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Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Membranes Surfaces

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Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Membranes Surfaces MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2011 PREPRINT 420 Mathias Grote & Max Stadler (eds.) Membranes Surfaces Boundaries Interstices in the History of Science, Technology and Culture Table of Contents Introduction – “Membranes, Surfaces, Boundaries” Mathias Grote and Max Stadler ............................................................................................................ 3 Epistemically Active Surfaces Königsberg 1851 – Helmholtz and the Surface of Time Henning Schmidgen .............................................................................................................................. 13 The Twofold History of Laboratory Glassware Kijan Malte Espahangizi ...................................................................................................................... 27 The Penetrated Surfaces of Ballistic Photography Lars Nowak ........................................................................................................................................... 45 Perceiving Boundaries From Harmony to Intensity – The Cultural Life of the Membrana Basilaris Veit Erlmann ......................................................................................................................................... 79 ‘B Moves Farther than it Should Have Done’ Perceived Boundaries in Albert Michotte’s Experimental Phenomenology of Perception Sigrid Leyssen ........................................................................................................................................ 85 Bodies, Interstices, and the Victorian Imagination Tina Young Choi ................................................................................................................................. 105 Boundaries of the Living: From Un-dead Surfaces to the Politics of Surfaces The Vitality of Membranes: Artificial Cells as Boundary Objects Thomas Brandstetter .......................................................................................................................... 115 Surface Politics and the Transformation of Waste into Energy Lisa M. Cockburn ............................................................................................................................... 125 From the Atomic Age to Anti-Aging: Shaping the Surface between the Environment and the Organism Alexander von Schwerin ..................................................................................................................... 135 Membranes, Surfaces, Boundaries. Creating Interstices .................................................................. 159 Introduction – “Membranes, Surfaces, Boundaries” Mathias Grote and Max Stadler Surfaces, Membranes, and Boundaries, one should think, belong to the more intimately familiar things. Not unlikely that you will be reading this text on a screen composed of liquid crystals or sheets made up of cellulose (familiar things indeed); venture outside, and most likely your gaze will not penetrate much further than a great many façades, Schaufenster, and streets paved with greyish asphalt. Take any object, in fact – it is arguably only in virtue of its surface – reflecting, vibrating, separating, or transducing – that it will make itself noticeable in the first place. “From the phenomenon of plant osmosis to the ordinary straining of breakfast coffee,” as the allegedly first text book on industrial filtration noted in 1923 (somewhat nonplussed), surfaces are active and surrounding us “constantly on every side, although [they are] seldom noticed or appreciated as such” (Bryden and Dickey 1923). No doubt about it: the world, more often than not, is and has been appreciated in its compactness, as stuff, things, and objects; far less so, in its interstices. Science, technology and culture are permeated and traversed by boundary phenomena, of course. From the materialities of life itself – whether cellular membranes, skin, immune-systems or ecological habitats – to surface, separation and purification processes in chemistry and industry to the making, processing and exhibition of photographs and films, things coalesce(d) at surfaces. They are palpable as well in the history of geography and politics, of urban and private spaces, of literature, art, psychology and the self; or again, as interfaces in contemporary media theory (and Western lives). They are, so much seems true, “constantly on every side”. But is there anything that unites these – evidently most diverse and slightly peculiar – “things”, family resemblance and metaphoric resonances apart? Or, more interesting perhaps (and certainly less metaphysical) – profound semblance or not, to what kind of questioning, to what kind of novel historical perspectives might this special class of phenomena lead us? Such, at any rate, were the questions intensely occupying the minds of a small group of scholars – and a few artists and a (considerable) number of exhibition-goers, too – on three consecutive days in October 2010. They had come together in Berlin following our invitation to think about their work in relation to this very theme, Membranes, Surfaces and Boundaries; and in particular, to think about this as a matter of materiality, intersections and sites of exchange (and hence, of non-disciplinary histories). For, clearly enough, there is nothing especially abstract or metaphoric about these seldom noticed and appreciated phenomena as such. Nor do most of them share the intellectual and aesthetic sex-appeal of those sleek and shiny interfaces constantly surrounding us (First-Worlders) in particular (just think of, say, “industrial filters” – rather than “video”): surfaces, membranes, boundaries and the like tend to exhibit quite definite levels of concreteness, exerting their omnipresent, indeed mundane agency in virtue of their specific, material compositions and constitutions. At the same time, few concepts would seem to display similar degrees of flexibility and mobility, forever resurfacing, as it were, in other sites and contexts. Consider films – in defiance of common expectations, this was and is a topic rarely concerned with “the cinema” only, as the British colloid chemist William Bate Hardy once noted, but with the exceedingly complex and in any case essential “films spread over the surface of each living cell” and ‘those thin films of matter, familiar to all in the form of soap bubbles or lubricating films of oil’ (Hardy 1936). 3 Mathias Grote and Max Stadler Surfaces, then, perhaps tend to be both: abstract and concrete, thing and non-thing, real and imagined, visible and invisible, spectacular and most prosaic; more interestingly even, or so it would appear on somewhat closer inspection, they in this way tend to be ontologically elusive, not unambiguously belonging to any one particular domain. Certainly no single discipline, field of knowledge or locale, as Hardy above reminds us, could make claims to being the sole purveyor of “films”. Much the same, of course, is true of those innumerable membranes, surfaces and boundaries – solid, porous, virtual and otherwise – that connect, separate and delineate things as well as places and people. And yet, very little historical and theoretical work has been done in terms of thinking, or at least bringing these various surface phenomena together, notwithstanding widely floated notions such as boundary objects or liminality, hailing from science studies and elsewhere; or, their occasional and often enlightening treatment by, say, historians of culture and art; or again, the growing literature in the history of science on things and their materiality. 1 Or that such was regrettably the case, that surface phenomena never quite received the kind of sustained attention they perhaps deserved, was the impression the three of us had when the idea for the workshop Membranes, Surfaces and Boundaries – documented in this preprint – first flickered up sometime in early 2009. It then seemed to us (and indeed it turned out to be) an immensely rich and promising sphere of historical phenomena poised to make a great diversity of scholars speak to one another – on the level of things and phenomena, rather than theory. Our small venture into this challengingly heterogeneous topic began when Mathias Grote presented his research on membrane biology in the 1970s at the Max-Planck-Institute in June 2009. Laura Otis, one of those present, was naturally inclined to the topic, having written a well- known book on Membranes already some ten years ago. Then, she had analysed their role as metaphors of in- and exclusion in 19th century science and literature. Another attendant, Max Stadler, also was deeply immersed in matters of surfaces at the time, then being in the final stages of his PhD thesis on the sciences of the cell in the first half of the 20th century. A rare occasion, we thought, to have three people in only one room working on such a topic, and we quickly discovered that we would be hard-pressed to name a great many more. It appeared obvious that something had to be done and that the topic, if not the general theme (whose dizzyingly multifarious dimensions were soon dawning on us), might perhaps be brought together in a workshop devoted to this ontologically rather peculiar class of objects: Surfaces. The idea quickly found its generous and enthusiastic supporter in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (whom we would like to thank at this point), and, despite a quickly growing wish-list of themes and a maturing little agenda, we went ahead drafting
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