Interviewed by Faith Lane (’23)
Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter (Punctum Books, 2023) tells the story of small matter such as bacteria, coral, fungi, lichen, pollen, protozoa, and viruses. With short entries that are organized like a herbarium or similar specimen collection, the book is a “microbium”—both the term for a single microbe and a play on “microbiome.”
As such, Microbium makes visible the often overseen but huge impact of miniscule matter on human culture and the environment. Each entry is a “microscopic reading” that describes the natural history and scientific discovery of a particular form of micro-matter, while also telling a story about the cultural and artistic roles it has played over the centuries. From the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the “coralness” of coral reefs to contemporary literature about the COVID-19 pandemic, this book places micro-matter under a cultural microscope and translates the significance of the invisible interspecies social realm to the human scale, magnifying the many ways in which micro-matter matters. Ultimately, Microbium shows the potential of micro-matter to teach us how to revitalize our political and cultural systems, habits of thought, and aesthetic or representational modes.
Faith Lane: Can you tell me a bit about yourself, your educational background, and areas of specialization?
Agnes Malinowska: I got my BA at UC Berkeley in philosophy and history, and then I came to Chicago to study at the Committee on Social thought. At the time, I thought I was going to be doing something with phenomenology like Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty and also feminist theory. But, I took some dramatic turns in graduate school, and I ended up working on a project regarding late 19th- early 20th-century American literature that was interested in the post-Darwinian uses of nature in political, racial and gendered ways. That got me into the non-human and animal studies world and animal studies. Microbium came out of that world, through collaborations with other people (like Joela, my co-editor) doing non-human stuff and also the history of science to some extent. Now, I’ve turned towards Gender and Sexuality Studies, which I started working on mostly by myself during my dissertation years and is now an interesting area of focus for me. I’m always, in general, interested in the way that the things that we call “nature,” the “non-human,” the “biological,” or that have to do with “non-human nature” out there, or nature as far as in our bodies, embodiment, reproduction, and sexuality… I’m interested in the way that these things matter and show up in culture and politics.
FL:How did you come to be a part of this project? Had you interacted with the other contributors before?
AM: Joela and I knew each other from UChicago. We organized an animal/non-human studies workshop together in graduate school. We also put together a panel on non-human matter for a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). The way that ACLA works is that you get a seminar of 12 people and you’re just kind of hanging out with them for a few days and sharing papers. So, it’s a really nice format, and some of our other contributors came from there. Then, we decided to do another panel a year later, one that was specifically about microorganisms, at another conference, the Association for the Study of Literature in the Environment (ASLE). Joela and I had wanted to do a writing project after ACLA, but in the year leading up to ASLE, we had started feeling burnt out on the topic. But at ASLE, a ton of people showed up at our panel. We didn’t know why. Like we’re not famous or anything. So we were just like, “Oh, people actually are interested in this,” which made us feel energized. We had this vision of how we wanted the book to be, and yeah, just kind of kept going from there. So like five of the contributors, including us, were from the Conferences. And then for the other three people, I just started doing research based on the types of microorganisms that exist. I knew I was going to write about bacteria, Joela was gonna do an entry on pollen, Ray was going to do viruses, Karen’s was gonna do fungi… so we thought, “okay, what other microorganisms do we want?” Then we reached out to people, cold-emailing them about our project and how we thought their work would be good in it. For example, one of our entries is on tiny, tiny animals, and I had just happened to read an essay by somebody that teaches at Brown on that topic, and I just reached out to her and told her about the project and asked her if she wanted to be involved in it. At that point, we had made contact with the publisher and had a proposal together, that helped us explain our project to people we were reaching out to.
FL: What was your vision for the project when you started it? Did its stakes shift throughout the time you worked on it?
AM: I think projects probably shift often but for this, frankly, it did stay pretty consistent. We knew we wanted something that felt intellectual but also more readerly, generalist, and accessible. In each entry, we wanted a mix of natural history, cultural history, literary or aesthetic analysis, and some kind of theoretical reflections, and I think that stayed true. Of course, people took their entries in all kinds of different ways. For instance, the person who was getting protozoa, it’s kind of an archaic term. It’s a weird term. “What is it?” You know, and so, I had no idea what that entry was going to be and how the person was going to do it. But Danny just took it in this amazingly creative way in directions that I couldn’t have imagined. So, in terms of content there were surprises, but the actual format of the book stayed consistent.
