Developing a theory for the analysis of natural
scientific perception
Kulturvetenskap med samtidsinriktning 41-60
Konst, Kultur, Kommunikation
Written by Adam Brenthel
Table of contents
1. Introduction
3
Questions
4
Empirical method
5
Theoretical background
7
Disposition
9
2. The Practice of Visual Representation in Science
10
The theoretical framework – Part one
11
Theoretical framework - Part two
13
The Gaze and different episteme
15
3. The experiment
18
The work process
20
Preparations of the specimen for SEM
20
Analysing the image
23
4. The scientific gaze
25
The Image
25
The Observer
27
The role of education
28
The space of the gaze
29
References
30
Appendix 1
32
Appendix 2
33
Appendix 3
34
Appendix 4
35
Appendix 5
36
1. Introduction
The objective of this paper is to develop a theory for analysing the practice of representing the world with visualizations in the form of different images and the scientific gaze that renders these images meaningful. These images are often combined with text, since the natural sciences are lexivisual practices. For natural scientists these visual and lexivisual representations appear totally unproblematic. Scientific representations can be many kinds of pictures, graphs, tables or diagrams and are seen as vehicles of knowledge; in their concrete and tangible form we call them images but they can also be displayed, screened and projected. I will not directly deal with mental images or conceptions of the world, only as one way to understand what renders the tangible images meaningful. But of course, the conflict between a culturalistic and a natural scientific conception of the world runs through this paper, as the empirical material is natural scientific and the analysis is culturalistic.
Scientists use, produce and distribute the scientific images in their daily work. Still the images are not questioned at all within the scientific community, they are not reflected upon. I see mainly two general problems with the practice of scientific visual representation:
First, these visualizations are accessible and intelligible in their fullness only for scientists. This constitutes a relational problem of power between those who are scientifically educated and those who are not. The problem is not unique for natural science; every discipline of knowledge tends to exclude those who are not scientifically disciplined. The problem has been described as scientific visual illiteracy1.
Second, natural scientists lack in some aspects a reflexive
approach to their visualization practices. Maybe it’s home-blindness, or natural scientists acquire an aspect-seeing/blindness resulting from social or educational disciplining. These two problems should be critical for contemporary natural science; the apparatus for scientific image production is developing fast and are becoming more efficient and ubiquitous. We live in the “spectacle” age according to Guy Debord, Foucault claims that it is the “surveillance” society and Martin Jay suggest that we should study it as a “scopic regime”,
whereas W.J.T Mitchell has it that philosophy has taken a “pictorial turn” after the engagement with text. The point is that contemporary/post modern philosophy is totally engaged with the question of the image. Still natural scientists regard the image as unproblematic.
My working hypothesis; there is a natural scientific gaze that renders scientific images meaningful and useful. By developing a
theory for analysing and describing this gaze from a Cultural Studies perspective, the practice of visual representation in natural science will be opened up for criticism. The empirical departure point of this paper is a field study in a zoological laboratory. I follow a doctoral student working with a SEM – Scanning Electron Microscope. SEM is used for high magnification of non-living specimens. This paper brings into play the outcome of this laboratory work – the scientific images, the context of image production and the production of meaning for its analysis, which will be performed from a social, cultural, discursive and power perspective i.e. a Cultural Studies perspective. Since Cultural Studies by tradition is mostly engaged with the study of popular culture; film, television, pop-art, literature from a reader perspective, it is necessary to point out that I am not focusing on the popular perspective of science. That would be popularized science discourse but instead intra-relational science discourse and educational discourse, still from a “reader” vantage point, the trained or in-training scientist perspective.
Questions
1.How does the scientific gaze render the images meaningful in this particular experiment?
2. How is the scientific gaze of this researcher constituted?
Empirical method
Walking through the laboratory, observing, asking questions, sometimes socializing with the research colleagues. This was neither an interview situation, nor observation; instead it was a go-along,
as Kusenbach presents it2. The go-along overcomes the ambiguity when
choosing generally from the two methods in ethnography – interview or participatory observation. In the interview situation the object of inquiry is detached from the “normal” context, socially and spatially. The context and practices that produces meaning are absent. The material obtained will be limited to the questions the ethnographer raises and to what the informant recalls and retells. The other option, participatory observation, will produce less empirical material to work with since not much is said in the laboratory; lengthy periods of silence characterize the material obtained in the digital sound recorder. The time needed for conducting a proper participatory observation was not at hand. Laboratory shoptalk is incoherent and the work is hard to follow for
an outsider in the laboratory3, either the outsider gets in the way
or gets lost. Performing the go-along, the ethnographic observer follows the object in the daily life, in this case in the laboratory, taking notes, photos, asking question and acting in a normal way, in the meaning of blending into the surroundings. Kusenbach sees the following advantages with the go-along method as compared with interview or observation.
First, go-alongs unveil the complex layering and filtering of perception: they can help ethnographers reconstruct how personal sets of relevancies guide their informants’ experiences of the social and physical environment in everyday life. Second, go-alongs offer insights into the texture of spatial practices by revealing the subjects’ various degrees and types of engagement in and with the environment. Third, go-alongs provide unique access to personal biographies. They highlight the many links between places and life histories, thus uncovering some of the ways in which individuals lend depth and meaning to their mundane routines. Fourth, go-alongs can illuminate the social architecture of natural settings such as neighborhoods. They make visible the complex web of connections between people, that is, their various relationships, groupings and hierarchies; and they reveal how
2 Kusenbach. Street Phenomenology: The go-along as ethtnographic
research tool.
