Unthinkable Plant Science: Troubling Cognitive Commons with Dr. Gagliano

• In Event: Methods of Engagement: Feminist Approaches to Collaborations in Studying Beyond the Human

Abstract

This paper emerges from ongoing ethnographic studies and experimental collaborations with Dr. Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist turned rogue scientist of ‘plant cognition.’ Since 2013, Gagliano has taken up the courageous and difficult task of uprooting much of what scientists thought they knew, or dared to ask, about plants. She has published numerous and highly controversial studies suggesting plants have memory, the ability to learn, and communicate through sound. And yet such narratives, bounded to the moral economies (Daston, 1995) of scientific peers and journal editors, offer only a small glimpse of Gagliano’s scientific risk taking endeavors. This paper will work to illuminate complexities of Gagliano’s scientific practices which exceed, resist, and disrupt what is scientifically ‘thinkable.’ With a ‘minor key’(Stengers, 2003) attunement to what Gagliano refers to as the ‘unthinkable’ realms of plant communication, this paper delves into the perceptual constraints and ontological assumptions embedded in the very concepts of ‘knowledge’ and ‘thought’--categories which have long forged a conceptual commons among scientists and science studies scholars alike. In doing so, this paper takes the ineffable, unthinkable, and unforeseen communions involved in the making of Gagliano’s scientific experiments with plants as challenges to not only scientific representation, but the grounds upon which the categories of knowledge and thought have long been scientifically, philosophically and ethnographically made to rest--the grounds of ‘the human.’

Author

• Kristi Onzik, UC Davis Anthropology