Abstract
An initial foray into the world of microbial lives and their respective human hosts, “Intestine Disorder” represents a new turn in body politics. This chapter integrates cutting-edge science on the human microbiome—the colony of trillions of organisms inhabiting the human body—with older meditations on the politics of immunity and autoimmunity. It approaches the question of the endemic by meditating briefly on the work of Foucault and Priscilla Wald and moves from there to an interrogation of the neoliberal appetite for risk at the extremophile margins of life. Representing an attempt to think through what Geroux calls the politics of the biome, “Intestine Disorder” approaches the key questions of this volume in a way that unsettles fundamental assumptions in the field of contemporary political theory.
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Notes
- 1.
Much of what we know about the composition and importance of the biome comes from the work done by the Human Microbiome Project (HMP). The HMP was established in 2008. Its work is funded by the NIH. Its research takes place at 80 different institutions, and is in a sense modeled after the Human Genome Project (HGP): it represents an attempt to collect, identify, and genetically map the colonies of microbiota that inhabit the healthy human body. For more on the HMP background and goals, see http://hmpdacc.org/overview/about.php.
- 2.
Belluck (2015).
- 3.
Among the many provocative discoveries of the HMP are two that are especially relevant here. First in importance is colony size: the bacterial population in a healthy human gut alone is on the order of 100 trillion cells. Second in importance is genetic diversity: “The Human Genome Project (HGP) demonstrated that there are approximately 23,000 different genes, on average, in an individual human; the HMP now estimates that the commensal bacteria that reside on and in that individual’s body incorporate a total of some 3 million different genes, suggesting a ratio of microbial to human genes of at least 130 to 1” (Schneider and Winslow 2014, p. 210). The cellular composition of a healthy colony is both larger (by a factor of ten) and more genetically diverse than the discrete human body.
- 4.
“In the United States, the first description of FMT appeared…in 1958, when Ben Eisenman, a surgeon at the V. A. Hospital in Denver, published four case reports in the journal Surgery” (Eakin 2014, p. 67). For many years, only a very small number of doctors willing to fully break with medical orthodoxy engaged in FMT therapies. Eakin mentions one doctor in particular, Thomas Borody, a “gastroenterologist in Sydney, Australia” (p. 67), who began performing the procedure in 1988, after reading Eisenman’s paper. Since then, Borody “estimates that he has…performed the procedure five thousand times,” including a procedure on his own mother (67).
- 5.
- 6.
Foucault (2003, p. 243).
- 7.
Foucault (2003, p. 244).
- 8.
On “massifying,” see Foucault (2003, p. 243).
- 9.
Both are examined carefully in Wald (2008).
- 10.
On the creation of states and their peripheral “shatter zones,” see Scott (2009, pp. 4–9).
- 11.
“There is evidence…that the demography and agro-ecology of state space, in fact, makes it more vulnerable to instability in food supply and to illness” (Scott 2009, p. 96).
- 12.
Wald (2008, pp. 11–12).
- 13.
A common argument about the link between sovereignty and immunity is that the latter necessitates and structures the former: the Hobbesian articulation of total risk elicits an immune (and perhaps an autoimmune) reaction. Against the grain of this negative “political” reading, identified as it is with the work of Derrida, is another more positive reading that also comes from Derrida. This occurs in his discussion of the “anchoritic community of those who love in separation,” who “love to love – in love or in friendship – providing there is this withdrawal” into what he calls a “community of social disaggregation” (Derrida 1997, p. 35). For a commentary on this specific passage, see Campbell (2006, p. 8).
- 14.
On “secular” and the various meanings—temporal and spatial—of the saeculum, see John Milbank (1993).
- 15.
Roberto Esposito’s reading of the munus concept focuses on the nexus of community foundation and law (2011, pp. 22–23). He comments for example that “Law constitutes community through its destitution” (p. 23), that is, by means of interpellating subjects whose lives are in constant tension with the expropriating demands of community. The same could be said for encounters and flows and the demands of community below the subject level, for example, in the contemporary anti-immunization movement.
- 16.
This disruption crosses two sets of borders at once: not only the boundary that distinguishes and separates territory (community/environment), but also the one that demarcates human/animal difference. Zoonotic disease in particular emphasizes the nominal nature of human “essence,” and highlights the fact that vectors of contagion do not always respect the boundaries that we draw around ourselves.
- 17.
On actants, see Bennett (2010, p. 9).
- 18.
Of course this capacity to occupy space in a “vegetal” manner can also serve as an image for more positive forms of political resistance. See Marder (2012).
- 19.
See Sullivan (1998).
- 20.
I think for example of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary Shoah, and the story of Simon Srebnik: “Of the four hundred thousand men, women and children who went there (to Chelmno), only two came out alive: Mordechai Podchlebnik and Simon Srebnik” (Lanzmann 1995, p. 1).
- 21.
The OED mentions or names two Roman generals who engaged in the practice: one source mentions Appius, another (drawn from Plutarch) mentions the general Antoninus.
- 22.
