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Witnessing Resistance: Assembly as a Technology of
Vision for the 21
st
Century
Andie Thompson UvA ID: 11249773
Research Master of Social Science
Supervisor: dr. Emily Yates-Doerr Second Reader: dr. Anita Hardon
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of
Masters of Science
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Witnessing Resistance: Assembly as a Technology of
Vision for the 21
st
Century
Andie Thompson
Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Word Count: 10,084
Abstract:
Acts of scientific witnessing are generally conceived of as knowing through direct observation and accurate, reproducible reporting of facts. Laboratory culture as imagined at the origin of the ‘experimental way of life’, presents as a model for an ideal society, a peaceable, neutral polity with modest citizens. However, labs are not value-free spaces, and their inhabitants are not accurate representations of ‘the people’- this we know from Science and Technology Studies. This article engages with the figure of the Modest Witness, the legitimated and authorized observer tasked with describing the object world, to consider practices of witnessing in the 21st century. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in a microbiology and genomics lab in St. Louis, Missouri, I describe three configurations of witnessing which refigure the Modest Witness in the contemporary moment. What can the social studies of science learn about witnessing, at a moment when scientists are mobilizing against anti-science governance and “post-truth” politics, from a genomics lab that studies unseeable things, specifically, resistance in microbial ecologies at the edge of the “post-antibiotic” era? In this article, I explore the relations of scientific witnessing through a metaphor borrowed from the lab, assembly, both as a political technique and method for witnessing microbial resistance without sight, but with vision. I show how resistance is mobilized, (dis)articulated, and enacted through the ‘technology of assembly.’ Witnessing resistance offers a way to rethink the politics of the laboratory and the objectivity projects of the witnesses.
Keywords: laboratory ethnography, antimicrobial resistance, standpoint theory
Introduction:
On a warm November day in 2017, I joined Amy, a Ph.D. candidate in molecular genetics from the lab where I was conducting fieldwork at a protest against the “Tax cuts and jobs act.” The act included a
3 stipulation that, as one informant described it, would “cut science down at the knee,” referring to the debilitating blow the process of knowledge production would receive if Ph.D. students were to be taxed as presented in the bill1.
The protest occurred at an Embassy Suites corporate short stay hotel and convention center in St. Charles, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. As we approached the hotel and began to weave through a gauntlet of security guards and peddlers selling MAGA (Make America Great Again) hats and other pro-Trump merchandise, we could hear the chanting of the protesters, “What do we do when we’re under attack? Stand up, fight back!”2; the call of democracy, the call to assemble, the call of the resistance.
Amy and I had assembled with a few hundred-people either protest to or in support of the Trump administration’s tax plan, a line police officer, some in full militarized riot gear bisected the two groups. In preparation for the protest, Amy had been mulling over science-themed chants to impress upon the crowd the importance of scientists. “Car, train, plane or bus, all your stuff is made by us!”, she called out with pride.
As we stood in the crowd, I asked Amy what motivated her to take time out of her quite intense schedule to be present at protests. With a tone that suggested the answer should have been obvious, Amy explained that her role as a scientist is as a “guardian of truth” and so standing in opposition to state power is a responsibility she is bound to when truth is being threatened. In leaving the lab, where life is, as she put it, “safe, sheltered, and boring” to protest on behalf of science, she hopes to link her work as a scientist to a broader movement of truth, justice, and freedom.
I met Amy, at my primary fieldsite, the Dantas Lab, a microbiology research laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she was researching the complicated interactions between probiotics, antibiotics, and microbial communities in the human gut. Amy’s self-proclamation of
1 The bill stipulated that tuition remission benefits would be included as income going forward and the tax rate
increased from 15% to 30%. For the students I was working with, this meant the ~$50k in tuition that had been waived for them would be added to the ~$25k they receive as a living stipend from the institution in exchange for their labors and then taxed at 30%, which ironically is close to their monthly earnings, leaving them with little, if anything, to live on during the PhD training.
4 being a “guardian of truth,” echoes the rhetoric from the March for Science, an event Amy and all of the members of the Dantas lab had participated in earlier in that year, on April 22nd, Earth Day. Robert Proctor, a historian of science, described the march as a global event rooted in “a broader perception of a massive attack on sacred notions of truth…sacred to the scientific community.” (Mooney, 2017) Indeed, the usage of terms such as “alternative facts”3 by government officials within the Trump administration marks an unsettling of a collective understanding of the word “fact” and who should represent them across communities of governance and scientific expertise (see ‘post-truth discussions in Fuller, 2016; Sismondo, 2017, Lynch, 2017).
The March for Science was an unprecedented mobilization of scientists, science advocates, and interested citizens, who took the streets in over 600 cities around the world. As a day of action, the March was mainly propelled by the trend of discrediting scientific consensus by governance and the rejection of evidence by policymakers; such as the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Environmental
Protection Agency, the United States pulling out of the Paris climate accord, the freezing of research grants and the gag order placed on scientists within governmental organizations regarding the dissemination of their research findings. The political mobilization of scientists brings to the fore the changing relations between the public, the scientific community, governance, and knowledge.
The trope of the scientist, originally conceptualized as the ‘Modest Witness’ (Shapin & Schafer, 1985; Haraway, 1997) is one of the original figures of science studies inquiry into the politics of truth claims and the criteria for credibility within the scientific community. Acts of witnessing are not generally considered as a practice that takes one to the street or directly engages with political actions, yet here Amy was, no longer interested in remaining “safe, sheltered, and boring”, linking her status as a scientist to the resistance projects of those who oppose the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration. With shifts in the boundaries between the political and technical, 21st-century sciences face new challenges and scientists’ response to them open up a new range of questions for scholars of science and technology
3 For a review of the usage of “alterative fact” and the reaction to this concept within science, see: Laine C,
Taichman DB. Alternative Facts Have No Place in Science. Ann Intern Med. 2017;166:905–906. doi: 10.7326/M17-0878
5 studies. In this article, I consider the practices of scientific witnessing in the context of the US to explore what the Modest Witness may be becoming in the 21st century.
