L is for the Way You Look at Me

The inaugural edition of the discursive programme L is for the Way You Look at Me begins by looking for renewed understandings of love through what is almost invisible to the human eye—the microorganisms that can only be seen through microscopes. The look that human eyes cast at single-celled organisms in the late seventeenth century propelled the modern science of microbiology and subsequently shaped the ways in which we understand, perform, and manage life. This modern view of life has in turn had a significant influence on our logics of arranging intimate relations and developing moralized discourses around them.

The act of looking, a primary mode of producing knowledge about life, takes us into fascinating realms such as the microcosm, while setting limits to our perception and thinking on what life is and what love means. As Donna Haraway denotes, the Latin word for look, specere, is also rooted in the word species. The word respecere subsequently signifies both respect and re-species.[1] To look is to specialize, to categorize, and to build a well-divided model upon which modern science and society are based. To re-look is thus to question the mechanical, taxonomical look that overproduces boundaries and thereby constructs the other, concealing a multi-scale intimacy that makes up the world.

Through the microscope lens that makes visible the many intra- and interactions among microorganisms, L is for the Way You Look at Me seeks a deeper understanding of the lively condition through which motion and emotion, life and love are made possible. Underpinning this concern is the question ‘what is life?’—what does it mean to be sentient, self-replicating, evolving, and multiple? This enquiry could in turn shed light on the question ‘what is love?’ and why we desire warmth, touch, empathy, and transcendence.

Contemporary understandings of ‘life’ have been closely linked to the development of microbiology, the study of the tiny, moving animalcules that surround us and our environment. Driven by the human need to specify the invisible germs that cause diseases and rot, microbiology is engineered by a dualist logic that aims to categorize microbes into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It establishes a modern view of health and safety undergirded by an obsession with the elimination of bacteria and a fear-based mentality manifested by a hyper-hygienic culture, germophobia, and xenophobia. From this can stem an ingrained fear of the other, anxiety over interpersonal and interspecies contact, and a fixation with borders and control, stifling diverse forms of intimacy outside the regulated conjugal and familial unit. The modern discourse around expansive yet territorial love is thus informed by a view of life preoccupied by cleanliness, uniformity, and anxieties over contamination and infection. In her performance-based workshop as part of the programme, artist and researcher Alanna Lynch entangles her body and personal histories intimately with ‘abject’ matters produced by microbial interaction, such as odours and slimes. Meanwhile, anonymous writer and biologist MYB (Meltdown Your Books) leads a reading session reflecting on an ontological reductionism oriented by value-based, gene-centric research tendencies prevalent in life sciences.

Reflecting too on the neo-Darwinian principle that emphasizes competition as the basis of evolution, L is for the Way You Look at Me draws inspiration from the complex web of microbial relations, which extend beyond mere rivalry. It is the largely unexplored, ongoing interaction of life, rather than the tissues it forms, that composes what we call life itself. Omnipresent microorganisms and their constant exchanges weave an intricate web of life that forms bacteria, protists, animals, fungi, plants, and humans, a shared ancestral lineage and ecological future. Marine biologist Flora Vincent outlines these microbial interrelations in her reading session, while in her fermentation workshop, artist and farmer Lo Lai Lai Natalie contemplates soil microbiomes in relation to the ecology of land and society. In these renderings of microbial vibrancy, to re-look/respect/re-species is thus to disturb the definite notion of subjectivity, suggesting that thinking, feelings, desires, and instincts are not individually-based nor simply socially constructed, but are also in a communal process of forming and reforming.

Microorganisms can also potentially provide us with the experience of multiplicity, teaching us to be and become many. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, for instance, delineates one type of human-microbe communication that disrupts subjectivity as fixed and isolated: intoxicated by-products of fermentation, such as alcohol, can destabilize the human nervous system, troubling one’s perception of subject/object divides.[2] ‘Being intoxicated’, a common descriptor for deep obsession and passionate affection, can potentially suggest a decentralized way to love, getting out of one’s own body and selfhood, and into the relational fluxes with multiple others far and near. This is similar to Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s suggestion that love is, similar to life, the demonstration of synergetic phenomena—‘entities behave as more than the sum of their parts’.[3] In her writing workshop, speculative fiction writer Regina Kanyu Wang explores symbiotic consciousness by including microbes into post-human narratives. Echoing the many interactions among the many organisms on many scales, L is for the Way You Look at Me reimagines and re-enacts love by learning and respecere-ing life sciences, especially the vibrant interrelations among microbes that underpin both life and death, evolution and transmutation.

Oftentimes, we find life (as a subject of natural science) and love (as a moral discourse) come together as moral lessons, rationalizing certain social codes while neglecting others. For instance, scientific observation of maternal behaviours in the animal kingdom contributes to the institutionalization of motherhood in a patriarchal society while the competitive nature of sexual selection seen across species renders rivalry a basic mode of reproduction and survival. These often selective and political exchanges between life and love seem to limit love to hierarchical relations and/or cost-benefit calculations. To break away from the restrictive association between life and love does not mean to disconnect the two fields but rather to respecere life with greater details, depth, and sensibility. L is for the Way You Look at Me explores the dynamics of life not only as harmonious interdependence or competitive rivalries, but more as ongoing processes that highlight relationality and multiplicity. In this sense, the programme’s exploration of love isn’t about formulating a specific way of loving, but about proposing a series of actions that attune our senses to minute connectivities, insignificant actions and metabolisms, proximity and ambiguity. Through this, we can become sensitive to vibrations both micro and macro. The programme hosts different microbes, people, and plants in a series of recurring workshops, screenings, reading sessions, and small-scale textual/audio/visual projects to start a prolonged process of knowledge digestion, idea exchange, and thought fermentation across different fields of knowledge, genres of art, flows of feelings, forms of intimacy, and ways of living/loving.

[1] Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 17–18.

[2] Kyla Wazana Tompkins, ‘Introduction’, Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot (New York: NYU Press, 2024, Google Books edn), 14.

[3] Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 8.