The Humanities Laboratory

What Goes on in Humanities Laboratories?

Aleksandra Kil-Matlak, Jacek Małczyński, Dorota Wolska

In the essay “Thinking as a Moral Act”, Clifford Geertz explores the idea of “scientific objectivity” by referring to the stereotype of the “white-coated laboratory technician” characterised by being “antiseptic emotionally”:

Like a eunuch in a harem, a scientist is a functionary with a useful defect; and, like a eunuch, correspondingly dangerous because of an insensibility to subcerebral (often called “human”) concerns. I don’t know much about what goes on in laboratories; but in anthropological fieldwork, detachment is neither a natural gift nor a manufactured talent. It is a partial achievement laboriously earned and precariously maintained. What little disinterestedness one manages to attain comes not from failing to have emotions or neglecting to perceive them in others, nor yet from sealing oneself into a moral vacuum. It comes from a personal subjection to a vocational ethic.1

This passage is interesting for at least two reasons. Firstly, Geertz deconstructs the myth of the impartial, emotionless scientist, arguing that disinterestedness is not a given, but a result of scientific professionalism. Secondly, confessing to his own ignorance about how laboratories work, he still invokes the stereotype of the “white-coated scientist”, which also demonstrates his ambivalent attitude to the natural sciences per se.2 On the wave of twentieth-century anti-positivist and anti-naturalist trends, which Geertz championed, the laboratory was disparaged in humanities seeking their own identity beyond analogies with natural sciences. Today, thanks to studies on science and technology, especially the “ethnography of the laboratory”, the humanities know more about how scientific laboratories work and that they are by no means as objective and insensitive to the matters of the human world as they might appear. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, something of a “disenchantment” of the laboratory is taking place. Its rediscovery – known as “the laboratory turn”3 or “laboratory fever”4 – is associated with the emergence of new research streams such as post-humanism, revisiting the relationship between nature and culture, digital humanities, experimenting with advanced technical apparatus, or those strands of the humanities related to neurosciences. This trend is also visible in the field of art and culture.5 It is manifested in diverse ways in the migration of concepts, research strategies, forms of cooperation or use of technical infrastructure. Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson and Jussi Parikka use the term “lab discourse” to describe “how the word lab serves as a kind of pragmatic persuasion, ordering, and organisation of material and discursive regimes, invoking an entire network of power relations that determine what is and is not possible to say or do within a space designated as a lab”.6 This “expansion of laboratories”7 was manifested especially during the pandemic, which surprised us in the course of our research. We observed at the time how the pandemic restrictions led to the laboratorisation of everyday life, as well as how the agency of infrastructure used for research was revealed. As researchers we had to, for instance, get used to online platforms used for teaching and participating in conferences. The pandemic also brought the question of trust in science and building its social authority into sharp focus.

The laboratory today evokes such widespread and multifaceted interest that, when reflecting on the phenomenon, it is necessary to identify the theoretical framework of one’s own approach, the questions constituting it and the fundamental research interest.8 When we set up the Contemporary Humanities Lab at the University of Wrocław’s Institute of Cultural Studies, we succumbed to this trend ourselves, only post factum beginning to consider what the label we had adopted meant for us. In preposterous mode – in the sense proposed by Mieke Bal9 – we began to look backwards and seek our own genealogy, as well as to ask what this observed laboratorisation of the humanities conceals. This book is the result of that reflection. Analysing various cases of humanities laboratories, we are especially interested in what makes them distinct and different from their scientific relatives. Can a humanities lab and one investigating natural sciences even be considered as related? Or should the relationship between them be seen transversally, outside of the opposition between the humanities and the natural and formal sciences? If the development of modern science means that the laboratory has been appropriated by the latter, is it possible to reclaim it for the humanities, while respecting their autonomy? Can a laboratory offer a remedy to their problems amid the struggle for their place in neoliberal academia and the endeavour to capture attention in society?10

While respecting the humanities’ uniqueness and difference from natural sciences, we do not ignore “the strange estrangement” – as Geertz called it – between these two domains of knowledge,11 which can be expressed by post-humanism, but we also wish to highlight the threats from the contemporary expansion and current situation of research in the natural sciences. From our point of view, the humanities laboratory should not be based on the idea of mimesis and imitate a scientific lab, but rather operate according to the principle of mimicry. As Homi K. Bhabha shows, mimicry is a strategy characterised by ambivalence expressed in the phrase “almost the same but not quite”. This ambiguity means that “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace”, challenging the authority it is based on.12 Only in this way can the humanities fulfil their (self-)critical function. In our view, this “transcendental mobility”, as Michel Foucault put it,13 involving constant undermining of their foundations, continual enquiring as to their own rules, affirmation of uncertainty, and the right to err and reflect (self-reflection), is a condition for their existence as well as the sine qua non condition of a humanities laboratory. In this sense, it can have a destabilising function and become a tool of intra-institutional resistance in the university structure.