What brought me to the Dantas Lab was not the mobilization of the scientific community to stand up and be counted or the call to become representatives of otherwise voiceless facts, it was the subject of their research: How microbial communities become resistant to antibiotics. The rising number of
pathogenic microbes able to resist antibiotics has been implicated as a major threat to global health, propelling the biomedical system rapidly towards the “post-antibiotic era.” A near-future imaginary “in which common infections and minor injuries can kill – far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st Century”, as described in a 2014 World Health Organization report. How microbial resistance came to be a looming public health crisis is a complicated story told well by Hannah Landecker (2016), indexing the series of conceptual misunderstandings and limited technological
methods under which 20th century science had been operating, coupled with industrial-scale production and use of antibiotics that simultaneously altered the biology scientists were working to study as they were studying it. Landecker has called this realization a ‘moment of involution’ when the life sciences must grapple with the enactment of microbial resistance, “the material future produced by what we [the sciences] thought we knew” (2016: 36).
The scientists I met at the Dantas Lab work to engage with the inheritance of AMR and use a transdisciplinary approach to explore paths towards a different material future. As defined on their website, their research occurs at the “interface of microbial genomics, ecology, synthetic biology, and systems biology, to understand, harness, and engineer the biochemical processing potential of microbial communities.”4 The object of knowledge the lab is working to know is called the resistome5. The resistome is the collection of genetic presences within any given community of biota, called a microbiome, that encode various abilities to resist and thus persist beyond destructive environmental pressures, such as pharmaceutical antibiotics. In the study of the resistome, samples of microbiota are
4Home Page. (n.d.). Retrieved August 13, 2018, from http://www.dantaslab.org/
5 As Dr. Dantas described this to me, he joked that “every scientist worth their salt works on something that ends
6 collected directly from the environment, their DNA is sequenced using metagenomic technologies and analyzed in a process called assembly where computational algorithms aligning DNA patterns make visible the diversity of microbes within a community and how they may be sharing resistant capacities amongst each other between different microbiomes.
At the outset of this laboratory ethnography, I was interested in unpacking how knowledge was being produced about microbial resistances using the assembly method: witnessing without direct
empirical observation. Given the manner in which the resistome is known and the stories being told about it, I had an a priori assumption that the ‘resistome’ had much to offer the conversations around anti-microbial resistance (AMR) occurring within the social sciences (Landecker, 2015; Chandler, 2016). However, I found that the resistance on offer in the lab was a complicated entanglement between microbial ecologies and political semiotics rendering certain power relations visible and forming allegiances against others.
From a political semiotic framework, social identities are constructed within a network of power-relations; whose meaning is taken up, whose is left out, and from which relations meaning is stabilized to become hegemonically present are the prima facie concerns (Drechsler, 2009; Sannikov, 2017).
Resistance is a relational act locatable as a confrontation within a relationship of power, a struggle full of generative potential for making adversaries, creating links, and disassociating particular relations in a plurality of cases (Foucault, 178; 96). In terms of knowing microbial ecology, articulating resistance is a process of linking up with, and dissociating from, power relations in the forms of hegemonic narratives and methods of making microbial life visible in particular kinds of ways.
In considering the Dantas Lab, at the interface of microbial and social resistance: what relations come to matter in the scientific practice of witnessing? How do these relations shape the (dis)articulation of microbial resistance using methods of witnessing without sight? This article rethinks what it means to ‘observe’ and who can be a witness when scientists are mobilizing in solidarity with multiple
7 Schaffer, 1985) to the street, and turning their gaze inward to consider the material relations which enact future potentials.
To answer these questions, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Dantas lab for three months between September and December of 2017. During the time I spent in the lab, of great concern to the scientists was articulating the value of microbial resistance, and through this articulation the value of science during an increasingly absurd political moment. This concern was most present in the activities of Dr. Dantas. As a charismatic personality he was often in the public eye discussing the lab’s work:
tweeting, being featured on podcasts and being sought out by journalists. Science communication and public engagement were important to him as he sought to influence public opinion regarding AMR and renew science as a durable and sustainable institution.
As an academic lab, the scientists were mostly graduate students working towards their Ph.D. in one of the biological subfields included within the scope of the lab’s work. While the lab’s scientists shared Dr. Dantas’ concern for public communication, their frequently hectic work weeks prevented them from engaging in activities outside of their ‘bench life’-the term they used to define the portion of
energies and time spent at their workstation.
The limitations of time and energy for activities beyond the bench also became barriers for me to engage in participant observation with the team during their regular work day. With only limited
laboratory procedural experience and often being lost amongst the jargon of bioinformatic and genomic science speak, I was of little use to them. Dr. Dantas became my primary informant, regularly sitting with me in his office for open-ended conversations on various themes from his work. In addition to Dr.
Dantas’ time, the majority of my involvement was to observe their weekly lab meetings and graduate student research presentations, mingle and chat with the lab during social events, symposiums and departmental events, conduct interviews with scientists from the lab, and attend protests in the greater St. Louis area. Drawing on the methodology of “Polymorphous Engagement” (Guterson, 1997), in addition to direct ethnography, many sources of data and ways of accessing observation sites are brought together for this article: scientific publications, science journalism, podcasts, and recordings of lectures.
8 This article draws on the genealogy of science studies to explore how the resistome scientists
witness not only the microbial phenomena they study but also the context in which they find themselves;
an anti-science, post-truth era in a racially segregated city where resistance is abundant. Borrowing from the lab’s own metaphor, I take assembly as a point of departure to explore modes of witnessing occurring in around the lab. Organizing the article into three sections, this analysis follows assembly as encountered in the Dantas Lab. Beginning with the lab’s t-shirt, assembly becomes a technology for making links while unmaking others in the political semiotic work of resistance. Through the lab’s metagenomic approach for knowing microbial resistance, assembly becomes a technology of vision, without visual perception from which new articulations of microbial life can be made. The last section of the article examines the material relations of the enactment of resistance through a bioengineered E. Coli organism designed by the lab. These three applications of assembly offer insights into the vision of the lab, where scientific witnesses are producing knowledge designed to do a particular type of resistance work; in these interventions, they are re-figuring what the scientific observer is in the 21st century.
