Original Research

Feeling Around for the Apparatus: A Radicley Empirical Plant Science

Kristi Onzik

UC Davis
konzik@ucdavis.edu

Monica Gagliano

Southern Cross University
University of Sydney
monica.gagliano@scu.edu.au

Abstract

Scientists are oft trained to think that “feeling” is not simply irrelevant but antithetical to their methodologies. That scientists are not simply objectively trained minds but also bodies that feel has been an important feminist contribution towards reimagining scientific knowledge—not as the product of self-directed teleological discovery, but as situated in time, place, and transformed through relations that oft exceed the binary logics of scientific representation; those founded upon rationalist distinctions between feeling/knowing, body/mind, object/subject. Through a collaborative methodological lens we (ethnographer + scientist) are calling radicle empiricism, we ask how a scientist comes to make sense of feeling and knowing—and the relations “between”—throughout shifting configurations of a pea plant decision-making apparatus. By focusing this study at the level of the apparatus (Barad, 2007), we provide an empirically based description—not a proposed model or theory—of some of the material-discursive relations through which the concepts of “feeling” and “knowing” are (re)configured through a scientist’s unexpected encounters with pea plant root tips or radicles. As such, we offer a perspective that does not assume “feeling” or “knowing” as distinct categories of a scientist’s knowledge making endeavors, nor as categories of experience that function independently of the historical, social, and material conditions through which they are made perceptible. Immanent to this description is an invitation to explore creative and collaborative practices of science-making in which the phenomena we study—whether pea plants or other persons—have the opportunity to reformulate not only our categories of “feeling” and “knowing” but the conditions through which they are made possible.

Keywords

Critical plant studies, plant cognitions, STS, multi-species ethnography, apparatus, radical empiricism

Introduction

In A Feeling for the Organism, historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) details the life and work of Nobel Prize–winning scientist Barbara McClintock. Though it wasn’t until the end of her career that McClintock became famous for her “discovery” of genetic transposition in corn, she was long made infamous amongst her colleagues for the incoherence of her scientific reasoning. Despite her perceived lack of appreciation for the institutionalized norms of scientific communication, she was accepted by her male colleagues as a “hard worker,” and nonetheless had what it takes to be a committed researcher in the nascent field of genetic science. The molecular techniques that came to define genetic science—and later biological “life itself” (Rose 2001, 13–17)—in the mid-twentieth century were still being developed, and McClintock’s studies of genetic inheritance were yet to be inhibited by disciplinary expectations. Though she shared with her colleagues a desire to reveal the lawful patterns of natural organization, she did not share, nor was she afforded the same opportunities to share, the power to isolate her discoveries to the objective coordinates of the experiment itself.

Such narratives of discovery are often reserved for a scientist’s Nobel Prize–winning speech or autobiography, articulated in the sensational language of “eureka” or “aha” moments, in which the missing piece of an experimental objective was suddenly received by the unassuming mind of the scientist. For example, while riding in a streetcar in Bern, Einstein recalls tapping into “God’s thoughts,” as the theory of relativity suddenly hit him as a “storm that broke loose in [his] mind” (Kaku 2004, 60–62); the ring structure of benzene arrived in a dream to Kekulé, in which a snake appeared to be eating its own tail (Rocke 2010, 194); and while in a cinema, Francois Jacob was jolted—“as though a line of fire cut through the darkness”—by a “glare of evidence” into the nature of gene regulation (Jacob 1995 398). These are stories that describe insight as instantaneous, decisive, and external to the “normal” processes of science, as the miraculous effects of a scientist’s mind making a brief foray into the realm of the “mystical” or “subjective experience,” only to return to the laboratory with visions of an apparatus whole and complete in its objectively discernible performance.

The story of McClintock’s discovery, as both she and Keller tell it, was markedly different. McClintock’s desire to know the processes through which corn kernels inherit their particular organizations developed through years of “losing herself” in the subtle variations of the corn she had planted—of spending long hours with each individual plant throughout their development, informing in her an ability for “direct communication.” What her colleagues understood to be irrational “vision” and poor scientific description were, for McClintock, the ineffable findings of a reverence and commitment to listening to “the material itself” (Keller 1983, 179)—a knowing made possible through years of cultivating “a feeling for the organism” (xxii). It was only after McClintock had long been dismissed into the margins of scientific rationality, and molecular scale technologies later developed, that her colleagues could bear witness to the vision she had spent the majority of her career trying to translate into a language of objective reason.