This notion of “carrying-forward” is vexed indeed. Caruth’s reading of Freud emphasizes for example that it is the very process of survival, the experience of emerging “unscathed” while others suffer and die, that reinforces the repetition of trauma. One passes through the unassimilable event only to carry it forward in a latent state; what originally resisted representation becomes painfully literal in its repetition. One faces the paradox of a “confrontation with the truth” (Caruth 1995, p. 7), a process in which the subject becomes instrumentalized as an object. In Caruth’s words, being traumatized means being “possessed” by (rather than conjuring and mentally “holding”) the traces of an unwanted idea or experience (p. 4).
- 23.
On munus, see Esposito (2011), Section III: “Compensatio.”
- 24.
Esposito (2011, pp. 22–23)
- 25.
On the issue of immunity and Schmittian political theology, see Esposito (2011), Chapter 2: “The Katechon.”
- 26.
On the mandate of total generality and the exception that works within it, see Agamben (2011), “Appendix: The Economy of the Moderns.”
- 27.
There are clear resonances here with the discussion in Otis (1999), on the emergence of modern theories of disease and the colonial enterprise. In that context, every allegedly positive step forward in the civilizing mission was always countered by a dialectic of anxiety elicited by the fear of mutual penetration. The colonizer marched forward at great risk, and in order to protect his work, a massive edifice of “tropical medicine” was established. Under this horizon, “(m)edical and cultural thinking combined to present aggression as defense; to depict the invaded as the invaders” (Otis 1999, p. 5).
- 28.
The work of Hayek is important in the context of a discussion of neoliberal vitalism because it marks the point of integration between older ideas of spontaneous order and newer emphases on non-equilibrium states. Hayek’s citation of works like Prigogine and Stengers (1984) for example is one of the reasons I consider him to be even more relevant than Schumpeter in the history of what I would call “extremophile life.” For a critique of Hayek on some of these points, see Hodgson (1996), Chapter 12: “Hayek and Spontaneous Order.” See also Cooper (2008, p. 44).
- 29.
For example, in the months immediately following the disastrous implosion of the American economy in 2008, unemployment became a kind of contagion. The immediate trauma cast a long temporal shadow because companies found out that productivity actually went up after workers were summarily laid off.
- 30.
One gloss on reading the imposition of medicine like broad-spectrum antibiotics tends toward a military imaginary: the application of such medicines are indiscriminate, like aerial bombardment applied as part of a “war on disease.” If what I have suggested here is true, however, one side of this metaphorical triangle (medicine–war–nature) has collapsed. The neoliberal vitalist reading of nature not only reimagines the space of nature as suffused with constant competition and conflict, it highlights that process as exemplary and especially productive. So-called equilibrium states may be comfortable, but according to this reading, they represent periods of low productivity. The economic world allegedly mimics nature best when it reflects ever-higher levels of pressure and stress. The aim of nature and the aim of capital turn out to be the same thing, namely the heightening of vitality, an increase in surplus.
- 31.
Cooper speaks of a capitalist delirium, which ultimately “finds expression in the NASA space biology program—a program whose conceptual and economic influence on the biotech revolution has been curiously neglected” (2008, p. 21).
- 32.
Esposito (2011, pp. 103–111).
- 33.
See Deleuze and Guattari (1972, pp. 222–240).
- 34.
- 35.
Marx (1976 [1867], p. 342). At the same time, the pure and concentrated expression of life’s power also serves as a limit on its contribution to the world around us: “Unlike the productivity of work, which adds new objects to the human artifice, the productivity of labor power produces objects only incidentally and is primarily concerned with the means of its own reproduction; since its power is not exhausted when its own reproduction has been secured, it can be used for the reproduction of more than one life process, but it never ‘produces’ anything but life” Arendt (1958, p. 88), emphasis added.
- 36.
“Here, laissez-faire is turned into a do-not-laissez-faire government, in the name of a law of the market which will enable each of its activities to be measured and assessed. Laissez-faire is thus turned round, and the market is no longer a principle of government’s self-limitation; it is a principle turned against it. It is a sort of permanent economic tribunal confronting government” Foucault (2008, p. 247).
- 37.
Dardot and Laval (2014, Chapter 9: “Manufacturing the Neo-Liberal Subject”).
- 38.
See Dardot and Laval (2013, pp. 281–284).
- 39.
This is of course the argument of university administrations everywhere, as they discuss the “de-tenuring” of faculty and their replacement with adjuncts on yearly contracts.
- 40.
This is the point about the production of the Muselmänner, the animate ghosts that haunted the liminal space between the living and the dead at Auschwitz. See Agamben (2008); See also Arendt (1973).
- 41.
“the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of ‘salary according to merit’ has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.” Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, Vol. 59 (Winter 1992, p. 5). Emphasis in original.
- 42.
- 43.
“Food, Farm Animals and Drugs,” Natural Resources Defense Council website, http://www.nrdc.org/food/saving-antibiotics.asp, accessed December 28, 2015.
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Geroux, R. (2016). Intestine Disorder: Neoliberalism and Biomial Politics. In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Endemic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52141-5_7
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