It’s a microbe’s world. We just live in it.
How do you make war against something that is not only not yet here, but whose futures are radically indeterminate?
Amber Benezra:The whole thing about microbes is that we can only see them through science. Knowing and seeing are very tenuous.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:If the tension that we're facing in so much stuff is its disembodiment right through its abstraction, what are the ways that we can kind of put it back into place or, like, surface it in our everyday lives? Hi. I'm Matthew Wolfmeier, and this is the University of Minnesota Press podcast. I am the author most recently of a book called American Disgust, Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the County Within. And I'm joined by two other University of Minnesota Press authors who I will turn to them to introduce themselves right now.
Amber Benezra:Hi. I'm Amber Ben Ezra. I'm a sociocultural anthropologist. I teach at Stevens Institute of Technology, which is a STEM school, an unlikely place for an anthropologist to be, but that's where I'm at. My book is Gut Anthro, an experiment in thinking with microbes.
Amber Benezra:My research has been working collaboratively with scientists who work on the human microbiome for about the past fifteen years, and, I'm really excited for this conversation today.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Hi. My name is Gloria Chansook Kim. I am a scholar of visual culture, media studies, and science and technology studies. So my work generally works across histories and theories of vision, computation and culture, and the environmental humanities, and infrastructure studies. I'm the author of Microbial Resolution, Visualization, and Security in the, War Against Emerging Microbes.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I'm Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside.
Amber Benezra:All three of our books were writing from different field perspectives, anthropology, media and cultural studies, history, science and technology studies, and we all have different takes on what is at stake in studying the microbial. I'm really interested to hear how you both came to microbes as your subject of study. What you like and what you hate about studying microbes, Amy, and if you'll continue to explore microbes in your work or your future work.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I can take the reins on that first. Thanks for that question, Amber. Yeah. How did I come to work on microbes? So before I started writing and researching and writing this book, I was thinking around questions around biology, biopolitics, and, the epistemological systems systems that work around that and frame knowledge about that.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:And then I saw an IBM commercial. I actually encountered it while reading the New York Times online. There was a kind of, flashing banner with a red silhouetted chicken. So I clicked on it for some reason, and then this video ad popped up. That ad is the object that I analyzed in chapter one.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:It's this, kinda short documentary called Deadly Migration, a documentary about the future avian flu pandemic that will come to kill us all and, how we can use computation and informatics to manage that risk. So when I saw that, a bunch of buttons, all of my buttons were being hit at once. Biology, biopolitics, but it was also intersecting with, the informational turn. It was, really intriguing to me the way that this was coming together with this commercial that's actually part of this larger IBM Smart Planet campaign. And it involved global infrastructures and all of the stuff about futures that I was really interested in.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I started learning about just looking at how we were talking about this future pandemic and about avian flu in particular. I started to become interested in this concept of emerging microbes. This particular concept emerging microbes pointed to this idea that, you know, we're not talking now about microbes that exist here in the present that we know are around us, but it kind of recast these questions I had been thinking about for a really long time to this hypothetical future space. Right? So this idea that they're emerging, they're constantly emerging.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:We don't know when, we don't know how, but we know that.
Amber Benezra:Thanks. That's great.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:I think I'm a really ambivalent microbe scholar in a way. This book is maybe kind of accidentally about microbes. It started because I was really interested in the controversies around fecal microbial transplants. Because of my proximity to the University of Minnesota Medical School for a while, I was aware of people there who were kind of at the forefront of experimenting with fecal microbial transplants, and so I was just like paying attention to what was going on. But it was mostly the fecal side of the transplant that I was interested in.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:This book is the third book where I'm really trying to work through this umbrella theoretical concept the biology of everyday life. It's like a class that I teach. It's like a research agenda, I suppose. And for a really long time, I was having a hard time finding good research on the kind of social study of human shit. We had, like, a week in the biology of everyday life class that was supposed to be the defecation week, and there were, like, three things that we could read.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:And so I was, like, there's has got to be an emergent scholarship in human shit. And when the fecal microbial transplant debates started, I was like, oh, maybe this is it. Like, maybe we're gonna finally tip over and there's gonna be a golden age of shit studies or something. That has not happened. Although, I mean, maybe maybe we're in the kind of, like, silver age of shit studies because there's more and more people who are working on kind of related things.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:But it's really my interest in the body and discourses of the biological, and, the microbial kind of gets caught up in all of that stuff. And really, I mean I wrote the book in the weirdest circumstances in the middle of the early part of the pandemic, and then I was in Finland really wondering why I had written the book. Like, who was this for? Because I didn't know very many people other than Amber and Jamie Lorimer who were, like, interested in microbes. And then I bumped into a whole bunch of people in Finland through the Center for the Social Study of Microbes led by Salazariola, and they were, like, the audience for the book.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:And I was like, wait a minute. Like, there's a bunch of people that are really into this, and there's, like, a conversation that's being had and, you know, it's just not where I'm at. And so all of a sudden, it was, like, 2021. I was, like, I think I need to revise this book in order to engage with all of these other people who are actually interested in microbes, and I was not. Like, it was just like there are these microbes in the story, but they're not central to it.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:But it ended up being really fortuitous because, like, in the latter part of the book, I really try and think about the body as a landscape and the way that as an object and as a phenomenological experience, thinking about how bodies are laminated together into their shared spaces as kind of these landscapes that intersect with one another is a way to bring together thinking about the microbial stuff with all of the human body stuff in ways that weren't just about, like, there's microbes out there, and then there's human bodies here, and we interact in weird ways. It's like we're just deeply imbricated into one another's lives, and we need to think about that. It was really clarifying for me to, like, wrestle with microbes both conceptually, but then also, like, what they're actually doing to human bodies. But what about you, Amber? Tell us about your life with microbes.
