The Human Microbiome as Visceral Commons: Resisting Rhetorical Enclosure

ABSTRACT

Exhortations to tend to the flourishing of one’s gut microbes have increased in past years and can be recited by rote: consume pre- and probiotics, diverse plants, and fermented foods; avoid unnecessary medicinal antibiotics and antimicrobial products. Recognizing that all frontiers of enclosure require corollary rhetorical enclosures, this essay locates the human microbiome as an imminent frontier of simultaneous capitalist and rhetorical enclosure. Human microbiome rhetoric encodes microbial life as a contained asset and narrowly frames human-microbe relations as the concern of responsible neoliberal consumers. Individual health as the ambit of concern should give way to the understanding of human-microbial relations as a shared multispecies concern—a visceral commons. Foregrounding the rhetorical dimensions of the practices that manage a crucial relational resource, a visceral commons coheres by means of intense feeling regarding the ways in which an always already distributed yet crucial resource irrevocably entangles us. This essay borrows concepts from commoners to close with four gestures resistant to the rhetorical enclosure of the human microbiome.

KEYWORDS:

• Commons
• human microbiome
• microbial deprivation
• paradigm chafe
• rhetorical enclosure
• visceral commons

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ Following the lead of fat activists, I put obesity in quotation marks to destabilize its medicalized and fatphobic associations.

² Although Garrett Hardin is generally agreed to be an ethnonationalist “far right idealogue,” Joseph Albernaz notes that Hardin’s reputation and the myriad cogent critiques of his essay do little to dislodge the essay’s stronghold on public discourse (119).

³ I thank the editor of this special issue, Johanna Hartelius, for pointing me toward this argument.

⁴ While it is illegal to patent a naturally occurring microbe, extraction techniques, microbe-specific applications, and laboratory-derived or -modified microbes can be patented (Silver).

⁵ A sampling of self-improvement microbiome books include: Robynne Chutkan, Gutbliss: A 10-Day Plan to Ban Bloat, Flush Toxins, and Dump Your Digestive Baggage (2013); Raphael Kellman, The Microbiome Breakthrough: Harness the Power of Your Gut Bacteria to Boost Your Mood and Health Your Body (2018); Kitty Martone, The 4-Week Gut Health Plan: 75 Recipes to Help Restore Your Gut (2019); Justin and Erica Sonnenburg, The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long Term Health (2015). These artifacts assign the cultivation and maintenance of robust, diverse, and beneficial intestinal bacteria as a task of self-care rather than community care.

⁶ I follow Chris Ingraham’s notion of gesture in Gestures of Concern. Rather than the instances of insignificance, gestures form a crucial role in building the affective infrastructures needed for worlds of mutual flourishing.

⁷ The microbial commons that I imagine is different from how some researchers use the term microbial commons to refer to the global set of collected microbial samples stored in laboratories (cf. Dedeurwaerdere; Overmann; Rest’s use of the term is an exception). Global deliberations regarding care for collected microbial samples are worthwhile even as their use of commons is impoverished.