ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

What is a Microbe? Graffiti and the Elucidation of Biology

• In Event: When Scientific Images Go Rogue: Popularization, Pluralization, and Contestation

English Abstract

Scientific graffiti is a little-studied—if also infrequently executed—area of inquiry in the history of science. The historiography of scientific illustration, of course, has a long and felicitous lineage. From Martin Rudwick’s pioneering work in geological diagrams, to Ursula Klein’s idea of “paper tools,” through Orit Halpern’s notion of “beautiful data,” to the atlases of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (among many, many others), historians have described how formal scientific renderings have served as the bedrock of knowledge-making. This paper supplements this lineage, treating scientific graffiti as a serious and instructive (if admittedly, marginal) contributor to more formal instantiations of scientific illustration. By way of example, this paper focuses on one particular instance of scientific graffiti, stenciled on bridges, walls, and floors around Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 2017. The image depicts a generic bacterium, under which is typed the slogan, “ceci n’est pas une microbe.” While this is not, of course, precisely an instantiation of scientific illustration, the graffito does include features—such as a coil of DNA in its notional nucleus, and a well-defined flagellum—that identify it clearly as an illustration based in a tradition of scientific illustration (as opposed to, e.g., William Heath’s 1828 cartoon of grotesque microbes in Thames water). What’s more, with equal clarity it brings the history of scientific illustration, laboratory work, and microbiology into dialogue with major aesthetic movements—most obviously through René Magritte’s surrealist painting, “The Treachery of Images” (a well-known, realistic painting of a generalized tobacco pipe over the legend, “ceci n’est pas une pipe”). In doing so, it raises many questions—some obvious, some less so. As an example of the former, we might ask if, as with the pipe, the microbe is not a microbe, then what is it—and why? More subtly, it’s possible to ask what this graffito is doing. How does it “work”? What is its underlying logic? Based on personal interviews and newspaper and archival accounts, this paper treats this image as a surprisingly apposite example of Walter Benjamin’s “profane illumination”: a manner of re-enchanting a recognizable, even banal object with quasi-occult force.

Author

• Michael Rossi, University of Chicago