informants situate themselves in the local social landscape. Fifth, go-alongs facilitate explorations of social realms, that is, the distinct spheres of reality that are shaped by varying patterns of interaction. 4
Since the physical room, the laboratory, and other spaces too, both material and virtual, are important in this paper, a method that takes into account both environmental perception and spatial practices is well suited. The instructions I gave the researcher concerning my presence, was to treat me as he would treat a colleague, to use whatever words, concepts and language he normally would. My own background as biologist helped me to be treated more like a fellow colleague, and less like an ethnographer. The go-along allowed me to observe the shaping of perception as an insider, or as Kusenbach write:
Go-alongs can sensitize ethnographers to the idiosyncratic sets of relevancies that govern their informants’ environmental experiences. Being able to witness in situ the filtering and
shaping of their subjects’ perceptions. 5
I followed the experimenter with digital sound recorder and digital camera during three days of work, asking questions and observing, trying to witness just that filtering and shaping of perception. An obvious problem with my empirical method is that the go-alongs are short compared with the time our experimenter spent and will spend in the laboratory. Never the less, my own background as biologist, minimize the time spent to grasp the fundamentals of laboratory life, allowing me to focus on the experimenter and this particular experiment. The downside is that my background has shaped my own perception, the very same perception I now seek to describe. Being aware of that I still consider the chosen method well suited for this field study. Still, the go-along is described by Kusenbach as a
phenomenological method6 but my framework is cultural theoretical,
treating science production as a sociocultural practice. The relation between phenomenology and cultural studies could be problematized but that is a task for another paper.
4 Kusenbach. Street Phenomenology: The go-along as ethtnographic
research tool. p. 466.
5 ibid. p. 469. 6 Ibid. p. 455.
I will bring the laboratory to the reader of this paper since most readers probably never have been in a laboratory. The digital material obtained during those days is presented as a slideshow and a pod cast. The pod cast is used as an introduction to laboratory work and scientific image production, but it is also an empirical source of this paper. Even though this paper has a fieldwork as a point of departure, the focus will be the philosophical, historical, cultural and social context of laboratory work and scientific image production, not the actual work. The empirical material that I will use in the paper is limited to what was obtained during those days in the laboratory. Since the outcome of that work only is a small part of a coming article I cannot follow the images outside the institution, but the images will result in a zoological article later. There is only one complicating factor as I see it, to use too much of our researcher’s material would compromise the trust that made the go-along possible, unpublished material is delicate to handle because the yet not common known is very valuable.
Theoretical background
To begin this brief theoretical background; Ludwig Fleck was one of the first to question the epistemology of natural science from a
cultural and social perspective. The book The Genesis and Development
of a Scientific Fact, translated to English in 1935, can anachronistically be called an early social constructivist work. He
developed the concept of thought collectives, also known as thought
styles in the 1930s. In the book, Fleck argued that scientific facts are dependent on the collective way scientists think and that this thinking changes over time. Therefore, scientific truth is unattainable and scientific knowledge production cannot be unidirectional or cumulative. He did this, not as a trained philosopher or historian, but as a practising medical microbiologist. The same goes for Thomas S. Kuhn, also he a science practitioner, a physicist and not philosopher or sociologist, though he taught a course in history of science on Harvard in the late 40s to the mid 50s. Kuhn takes as his departure the thoughts of Fleck when he writes
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. Kuhn uses historical examples to show how the way scientists think has dramatically changed over time; the Copernican revolution, Lavoisier discovery of oxygen and disproval of the phlogiston theory and explaining what caused these changes. As the title reveals, the change in thinking over time is revolutionary, overthrowing old knowledge and way of
thinking, replacing it with new ways. The way scientists think and work is called a paradigm. In the beginning of a paradigm, new textbooks are written, the history rewritten to conform to current paradigm. New techniques and instruments are developed. Science in this phase is flourishing and very productive, the phase is called
normal science, in time anomalies and contradictions will arise within the paradigm, straining it but not giving away until a new credible paradigm can replace the old in a revolution. The new and the old paradigm are incommensurable, lacking a common ground for understanding each other, that is why the change must be revolutionary and this makes linear accumulation of knowledge impossible. Much is similar to the Foucauldian criticism of science, though Foucault focus on similarities within epistemes instead of the process of change and his concept is much broader, including all possible knowledge in a given time. After Kuhn groups of sociologists started to investigate scientific institutions, ethical norms and systems of rewards to give it sociological explanations. The most well known group is the “strong programme” (David Bloor, Barry Barnes, Steven Shapin), focusing on explaining scientific “beliefs”. The “strong programme” did not deal with the technical aspects of science but had an outsider perspective. The needs to understand science as a situated practice lead many academics to do methodological studies (Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michael Lynch, H.M. Collins, Steve Woolgar, John Law). One of the more known is Bruno Latour, a French sociologist of science who also has been engaged in the questioning of the scientific images. Latour claims that science only can be understood if studied as a practice and has been one of the founders of the Actant Network Theory (ANT). ANT is a constructivist attempt to describe the interaction between human and non-human in a material-semiotic network. The similarities to the material of this paper are apparent. The major works of Latour that
deals with these questions are Laboratory Life: The construction of
Scientific Facts and Science in Action. ANT has inspired many others within Social Studies of Science and Feminist Studies of Science. Foucault’s work opened up for the study of visual culture of medicine, for example Karin Johannisson and Lisa Cartwright. But
there are also Donna Haraway, writer of Manifesto for Cyborgs, Judith
Butler, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding to mention a few of the he feminist critics of scientific representation and language.
My theoretical framework for this paper consists of selected parts from the art historian Jonathan Crary, cultural theorist Martin Jay, feminist and film theorist Lisa Cartwright and Michel Foucault. I
draw mainly from these four to construct the theoretical framework (presented in chapter one) that will allow me to analyse the scientific gaze and the images. The first analytical assemblage is the episteme analysis that helps me to talk about science as a discursive practice and power. The second assemblage is the gaze as an epistemological apparatus – how seeing is connected to knowing.
Disposition
The next chapter gives a theoretical framework for the following two chapters. Here I present relevant work done by others on topics in the vicinity of mine and necessary theory and philosophy. It starts with a discussion on what characterizes the scientific images. Then follows the theoretical framework made from “Foucauldian bricks” that structures the analysis.
