Biological Times. Media, Technologies, and Architectures of Epistemic Temporality

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In recent years, molecular biology, brain research, biomedicine, and similar disciplines have provided ample evidence that time is not simply an exterior means for measuring life but crucially functions as its internal operator. Our project aims at historically reconstructing important aspects of this development by focusing on the media, technologies, and architectures of the modern life sciences. Drawing on recent sociology of science and the tradition of historical epistemology we hypothesize that the production and representation of specifically biological times cannot be separated from the emergence, evolution, and propagation of complex research machines configuring site-specific materials and matters (instruments, model organisms, recording surfaces, etc.) and typical regimes of signs (e.g., numbers, curves, images). In addition, we assume that these research machines can be used as guiding threads for re-inscribing the specific times of biology - the Eigenzeit of research practice as well as the Eigenzeit of organisms - into the history of modern culture and society. Focusing on paradigmatic configurations in the history of the life sciences during the 19th and 20th centuries, we aim at showing (1) that time-based media such as cinematography shaped the research agenda of disciplines such as General Physiology and Animal Psychology, while also defining a new aesthetics of life that can be traced to the cinema of Surrealism and beyond; (2) that single technologies, e.g. the heart-lung machine as it was developed in the 1930s, contributed to extend the life span of individual organisms and resulted in new representations of biological as well as technological processes; and (3) that, starting in the 1870s, the architecture of biological laboratories was shaped to favor the visualizing biological facts (e.g., by means of lecture halls with projection facilities), while the developing structure of their interior expressed another time image of life. As a result, the principal aim of our project is to demonstrate that the epistemic temporalities of the modern life sciences cannot be separated from an aesthetics of time extending far beyond the realm of laboratory science.