On the Siting of Science: Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in the U.S.-American Television Show Breaking Bad Martin Butler This contribution explores forms of representing laboratories, scientific practice, and their subjects in the U.S.-American television show Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-2013). Starting from the idea that scientific practice is always embedded in, and shaped by, specific socio-material constellations and thus needs to be understood as situated, it argues that the series’ laboratories, as sites of science, articulate different conceptualisations of science and scientific practice while contributing to modelling the series’ main characters through their respective set-ups. By analysing this mutual interdependence between the spaces and settings of the laboratories and the ways of both doing science and becoming a scientist, the contribution demonstrates the potential of serial television in the production of, and critical reflection on, notions of scientific practice, its settings, and its subjects. The award-winning television show Breaking Bad, aired on AMC from 2008 to 2013, portrays high school chemistry teacher Walter White, who, after having been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, decides to enter the drug business, cooking crystal meth to pay for his medical treatment and to secure his family’s financial future. Both in public discourse and in scholarship, the serial depiction of the protagonist’s breaking bad, told in 62 episodes organised in five seasons, has been celebrated, among other things, “for its compelling storytelling” (Guffey 2013: 155), its complex character development, and its critical engagement with then-current social and political discourses. Moreover, reviewers and scholars have focused on the role of science in and for the show, explaining the series’s success by highlighting its very specific form of representing science and its functions. Ben Wetherbee and Stephanie Weaver, for instance, argue that “the show has rhetorically used science to its own advantage, to garner AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 2 Gunther Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0012 Martin Butler 210 praise and credibility as a distinctive and ‘serious’ television programme” (2013: 2). For them, “the show’s science functions […] as a narrative catalyst”, as Walter White’s “chemistry provides the opportunity for Breaking Bad’s storyline to probe the social and economic issues of the American family, capitalism, the War on Drugs, and American-Mexican border relations” (2013: 2). “Chemistry”, they point out, “is a point of access into the show’s ‘serious’ subject matter” (2013: 2). Morgan Fritz sheds a different light on science in Breaking Bad and reads the show’s protagonist as an epitome of what Nicos Poulantzas has called “the new petty bourgeoisie” characterised by an “experience of exploitation in spite of its dislocation from the site of  class  struggle” (qtd. in Fritz 2016: 178). For Fritz, Walter’s aporia is representative of this experience, and his “meth production liberates him from exploitation and meaningless work, for which he substitutes scientific work bordering on art in its quest for perfection and purity” (2016: 181). In my contribution, I would like to add to this discussion of the show’s forms of representing science. To do so, I focus on the ways in which the space of the laboratory - i.e., the space where Walter and his assistant, Jesse Pinkman, cook their meth - is produced through means of audiovisual representation, and, at the same time, affects the characters’ practice of ‘doing science’. In other words, I ask how different locations, ranging from a recreational vehicle to a fully equipped meth kitchen, are transformed into what Steven Shapin (1988) has called “sites” of science through the show’s portrayal of practices of drug engineering and production, and how these practices are, in turn, represented as being shaped by their specific socio-material environments. 1 I start from the assumption that laboratories, as the (alleged) “linchpin of scientific experimental practice” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 23 2 ), are not (necessarily) “buildings set apart” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 23), but ‘produced’, or installed in and through processes of redefining space through specific practices. They are, in other words, “a hybrid moulded by its social environment and in interaction with other social settings” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 23). By focusing on a selection of these “hybrids” in Breaking Bad, I would like to illustrate that the show depicts the lab both as a “placeless place” (Kohler 2002a: 476; see also Kohler 2002b) imagined as a site for the accurate and meticulous (re)production of scientific practice and as a site which is shaped by, and gives shape to, this very practice and its subjects. Specifically through its serial form, I argue, Breaking Bad allows for a detailed depiction of this mutually constitutive relationship 1 David Livingstone (2003: esp. ch. 2) has elaborated on this mutually constitutive relationship between the location and the practice of science. 