Missing Mess and Strange Agencies in Online Images of Mind-Microbiome Connections

Abstract

This paper examines online images of the relationship between the human microbiome and mind. It asks how these images visualize connections between vastly different scales and kinds of being, and discusses what kinds of agency they perform. An archive of 274 images was built using Google® image search and a qualitative analysis of imaging strategies resulted in five groups of images characterized by their use of linking, zooming, texturing, absent elements, or strange agencies. The images were overwhelmingly ‘clean’ – simple lines, plain backgrounds and pastel colours dominated – and mess, spookiness, and dirt were largely invisible. The microbes and minds shown were often de-situated, and out of context. In discussion, we argue that the strategies by which connection between scales were directly depicted, or indicated using diagrammatic tropes, elided the strangeness and ambiguity of mind-microbiome research. Images that instead broke the rules of scale by texturing microbes into human forms, using symbolic connections or missing elements, were open to more critical engagement. We suggest that not depicting connections might sometimes be more effective than depicting them for inviting critical engagement, though this is an unstable and context-dependent effect, deserving of further empirical investigation. We further discuss that the absence of mess might speak to its potency, and challenge us to explore its potential for engaging (and holding open) the uncomfortable affective tensions that surround questions of multispecies human agency – tensions between excitement and scepticism, intimacy and alienation, awe and disgust. The study contributes to STS literature on the importance of images in mediating relations between science and society, and to STS studies of the implications of microbiome research for how human agency is understood.