Metabolic objects: thoughts, trajectories and troubles

From 2018 to 2023, I have been part of the metabolic objects project at Medical Museion. As the project has now ended, in this blog post I want to reflect a bit on the twists and turns of the project and revisit some of the core ideas that developed along the way.

Philosophical groundwork: metabolism that process-thing
Back in 2018, I was employed at the museum to develop the metabolic objects project in collaboration with Louise Whiteley, Adam Bencard, Malthe Kouassi Bjerregaard and Niels Vilstrup among others. I began working at the museum without previous experience as a curator and with a background in continental philosophy. However, I was employed at the museum to work on something completely different from my previous research into academic poetics. Two core questions shaped my research: what are metabolic objects (an ontological question) and how can the museum potentially collect such objects and develop a future “metabolic collection” (a museological question)?

Given my background in philosophy, I found it most fruitful (and easiest) to begin with the ontological question. So I started exploring this weird juxtaposition “metabolic objects” particularly focusing on what the “metabolic” bit might mean. In this exploration, particularly Hannah Landecker’s work proved extremely valuable and formed my path towards a clearer grasp of the historical underpinnings of the concept as well as both scientific and philosophical uses of it today.

Historically, the term “metabolism” designates the exchange of matter as the German expression Stoffwechsel, introduced in 1815 by chemist G. C. L. Sigwart, neatly captures (Bing 1971). In the 1960s, philosopher Hans Jonas argued that metabolism is not some peripheral activity but all-pervasive within the living system (Jonas 2001, 76, n. 13). For Jonas, metabolism is a key concept with which to think about organisms as different from dead matter. In contrast to dead matter, which is characterized by its identity being independent from circulation and exchange, living matter remains the same only by their own metabolizing activities. Living matter persists as the same organisms by not remaining the same matter.

Today metabolism is one of the most widely agreed criteria for being alive. What is interesting today is that metabolism in Landecker’s words designates ‘the interface between inside and outside, the space of conversion of one to another, of matter to energy, of substrate to waste, of synthesis and break down. A process-thing, it is always in time’ (Landecker 2013, 193). Could the metabolic objects I was seeking to grasp be these process-things and what would this entail? It would entail that the objects were always relational (an interface in-between inside and outside), temporal (dynamically exchanging, converting and breaking down) and dispersed across scales (from cells, organs and individuals to ecologies and the planetary). While metabolism grew on me as an extremely vast and fascinating concept, I also realized that it would be increasingly difficult to pin down in definitions and almost impossible to decide on what to collect, because from the outset they could potentially be every living thing.

Exploring metabolic objects: Thomas Feuerstein’s bioart
To get closer to the process-things I was looking for, I left the safe habitat of the philosopher hiding behind books and a computer screen and ventured into the museum. At the time, we were exhibiting Thomas Feuerstein’s bioart at the museum and quickly his work had a serious impact on my thinking. His works seemed to be material manifestations of the process-things I was looking for.

To take an example, his work Pancreas became a catalyst for my fledging reflections on metabolic objects. Pancreas is a processual sculpture that transforms books into sugar that feeds human brain cells inside a vat. However, not just any book; Feuerstein has put the brain cells on a strict diet nourished solely by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The Phenomenology is shredded, soaked in water, and pressed through an artificial intestine. From this soaking wet condition, Hegel’s Phenomenology becomes a book of life sustaining human brain cells through an uncanny kind of reading, I have been tempted to call metabolic. A metabolic reading through which the organism breaks down and transforms the book to become part of itself. Standing in front of Pancreas, the very writing of philosophy dissolves into flesh. It is, however, crucial to notice that the installation is also a living organism. Not merely composed of tubes and containers, inside the containers reside real human brain cells and living bacteria. It is virtually a metabolic machine with its own life processes breaking down and building up matter (read more in the exhibition catalogue “Metabolic Machines”). As such it is a metabolic object.

From ontological musings to collection pragmatism: A schism emerges
Exploring Feuerstein’s Pancreas brought me closer to an understanding of metabolic objects ontologically. Metabolic objects cannot exist in isolation. They are deeply intertwined, temporal and living. However, this realization did not prove particularly helpful for the collecting purposes of the project. While it could provide an answer to the ontological question (what are metabolic objects?), the museological question (how can we collect them) became difficult and obscure. So I began questioning myself and my methods. Was I wanting the impossible? Did I take the metabolic too literally and developed a hyperbolic and boundary seeking philosophy (this seems to be a hallmark of philosophy)? Should I rather pursue a pragmatic approach that could be more useful for the museum?