Amber Benezra:Well, I will just rest assured, my book talks about shit a lot. So that is, you know, I'm on that train with you. Absolutely. It's unavoidable when you're talking about gut microbes. Right?
Amber Benezra:But I also had the same experience because there is a huge Scandinavian there's, like, people in Sweden, people in Iceland, people in in Finland who are really deeply concerned with microbe social scientists. And it is a you're right. It's not something that we we have here in The US. It's very different. My story is kind of pretty basic.
Amber Benezra:I was a graduate student. I was developing a dissertation project about I was really interested in biobanks and genetic relatedness as we are coming to understand it and, like, you know, deep histories of ideas of kinship and anthropology. I was actually really interested in Mormons and, like, archival genealogies and how genetic testing is changing that kind of record keeping. The point is I was in a class called anthropology of science, taught by Emily Martin at NYU. One day after class, she just was like, you should look into the Human Microbiome Project.
Amber Benezra:This was 02/2009, so it was the year that that project started. She was like, you should look into this human microbiome project. I think you would really be interested in it, and it would be really right up your alley. And I was like, okay. And then I just started looking into that.
Amber Benezra:You know, it was an NIH funded project trying to determine what the most healthy what's a healthy human microbiome. Right? That project failed, and they were like, we can't figure that out. It's not the same for everyone, obviously. But, yeah, I just sort of naively started, emailing all the PIs on that project, and Jeff Gordon wrote me back.
Amber Benezra:Actually, he called me on the phone, and the rest is sort of history, but it was so I feel like I just fell head first into my groves very unintentionally. I am curious to hear if if there's anything you hate about working on microbes and if it's something you'll continue. I've been thinking a lot recently about my future work, and I feel so tied to microbes. But then I'm like, maybe I'll just choose something completely different.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I feel really sorely left out here that I don't write more about poop, because if you know anything about me, which I don't expect you any of you to, I I'm fascinated by poop, and I if there's something called defecation week, I'll be there. I I think it's really interesting the ways that we're talking about microbes as I also got into microbes accidentally. You know, it was a way for me to talk about making futures operable and making planets operable and systems operable. And, moreover, to this point about what we love or hate about working with microbes, because I'm I use microbes in a way to think about futures and, you know, scales of the planet and the body and forms of knowledge and knowledge making. What I love about working with microbes is that, it becomes this object where we can start thinking about all of these things.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So when I'm thinking about emergence, that kind of quality of microbes that I'm dealing with, you know, it is this really interesting epistemological problem of, right, so we're gonna build a war against emerging microbes, right, so then how do you do that, right, how do you make war against something that is not only not yet here but whose futures are radically indeterminate, right? So what does that look like? So it becomes this really rich way of thinking about futures and how they can be made operational. And then microbes kind of lead me to think about a a range of questions, including, you know, how are we gonna think about life and habitability or even what it means and feels like to be together on this planet in the future. So those are things that I love about working with microbes.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:One thing that's been a real challenge, because I work with contemporary pandemic landscapes, is things are happening all the time and it sometimes feels like you're trying to trace a moving object. So that's been a real challenge. What about you, Matthew?
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:I don't think I have any purposeful plans to spend more time with microbes as a research object. But I I say that with some reservations because I think that one of the things that this recent experience has done for me is it's, like, opened up a register in a way where it's, like, now in anything that I think about, the question is what's the microbial's role in whatever this thing is? I think it's about seeing the microbial or, like, taking it into consideration in a way and recognizing that alongside with all of these other features in our, like, social and environmental worlds that we inhabit that, like, the microbial is something that needs to be paid attention to. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's, like, a main character in the story for me, but that it is a character or set of characters in the story and making sure that whatever I'm thinking about makes room for the microbial to insist on its presence seems really important. I have a hard time staying put with an object, so the prospect that I would spend more time with microbes in a direct way is always it's like the kind of thing that I refuse to do, but it's like they're companions and recognizing that companionship in a kind of scholarly sense seems really important.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:This is a collective thing. Right? That, like, what we're doing is trying to draw attention to all of these other features of our worlds and that hopefully what we're doing is making it an additive project for everybody. Right? That it's not just for us as individual researchers, but other people too.