McClintock’s story works to partially situate (Haraway 1988, 578–81) our inquiry into the feelings that make a scientist’s insight possible, and differently so. We (ethnographer + scientist) draw inspiration not only from the more-than-human connections that give shape to McClintock’s empirical practice, but from Keller’s accounting of them—her honoring of a scientist’s desires to know and represent her knowledge as objective, while choosing to contextualize, embody, and pluralize such pursuits; to add to, rather than subtract from, a scientist’s experience of knowing. Building upon McClintock and Keller, we borrow insights from a rich tradition of feminist science studies and sensory-based ethnographic approaches that have laid the grounds for studying not simply the empirical compositions of a science but the empirical compositions of a scientist. Those studying the affective, more-than-human dimensions of bodies in experimental formation (Prentice 2013, 171–98; Myers and Dumit 2011, 241; Myers 2015b, 99–117), and the shapeshifting, “involutionary” (Hustak and Myers 2012, 78) encounters through which the relations “between” scientists and plants, subjects and objects, feeling and knowing, are made susceptible to reconfiguration.

We foreground the unfurling of a pea plant decision-making “apparatus”—as a “dynamic set of open-ended practices, iteratively refined and reconfigured” (Barad 2007,167)—as a means of inquiring into the affective, material-discursive conditions through which Monica Gagliano, a plant scientist, comes to feel and know differently. In so doing, we simultaneously inquire into and offer a different translation of those narrative habits that locate a scientist’s insight, the locus of their knowing and making decisions, inside of their head—as an isolated “aha” moment or as the objective, unmediated discernments of an apparatus “out there.”

What grows out of this attention to an unfurling apparatus is not only a re-articulation of the empirical grounds of scientific insight, but a different constitution of “the empirical.” Traversing into unexpected experimental terrains, the pea plants invite Gagliano to slow down and pay a different kind of empirical attention—from one bent on separating “feeling” and “knowing” through a perceived distance between observer and observed, words and things, to one that takes all categories of analysis, including “empirical,” “experiential,” “feeling,” and “knowing,” as contextual, contested, and contingent (Scott 1991, 796). From within the wily “outgrowths” of this apparatus sprouts a situated, more-than-human response to an event in which it becomes possible to trace how a scientist’s senses are reconfigured through unexpected encounters with pea plant root tips or “radicles”: an ethics of response we describe as “radicley empirical.”

Radicle, like radical, describes a rupture—a root sprouting from seed. In our experience, or rather, the experience which we found ourselves responsive to, radicle simultaneously describes an object of empirical inquiry—the primary roots of pea plants—and the morphology of the context—a nonlinear feeling around for the creative potentials of experimentation. In this sense, our notion of radicle empiricism stems from and builds upon its Jamesian alliteration “radical empiricism” by inquiring into, rather than assuming, the relations that constitute the “between” of feeling and knowing (James [1912] 2003, 51–68). As such, our concept of radicle empiricism aspires towards what feminist scholar Lindsey Andrews calls a “minor empiricism” (2015, 6). In refusing the terms of a rational organization of the senses, especially the privileging of vision, as a fixed, ahistorical, and value-neutral source of knowledge, pea plant radicles invite us to explore a “minor” awareness of experimental senses, an awareness that unfurls from within their ongoing constitution and reorganization.

Radicles are, after the seed, considered to be a plant’s “first” sensory organ. Highly sensitive and rapidly shapeshifting, radicles are charged with the capacity not only to break through the hard casing of embryonic primordia but to drop into and navigate the dark unknowns of subterranean earth. For Darwin and the few who call themselves plant neurobiologists today, the radicle is equipped with “neuronal-like” signaling capacities, the electrochemical wherewithal to translate messages from their surrounds into a coordinated trans-organismal response (Darwin 1880, 573; Masi et al. 2009, 4048–53). But radicles, as we have come to make sense of them, are masters in sensing. Siphoning around through soils for stories of potential lifeways, radicles can forecast possible atmospheric futures through the touch of earthly matter. Their power, or rather the mystery of their power, lies in their meristematic indeterminacy, the courageous sensitivity of undifferentiated cells to reach into the unknown and gather insight. With Natasha Myers, we have come to see these “million-fold nodes of growth” as “centres of indetermination, each an ongoing experiment in and with the world” (Myers 2015a, 37). And akin to Deboleena Roy’s stolonic inspiration, radicles can lure us out of a transcendent trance and into immanent connection, inviting us to not simply “feel for” the organism or apparatus, as if it’s already “out there” waiting to be revealed, but to “feel around for” the possibilities of our milieus (Roy 2018, 57–89)—to re-root and ground our senses into the demands of the present for a more responsive and response-able (Haraway 2016, 34–36) plant science. That is, a more radicley empirical plant science.

