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Paper short abstract

This presentation draws from years of ethnographic research into human-microbial interactions to attempt a sensory ethnography of the “avisual” (Lippit 2005): a form of visuality that is invisible to the human eye yet nonetheless real, visible somewhere else, beyond human scale, in the mind’s eye.

Paper long abstract

This presentation draws from years of ethnographic research into human-microbial interactions to attempt a sensory ethnography of the “avisual” as described by Lippit (2005): a form of visuality that is invisible to the human eye yet nonetheless real, visible somewhere else, beyond human scale or in the mind’s eye. This is a visuality that cannot be brought to surface, like the dreams or thoughts explored by psychoanalysis, only visible in the mind of the one who thinks of them and yet intrinsically connected to his or her experience of the world.

Using ethnographic descriptions and media, the paper will explore how bodily symptoms participate of this form of avisuality: born at the end-point of immunological relationships, symptoms are more like a felt trace, the shadow left by the “unassimilable” (Massumi 2002) in its passing or halting. They belong to the order of “pre-personal” and “autonomous” forces that affect bodies and are affected by them (Stewart 2006).

Involved in emergent human-microbial ecologies, bodies become “attuned” (Peterson 2016, 2021) to the forces that incommensurable worlds bring upon them, bringing into view how human-microbial relationships depend on our ability to cultivate a renewed understanding of sense. This is also a renewed understanding of vision, based on the recognition that “abstractions are not unreal, nor separated from material surfaces” (Parikka 2023). A rash on the skin is not that different from the strips on a COVID test: they both invoke images of ecological relationships that depend upon our ability to take abstractions seriously.