Anaerobic (gut) chambers: visible invisibles and the materiality of transparency

Most biomedical research of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract builds from an understanding of the body as a series of interior spaces that can be visualized and intervened with the aid of technology. In their attempt to understand internal phenomena like digestion, microbiomes, or disease, researchers rely on tools that seemingly eliminate the opacity of the body’s surfaces and make the interior space visible. In doing so, they participate in what Foucault calls the spatialization of disease, a modern understanding of bodies as spaces that contain observable phenomena within them. Yet as they employ tools to make the inside of the body accessible to the medical gaze, their approach participates in a characteristically modern conflation: that between optical transparency and absolute visibility. To explore this conflation, this paper draws from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a biomedical laboratory specialized in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and from daily ethnographic observations of a transparent tool used to mimic the inner environment of the GI tract: the anaerobic chamber. Employing a sensory ethnographic approach, the paper attends to the chamber’s materiality and design, showing how the tool transforms modern assumptions about transparency into a sensorial and operable object, offering a tangible ethnographic example to explore the conflations surrounding this concept. Finally, by analyzing the chamber’s components such as its gloved ports, plastic walls, and inner peristaltic pump, the paper discusses how modern medicine’s desire for transparency produces what Foucault calls a visible invisible, a view of the living interior that is ultimately superficial and inert. As the anaerobic chamber helps elucidate, modern attempts at studying the inside of the living body often ironically translate into a reading of surfaces that make visible certain aspects of the interior at the expense of obscuring or neglecting others. Ultimately, the paper argues that this interplay between depth and surface, inside and outside, living and inert, exemplifies how the modern pursuit of transparency is ultimately the pursuit of a vision which, in its revealing, also conceals.