Situating Encounters

From January to April 2019, Kristi Onzik, an anthropologist and feminist science studies scholar in training, had been studying and working as a research assistant with Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist and pioneer of the emerging fields of plant cognition and communication. Gagliano’s name is perhaps readily recognized by many feminist scientists and science studies readers, particularly those “differently” interested in plants. Over the last decade, she has published several provocative experimental studies, in “prestigious” journals such as Scientific Reports (Gagliano et al. 2016) and Oecologia (Gagliano et al. 2017, demonstrating preliminary evidence for phenomena such as memory, habituation, and associative learning in plants. Such phenomena have long been thought to require not only a “proper” nervous system but a highly sophisticated one. Further amplifying her knack for what she has described as “unthinkable plant science” (see her phytobiography Thus Spoke the Plant, 2018), Gagliano has also catalyzed the field of “plant bioacoustics,” in which she and a very few others have begun to explore the sonic realms of plant communication. It is within this burgeoning and highly experimental field of phytonic soundscapes that our collaborations in cultivating new kinds of empirical senses with plants began to take shape.

Since 2016, Onzik has been working to ethnographically ingather a sense of how the novel and still highly experimental (and controversial) sciences of plant neurobiology, cognition, and communication are being made. If Onzik’s studies inquire into scientists attempting to, as Myers has best described it, “sense and make sense” of plant sensing (2015b, 2), then the scientists Onzik studies are attempting to make sense of plant sensing through apparatuses common to the domains of cognitive science and neurobiology. As such, there is a peculiar kind of tropic twist that happens in conversations and experiments with these plant scientists, and not others. Onzik’s field notes evoke stories of plants responding to scientists in ways that not only displace the centrality of the brain and vision from longstanding theories of cognition but, in so doing, challenge the cognitive theories embodied and prefigured by the scientist’s methods of prehension. Lured into the nutational curiosities of roots and shoots, through spacetime encounters that challenge the language and techniques of a scientist’s a priori “cognition,” these scientists are, quite publicly, losing grip on those rationalist certainties that sustain their knowledge and their careers. The feelings—the doubts, fears, and hesitations—that once lurked in the shadows of their objectifying confidence become not simply palpable but part of their experiments. Grasping for the stabilized explanatory grounds of cognition in the languages and techniques of neuro- and animal behaviors sciences, these scientists find that no such stable ground exists. The plants once naively assumed to be the objects of objective investigation become increasingly and unexpectedly responsive to scientists who are no longer certain where the “true” boundaries of knowing reside.

At the time of Onzik’s fieldwork, Gagliano had recently been awarded a two-year grant at the University of Sydney. Her position as a “natural scientist” was unusually co-funded by the Sydney Environment Institute, an interdisciplinary cast of humanities and social science scholars broadly working to “collaboratively design and implement strategies for just and sustainable environmental transformation” (Sydney Environment Institute, “About Us”). And while Gagliano was considered part of these conversations, she was also given space in a large lab in a stately old (re: imperial) biological sciences building, replete with portraits of Darwin, Cook, and a rich display of nineteenth-century taxidermy, where she could continue her experimental work.

Shortly after Onzik’s arrival, we began building an apparatus designed to test pea plant decision-making behavior in response to the sound of water. The apparatus was to be a more complicated variation of a previous one, in which pea plant roots were asked to make a choice inside of a two-way Y-maze: to either grow towards the sound of water, or away. Water is here understood to be an evolutionarily necessary and thus desirable resource for peas, and sound being one possible modality through which pea plant roots can sense and locate water. Gagliano noticed the germinating pea plant radicles not only grow towards the sound of water (% of time) but anticipate its direction prior to reaching the “node” or “decision-making obstacle;” the radicle having already chosen to grow into the arm of the Y-maze that would prove the path of least resistance—the most “efficient” path— towards water (Gagliano et al. 2017, 151–60).

