The microbial, touching body

Touch is co-transformative, an experience in which the boundaries between the self and other are blurred (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017). Touch not only situates us phenomenologically in an inter-relational world, but also implies a co-transfer of bacteria, fungus and viruses between agents.

This site of contact is a charged boundary, rife with paranoia- especially in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Pasteurian advances in hygiene have transformed health and medicine, but a blinkered focus on the risk of “pollution” ignores the generative possibilities that microbial contamination might offer. We exist in ongoing interdependent relationships with a myriad of microbes. There is an uncanny, subconscious nature to this invisible force which persistently affects our bodies despite its ephemerality.

Katz (2012) details the rapid decline of H. Pylori in the human stomach- a companion species, per Haraway (2003), which has lived in the human gut for at least 60,000 years. H. Pylori has been associated with issues such as ulcers and stomach cancer, but it also plays a role in regulating stomach acid levels, immune responses and hormones that control appetite. Dwindling H. Pylori levels are linked with increased levels of asthma, obesity, acid reflux and esophageal cancers. There is a trend towards binaristically categorising bacteria as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, which microbes evade. Human life seems largely to be enriched by this symbiotic coupling.

Katz also cites biologist Lynn Marguis’ assertion that a symbiotic relationship between fermenting bacteria and other single-celled organisms came to be permanently embedded as the first eukaryotic cells that fungi, plants and animals compromise- symbiogenesis, or co-evolution (2012, p.40). A mere 43% of cells in the human body are actually human, the remainder are microbes, or the microbiome (Gallagher, 2018).

Babies are born with sterile digestive systems, and the microbe-rich vaginal canal, breastmilk, and initial mouth-first explorations of the world all inoculate the body with bacteria that are essential for digestion. Our bodies fundamentally cannot extract and absorb nutrients from food without the bacteria in our gut.

We might understand what Katz has coined the War on Bacteria as a proxy war for human exceptionalism. A full acceptance and acknowledgement of our imbrication in the microbial world entails a conceptual transformation of our skin from a barrier against the external world, to a permeable membrane. Posthumanism topples us from the top of the food chain, so to speak.

This “ontological whiplash” (Shotwell, 2016, p.114) can prompt a kind of hysterical conservatism, a policing of the boundaries of human/microbe relations. The purism in the War on Bacteria might be framed as an “attempt[...] to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control” (Shotwell, 2016, p.8)- a reductionist attempt to maintain the anthropocentric character of the subject.

We live in a state of intense co-production with microbes. Anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism might posit our bodies as the “host”, with microbes either representing threat or symbiotic benefit, but attention to the nature of these relationships muddies the water. We exist in co-embodied, co-constitutive entanglements. Shotwell (2016) reminds us of our role as actor, not protagonist in this “microbial narrative”- that we are “affect[ed], and [...] even kill[ed]”, but it’s “not about us” (p.114).

Anna Tsing (2015) posits “contamination as collaboration”, while emphasising that “mutual benefits do not lead to perfect harmony” (p.111). Exchanges are not gains and losses, but a series of encounters that build towards a larger ecological liveliness and vitality. Implication in these relationships is not a choice, but a condition of existence, attention to which can breed care and response-ability, offering new ways of understanding our position in a multispecies world (Haraway, 2016). Accepting this kind of tangled posthumanism involves risk- exposure to viruses and poisoning, but also a risk to the ego in forgoing a conception of the human as the central global figure, or even as in total control of our own bodies.

In making sauerkraut the only thing added is salt, which creates conditions favourable to the thriving of lactobacillus (LAB), which already lives on the skin of the cabbage, and on your human skin. The LAB create lactic acid, which prevents fungal growth from taking hold, and kills other kinds of bacteria which might seek to colonise the batch. There is no end point for fermentation; successive waves of motley microbial populations rise and fall, crowding each other out- Fermentation is the path of least resistance, something that happens everywhere when you do nothing.

Fermentation as thoughtful practice
Merriam Webster defines praxis as “practical application of a theory”. When considering the role of the body as implicating us intra-actively in Merlou-Ponty’s Flesh, the distinction between theory as “head work” and practice as “hand work” is problematised.
Lisa M. Heldke, in Foodmaking as Thoughtful Practice (1992), posits the interconnectedness of foodmaking as an invitation for collapse of the subject/object divide. In thoughtful practice touch is central to this collapse- in pounding cabbage for sauerkraut, the act is not a “subservient” physical activity which “supports” ferment-making “theory”, maintaining an epistemological distance between the “ferment-theorizer” and cabbage. The making is an essential part of the “theoretical-and-practical” process of production, in which “subjects’ and objects’ boundaries necessarily meet, touch and overlap” p(.206).
Thoughtful practice, as inherently embodied, is “intelligent”, “wary, observant, sensitive to slight hints and intimations...(In them, a)ction is not suppressed but is moderated” (p.216).
In fermentation we cannot coerce specific ends, we can only pay close attention to changing conditions over time. We must engage with non-human temporality, accepting that we can never have complete control over our ingredients. Fermentation is a co-constitutive, co-embodied process, made with microbes, requiring attunement to a shared environment and the potential needs of the other. This attention requires care- creating a particular environment in order to facilitate the population growth of one microbe over another, and responding to the emergent and context-dependent nature of each unique ferment. We become accountable towards another life, decentering the human self (Hey, 2019).