Introduction: Embracing Ambivalence and Change**

Abstract

In 1997, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger published his now seminal book Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Twenty-four years later, in 2021, he compiled a collection of essays under the title Spalt und Fuge: Eine Phänomenologie des Experiments, which will shortly also be available in English. What happened between these two books? What does it mean to write the history of the life sciences now? What is the place of Rheinberger's historical epistemology in the contemporary landscape?

These were the questions that we, the editors, started discussing in the summer of 2021. The occasion was not only Rheinberger's latest book, but also the more mundane fact that one of us, Lara Keuck, had just joined the editorial team of this journal. The other one of us, Editor-in-Chief Kärin Nickelsen, therefore proposed to collaboratively edit a small topical collection, dedicated to their mutual interest in the history and historiography of the life sciences, in order to introduce the novice to the inner workings of journal making. Rheinberger's Spalt und Fuge would loosely serve as a starting point for a forum of four or five short contributions, mainly from early and mid-career scholars in the field. The project would avoid any Festschrift character (since several of them had been published already¹); instead, we wanted to initiate a discussion about how topics and concepts associated with Rheinberger's work, and others that originated in the same period, are dealt with today. After all, we are now starting to write the history of life sciences during the 1990s, when some of our favorite historiographical tools were invented. What does this mean for our distinction between actors’ categories and analytical categories? Are concepts such as the experimental system still helpful, given the enormous changes within both the life sciences and their historiography? We drafted a one-page concept paper and started to send out invitations.

The project developed a dynamic that we had not anticipated. Our colleagues thought the questions were timely and worthwhile; however, they also inquired about the scope of our collection and the invitees. We realized that we needed to include more voices, from scholars across academic generations with different degrees of proximity to Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) under Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's directorship (1997–2011). Thus, in between recurrent waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked some of the busiest scholars in our field to write an essay within a ridiculously short timeframe—and, miraculously, they agreed. In early April 2022, we met in person and on screen, for an authors’ workshop at the MPIWG (Figure 1). We had, meanwhile, added a subtitle to our initial proposal, which read Traces of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. We deliberately chose the Rheinbergian term traces because, despite our broad invitation, all of the essays sought connection in some way or another to Rheinberger's work. Moreover, the memories of engaging with Epistemic Things and being part of the community in and around Dept. III clearly played an important role in the amazing turnout. We still were unwilling to add another Festschrift to the list, but we acknowledged the paradox of the project in the title of our introductory remarks, Ceci n'est pas un hommage.

The workshop was a remarkable hybrid of events. At times, the colloquium of Department III was revived (through the participation of Rheinberger and long-standing members such as Christina Brandt and Staffan Müller-Wille), and at other times it was historicized. For those who had never belonged to Rheinberger's department, including the editors, it was an exciting experience. For others, it had the bittersweet flavor of nostalgia with a pinch of deconstruction. At the end of the workshop, blessed (and challenged) with a colorful bouquet of presentations, we suggested three Rheinbergian terms that we would use to cluster the papers for their publication: Conjunctures, Traces, and Fragments. In his Postscriptum to this collection, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger himself reflects on the meaning of these categories in his work, and we happily refer to this essay for an illuminating introduction into his intellectual cosmos.

The collection ends with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's Postscriptum, which was the first manuscript submitted after the workshop to our journal. It delightfully explains, and to some extent justifies in retrospect, our choice of the three sections of this issue. However, in the age of post-post-postmodernism, and in any event within a Rheinbergian Denkstil, there is always ambivalence and fluidity. Principles of order may appear natural but they are inevitably contingent, and nobody can fully plan or predict the outcome of experimental endeavors like ours. After reading the submitted papers in their final form, we realized the multitude of alternative ways to pair and cluster essays that resonate with each other in compelling ways. There was, however, one recurrent theme that also was very much present at the workshop, namely the question of temporality and change beyond linear chronologies. The complexity of time and change came up in so many essays, across our carefully curated sections, that we decided to embrace the ambivalence, and rename the special collection to On Epistemic Times: Writing History 25 Years after Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube.

The title reflects the particular engagement with epistemology and temporality in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's work—that we, of course, are not the first to notice³—by tentatively framing Rheinberger's heritage as a period of epistemic times. We suggest situating the book and the period by identifying four ways in which the collected essays highlight different types and layers of change—and various forms of borderline cases that can be read as transitions from one type of change to another:

When using these layers of change as an alternative principle of order, a very different table of contents emerges, which we are suggesting (Table 1). By doing so, we also acknowledge the fact that most of our readers will not access these essays in their printed configuration, but in digital space, and in the order that they themselves find sensible.

Many of the contributions in this volume offer tentative answers to the questions that sparked this project. They reflect on the meaning of writing the history of sciences now, the place of Rheinberger's historical epistemology in the contemporary landscape, and the changes in the field over the past 25 years. Yet they also raise more and equally pressing questions for the future. Beyond temporality and change, perhaps the most commonly shared contemplation is the crucial role of the scientific collective, which we have only just started to incorporate systematically into our epistemologies. We look forward to exploring this topic more thoroughly in future projects, collectively.

This special issue, just like so many of the histories it contains, is already the result of collective effort. It profited from the engagement of all authors during and after the workshop, and from the comments made by the additional discussants, Christina Brandt, Onur Erdur, Alfred Freeborn, Staffan Müller-Wille, and Ohad Parnes. The essays not only went through peer-review, but were also skillfully language-edited and formatted by Aleksandra Ambrozy and Elizabeth Hughes. Henrik Hörmann, Klara Schwalbe, and Birgitta von Mallinckrodt of the Max Planck Research Group Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences helped to organize the authors’ workshop. Dominik Knaupp from the Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte team in Munich as well as the WILEY team helped us to organize the many versions of the many contributions into this published form.

In this sense, our project has come to a conclusion. However, as Hilgartner's essay reminds us, collective projects, such as a party or an epistemological adventure, only come into existence through their performance. It is not preconfigured who and what makes the party, how it develops, and where it ends. Our own party, the joyful dance of sources and literature, categories and narratives in the historiography of the life sciences will certainly go on; and we will continue to struggle with the issues of time and change, both in our daily work and in our meta-reflections. Linear temporality, as Rheinberger observed, is the easiest way out of this predicament, but also the least interesting form of history writing. We should therefore turn and face the strange—time may change us, but we can't trace time.⁴