Histology, from histos: the web of the loom.

In March 2018 scores of articles in science magazines announced the discovery, published in Scientific Reports by a team of pathologists at NYU School of Medicine, of (almost) a new organ within the human body. Behold the interstitium. Lurking under the skin, just below the surface, are a series of interconnected fluid-filled compartments supported by a meshwork of strong and flexible connective tissue proteins: strong, flexible shock absorbers. What was previously thought to be merely dense tissue now appeared to be a new subcutaneous dimension of interconnected spaces: new worlds. The spaces are full of fluid to protect what lies underneath them. Without the fluid the compartments collapse, ‘like a building with the floors suddenly knocked out, leaving the whole structure to flatten like a pancake’ (Gibbens 2018).

There are several things we can take from this announcement. Both the concept of newly discovered secret compartments netted together under the skin and the imagined perception of these compartments flattened like a building are imaginative manoeuvres requiring spatial deformations. Imagining this new ‘organ’ requires a kind of imaginative proprioception beyond our conventional sensory systems; the systems themselves would require deformation. The interstitium is an in-between world of new complexity; it is the addition of a dimension.

Interstitia then – two, in fact – line and bolster this chapter, which draws together topology (the mathematical study of spatial properties preserved under continuous deformation) with synaesthesia (the perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one cognitive pathway leads to automatic experiences in another). The consideration of a topology of the senses is derived from an apprehension of the limitations of geometric systems, segmentations and scales: particularly for those existing at the margins, interstices or outside these systems altogether.