Abstract

Microbes live inside, on, and around us at all times. While humans and microbes have been historically interdependent, the fact remains that microbes can live without us-humans while the reverse remains untrue. Given our futures, how do we-humans (continue to) live with microbial life when we cannot easily communicate with them?

This project examines the hands-on material practices of fermentation to analyze how we engage with microbial life when they are both invisible and incomprehensible. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across three sites in Japan, I worked with(in) places like sake breweries and creameries as a way to study microbes, their ecosystems, and the people who repeatedly attend to them. Specifically, I foregrounded a multispecies approach, emphasizing sensory data and feminist modes of relationality to theorize how we connect across species, scales, and stakes.

My analyses show that fermentation can be framed as an ongoing dialogue with microbial life through space-making and attunement. Space-making refers to the iterative practice of arranging environments to make them hospitable and conducive for microbial others. This displaces the human-fermenter as one of many participants in what I call the ambient. Building these spaces is predicated on the practice of attunement, which I examine as an embodied, rhythmic, and spatial awareness in a multispecies call-and-response. Combined, these practices connect beings that mutually enable one another towards convivial relations, which grapple with the ethical questions of how to work-with, even use, microbial life. These practices rewrite fermentation as a contingent process (not a causal one) in which relations emerge through repeated encounters.

Situated at the nexus of critical communications theory and feminist technoscience, this project contributes to the urgent need to theorize ways of communicating across incommensurable differences without the triplicate offenses of speaking for the microbial other, presuming symbiotic benefit, or using abstractions to absolve ourselves from having to reckon with a perilous present. Microbes do not just exist “out there” or “in theory”; they literally and figuratively thread through our bodies, environments, and social spheres regardless of whether we are conscious of these tetherings or not.