The ‘Modest Witness’: Objectivity, Boundaries, and Technologies of Vision
Shapin and Schaffer introduced the character of the Modest Witness, the “man who’s narratives could be credited as mirrors of reality” (1985; 65) in their canonical work, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes,
Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985). The figure emerged through the author’s analysis of Natural
philosopher Robert Boyle’s (1627-1691) endeavor to introduce the experimental method within 17th -century science. The central enterprise of the Modest Witness is the enforcement of implicit social orders across the scientific community for the production of matters of fact. Shapin and Schaffer describe the technologies for ordering deployed by the Modest Witness in three parts: material technology- the values inscribed into the instrument of the air pump and it’s functions, a social technology- the conventions of collective interaction and the consideration of knowledge claims, and a literary technology- the means by which the phenomena could be known and observed by non-direct witnesses through a “naked way of
9 writing”(66), a dramatization of the material and social referred to as “virtual witnessing”(60). These three technologies ensured vermisilitude and objectivity. As Shapin and Schaffer describe, objectivity is an “artifact of certain forms of discourse and certain modes of social solidarity.” (71) How these technologies resonate into the resistome lab offer productive points for analysis. What values are being inscribed through material enactments designed by the lab, how does the lab narrate the claims produced, and what types of social solidarities are leveraged in the process?
Such questions are taken up by Donna Haraway in her book, Modest_Witness
@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (1997). Haraway expands the figure of the
Modest Witness to closely inspect the relational categories that define ‘man the mirror’ and reliable knowledge in science. The laboratory, according to Haraway, is a ‘theater of persuasion,’ the purpose for which is to make visible “truths about the way the world is” for a highly regulated public (270). Haraway adds to the characteristics of the Modest Witness the uncanny ability of “self-invisibility,” rendering the man behind the mirror invisible so that only his modesty remains present. Modesty; as Haraway defines, is a constellation of measure, moderation, solicitude, and reticence that runs counter to the masculine images in Western heroism (31). The image of the scientist became that of ‘man-in-the-making,’ where modesty is an alternative norm for masculinity in the post-heroic age of culture6 (ibid). The concept of
modesty and the lab as theater of persuasion where truth is made visible only for a curated crowd of like
minded individuals comes into to conflict in a space like the Dantas Lab, where politics are
unapologetically engaged and truth claims about the way the world is, are presented to unsettle rather than enforce.
Objectivity projects within science have been conceptualized in feminist epistemologies as standpoints (Harding, 1995; Haraway, 1988 & 1995; Star, 1990). Harding emphasizes that “not all social values and interests have the same bad effects upon the results of the research” (1995; 71), suggesting in her conceptualization of ‘strong objectivity’ that “democracy-advancing values” (ibid) have produced less
6 Haraway makes this assertion in conversation with the work of literary scholar Bonnie Wheeler (1992) on
the figure of King Arthur and his emergence as the original vir modestus model of man- a high status, disciplines, ethical man of restraint.
10 distorted scientific beliefs than neutral objectivity. Haraway operationalizes how this might be done by including the as these perspectives of the subjected (1995; 118). Such critical positions and their “multiple marginalities” have power, says Star, “a power that at once resists violence and encompasses
heterogeneity. This is at its most powerful a collective resistance, based on the premise that the personal is political.” (1990;30).
To examine the politics of standpoints in the lab, who the in the 21st century witness is can considered by following the boundaries between the polity within and without of the lab (Shapin & Schaffer,1985). The stability of the experimental model has, historically, had much to do with the qualities of society being reflected and the number of allied connections to dominate political forms (Latour, 1983 & 1987). The Modest Witness and the laboratory “he” inhabits was not just a space for scientific knowledge but also, “a functioning example of how to organize and sustain a peaceable society between the extremes of tyranny and radical individualism” (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985; 341).
In many ways, Haraway’s refiguring at the edge of the second millennium marks the death of the Modest Witness as it was originally conceived, modesty became masculinity and witnessing an act only possible from the invisible subject position of objectivity, an unsustainable configuration for modern science. Yet she remained hopeful for a rebirth, a figure with a “reinvented desire for justice and democratically crafted lived well-being.” (267). In Haraway’s words,
“a kind of modest witness that insists on its situatedness, where location is itself always a complex construction as well as inheritance and that casts its lot with the projects and needs of those who could not or would not inhabit the subject positions of the self-invisible and the discursive sites, the “laboratories” of the credible, civil man of science.” (270).
Here, I explore how the Modest Witness might be re-figured again, in the US political context when the “sacred notion of truth” has been publicly questioned by governance and the witnesses destabilized as authorities on the state of reality. The boundaries between the technical and political are not clearly delineated nor is the standpoint of the witness. The Dantas lab provides a case to consider how
11 “democracy-enhancing” objectivity projects have been operationalized to witness the social and the material in the study of microbial resistance, a project in which standpoint matters. I follow assembly as a
technology of vision, not as an act of visual perception of empirical phenomena but of vision- ‘the ability
to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom’7 and of standing publicly accountable for and attesting to one’s representations (Haraway, 1997:267).
The Right to Assemble: Witnessing for ‘the People’
The verdict was “not guilty.” On September, 15th, 2017, a final judgment in the case of the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith was ruled, exonerating the police officer who had ended his life. Mr. Smith, a black man, was killed in 2011, three years before the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a northern suburb of St. Louis. In the aftermath of Brown’s death and the grand jury decision not to indict the police officer who killed him, the city of Ferguson weathered several weeks of intense revolt that escalated from protests into rioting, known as the “Ferguson unrest.” In the time between the Ferguson unrest and the 2017 verdict, protests had occurred across the nation amid heightened scrutiny of police use of excessive force and the numerous killings of unarmed African Americans, particularly young men, by police.
In the days leading up to the verdict, the city seemed quieter than usual, even subdued. The Mayor of St. Louis had been quoted in the news saying that the city was “on edge” and calling for calm. An influential activist group of Clergy had also made the news, warning that anything other than a guilty verdict would bring blood8. I was in a coffee shop when the verdict was announced. Just moments before the announcement I overheard the shop’s barista conversing with a customer about how details of the case were so extreme that the verdict “simply must be guilty.” Then the verdict was announced and sucked the energy out of the room. Audible sighs from the customers could be heard, and then silence. One hundred
7 Definition provided by Webster’s dictionary
8St. Louis' Catholics Push For Peace, In City Roiled Again ... (n.d.). Retrieved from
12 days of protest were announced, organized by Black Lives Matter and Expect Us. The national guard was called into St. Louis on standby, in case of “unrest.”
An hour or so after the verdict was announced, I arrived at the lab for the weekly research update meeting and found an atmosphere similar to that of the coffee shop. The lab members, more quietly than usual, filled the room. Dr. Dantas, per his custom, was the last to arrive. As he walked into the room, he looked around at this team and then down, shook his head, and said, “this is a shitty, shitty day.” It was then, observing the solemn reaction of the room, that I noticed the t-shirts that many of lab members present were wearing: a dark blue cotton tee with a striking design.