2 Landbrecht and Straub (2016) provide an excellent survey of research on the laboratory; see also David Pithan’s recent book Corporate Research Laboratories and the History of Innovation (2022). For a comprehensive study of the history of the chemistry laboratory going back to the sixteenth century, see Morris (2015). Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 211 between place-making and subjectivation both over time and in different spatial arrangements. My argument draws on an array of existing scholarship, some of which has been specifically helpful in and for my argument: Wetherbee and Weaver (2013), for instance, have provided an insightful examination of the role of science in Breaking Bad, also referring to the laboratory as a space of science, while Alberto Brodesco has analysed the development of Walter White’s “scientific rationality” (2013: 56-59) in the series, also taking into account different contexts of scientific practice and their normativities. I will draw on some of their arguments in my contribution, which sets out to expand on their analyses through my decided focus on the laboratory as a site of producing science and ‘scientificness’. Ensley F. Guffey has included the laboratories in his exploration of place-making practices in Breaking Bad (2013: 164-169), showing “the manner in which Breaking Bad uses experience of place and space to create a more fully realized diegetic world” (2013: 155). My focus, however, is on the process of turning these spaces into sites of science, while also illuminating how these sites, in turn, affect the praxis of science and its subjects. To begin with, there is perhaps a simple reason why the narrative of Breaking Bad is particularly apt to render the process of transforming different places into what we would usually identify as laboratories: The production of crystal meth is illegal and thus needs to happen in a space which is generally not used as a laboratory and which, more importantly, must not be identifiable as such. For this reason, it is a recreational vehicle, a 1986 Fleetwood Bounder, to be precise, which is turned into a laboratory in the first season of the show, as Walter and Jesse start cooking meth in the desert of New Mexico. The conditions in this vehicle are far from the stereotypical cleanliness of the laboratory (see also Wetherbee & Weaver 2013: 8); however, the RV is produced as a laboratory through the detailed depiction of Walter’s scientific expertise and skills, which adds to what one may call the ‘scientification’ of the meth-cooking process and, accordingly, to the ‘laboratoriness’ of the vehicle. As Walter combines various ingredients (Illustration 1), the audience gets involved in “experimentation in progress” (Straub 2016: 57), a topos established in the visual depiction of lab life at the turn of the twentieth century (Straub 2016: 57). Viewers see close-ups of chemical reactions and their preparation as well as the technical apparatus needed to make them happen, as Walter elaborates on what is happening. In his field of expertise, Walter appears highly confident and despite the confined space and limited resources produces high-quality crystal meth and becomes a central player in the regional drug trade, working under the pseudonym of Heisenberg. Martin Butler 212 Illustration 1. ‘Doing science’ in the RV. Screenshot from the episode “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”, season 1, episode 6. Breaking Bad © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. Walter’s skilled scientific practice contributes to re-signifying the mobile kitchen into a site of science, while, as Wetherbee and Weaver point out, “it is through this messiness  …  that Walt emerges as something close to a classic, masculine protagonist” (2013: 8) at the very same time. The image of science produced in this interplay between car and characters thus turns out to be an amalgamation of a particularly white and male spirit of testing the limits of what is possible, and the idea that these limits can even be crossed through the application of scientific principles. 3 This exploratory gesture is emphasised by the setting of the RV-lab, which is frequently shown as part of a scenery easily associated with what has come to be known as the Frontier in American cultural history. In accordance with the specific notion of masculinity (both of Walter and of science itself) communicated by staging the chemistry teacher as the “individualist masculine anti-hero” (Wetherbee & Weaver 2013: 8), the geographical location articulates a specific imaginary of science as a practice of transgression, both with regard to the limits of knowledge and in view of ethical constraints. In contrast to the institutionalised and highly restrained setting of the classroom, Walter’s scientific activities can unfold freely in the desert, “where anything can happen and everything is allowed” (Guffey 2013: 169). As his “small” science as a teacher “returns 3 For a more detailed discussion of the gender dimension of meth-cooking in Breaking Bad, see Lowry (2019). Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 213 big”, as Alberto Brodesco puts it, “his chemistry majestically gets back its strength and creativity” (2013: 54). 4 Illustration 2. At the frontiers of knowledge: New Mexico as liminal place. Screenshot from the episode “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”, season 1, episode 6. Breaking Bad © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that the first season prominently features the landscapes of New Mexico as a background to the narrative, with “Albuquerque, the surrounding indigenous pueblos, the mountain and desert scenery, and the big Southwestern skies becom[ing] dynamic forces in the visual language and thematic significance of Breaking Bad” (Hunt 2016: 33). 5 An outlandish and ‘outlaw-ish’ place invested with a history of secret scientific endeavours “far from prying eyes” (Hunt 2016: 33) and from the urban centres of the United States, New Mexico might well be conceived as what Christina Landbrecht and Verena Straub, referring to Karin Knorr- Cetina, call “an ‘other’ environment” (2016: 29), a liminal place with “its own social and cultural codes” (2016: 28; Illustration 2). 6 4 Lisa Weckerle expands on this frontier imagery with regard to the RV and its setting (2019: esp. 124-125) and reads other constellations in the series as renderings of the Frontier myth. 5 See Hunt (2016) for a comprehensive analysis of the significance of space and place in Breaking Bad that specifically elaborates on the (trans)formations and intersections between the local, the regional, and the global aspects of the drug trade, as represented in the show. 6 Guffey also discusses the role of the RV in the series, yet not primarily in terms of the representation of science and scientific practice, but rather in view of its symbolic value for Walter and Jesse as “a place with deep meaning” (2013: 166). Also, Guffey describes the RV as “a complicated study”, as it is “inherently mobile, yet it Martin Butler 214 Sure, and perhaps in the first place, the New Mexico setting marks the genre of the Western critically negotiated in Breaking Bad (see Bitar 2022: 60-61 and 65-66, Hunt 2016: 35, Weckerle 2019), which, in turn, “significantly impacts the show’s gender representation” (Bitar 2022: 65). At the same time, however, the desert setting in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands reinforces the popular image of lab life happening “in a place remote in terms both of its location and architecture” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 27). This image of New Mexico as such an ‘other’ place of scientific progress, which Breaking Bad draws upon to invoke a notion of science as a crossing of boundaries, has been shaped by the (hi)story of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and its involvement in the development of the nuclear bomb during the famously infamous Manhattan Project. “Los Alamos scientists”, as Joseph Masco has it in his study on what he calls “nuclear borderlands”, “created much more than a new technology with the invention of a military atomic device in 1945; they engendered new forms of consciousness, new means of being in the world distinct from those that came before” (2006: 1). 7 Los Alamos has thus become a site embodying the “utopian belief in the possibility of an unending technological progress” and as such, the “beginning of American big science” (Masco 2006: 1), framed by what Flannery Burke has called “the Cold War climate of secrecy” (2017: 246). During the Cold War, as Sandra Kaji-O’Grady and Chris Smith point out, “remote places became the sites of science” (2019: 4). No wonder, then, that Los Alamos - as one of the most secret and, at the same time, most prominent sites - soon entered the American popular imagination, e.g. through the adventures of the Incredible Hulk, whose alter ego, Bruce Banner, built nuclear weapons in a secret lab in New Mexico (Burke 2017: 258), or in a range of cases of livestock mutilation in the area which, as a report has it, were interpreted as side-effects of “the work of Los Alamos laboratory scientists” (Burke 2017: 259). Walter White’s meth-cooking in the RV, then, continues this image of borderland science, combining it with the romantic self-conception of pre-war scientists as “essentially solitary in their confrontation with nature” (Peter Galison qtd. in Klonk 2016: 5). Moreover, the improvised nature of the laboratory, exposing the DIY character of Walter’s and Jesse’s endeavour, connects the scientificness of their also includes essential elements of home and permanence” (2013: 165). This provisional nature of the RV lab, as one might argue, adds to its liminal status as a place ‘in-between’, or at the border. 