Chapter three is a description of the experiment that produced the images in question. It is both a basic protocol of how the experiment is carried out and a compilation of what was said about the produced images by the experimenter. This chapter is complemented with a slideshow and a pod cast.
In Chapter four I test my theory by applying it on the scientific gaze. Here I present my conclusions and suggestions on follow-ups.
2. The Practice of Visual Representation in
Science
Scientific images are often seen as naturalistic representations of the world, meaning derived from real life or nature but also being naturalistic in the artistic meaning of the word – true to life, realistic or mimetic representations. These images can in some way be described as naturalistic in the first meaning but not in the latter since scientific images are always rendered or transformed to become useful. Lynch describes four modes of transforming images to make them more useful or theoretical. These transformations are filtering, uniforming, upgrading and defining. Filtering can be removing unused visuality from the image material in order to direct the gaze toward relevant information or simply to extract material to make a separate diagram. When visual conventions are laid down over the image, for example using colour fields or shading, Lynch call it uniforming. Upgrading is when dim differences are made distinct or fragments missing are restored and when parts of the same structure are made more alike and at the same time different from other structure, the transformation is called defining. All this is done to make the image come closer to an eidetic image - a mental image of how it really looks, according to Lynch. Lynch’s four modes shed light on the fact that there are many different ways to make images more “scientific” and he contributes to a vocabulary on these images. The point is that scientific images are regarded as “naturalistic” – meaning showing the real, when they are rather showing an idea of what is real. The images correspond more to an eidetic conception than they are naturalistic images. An objection to this statement could be that the eidetic idea is constructed from naturalistic images. I will return
to this question in chapter three concerning the role of education.7
If you read a natural science article, there will be many images in it, whereas in an essay in the humanities is it likely that there will be no images. Natural science is both lexivisual in the meaning that image and text contribute to each other – images showing what the text says. But also that text can invade the images, becoming part of the visual. Apparently, there is no conflict between the text and image, they can reside on the same surface, elsewhere is this potential conflict taken as an explanation why studies on scientific images are so difficult. As Michael Lynch points out concerning the analysis of scientific visual documentation:
“Verbal propositions, arguments, references, analogies, metaphors, and ideas have received much greater attention as constituents of scientific reasoning and rhetoric. The imbalance may be due to the fact that methods for analysing verbal materials are more developed than those for analysing pictures. The fact that writing is the dominant medium of academic discourse is not incidental; while pictorial subject matter is alien to written discourse, and requires a reduction to make it amenable to analysis, written subject matter can be iterated without any “gap” within the
textual surface that analyses it”8
Still, this does not seem to stop the study of art or visual
culture. The “gap” that always is produced when describing the visual with text is maybe unbridgeable, but that is not wholly the answer to why scientists and academics often seem to avoid questions of the scientific images.
The theoretical framework – Part one
In the structuralist book The Order of Things9 Foucault outlines a
criticism of the history of knowledge. It is a comparative study of grammar with philology, biology with natural history, and study of wealth with political economy. Foucault tries to find the epistemological rupture on an archaeological plane that explains the transformation of philology into grammar, study of wealth into political economy and natural history into biology. These transformations occur about the same time for these three areas of knowledge. One discipline of knowledge cannot arise from the failure or absence of another. Biology and natural history may have knowledge of the same objects, but it is not the same knowledge. Natural history knew the history of many plants and animals, but not in the meaning of genealogy. Natural history knew the names and living
conditions of these plants and animals and placed them in a hortus
siccus, a dry garden. In these dry gardens the natural historian could arrange plants and animals according to their presumed relationships, every species at a god-given place. Linnaeus combined all histories of the living (and dead) he could find, giving every species a Latin name. But it was not a science of life. Life was first invented as biology arose on the historical scene, when Cuvier toppled the glass jars in the zoological museum in Paris. The
8 Representation in Scientific Practice ed.Lynch and Woolgar p.153. 9 Foucault. The Order of Things.
dissection of the animals in the glass jars opened up for new knowledge, the gaze now saw the invisible. Dissection and autopsy opened up the body to reveal life. Paradoxically, death was the price paid for knowledge of life. Foucault searched for the ruptures that explain this moment of dramatic transformation and find that they coincide for many areas of knowledge, pointing to an explanation on another level. These levels are called strata, borrowing from archaeology and geology. Foucault finds two fault lines in the epistemological bedrock that supports the strata above; they run under several areas of knowing 1650 and 1800 corresponding to the rise of natural history and the invention of life with biology.
Foucault has a constructivist view on science; he is one of the founders of social constructivist criticism of science. This is how
he articulates the aim of The Order of Things which describes his
position well:
I should like to know whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their
function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical
possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them. In short, I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individual who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse: what conditions did Linnaeus (or Petty, or Arnauld) have to fulfil, not to make his discourse coherent and true in general, but to give it, at the time when it was written and accepted – or, more exactly, as naturalist, economic, or grammatical discourse?”10 (My italics)
Following The Order of Things came The Archaeology of Knowledge11; it
can be read as a methodology book and is the end of Foucault’s
archaeological period12. His method to identify the epistemes that
explain what can be known during a certain epoch is discourse analytical. According to his method; to do a discursive/epistemic analysis you must go to the archives and read everything that has been written on a special subject, not discriminating between high and low, famous, infamous and unknown. The episteme determine all
10 Foucault. The Order of Things. p.xiv 11 Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 12 Jay. Downcast Eyes. p.407.
that can be said in a meaningful way, not only scientifically. An important point to make is that the episteme is not a repressive structure that is determined by those in “power”. The episteme in which power is exercised is productive, instead of only repressive. Power is always productive according to Foucault and power cannot belong to anyone but only be exercised in relations. It does not say
whether power is good or bad, only always present13
Foucault’s analysis of episteme is used in this paper to understand what unites the intra-science readers of scientific images and how the gaze is employed, not to find a repressive or conspiratorial superstructure. Power is exercised through the images, there is nothing behind them – everything is there on their flat surface. The episteme concept is used to talk about contemporary biology, as a mental tool to grasp the conceptual scaffold that makes possible science as a shared understanding.
