Feeling Around for the Apparatus: A Radicley Empirical Plant Science

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.