I’d like to suggest that we are seeing the contours of what I call molecular being, a mode of being different from for example genetic being, humoral being or anatomical being.

Ken Arnold, Head of the Wellcome Collections, wrote a few years ago about the powers of medical history museums: “We feel medical history through its artifacts, not only, like everything else that has a third dimension, because that history tangibly engages another of our senses, but because many of those objects manage to reach inside us in a most discomforting way – often because they literally relate to our hidden inside.” But one of the fundamental issues about putting biomedicine on display is that it often opens up a molecular interiority, which is confusing, abstract and ultimately extremely difficult to grasp, literally and figuratively.

In this presentation, I’d like to expand on the notion that the difficulties related to putting biomedicine on display is tied matters of scale and reference, and that this question of scale creates a need for a new conceptualization of the materiality of being. The hypothesis is that the communicative challenges posed by the modern biotechnologies lack of visibility and abstract nature are in part caused by these technologies lack of bodily reference. Where the objects from medical history used to point directly at the often very harsh treatment of the infected and suffering body, the new biomedical technologies do not reveal much of their use by their appearing due to their technological complexity and the sophisticated treatments procedure.

Man used to be ‘the measure of all things’, as Protagoras said, but the recent biomedical insight into “life itself” identifies, studies and manipulates nature on a level at which man’s experience of his/ hers body seemingly is no longer a useful scale of reference. The change of scale from the molar – from the level of tissues and organs – to the molecular – the primal soup of proteins, enzymes and the host of molecules that make up life itself – has led to a loss of reference, which in turn makes the progress and possibilities of modern biomedicine opaque to us. The level on which modern biomedicine conceives of the body and acts upon it is seemingly immaterial, and thus our notions of materiality comes into question. The scale upon which biomedicine is based creates a potential rift between technological and scientific developments on the one hand and our lived experiences of the body on the other. This lack of bodily recognition with the biomedical body creates a distance towards biomedical objects.

The modern biomedical technologies are often invisible, abstract, diffuse, and complex, globally distributed, intangibles and non-visual. Or, more precisely, the materiality of the new biotechnologies, their form and expression give no direct hint of what they are used for and how they work. This development is contrasted traditional historical medical instruments, where the objects visually and materially give clues to their use. As extensions of physical movement and scaled in relation to the human body, the lived bodily experience could directly be used as a way of understanding their former use and function. Traditional medical history has been told through its tools – the visceral reaction to a surgeon’s knife or a cane for biting during surgery before anesthesia is immediate; the tool gives a glimpse of the forms of being associated with its use. But the biomedical industrial complex produces no objects that provoke such reactions; an MRI scanner might be an impressive looking piece of machinery, but it gives almost no sense of being other than perhaps a fleeting sense of claustrophobia.

Biomedicine engages with our bodies and selves on a level that is so far removed from what we have sensory accessibility to, as to be a completely different order of being. Its effects are felt and registered, be it the myriads of advances in biological psychiatry, molecular drugs or genetic therapy, but that which is affected in us is out of reach for any sensible appropriation of the world. The sheer gap between the level of our sensory appropriation of the world and the molecular level makes it exceedingly difficult to grasp any ‘thingness’ of the biomedical objects. We can show images of molecules or strands of DNA, but these images mean little to us as part of our lived, felt experience. They do not register as part of the world as we lived, and exits only as effects that trained experts have to explain to us is connected to this molecule or that chromosome. The handling of the biomedical object is often so complex that it involves a collective of subjects or a network of subjects and technological translations and processes that goes beyond the act of the individual.

The problem of the scale of biomedicine, then, and especially from the view of a public understanding and appropriation of medicine, is to make connections between the visual abstractions of a molecular world and the lived being of the modern individual. This is also the museological challenge for any museum institution wishing to engage with the biomedical reality – a reality that is increasingly becoming part of everyday clinical reality across the western world. How can we translate from the biomedical things (molecules) to the lived experience of molecular being?

