Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria

Abstract

Numerous calls for conference papers, articles and book chapters concerned with various iterations of human-animal relations circulate the listserv highway. What invitations to consider human-animal relations do, in effect, is adopt what Margulis calls a ‘big like us’ approach; concentrating on creatures that easily bear human ocular scrutiny — creatures we can see unaided by the technology of microscopes, as though creatures ‘big like us’ resemble the majority of life. Perhaps we could imagine, as no doubt science fiction writers have already, our eyes to have microscopic vision, enabling us to focus immediately upon the microbial world unimpeded by what must then be unfathomably oversized species. Perhaps we might then overcome the myopia that defines our natureculture border to be with animals.⁴

Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.¹

Any good biologist finds it intellectually distressing to devote his [sic] life to the study of a group that cannot be readily and satisfactorily defined in biological terms; and the abiding intellectual scandal of bacteriology has been the absence of a clear concept of a bacterium.²

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?³