5.1.2: An Infinite Meal

I have repeatedly argued that western academic practices are colonial practices.¹ To produce an argument, scientists needed to take a phenomenon and stage it in an environment where it could be seen as natural.² The biomedical specimen requires an extraction from the body of a patient, which is made legible through various modes of mediation, technical skill, and discursive agreement (0.1.3; 2.3.1). This dissertation has taken umbrage with this process, noting how the beneficiaries of these practices are rarely the people or communities who are seen as a resource.³ Moreover, this theft is not unique for medical researchers. It also exists for most researchers working in the western academy, and in the global university system. The production of new arguments depends on a steady flow of new materials captured by various methods and framed within a discipline’s discourses.

As I conclude this project, I want to ask a simple question: why does the academy need to take these materials at all? Certainly, there is a colonial will to capture, destroy, and control the other,⁴ but entwined in that is a deeply capitalistic undercurrent. Just as capitalism imagines new economies, consumers, and resources, there is no end to knowledge, nor is there an end to its expansion.⁵ There is only a promise of more knowledge.

Thomas Khun wrote about scientific revolutions: his logic posited that eventually one paradigm’s conceptual issues, which emerged in experimentation, would prove too messy and illogical for that framework to continue to succeed. A new model, a new paradigm, would force a change, even if that model had issues which would need further appraisal.⁶ Important for Khun’s ideas is that a new paradigm brings with it a new opportunity for what he calls ‘normal science’. This is a process of testing the postulates of the new paradigm in every applicable space. For example, if tuberculosis is a microbe that can live throughout the body, then there should be research to see whether other diseases, like Pott’s disease, might be caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the organ. A new paradigm is a new opportunity to examine old work: to reimagine the causes of a phenomenon within the new model.

Khun’s work is positivistic: scientific revolutions are caused by an engagement with the natural world, which will eventually win out. Curiously, he does not seem interested in thinking of an end to a cycle of revolutions: every theory is limited and prone to issue. The revolutions cannot stop, for there will always be more specific, careful frameworks through which to think about the world.

Khun did not have the capacity to talk in terms of culture. His model cannot answer how science has historically been an exclusionary system. Certainly, in media studies, or cultural studies, or science and technology studies (STS), there can be a narrative of revolutions. The postmodern turn in French philosophy, or the cultural turn of the Birmingham School, the writing of Michel Foucault, or Edward Said, or Judith Butler, or Bruno Latour, producing their ripples and shifts in the discourse. A limitation, at least in the context of humanistic study, is that the revolution never does away with a framework entirely so much as add a new analytical lens.

For all of these revolutions—Khun’s or those in the humanities—there is a shared commonality: they afford the publication of a tide of new scholarship. These revolutions continually provide a new arena for scholars to explore, examine, collect, and distribute. For example, Bruno Latour and his colleagues rightfully charged sociology to look at the sciences themselves. There is a political valence to their work, but there is also a colonial and capitalistic one: if scientists were not seen as a research subjects or research objects before, the establishment of STS as a scholarly field meant that there was an entirely new world for scholars to chart, describe, and conquer. Every new revolution is a new region for hungry knowledge workers hoping to make their name in the brutal, exclusive, and competitive academic system.

The specimen in this regard is valuable precisely because it may be used within a new paradigm to make arguments or insights that were hither to undiscovered—as blood collected for eugenicist research may be valuable for DNA or genomic research.⁷ Every object in a collection can be digitally scanned, analyzed by a spectrometer, x-rayed, sampled for DNA, and so on. New technologies, new paradigms, new analytical frames recolonize the specimen. The specimen, like Prometheus’ body when chained against a rock, is bit at, consumed, exhausted, and left for the next revolutionary model to regenerate it again (5.1.1). A new model is like a new day, with the same specimen to devour for insights, claims, and scholarly credibility. The specimen is infinitely reusable, and any harm in its original construction is secondary to the infinite possibility of new potential research.