The popularity of the laboratory in contemporary humanities can be traced to the cult of innovation and creativity, which tallies with neoliberal methods of administration of academia and scientific life (preferred forms of cooperation, instrumentalisation of knowledge, the grants system, principles of parameterisation of science). In this sense, laboratorisation represents a threat to the humanities and a cover for their subordination to a neoliberal system of academic research modelled on free market rules in which their results are treated as products. This creativity-based model was criticised by Andreas Reckwitz, who introduces the concept of “aesthetic capitalism”, entailing “the constant production of new things, in particular of signs and symbols – text, images, communication, procedures, aesthetic objects, body modifications – for a consumer public in search of originality and surprise”.14 According to Reckwitz, since the 1970s culture has been governed by “the creativity dispositif”, manifested in the realm of social practices (consumption, sport, and sexuality – to which we can add art and science).15

In recent years, the humanities in Poland have been swept up in the spirit of innovation. As Ryszard Nycz has argued, “it makes no sense to abandon (or be excluded from) participation in this innovative-creative community”, as this participation can allow the “applied” functions of humanities to be appreciated.16 Today, observing the advancing process of marketisation of knowledge, we can recognise the currency of Stanisław Pietraszko’s claim that in the new millennium the humanities have entered a “technological phase” and been subjected to the instrumentalisation of knowledge.17 From our point of view, the humanities laboratory should become a place of resistance within (or outside of) university structures. What it offers us is the possibility of making mistakes, which was devalued in the capitalist, success-oriented order of knowledge. This right to err is inherent in the etymology of the word “laboratory”. It derives from the Latin labor, meaning work, toil, endeavour, but also sufferance and distress. It is also contained in the verb laboro (to work, strain, take care of something, but also suffer and endure hardship) as well as labor (to slide, sway, edge along, slip, trip, and stray).

A humanities lab can be a place in which “subjugated knowledges” (as Foucault put it) are cultivated, that is one excluded from official circulation, for example because of its naivety, or “undisciplined” and “antidisciplinary” knowledge (as Judith, aka Jack, Halberstam put it). Halberstam opposes “logics of success” and seeks to reclaim the right to fail, writing “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more co­operative, more surprising ways of being in the world”.18 A laboratory may therefore be useful in “undercommoning” the university, being its “internal outside”, providing shelter to the maroons that try to “steal” it and share its resources,19 as well as being a refuge for those who, like Jacques Derrida, “feel bad” at a university.20

The laboratory from a humanities perspective can be considered in three dimensions. First, scientific laboratories may be their subject of interest (as in the case of science and technology studies). This approach focuses on how laboratories operate in the natural sciences, how they generate facts and build their credibility. The second subject of attention can be humanities labs, pursuing their own research and developing epistemic strategies. This understanding of laboratories may be encountered in digital humanities.21 Third and finally, one can adopt a meta-epistemic perspective and treat the humanities themselves as a laboratory. In this case, we are concerned not so much with a humanities laboratory as a labor­atory of humanities, their theories, concepts, research procedures and functions. Although in this book we are analysing diverse cases of humanities laboratories, we are particularly interested in this last approach. We therefore adopt a reflective humanities approach, which holds a mirror to our own concepts and procedures and asks about the conditions of its existence and functions.22

The laboratory itself has been conceptualised in various ways. From Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s point of view, it is a “system of literary inscription” and “a hive of writing activity”, as well as a place of “creation of order out of disorder”.23 Jussi Parikka sees it as “a form of textual simulators”, while also pointing to the performative aspect of laboratory work as well as its function in the twentieth-century “technological society”.24 According to Ian Hacking, it “is a space for interfering under controllable and isolable conditions.25 Karin D. Knorr-Cetina sees the laboratory as a place for “reversal and reconfiguration of the surrounding order”, while “a laboratory practice entails the detachment of objects from their natural environment and their installation in a new phenomenal field”.26 The non-uniform nature of the laboratory complicates matters further. Knorr-Cetina identifies various types, such as the war game or sandbox (simulation of the real world in the laboratory space by creating models of it), the medieval cathedral (experimentation as manipulation), and the psychoanalyst’s couch (where it is not objects as such that are examined, but their symptoms).27

A further challenge is differentiating laboratories from other places and forms of knowledge generation (e.g. workshops, centres, institutes, libraries, archives, clinics, incubators, factories, or so-called “tribes”). Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, observing the media labs operating today, notes that a laboratory is no longer confined to a physical space, but is rather a project (concept, initiative, programme).28 A lab in this sense is geared towards solving practical problems of, for example, climate change, social inequalities or the migration crisis. This praxeological orientation is one of the hallmarks of contemporary humanities laboratories. As Pawlicka-Deger and Christopher Thomson argue, they are “sites of intervention and collective imagination engaged in tackling pressing social problems”.29

