Accessing Microbial Lifeworlds: Weird Entanglements and Strange Symbionts
Accessing Microbial Lifeworlds: Weird Entanglements and Strange Symbionts

Summary/Abstract: Beginning with an analysis of the discovery of endosymbiosis—the finding that the mitochondria of eukaryotic cells are derived from a once free-living bacterial ancestor—this paper is concerned with the sense of weirdness that certain findings in microbiology have the capacity to evoke. However, as the story of endosymbiotic theory unfolds, it becomes evident that the weirdness of microbial life is not to be found only in the organisms’ biological characteristics themselves, but also in the dynamics of how these characteristics have been successively framed and reframed in scientific discourse. In this sense I argue that the weirdness of the microbial world is to be found in its recalcitrance and difficulty to be contained. This view is further supported through reference to contemporary perspectives on the dependence of humans upon microbes that displaces relations of symbiosis in favour of a less symmetrical vision. The scale, complexity and unceasing transpositions of microbial worlds means they are constitutively withdrawn from human access. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationships between the biological features of microbial life worlds, the onto-epistemological dynamics of our apprehension of these worlds, and the conception of the object-oriented ontology (OOO). Rather than subsuming the weirdness of microbial worlds within a generalised frame of weirdness, as gestured by OOO, I suggest that an alternative ontology—that of subtending relations—may more productively encompass human-microbe relations.

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