrhoids.

Sven Erik’s was a qualified guess, but it seems like the area of expertise that we are dealing with here is rather odontology. Thomas put a query about the syringe on rete, the mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments, and immediately received some very interesting answers. First out was Frank Manasek: 

This type of syringe was common in dentistry or in minor surgery where local anesthetics (such as lidocaine) would be used. Later syringes of this style were designed to use disposable ampoules of anesthetic, and disposable needles. (This one predates both.) The needle on this example is long, suggesting its use in mandibular blocks.

Following Franks lead Alistair Kwan elaborated:

I was just about to write almost the same thing. The last time I asked a dentist about the move away from these, he said that patients are more scared of them because they are big and shiny, and harder to
keep out of sight — convenience and cost of disposables did not play into his decision, though they are primary issues in debates between surgeons, surgical nurses and hospital administrators.

If you compare with today’s common disposables, the plunger design involves a different handhold that increases control through tight spaces and increases pressure on the contents. If you try them out, you can experience how the palm-grip hold is much less subject to little wobbles in the finger and thumb joints. (A high-stability grip for the disposables is to wrap them in all four fingers of a fist, which limits where you can work.)

You can also experience how the palm-grip hold and the lighter two-finger hold are suited to injecting targets at different heights and orientations. You cannot comfortably inject straight down with the
palm grip hold unless you are leaning right over the patient. But your forearm is positioned for easy aiming sideways or forwards or upwards, as into the nerves in the mandibular joint.

For times when you want a pistol or palm grip (e.g. in veterinary medicine), there are handles for disposable syringes. The handles derive from earlier syringes in which they were inbuilt. In recent years (decades?) they have simply had the syringe removed, leaving a hollow or brackets in which to insert a disposable. Similarly with ring grips, now marketed for use by non-medical people with frail hands who need to administer to themselves or family members, and for cake decorating.

Easy disassembly makes cleaning easier but it sometimes owes more to manufacturing processes than concern for scrubbing and autoclaving. A device like this is often cheaper to mass-produce from standard stock than by building all components from scratch. If it goes together easily, it often follows that it comes apart easily as well. Today’s one-way barbed fasteners and sonic welders have of course
cancelled that rule.

Now what began as an artefact without a history suddenly had spawned a fascinating insight into the world of dentistry. Peter Morris continued (still on the rete list):

These syringes are still in very common use by dentists in the UK. I don’t recognise the disposables mentioned by Alistair. Personally I always try to avoid the jab if I can which provokes friction between me and the dentist. I would say the needle is a little bit thicker than it appears in the photograph, but it may just be a matter of the scale of the photograph (and the psychological effect of it going into your mouth). A quick look on the web throws up JS Dental Manufacturing Inc of Ridgefield Connecticut. I cannot find out how long it has been in business but it seems well established.

And back to Alistair:

I should clarify a bit though: the common disposables are less stable than the big dental model when used in the mouth owing to how they  have to be held. What I originally wrote (in a low-energy moment at the end of work yesterday) was unclear, though I’m sure that your exhibit writers will have no trouble doing better. (I’m now at the start of the day so am more critical of what I write!)

And that critical attitude might be what made Alistair return with one last comment:

It might also be worth indicating that some anaesthesia techniques begin with aspirating by withdrawing the plunger to suck a little on the tissue that the needle has entered. This tests whether you are in the right place: the colour of the liquid obtained indicates the extent of blood supply. If you get blood, you know to withdraw the needle and start again. (I find needle-guiding techniques very clever. Other common rules are to locate external markers for guidance, and to hit bone or a sudden resistance change as an indicator for depth. Some markers for mandibular anaesthesia are in the ear which is why the dentist puts his finger there — as target to aim for — while inserting the needle.)

Aspiration is reflected in some plunger handles: they have a ring for the thumb.

It’s more difficult to aspirate with pistol-grip and palm-grip syringes because pulling and pushing require different holds. That may entail having an assistant steady the patient’s head.

Following Peter’s post, I had a quick look at some on-line catalogues and saw that both metal and disposable plastic syringes are sold by dental equipment suppliers.

So thanks to our fellow histrorians and curators on the rete list, we’ve been able to construct a much more detailed curatorial story about the syringe than I ever imagined when I first posted the original quiz.

And so we need a winner. The stern panel of judges (who will remain anonymous) has decided to a name Alistair Kwan the winner. So Alistair, whenever you come to Copenhagen, please visit us here at Medical Museion and claim your prize.