Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic Ontologies, Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic Microbiology

Based on an analysis of an ongoing scientific-political controversy over the toxicity of a fish-killing microorganism, this paper explores the relationship between responsibility and nonhuman contributions to agency in experimental practices. Research into the insidious effects of the dinoflagellates Pfiesteria piscicida (the fish killer) that thrive in waters over-enriched with nutrients, has received considerable attention by both the media and government agencies concerned with public and environmental health. After nearly two decades of research, the question of whether Pfiesteria can be regarded the 'causative agent' of massive fish kills in the estuaries of the US mid-Atlantic could not be scientifically settled. In contrast to policymakers, who attribute the absence of a scientific consensus to gaps in scientific knowledge and uncertainties regarding the identity and behavior of the potentially toxic dinoflagellates, I propose that an inseparable entanglement of Pfiesteria's identities and their toxic activities challenges conventional notions of causality that seek to establish a connection between independent events in linear time. Building on Karen Barad's framework of agential realism, I argue for a move from epistemological uncertainties to ontological indeterminacies that follow from Pfiesteria's contributions to agency, as the condition for responsible and objective science. In tracking discrepant experimental enactments of Pfiesteria that have been mobilized as evidence for and against their toxicity, I investigate how criteria for what counts as evidence get built into the experimental apparatuses and suggest that the joint possibilities of causality and responsibility vary with the temporalities of the objects enacted. This discussion seeks to highlight a thorough entanglement of epistemic/ontological concerns with the ecological/political relevance of particular experiments. Finally, I introduce a new kind of scientific object that - borrowing from Derrida - I call phantomatic. Phantoms don't emerge as such, but appear as traces and are associated with specific matters of concern.