In the design, a series of ‘fists of solidarity’ extend across the chest line. Within the illustration, the genetic code for microbial resistance is inlaid. Around the exterior are antibiotic molecules, and below reads, “the right to assemble.” Here the “right to assemble” is a double entendre referencing the freedom of speech and protestation and for the method used in the lab for studying microbial resistance, functional
metagenomics, the process of cataloging, predicting, and enabling the assembly of a microbial genome.
As the room broke out in chatter rehashing the verdict, the ensuing protests, and speculating on the response of the cities governance, I turned the person next to me, a Ph.D. candidate in epidemiology, and inquired about the shirt. They described that every year the lab creates a t-shirt. This particular variation was designed in resistance to the political moment in the US, after Trump was elected, and worn by the lab during the March for Science. “We usually just wear this shirt for community outreach events,” they explained, “But today, it felt appropriate, so I put it on.” Moreover, they had not been alone in the assertion. At least half the room had selected to wear their resistance shirt for today.
The ‘right to assemble’ is one of the ten declarations included in the Bill of Rights (1791), the first amendment made to the United States Constitution. The adoption of the Bill of Rights instated a new purpose for government: protection of individual rights, which includes protection of individuals from government impositions to dictate how citizens choose to live their own lives. In the context of the first amendment, individual rights were introduced into federal law at the bequest of the anti-federalist
13 majority9, for whom mistrust of the government was still fresh from the fight for independence from colonial rule. The right to assemble sits in company with ‘freedom to practice religion, the freedom of speech and of the press, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.’
As I encountered it, the ‘right to assemble’ comes to refer to a political statement about the right to collectively organize and stand against (anti)biotic environments, with science in solidarity with the marginalized communities for whom resistance is vital. This interpretation was furthered by another relic of the March for Science, the sign on the door to Dr. Dantas’s office reading, “In this house, we believe: Black lives matter. Women’s rights are human rights. No human is illegal. Science is real. Love is love. Kindness is everything.” These six declarations, written in various fonts and bright neon colors fit squarely on an 11x17 black sign. To add to the double entendre of the “right to assemble,” the laboratory becomes a link in the ‘citational chain’ (Butler, 2015: 162) of popular sovereignty in the making. Through the sign, the t-shirt, and how they are mobilized, the Dantas Lab has laid claim to being part of “we the people,” standing with the multi-marginalities not represented and living under threat of various forms of violence from the sovereign state.
Within the citational chain, shifts can be made to define which relations matter in the formation of popular sovereignty through linking and unlinking with various standpoints. Stabilizing who “the people” are if only for a specific time and context, unites a heterogeneous collective of subjects,
demanding change and claiming territory for the “lived possibility of revolution” (162). As a collective, the Dantas lab was comprised of individuals who were not homogenous in their personal values, but the lab as a political collectivity was a principled space with shared politics. The politics on offer were significantly shaped by Dr. Dantas and the mode of political ordering he made possible within the lab by setting examples for how to engage with each other, the scientific community, and contemporary politics.
An example of this ordering is found in a Friday late afternoon ritual where the lab ends their week by sharing snacks, including a loaf of freshly baked bread made with a bread machine in their staff
9 In the context of the United States, Federalists where the supporters of the proposed Constitution,
14 room, while discussing the goings-on of the social and political spheres.10 During these Friday
assemblies, Dr. Dantas would often tell stories from his experiences working within science, stories with a central moral that might offer guidance to the Ph.D. students and early career researchers under this mentorship. As an illustration of such guidance, when discussing how to prioritize the constant flow of opportunities to attend and present at conferences, Dr. Dantas advised his team to critically assess the value of the conference based on the diversity of the invited speakers. If more than fifty percent of the speakers were white males, “pass” advised Dantas who explained there are many women and people of color working within scientific communities of expertise, to exclude them from a conference lineup is “lazy, if not intentional.” Dantas referred to these conferences as “JABWM” (jab-wam), standing for “just another bunch of white men.” In this example, the movement to critically consider how and where
particular standpoints are maintained is also a question of whose scientific work influences and shapes the scientific community.
In addition to aggregating ‘the people,’ the assembly is a productive technology, forging collectives to share ideas, make decisions, and constitute knowledge. In this way, the individual witness in the scientific assembly becomes less important for their scientific attributes and more visible for their alignment with popular sovereignty. These shifts in relations of witnessing bring attention to the question of “who can be a witness in 21st-century science?” as a work-in-progress.
This ambiguity came up during a conversation with Dr. Dantas, where he described to me that the sciences were grappling with similar issues brought forward by the #MeToo movement11 to illuminate power abuses within male-dominated institutions12. Dr. Dantas described this tension as an “internal bloodletting”, a powerful analogy for releasing toxins from a system. The sciences have to take measures to balance the knowledge produced by people whose behavior is no longer acceptable as to not “spoil the
10 This was called OOFF (Official Optional Formal Friday). It was a weekly tradition to socialize, gossip, share news,
engage in creative theoretical discussions, and speculate about possibilities. As a component of the labs culture, attendance was not explicitly required, but there was social pressure to join; especially if one was participating in a rotation and hoping to gain formal acceptance to the team for their dissertation research.
11 The #MeToo movement is an international movement against sexual harassment and assault bring awareness of
the prevalence in which is occurs and calling for actions to improve gender equity.
15 lineage” of those they have mentored. The “fail-safe” of the scientific method, as explained by Dr. Dantas is in the repetition and constant reinterpretation of ideas,
“As people reinterpret that theory and use that theory, they can divorce themselves completely from the person who developed it originally. That for me is why the sciences have a little bit less of an “ick factor”. And yeah, maybe you don’t recognize that person anymore, you don’t call it “so and so’s theory,” you just call it “the theory.” It can very rapidly evolve and get reused. You know, “standing on the shoulder of giants,” it is just “standing on the shoulders of other ideas.”
As Dr. Dantas describes, science can be balanced by disassociating an author from a theory, protecting the knowledge and letting the ideas stand without the giants who build empires13. An interesting reimagining of Haraway’s ‘self-invisibility’ (1997), instead of the scientist contorting to erase their own agency as a statement of objectivity, they exercise their own visibility through assembly to bring into the visual field the standpoints considered toxic to the system of science and unlink the specific subject positions, lineages, and practices from the collective of witnesses.