We understand the laboratory as a mode of knowing, i.e. a way of creating knowledge in the humanities.30 This meta-concept focuses our attention on how we know what we know (as Knorr-Cetina as well as Lorraine Daston put it31). We are therefore thinking of a kind of modality of knowing signalled by a multifaceted how. Thus we do not reduce the laboratory to an idea, metaphor (as is often the case today32), research practice, infrastructure, place, space or institution, although this modality may also contain both spatiality and an institutional and material dimension. Although it might seem that the examples of humanities laboratories we analyse have more differences than things in common – they were formed at different times (although increasingly in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century), in different historical, social, political, but also epistemic contexts, representing various fields of knowledge – we would like to highlight a few distinguishing marks of the laboratorial mode of knowing: nomotheticity, holism, experimentality, innovativeness, openness, collectivity and infrastructurality. They form a kind of network, are interlinked in certain cases, appearing with various intensity and forming original configurations. These are discussed in detail below. Some of them resembled those highlighted by Wershler, Emerson and Parikka’s project. Their “checklist” included space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, imaginaries and techniques. These comprise “the extended lab model”.33

While working on this book, we discovered that John Law uses the term “modes of knowing”, which he treats as forms of giving meaning to the world. In Law’s view, there are different, competing and mutually exclusive modes of knowing. These operate on the basis of exclusion, with their own “blind spots” and shaping their own “forms of othering”:

Necessarily they work by pushing experience through a screen of presuppositions to produce workable forms of knowledge or experience. As a part of this, they distinguish the probable from the improbable, and the possible from the impossible.34

Concentrating on “academic modes of knowing”, Law lists their own forms of differentiation. What they cause to be overlooked is the significance of passions (often concealed) and their impact on the subjects of research undertaken, the role of corporeality in the cognitive process, “material heterogeneity”, concerning the possibility of using other tools of scientific communication (e.g. art), excess, with which the naturally “austere and moderate” social sciences cannot cope (in contrast to love or ecstasy), specificity – the tendency to universalise (rather than situating) knowledge, formlessness (Western researchers tend to seek forms), and the performativity of knowledge. For Law, an example of an alternative way of knowing to academic ones is the baroque. It is worth considering what strategies of differentiation are developed by the laboratorial mode of knowing and what is lost sight of.

Another typology of ways of knowing is proposed by John V. Pickstone, who distinguishes interpreting meanings (hermeneutics), describing and classifying (natural history), dismantling into smaller parts (analysis), and synthesising (experimentalism). According to Pickstone, these constitute a complex set, occurring simultaneously albeit with varying intensity – for example analysis was dominant in the first half of the nineteenth century, then experimentalism in the second half. Interestingly, they are transposed between natural sciences and humanities, which means that the relations between them can be viewed not in terms of epigonism, but mutual transfers. Pickstone offers as an example of such interactions Hippolyte Taine’s theory of art and its connection to Cuvier’s analyses, or the relations between linguistics and analytical science (such as chemistry).35 He argues that the methods of cooperation developed during seminars at which texts were analysed might have served as a model for German scientific laboratories, while German philological seminars were based on the models of laboratories.36 We can observe similar transfers in the cases of humanities laboratories that we analyse. For example, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas drew from evolutionary psychology. The concept of terrain in anthropology was formed during scientific expeditions. Scholars from the Leipzig School acquired epistemic virtues by practising in psychological laboratories. Claude Lévi-Strauss was fascinated by mathematics, and Juri Lotman borrowed analogies from cybernetics and research on the functioning of the brain.

Despite the current popularity of the laboratory in its various forms in the humanities, the history of humanities labs is yet to be the subject of detailed studies. Existing surveys mainly focus on media laboratories and do not delve further back than the 1980s.37 An exception is Alexandra A. Argamakova’s article, although this is not so much about a humanities laboratory as a “humanitarian” one, understood as a “social network and interactive venue for collective cognition, skilled communications, and practical problem-solving”.38 The author particularly emphasises the social dimension of its operation, the practical results, and the role it plays in development of society. She suggests as the “prototype” of this kind of laboratory churches, religious associations, statistical offices, scientific societies, intellectual clubs, salons, or political circles. Their social impact involves collection and explanation of data, producing political and economic expert reports, forecasting the future, modelling the past, finding the communications and psychological techniques used in management and politics, public discourse analysis, understanding cultural phenomena, elucidation and dissemination of knowledge. Although this praxeological dimension is not insignificant to us, in this book we do not confine ourselves to this aspect.

