Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. (2023) Split and Splice. A Phenomenology of Experimentation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo192229451.html>

German original: Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. (2021) Spalt und Fuge. Eine Phänomenologie des Experiments. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. <https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/hans-joerg-rheinberger-spalt-und-fuge-t-9783518299432>

Since last year, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s most recent book is available in English in a translation provided by the author himself. This book review offers a good opportunity to revisit the work of a historian of science who has increasingly become relevant to the artistic research community. I, for one, have been inspired by his work ever since I first met him in Zurich in the context of the Swiss artist Hannes Rickli’s research project Spillover. In this review, unlike my previous texts on his work, I aim not so much to delve into the details of Rheinberger’s historical epistemology than to answer the questions why and how his work may be relevant to the community of artists still grappling with notions of science.

Rheinberger is a biologist and, thus, first and foremost a practitioner. However, he is also a philosopher and a philologist, who together with Hanns Zischler translated Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology into German (the first edition of this translation was published in 1974 with Suhrkamp). In his article ‘Translating Derrida’, Rheinberger (2008) refers to the contingency of it all, and I like to imagine that the ‘task of the translator’ – to borrow a term from Walter Benjamin – points here not only towards Derrida, but also towards the historicity of the experimental sciences.1 More specifically, in terms of methodology, both of Rheinberger’s roles require material conditions that allow for differential reproduction, a key notion in his thinking, that is, the formation of identity across difference.

Approaching Split and Splice from this angle, the first thing we must notice, is its binary form, not only in the title, which refers to two opposing practices, but also in its two-part structure: Infra-Experimentality and Supra-Experimentality, held together by a six-page introduction and a two-page postscript. In fact, Rheinberger has made use of the binary form in previous books, most importantly in Towards a History of Epistemic Things in which he oscillates between chapters of ‘reenactment’ and those of ‘recounting’. (Rheinberger 1997, 2) as well as in The Hand of the Engraver (Rheinberger 2018) in which the encounter between the engraver Albert Flocon and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard is differentially worked out. (As the book’s succinct subtitle Albert Flocon Meets Gaston Bachelard suggests, Rheinberger refers not just to a historical past, but also stages the meeting between the two as ongoing enacting registers of contemporaneity.)

Despite the ascending order of its parts, the binary form of Split and Splice has the effect that once it is read and an imaginary object formed, the reader is liberated to freely move up- or downstream, that is, from the concrete to the abstract or vice versa. In fact, in chapter 9 (‘Thinking Wild’), the bond between the concrete and the abstract represents the crescendo of the book, its programmatic core, already developed in The Hand of the Engraver, but now deployed as key to a ‘phenomenology of experimentation’.2 In this way Rheinberger, the epistemologist, is not only reporting on science and its history, but also, to quote Bachelard, ‘participating in an emergence in order to understand’ (158, emphasis in the original), which includes, I might add, the material form of his book as well as the relationships it entails. The logos enacted in this kind of phenomenology, as outlined by Rheinberger in the introduction, ‘no longer obeys a logic of expression, according to which the phenomena are always only something secondary, derived; instead, it follows a logic of articulation according to which the phenomena gain their sense and meaning through their references to each other.’ (5) Not only can we get a sense of how deep artistic competence is called upon here, we are also prompted to judge how successful the book as articulation is and not just the knowledge that it communicates.

Part 1

The first part of the book is tasked to embed Rheinberger’s exposition as closely as possible in the material reality of empirical science. ‘It is one of the principal concerns of an epistemology from below to preserve the research technologies behind the representations that derive from them.’ (65, my emphasis) Accordingly, part one’s five chapters present examples of specific scientific techniques, to highlight moments of epistemic gain that support a more general theory of experimental systems. All images of the book, with the exception of Flocon’s Whirlwind of the elements (n.d.), are in this first part to anchor what is said in material scientific practice, in line with what Steven Shapin (1984) referred to as ‘literary technology.’

Readers not familiar with Rheinberger’s theory of experimental systems will get a short introduction in this part, most importantly how new knowledges emerge in the form of ‘epistemic things’ from specific constellations of technical objects in the laboratory. According to Rheinberger, these enter the world epistemically under-determined through sets of traces allowing them to have a knowledge-future and, hence, historicity. He writes that ‘All experimentation disembogues in generating traces’ (14). In line with Derrida, ‘trace’ is of course an important aspect of writing, or better, ‘arche-writing’ as a material operation of articulation, more fundamental than speech and expression (and also ‘vulgar’ concepts of writing (Derrida 1997, 60)).