An acknowledgement is present in Dr. Dantas’ stories that Science has bias, and in his depiction of the tensions between the abusive power structures (the “ick factor”) and knowledge production (scientific method), a transporting of principles and social actions work to redefine what is acceptable is within the assembly of witnesses. Here, standpoint is not that of a single witness; witnessing is a plural act, an assembly of a plurality of standpoints. Following the logic from the Dantas Lab, knowledge can be divorced from the knower because knowledge is a communal property.
Witnessing, as described here, presents a commitment to popular sovereignty; to stand with ‘the people’ and from this standpoint, a more just future can be envisaged. This vision of future possibility becomes a technology of assembly- from which lines can be drawn for what standpoints ought to be included as witnesses and which should not as a balancing practice for the collectivity. Assembly allows
13 The process of disassociation is not as clean as it appears in this quote. Dr. Dantas also described the challenges
of funding and institutional “tolerance” for toxic researchers who bring in huge grants or have celebrity status which works towards garnering endowments.
16 the scientists to stake a claim on the power of credible witnessing and establish a boundary of who can be trusted with this power, as Star writes, “power is about whose metaphor brings worlds together and holds them there.” (1990, 30)
(Dis)Articulating Resistance: Witnessing through Assembly
Nathan opened his research update presentation with the following statement: “the gut is alive!”, he called out as he stiffly waved his hands in the air, an iconic move from the original Frankenstein film, while on the screen behind him an animated microscan displayed a community of squiggly and differently shaped microbes gyrated around erratically as oblong greyscale forms. Nathan asked the audience to notice how some microbes are more grounded in their motion (stationary, subtly gyrating) while others are more “directed”, he then drew the attention to one microbe in particular, a slightly longer skinner organism which quickly moved in a straight line from one side of the image to other, “shooting through” as Nathan enthusiastically put it. A couple of “oohs” rose from the audience. Dr. Dantas inquired what level of microscopic lens he had used to capture what was being viewed. “100 or 1000x, I can’t quite remember,” replied Nathan. I was not sure if this was dry sarcasm, but I suspect it was. He then specified, “1000x capturing organisms 1 micron across and about 10 microns long”. The topic of his talk had nothing to do with the animated microbes he opened with; it was simply a rhetorical move to capture the audience’s attention. This instance was the only time I saw a microbe while in the lab and, as I would come to understand from their work, seeing a microbe is a novelty for them as well.
Microbes and their functions pose a problem for the practices of scientific witnessing. Empirical observation of microbes became possible with innovations in instrumentation beginning with the development of Leuwenhoek’s microscope14. Seeing the otherwise invisible microbes led to their
classification based on morphological appearance. With the development of pure culture, a culture-based
14 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723) was a Dutch inventory who, in the 1670’s devised the first microscope
17 method15 of isolating and cultivating single strains of microbes in the nutrient media of petri dish, the functions of individual strains could be studied. Knowing microbes through a petri dish, however, introduced the problem of culture bias. A popular statistic for illustrating the limits of culture-based methods is that less than one percent of the assumed diversity of microbes can be cultivated using
laboratory methods leaving 99.0-99.9% of microbial diversity unrepresented. “Microbial communities are not a pure culture, and this is just bad representation,” says Dantas, “if you don’t know who is there, you don’t know what they are doing.” Or how they are doing it.
The genomic revolution16 transformed how microbes could be known by scientists. The diversity of microbes present in any given ecology can now be sampled directly from the environment, measured and identified through DNA in a process called Metagenomics. This method made sampling the diversity within various habitats possible by transforming whole microbial ecosystems into biological units for analysis. Amber Benezra has called the use of metagenomic methods, “datafying microbes” (2016), a process of reducing microbial functions to individual units in massive databases for the purpose of drawing connections between microbial presences and concerns of human health. The ‘datafied microbe’ made visible the uncultured majority (see Forsberg et al., 2014). Data-driven approaches have
dramatically changed what is knowable of microbial life (Leonelli, 2015). However, another bias emerges when studying microbial functions from these massive databanks of hundreds of millions of microbial DNA: the bias of the known. A biomedical computational review article editorialized this bias well:
“Matching a microbe buried inside a metagenome to a genome in a reference database is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. But identifying the genes from a microbe that hasn’t previously been sequenced and figuring out what those genes actually do is even more challenging.” (Gelfand, 2012)
15 Robert Koch’s (1843-1910) contributions altered the trajectory of the field, providing microbiology with ‘pure
culture’, a method of isolating and cultivating single strain micro-organisms on nutrient medium. In addition to culturing techniques. Using this method, Koch was able to definitively determine Bacillus anthracis was the cause of Anthrax, the first case linking microbes to illness.
16 The Genomics Revolution refers to the period between the late-1990’s and mid-2010’s during which
technological advances, coupled with the shrinking cost of genome sequencing and analysis made genomic research an essential component of modern life sciences research.
18 In the study of the resistome, knowing the function of the gene and how microbial communities use it is the central line of inquiry. Microbial genomics labs, like the Dantas Lab, use a technique called functional
metagenomic assembly to make gene functions visible as data and thus knowable. Through the extraction
process of DNA, enzymes break the strands into fragments of short and long strands of genetic
information. This raw genetic information is sent through a computational program called an assembler which uses an algorithm to pattern match the DNA strands by overlaying all the strands present in the metagenome without the use of a reference sequence. This matching process creates “consensus sequences” called contigs. The contigs are then compared to known reference sequences of resistant genes to identify which contigs might potentially encode resistant capacities under the operating assumption that groups of genes that do similar things tend to be configured in similar patterns.
From my untrained eye, what I saw from observing the process of assembly was as follows: a scientist takes a solution of extracted DNA to a sleek instrument with an interactive touch screen placed along a counter against a wall. This instrument is called a High-Throughput Sequencer. The scientist logs into the instrument with their unique user ID and password. The instrument prompts the scientist through a series of commands, such as “load reagent cartridge,” “load flow cell,” “load buffer cartridge.” The scientist complies. Once all necessary components are loaded, the scientist selects the details of the sequence they are going to run from a series of options that had been preloaded into their “user account” via a web application and presses “start” on the touch screen.
