On Becoming Microbes and People with Texts. Moving Academic Writing Toward Responsible Agency

This chapter explores how academic textual production may be understood as a practice of responsible agency, through a dialogue between two scholarly texts about microbes. The first emphasizes the discovery of bacteria, suggesting an asymmetry between humans and nature. The second emphasizes the production of bacterial resistance to drugs, inscribing a symmetric interdependence between humans and nature. By exploring these two texts, the chapter outlines two contrasting ways in which microbes and authors are inscribed as actors in the texts. Ironically, these explorations also work to multiply, complement, attenuate, and fuse inscribed agency, outlining modalities of response through the practice of crafting texts as artefacts. The chapter argues that agency, both as textual device and as responses inscribed through reinterpretation, must be treated as a kind of chimerism, which, as a consequence, means that agency is emergent, and that the ability to respond through the demands elicited by scientific text production has the prime responsibility for translating worlds to words.