As scientific apparatuses, Gagliano explains, mazes have generated much insight for cognitive and behavioral scientists and are themselves considered amongst the most “efficient” ways of studying spatial awareness and discriminatory learning behaviors in a variety of animal species. As pea plants have a different bodily organization with different sensory organs, perceptions, and speeds than animals, Gagliano has designed a maze out of two panes of plexiglass, nylon rope, a thin layer of soil, and a small hole at the center in which the pea seedling (Figure 1) is positioned. Beneath the glass are time-lapse infrared cameras, so that Gagliano can record the decision-making behaviors of the growing roots in the dark. With this new apparatus, Gagliano aims to test whether pea roots can make the right decisions to explore efficiently and choose the path of least resistance when navigating the more complex four-way maze (Figure 2). Based upon the findings of Gagliano’s prior research (Gagliano et al. 2017), she expects to find that peas can sense the location of water through sound vibrations, and can do so efficiently—that is, they can avoid energetically expensive detours by using sound waves for sensing and deciding upon the most direct path to water.

Figure 1. Pea plant radicles sprouting inside water-soaked paper towel roll; a hydroponic germination technique Gagliano learned during training. Seeds are considered germinated and ready for planting inside a maze when the radicles are >5mm long

Figure 2. Time series infrared photography of a pea root navigating a four-way maze. (A) Experimental time T0: The germinated pea is planted in a small circular pot whose base is positioned at the center of the maze as indicated by the green dotted line (Circle of Choice, CoC). The base of the pot sits on a glass panel and has been cut open to allow the root to exit and explore the maze once the glass panel is reached. No root is yet visible. (B) Experimental time T1: The root reaches the glass panel and becomes visible within the CoC area as indicated by the green arrow. (C) Experimental time T2: The root starts growing within the CoC area. (D). Experimental time T3: The root grows directionally towards one arm of the maze and exits the CoC area as indicated by the green dotted line. The root is recorded as “making the choice.” (E–F) Experimental time T4–5: The root grows into the chosen arm of the maze.

Through her trainings as an evolutionary ecologist, Gagliano has come to accept efficiency as a defining parameter for knowing and making right decisions across all life forms—in humans as in peas. As Gagliano described it to Onzik, the right decision pivots upon a pea’s natural tendency to move through the world teleologically—motivated by an innate desire to achieve fitness and duration in the world—and this is embodied as a natural predisposition for making good predictions, for knowing one’s world and anticipating one’s place within its evolving conditions. Thus, the one who knows best—the one who knows how to make the right decisions—is the one who has what it takes to not only “sense” or “feel” but to “know” where they ought to be and how to get there on the path of least resistance. Implicit in this way of knowing how right decisions are made is the assumption that not knowing where one is going is, evolutionarily speaking, a risky energy expenditure—constitutive of detours, mistakes, or “wrong” decisions. Wrong decisions are thus revealed not simply in actions of moving away from what is assumed to be the desired stimulus but by parameters that recognize non-goal directed actions as behaviors lacking predictive value—those behaviors based on bodily guesses, heuristics, or feelings, not “true” cognition. In the design of this experiment, wrong decisions take on the appearance of pea roots growing in a variety of directions, or those that make “detours” before finding the clear path.

Early in the construction of the mazes, Gagliano began to feel overwhelmed by the particular constraints and affordances of the lab. While it offered her science the possibility of controlled temperatures, sound-proof isolation, and sterile conditions, it also espoused the privilege of generating waste in the name of science. As we unpacked the plexiglass of her mazes, engineered according to her specifications, we found ourselves surrounded by plastic wrap and Styrofoam boxes—materials of short-term use and long-term terrestrial consequences. An unbearable sense of ethical disconnect imposed upon Gagliano’s ecologist senses, demanding of her to change course. Without much hesitation, and the support of her new colleagues, we packed up the mazes, water tanks, cameras, and pea seeds into the back of her van and headed north to the subtropical part of New South Wales. We found ourselves a house surrounded by forest, crawling with spiders, newts, and snakes, and equipped with a large backyard shed, spacious and barren enough to perform as Gagliano’s new lab. We began setting up the pea plant decision-making apparatus immediately, so as not to waste any more time on her short contract. We also incorporated the Styrofoam boxes into the apparatus itself, so as not to waste any more materials.