Another possibility would have been to use the paradigm concept,
as Kuhn14 defines it or Flecks thought styles15. But the paradigm
concept focuses more on differences, why paradigms change over time and less on what unites them16.
Theoretical framework - Part two
The second Foucauldian theoretical brick that composes the framework of my analysis is the gaze as an epistemological apparatus. The Gaze
is a topic that Foucault designate primary in the books The Birth of
the Clinic and Surveillance and Punish but also in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. In Surveillance and Punish
Foucault presents an analysis of how visuality is deployed as a disciplining tool in contemporary society. He takes Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as a model for how that power is deployed in society
(1975), that analysis is probably what Foucault is most known for
today. Therefore is it necessary to stress that I am not doing an analysis from Foucault’s panopticon concept even though I will use
parts of Surveillance and Punish. From a visuality vantage point is
the “Society of surveillance” a consequence of the gaze as an epistemological apparatus. When Man becomes a subject with a gaze that produces knowledge, it is knowledge of man himself that is produced. Man becomes an “observed spectator”, observed by himself. “Man functioned both as an alleged neutral metasubject of knowledge
13 Foucault. Power.
14 Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
15 Ludwig Fleck. The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
and as its proper object, viewed from afar”17 I will use the part of
Foucault’s work that deals with seeing and knowing – how the gaze is connected to knowledge and how this gaze is deployed, not primarily to discipline others but to gain knowledge. Then, this potent gaze may be a product of discipline in school, which inevitably is a part of the panopticon.
In her book Screening the Body – tracing visual culture in
medicine, Lisa Cartwright uses Foucault as a starting point when analysing the “scientific” uses of cinema from a feminist perspective.
Foucault has described the penetration of the medical gaze into the interior of the body in the practice of pathological anatomy as “the technique of the corpse”. He notes that the opening up of the body in autopsy in hopes of exposing to sight the seat of disease ultimately failed to render pathology fully visible but lead the physician instead to traces of the disease mapped upon organs and surfaces. The qualitative and empirical gaze of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomoclinical perception that Foucault describes overlapped with and was ultimately challenged by the relentless analytical and quantitative gaze demonstrated in the cases considered in this volume, a mode of perception carefully incubated within the laboratories of physiologist and medical scientists and finding its expressions in an unlikely range and mix of institutions and practices, including the hospital, the popular cinema film, the scientific experiment, and modernist artwork.18
Cartwright shows how the film, which records and quantifies the visual, complements the gaze and sometimes challenged it. Film becomes a tool for the gaze in medicine. Much work has been done on the medical uses of images; Foucault is the main contributor and departure point of that discourse. Even though scientists of the zoological laboratory use some of the same techniques that medicine uses for producing knowledge, science and medicine are not identical practices. It is an obvious statement, but humans and animals come from the same origin, and from a biologist standpoint humans are animals. But from a political standpoint humans are not animals; animals do not have the same rights as humans for example. That could be one reason why less critical work has been done concerning the
17 Foucault. The Order of Tings. p.318.
visualization in natural science than in medicine – medicine is in part a political instrument. That can to some extent explain why the usage of images in medicine is more studied than in natural science, even though it is principally the same images. Foucault shows how medicine became a science by using a language, both verbally and visually that is analogue to natural science, but natural science itself stay a somewhat blind spot.
The Gaze and different episteme
On the exterior, on the surface of the body, signs had to be read in
order to establish what the patient was suffering from in 18th century
medicine. If this reading is pursued correctly, seeing will say what disease it is, but only if the patient died was it possible to know more precisely which disease it was. In autopsy, in the interior of the body, on surfaces of the tissues of the organs – there is the disease totally visible and thereby knowable. Death is paradoxically the key to knowledge of life. This is maybe the most fundamental difference from a Foucauldian perspective between early medicine and natural science, in biology it was and still is politically accepted to kill for knowledge, not in medicine. Model animals are brought up and carefully studied only to be experimented on and killed in a more
controlled way; for example the well known fruit fly Drosophila
melanogaster. The fish that is used in this experiment is one of the first (or last) animals seen from an evolutionary perspective that has animal rights since it belong to the group of the most primitive vertebrates. Swedish law draws a line between vertebrates and
invertebrates; only animals with backbone have rights.19 There are
much more politics in medicine than in biology, explaining the pursuit to unveil medicine. I am not trying to show that science also has a political foundation as Foucault showed that medicine has. Even though I consider the foundation of science ideological, we can choose to call that foundation an episteme, a paradigm or evidence based practice, depending on where we come from academically.
The qualitative gaze was replaced with a quantitative gaze as the surface of the inner organs and tissues did not reveal everything about life. Cartwright traces this epistemic shift and it coincides with the usage of film in medicine. In the natural sciences the shift probably came earlier, maybe with the organic chemistry. But it is not the aim of this paper to find that shift; I only conclude that