Amber Benezra:I agree with you. Absolutely. And I think that's what I would answer is my reason for loving microbiome or microbes is that the microbiome is such a biosocial object. It's an inroad with scientists or biological scientists in a way that the environmental impact of getting cancer or not can be debatable. It's hard to trace those things back to a cause.
Amber Benezra:When you're talking about microbiome, you can't leave out environmental factors. Right? Things like nutrition, geography, like, all the things that go into informing what microbial populations we have are essentially social and intimate in all these things. So as a person who wants to work with scientists, it's like an ace up my sleeve that I'm like, but you have to pay attention to the social in these these circumstances. But I think like you're saying, Matthew, also, we all as humans have to pay attention to the micro real, whether we want to or not.
Amber Benezra:All the time, the scientists I work with were like, the microbes world, we just live in it, which I think is really true.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:So the question that I have for the three of us is kind of me playing devil's advocate. I'm wondering if, focusing on microbes from the humanities and social sciences is kind of frivolous in a way. What are the politics of focusing on the microbial instead of something that might be widely accepted as more pressing? I see both of your books as being, like, deeply political in their commitments, but I wonder how you, like, talk about those politics when you're talking about your projects to other people.
Amber Benezra:I think both of our both Glorian and my books address objects in human health, so it immediately gives it some kind of value to other people because of that sort of translational aspect of it. But I it is I I talk about this in my book a little bit that I have been accused by other anthropologists as not having human cultural lives at the center of my work. The stakes when you're talking about microbial worlds, they more abstracted, but especially like in light of recent political situations and election outcomes in this country, I'm I've been asking myself what academia matters at all. Right? Like, if the world has gone to to garbage, like, what are we doing with ourselves?
Amber Benezra:My central focus always is how to bring the biological and social sciences together. And, again, like, I feel like microbiome work is the way to do this, and I desperately want science to be better than it is. Right? To be more equitable, to be doing better work, to draw all the things you talk about in your book, Matthew, about just the persistence of white supremacy. And I think, Gloria, you addressed this too, the idea of bioeconomies that aren't concerned necessarily with fairness or equity or who is the focus of these kinds of things.
Amber Benezra:I want science to be better. I wanna be trying to be a part of how to do that. And so for me, that's why microbiome work seems like the stakes are high. Like, there seems like there is a lot to be done here that is valuable and not frivolous. And also because I do believe that there is a lot at stake for humans if we don't get our shit together figuring out about how to live with microbes, what, you know, or what they're doing or what our relationships are with them.
Amber Benezra:A sort of a global outcome climate environment, our health, the health of our planet. I think there is some urgency to that. To me, it doesn't feel frivolous, but I definitely see that framing and how it looks like that and how I often have to explain myself to other social scientists in terms of the significances of this work.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I think my experience working with microbes in the humanities has been a little bit different, you know, to this question of its frivolity. I hadn't really, fortunately, been challenged on that front, and I so I think I'm pushing back a bit on the premise of that question because I think the microbial is widely considered to be a pressing topic right now, and that seems to be the case for me both in and, outside of the humanities and social sciences, but also in and outside of academia. This is especially so right now after we've just I I I don't wanna say come out of a long pandemic, but we're living under this kind of long kind of unending shadow of whatever that was. And we are living amid these landscapes of all sorts of food crises of e coli and salmonella outbreaks that are a consequence the way the world is now put together. You know, it also comes up with this particular kind of salience, as Amber, you pointed out with the recent elections and the nomination of a new secretary of health who is against universal vaccination.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So now many people are worried about what that will look like. I also think that just climate catastrophe is hurdling all sorts of kind of microbes at us and, you know, like you, Amber, we have no choice but to deal with them. So to me, the microbial seems very much at the forefront of a lot of discussions happening in various areas across academia and not, but then also in, you know, let's say also in government and policy, but also, like, experts and just kind of everyday people thinking about how to kinda get on with living. I think that when the humanities and social sciences take up the microbe as we do in our three books, the microbe kind of comes up as this key element that mediates between all of these registers, between politics and culture, and moves between all of these kinds of relations of social, scalar, bodily, and ontological difference. When we think about it in the humanities and social sciences, it seems to register broader ways of thinking about living and survival and how we're gonna do that.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Yeah. I mean, I think about it a lot from the perspective of Americans have been pretty well protected from things like chronic dysentery.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Mhmm.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:And with changing regulations around pollution and water cleanliness levels and stuff like that, we might not be quite as protected from that stuff in the near future.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:And, I mean, I sometimes think that, like and this is especially true in, like, medical anthropology and medical sociology, that what we focus on in the discipline overrepresents things that have minimal impact on global populations, which is not to minimize those conditions like HIV AIDS, the number of people who focus on that, and the number of people who are diagnosed with HIV AIDS these days is a smaller and smaller number despite its enormous prevalence in our field. But when you think about the impacts that microbes have on people's enduring health, that's pretty much everybody. Right? And the way that we don't center conversations like that seem like real detriments to what we're doing as a scientist and people in the humanities. Right?
