ABSTRACT
The practical sensibility of artifact accounts was reflexive to a competence with particular experimental and observational practices in an instrumental complex. To insist, in principle, that scientific work is essentially artifactual would be to overlook the situated relevance of questions of artifact during actual courses of inquiry. An essential artif actuality inhabited this "distance" and was other than that artifactuality which inhabited the recognizability of technical practices in the textual remains of laboratory inquiries. The "paper doll" invention raises the question of how laboratory practices are to be re-presented in a textual demonstration. In the laboratory studied, such a demonstration involved producing an in vitro demonstration using disembodied brain material, a chemical bath improvisationally constructed from shop materials, and the introduction of selected chemical constituents to "trigger" the accountable anatomical events which distinguished axon sprouting. Traces were made of the linear "borders" of the intact and degenerating fields of axon terminals "above" the granule cell layer.
