ABSTRACT
Mike Hill in his “Lord of the Fleas: Science, Monsters, and Political Fraud” focuses on Margaret Cavendish who, having seen Robert Hooke’s 1666 “unprecedented depiction of a microscopically enlarge flea,” struggled to explain “how two views of the same flea at opposing ends of the visual scale could be simultaneously and equally real.” Her resolution, enlarged by Hill’s discussion of thinkers and scientists from that day to the present, allowed for art as a “science affirmative practice” to “subvert old explanations of reality, and reveal unseeable arrangements of matter in flux.” He then contrasts this expansion of knowledge, this bridging or ‘rendering’ between media and matter, with the “rejection of science by politicians and their corporate minders, lies about election landslides, the fictions of ‘white’ identity, and other reality perversions initiated by the ‘Trump Revolution’.”
