On body-environment continuities from a laboratory commensalism

Résumé
In describing scientific practices, STS commonly orients toward action and meaning. These can be related to C.S. Peirce’s phenomenological categories of Secondness and Thirdness. In this talk, I continue that work by turning to a laboratory of neural genetics that studies olfaction by employing the fruit fly as its model organism. I, however, also ask whether it may be possible to catch certain aspects of suchness and qualities of feeling of immediate experience in everyday practices of the laboratory. 

Neural genetics exhibits one of the “post” aspects in post-genomic science—its turn to the environment. To get at how practitioners of neural genetics accomplish such a turn, I pay attention to an occasion of designing experimental chambers for an optogenetics study. While recognizing sensory qualities of my own inhabitation of the laboratory, I follow how practitioners, in going beyond the precision of genetic tools, deal with the body’s relationship to space. As olfactory spatiality brings forth traces of Firstness, it suggests a multispecies closeness that does not rely on a cross-mapping of attributes known from the human sphere. I conclude the talk by exploring how such phenomena may be articulated beyond the laboratory locales that occasioned them.

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