The experiment began with what appeared to be several weeks of successful piloting. The initial design was based on two groups: the treatment group (i.e., water sound is randomly assigned and applied to one of the four arms for each replicate maze) and the control group (i.e., no sound is applied, all arms are intended to be equal and hence, seedlings are expected to grow randomly into any one of the arms). As the experimentation proceeded to testing phase (after approximately five days of seed germination), something unexpected arose. When removing the plexiglass covering to peer at the growing roots beneath, Gagliano noticed that almost all pea plants in their individual mazes, both those in control and treatment groups, were making the same decision. Irrespective of treatment but far from random, the young root tips are responding to a stimulus, albeit not the one provided by Gagliano. The apparatus worked to generate a collectively oriented behavior of the young pea plants, though Gagliano did not know, or control for, this decision.

Figure 3. Images of maze apparatuses in construction. (A) Onzik adhering nylon rope to plexiglass at the university lab. (B) After the four nylon rope “arms” are adhered, mazes are, after being moved north to new lab, covered in soil (C) then topped with dark plexiglass to protect roots from light radiation, pot with germinating pea seedling placed center. (D) An image of the four replicate four-way mazes inside of the new backyard lab.

Unfurling Expectations

Gagliano’s initial response to the unexpected performance of the apparatus was what she described as a “visceral,” “gut feeling” of frustration, a frustration that comes with the sense that she, not the peas, had failed to know correctly. In previous studies she had considered herself successful, and knowledgeable, after demonstrating that pea roots sense and make the right decisions by growing efficiently towards the sound of water. So what went wrong with her design of the apparatus? Where did she go wrong? Rather than assessing all the details in which Gagliano’s experiment could be rationalized as “wrong,” we explore how it is that Gagliano came to feel, and know, the response of the apparatus as the effect of her own cause, her own wrongdoing.

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad describes a situation in which a scientist’s apparatus becomes palpable as a “dynamic set of open-ended practices, iteratively refined and reconfigured,” rather than a mere instrument of observation (2007, 167). She gives the example of Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach’s magnetic spatialization experiment, in which a simple exhalation, rich in the sulfuric residues of cheap cigars (the only kind Stern could afford), left its mark on a silver plate. In so doing, the liveliness of the apparatus was revealed to Stern, and evidence for a different phenomenon—the angular momentum of the electron—a difference that was previously inconceivable, became possible. For Barad, the example of Stern’s cheap cigar makes poignant the material-discursive natures, the indeterminate and dynamically shape-shifting potentials of an apparatus. The cigar is, in Barad’s rendering, a “condensation” or “a nodal point” of the “workings of other apparatuses, including class, nationalism, economics, and gender, all of which are part of the Stern-Gerlach apparatus” (2007, 167). As Barad’s account works to demonstrate, scientists tend to take for granted that the outside boundary of an apparatus ends at some “obvious” visual terminus, or that the boundary circumscribes only that set of items a scientist learned to list under “equipment” during lab exercises in science class. They tend to trust the habits of their training, a training that encourages “an immediate grasp of the “apparatus” in its entirety” (Barad 2007, 165). Such habits, Barad suggests, make a scientist susceptible to preconceptions. They work to manage uncertainty by diverting attention away from the lively, agential propensities of matter—of the creative potencies of silver and sulfide or, in our case, a laboratory porousness made perceptible, and significant, through radicle recalcitrance—and focusing attention on the stabilizing forces of past experience. These are embodied conceptions of how an apparatus and a scientist, entangled with the habits of another, ought to perform.

In Gagliano’s initial response, we trace a sense of success and failure—the “right” and “wrong” outcomes— of her experiment pivot upon a habit of knowing in which Gagliano considers herself solely responsible for defining and predicting all possible parameters and outcomes of the apparatus. This is a habit that, in facing the unexpected, affects a feeling of frustration and a concomitant story of individual failure. In this response, feeling corresponds to a wrong kind of knowing, of being uncertain and lacking control. The right kind of knowing is, like that inscribed into the design of the apparatus, an achievement of goal-directed foresight or “planned” action (Suchman 1987, 27–48). It takes shape as an assumed clear line of intent, where action proceeds from a plan made inside of an actor’s body, inside the scientist’s head. Such explorations are, to Gagliano’s disciplined senses, not only inefficient but also difficult to articulate and prove as objectively knowable. They are expressions of feeling bodies whose experiences of knowing are porous to their milieus in ways that run the risk of expending too much energy. In this narrative, such bodies lack the ability to transcend the temporality of the present into the realm of the future abstract—the realm in which, according to the design of Gagliano’s apparatus and that learned through her training—is what constitutes true “knowing,” and the conditions in which true “knowledge” of the world can be presented. These feelings of wrong kinds of knowing, as disciplined senses or what Barad calls “habits,” can be traced from within the material-discursive relations of a highly competitive evolutionary ecology department, where Gagliano was trained to feel that having what it takes to be a good scientist is a “natural predisposition.”

