Basic physiology textbooks suggest that tissues are the “fabric” of the body, distinguished by morphology and function (Solomon 2003:32 the “fabric analogy” has also been made by Junqueira and Carneiro, 2003: vii). Or consider animal flesh, which in a laboratory setting may be considered tissue, but on your plate is “meat.” “Tissueness” is not an intrinsic quality, but rather articulates flesh taken from the body within medical and scientific contexts.
For example, placentas are deeply ambiguous entities that can be wastes, tissues, or sacred objects – even food (Jones and Kay 2003 Ober 1979 Helsel and Mochel 2002 Davidson 1985). The same bits of flesh that serve as tissues in that context serve as something entirely different in others. There is no “original state” of tissue before the intervention of science. (2002: vii)īased on these discussions, I propose the notion of the “tissue-fragment” as a way to conceptualize these entities more fully in their biotechnological and embodied existence. Attending to enactment rather than knowledge has an important effect: what we think of as a single object may appear to be more than one. Which entity? A slightly different one each time. These are practices in which some entity is being sliced, colored, probed, talked about, measured, counted, cut out, countered by walking, or prevented. This resonates with Mol’s concept of the body multiple : that is, the pluralizing practices of health and illness (in Mol’s study, atherosclerosis) that comprise the entity we call “the body.” tissue cultures), and sometimes becoming a new part of an existing body by replacing or repairing parts (e.g. biopsies), sometimes associated solely with a “laboratory life” as an object unto itself (e.g. I argue that within these collectives, tissues persist unstably between fragmentation and wholeness, sometimes functioning metonymically for the body in which they originated (e.g. Employing a relational materialist approach (Latour 2005, 1999, 1992, 1988, 1987 Latour and Woolgar 19 Law and Hassard 1999), I argue that bits of flesh become tissue by virtue of their interaction with and contribution to the heterogeneous, collective terrains of matter, practice, knowledge, and politics that comprise histology, tissue procurement, tissue economies, and therapeutic tissue products. In this paper, I show that behind this simple definition are a range of iterations of tissue that need be accounted for if the term can be usefully and critically employed in sociology of health, the body, medicine, and science. Yet does this fully account for the variegated entities that we understand as tissue or the sometimes-contradictory applications of this term? How are tissues conceptualized in this work? In their book Tissue Economies (2006), scholars Cathy Waldby and Robert Mitchell use the term “tissue” in a “generic sense, to include blood, organs, and any other kind of living matter taken from the body” (Waldby and Mitchell 2006:4), a definition implicit in much of the literature. The explosion of biotechnological innovation in the last few decades has drawn the attention of many scholars who trace the circulation of tissues in the laboratories, bodies, institutions and politics they inhabit (see Landecker 2007 Waldby 2002a, 2002b Waldby and Mitchell 2006 Lock 2001 Kent et al. As such, in this paper I propose the notion of the “tissue-fragment” as a way to conceptualize these entities more fully in their biotechnological and embodied existence. While these processes have been elaborated in the literature, we lack a terminology that captures and accounts for them. tissue cultures), and sometimes becoming a new part of an existing body (e.g. biopsies), sometimes associated solely with a “laboratory life” (e.g. I argue that tissues represent a duality of fragmentation and wholeness, sometimes metonymically standing in for the body in which they originated (e.g. These tissue lives are contradictory, producing tissue as an intelligible and acceptable object as well as a contested and unstable one.
Practices and heterogeneous collectives of actors, including histological study, organ donation, biopsies, hospital waste collection, and therapeutic uses of tissue products imbue tissues with complex social and cultural lives. Matter from bodies becomes tissue, rather than this being an ontological given.
McGill Sociological Review, Volume 2, April 2011, pp.
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