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:I'm glad that both of you feel like it's maybe more central in some ways than I sometimes perceive it to be. I think my experience has often been that I feel like I'm talking about things that other people think are fringe topics. Like, my first book was about sleep and sleep disorders, and that people didn't immediately think, like, oh, right. We should all be working on sleep because, like, that's a problem that everybody has, was really confounding to me. Like, there's, like, no anthropology of sleep before 02/2002.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Like, what's happening if we're ignoring these things that are such important aspects in our everyday lives, but also just our livelihood? So I mean, I kinda think it's intensely political to think about this stuff, and we'll probably be revealed to be even more political as we move forward over the next few years because we'll see, like, what happens when you take away all of the protections that we have to, keep us safe from microbes. Like, if we're gonna stop pasteurizing milk, that's gonna be a real doozy.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah. Okay. So, I want to turn to talk about the material of microbes, particularly the material semiotics. So across our three books, we each are dealing with microbes as is really, kind of almost endlessly mutable entities. Like, they can be brought from one place to the other.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:They can be transmuted from this form to the lab, to this, to that. This happens not only because microbes are put through various processes in the experiments and scientific projects that we're each charting out. So, you know, for instance, Matthew, the making of fecal transplant matter or things like fermentation and pickle juice or shotgun sequencing or, the presence or absence of nutrition for you, Amber, or in me, it's the insertion of gene segments into plasmid rings to reanimate old viruses or, you know, the speculative imaging technologies that are supposed to bring these things into view. These are scientific processes, but they're not only that. As these things are happening, they're also moments that change the kind of material semiotics, the material context in which microbes are placed.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So, you know, whether it's placed in the computational space or in a vaginal space or in a fecal space, I'm interested in the ways that that then alters what microbes come to mean. I'd be really interested in talking about the material semiotics of microbes and, you know, how did the changing material context in which microbes were placed alter what they meant and how they get taken up, or how they don't get taken up in the social realm?
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:I mean, I think the example that most immediately comes to mind for me is really about fecal microbial transplants. When people are thinking through whether or not they're willing to put somebody else's microbes into their body, they become different kinds of things. Your microbes are fine in your body. Whatever is going on over there is, like, just fine for most people, but the prospect of using them therapeutically for illnesses in your body suddenly raises all these questions. That's really at the heart of the controversies around fecal microbial transplants or at least that's the argument that I make in the book that, like, people can kind of think about microbes in the abstract and be okay with them.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:And I mean people at the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health. Like, the abstract idea of microbes is just fine for most people. When you start to think about the actual practice of taking donor feces and putting it through a distillation process and then using it as a therapeutic for a patient, like, that troubles a lot of people, and they have a hard time really naming why it's so troubling to them. That's one of the things I wrestle with in the book is, like, why are we so troubled by the biological as a therapeutic? Really, that's, like, the narrative arc of the book.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Like, why is the biological dangerous when something like the pharmaceutical seems to be just safe for most people? And when you think about those two things in parallel, like, most people are just fine with most pharmaceutical chemicals all the time. Like, wherever they are, they're like a benevolent therapeutic. But when you think about biological material, it's okay over there, but it's not okay if you're gonna put it into my body. Working through that central problem was really the the key for me in thinking through exactly the material semiotics of microbes.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Like, what how do you deal with the inherent meanings that become associated with the microbial, and can you untangle them in order to make them therapeutic, in an unproblematic way? I think I'm ultimately kind of pessimistic about it because I really see racism as being one of those central semiotic valences that get applied to microbes. And so we we kind of can't purify them. We can wash them. And any attempt to create a pharmaceutical microbe in the sense that you're creating it in a lab doesn't seem to work in the way that we need it to work.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:And so as long as microbes carry the semiotic weight that they do as kinda cultural objects, they'll never really achieve the full potency of their, like, therapeutic potential.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I I think that's a fascinating response. I'm wondering about the fecal matter of microbes. I mean, that is a pretty potent material semiotic. Right? And so, you know, I'm thinking about the various ways that it has to be treated in order to kind of reach therapeutic status in your book.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I mean, I'm I'm trying to think through the materiality of poo here. There's something about the way that, shit is made in the body that seems to index everything about one's body, a very particular person. And then to have to replace those pathogens or those microbes in another person, there's something so difficult about that.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:I was just gonna agree. I mean, I think it's so complicated. Shit is such a terrible symbol in a way, and the reality of trying to deal with it is always caught up in all of this baggage. Right? And one of the things that I have been really interested in, like, as a parent, but also someone who reads a lot of parenting guides as critical objects.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:You know, one of the first things that happened to me as a parent is all of the weird hang ups I might have had about human waste just had to be washed away because, like, I have to deal with a poopy kid. And, like, when you have to deal with other people's shit, it just becomes a different kind of thing. It enters a different semiotic space. And I had a uncle who was a janitor for most of his career, and he would always, like, chide us for not cleaning the toilets at my grandmother's house. He was like, just put on a glove and scrub it.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:You know, it's like just shit. As a 13 year old, I was like, what is he talking about? Like, that's mortifying. But, like, as a parent, I totally get it. And it's so weird to me.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Right? It's it's weird that, like, you can have all of these parents who are doctors or FDA policymakers, and they can't inhabit that parenting space where it's like, well, it's just shit for the most part. Right? And their role as medical experts do. Right?