19 Supplement till Centrala Försöksdjursnämndens skriftserie Nr 45, p.
natural science is a quantitative science. Modern biology episteme is dominated by molecular techniques that can be nothing but quantitative. But the gaze is still a qualitative tool eclipsed by the natural sciences self-identification as quantitative. Still, the theoretical point of departure used by Cartwright with her focus on how the objects of study is disciplined can be used for the study of visual culture of natural science. Jonathan Crary on the other hand leaves the objects and the visual material behind and focuses on the observer, asking how the modern observer has been constructed and described, an approach that I will borrow from to get a hold on the scientist as beholder of the gaze:
Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations. And by “conventions” I mean to suggest far more than representational practices. If it can be said there is an observer specific to
nineteenth century, or to any period, it is only as an effect of
an irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations. There is no observing
subject prior to this continually shifting field.20
His intention is to write an alternative history of vision, using different vision devices he searches for archaeological ruptures, borrowing from Foucault, contesting accepted art history of vision:
Whether perception or vision changes is irrelevant, for they have no autonomous history. What changes are the plural forces and rules composing the field in which perception occurs. And what determines vision at a given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or worldview, but rather the function of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface. It may even be necessary to consider the observer as a distribution of events located in many different places. There never was or will be a self-present beholder to whom a world is transparently evident.21
Crarys work is useful in my analysis of the interpreter of scientific images. As soon as you claim that there is no “self-present beholder to whom a world is transparently evident”, then you must examine the
20 Crary, Techniques of the obsever. p.6. 21 ibid.
beholder to know what this beholder sees, but the individual beholder
is only interesting as a member of a discursive episteme22. I will
examine what the scientist in the SEM-laboratory sees in the scientific images, not to psychologize or historize him but to conclude from that what the episteme makes possible to see. According to Crary is it possible to grasp this observer by studying practices distributed in many different places, but on a single social surface, the laboratory in my case.
3. The experiment
This experiment is carried out to reveal a story. The story of how vision has evolved on earth. In the images produced during this experiment, there are signs that can be interpreted to tell that story, but these signs are maybe only legible to the scientist, to others the images stay mute but beautiful. By retelling and analysing the story of this experiment, I hope to reveal a story of the scientific gaze.
The aim for our experimenter’s PhD project is to establish
relationships in critical vertebrate groups by studying eye morphology. He is doing this within a larger group of other doctoral
students, senior researcher and professors, constituting The Vision
Group in Lund.23 On their homepage, they describe their research:
Our specialty is the design and evolution of eyes, and especially how eyes are adapted to the lifestyles and habitats of animals. Four major research themes are pursued, with techniques ranging from optics, electrophysiology and theoretical modeling, to
electron microscopy, molecular biology and visual behavior.24
The four major research themes pursued in The Vision Group are: eye designs, evolution and development of visual systems, vision in dim light, and color and polarization vision. Our researcher is engaged in eye design and the evolution and development of visual systems, where he is focusing on the lamprey, bichir, lake sturgeon and shark. By doing visual analysis (microscopy, schlieren photography and lens
laser scanning, in vivo photo refractor metrics) he is establishing
the relations of these fishes and thereby the genealogy and the development of multifocal lenses; which are enabling colour vision in eyes with short depth of focus, necessary for colour vision under water. The work our researcher performs is done with the most modern of instruments, high-tech and very expensive. He is working within the modern molecular paradigm, but visual culturally he is still connected to Linnaeus. Today, genetics is presented, at least in popular writings of science, as the final solution to the question of genealogy. But as our researcher points out, genetics are still “only a qualified guess based on mathematical algorithms”. True evolutionary relations can always be discussed, and there will always be lacunas in the family tree. Extinct species will be unknown unless
23 www.biol.lu.se/cellorgbiol/visiongroup
they are found as fossils and it is hard to extract DNA from fossils since it degrades. Many extinct species have lived on our planet but today no physical trace of them can be found. Our researcher will do genetic analysis in a specific genetic locus on all species he is studying. The genetic constitution of an individual organism is called a genotype; the expressed and visible character is the corresponding phenotype. These are the two levels of analysis that he is working on. In the visible analysis, which is the level I am studying, he is searching for morphological characteristics that can be compared with the closly related fishes presented above. The visible analysis he uses is in some way the same conceptual model as Linnaeus used. As Linnaeus belonged to an earlier episteme, that of natural history according to Foucault, there are interesting comparisons that can be made on the level of visual culture between a qualitative and a quantitative epistemology. I will return to this in the last chapter.
The aim of this particular experiment was to magnify the eye of a
Cuvier’s bichir, Polypterus senag a l u s, to establish useful
characters. By comparing with fish he studied before, discussions with his supervisor and consulting the literature, three loci in these fish eyes seem to be particularly interesting. These loci are; the attachment of the lens to the eye globe; which can be an intraocular muscle plus one or more suspensor ligaments, one or several membranes, a ciliary body with ligaments and an extra-ocular muscle. The second locus of interest is the stiffness of the lens, which is hard to measure but is felt during dissection. The third locus is the surface of the lens cells, which constitutes the lens; these are always elongated but can be flat, round, regular, irregular or protrusion/spotted. Other locus in the structure of the eye may prove useful later, hopefully they will be found in the work process. Everything is documented as image files with names connecting them to species and structure. This is done to create a gallery of images where characters can be compared to study possible relationship. This experiment, as most ones, is part research and part training – training both for the researcher’s eyes and hands. Many images have been and will be produced with the SEM without knowing exactly what he is looking for, rather he does it for the sake of looking, training his eyes, establishing an aspect seeing. The eye characters that will be valuable for the production of articles will hopefully appear before his eyes, maybe on images where they could not be seen before in his dry garden, the digital gallery.
The work process
The work from preparation of necessary solutions of buffers and fixation to the final image took four days in the laboratory, spread out over two weeks. I followed the experiment during three days. When the specimen is fixated and dry, it can be stored for quite a long time, many months in a freezer. Good specimen will be stored, only degrading when used in the SEM, due to the harsh electron treatment. The preparation text that follows will be complemented with a slideshow and pod cast.
