Review: Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, ‘The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies’
Review of Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies, (Uni of Minnesota Press, 2022), 334 pages.
Abstract
The Lab Book is a crucial intervention into humanities labs and their precarious institutional environments. Situated between science and technology studies (STS) and media archaeology, Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka’s book develops a heuristic for analyzing these hybrid spaces, producing a valuable tool for understanding the assemblages of space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, and imaginaries supporting their existence. The authors test their heuristic on a wide variety of case studies. Including a chapter of “Techniques” implemented by labs, The Lab Book guides readers through the complicated variation of situated practice characterizing media labs across the world.
Reviewed by Roger Whitson
Darren Wershler, Lorie Emerson, and Jussi Parikka begin The Lab Book by analyzing a French Language Lab at Middlebury College in Vermont in 1928. Depicting technologies such as Alexander Graham Bell’s dictaphone and Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, the authors use the photo to illustrate the interpretive categories that drive the book. I remember a similar photograph (Figure 1, below) I encountered in the special collections of Washington State University’s library in 2016, where I teach courses in literature and media history. Taken in 1912, the photo depicts a student speaking into a wax cylinder recorder, one of the earliest commercial technologies for audio recording and playback. Professor Frank Chalfant modeled his Phonetic Laboratory after language labs in France, where recording equipment supplemented foreign language instruction. As the authors’ reading of the Middlebury College French Language Lab and the photograph of the Phonetic Lab show, many early media labs were dedicated to language learning. This early history reflects not only the relevance of foreign languages to humanities labs, but also the disciplinary aims of public University teaching during that period. Technologies were not deployed for their own sake, but to support the cultural hegemony of European colonialism represented by University curricula. That media labs and Universities now feel pressured to negotiate with academic privatization and monetization forms one focus of The Lab Book, illustrating how neoliberalism has changed their activities.
Figure 1: Chalfant Language Lab, 1912. From WSU Lantern Slide Collection (PC 6 n300), Washington State University Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Pullman, WA.
The authors explore these pressures by examining what they call the “hybrid lab,” a term they adopt from Bruno Latour’s argument in We Have Never Been Modern that new hybrid actors emerge in modernity rejecting the “division of powers between politics and science” that constitute its epistemology (qtd on 7). The hybrid lab functions in the space between politics and science, creating new opportunities for understanding their interconnection. Instead of being limited to the scientific lab, hybrid lab case studies in the The Lab Book feature makerspaces, media archaeology labs, teaching and research collections, home economics labs, black agricultural extension labs, and parapsychological labs. Latour is a prominent figure in the book, showing The Lab Book’s indebtedness to Science and Technology Studies (STS), even though much has changed since the heyday of the “science wars” when figures like Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accused STS and postmodernism of being threats to the objectivity of science.[1] Science in 2022 confronts much more formidable foes: social media echo chambers; climate change denialisms; anti-vaxxers; and misinformation campaigns from Russian spies, Q-Anon, Cambridge Analytica, and our former president. The Lab Book outlines how hybrid labs can produce and legitimate knowledge in this post-truth era, and one of its many contributions lies in making the case for the urgency of Science and Technology Studies especially when science is on attack from the resurgent fascism of the right.
The Lab Book explores how labs can construct an open and robust space for these matters of fact by translating their affordances into an “extended lab” heuristic (3). The heuristic and its elements form the logic of The Lab Book’s various chapters. They are, as the authors say, “processual and inherently interdependent” (11). The case study framework enables the authors to apply their heuristic to a wide variety of labs showcasing the diversity of their examples, while illustrating the permutability of the heuristic’s elements and the very different constellations formed by them. For instance, the “Space” chapter compares Menlo Park and MIT Media Lab as case studies on how space influences lab culture. Menlo Park’s remote location enabled Thomas Edison to create a culture that anticipated many of the attributes of contemporary startups, including flexible and configurable workspaces and crunch time. The MIT Media Lab, on the other hand, espoused a contradictory culture of transparency and secrecy that is reflected in both of their major buildings. In particular, the 2010 building attempted to address the transparency concern by featuring a glass-and-steel exterior yet also wrapped that exterior in a tight metal mesh with blinds on the inside. Given the revelations of the “People” chapter, that the MIT Media Lab under the leadership of Joi Ito accepted ongoing funding from notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein even after he pleaded guilty, it is clear that “[c]onstruction plays the role of the subconscious” as the epigraph from Walter Benjamin at the beginning of the chapter says (qtd on 37).
As can be seen in the example above, the authors don’t simply use “dynamism” or “process” as rhetorical flourishes in the introduction. Like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s deployment of the rhizome as an organizational structure for their sections of A Thousand Plateaus, chapters of The Lab Book structurally engage these interdependencies as they unfold: “surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.” (Deleuze and Guattari 5). Short parenthetical asides suggest nodes or links of this network as they emerge in the argument. The “Apparatus” chapter explores Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF), The Signal Laboratory, and Emerson’s own Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) as examples of how processes and materials take on their own agencies in labs. Eschewing the Benjaminian “aura” of blackboxed technologies and museum cultures, such media labs emphasize hands-on work and “operative staging” blending mathematical and scientific theory with humanistic questions (68). Ernst keeps a flip-flop circuit in the MAF to demonstrate how the vacuum tube, developed to amplify electric signals for telecommunications technologies, is reappropriated into a tool for logistics and operations in digital technologies. While funding and teaching requirements keep Emerson’s MAL tied more closely to museum culture than the MAF, its reconfigurable space also exemplifies the wide variety of platforms, iterative processes, and communities that such spaces inspire.