However, while referring to Derrida and in line with Rheinberger’s program, chapter 1 (‘Traces’) approaches its topic ‘from below,’ through the technique of radioactive tracing, which he also uses to introduce a sub-text of the book’s first part: the shifting relationship between analogue and digital spaces in experimental science. Rheinberger is clearly comfortable with the former, which more directly lends itself to be taken as ‘graphematic space’, but we see him labor at different moments to test how his theory of experimental systems can be applied to the latter, often taken as belonging to the ‘representational space’. (20)

When chapter 2 (‘Models’), thus, touches on computer simulations, Rheinberger sees the material substrate lost – they have their function, but ‘computer models of this kind cannot be better than the experimentally generated data on which they are based.’ (44) However, grounding models in model organisms, Rheinberger emphasizes the fictionality of models, which ‘create the illusion of being able to see the whole.’ (25, emphasis in original) ‘In the graphematic space of the experiment, one never can get hold of the whole.’ (ibid.) Still, being ideal – and also temporary – objects, through models a ‘second-order space’ of graphematicity is opened up ‘between models’ (39, emphasis in original), in the space of representation.

It only at the end of this chapter that Rheinberger explicitly opens a door to the arts when he states that there ‘the relation between the model and the modeled is inverted from the start,’ raising the question what such difference says about the ‘relation between the sciences and the arts’ (45). However, since part 1 is tasked with (scientific) infra-experimentality, the question of art is, in this context, irrelevant. This is a clear signal for the historically developed and now necessary separation that Rheinberger sees between the fields and which he reflects on in part 2. However, here too, more important than the ‘spilt’ between the fields is the fact that culturally, they are also ‘spliced’ – and can be spliced by an attentive reader not looking for identity of forms but for effects emergent between them.

Chapter 3 looks at processes of ‘Making Visible,’ where becoming-visible is seen as the result of material manipulations, from which visualizations are only later consequences. On page 46f. Rheinberger makes the strong point that even today, ‘what goes on in the space between the knower and the object of knowledge that has remained epistemologically underexposed, despite the efforts of the contemporary practice turn in sociology, history, and, more recently, philosophy of science.’ (original emphasis) At this point we would perhaps have expected a reference to New Materialism or Speculative Realism to suggest a different context for the book where ‘practice’ is too human a term to remain contemporary.

For Rheinberger, scientific preparations are a case in point. In them, what is materially given is manipulated in such a way as to enhance some of its structures or processes. Preparations are ‘reified intermediates’ (geronnene Zwischendinge, 53), which have departed from the world as it commonly is without ceasing their material bond to it. Unfortunately, in English, there is no good translation for the German term Darstellung, which Rheinberger uses at central moments of the chapter to characterize ‘representations that do not depict at all in the narrow sense of the expression.’ (52) The concept of Darstellung, in particular in the Romantic appropriation of Kant’s philosophy, not only ‘rejects the imitative claims of mimesis and mimetic representation’ it also ‘attains to a materiality of figural representation.’ (Seyhan 1992, 7) ‘Perhaps because, [they have] nothing to do with the traditional idea of representation as a depiction’ (60) such ‘reified intermediates’ multiply into ‘mutually referential chains [Darstellungsketten] or networks of representation [Darstellungsnetze]’ (German original not supplied in the translation, 65), which are able to act as trace carriers.3

My preferred notion in the book, however, it that of ‘grafting,’ the title of chapter 4. This conceptual dimension is already sketched by Derrida in reference to Bachelard (1981, 203 n.21). Thinking about grafting, I found it interesting to experience a richness in the word much less available in the term ‘appropriation,’ which is used to cover similar grounds in the arts. Regardless of which terms we prefer, Rheinberger’s work could inspire us here to look closely into our own words, testing the validity of concepts more thoroughly at the site of making. Apart from its role in biology, the material basis of this chapter, Rheinberger is keen to expand on grafting as ‘cultivating’ or later ‘cultural technique’ (Kulturtechnik) emphasizing, in reference to Isabelle Stengers, ‘migratory movements that promote knowledge’ (67) rather than appropriations on the level of metaphor and analogy. ‘Such movements, which Stengers also calls “nomadic,” are a prerequisite for cultural techniques characteristic of widely different practices to shed light on each other. These practices range from manipulating organisms to practices of writing, from artistic to scientific practices of experimentation.’ (70) In fact, compared to the previous chapters in this part, with the references to Derrida, Stengers and Bachelard, for whom the graft is ‘a figure of the movement of “material imagination”’ (71), the reader has the distinct sense that techniques both wander into and out of science (and any field, for that matter) to create dense concepts for thought.