Preparations of the specimen for SEM
After a meeting in the institution concerning the economical compensation for teaching undergraduate classes, our researcher started the experiment looking for a colleague that had some spare buffer. Preparations take most of the time and this was an attempt to save some time. A buffer is a mixture of an acid and alkali (the opposite of an acid), reacting with each other. The buffer solution prevents the pH to drop or rise violently when other acids or alkali is poured into it; this is to protect the specimen in it. The specimen must stabilize before further handling like cutting, fixation and other necessary preparations. The search for leftover buffer ended with doubts over what was in the beaker found. After a long discussion with colleagues about where the first colleague was and where she kept her notes and what really was in the beaker he found, it seemed risky to use her unknown buffer. So an hour or two was spent finding empty clean beakers, calculating and weighing chemicals in the chemical room, dissolving it in pure water with a special magnetic stirring device. The laboratory is located in an old five-story building, beautiful but not practical, our researcher moves between the stories three, four and five and the basement, this takes time. When the chemicals for the buffer are dissolved, plastic is put over the beaker and two smaller cups are labelled with date and name. It is time to take the elevator to the aquarium in the basement and select the fish for today’s preparation. All the fishes in the aquarium is ocularly examined, sick fishes must be removed quickly before infections are spread to other fishes. Today all fishes look healthy. Our researcher chooses a medium size fish and catch it with a bag net, then put it in a bucket with lid. The fish in the bucket and the experimenter take the elevator back to fifth floor. Scissors and pliers are prepared for the execution of the fish, the neck spine is cut in two, but the Bichir continues to move during the removal of the eyes, though it is dead. The eyes are
removed under a light microscope (10X) since it is a delicate job extracting interesting parts, leaving tissue that obstructs the gaze. The skill necessary comes from experience, our researcher is in the beginning of his doctoral education and the work is part research and part education. Another fish is therefore brought up from the aquarium to secure success in the experiment; it is hard to tell whether the removal was successful before it is under the SEM due the smallness.
Washing and fixation
The four eyes is labelled and put into the prepared buffer with glutaraldehyde for washing and fixation (glutarladehyde is a colourless liquid used to sterilize medical and laboratory equipment and embalming specimen). Samples can be dirty or clean depending on what one is interested in. The interior of the eye is interesting in this experiment and all exterior will be perceived dirt. The two first eyes are cut open and dissected before fixation. The second pair is first fixated and later dissected, an invention made today during the work process. Four small plastic beakers with the eyes are placed in a fridge for 12 hour to fixate.
Dehydration
The next day is the buffer/fixation solution poured out from the plastic beakers and 99.6% ethanol alcohol is poured into them. Rests of buffer and fixation in the eye will dissolve into the alcohol, after 15 minutes the alcohol is poured out and replaced with new alcohol. The buffer and fixation are water based and must be removed from the specimen to dehydrate it. It is crucial to dehydrate the specimens due to the vacuum in the SEM. If there is water or other liquids in specimen it will immediately evaporate from inside destroying it, which is why living specimen cannot be examined in SEM. Alcohol has the ability to dissolve both water and lipids and therefore it is a suitable agent for removal of water. This process is carried out 10 times, i.e. this takes half a day, leaving 10 minutes windows for studying articles, writing and preparing other setups. Laboratory life is time fragmented.
Drying
When the specimen is dehydrated it can be dried or stored in alcohol. Alcohol is a preserving agent and a step on the way to a dry sample. The specimen has so long been submerged in a liquid, first a buffer/fixation and now pure alcohol. Drying is a critical work
moment since we have to move from one phase to another, from liquid to gas – that is drying. It is very violent for delicate specimen to cross phase borders. Great forces can rip fragile structures apart from inside. The solution for our researcher is to use a Critical Point Dryer. This is a dryer where the alcohol, which the specimen is in, is mixed in a small chamber at 10° C with carbon dioxide in high pressure. High enough pressure will liquefy the carbon dioxide and it will thereby be in the same phase as the alcohol. The alcohol is dissolved since it is both water and lipid soluble as is carbon dioxide when it is liquid. Then a valve is opened, pressure drops as gas flows out bringing some alcohol with it. The valve is closed and new carbon dioxide is let in the chamber and the pressure rises, dissolving more alcohol. The process is repeated till all alcohol is removed, the experimenter knows this when it doesn’t smell alcohol from the valve. When all alcohol is removed the temperature and pressure is raised above 31.1° C and 72.9 bar with the valve closed. This is the critical point for carbon dioxide, meaning that if both now temperature and pressure is dropped below this point simultaneous the carbon dioxide will go from liquid to gas without crossing a phase border i.e. the liquid has no surface as it turns into gas simultaneous in the whole chamber. Now the chamber can be opened, revealing a dry specimen, hopefully intact.
Mounting
The specimen is now mounted on a 12 mm aluminium cylinder with tape or glue. It must be in contact with the cylinder to ground it electrically; otherwise it will be damaged in the SEM. To increase the conductivity of the specimen it is coated with a thin layer of gold and platinum. Gold/Platinum is dissolved electrically in a sputter coater machine that covers the specimen placed in it. The thickness of the coating is 15-20 nm, 1 nm is a 1/1000 000 of 1 mm; very thin but it is never the less the gold surface that will be screened later. When the specimen comes out from the sputter it has changed colour from whatever it was before to black metallic.
Scanning Electron Microscope
The SEM apparatus is located in a room with compressors and computers in a vibration absorbing arrangement. Motions and vibrations in the room will affect the outcome of the SEM, creating striped or distorted images. The four cylinders with fish eyes are placed in a holder with numbers on. This holder is placed in the sample chamber, the stage of the microscope, the chamber is closed and the
compressors are turned on. High vacuum is created in the chamber to avoid that gas molecules interfere with the electron beam. Electrons are “shot” at the specimen to generate the image; since electrons have a much shorter wavelength than visible light they can depict smaller structure. The resolution of a SEM is about 1-20 nm, not enough to see singular atoms but almost. The electron source is heated up and the computer starts up. It takes a couple of seconds before the overview screen image turns up. It is a low definition image that permits the operator to turn and zoom in real time to orient his gaze.