What is needed, it seems to me, are philosophies about the material nature of the world that allows us to reconceptualize this new, molecular being. The disappearing of the object in biomedicine might seem like a good reason to abandon any debates of materiality, ontology, haptics, aesthetics and so forth, but in fact they simply sharpen the need for such debates – a fact highlighted by the steadily increasing body of work on materiality that is being produced in the past five years or so. We are, it seems, at a moment in which questions about materiality and the relationship between human and world are being raised in new and urgent ways.

Asking ‘what is an object and how do we relate to them?’ is a question, that contains another question, namely ‘who are we, and how do we relate to the world?’ This is in part because any discussion of the physical qualities of objects is inherently a discussion of our tangled relationship to the world as such. The question of scale and biomedicine opens for new questions about our integration in the world and about the material constitution of human existence, a point Bruno Latour made recently: “Whereas at the time of ploughs we could only scratch the surface of the soil, we can now begin to fold ourselves into the molecular machinery of soil bacteria.” (Bruno Latour, “It’s development, stupid! or: How to Modernize Modernization”). We are, it seems, molecular beings through and through, and we need new philosophies that explore this materiality – and display practices that attempt to highlight it.

One possible philosophical tool in the attempt to explore molecular being is Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the body without organs. The body without organs is useful for the problem of molecular being for several reasons: First, it reconfigures the body as a thing as such. By describing a porous entity consisting of multiple levels of flows and fluxes, it approaches the scale-issue head on, claiming that we must actively embrace the molecular aspects of being, rather than the molar. Secondly, the notion of a body without organs that is a body not governed first and foremost by the logic of the organs, but rather by the fluctuations of molecular flows chimes well with our new fates as molecular beings. The body cannot be broken down into things that are different from one another, but is made from the same stuff in different configurations. Thirdly, the body without organs stresses connectivity across contexts, stressing flows that might as well move through molecular as through language. There are not any more ‘correct’ ways to allow the visitor to grapple with the issue of molecular being, what matters is only how the exhibit manages to resonate with the complex web that is the spectators sense of being.

The realization that the body is a molecular structure will only be accessible to the individual as a sense of being when that sense of being is reconfigured. As much as our senses are responsible for the ranges of our sensory appropriation of the world, we can still attune them to different channels and appropriate their inputs in different ways. Thus, if we think ourselves as a being that is not made up of a variety of different substances, but rather as a instantiation of a variation in a common substance, we experience our being differently – for the historian of medicine, this sort of reconfiguration of the sense of the body can be traced throughout the millennia, and each reconfiguration leads to new representations of modes of being. Today, most of us a hardwired to think of the body as a complex piece of anatomical machinery, a conception that has a very specific history; but this conception is exactly what biomedicine is reconfiguring by engaging with life at the molecular level. A concept like the body without organs might possibly be a minute part of the verbalization of such a reconfiguration, whatever the status of its logical and conceptual coherency (other possible philosophical approaches to molecular being could be that of the so-called object-oriented ontology, promoted by Graham Harman and Levi Bryant. Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter is another example, as is recent works by Bruno Latour).

The question of scale transform into a question of being – and it seems to me that we, as museums of medical history – are potentially important players in the public engagement with the new molecular forms of being that biomedicine is producing all around us. We need exhibition practices that explore our existence as part of a material world (by showing science as a material, existential practice rather than an abstract knowledge production, for example). Putting molecular being on display means highlighting the common materiality of the world, expose a wider distribution of agency, and thus partake in a movement to reshape the self and its interests.

Biomedicine and molecular biology unearths new forms of life, which in turn necessitates new ways of being and new ways of conceptualizing what life is. Some of these new turns are threatening – anti-democratic, inhuman, disrupting – and other offer possibilities for change and new sensibilities. New materialisms allow for new questions to be asked and new conclusions reached – not necessarily better or more just ones, but at least different ones.

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