Characteristically, part 1 concludes with a chapter on ‘protocols’ that extend the phenomenology of experimentation into forms of writing not yet absorbed into the representational space of science. Protocols, too, are objects between material and conceptual spaces, which also, temporally, sit between experimental iterations. The material reduction of the experimental setting into the two dimensionality of the page affords new and reversible arrangements in a ‘space of contingency.’ (94) ‘In its material constitution, the laboratory is a locus of experimental trajectories with their phenomenal expressions as described in chapters 1 to 4. This chapter has shown that just as importantly, to quote Friedrich Kittler, it is a “writing system,” an Aufschreibesystem, an indispensable space of notation for emergent knowledge.’ (95) In fact, as this first part amply demonstrates, a phenomenology of experimentation is unthinkable without giving processes of writing and articulation their due place at the heart of this material culture.

Part 2

The second part of Split and Splice is concerned with the cultural context that surrounds experimental systems and with which they are in exchange on all levels (cf. 109). This concerns the interrelationship between different experimental systems as well as experimental culture at large, that is, a culture that values material research. Looking at Rheinberger’s work over the years, it seems that it has been developing into a much broader view in which the specifics of scientific research must be seen as part and parcel of a shared cultural history. I don’t think Rheinberger has ever referenced Nietzsche’s dictum ‘for the problem of science cannot be recognized within the territory of science’ (denn das Problem der Wissenschaft kann nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft erkannt werden) (Nietzsche 1999, 5) but through Foucault and Derrida, when trying to understand the history of science, we might have arrived at a similar point. However, while Nietzsche was engaged with the contemporary art of his time – music, in particular – in Rheinberger, contemporary artistic (research) practice is absent from Split and Splice and the (few) references to art he makes, refer to the American art historian George Kubler and Albert Flocon. This raises the question when the historical moment of Rheinberger’s own thinking is – its ‘systematic age’ (Kubler) – and whether it has arrived yet at a culture that includes contemporary art.

For artistic researchers reading Rheinberger, such a suspected delay has two major implications: firstly, Rheinberger’s work is not readily available for our contemporary artistic context, its application requires the right kind of labour – grafting, if you will – to see what grows; and, secondly, when carrying out this labour, we need to match the density of his thought. This would involve learning how he, over the course of his intellectual life, not only identified a ‘conjuncture whose derivations have to this day not been fully understood’ (between the works of Foucault, Derrida, Kuhn and Kubler, 100) but also departed from it. Personally, I see Rheinberger’s main contribution in the wedging open of a difference between research and knowledge on a material level, where the latter is more an effect of the former than its raison d’etre. As Rheinberger characterizes his work in an interview with Jens Hauser and Lucie Strecker in the context of their artistic research project Microperformativity: ‘It is basically an attempt to replace ontology with epistemology. But if it all ends there, it leads to that sort of arbitrariness that we know well from constructivism. There needs to be a feedback to the ontic realm that keeps gaining on us.’ (Hauser and Strecker 2020, 69) Could it be that the value of research lies, first of all, not in its contribution to knowledge but in its epistemically caring relationship to a materiality beyond the demands of our knowledge society, ‘a particular affinity for the system in and with which they [researchers] work’ (113)?4

Chapter 6 looks at ‘The Shapes of Time,’ a pluralization of George Kubler’s famous title, to describe ‘the flow of patterns of material systems.’ (99) Over the years, Rheinberger has consistently indicated the importance of Kubler’s theory of form to explain the dynamics of experimental systems and, ultimately, the temporality of epistemic things. Following Kubler, we must imagine culture not taking place within chronological time but rather consisting of bundles of sequences with different, unpredictable temporal dynamics (‘proper times’ [Eigenzeiten], 112). These are driven from behind by their changing material constellations, the problems these articulate and the innovations that emerge. Here, Rheinberger sees – with Kubler – a ground that links artistic and scientific development ‘in the temporal dynamics of their [epistemic things’] becoming, and consequently in the structures of their emergence.’ (101)