The sequenced data is automatically uploaded into the lab's server database upon completion, which the scientist can access through their personal workstation computer. The data file produced by the sequencer contains lines of genetic information called “reads” at different lengths as well as strings of data containing identifying information in the form of symbols and random letters that I could not decipher for meaning. This file is uploaded into the computational software program that performs the assembly, a simply designed interface that asks the user for only a few pieces of information: which type of genetic sequencer was used, which assembly algorithm to use, and which thresholds to use to assess if a read should be included or excluded. The algorithm then produces a set of contigs- consensus
19 sequences, which, depending on the analysis software, either appear as stacked lines of various lengths or a series of DNA base pair notations ordered on top of each other with frequency lines mapping through the pattern matches.
What can be witnessed through assembly methods is not a microbe or an act of resistance, it is a
potential derived from patterns and made manifest as a contig. In order to know the function the contig
encodes, if any at all17, it is tagged with a traceable molecule and added as a link, in a DNA molecule called a plasmid. The plasmid is offered to colonies of E. Coli host bacteria suspended in a solution, who are then put through a series of chemical exposures to cause them to take the plasmid into their bodies, a technique science learned from observing how microbes share genes called an “artificial horizontal gene transfer test” (Pehrsson, 2013). The E. Coli hosts are cultivated in Petri dishes and used in a series of iterative experiments, including antibiotic exposures, to force the expression of the gene in the organism and observe its function. The surviving E. Coli are then sequenced to reveal the barcoded segments of DNA that enabled their survival, re-datafying the microbial genes, thus creating a known resistance.
All of this is done without looking directly at microbes. Even the E. Coli colonies in the petri dish are not visually perceived as anything other than a subtle spotty discoloration smeared across a nutrient media. The practices of witnessing resistance are done through datafication and assembly using massive genomic information databases: high throughput next-generation genomic sequencers that know the individual scientists and their needs based on personalized user interface system, assembly algorithms18, and E. Coli host bacteria that live and die by the millions to make resistance genes known.
From this method, individual genes cannot be matched to individual microbes. Resistance genes are communal property. Knowing what microbial communities are doing is a matter of relations between
17 These protocols are not without fault. Misassemblies occur frequently with metagenomic data as
many of the assembly algorithms rely on high abundances of the same type of microbe for accurate pattern recognition.
18 The Dantas Lab has written their own assembly algorithms specific for studying functional resistance:
ParFums – to identify novel genes, Resfams- to ontologically annotate the genes, and ShortBred- to measure abundance of genes.
20 abundances. How abundant a particular resistance gene is within a microbial ecology is a marker for how the community is interacting with its environment. An abundance of resistance genes is assumed to mean an abundance of the need for them in order to ensure the community’s survival.
The studies done in the lab have generated claims that resistance is not a new mutation in response to antibiotics. Instead, resistance is an ancient perpetual presence, a “genetic reservoir”
(Forsberg et al., 2014) that can be drawn upon as needed based on exposures in the environment. The use of antibiotics in one habitat has a ripple effect causing “gene flows” from habitats where the reservoirs are largely maintained into others; notably between soil bacteria and human pathogen (Forsberg et al., 2012). Resistance was also located within the bodies of a remote tribe of ‘uncontacted Amerindians’ assumed to have been living in isolation from the modern world for several generations, leading to the claim that “antibiotic resistance is a natural feature of the human microbiome even in the absence of exposure to commercial antibiotics” (Clemente et al., 2015). In a subsequent review article written by Drs. Dantas and Sommer they conclude,
“The most resounding message that comes through from every new resistome study is that the pool of resistance genes, and the mechanisms of resisting antibiotics, available to bacteria are effectively limitless. To stay ahead of the game we must take a multipronged approach, looking for new ways to keep pathogens in check, while also searching for even newer antipathogen strategies. Even when therapies appear to be highly effective during their initial deployment, it is only a matter of time before pathogens tap into the enormous resistomes of their many neighbors and once again thwart our very best drugs.”
(Dantas & Sommer, 2014, p. 51).
The case of the resistome, as it is studied in the Dantas Lab illustrates how the abundance of resistance known through computational data-driven methods articulate microbial life and their relations. The
articulated microbe is an example of ‘thirdness’ (Fortun & Bernstein, 1998), the in-between space or
middle ground within western dualism where words are given, or if necessary are invented, to describe phenomena as adequately as possible but not as an objective truth of nature. As witnesses, the resistome
21 scientists are not working to observe and report on nature, they are actively (dis)articulating it so that microbes might reveal something about themselves and their communities. Here, scientists are witnessing through assembly, and in doing so they are articulating microbial life by manifesting microbes as
something between literal and metaphorical knowledge; not empirically observable nor fully describable.
Assembling a New Narrative: Material Relations for Speculative Futures
The stories science tells of microbial life matter. The first anthropological article on microbes was
published in 1893 by D.S. Lamb, titled “The Deadly Microbe and Its Destruction.” At the time of Lamb’s article, there were only 185 known microbes which were quickly being classified by the manner and circumstances in which they cause illness in hosts: humans, agricultural livestock, and domestic pets. In many ways, Lamb’s article chronicled human-microbe relations at the technological moment of pure
culture techniques and the development of methods for diagnosing causality between microbes and
disease leading to the general acceptance of germ theory19. Such pivotal moments and technological developments shaped how microbes came to be understood for the next century.
This was the beginning of the story, for “The Deadly Microbe and Its Destruction,” the dominant
figurative structure (Fuchs, 2015)-constellations of instruments, literature, practices, and logics- built into
scientific models of articulating microbial life through the 19th and 20th century. Figurative structures are ‘metaphors that bring worlds together’ (Star, 1990); as science studies, scholars have shown time and again, they have the power to privilege and limit what is possible to know, which in turn has material effects (Martin, 1994; Landecker, 2007; Haraway, 1991). One such material effect has been the rise of antimicrobial resistance in pathogens (see Landecker, 2016).
22 Antimicrobial resistance became part of the story shortly after the development of the first pharmaceutical antibiotics20. Even Alexander Fleming, the microbiologist who isolated the first antibiotic molecule, penicillin, from Penicillium mold famously warned of resistance in his Nobel acceptance speech. Fleming told the audience that he had witnessed the ease in which microbes can become resistant to penicillin in the lab if exposed to concentrations not sufficient to kill them. He concluded by narrating a story about a future in which misuse by patients renders penicillin ineffective, the moral being,
“If you use penicillin, use enough” (Fleming, 1945). The development of early pharmaceutical antibiotics marked the beginning of a several decade long race to locate novel molecules with antibiotic properties, alter them, or develop completely synthetic versions hoping to find a “magic bullet”21 that microbes could not resist. This line of logic has been captured in the widely used warfare analogies pitting science and technological innovation against the wiles of the microbes with their quickly mutating ways (see Nerlich & Hellsten, 2009; Nerlich, 2009; McLeod and Nerlich, 2017).