Analysing the image
First the experimenter has to “find” his samples; a round edge turns up, then a big number three, covering the whole screen. We are still only looking on the holder of the cylinders on which the samples are mounted. After some fixing with the adjustment wheels a fish eye turns up on the screen. The experimenter’s focus is now directed towards the computer screen, the detector in the SEM is manoeuvred with tuning wheels on a control panel, the result shows up on the screen. Depending on level of magnification, the tuning wheels can be more or less sensitive. The specimen in the electron chamber has turned into an object-image on a screen.
- That is beautiful, is the first comment from our experimenter. He has inspected the samples under light microscopy before they where placed in the SEM, number three he suspected to be the best preparation, now he has a confirmation on that suspicion. An overview screen image is scanned with high-resolution; earlier only low resolution scanning has been used to enable real time movement on the screen. The high-resolution screen image is printed out on paper, “good to have so that you don’t lose your self on the screen”. Our experimenter move around in the image, zooming in and out, for an untrained eye it is hard to get oriented. I feel a little nauseous.
- What do we see on the screen?
- This is the lens, and that is ligaments, and a muscle.
- The muscle is interesting cause it can help me to see differences between species. I think it is a helpful character. This is a really good image….
- What is the difference to light microscopy?
- Similar pictures can be generated in light microscopy, but many interesting parts are transparent, cannot be seen in light microscopy. But the big difference is the possibility of
magnification. It is a very good image, it was what I was looking for today, let’s save this image.
-Let’s put out the light in the room so we see more details. But there are some detritus in the sample, from clothes, fibres maybe. Artefacts, suspicious, debris from the preparation, and when drying it shrinks.
- Can you tell if the preparation changed the specimen?
- I photographed it under light microscopy before drying, making it possible to measure the grade of shrinkage, but probably a couple of percents. Things change during preparation, and I write that in the article, but everybody knows these things, the solution for me is to look on many samples.
-Thin structures vibrate and may cause imperfect image, we can magnify 10.000 with this SEM and still have good images. Does this ligament belong to this structure, hard to tell? Where does it come from?
-How can you differ a ligament from a muscle if they have the same colour here?
-I know it from the light microscope, where they have different colours. And it is possible to dye tissue to know what it is, if it is hard to tell, but that is work to do later. Now I want as information rich images as possible, this does not look the same as other bonefishes. It is easy to lose the orientation of the fish eye during preparation, another time I have to orient it under light microscopy and then embed it in gelatine. The first time I look in a new eye, it is most about my orientation. The literature on the topic does not comply with reality, but we are the only group working with these fishes vision, so there are very few articles published to compare with.
4. The scientific gaze
To answer my questions, this analysis will be carried out from two ends, from the image and from the observer. These two meets in a site, in this case, it is the stage of the microscope, where the scientific discourse intersects a material practice. It is a site where the corporeal specimen loses its materiality as is turns up on the screen, turning into an object-image, still corporeal but to become totally immaterial. When it meets the gaze of the scientist, it becomes scientifically useful and scientific “truths” can be stated.
The residence of truth in the dark centre of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze that turns their darkness into light. All light has passed over into the thin flame of the eye, which now flickers around solid objects
and, in so doing, establishing their place and form.25
The Image
What was described in chapter three is nothing but the disciplining and removal of nature, since science is a cultural practice, nature
must be subtracted26. All those steps that took the fish swimming in
the aquarium to the object-image are disciplining processes. The particular specimen is detached from corporeality and turned into a general scientific and cultural artefact. Science is knowledge about the universal or general. From knowledge of the general, the particular can be predicted, but general knowledge is produced from the particular.
The particular fish eye cut out and still bloody, is to body-laden to ascend to universality (appendix 1). Under the light microscope, which was before washing, fixation, drying, mounting and coating it could be turned into a photomicrograph, a little more knowable, but only used to estimate shrinkage and to select the specimen to focus on later (appendix 2). And even as is it turned into an image on the screen it was only one example of one individual fish eye (appendix 3). When the researcher decides on specific loci of interest it starts to ascend to universality (appendix 4 and 5). These loci are described and what is found there is transcribed into words and named if they yet have no name, this is a passage from visuality to text, the gap is bridged as the object has been dissolved. Every character
25 Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic. p.xv. 26 Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic. p.7.
that our researcher finds interesting is scanned and saved as a high-resolution image in a gallery. It is the same practice as the natural historian’s undertake, “a meticulous examination of things themselves for the first time, and then of transcribing what is has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words”.
The corpus of the fish eye is eclipsed by a gold/platinum surface on the stage of the SEM; it is only a reflection that is turned into an image. This is symptomatically for this seeing practice since it is as much to exclude, as it is to interpellate nature when deploying the gaze. The SEM renders everything in a grey scale and this is more of an advantage than detrimental, because “everything that presents itself to our gaze is not utilizable: colours especially can scarcely
serve as a foundation for useful comparisons”27. Colours are more or
less subjective as they are a function of the agency of light, depending on what kind of light that illuminates a surface it is perceived different. In the SEM, electrons have that agency. However, very colourful SEM images are often seen in popular writings of science. These images are more the result of Photoshop then they are to be used for scientific purposes; colour is added in a way that reflects the producer eidetic conception of the invisible world. It is an invisible world since visible light (400-700 nm) is too crude
to penetrate to the “truth in the dark centre of things”28
This tabulated juxtaposition of words and things in the dry garden, which is our researchers digital image gallery is, but only when it is dense enough, the foundation of his seeing and knowing. The articles he will produce during his PhD project will be constructed from this material, even though he yet do not know what articles he will write. Our researcher has chosen a method where only characters on specific loci are relevant in a constructed system. “The system is arbitrary in its basis, since it deliberately ignores all differences and all identities not related to the selected structure. But there is no law that says that it will not be possible to arrive one day, through a use of this technique, at the discovery of a natural
system”29. The natural system as opposed to for example Linnaeus
artificial system for classifying is the ambition to reveal true relationship of all species. It was obvious for Linnaeus that his system was a construction. Today, genetics has been presented as the way to establish a true natural system, but some vertebrate groups
27 Foucault. The Order of Things. p.133. 28 Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic. p.xv. 29 Foucault. The Order of Things. p.140.
escape this ambition, our researcher call these groups critical. But in between two epistemic different practices, one quantitative molecular genetic and one qualitative visually classifying, our researcher believes that his method can give these critical groups there proper place.