In their ethnographic studies of physicists and protein crystallographers, respectively, anthropologists Sharon Traweek (1988, 123–25) and Natasha Myers (2015b, 23–25) propose that what comes to count as “natural predispositions” are sociotechnical achievements—embodied in time, through ongoing practice, and subject to change through technological, material, and sociohistorical contingencies. We briefly explore some of the material-discursive practices through which Gagliano became entrained to a particular narrative of knowing—through which Gagliano learned to embody an image of herself as a scientist already predisposed to making those decisions that lead to the most efficient or “immediate” grasp of an apparatus and its outcomes—towards generating knowledge in objectively definable and probabilistic terms. From within Gagliano’s response, we can trace the subtle cues of her teachers and peers, iteratively articulating and reinforcing the conditions in which she was put to the test as “fit” or “not” to know as a scientist. Through coursework and lessons to familiarize herself with her biases, or “subjective feelings,” Gagliano embodied the distancing protocols of an objective observer, developing what was presumed to be an affectively “neutral stance” between herself and her apparatus. Repeated practices of checking “biases”—incorporating cameras as technologies to stand in support, or as counter to, her potentially fallible vision, searching for ways in which one’s “social” body, the influences of unscientific experience, might get in the way of proper knowing—aggregate and condense to become experimental habits. Throughout her training she came to make sense of herself as either already having what it takes to accurately, and efficiently, predict and demarcate the parameters of a knowable outcome, or not. Feeling emerges from within this narrative as part of this realm of “subjective bias.” As subjective it formulates an experience of knowing that, while at times insightful, cannot be taken seriously, or made legible, as a true form of knowing—or not the kind of knowing through which objectively right decisions get made.

In revealing some of the material-discursive compositions of Gagliano’s apparatus, the narrative of “knowing” affectively entrained into her practice as a “natural predisposition,” we work not to reduce such sensory dexterities—such habits of feeling for knowing “objectively”—to being “inherently wrong.” Rather, in foregrounding the feelings made possible by encounters with the unexpected, we suggest that feeling is neither antithetical to objectively knowing nor is it a sense, or experience, that a scientist has and that may prove insightful “at times.” Rather, we seek to demonstrate how feeling is a phenomenon both affectively constituted by and constitutive of a particular habit of a scientist’s knowing experience. And, like all habits, such feelings are susceptible to reconfiguration, “made and unmade on the level of immanence and radical experience” (Stengers 2011, 27). From within the material-discursive contingencies of an apparatus, in which it becomes possible for Gagliano to feel—to sense and make sense of—herself a failure, insight reaches out like the roots of the peas, luring us into experimenting with the indeterminacies of an apparatus as the grounds for a radicley empirical plant science.

Feeling Around for the Apparatus

In Getting Lost, feminist scientist and science studies scholar Patti Lather (2007) proposes a practice of learning to work within the “ruins” of science, despite its many disappointments (i.e., deterministic biological theories, biotechnological waste, the violence of positivism and belief in pure objectivity). Like Donna Haraway’s invitation to “stay with the trouble” (2016, 1–8), Lather asks of us to renegotiate the conceptual limitations of our scientific ruins, suggesting that “terms understood as no longer fulfilling their promise do not become useless. On the contrary, their very failures become provisional grounds, and new uses are derived” (2007, 10–11). In their “preferring not to” (Stengers 2005, 996) respond, or at least, not to respond in “the right way,” the pea plant roots invite us to slow down and pay a different kind of attention to “the limits and necessary misfirings” (Lather 2007, 11) of an unfurling pea plant decision-making apparatus. From within the mess of a scientist’s newfound experimental entanglements, it becomes possible to not only reimagine Gagliano as the “one who knows,” designs, and speaks for the performance of the peas, but to translate such imaginings into more-than-human empirical formations.