In what is perhaps the most complicated yet crucial chapter of the book, the authors apply this focus on the making and remaking of media history to a broader consideration of the entangled mass of actors and policy signified by “Infrastructure.” Despite Susan Leigh Starr’s call to “study boring things” more than 20 years ago in 1999, infrastructural analyses have only appeared recently in prominent works from Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty to Tung-Hui Hi’s A Prehistory of the Cloud and Shannon Mattern’s Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Even so, infrastructure has very real political effects — often reinscribing nationalist and imperialist pathways of control and governance. The authors illustrate this sense of the “path dependency” of infrastructure by examining grey literature: a “mass of bland and generally unobtrusive writing” — such as grants, white papers, and instruction manuals — whose ubiquity and banality enable policy decisions to be automated without regular oversight (112). In conjunction with the chapter’s account of the origins of Canadian home economic labs and the role of scientific methodologies in Arizona State University’s [ASU] redesign of the New American University, the focus on grey literature shows how the extended lab model illuminates modes of analysis that too often remain hidden. In terms of the New American University, the scholarship of ASU president Michael Crow focuses on science and engineering fields to the detriment of humanities and social science labs, while also glossing over the ambivalence many scholars of the University communicate when exploring the shift from what the authors call the “circulation of research in the public interest to entrepreneurship” (148). The near invisibility of humanities labs from this story suggests that even the digital humanities, aspects of which have embraced Crow’s R&D models, really have no place in the New American University. As I read this chapter I couldn’t help but remember Siegfried Zielinski’s description of Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project from the introduction of Deep Time of the Media and imagine a future University where the detritus of such fields become like those machines “which dead-ended and were never developed any further” (2).
Of course, the authors do not hold the same apocalyptic vision that flashed in my imagination when they describe the rich diversity of media lab variantologies. As much as they sound the alarm bell at the New American University, the authors also imagine “a much richer range of styles, scales, operations, and functions [for Universities and labs] including the situated practices of different academic and para-academic institutions that extend the lab beyond its walls” (242). The chapters on “People” and “Imaginaries” exemplify such diversities by describing a wide variety of what composes a lab. Along with a “Techniques” chapter that ends the book with a Raymond Williams Keywords-like list of essays about cultural techniques associated with hybrid labs, the “People” and “Imaginaries” chapters show the power of variation in how labs function. In the spirit of inclusion, the authors have planned an expandable “Glossary of Lab Techniques” on the Manifold site for their book[2]. Yet I also wonder about the near-absence of discussion around libraries and archives in The Lab Book. What separates a lab from an archive, and what power asymmetries are involved in those distinctions? Especially given the hybrid nature of makerspaces, which sometimes appear in libraries and sometimes in labs, the enmeshed relationship between a fact’s production and its preservation is worth addressing. While there is already much written about libraries and archives, the specific heuristic developed in The Lab Book could add substantially to that conversation.
The comparison of wide-ranging lab variantologies invite a reading of The Lab Book as championing what might be called a “new empiricism” regarding the production of matters of fact. Latour scholars like Prachi More have used “new empiricism” to describe his work in the past. More quotes Latour to compare the change from older empiricisms to his method as like “shifting your attention from the stage to the whole machinery of a theater” (qtd on 62). By using the theater as an example, Latour appeals to the new empiricism of lab variantologies as he recalls public demonstration labs common among early practitioners of science. It is in the difference between a stage, an audience, and its machinery in such theaters that the authors find the most pressing matter for the hybrid lab today: “[t]here is a desperate global need to extend discussions about relations inside the lab to the world beyond the lab — a world currently engaged in arguments over the ideals of democracy and the nature of social justice” (247). Greta Thunberg’s September 2019 climate protests taught us that science has a pressing role to play in social justice. Yet despite this urgent need, scientists are only gradually realizing their political role. For many of them, September 2019 was their first act of civil disobedience. Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump, a text the authors quote to underline the urgency of a science engaged with politics, describes the space of the laboratory as a “restricted public space [,] […] a disciplined space, where experimental, discursive, and social practices were collectively controlled by competent members” (39). In an age when peer review seems too slow to counter the new COVID variant and a consensus of scientists not powerful enough to implement even the weakest of climate change reforms, it is hard to imagine that the quasi-public space of Boyle’s laboratory would enable a robust production of matters of fact. “Hobbes was right,” say Shapin and Schaffer in the last sentence of their book, suggesting that no group of scientific experts can overcome the Leviathan of power and politics (344). Even Latour, in a 2018 New York Times profile, says that people “need to defend the conditions in which science can thrive.” But do we really want science to exist in its current form? As the many examples of hybrid labs presented by the authors suggest, varying conditions might also give rise to something new and unpredictable. “And this takes time,” they say (248). In the lapse we have The Lab Book: a work that isn’t afraid to experiment with the hybrids emerging before us.
[1] See “A Glossary of Lab Techniques — Extending the Lab Book,” for more on the current call for proposals.
[2] For more on the history of the “science wars,” see Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense.
References
Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2015.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Kofman, Ava. “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science.” The New York Times, 25 Oct. 2018.
Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. MIT Press, 2016.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard UP, 1993.
Mattern, Shannon. Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. U of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton UP, 2018.
Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, Picador, 1998.
Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, 1999, pp. 377–391.
Werschler, Darren, et al. A Glossary of Lab Techniques — Extending The Lab Book, Manifold: University of Minnesota Press, https://manifold.umn.edu/page/extending-the-lab-book.
Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. MIT Press, 2009.
Roger Whitson is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the English Department at Washington State University. His research lies at the intersection of literature, media archaeology, and science and technology studies. Author of two monographs ‘William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media’, co-authored by Jason Whittaker (Routledge 2012); and ‘Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories’ (Routledge 2017).
Email: roger.whitson@wsu.edu