7 The Laboratory (referred to as “National Atomic Laboratory”) is actually featured in the pilot of the series, as Walter asks his wife to visit an exhibition there (Sharrett 2021: 60). Sharrett (2021: 57-64) explores the semantics of Los Alamos in closer detail, but, apart from pondering the nuclear bomb tests that defined that area, is not concerned with its implications for an understanding of the practice and functions of science in the series. Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 215 practice with an entrepreneurial spirit of innovation and creativity reminiscent of recent ‘start-up’ and ‘maker’ cultures. 8 In season 3 of Breaking Bad, Walter and Jesse produce crystal meth for Gustavo Fring, who is in control of the meth trade in the region. For this purpose, the basement underneath an industrial laundry is transformed into a laboratory. This time, the lab space is less defined as such through the showcasing of scientific practice than through its technological equipment, producing a specific notion of science as characterised by cleanliness and accuracy as well as being embedded in a cycle of industrial production (Wetherbee & Weaver 2013: 9, 12, Guffey 2013: 166). The messy lab of the RV, in which science is performed on the basis of minimal resources (Wetherbee & Weaver 2013: 8), is replaced by a space which seems to be controllable by both Walter and Jesse, who can now draw on a reliable technical apparatus that, as we learn, was installed by a German engineer called Werner Ziegler, but is, in fact, controlled by Fring, who can observe the drug production through cameras installed in what is often referred to as the ‘superlab’ of the series (Illustration 3). Illustration 3. The superlab as factory-laboratory. Screenshot from the episode “Fly”, season 3, episode 10. Breaking Bad © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. The superlab represents another design, or architecture, of and for scientific practice, which was put into place by large-scale endeavours such 8 Pierson elaborates on the neoliberal elements of the show and, with reference to the meth-cooking activities, argues that, as a “successful gangster, Walt exemplifies the tenets of neoliberal entrepreneurism” (2013: 23). Martin Butler 216 as the Manhattan project. As Galison puts it: “Physical plants, social ordering, and a new subject position entered together in the government-sponsored factory-laboratory exemplified by Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos” (qtd. in Klonk 2016: 10). Although this form of organising science has long been replaced by yet another, more decentralised structure of scientific practice (Klonk 2016: 10), Breaking Bad picks up on this idea of the “industrial style, hierarchically organized laboratories” (Klonk 2016: 10) in order to emphasise the mechanical reproduction of scientific practice within the constraints of the drug trade, thereby confirming Karin Knorr- Cetina’s observation that “the laboratory itself limits the scope and the form of scientists’ activity” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 25). At the same time, in what Angelo Restivo describes as a strikingly “untimely” way of representation, the depiction of the superlab as a factory-laboratory contributes to signifying “both an (outmoded) faith in the utopian national project of modernization, and the dark reminders of its potentially lethal consequences” (2019: 94). Whereas in the RV, the enterprise of meth-cooking is linked to passionate engagement with science and its procedures, the superlab affords a division of labour and, consequently, a rearrangement of subject positions. Walt surveys the procedure of meth-cooking, while Jesse develops routines of emulation, which do not need any specific scientific expertise but require an exact reproduction of what Walt tells him to do. Jesse, as Ian Dawe puts it, “learns the art from Walter, not the science” (2015: 142; see also Guffey 2013: 164-165). In other words, while Walter knows about the why of chemical reactions, Jesse acquires the know how of meth production. “  Jesse’s  take-home message is always practical, focused on little technical details rather than scientific principles. This artisanal approach differs sharply from [Walter’s] scientific approach” (Dawe 2015: 142). For both men, working in the superlab becomes a daily routine, visualised through recurring sequences in which the different steps of meth production are displayed in a highly repetitive manner. Upon entering the lab, the two characters change their apparel, thus adding to their appearance as just two parts of highly sterile equipment, being subjected to the logic of serial meth production, which increasingly strips the two characters off their individual agency. Yet, their division of labour in the lab reproduces what Livingstone has called the “epistemological chasm dividing the scholar from the mechanic” (2003: 24). As the scholar, Walter tries to maintain his position as the authority in the lab. He repeatedly stresses that his “formula”, a term he uses to describe his scientific approach to meth production (Adkins 2017: 27), is at the very heart of Gus’s business. This emphasis on the “formula”, on the one hand, is part and parcel of Walter’s “adamantine insistence on respect for the chemistry” (Guffey 2013: 164), which, as Guffey has convincingly argued, articulates Walter’s “own self- Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 217 image as a professional scientist” (2013: 164). 