Turning toward the undetermined, albeit collectively shared interests of the peas, Gagliano, like the peas, begins to feel around for the potentials of a new possible apparatus—one in which the design, performance, and outcome are no longer constrained to the visual or “knowable” spectrum of Gagliano’s prior trainings but opened to radicley empirical formulations. The guiding inquiry is thus no longer concerned with whether or not the individual plants respond to the sound of water within their individual mazes—efficiently or aimlessly—but with what it becomes possible to know within the porous and indeterminate contingencies of the apparatus.

In so doing, Gagliano becomes a scientist whose knowing is made possible by not simply “losing herself” but by becoming herself, “a scientist who knows,” differently. For her capacity to know is no longer trapped inside of her body as a “natural predisposition,” revealing itself as either right or wrong, objective or subjective, efficient or aimless. Rather, in feeling herself as a failure in response to the unexpected outgrowth of the apparatus, Gagliano begins to feel herself as part of its empirical formulations—both constitutive of and partially constituted through the very phenomena the apparatus was designed to reveal. From within this disorienting space of no longer being the “one who knows”—the feeling of being immersed with one’s apparatus—the boundaries between scientist and object, knower and that which is to be known, are unclear.

Gagliano is absorbed into unexpected experimental relation with the peas, where the boundaries between the two, are subject to radicley empirical innovation. For a scientist’s insight, her capacity to know, is not a matter of “aha” or “objective” revelation but a matter of feeling around—a matter of unfurling in time, space, and intimate, more-than-human relation. A matter of becoming responsive to asynchronous outgrowths, to the inevitable sproutings and spreadings of the unexpected, to those radicle ruptures in rational conformity in which new possible plants and scientists take shape.

From within these newly responsive iterations of the apparatus, the individual pea seedlings are still positioned within individual mazes, but the four arms are now reduced to two, with both arms oriented towards the common, albeit still unknown, a stimulus. The difference between the treatment group and the control group is constituted by a small roadblock. The roadblock, a rectangular cutting of polystyrene foam, is randomly assigned and placed at the entrance of one of the two arms for each replicate maze. No roadblock is added to the control group, and therefore the seedlings are expected to grow randomly into either arm of the maze, as both arms are equally uninhibited. By adding a roadblock between the pea plants and their desired direction, Gagliano is interested in observing how plants decide the best route to reach stimulus a Are they able to identify the arm of the maze with no obstruction before arriving to it? And would they change the direction once the obstacle is encountered, or would they attempt to overcome it? Neither decision is more right or wrong. Rather, Gagliano is now interested in observing the spatial and temporal patterns that arise from “the root collective”—including the pea roots, maze boundaries, and roadblocks, time-lapse recordings, stimulus a and the in situ, that is intra-active cultivations of the apparatus—through which Gagliano, too, is figured. Her recordings and observations are not only generated in response to the direction of the pea roots’ growth and whether they reach the target inside of the maze (i.e., can the peas make right decisions), but also how roots move and traverse through soils in relation with the shifting boundaries of the maze (i.e., the relational encounters through which pea roots are responding to different constraints and affordances within and beyond the maze) (Figure 4).

Cultivating a heightened attention to the qualities of the medium through which knowing can be felt or experienced as knowledge—the transparent panes of glass through which both the scientist and the camera can visualize the pea plant roots inside a maze—Gagliano relinquishes the capacity to claim unmediated transparency to an objectively discerned experiment. Instead, the panes of plexiglass, the soil, the cameras, the pea roots growing towards an unknown stimulus, activate a “vision beyond the visible” (Scott 1991, 794). A vision that both conducts and challenges the fantastic projections that form the basis for Gagliano’s scientific investigation into “pea plant decision making.” In this story, the phenomena of feeling, knowing, and making a decision originate not in a presumably unmediated experience of a “natural” or “inherent” predisposition, but out of an intra-active or affective prehension of the moving, differentiating qualities of the apparatus: the displacement of soil by growing roots, the light diffracting through the lens of the cameras, the sonic vibrations of water, the emanations of an unknown albeit significant signal somewhere beyond the walls of the lab, and Gagliano’s trained senses, expanding and feeling around for the potentials of a living, growing, unfurling apparatus.

Figure 4. (A) Construction of two-way maze with roadblock. (B) Image of radicle growing into unobstructed arm of maze.

