Afterword: Evidence and Experiment

In styles that range from the performatively paratactic and experimental, to scholarly sobriety and sharp sociocultural critique, these chapters engage issues concerning the contemporary uses and forms of experiment and the building and distribution of kinds of evidence in relation to new concepts and practices of experimentation within the contemporary biomedical sciences. They explore some less obvious ways in which knowledges and practices forged in this new ‘megaphone’ science resonate far beyond conventional spaces of research and are deeply and reciprocally entangled with the embodied self-fashioning of individual selves and group identities. Everywhere, not only in postmodern theory or art, as Ian Hacking has reminded us, people are made up: but they are fashioned through highly reflexive and recursive knowledge-making practices deeply intertwined with and distributed across multiple agencies and cultural domains. In this response, I will consider key themes explored in these chapters by bringing to bear on the discussion some earlier conceptualisations of experiment and evidence that still powerfully shape our cultural assumptions and I will consider briefly whether some further reflection on experimentalism in the arts may also usefully bear on key interdisciplinary questions for a future critical medical humanities.