From our point of view, the humanities laboratory constitutes a prism through which one can observe the history of the humanities. In this sense, our project occupies a place in the increasingly popular field of history of the humanities.39 The collected texts demonstrate that since the end of the nineteenth century, a laboratorial lineage has developed in the humanities, although it is difficult to identify a single progenitor.40 Rather than a family tree where it is clear who is whose ancestor, its form is more that of a rhizome. Interestingly, while some of our case studies concern luminaries of the humanities (e.g. Lévi-Strauss, Lotman, Otlet and Warburg), they are not identified with the laboratory mode. By highlighting this aspect, we not only shine new light on their scientific activity, but are also able to trace the similarities and differences between them.

Apart from the historical aspect, the geography of knowledge and its situation are also important for us. Although a laboratory can give the impression of a “placeless place”, as David N. Livingstone put it, the spatial dimension of science should also be taken into account.41 Among its manifestations are the unequal ways of distributing knowledge between “centres” and “peripheries” or building scientific authority and seeking recognition by citing the works of researchers from the “centre”, which Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “cultural cringe”.42 While working on the book, we realised that we prefer to cite the works of Foucault or Latour, and not, for example, to the ideas of Ludwik Fleck and his “thought collective”,43 to whom Kuhn was indebted, with his intellectual debt being paid post factum by Latour.44

Among the symptoms of our own “semi-peripheral situation” are the recurrent dilemmas concerning the literature we cite (the lack of translations of key texts for us into English results in erasure of local traditions and adapting to disciplinary divisions (Polish cultural studies has different genealogies to its English counterpart, yet its locality is lost in translation).45 This problem of “asymmetrical translations”46 is an echo of Chakrabarty’s telling quotation about the differences between the obligations of historians of Europe and those of the “Third World”. Taking as case studies Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre and Juri Lotman’s Laboratory of History and Semiotics was a move designed to decentralise the circulation of knowledge and examine “semi-peripheries” on a map dominated by the “science of the centre”.47

The concept of a humanities laboratory demand not only “provincialisation”, but also general critique undertaken from postcolonial positions. When designing its contemporary form, one should not forget the role played by scientific laboratories in the context of colonialism and genocide. As Helen Tilley shows, Western European scientists treated Africa as “a living laboratory”.48 Scientific research in various disciplines (e.g. anthropology, botany, epidemiology, geography, medicine) in European laboratories was closely linked to the fieldwork taking place in colon­ies. Dibyadyuti Roy and Maya Dodd note that laboratories were associated with a history of violence and should thus be treated as “with substantial doses of suspicion”.49 Owing to the history of colonial relations, contemporary digital humanities laboratories in India differ from those in the Global North in terms of infrastructure and face different problems (e.g. multilingualism). Also today, as Wershler, Emerson and Parikka point out in their critical analyses of the operation of the MIT Media Lab (a renowned institution, founded in 1985 and still operating today), laboratories can be a place promoting “digital colonialism”.50

In designing a contemporary form of the humanities laboratory, an important role for us was played by the research, teaching and artistic projects conducted in the Contemporary Humanities Lab, which aimed to test the laboratorial mode of knowing. During their implementation, we found several elements linking them – their experimental nature, situational aspect, collectivity and openness (disciplinary, institutional, generational), manifested in the involvement of students in our activities as well as forming relations with partner institutions. The first activity – Medienkamera (2019) – took the form of an exhibition taking place as a result of the course “Ideas of contemporary humanities”, which involved arranging a media cabinet of curiosities in a room at the University of Wrocław’s Institute of Cultural Studies. Its objective was to reflect on the concepts of “old” and “new” technologies and on academic infrastructure.51 The second project – Museum of the Anthropocene (2019–2022) – took place as part of a specialist seminar in conjunction with the Museum of Natural History at the University of Wrocław and Wrocław Contemporary Museum. Its aims were to reflect on the mission of a natural history museum in the light of climate change as well as trying to build a bridge between science, art and humanities. The result was an exhibition in the form of an intervention at which students’ projects were presented.52 The third activity – COLLECTIVE (2022–2023) – took place as part of “Contemporary laboratory” course in conjunction with BWA Wrocław. A reading of Latour’s Politics of Nature as well as Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s A Political Theory of Animal Rights provided the inspiration for staging and recording the collective’s meeting debating the question of granting Wrocław’s pigeons resident status in the space of the city’s main railway station. This resulted in a film in which students took on the role of spokespersons with the task of presenting the positions of entities they selected (pigeons, rats, Polish State Railways, passengers, the city, enviromental activists).53 These activities served as a testing ground allowing us to form our own identity. They also allowed us to observe that we were interested in problems eluding disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, they enabled us to practise cooperation both engaging students and by building alliances within the university and outside of it.

While working on the project, we were also accompanied by Maciej Bączyk, an artist who – inspired by Aby Warburg's atlas method – created a visual story about the laboratory in the humanities in the form of a fanzine from illustrations collected by our team.