Furthering Ontological Pluralism, Maybe: The Strange Case of the Microbial Recordings

This paper describes the trials and tribulations of drawing on Latour’s work on ontological pluralism (An Inquiry into the Mode of Existence) to make sense of a series of recordings collected by participants in a sensorial urban walk focused on bacterial “field marks” that I developed with artist-researcher Louise Mackenzie. I explore the possibility that our inability fully account for the recordings should not be seen as failure but instead could be related to the generative power of compound intersections between modes of ordering. I propose that specific arrangements of mode of existences deploy the confusion that we experienced in listening to the microbial walk recordings. Drawing on Serres’s sensorial philosophy of knowledge, I suggest that caring for “neglected things” might entail attending also to incomplete, confused ways of being.