9 On the other hand, Walter’s maintaining of scientific precision seeks to keep up the scientificness of the factory-laboratory he is trapped in. In this vein, the insistence on his “formula” signals Walter’s efforts to detach himself from the actual results and effects of his doings in the lab, while at the same time, being fully aware that he cannot really escape the situation he has put himself in, which reduces him to a worker. At this point of no return, in what seems to be an act of compensation, he develops an almost neurotic obsession with technicalities (see also Adkins 2017: 22-25), at times combined with a hypersensitivity towards any disturbances of the procedure. The representation of this hypersensitivity is pushed to the extreme in the season three episode “Fly”. In this episode, Walt becomes obsessed with a fly that has entered the clean space of the laboratory and threatens the perfection of the production process. 10 Walter’s compulsive hunt for the fly, whose perspective is sometimes represented in point-of-view shots, highlights the insect as an analogy to his own situation. Like the fly, he is trapped in the lab, both spatially and ethically, becoming increasingly aware of the consequences of his applied science, while constantly trying to avoid being concerned with them too directly (see also Guffey 2013: 166-167). The site of the lab, which, for obvious reasons, needs to be kept a secret place, turns out to be a trap on another level, too, as it confronts Walter with the limits of his scientific authority. In the ‘outside world’, he is but a chemistry teacher who even has to work in a second job to make ends meet for his family. Due to his cancer, he cannot even continue this career and seems to be stuck in a situation in which his scientific expertise, though regularly acknowledged by family and friends, does not really matter anymore. Walter’s increasing frustration, as viewers learn early in the series, goes back to an unsuccessful claim to fame in the scientific community that reaches far back into the past, when he had partnered with his colleague and friend Elliot Schwartz to open a business called Gray Matter Technologies. Walter left this company, cancelling his relationship with his thenlab assistant Gretchen, who, after they had split up, decided to start dating Elliot Schwartz instead. Gretchen and Elliot, then, further advanced Gray Matter Technologies, which was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Prize, and 9 To claim and hold this position of authority, as Fabio L. Vericat has argued, Walter also draws on the elaborate discourse of science: “His powers largely rely on his control over words as written signs, but whose pronunciation becomes occult and only he can legitimately enunciate” (2019: 155). 10 In his reading of the episode, Vericat points out that the ‘threat’ of the fly to the sterile atmosphere of the superlab and, eventually, to Walter’s control over it, is not only rendered on a visual level (e.g., through close-up shots of the insect and the dramaturgy of Walter’s desperate attempts at catching it) but also on an acoustic level: “The fly’s indefinite buzz defeats Walt because it upsets his control over acoustics as univocal inscription” (2021: 161). Martin Butler 218 drew on Walter’s scientific expertise without sufficiently acknowledging his contribution. This experience of personal disappointment adds to Walter’s desire to let people know about what he does in secrecy - a desire, which, as Steven Shapin (1988) describes in his account of science in seventeenth-century England, is driven by the fact that scientific knowledge, to be acknowledged by the community, needs to be ‘showcased’. In other words, the “creditworthiness” (Shapin 1988: 404) of scientists is gained and maintained by what Shapin calls the “‘discoursing’ upon” an experiment (1988: 399). “The career of experimental knowledge”, he continues, “is the circulation between private and public spaces” (1988: 400), before concluding that, in modern societies, “we believe  scientists  because of their visible display of the emblems of recognized expertise and because their claims are vouched for by other experts” (1988: 404). This public demonstration of expertise, however, is virtually impossible in a situation in which the ‘site of science’ needs to be hidden from the public. Walter is well aware of the consequences should he showcase his meth-cooking beyond the laboratory in an attempt to demonstrate his scientific