Dr. Dantas refers to this dominant narrative of resistance as, “The traditional framing,” in which “microbes are innately susceptible to antibiotic molecules, until through prolonged low-level exposure, over time, they evolve a resistant capacity.” The trouble with this frame from his perspective is that it ascribes too much power to the exposure time of single strains of microbes to antibiotics as the cause of antimicrobial resistance. This is a residual understanding of microbial interactions left over from the pure
culture era of knowing microbes. In conversation with Dr. Dantas, he addressed this, “I am basically
redoing what has already been done before using different technology and finding a dramatically different story of resistance.” The shift in technology was from the pure cultured space of the petri dish where microbes were isolated, cultivated, and visually perceived to the technology of functional metagenomic
assay where microbes are datafied, assembled, and known.
20 It is important to remember that antibiotics are molecules made by microbes. Original thought of as a chemical
defense system, microbes are now understood to be produced for a wide variety of reasons including as a form of communication called qourum sensing (Rutherford et al, 2012).
21 Elreich’s magic bullet was a theory from the 1900’s stating that chemical properties could be used to eliminate
23 The resistome becomes helpful to think of as a new figurative structure, a constellation of partial connections to the thought linages and instruments of the past, their material consequences, the
contemporary work to articulate the microbe through functional metagenomic assembly and a vision for the future of human-microbe relations. Through the resistome, a different set of metaphors are brought together. Dr. Dantas described the tension of shifting metaphors as a movement away from the warfare analogies popular in the antimicrobial resistance discourse. His interest is in telling the story of what comes after the war metaphor. In his words:
“It's not only just eradication antagonism. There are many, many different ways to use community-based analogies. Right. And everything that comes from communities. The stratification of communities, the evolution of the community’s greater goods, public goods, if you will.”
For Dr. Dantas, the resistome poses an opportunity to investigate how resistance comes to matter within microbial ecologies. Resistance genes do far more work than finding their way into pathogens to create clinically complicated, and increasingly deadly medical conditions. Understanding resistance through ecological analogies requires exploring resistance genes for their productive antagonistic potentials, and the ways they may be providing a service essential to the intricate balancing of microbial ecologies. Dr. Dantas explains:
“Those [questions of antagonist potential] are questions that are critical to us, not just in our understanding of resistance and antibiotics, but also, for instance, things that can be done with this knowledge… That's something you can learn from microbial populations. What do microbes do to try to survive from an evolutionary perspective? Where the individual doesn't really matter… So I think that gets back to, "Why do you want to maintain diversity of thought, opinion or action in a human population?" Because as a population of humans, we're better adapted to change and perturbations by having that diversity.”
Microbial resistance as it is articulated from the figuration of the resistome and its instruments of
24 ecological balance is maintained by drawing upon the resources from within and across communities. Microbes have become ‘good to think with,’ as pointed out by Heath Paxon and Stephen Helmreich in their analysis of the making of ‘model ecosystems’ within the life science. Microbial ecology is being increasingly mobilized to provide a theoretical account of “human entanglements with nonhuman agencies [...] often mobilized in ways that rely explicitly on their multiple relationalities and openness” (ibid, 185). Through the resistome, resistance becomes “newly appealing, full of unexpected,
uncharacterized possibility as well as pliable to cultural projects.” (ibid, 168).
In Dr. Dantas’ call to examine what “can be done with this knowledge,” resistance becomes a tool for interfering in the social and material futures of microbial ecologies. The Lab’s interventions into the material enactments of resistance are through synthetic biology, and the design of probiotic E. Coli organisms bioengineered with series of resistance genes the lab had serendipitously encountered in the soil (Dantas, Sommer, et al., 2008). These genes give microbes the ability to produce an enzyme
rendering them capable of catabolizing or eating, antibiotics as their primary source of food (Crofts et al., 2018). In the article reporting the successful engineering of the enzymatic pathway, Crofts et al. suggest toward the possibility that one of the functions of penicillium mold is to feed the diversity of microbes cohabitating in the soil while also protecting the community from outside colonization of microbes not carrying the required genes for survival.
The vision, thinking here in terms of imaginative possibility for the future, for these bioengineered E. Coli is to develop them as “tools for in situ bioremediation of antibiotic-contaminated soils or
environments, … their remediation could help prevent the spread of resistance.” (Crofts et al., 2018). The speculative potential of E. Coli performing clean-up duty in spaces where humans have amplified
antibiotic resistance is not the only way this technology is thought to have beneficial capacities. During a podcast interview, Dr. Dantas referred to the vision for the productive value of microbial resistance as a “lesson in humility” taught to science by microbes who have co-existed for billions of years,
25 “[If] we begin to understand how it is that microbes collaborate and negotiate and figure out ways [hesitant pause], I know I'm humanizing this, but we can certainly find parallels and ways to say bugs [microbes] have figured out a way in which to share and figure things out on their own and when some bad stuff happens, they figure out a way in which to bounce back. If we learn from that, we can come up with a brand-new way of making therapeutics… [that will] either suppress or wipe out the bad guys [pathogens] while allowing all of the other good bugs [commensals] to not just not be hurt, but maybe help us along the way. ” (Dantas & Emmett & Kennedy, 2018)
Dr. Dantas expanded on his vision for the probiotic-based therapeutics of the future during a
conversation, describing that in the same way that the lab has been able to bioengineer an enzymatic pathway to perform bioremediation in industrial and agricultural environments, E. Coli could be engineered to do work within human microbiomes to ‘out-persisting’ pathogens. “Turning resistance on its head”, says Dr. Dantas, “to engineer bacteria to do good things,” such as locate pathogens colonizing a particular site in the body and produce a hyper-specific protein or enzyme that allows the probiotic to overwhelm the pathogen and eliminate it from the colony. “This is all just talk at this point,” cautioned one of the lab’s synthetic biologists noticing my interest in response to Dr. Dantas’s remark, “we still need to prove proof of concept and while there is a lot of excitement around this we are dialing back and just trying to argue that E. Coli, as an organism, has been somewhat misunderstood and is a viable probiotic.” “It is like personalized medicine for ecosystems,” described Dr. Dantas, “It’s not sci-fi, it’s just around the corner.”