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:That they succumb to all of the disgust that is associated with biological materials, and they just can't extricate themselves from it.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:As I was reading your book, I was thinking about how some parents relate to their infants' shit. For me, it's how I relate to my dog's shit. So that's another material semiotic that surfaces for me in this work where it's about the the body that it comes from and the intimacy and proximity that one has with that. I think that's fascinating. And and I think that just the way that fetal transplants work, like, where they have to enter the body of the recipient seems to kind of cancel some kind of fundamental grammar of the body that we have come to accept.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:And I'm I'm really eager to hear from you. You're bringing to mind the ways that you're talking about race and microbes. And I was thinking, so microbes are this thing that carry all of it's so hard to wash whatever racializations around it accrue. You know, I'm thinking of the HeLa cell by contrast. So what's the difference?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:This isn't a question for you, but something for me to think about. What is the difference between a cell and a microbe? They seem to be different kinds of objects circulating in these ways and able to attach and detach from concepts.
Amber Benezra:It's funny because just this week I taught my students an introduction to science and technology studies about material semiotics. These are, you know, mostly engineering students. I'm trying to get them to understand this. I was like, do you know what semiotics is? Here's a history of this whole field in five seconds.
Amber Benezra:There's simultaneously always a relationship between things and between concepts. And you can't take those things apart. I'm like, that's my one second, you know, definition of material semiotics. So it's just interesting that you're bringing this question to us today. I wanted to respond to Matthew's comment just because I was thinking about, when you were saying your biology is fine over there.
Amber Benezra:Right? It made me think of this Seinfeld joke once where he was like, you know, other people's hair were like, we love all of we run our fingers through it, we like will kiss someone's head with their hair, but their one single hair in our food is like, get out of here, like this is unbearable disgust. Right? In questions actually that I had thought of for both of you it sort of encompassed in all of this is that it's like having microbes or biology out of place. The same goes for like a vaginal seeding right?
Amber Benezra:Right? So there's a lot in the vaginal microbiome that's really valuable to vaginal birth and you know that's when kids become inoculated with all of these microbes when they're born and so if babies are born by c section they get skin microbes instead, right? So that's a whole thing. So there are a bunch of scientists I know wanted to do experiments where they a mother was giving birth by c section. They wanted to just take her vaginal microbes and swab the baby's face or mouth with it.
Amber Benezra:And hospitals were like no fucking way. They're like no No IRB is gonna give you approval. And, you know, the PI's are like, but these are the microbes kids would get if they were going through the vaginal canal of their own mother. And hospitals were like, absolutely not. Can you do that right?
Amber Benezra:So it's like this biology out of place idea that is very that I think there is discussed and some sort of disturbance that comes up for us. The scientists I work with somehow take these so they were working with fecal samples that arrive in like just big tubes of shit, and they have to pulverize them and they do that while the shit is frozen and they do it as fast as they can so that it doesn't become more shit like, right? Like they do not wanna remember what it is. And I think that they have devised this method to distance themselves from that biology out of place because they just start extracting RNA, right? They're continuously purifying the sample.
Amber Benezra:It becomes less and less like shit, right, they're taking out the microbial genomes. And so, I it's some kind of altering of the material part of the material semiotic to make it more palatable, to make it somehow more a scientific object. And I'm just thinking of all this stuff for the first time as we're talking about it, which is just really interesting. And I think my question to you is gonna be, Matthew, like, you know, you talk about unsettling disgust and I'm wondering if the scientists themselves need because they were very disconnected from where the samples were coming from, right, in urban Bangladesh, right, and those bodies and there's exactly what you're talking about so much race and ethnicity and class and nationhood and all kinds of things wrapped up in those samples. Because when scientists can just see the samples as microbes and not people, it's also somehow safer.