ingenuity. At the same time, he seems to be constantly tempted by the idea of letting people know about him being the author, and the authority, of his formula. This urge, which not only grows due to Walter’s equally growing hubris but also results from the economy of attention and acknowledgement characteristic of the field of science, increases during the series (see Echart & García 2013: 207-209). As Pablo Echart and Alberto García argue, “[T]he ever more pathological personality of Walter demands public recognition, he needs others to be aware of his talent” (2013: 208). That is why, more often than not, Walter is dangerously close to revealing what he does in secrecy. One decisive instance of this ambivalent temptation can be witnessed when Gale Boetticher, Walter’s laboratory assistant, is murdered, and the police identify Gale as Heisenberg, Walter White’s alter ego. Through his brother-in-law Hank Schrader, who works for the Drug Enforcement Agency and is involved in the investigation, Walter - as a specialist in chemistry - gets involved, too, and is asked for assistance. Instead of confirming the police’s suspicion that Boetticher is Heisenberg, which would easily bring Walter relief, as he would be taken off the line in the ongoing police investigation, Walter seems to be urged to set things right and, eventually, cannot resist to point out to his brotherin-law: “This genius of yours. Maybe he’s still out there” (Walley-Beckett 2011), thus making the ever-sceptical Hank keep the case open rather than closing it. Walter’s wish to be acknowledged as “a genius” is also the starting point of his downfall. Flattered by his lab assistant Boetticher, who, at one point, gives him a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a present, and dedicates this book to “his other W.W.” (Walley-Beckett 2012), Walter does Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 219 not erase this trace of his meth cooking activities, but keeps the book as a constant reminder of his scientific excellence. He even goes so far as to leave the Whitman book in the bathroom of his family home, where, eventually, Hank discovers it and quickly identifies Walter as the true Heisenberg. As expected, this identification does not at all go along with the acknowledgement of Walter’s scientific genius, but rather with the instant wish to hunt down Walter. In this vein, then, the “‘discoursing’ upon” (Shapin 1988: 399) his experiments in the lab does not at all lead to the effects that Walter may have wished for. Accordingly, in Breaking Bad, the laboratory is a highly ambivalent space - “a chemist’s paradise, but also a factory, a prison, and a tomb” (Fritz 2016: 182), in which Walter and Jesse can exercise their skills and in which they are - both literally and figuratively - trapped at the very same time. The laboratory produces Walter as a self-confident expert equipped with authority but at the same time adds to his frustration, as the outcome of his genius has to be kept a secret. That is, his scientific expertise cannot be showcased to a community which, as he believes and repeatedly remarks, would be impressed by what he has achieved and would pay the respect he so desperately longs for. So, the dilemma he faced as an underestimated teacher comes back with a vengeance when he enters the business of meth-cooking. Over the course of the series, this dilemma puts an ever-increasing pressure on Walter to reveal what he has been doing in order to earn the credentials he thinks he deserves. In contrast to Walter’s (claim of) ingenuity, Jesse’s expertise in methcooking, as I have hinted at above, rests on knowing how rather than on knowing why, and turns him into an indispensable agent in the production process and a target of both the police and competitors in the drug trade. For him, too, the laboratory is thus both a safe space and, as the final season of the show emphasises, a highly dangerous one. Indeed, towards the end of the show, a white supremacist gang kidnaps Jesse and forces him to cook meth. He is trapped in, and chained to, what looks like an assembly line in a meth factory (Illustration 4). Martin Butler 220 Illustration 4. Trapped: Mechanical Reproduction in the Lab. Screenshot from the episode “Ozymandias”, season 5, episode 14. Breaking Bad © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. Whereas the opening of the series stages the ‘scientification’ of methcooking, as Walt’s and Jesse’s RV transforms into a lab, its conclusion ‘descientifies’ the illegal activity, as Jesse’s face is covered in blood, signifying a degenerate body being stripped off its subjectivity and abused as means of production. As Cheryl Edelson argues, this disturbing image of Jesse as a slave working for the supremacists’ drug industry calls forth memories of “the slave-labor of Third Reich factories such as the Dora-Nordhausen” (2015: 196), and with it, the instrumentalisation of science for ideological purposes: “Here”, as she puts it, Jesse is compelled through torture, terrorism, and