In the relations of resistance, a connection is being between drawn between the communities of humans and microbes. Science has learned a lesson in humility from microbial resistance and now uses a lens of community and ecology to find ways to cohabitate after the war metaphor. In line with what Lormier has called, the ‘probiotic turn’ (2017) within science, the Dantas Lab provides an example of microbial sciences reconsidering the antibiotic approach of controlling “unruly ecologies” by challenging taboos and inside/outside dualities. E. Coli has traditionally been an organism framed as best left on the “outside” of the body and hearing that the future of infection control may be intentional E. Coli
26 colonization renders, for me, images of news articles warning of undercooked meat and sick restaurant patrons. The probiotic future may be E. Coli colonization and, in this possibility, assembly as a
technology of vision becomes a speculative future making act, that involves humility and a collaboration
with chimerical E. Coli bacteria who modulate material enactments on behalf of both microbes and humans.
21
stCentury Witnessing and the Project of Scientific Vision
I began this article at the interface of microbial, political, and scientific resistances; asking what becomes of the ‘Modest Witness’ in the 21st century, when scientists are mobilizing to participate in democracy, when the antibiotic era is swiftly coming to an end, and new narratives for a more livable world are sorely needed. To answer this question, I followed assembly as it becomes a technology of vision tracing a pathway through which possibilities of knowing in a situated way might come to “lie visibly at the heart of our best science” (Haraway, 1997; 39).
Witnessing, at its most basic level is to have knowledge of something. To witness can denote directly seeing, being present at a particular time and place where something has occurred or telling about a belief held as truth. As a scientific practice, witnessing has been conceptualized as direct observation and reporting of phenomena by a person authorized to testify to particular claims they know. Practices of witnessing that do not involve empirical observation of phenomena pose a problem for the ‘standpoint of objectivity’ (Haraway, 1988), a position that requires the observer to report only on reproducible
empirical information, leaving emotion, belief, and interpretation out of the equation. However, witnessing situates, both the knower and the object being known, entangled in specificity and
consequential enactments. Haraway has described this as “Connection and coalition bound to sometimes painful structures of accountability to each other and to the worldly hope for freedom and justice.” (1997; 33) Whether the witness accepts the situatedness in which they find themselves is a question of
27 In the Dantas Lab, vision as a technology of assembly acts by uniting the scientific community with ‘the people’ and establishing new boundaries for who can be a credible witness, as well as how witnesses ought to be (in)visible in relation to that which they report [e.g. ‘icky’ scientists divorced from their theories vs. conferences judged by the diversity of their presenters]. Assembly reaches beyond truth of objective fact, to offer a sense of participation, of bearing witness. To witness in this way is to hold as truth particular commitments and stand accountable, a practice done in the lab through acts of resistance against harmful power relations amplified during the Trump administration. As a technology, assembly provides a mode of ordering used to discipline the sciences, letting toxins out, and bringing in values of social justice which reflect an idealized image of resistance and the possibility of change within society. The sign on Dr. Dantas door, the lab’s t-shirt and how it is mobilized are examples of how the witnesses resist.
The direction scientific collectivities may be moving is not as cleanly virtuous as I have described here. The pressures of funding, industry partnerships, and the complications posed by the politics of retaining problematic faculty who carry significant grants for an institution makes realizing the new figure of the witness a messy proposition. However, if the lab and its inhabitants are a microcosm for an ideal model of citizens and society, as suggested by Shapin and Schaffer, then the Dantas Lab’s mode of ordering and their objectivity project of imbedding ‘democracy-enhancing values’ (Harding, 1995) into their collectivity is a hopeful departure from the model of a ‘culture of no culture’ (Tarweek, 1988) that has persisted within science from Restoration-era England to 20th century modernity. As Shapin and Schaffer have claimed, “solutions to problems of knowledge are solutions to problems of a social order." (1985, 21).
Resistance is known through the resistome in part parts: through assembly to render visible microbial ecologies and by providing a new repertoire from which stories of resistance can be told. First, a
technoscientific gathering of scientists, sequencing instruments, assembly algorithms, and E. Coli hosts work as collaborators to articulate microbial resistance. To know resistance requires a series of
28 sequence among tens of millions. This virtual witnessing requires no direct observation, witnessing is an act of collaboration, of an assembly.
Second, the analogies are drawn upon when thinking about microbial life and relations of resistance to highlight the productive aspects of antagonism. Through the “lens of community and ecology,” the resistome witnesses are situating their knowledge so that consequential claims might be made in the entanglements of humans, antibiotics, and microbial agency. No longer merely an act of reporting
observable phenomena, 21st-century witnessing is interventional, actively and reflexively considering the possible material future humans might come to inhabit. This process materializes as chimerical E. Coli organisms designed to modulate ecologies on behalf of both microbes and humans; cohabitating, collaborating and cleaning up after.
The witnesses I met in the Dantas lab do not make sense against the conceptualization of modesty. To draw on Dr. Danta’s words, perhaps humble, fits better here. The shift from modest to humble is
rhetorically small but with radical implications. Modesty derives from Latin modus, meaning ‘measure’ or ‘manner’ is a careful affectation marked by pretense of restraining one’s capacities, a quality focused outwardly on the perceptions of others. Humility derives from Latin humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil.’ The lesson of humility is to turn the gaze inward, acknowledging the limitations of one perspective and deprivilege the self and its image for a focus on the larger order of life.
Perhaps the ‘humble witness’ might provide a more generative way to conceive of the scientific observer when what is being witnessed is a process of deprivileging through resistance: the antibiotic molecule, the modest man of science, and the methods of objective vision. Through the technology of assembly new narratives are being held together, labs are theaters of persuasion not for what is but for how things could be- socially and technically, where truth claims are not made from observations, instead possibilities are narrated, and the future of antimicrobials are modulating probiotic therapies. Entangled in the relations of resistance and how they are witnessed are microbes, scientists, technoscientific
instruments, social justice movements, and ‘painful structures of accountability’ (Haraway, 1997). These insights and mobilizations come to bear on critical moment in US politics, where assembling to stand up
29 and be counted matters, the plurality of standpoint matters, and in this productive antagonism a vision for possible future enactments is held as truth. A lesson about resistance from the microbial communities to human communities, diversity is a means of survival.
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