Here Any Question When a Cut and a Slice Are Just the Same
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Architectural Association The Slice: School of Architecture Cutting to See A cut and a slice is there any question when a cut and a slice are just the same. A cut and a slice has no particular exchange it has such a strange exception to all that which is different. A cut and only slice, only a cut and only a slice, the remains of a taste may remain and tasting is accurate. A cut and an occasion, a slice and a substitute a single hurry and a circumstance that shows that, all this is so reasonable when every thing is clear. — Gertrude Stein, What Happened: A Play (1922) Seeing is a matter of surfaces. It’s for this a secret order, spill lurid innards and open reason that both vision and representation new views. The convention of the architec- are continually haunted by the problem tural cross-section here finds its parallel of insides and outsides – the relationship in the physical sectioning of histological between the external and what lies within. specimens. The pleasures of the Paris- A merely perceptual matter? If only. It has ian voyeur meet the dutiful labours of the crept on us: the ocular paradigm of post- lumberjack. The earth itself, like an onion, Cartesian metaphysics gradually sublimed reveals its hidden structure. So take a look. this pervasive visual anxiety, creating in But remember, cutting to see is an object the process our basic metaphors for critical lesson in the violence of vision. The world inquiry itself: ‘superficial’ propositions, looks different when you wield an edge. ‘trenchant’ analysis, the joys of insight. THE SLICE is a laboratory for a With these matters in mind (and a future themed issue of Cabinet, a quarterly whetted blade in hand), the editors of non-for-profit magazine based in New York. Cabinet magazine here take up THE SLICE, Now in its tenth year, Cabinet embraces that clean incision that forever links the and promotes the most expansive definition sharp knife to the keen eye. Moving across of ‘culture’ possible, one that includes both historical moments and disparate fields, the quotidian and the extraordinary, in or- this exhibition examines the peculiar tradi- der to foster an ethic of curiosity about the tions that link visibility to the swift saw. world we have made and inhabit. From the cutaway view to the geometry of projection, from the microtome to the CAT- Exhibition curated by D. Graham Burnett Scan, from the surgeon’s scalpel to and Christopher Turner the sadist’s guillotine, the slice can reveal www.cabinetmagazine.org THE THIN FILM: VANNEVAR BUSH visualisation techniques in the biological delicate modification of the familiar car- tion – nothing less than an unspooling of AND VISION BY INCISION sciences.1 He called it an ‘Automatic Micro- penter’s plane. Interestingly, a set of six the tightly wrapped world of microscopic tome’, and his device – a dead end, finally, of his mounted specimens traded for more forms. D Graham Burnett in the history of technology, but a lovely than a common microscope circa 1800. If All this was handcraft. Knack. and suggestive dead end indeed – will you were a gentleman, and you owned one Technique. Skill. And I can say this with serve as a choice occasion for a moment’s of these bloody drawing-room conversation some confidence. Back when I still thought reflection on the charged intersections of doo-daads, you wanted to make sure you I wanted to be a doctor, I worked for a sum- the blade and the eye. had something interesting to look at with mer in an immunology lab, where I killed A word about microtomes, which it. Something to show the ladies. And that many hundreds of white mice and removed had been around for more than a century basically required a microtome, which you their pancreases. I then froze these sad by the time Bush began to think about how probably did not have – and couldn’t have little blood-sacks into tiny ice-cubes in they might be reinvented. At its heart, a made work if you did. long trays – all this being preparation for micro-tome is nothing more than its name Improvements in screw-cutting lowering them, one at a time, onto the stage implies: a fine-cutter, a cobbling together technologies in the early nineteenth of a refrigerator-sized cryotome (basically of the Greek words for ‘small’ and ‘cut’. The century (linked to the increasingly large a microtome built into a freezer). The point term itself seems to have been coined in and sophisticated industry producing then was to use a delicate brush and a nee- 1839 by the French microscopist Charles chronometers and navigational instru- dle and a little touch to crank out beautiful, Chevalier, but finely machined devices for ments) eventually gave rise to commercial long ribbons of paraffin-ice, each with