Amber Benezra:So then microbes can stand in for people in a more safe way which is also problematic. So I wonder like is the discuss necessary? Right when they're pulverizing actual shit, they have to remember it came from a human butthole. Like, they when they're just sequencing, you know, microbial genes, they don't have to think about that at all. And maybe that's a problem with science.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Yeah. I mean, I I don't know. I mean, I'm a big proponent of the experience of disgust. Right? I mean, I think that that's one of the things I really came around to in working on the book was our lives are too devoid of disgust in a weird way.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:It's like we're disgusted by the wrong things in some sense. We need to reinject the opportunities for us to be disgusted around the right kinds of things. Right? Because when we're disgusted, it kind of helps us think about the parameters of what's okay and what's not okay and why certain things are not okay. Then that's an opportunity to work through that disgust.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:I mean I tell people that that book is like a love letter to Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, which I think it is. Yeah I mean I I stand by it, but like they you know were really critical in helping me think about like why we don't experience disgust or why we don't want to experience disgust. And I work with students all the time on trying to get them to discuss themselves within parameters that they feel okay with. In that biology of everyday life class, I have them do these experiments where they have to, like, write auto ethnographies about physiological processes, and they have to create rules to, like, eat differently. So, like, students will eat without using utensils for a week and come into contact with their food in ways that they never do.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:And they often narrate that, like, in the beginning, it's kinda disgusting, but then they're kind of okay with it. And, like, where does the disgust go? And thinking about that is really helpful. Like, where does it go? Like, it it can disappear almost immediately.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Right? When you think about those scientists, like, breaking up those poop icicles, it's like you kind of want them to have that experience of disgust. You like I take it from what you were your book that like you kind of want them to remember and not be able to work as quickly as they do in order to like remember that there's people. And that maybe in the remembrance of those people it helps them unsettle some of the assumptions that are baked into what they're about to do with that RNA sequencing. I don't know, I'm a big proponent of being grossed out.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I love that. I love being grossed out. I think it's a beautiful, liminal experience, and I I have to admit my thresholds of disgust are pretty wide. But, you know, I'm thinking about that frozen about the poopsicles in your book, Amber, and I was fascinated by that because I was understanding that as yet another biomedical kind of I guess we can kinda loosely call it a biomedical intervention, but this kind of strategy to change the material semiotics around feces by changing its states, right? So there's some really amazing writing about refrigeration and cold storage and freezing by Joanna Radin that would shine some beautiful light on poopsicles.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:But as we're talking about this stuff and these kind of changing states of microbes and how, Amber, you wish that scientists would deal with the real kind of melted mess of shit because it helps them to remember where these come from and what what they're attached to. It makes me think about a different kind of material semiotics in my book where now I'm just really sad that I don't write about poo. In the last, couple chapters of my book, I talk about this kind of, yeah, Silicon Valley led effort to create an atlas of all the microbes in the world. And this atlas is this, speculative endeavor. It's tied to this total Silicon Valley dream of making the world into this kind of vast platform of bioinformational sharing and pushing and surveillance.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Part of that dream comes from this one scientist entrepreneur who became interested in emerging microbes and who had this idea of creating this kind of global atlas of all microbes and one that will be constantly updated because they're always emerging. So this scientist entrepreneur became interested in emerging microbes when he noticed, so he was working in Cameron at the time, and he noticed that there were a lot of hunters hunting for meat in jungles. And in taking note of the close bodily contact between these hunters and the animals that they would hunt, He thought, you know, this is a great way to, you know, kind of anticipate how viruses will spill over from humans to from animals into humans and create these pandemics of the future. The whole thing is this infrastructure, this system to move viruses found in animals through all sorts of material transformations. So it's in the animal body, then you sample the blood of the animal and the person who hunted them and then people around them, and then that stuff gets transformed into bioinformational stuff that can be kinda stored on a database.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:And then the ways that that moves from an extremely racialized, deeply colonial kind of practice into this kind of abstract realm of computation, is an interesting kind of transformation for me because one of the things that people often think of when they think about data and this kind of computational space, there are no bodies in it. It seems to be free of many of those frictions. But, yeah, like you, Amber, I wish that there were I mean, there are ways in which these concepts remain attached in that kind of bioinformational space, but I wish those abstractions were not as as easy or or clean.
Amber Benezra:I think what you're saying is very tied to the theme of your book. The data is the way of seeing now. I mean, for sure in human microbiome, no one uses microscopes. Absolutely not. Right?