Two characters are easily turned into images, the attachment of the lens and the structure of the lens fibres (appendix 4 and 5). Whereas the third character, the stiffness of the lens is not visible but tactile, and could not be turned into an image during this experiment. But later our researcher will construct a technical device, a heave where one end will be applied on to the lens, the other end equipped with a thin laser beam that point at a scale. In this way is tactility turned into visuality, allowing the gaze to be deployed.
The Observer
It is apparently a privileged place our researcher has found, or created, a place were very few have been before him. He feels thrilled, “it’s a beautiful image”. There are no precise words that describe this place, no final words or complete descriptions that circumscribes his perception. It is as “The gaze will be fulfilled in its own truth and will have access to the truth of things if it rests
on them in silence, if everything keeps silent around what is sees” 30
-Let’s put out the light in the room so we see more details, he suggests. Theory is silent when gazing writes Foucault, but theory is still bound up with its armature. “This gaze, then, which refrains from all possible intervention, and from all experimental decision, and which does not modify, shows that its reserve is bound up with the strength of its armature.” Gazing at the screen in the dark room, everything seems clear and the armature that holds up the gaze is silent. To grasp the construction of the gaze, this armature must be analysed as an “irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive,
social, technological, and institutional relations”31 In this
analysis, the role of education and the space of the gaze.
30 Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic. p.132 31 Crary, Techniques of the obsever. p.6. 31 ibid.
The role of education
The journey from visible to invisible parallels in the experiment is the reversal of the sequence of courses on the biology programme. The first course our researcher began with, if he followed the
recommended course plan was physical chemistry, followed by organic
chemistry, biology and chemistry of the cell, genetics, microbiology, physiology of plants or humans, zoology or botany, faunistics, floristics and probably last ecology. These are the compulsory course for a degree in biology, with some variation depending on what kind of degree you want. If you are more interested in animals than plants
you choose zoology instead of botany and you chose between physiology
of humans or plants but otherwise; these are the courses you must have in your degree. The sequence of courses is regarded as a
necessity but not an obligation, the student need to know physical
chemistry to know organic chemistry and organic chemistry to know
biology and chemistry of the cell because the reactions in the cell are of course organic chemical. When the student understands basic cell and functions the focus moves towards cell-to-cell interactions.
Genetics follows cell biology to explain how the cell and the organism have evolved and how they reproduce. Then how cells form tissues and then how these tissues form organs, which explains how the individual organism is organised. After that, the student gets acquainted with the organisms and their names, floristics and faunistics. When the student recognizes the plants and the animals, the ecological course explains the laws of interactions between different organisms. The student has now spent two years of study, from the atom to the molecule to the organelle to the cell to the tissue to the organ to the organism to the organism interaction with other organisms - from the very small intangible to the visible and
corporeal.32 When this conception of the world has been established,
the student has a scientific gaze, now is he able to explain why zebras are striped on a molecular level.
In the laboratory on the undergraduate level is the biological, chemical and physical knowledge tested against “reality” in pedagogic experiments. This is to confirm theoretical knowledge in practice but also to discipline. Laboratory protocols must be followed strictly and basic methods learned. Supervisors, often doctoral students, evaluate the student-experimenters performance and check the results against theory and test substances. The laboratory is hierarchically organised and “the laboratory visual culture is, after all, a culture
of human corporeal supervision and discipline, even in the case where
the human body is not directly studied.”33 The laboratory is a part of
the panopticon on the level of education; only the disciplined scientist is allowed to deploy the gaze.
When the compulsory courses are taken, the student makes the
choice of what direction he/she wants as advanced courses are chosen. The advanced course are often connected to a institution, in our case was it the zoological institution where he also did his examination project on the methodology he now is applying in his PhD project. Education has in some way fostered him into his PhD project, of course by his own choice, but it was a necessary way to take to get where he is now.
The space of the gaze
In the laboratory, in the position of PhD student, he is given access to the instruments and a social and cultural context that allows him to deploy his gaze as an epistemological apparatus. His supervisor guides him toward the appropriate use when they design experiments together. The first year is dedicated to learn the practice of visual representation, to create an image gallery and, to orienting his gaze towards the design of fish eyes in critical vertebrate groups.
He transforms particular specimen, with help of the instruments in the laboratory, into images that corresponds to the natural scientific conception of the physical world. This is an eidetic image of the world that only exists as a platonic ideal of the modern biological episteme. In this platonic place do mathematics, physical law, chemical reaction and ecological theories, explain everything, and this place is structured in layers corresponding to the sequel of course presented above. Mathematics explaining physics, physics explaining chemistry, chemistry explaining ecology and, ecology explaining all interactions among the living. When approaching the physical world out there, observations are interpellated on the right level of knowledge and disciplined into general knowledge on the level of physics, chemistry and mathematics. When nature is subtracted, the gaze sees and knows.
With this paper, I have drawn a conceptual diagram of how the natural scientific gaze is deployed in comparative zoology. In some way is this is also a (mental) visualization of the order of things, and this diagram would be an image to add to other images, yet this image stands to challenge the previous ones in a quest for multiplicity. The in-depth analysis of visual culture and the gaze in zoology and other natural sciences will be undertaken in a coming paper where the theoretical assemblage developed here will be employed.
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Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
The first image that was taken during this experiment in the SEM. It was printed out on paper to be used as an overview image or a map during operating the SEM.
Appendix 4
The suspension of the lens. This is one of the characters to be closer examined and compared to other species.
Appendix 5
A lens cut in half, showing lens fibres, the second character search for during this experiment but this is from another experiment. This is from a lamprey.