However, Rheinberger explains this link not as analogy, but rather he suggests a material connectedness in a larger cultural context for ‘the trajectory of epistemic things is not identical with the trajectory of experimental systems’ (i.e. the technological conditions), as they are able to ‘jump from one experimental system to another’ (106) even if they are only ‘marginally related.’ (107) This is possible only if epistemic things are always already engaged in a ‘permanent “double action of abstraction and concretization”’ as Rheinberger says in chapter 9 (156), quoting Bachelard. Providing suitable cultural conditions, epistemic things can wander and allow for ‘connections between different fields and thus for the subversion, if not surmounting, of the institutional academic barriers of disciplines.’ (126)5 In some sense, then, the more we experience culture from the vantage point of an epistemic thing, the less it appears already striated into fields and disciplines rendering all of them open for possible connections, should they be afforded by the materials in play. Rheinberger does not say so explicitly, but his explanations also seem to provide the rationale for how and why the concepts he himself uses wander, for instance, from the history of art (Kubler) to the history of science (Rheinberger). 

Accordingly, we would expect chapter 7 (‘Experimental Cultures’) to engage with a wider problematization of ‘culture.’ However, Rheinberger first spends a large part of the chapter binding this notion back to the cultivating of biological materials in vitro. While not wrong, there is a sense that this could have been done in part 1 making space, for instance, for a problematization of the nature/culture divide as delivered in his 2014 Marsilius lecture (Rheinberger 2015), which includes detailed sections on Mannheim and Bourdieu now too briefly mentioned. This choice seems symptomatic for Rheinberger: in key passages, his major books don’t seem to allow his narrative to stray too far from material phenomena in the history of science. At the same time, as the last section of the chapter makes clear, in leaning heavily on Bachelard, Rheinberger’s thinking about the sciences, too, must involve the arts as one important point of cultural difference needed for ‘a differential, scientific philosophy which would constitute a counterpart to the integral philosophy of philosophers.’ (Bachelard quote, emphasis in original, 129) Implied are historical co-dependencies across fields that have developed in the 19^th century, fundamental to each field’s specific ability to gain “access to an emergence.”’ (130 quoting Bachelard also in the French original: une accession à une émergence.)

In the last consequence, for such a differential, scientific philosophy, the fragmentation of knowledge is not to be lamented; rather, it offers the ‘precondition for the unprecedented fertility of the sciences of his [Bachelard’s] time.’ (ibid.) In the same vein, Rheinberger does not seek an integration of ‘science’ and ‘art;’ not only do they need to be seen as different, they also need to be seen as differentiated to a degree that undercuts such simplistic dichotomies, which limit the possible trajectories of epistemic things. In fact, scientific culture is actively differentiating ‘lead[ing] to the formation of intercultural zones in which new hybrid forms of understanding are tested that can in turn lead to further productive differentiations or amalgamations.’ (131) Such differentiation and hybridization, I might add, has been similar in the history of art, with the effect that we cannot always be sure where an epistemic thing is to be situated, either in terms of ‘boundary objects’ (ibid.) or more generally as an ‘object with an aura endowed with a fringe of uncertainty.’ (141) Unfortunately, accessing the concrete at such a point of abstraction is facilitated by Rheinberger for the sciences but remains unattended to for the arts. For instance, when he aims at ‘bringing the sciences as specific knowledge cultures into contact and in relation to other cultures of knowledge, such as cultures of the arts and technical cultures, among others’ (131), the arts remain too unspecific. The differentiation that Rheinberger describes in terms of space (in the wake of Kubler), has, in the arts, also befallen time. This has lead to contemporary art and, with it, very different temporalities of knowledge and the question of whether futurity, so strongly linked to scientific development, is tenable for the arts. (Lee 2001)

Chapter 8 (‘Knowing and Narrating’) deals precisely with the issue of history, in particular since the German language affords a slippage from ‘story’ to ‘history’ – Geschichten (in the plural) refer to stories, while Geschichte (in the singular) refers to history, if not indicated otherwise through the context or through the use of an indefinite article. While not giving up on ‘history’ as distinct from ‘story’, the poetological substructure of research is acknowledged. Not only do ‘experimental systems embody and realize a narrative structure’ (135), ‘the activities in the fields of poetry and of the arts share with the sciences the basic feature of this epistemic posture.’ (144) The chapter makes a strong case for the generative aspects of experimental science. Like in The Hand of the Engraver, the emphasis lies on the hand (lat. manus) in the making of knowledge, which the German Begriff strongly expresses (a German Griff is a grasp or hold, Begriff translated is a ‘concept’).