Amber Benezra:They're only looking at microbial genomics. So the way you see what microbe species are there is by looking at what genes are there. These ways of seeing it are so abstracted that there's almost no material to the material anymore. Right? So I think I mean, this is actually the question I was going to ask you, which is that, I mean, for all of us, is there a a real material functioning in life of microbes outside of human surveillance?
Amber Benezra:I mean, what are we know that sometimes we can see them in under microscopes. We know when we get sick. We think of the presence of pathogens as making us ill. We can sequence their genomes, but the whole thing about microbes is that you can only like, we can only see them through science. And I know there are other people working on things like shamanistic histories, you know, of people knowing the presence of microbes, but knowing and seeing are very tenuous Mhmm.
Amber Benezra:There. Right?
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Yeah. I I was thinking about a pitch for an old project while while I was reading Gloria's book. Gloria does such a good job of thinking about the high-tech resolution of the microbial, right, and how it is entering into all of these, like, spheres of consumption for us. Right? That we're, like, confronted with images of microbes in ways that we hadn't been twenty years ago for sure.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Right? A while ago, I was pitching this idea that should have people wear entirely white outfits with, like, white gloves and spend a day in all sorts of different contexts to show how dirty they get and then display those suits. Right? So, like, have people ride the subway in New York City, have people walk along streetsides in suburban New Jersey, have someone wear that same suit in a slaughterhouse, like, all those kinds of places to really try and, like, surface all of these microbial interactions that people have, but we don't really account for them. Right?
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:And that was, like, a pitch that I made before the pandemic. And then during the pandemic, I really became like, I've always been a handwashing advocate, but all the pandemic made me like a proselytizer around handwashing. Like, I'm always troubled going to men's restrooms because the number of men who don't wash their hands after they use the urinal where the toilet is constantly confounding, and I don't know what to do about that. But it was like this moment where, like, you can see, or, like, I'm starting to see the microbes. Right?
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:What we're all struggling with is, like, how do you re embody the microbial If the tension that we're facing in so much stuff is its disembodiment, right, through its abstraction, what are the ways that we can kind of put it back into place or, like, surface it in our everyday lives in ways that are safe, that aren't about E. Coli outbreaks, but instead about, like, what are the microbial interactions that you're having in your refrigerator this morning, and how are you changing those microbial interactions by cooking or otherwise preparing whatever it is that you're about to eat, and what's happening when you're in the shower. And so creating those kinds of ways to see and interact with the microbial seems like a really important next step in thinking about how do we resist the, like, pure abstraction of these forces in our everyday lives.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah. For me, that question of materialization, I feel it a little differently because the thing in microbial resolution that I'm dealing with is this problematic project to turn this thing that exists in a state of pure possibility. Right? Just like the next thing. Right?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:It doesn't matter if, you know, we already we're still or just in the long tail end or whatever this is in a pandemic. We're still looking to the next thing. That emphasis on emergence and trying to materialize that, that's the kind of crux of the question of materiality in my book. Yeah. You're prompted to think about this in terms of materialism as a rich one for me.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So one question that I kept turning around in my head, you know, what is the material status of an emerging microbe? What does it mean to, you know, if emergence signals this realm of unknowable or non knowable kind of open possibility, then how, in the war on emerging microbes does that kind of amorphousness and that non knowledge or that non knowable quality become transfigured into something that can be governed or governed through. And so, like, crucially for me, what that means is that when emerging microbes are materialized, what is materialized is this kind of, you know, they have to be materialized with, this non knowledge and this kind of amorphousness intact. So the thing that is materialized is not like, yes. I know it's here.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:The thing that has to come into being and, come into form as a kind of governable object is this amorphous moving target. So for me, it's hard to think out of a kind of surveillance structure because the war on emerging microbes is this whole project to secure by scanning the entire planet, and how to make that operable. But, you know, Stephanie Fischel in the microbial state has some really great work that works through a new materialism to think through a new kind of global politics of thriving through the kind of material realities of microbes.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:So I I'm thinking about thriving too, Gloria, that, like, one of the things that we're all wrestling with is really the ambivalent rule of microbial knowledge in some way. Right? That it's important to know about microbes, but then what do you do with that knowledge? There's, like, dangers associated with microbial knowledge and in terms of, like, their weaponization. And there are real benefits to it too.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Right? That being able to test for certain kinds of environmental dangers is really important. But, like, I end my book with, like, real irresolution, it feels like we keep kind of taking microbes seriously in medicine and global public health, and then we turn away from it. And, like, there's this turn to and away from microbes over and over again. And when we kinda get lazy about it, then we remember that we have to pay attention to microbes because they're kind of a problem.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:But there doesn't seem to be a lot of financial incentives for pharmaceutical companies to actually do something proactive about microbes outside of, like, surveillance medicine in some respects. So I wonder if you both could help me think about, do microbes offer us some kind of post capitalist opportunity or some kind of anti colonial opportunity? What is, like, the possibility of the microbe that we want to embrace in thinking about, like, our collective futures?