its preparing transparently thin shavings of microtomes that allowed a user to advance little translucent smudge of pancreas. I was specimens can be traced back to the mid- the specimen onto the cutting blade with not very good at it. The project stagnated. In the late spring of 1952 the most power- eighteenth century at least. The technical great control, measuring out the slice in It is a testimony either to the difficulty of ful scientist in the world, Vannevar Bush, rationale for such mechanisms is clear micrometer increments. These devices – the technique, or to my troubled youth, submitted a short paper to Science, the enough: the higher magnification generated made by instrument makers in England and that I eventually nicked the extra cryotome American journal of record for investigators by increasingly sophisticated compound mi- Germany in particular – stimulated powerful knife, for which I made a handsome inlaid of nature. Little surprise there. By the early croscopes in this period placed a premium new techniques in the biological sciences. handle in the woodshop. I thought there 1950s Bush had been generating signifi- on powerful illumination; it is very difficult Combined with the development of chemical was something grand about owning the cant scientific results in half a dozen fields to get adequate light on an opaque speci- stains and embedding procedures (fixing a sharpest street blade in West Philadelphia. for some 30 years. In the 1920s his forays men placed vanishingly close to a strong soft specimen in a block of wax or jelly to It was not, however, convenient to carry, into radio signal amplification had led to objective lens. Much better to project the improve slice quality), reliable microtome being seven inches long and shaped like a the founding of the Raytheon Corporation light through the specimen. Not only does sectioning procedures allowed a new gener- blocky candy-bar. Nice handle, though. (soon a leading defence contractor), and this make it easier to concentrate and ation of medical doctors and anatomists in Which brings us back to Vannevar made him a very wealthy man. During the direct the light through the viewing tube, it the late-nineteenth century to make major Bush. His ‘automatic microtome’ repre- war his administrative gifts, technical savvy also permits the close examination of fine discoveries in pathology, histology and sented a prescient bid to get punks like me and diplomatic futurism propelled him to inner structures of the tissue itself. But embryology. From precise sequential slices out of the whole process. What he and his the helm of the Manhattan Project, and po- all this hinges on sectioning the specimen these investigators could reconstruct com- colleagues had designed was a microtome sitioned him to serve as the de facto archi- into sufficiently thin slabs – thin enough plex three-dimensional structures with geo- that – in principle – obviated all the fussy tect of American Cold-War science policy. to be translucent, and precise enough to metrical precision. It has even been argued lab-tech work with those delicate ribbons. It has been calculated that in the 1940s minimise depth of field problems during that certain mechanistic approaches to Instead, trading on the machinery at the something like two-thirds of US physicists focusing. Hand cutting will only get you so morphology and development in this period heart of a movie-camera, his device fed a were working either directly or indirectly for far on this, especially with rigid or messy can be understood to reflect the predilec- ribbon of modified 35mm Kodak film stock Vannevar Bush, who is now most often re- materials. tions of men who spent much of their lives through special tractor feeds down onto the membered for his visionary Memmex project The earliest documented micro- shaving reality into two-dimensional planes face of the specimen. The microtome blade, – a mechanical, extendable, configurable, tomes were in fact designed to cut whisper – and plotting the results on graph paper.2 working a little like a shutter, then shaved microfilm-based cognitive prosthetic fre- thin chips of wood. It had been plant tis- Eventually fancy rotary microtomes were off a micro-fine tranche which adhered to quently cited as a forerunner of the World sue, of course, that had lead the earliest even rigged up – machines that worked a the emulsion as it passed by. Presto! Turn Wide Web. microscopists to coin the term ‘cell’ back little like a modern deli-slicer, automatically the crank and the three-dimensional world So what was this titan of power/ in the seventeenth century – a word meant advancing the blade (or the sausage) on becomes a moving picture. Think of it as knowledge working on in the early 1950s? to liken these boxy microscopic structures each pass by a preset interval.