However, what differentiates ‘history’ from ‘story,’ according to Rheinberger, is not narrative structure but ‘the fact that they [scientific texts] have another author’ (132, original emphasis), leaving no space for fictional, scientific facts. Can the distinction between ‘history’ and ‘story’, though, be resolved in this way? A number of challenges are evident: firstly, if we take the notion of author as creator of a text, we experience an ontological limit to Rheinberger’s epistemological enterprise; secondly, if we follow Barthes (1977, 145) and take the author as ‘born simultaneously with the text,’ the other author, too, exists only in and through the text. If, as Rheinberger says, ‘the forms of narration are not indifferent to scale’ (148), does he suggest that the other author (whether nature or God) can, historically, still survive as singular with a single story – or history – connecting all narratives, while other, non-scientific (or religious?), cultural techniques cannot act on such a global scale?

Chapter 9 (‘Thinking Wild’) does not respond to this problem of authorship, following instead the general trajectory of the book to widen and strengthen the connections made as research progresses bottom up. At the centre of the chapter stands a link that Rheinberger makes between Lévi-Strauss and Bachelard concerning what the latter terms the ‘double action of abstraction and concretization.’ (156) Importantly, abstraction is not seen as a more advanced developmental stage; rather ‘they [abstraction and concretization] presuppose each other.’ (ibid.) When comparing the differences between mythical and scientific thinking, for instance, both processes apply, albeit according to different activities and differently organized knowledges. In fact, even the sciences themselves, according to Rheinberger, may not be organized around the same principles leading to the insight (attributed to Bachelard) that ‘every sufficiently complex equation was in need of its own epistemology.’ (159)

At the same time, despite these unsurmountable differences between fields, enacting processes of concretization and abstraction, they all work a cultural ground, rendering it impossible to maintain categorical distinctions. For this reason, with Rheinberger we see the possibility to find, along with an increasing differentiation, an interconnectedness. This does not only happen abstractly through different but comparable concretization and abstraction techniques, but also, as demonstrated in chapter 4, in the concrete through nomadic movements of knowledge techniques and epistemic things across culture. Suggesting, as Rheinberger does, a mythical element (‘wild thinking’) within the sciences – and research in particular – does not challenge their specificities but, by going deep, provides material bonds in the making of knowledge that are lost when the knowledges themselves enter the space of representation.

The book’s second part ends with ‘A Eulogy of the Fragment’ to emphasize that the gaps that open when things are split are epistemically productive when spliced again into new things. In chapter 10, Rheinberger underlines this in two directions: as a historian looking to the past encountering archives that can hold nothing but fragmentary knowledges and as a scientist who in an experimental system sees a trace generated as ‘a fragment of the fragment’ (166) when future is made. Splitting and splicing as material research activities offer a refreshing perspective to the more ontological considerations that can easily be associated with the fragmentary, in particular in art discourse.

In Split and Splice, the fragment is not taken in isolation, like a single shard of an antique vase, closing in on itself; rather, only when fragments enter functional relations with others do they become meaningful. At the same time, and in line with an approach through experimentation, such multiple fragments don’t fit with a pre-established necessity to make whole again what once was (the vase); the splice is an artefact of contingency able to hold only so much – or not at all. In Rheinberger’s theory of experimental systems, new knowledge enters the world through unprecedented events, as traces, and their provisional conjuncture through recurrence. ‘Let me repeat that,’ writes Rheinberger in Toward a History of Epistemic Things (1997, 135) ‘there is no logical necessity for such recurrence,’ nothing of which a fragment is a fragment that would lend the conjuncture necessity. If this is the case, the fragment can only be a fragment of a thing-to-come - fragments here are of the future and not of a (broken) past.

However, having opened this review on the notion of ‘articulation’ not only as the book’s modus operandi but also fundamental to the pragmatics of meaning-making, it seems somewhat surprising that Rheinberger does not conceive of the provisional conjuncture of fragments as articulation, in line with his epistemological project. In fact, I would go as far as to suggest that Split and Splice’s subtext is an (incomplete) theory of articulation, which would have deserved to be hinted at in this chapter.

Postscript

The last three pages – postludium rather than postscript in the German original – provide us, with an engraving by Albert Flocon, the only direct reference to art in the book. It seems to be there to suggest what the book otherwise didn’t or couldn’t do: to get close enough to concrete artistic things, which, in The Hand of the Engraver, Rheinberger proves more than capable of. At the same time, this postscript is not really about art; it uses art to give a representation to what suggests itself as fragmentary, ‘vibrating time’6 within a phenomenology of experimentation as well as its articulation in Split and Splice.