And it was very great to find Punctum, the publisher, because we didn’t want this to be a conventional academic book. Lots of good academics have published there, and it’s a serious press, but it’s independent, and their whole thing is about welcoming non-traditional projects like hybrid forms. So that felt very serendipitous to be like, “yes, there’s actually a press that really works for us for what we want to do.”
One big thing that changed during that time was that COVID and the pandemic happened. The person who wrote about viruses totally changed their entry because COVID happened and he couldn’t not write about it in terms of COVID. So, it did feel like this work became really important. Like, we know that life on the microscale can dramatically impact the way that we live on the macroscale and culture and politics and history.
Personally, I was already kind of moving away from non-human studies. So, it was a fun project to have on the backburner, and it was something that felt kind of sustaining. At times it was frustrating, but the continuity was good. Since I’m not a research professor, every time I try to publish it’s like an extracurricular activity. It’s a hobby. So, the personal stakes changed for me in part because I was moving away from this segment of my interest. I was becoming a little bit less interested in pursuing non-human matters for publication. But that almost made it feel like my side project in a way because it wasn’t what I was teaching. I have this interest in plants, animals, biology, and the history of science that doesn’t feature as much in my professional life because I’m teaching Gender and Sexuality Studies now. So it felt like indulging. What once was part of my main work now felt like a side interest or hobby, which is kind of fun.
FL: You’re one of the co-editors for the book. How did that kind of come about? Did you always know that you wanted to be an editor?
AM: You know, the editors are the people who are putting the project together, like deciding what it’s going to look like, and then editing every single entry. We set the tone for each entry, I read and gave feedback on every single one. We were pretty intense editors. It was a great experience and it was because we knew that we collaborated well and were friendly. So I knew that it would work well with us, because we both give a lot of feedback, and it would be hard for me to work with somebody who was like, “Oh, this is fine as it is” with me being like, “No, no, this has to tell the story, be really clearly written, and meet my standards of being engaging.” So yeah, editing is like being the person who comes up with the idea and conceives the vision for the book, but also doing line edits, a lot of groundwork and project management, and a lot of nudging people to get their contributions in. It also felt natural to me, because I do so much feedback, giving edits for MAPH theses, and because I was always really into being a part of workshops as a graduate student. But yeah, this is my first published, edited volume, but also feels very in line with the work I do.
FL: You write that “humans are, in a way, even more bacterial than they are human” (p.32). I noticed you balancing science and the humanities in the text, and sometimes even humanizing scientific concepts. Off the top of your head, what are your thoughts on art and science? Do we have to humanize science to make it artful, or what was your process with the writing style regarding writing about science to a larger general public?
AM: So much of science we can’t easily see or access through our senses. It’s like, we live in this world, and we access it culturally, and on the human scale, but then there’s so much happening on the molecular level, and there’s also so much happening on a bigger, like, geological or astrological level. So the issues of scale are always going to be a thing. In some ways, there’s always going to be a process of translation like using metaphor, or like trying to make scientific concepts scalable to a site where we can feel like we have access to them. We live in a material world, and we obviously know that there are global ecological processes that are happening that are dramatically shifting our way of life. And so, it seems like anything we do to make those micro processes and large-scale processes more alive to us, by making them scale to humans and making them something we can see, feel, experience in some way, whenever we do that, that seems like a good thing to do. Because we do often shape our lives around ignoring, you know, we make our houses, we make cultures. In some ways, at least in Western culture, the way we live now is often about keeping things out and trying to make spaces of culture, so I think it’s always good to figure out ways to understand ourselves as material creatures in a material project and material world.
FL: In your book, you talk about a “new politics of collective identity.” Can you muse a bit about what that might look like?
