COVID-19, microbiopolitics and species precarity in the anthropocene

ABSTRACT

The turn towards deep entanglement precipitated by the Anthropocene has seen a rise in probiotic approaches towards microorganisms that highlight human-microbe relationalities. However, COVID-19 complicates this relationality not least considering its staggering effects on human society which have reinforced notions of solidarity and common crisis, as evidenced in the various biopolitical measures or the ‘outbreak narrative’. In this regard, Heather Paxson’s formulation of microbiopolitics as the construction and evaluation of categories of microorganisms serves as a useful model to ask what kind of microbiopolitics the coronavirus pandemic makes possible and what these strategies imply for collaborative human-microbe relations or multispecies flourishing. The microbiopolitics that marks the pandemic as new mutations and strains of viruses are being identified and a future of zoonotic diseases is anticipated shows this microbial relationality as already present. However, to make sense of entanglement in the pandemic is to recognize microbiopolitics as socio-politically contingent and undercut by anthropocentric anxieties for our own well-being but also as a species precarity. This species precarity for humans shows that the pandemic is differentially experienced as a self while negotiating its relations with non-human others. It is what demands of us that we develop strategies for living along with the virus or other microbes for the foreseeable future.

KEYWORDS:

• Microbiopolitics
• Covid19
• multispecies
• species precarity
• Anthropocene

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Rukmini Nair, Bharati Puri and Nandan Rosario for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful for conversations with Anna Tsing which helped me to think very differently about relationships. Ankur Barua read many drafts and provided steady support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Haraway is not quick to assert that her Chthulucene is not inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s spectral ‘misogynist racial-nightmare’ monster (she does so only by p101 of When Species Meet) though that is the first reference that springs to mind for a certain demographic of readers.

2 I also have in mind the notion of wretchedness from Fanon’s classic text The Wretched of the Earth (2007) which examines it as a structure of dehumanization concomitant with colonization.

3 Paxson locates value in the epistemic virtue of artisanship.

4 The microbiome is the genetic material of all the microbes such as bacteria and viruses that live inside and on the human body.

5 Patricia Wald’s classic text on epidemics coins the term ‘outbreak narrative’ to show how a formulaic plot identifies the emerging outbreak, traces its global networks and documents the scientific expertise necessary to contain it.

6 One can also discern the similarities between Deleuzian rhizomatics and Harawayesque tentacular thinking.

7 The mRNA vaccines however do not contain any live virus.

8 While reading the Life of Cheese, I seriously wondered if Paxson is talking about some kind of non-dairy cheese which does not involve cows. Paxson and Helmreich (2014) are keen to distinguish their position from the new materialists who focus on the vital agencies of matter but surely that is not such a puzzle when it comes to cows.

9 I borrow this phrase from the important essay by Cora Diamond called ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ (2003).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by United States - India Educational Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Susan Haris

Susan Haris is Fulbright-Nehru research fellow in the Anthropology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a doctoral candidate in literature and philosophy at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.