Conclusion

Gagliano’s radicley empirical inquiries remain ongoing, though not in any form easily translated into the representational demands of science. The peas continue to lure her into feeling around for the creative outgrowths of an apparatus—spurning a curiosity in more porous, ecologically responsive and response-able modes of experimentation. Having since expanded into a meshwork greenhouse adjacent to the lab, and thereafter into the unruly bounds of the vegetable garden, the once sterile expectations of a properly controlled apparatus have given way to the fervor of the surrounding forest—to the cacophony of birds and insects, the fluctuations of light, moisture, wind, etc. The apparatus through which Gagliano’s insights become possible is subject to dynamically more-than-human composition. The perceptions of both Gagliano and the peas are a matter of perpetual cultivation. And while such radicley empirical modes of experimentation have the potential to provoke new insights about how a scientist comes to feel around for knowing differently, it nonetheless proves difficult for a scientist charged with the task of generating replicable data in a timely manner.

In pointing to the limitations and tacit conditionings of a scientist’s knowledge-making habits, the peas invite us to slow down and feel around for new possible conditions through which science can be made. While the peas point away from the expected, from the conventions of an a priori knowing, they do not point to a “something else” out there waiting to be revealed. This is, as we see it, the radicley empirical invitation. It is not simply a reformulation of the scientist’s question but a reconstruction of the very terms through which a scientist’s questions become possible. Not simply a renewed epistemic attention to a scientist’s “feeling body” but an interest in the material-discursive histories through which the very concept of “feeling” is made possible within the empirical practices of a scientist. In accepting such an invitation, we endeavor to expand our potentials for response.

Feeling around for the potentials of a pea plant decision-making apparatus is less a practice of generating new knowledge about peas than it is a collaborative experiment in cultivating a radicley empirical ethics of transdisciplinary and transspecies response-ability. As such, feeling and knowing do not precede their experimental encounters as inherent capacities, natural predispositions, or experiences that one “has,” but are rather experiential categories made possible through intra-active, more-than-human encounters. Particular scientists and plants, feelers and knowers, precipitate out of these intra-active entanglings at the expense of others. No “decision,” or theorizing of “decisions,” is innocent, but rather is partially constitutive of the very world it claims to represent.

Like many scientists, Gagliano continues to grapple with such ruptures in convention. For such empirical habits are not easily broken. They are instilled in the canons of her discipline, the expectations and policings of colleagues, and the maze-like network of institutions that demand efficiency and control—at the expense of curiosity—out of both herself and the processes she studies. But as we have come to see it, Gagliano’s struggles against the habits of science are, all the while, indications that Gagliano is feeling around for openings into a differently possible science—sensing and making sense of herself anew from within the mess, the ruins, the failures, and ethical entanglings of the scientific venture. We suggest that this is perhaps all the while the kind of science the peas invite us to craft. As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, learning to listen to plants requires us to “unlearn hurrying,” to relinquish “the parameters of efficiency and controlled for precision” from our scientifically trained preconceptions (2013, 233). Such modes of listening require much more time, and trust, that scientific insights can be generated without fully knowing the conditions in which, for example, “right” or “wrong” kinds of knowing can be rendered knowable.

As a minor empiricism, our radicley empirical proposition is neither better nor worse, more right or wrong, but a different way to go about crafting inquiries into the sensorial (re)configurations of knowing. From within the creative unfurlings of an apparatus in unexpected formation, it becomes possible to amplify the responsive potentials for radicle and all kinds of radically empirical means of knowing. Evoking different translations of a scientist’s detours, their feeling around for an apparatus without a clear knowing of what’s to come not as wrong but as perhaps immanent to the act of novel inquiry; extending the invitation to feel around for, and therefore about knowing, plants, scientists, and all kinds of feelers and knowers, differently.

Acknowledgements

Monica Gagliano is supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation under the Diverse Intelligences Initiative (grant # TWCF0313 & TWCF0541). Kristi Onzik is supported by the UC Davis Department of Anthropology Graduate Student Summer Fellowship and UC Davis Feminist Art and Science Shop HATCH (Mellon Research Initiative) Research Award. With special thanks to Dr. Joseph Dumit, Dr. Marisol de la Cadena, and Dr. Suzana Sawyer for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript and for the generous encouragement received from anonymous reviewers throughout the publication process.

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Author Bios

Kristi Onzik is a PhD Candidate in the UC Davis Anthropology Department. For information please visit https://anthropology.ucdavis.edu/people/konzik.

Monica Gagliano is an Associate Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Director of the Biological Intelligence Lab. For information please visit www.monicagagliano.com.