The Lab as Cultural Technique and Medium

Abstract

What do you associate with the word laboratory or lab? The various images, imprinted on the minds of many Western readers of fiction—think Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (1818)—or fans of the (mad) scientist depicted over the history of film, oscillating somewhere between genius, God, and gangster, have left a certain taste of unease or discontent, to reference a Freudian title. Didn't COVID-19 arise from a lab, so the controversy goes? But then, didn't the COVID vaccinations also arise from labs?The LAB Book arrives at an auspicious moment: a worldwide pandemic certainly invites new debates about the cultural politics of laboratories. Importantly, this book invites us to think about and rethink what a lab is, what it can and cannot do, and how we engage with it as a cultural phenomenon of experimentation, knowledge production, and actor or facilitator for creating approaches to our world's complex problems. The authors fittingly start out by marking the term's inflationary application in that “the first difficulty in talking about labs with any precision is that the metaphor of the lab has permeated contemporary culture to the degree that it can apply to just about anything” (1). They suggest a heuristic they call “the extended laboratory model” to address and analyze what they designate as a “lab discourse” that “invoke[s] an entire network of power relations” (6) To structure the cultural history of this discourse, the book is divided into six chapters, each of which presents an aspect of the extended laboratory model concept: space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, the imaginary, and techniques. The approach is comparative—although this reader considers it phenomenological as well—and emerges from the three authors’ background in media archeology and media studies. As such, they revise Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's definition of a lab—“scientific activity is not about ‘nature,’ it is a fierce fight to construct reality”—as put forth in their study on Laboratory Life as a social environment from 1986. Instead, Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka propose a lab's “cultural and media (studies) activity . . . as a fierce fight to construct and deconstruct the material contexts of how culture comes about” (25). Labs, then, are very much the hybrid spaces where culture happens.The focus on hybridity presents another of the main arguments in this book whereby the notion of the word lab as signifier is broadened and deepened, given its application in numerous areas (arts, humanities, social sciences, natural or hard sciences, design, architecture, maker spaces, studios, public/private). The discussion of the main aspects or elements—space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, the imaginary, and techniques—over the six chapters is necessarily, instructively, and thankfully interdisciplinary. Each chapter, including the introduction but excluding chapter 6, features one to three case studies—for example, Middlebury College's French-Language Lab, Menlo Park, MIT's Media Lab, the Signal Laboratory, Black Laboratories and Agricultural Extension, ACTLab, Hybrid Spaces of Experimentation and Parapsychology, and Bell Labs—and provides concrete parameters to participate as a reader in the historical and cultural analysis of the laboratory discourse and the application of the extended laboratory model. In the case of MIT's Media Lab, for instance, the authors unpack “the specific way in which the MIT Media Lab discourse is double—claiming to be part of a long lineage of labs while at the same time positioning itself as utterly new and singular” (64). At the Media Archeology Lab, directed by one of the coauthors, Lori Emerson, “artifacts are collected, repaired, made, debated, unpicked and opened, reconnected, and sometimes even built from scratch” (104), indicating that labs generate both material and cultural questions around their use and historiography. Along the way we encounter essential genres such as “grey literature” (invisible documentations such as proposals or lists of data or reports); the rich visual records of a particularly fastidious branch of labs, Home Economics or Household Science; and the value prerogative, a pesky problem related to political, public, and financial support for research and development in the form of, for example, donations (MIT Media Lab's connections to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein is one such conundrum). But the value prerogative also includes the avant-garde, the radical and the ideologically or fundamentally creative, as the subsequent discussion of Allucquére Roseanne Stone's pathbreaking ACTLab suggests (177). This is the point at which the authors place the hybrid lab itself at the center of cultural production or in the middle—a veritable medium—of existing structures: “What if hybrid labs are indeed partly defensive structures, shelters, and membranes that can thrive in institutional settings? What if they are interfaces that open up to multiple worlds and harbor particular techniques of academic practices?” (185).What if indeed! The book concludes with the authors imagining labs as “speculative spaces” that can invigorate universities as start-ups or incubators creating bridges between academia and the public. Entrepreneurship, the lab's people as celebrities (e.g., Claude Shannon's “quirky” period “paid off in huge amounts of positive press for the lab in a way that information theory never produced,” 206), and the hybrid lab's perhaps innate abilities to turn lab techniques into cultural techniques (215) all contribute to looking at the lab's ontology, value, possibility, and promise anew. To turn cultural discourse into practice, the authors suggest a list of techniques they consider particularly relevant for the lab's imaginary: 3D printing, collaborating, collecting, dis/assembling, experimenting, failing, living labs, prototyping, and testing. In the free and fully online version of this book, available via the University of Minnesota Press's Manifold platform (https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-lab-book), the authors invite interested scholars to add to this first list of techniques by describing their own, thereby building a collaborative repository and resource of techniques available to all.For anyone even remotely interested in the cultural and historical construct and concept of the laboratory, this book is required reading. While there are many different studies on specific labs as such, with one of the most recent focusing on the Simulmatics Corporation (Jill Lepore, If/Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, 2020), the plethora of information gathered around “laboratory discourse” in combination with a thoroughly developed new model questioning the lab's (cultural) techniques and practices, anyone thinking about or actually working in labs will find inspiration to consider what a lab can and cannot do in the twenty-first century. For those planning to establish a lab of any kind, hybrid, interdisciplinary, start-up, or incubator, this book will help considerably to contextualize such plans. It will also help conceptualize the lab as a medium that communicates far more than the imprints from fiction and film that public perception has been influenced by: the lab as a participant in world making toward “a facility for interdisciplinary translation” (248).