While the rear-view image of the book that Rheinberger creates in the postscript does work in providing an image of how time is implied on all levels of articulation, in terms of art, it offers what may be called a double-edged sword. It is true, Rheinberger’s interpretation of Flocon’s engraving is persuasive: art can, indeed, help holding a dense image of a complex reality. However, in using an art work in this way, a suggestion is also made that art is to be situated on the representational side of things, which contradicts not only its wider, multi-facetted cultural role as elaborated throughout the book, but it also undeservedly distances Rheinberger’s project from contemporary art, which in my understanding does not seek such images.

While this judgement may not be shared by everybody, the postscript should not distract from the relevance of the book for artistic research. Split and Splice further develops and strengthens an understanding of research as cultural activity over and beyond disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, it moves beyond the ‘practice turn’ into registers of materiality and temporality to suggest a wide connective fabric of epistemic things not to be captured unless articulation is problematized. Split and Splice shows us how epistemicity is enacted as ‘double action of abstraction and concretization’ for which a similar project in the field of art is, sadly not yet realised. Beyond Split and Splice, at stake will be the question where the limits of historical epistemology will lie and whether a contemporary epistemology will be possible at all.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, 142–48. New York: Fontana Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. London: Athlone P.

———. 1997. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hauser, Jens, and Lucie Strecker. 2020. “‘Agency Is Everywhere’. An Encounter with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger.” Performance Research 25 (3): 65–71. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1807760>

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Standford: Stanford University Press.

———. 2000. “Dimensionen Der Darstellung in Der Praxis Des Wissenschaftlichen Experimentierens.” In Die Erfahrungen, Die Wir Machen, Sprechen Gegen Die Erfahrungen, Die Wir Haben: Über Formen Der Erfahrung in Den Wissenschaften, edited by Michael Hampe and Maria-Sybilla Lotter, 235–46. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

———. 2008. “Translating Derrida.” Dalhousie French Studies = Derrida : Legatee and Legacy 82:85–91.

———. 2015. Natur Und Kultur Im Spiegel Des Wissens. Vol. 12. Schrifen Des Marsilius-Kollegs. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.

———. 2018. The Hand of the Engraver. Albert Flocon Meets Gaston Bachelard. Translated by Kate Sturge. SUNY Press.

Seyhan, Azade. 1992. Representation and Its Discontents. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Shapin, Steven. 1984. “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology.” Social Study of Science14 (4): 481–520.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London & New York; Dunedin: Zed Books; University of Otago Press.

Biography

Dr. Michael Schwab is the Editor-in-Chief of JAR, the Journal for Artistic Research. Click here for his profile.

• 1In ‘Translating Derrida’ Rheinberger (2008, 179) says that ‘it is probably not unjustified to read all of Derrida’s thinking-as-writing or writing-as-thinking as a procedure of translation’ probably unaware at that point that in his ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend,’ Derrida remarks that ‘the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation.’ (1)
• 2Crucial for the discourse around artistic research is the fact that the ‘double action of abstraction and concretization’ (Rheinberger quotes Bachelard here, 156) cuts across the non-sensical theory/practice divide. As Rheinberger says in The Hand of the Engraver (2018, 60): ‘Concretion is achieved by means of abstraction – and that, incidentally, is the basis of experimentation. This is overlooked when, as so often occurs, the abstract is banished to the banks of theory and the concrete to those of the experiment.‘
• 3Rheinberger problematizes Darstellung e.g. in (Rheinberger 2000, a book chapter published in German), however, without referencing the German philosophical tradition. Furthermore, problems of translation are also not discussed. When Rheinberger quotes Hacking saying: ‘Der Mensch ist ein darstellendes Wesen’ (Rheinberger 2000, 245) he uses his own translation of Hacking’s dictum: ‘Human Beings are representers’ (Hacking 1983, 132, original emphasis not in Rheinberger’s German translation) without further commentary.
• 4When I am saying this, I am acutely aware of the injustices committed in the name of research. (cf. Smith 1999) However, it may be possible that much of this has been due to a dominant scientific paradigm rather than research practice per se.
• 5A slight difference to the German original should be noted here which reads: ‘institutionelle akademische Barrieren wenn nicht zu überwinden, so doch zu unterlaufen.’ (181 in the German original) While the English translation suggests a possible ‘surmounting,’ the German original remains more skeptical.
• 6The concept is introduced on page 175 in reference to Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro Santos, who is quoted as saying: ‘For us, the first form of time is time that vibrates.’