This questioning led to a schism between an ontologically driven exploration and a collecting practice. This schism is deeply related to the museum as a place where things go to die. It simply does not have the infrastructure to sustain and maintain metabolic objects in the ontological sense of things actually being alive/metabolizing almost like the animal facilities of large-scale lab units. Consequently, I developed two definitions. A narrow sense of metabolic objects that emphasizes that metabolic objects undergo life-processes. This strict meaning implies that metabolic objects are alive and the museum would become a host of life processes. But I also developed a broader meaning of metabolic objects as objects that relate to metabolism. For example, they can be traces of life processes reduced to figures, models, and data, but they can also be equipment, techniques, and experiments.

 

The narrow and broad definitions led to a much-needed division of labor for me. The broad meaning seemed useful for collecting metabolic objects that the museum was actually able to handle, preserve and store. Yet from a research perspective, I was much more intrigued by the ontological definition and the possibilities/impossibilities it entailed museologically.

Metabolic objects as a collecting project
Following the broad definition, I began searching for metabolic objects in laboratories at the Center for Basic Metabolic Research that Medical Museion is part of. In particular, I started interviewing group leaders, postdocs, PhDs, lab managers, technicians (thanks to all of you!) in an attempt to co-curate a future collection. The idea was to co-curate objects together with participants, each with their own idiosyncratic biases and interests that altogether could form a multiplicity of perspectives.

Before each interview, I asked participants to find three to five objects that they either found crucial for their research/work, thought would be worth exhibiting or found aesthetically pleasing or disgusting. I also asked them beforehand to think about living organisms, whose metabolic processes were crucial for their research. These questions were aimed at identifying objects that were both significant for their work and worth collecting and/or exhibiting at the museum. However, the interviews diverged drastically in terms of focus, flow and objects. For some this was an almost impossible task, because as they described it, they aren’t really working with objects, although they still have offices with computers, coffee cups and so on. For others, the sheer abundance of objects led to hours of unfocused exploration in labs without pinpointing anything specific. Returning to the interviews later for analysis didn’t make navigating the mess of objects easier. It resulted in a list divided into focus objects that the informants deliberately choose, objects we came across in our exploration and objects they don’t treat as objects.

It also became clear to me that even when you work pragmatically, trouble always finds you. While the broad definition brought me us closer to objects that we could actually collect and preserve at the museum, it wasn’t particularly successful. I realized that (obviously) it is difficult to collect things that people are still using. Collecting depends on the lucky incidence of objects becoming obsolete and available.

A serendipitous moment
While the collecting project wasn’t particularly successful in terms of outcomes, something unexpected happened in the process of preparing for the interviews. As I was developing the interview guide, I tested it on my co-workers at the museum, in particular conservators working in the collections and curators developing exhibitions. In these pilot-interviews, I became increasingly interested in the metabolic labour conservators carry out to keep objects from falling apart in our collections: cleaning, storing, maintaining. As Fernando Dominguez Rubio describes in the case of the Mona Lisa – objects always fall apart. They are indeed slow events gradually sliding from object to something closer to process-things. In museum collections, these slow events are, however, manipulated into ‘unnaturally’ low rates of transformation in order to extend object lifespans (Domínguez Rubio 2016).

What I began to realize in conversations with the conservators working behind the scenes in the museum was that maybe there was another way to combine my ontologically driven interest in strictly speaking metabolic objects and the museological question in a slightly different format: could we perhaps transgress Jonas’ distinction between dead matter and living organisms, and under the right conditions, make new interfaces between objects and organisms and awaken objects from their metabolic slumber at the museum?

Practicing ontology at the museum: metabolic carpentry and The Living Room
So we began to seek other ways of working with objects at the museum. As Ian Bogost notes, recent trends in contemporary philosophy such as speculative realism and object-oriented ontology suffer from being very much philosophies of first principles like the old school metaphysics of the past, or as Bogost polemically argues: “If a physician is someone, who practices medicine, perhaps a metaphysician ought to be someone who practices ontology” (Bogost 2012, 91). “Philosophical carpentry” names such a practice – a practice that contends with material resistances and constructs artifacts as philosophy. In particular, I became increasingly interested in the unwanted material resistances at the museum – deterioration, heritage eaters and environmental variables (such as temperature and humidity). Could the division of labor, I embraced earlier become undone through ontological (and slightly disruptive) collection work at the museum?