outright muscle memory to shuffle mindlessly, on a track, through the procedures of the meth cook. He has been debased into what Foucault would call a ‘machine-man’ robbed of agency and identity through ‘disciplinary mechanization’. (2015: 196) While the explicitness of the show in its depiction of both the white supremacists and Jesse’s installation as part of the mechanics of an automated production sequence lends itself to be associated with the Nazi atrocities, it also, in a more general sense, articulates a sinister critique of capitalism, in which the human body and its knowledge are both subjected to a regime of economic efficiency and constant optimisation, as a radicalised form of the factory-laboratory in which Walter and Jesse were imprisoned by Gustavo Fring earlier in the show. * * * * * Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 221 Apart from the RV, the superlab, and the Nazi meth factory, the show offers a range of other constellations in which spatial arrangements and processes of subjectivation interact. Walter acts as a teacher in school, where he is subjected to the classroom and the curriculum and is not able to showcase his genius; the basement of Jesse Pinkman’s home is turned into a temporary lab that, as Guffey argues, corrupts Jesse’s home as “the most intimate of places” (2013: 157-158); and Walter and Jesse install a mobile lab in different houses they illegally enter at night, disguised as a pest control company, which turns them into “invaders who violate the most intimate places of people whom they have never met” (Guffey 2013: 168). Specifically through its serial narration, Breaking Bad reflects on the different dimensions of what Shapin calls the “siting” (1988: 373 et passim) of science. By drawing on different set-ups which, through the characters’ actions as well as due to specific arrangements of props, are turned into meth-cooking labs, the show negotiates different notions of science and scientific practice, ranging from science as an exploratory endeavour that pushes the limits of knowledge and its applicability under highly adverse circumstances to science (or rather: its application) as a highly routinised procedure deeply embedded in socioeconomic constellations of power, both on an illegal and a legal level. Moreover, in as much as the protagonists of the show contribute to the creation of their labs through practice, the “local circumstances of the laboratory” (Latour & Woolgar 1986: 173) contribute to the production of their specific subject positions - from masculine authority to a dehumanised slave in the machinery of meth production at the end of the show. Depicting this mutual constitution of spaces, subjects, and their scientific practices, which I illustrated by focusing on three sites of science in the show, the show draws on the traditions, or ‘genres’, of visualising laboratories. In other words, lab life in Breaking Bad - be it in basements or in factories - is rendered in terms of an established repertoire of images (re)produced specifically in photography, but also in the making of movies and television shows. In her historical account on visual representations of the lab, Verena Straub uses Breaking Bad as a starting point to argue that the image of the laboratory as reproduced on television and in film “is rooted […] in a centuries-old iconographic tradition that remains predominant in our cultural imagination to this day” (2016: 49) and which, especially since the “standardisation of laboratory architecture” in the second half of the nineteenth century (2016: 56), has regularly featured “the figure of the solitary genius” (2016: 53), the “alchemist-philosopher” (2016: 55; italics in original) surrounded by the technical means that enable him to pursue his scientific endeavour. Moreover, it was the visual staging of laboratories at the end of the nineteenth century which contributed to what Straub calls a “second modern myth” (next to that of the solitary genius), “namely that of the laboratory as factory” (2016: 55). In Breaking Bad, this idea of the single scientist is articulated through the character of Walter Martin Butler 222 White and amalgamated with another traditional image of the laboratory, which emphasises the “interaction between man and machine” and puts the lab in direct analogy to a “factory” (Straub 2016: 53, 37). The show’s depiction of different laboratories not only negotiates wellestablished images of science and its subjects, but also reverberates with what Kohler has called the “placelessness” of the laboratory as “a social form that travels and is easy to adopt” (qtd. in Kaji-O’Grady & Smith 2019: 43). Placelessness, for Kohler, is a “rhetorical fiction” (Kaji O’Grady & Smith 2019: 43; see also Livingston 2003: 185) connected to a universalist idea of science as a mode of knowledge production detached from nature; that is, removed from any disturbing, irritating, or corrupting external influences. 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