Amber Benezra:I mean this is what I'm thinking about in terms of my next step, my next research with microbes and in the last couple of years I've written a lot about race in the microbiome and how race keeps getting reified in in human microbiome studies but also we're at a moment where you know microbiome science is very new. It is only fifteen years old. And there is an opportunity, there's an opening here and I think this is just my book came out last year, I gave 14 talks last year. More than half of them were two microbiology departments that invited me to come speak. So that I feel like is there's a lot of promise there And I often gave the this race talk to them about how using race as a proxy as a population descriptor when you're looking at, you know, microbes because it it keeps coming up in like many studies.
Amber Benezra:People of this race have these microbes in their gut or people of this race have these microbes in their vaginas, right? So that we just this keeps like being replicated all these medical racism and I've been able to talk to these scientists about making their science better which is really the key way to get in with scientists is like convince them it's valuable to them and saying your data will be more exact if you're looking at environmental toxins, diet, all the other things that actually shape your microbiome and not just using race as kind of a sloppy lazy proxy for describing populations of people. I feel like there's a possibility there to make a change in these legacies of racializing. There's a little bit of momentum and enough other and junior scientists working on this who care about making these changes where we can kind of get in on the ground floor to be like, okay. And you know, there's a whole other side.
Amber Benezra:All the malnutrition stuff that I was working on that is is in the book is very much focused on creating a saleable probiotic that's going to fix a broken microbiome. Right? And so that's kind of the the other spec end of the spectrum of what you're talking about. The commercialization of microbiome treatments or microbiome derived foods or all these kinds of therapies is extremely capitalist. Right?
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:What I was thinking about in your discussion of ghosting race in the book, maybe it's an opportunity to get people to think with different kinds of variables instead of race. The way that race keeps creeping back into science and medicine is so flummoxing, and it's like they just don't have the conceptual tools to stop thinking about race. And, you know, maybe this is one way to build an anti racist science and medicine that's like, we need to focus on these variables, not those variables that aren't real.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:My response is a little more and and the things that I hope I can offer are much more modest. Of course, we all hope for a far more just future, and I can't speak to what alternatives would be except in terms of, for me, kind of speculative hopeful term. In the work that I do, I'm interested in understanding this cultural register. We have this war, on emerging microbes. It's premised on this irresolvable tension.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:We have to secure this unsecurable thing called emergence. A world kind of gets built through that dynamic. How do kind of economic systems, infrastructures, and policy get built upon this irresolvable kind of crops? But also and kind of more fundamentally, I'm also interested in the kind of affective and epistemological and political registers of contemporary culture and how this kind of irresolvable tension becomes a mode, or this kind of substrate of existence. In the book when I start thinking about this tension, like what does it mean to mount this project on this irresolvable tension and then to kind of build it out this way.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:What we have by the end of the book is this picture in which we trace through the examples and the analysis the ways that this system has an attendant other set of irresolvable tensions at its core. It produces these kind of other irresolvable tensions. So for instance, between, you know, humanitarian and capitalism and between the biological or biospheric and then the economic and then between global health and militarized approach to seeing the world. Within this program, the kind of divergent aims of these kind of areas become and are made coterminous. So then, you know, I'm particularly interested in how this happens through technological proliferation, right?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:We just have to keep building technologies and optimize the world as this platform so that these things can be done. And if we do it, then these things that seem to be contradictory will come into some kind of harmonization. You know, humanitarian efforts and capitalism can really kind of meet happily if we just kind of proceed this way. What I hope I can offer is just in kind of tracing a way to contextualize and understand why things feel so bad, why things feel so hard, like, how is it that we have all of this data and we can do all of these things with data? We have all of this power and states have this incredible economic clout and there's all of this goodwill and all of this exists, but we can't.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:One thing we can kind of look at is the way that, technocratic modes of governance have kinda come to the floor as this kind of answer to all of these problems and the thing that's gonna massage out all of these inconsistencies. If we can kinda see that as this problem, then we can also point to it, and it's kind of a reversal as a possible way out.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer:Well, thanks to you both, and thanks for having this conversation. Maybe I'll invite us all to go do something gross.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah. I hope to meet you all in person one day and toast with probably a cocktail consisting of many microbes.
Amber Benezra:Absolutely. We have to get our material part of our collaboration here. We've had our semiotic. We need the material.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota press production. Books by Amber Ben Ezra, Gloria Chansook Kim, and Matthew Wolfmeyer are available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.