AM: You know, I think at the time I was thinking about the emergence of Black Lives Matter, and like the emergence of like mutual aid groups in light of COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement, and then also feeling very disappointed by what happened with the Bernie Sanders campaign and the normalizing of this moment where it felt like we might have a Democratic socialist president, and I was more politically engaged with that than anything else I had been. And so maybe, part of me was just kind of thinking about how hard it is to or how, thinking about like strains of culture that were moving towards collectivism, like mutual aid stuff, but also resistances to that and the feeling of that as being radical something that is like brings people together in a non-hierarchical movement where the point is to let go of possessive individualism and that separates us. You know, I’m just kind of riffing because I feel like in some ways, when I read those words, I cringe a little because I’m like, “Oh, that feels a little sentimental” and like, sappy or something, and I wonder if it’s a little empty. But at the same time, I was just learning a lot about bacteria with this piece, and I was like, “Wow, bacteria are constantly splitting. They’re trading genetic information. They’re sometimes donating genetic information to each other. They’re never totally singular.” And I connected that to the way that many humans in the world are encouraged to be in the world in a way that’s really owning of identity and selling it as a package to each other but also on the marketplace, being like “This is who I am.” But what if we didn’t care so much about being an individual. I like being an individual, but I also wanted to make some sort of leap in imagination, like what if we did live in a way where ourselves and our things and our identities weren’t so personalized? I don’t know what that means even, but I think that part of it is it’s actually just hard to think about what collectivity could mean, given that we don’t live in a world that allows for much of it.
FL: Are there other favorite takeaways of yours that you’ve gleaned from learning about micro-matter? You’ve talked about how it can offer ways to rethink systems, but is there anything else you feel like we missed?
AM: Well, a lot of the entries touch on how different kinds of micro-matter live together. Like lichen is a composite species with fungus and algae. One thing that’s always fascinated me, but is not a positive takeaway is the way that bacteria and disease get racialized. For example, when disease outbreaks get attached to populations, and those populations somehow become figured as centers of bacteria or viruses. When I was talking about how we might imagine ourselves as bacterial, we really are. We have so many bacterial cells. We’re alive with all kinds of things and that’s kind of amazing to think about. And in that kind of deindividuation plus imagining ourselves as part of an interspecies assemblage or collective. But then when there’s disease panic, people react based on their beliefs about certain kinds of people that they already think are sort of dangerous. Like immigrants or racialized others or radicals of some kind become seen as carriers, but also like giant, scaled-up bacteria in this kind of negative imaginative projection. I’ve always been interested in the way that people use nature to talk about other things when what they’re really talking about is gendered or racial hierarchies. And then nature becomes a way of being like, well, it’s just natural, this is the scientific basis, the anthropological order, the biological order.
FL: One last question, do you have any advice for MAPHers regarding their own intellectual projects and passions?
AM: Well, first, I’ll say if you’re pursuing something, it’s important that you can sustain an interest in it. There’s some scholars who are just like, “Here’s my thing, and I’m gonna do it for like, my whole career or whatever.” I’m not that person. Maybe in part why I’ve always gravitated towards being a teaching scholar is because I can have all these interests and then fold them into classes and that’s awesome. But anyway, the point is maybe don’t even think about things in terms of passion, but like if you have a drive to do intellectual work, just starting off by following something that you think could sustain you as an interest for like, a few months, and then, immediately, if you’re like me, trying to find other people who share that because I don’t sustain well by myself. It was really important for me in graduate school to be a part of workshops like writing groups. I like doing things that make intellectual work more collective for myself. We don’t know how many people are actually going to read the book, but we’re doing it for each other because we have this vision and we’re going to realize that vision together. And hopefully the contributors find it meaningful to see that final product too and be part of it too. So hopefully it’s for all of us that are part of the project, but I know for me and Joela, it’s to like be like “we’ve done all of this. We’ve had all of these conferences. We’ve done all of this organizing around making intellectual spaces together and had all of this intellectual exchange.” We wanted a product in the world that was a culmination of that intellectual and social exchange. And so I always felt like when we were doing it, we were doing it for each other in part. So for MAPHers, I would say find a way to be part of a collective of people who share your interests, whatever that looks like for you. And you can cheer each other on. And if you’re a person who has aspirations to keep writing or doing creative work of some kind, you know, try not to overthink whether it’s going to be your final passion.
Prof. Agnes Malinowska has been a MAPH preceptor at the University of Chicago since 2014 with appointments in UChicago’s Department of English Language and Literature, the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, and the Center for Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity.
Faith Lane (’23) is an Editorial Fellow for Issues I and II of Common Forms who completed her thesis on transgenderism and gender identity in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.