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Micro-Life: A Reflection on Species and Collaboration

Abstract:Micro-life is a heuristic for researching and thinking across forms of life and matter at a very minute scale without exceptionalizing any one micro-organism in particular. It draws out the fraught relationship between discourses about species and the matter of the species itself. Focusing on micro-life helps name political orientations to the world, processes of disidentifying with the coherence of our material selves, and experiences that invent and sustain collaborative and fluid relations. Micro-life was generated during a performance studies conference. Thus, as a performance studies methodology, it helps foreground the non-visual exchanges that occur during performance. Micro-life makes room for reflection on the politics and possibility of human (and non-human) collaboration, but, as something to think, live, and make politics with outside of performance studies, it is a category of life and analysis for what we call the cellular humanities.