Around 2021, we began developing our own ontological practice of metabolic carpentry seeking to craft interfaces between organisms and objects, and cultivate the rich intensive variations of objects eating, exchanging, digesting each other. Drawing on Caitlin DeSilvey’s post-preservation theory (DeSilvey 2017) and being fortunate enough to work with Caitlin in person, we experimented with bringing living organisms (notably pink oyster mushrooms and wax worms) and discarded museum objects into contact and explore their transformations based on the idea that decomposition does not necessarily entail loss but also leads to new, living beginnings. Our experiments took place in a small dusty basement room that we called “The Living Room” and over a period of two years (2021-2023) museum visitors had the opportunity to discover discarded objects in different states of transition and decay (read more about The Living Room).

In our experiments, we were not just transforming the image of the museum; but also cultivating a sensibility of connections between objects, organisms and environments, in constant circulation and exchange. Our metabolic carpentry, however, not only reworked our sense of connections between objects, organisms and environments at the museum, but also material museum practices engaging conservators, artists and visitors. It was a way to do other things with objects at a place usually devoted to dead things and distanced bodies.

Final remarks: from metabolic objects to museum metabolism
When I look back at my work now, I think it is obvious how the concept of metabolism has constantly challenged, fertilized, changed even metabolized my work possibly because of the sheer magnitude of the concept.

In my early work, I was focused on delimiting what a metabolic object could be, yet quickly realized that metabolism is such a vast concept that it proved impossible to define it as other than a process-thing – a process-thing that was extremely difficult to host at the museum.

At the same time, I also found it difficult to decide what to collect and developed an even broader concept to include the machinery and technologies used to measure, capture, objectify metabolism in science. Yet this collection strategy was perhaps too broad and contemporary compared to the serendipity involved in finding unused stuff to collect.

While I found Jonas’ distinction between organisms and dead things useful to set up this distinction, I also realized that everything is much more metabolic than we think. Even allegedly stable collections are undergoing processes of deterioration and transformation over time. Gradually, metabolism became a creative concept to seek out these processes of decay and break down – they in a sense became my process-things linked to the organisms and environmental factors that play key roles in these processes.

Seeking these interfaces actively led to metabolic carpentry as a generative practice for museum work and philosophical work simultaneously, essentially blending the different parts of my project and messing up the nice distinction between a broad and narrow sense of metabolism

Yet as I was exploring the work of conservators as well as developing the practice of metabolic carpentry, the whole museum also started to appear as an organism. As one huge metabolic beast, itself consisting of flows, circulations and exchanges. A hungry beast that had however, eaten too many objects without having the proper disposal pathways or digestive system.

The Living room brought us to the end of the lifecycle of things and explored how things live and die both literally and figuratively at the museum. But now that this project has ended, I’m left with a question of endings… or rather the unending endings of process-things and the problems they pose will keep on metabolizing my thinking…

Header photo: Mold in the collection, image from Sara Valle Rocha’s work on Decayscapes, 2021.

Readings

Bencard, Adam, Martin Grünfeld, Jens Hauser, and Louise Whiteley, red. 2020. Stofsk(r)ifter: Metabolic Machines. Copenhagen: Medical Museion.

https://www.thomasfeuerstein.net/20_BIBLIOGRAPHY/30_TEXTS_&_ARTICLES/STOFSK(R)IFTER.pdf

Bing, Franklin C. 1971. ‘The History of the Word “Metabolism”’. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 26 (2): 158.

Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2017. Curated Decay. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Domínguez Rubio, Fernando. 2016. ‘On the Discrepancy between Objects and Things: An Ecological Approach’. Journal of Material Culture 21 (1): 59–86.

Jonas, Hans. 2001. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press.

Landecker. 2013. ‘The Metabolism of Philosophy, In Three Parts’. In Dialectic and Paradox, edited by Ian Cooper and Bernhard Malkmus, 1st, New ed. ed., 193–224. Cultural History and Literary Imagination 19. Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften.