This collective beinghood

A split requires the relinquishing of self to another and for another.

‘a body is the capacity to form new relations, and the desire to do so’(1)

Ian Buchanan

Science demarcates the boundaries between species. These boundaries are typically drawn between those that reproduce together and those that cannot.(2) This has proved limiting for the categorisation of microbial bodies — the bacterial do not fuck, they split. Any delineation between microscopic bodies is attributable to a mutation, a generational genetic translation downwards. From one, to two, to four, to more. Slight shifts in embodiments eons ago emerge in the lives of the next split. My skin crawls with cellular coding imbued with splits gone awry. This split with mutation becomes a physical division — a pulling apart — in loss, not just of the other but of oneself. 

Image credit: Seet van Hout

A split requires the relinquishing of self to another and for another. A corporeal communion: we offer our bodies as bread, our blood as wine. This occurs not out of a masochistic self-maceration, but an evolutionary understanding that there is an instability in our surfaces, an unsureness in where we begin and end. This corporeal giving can be understood as a ‘bad debt.’ Bad debt, coined by Moten and Harney, refers to a giving of oneself without the expectation of return, a refusal of ‘the balance sheet.’(3) This deliberate ‘bad debt’ is a refusal to participate within the close-market society, a refusal to participate in the debt-credit cycle, where economic mobility is contingent upon the taking on of ‘good debt’ to the benefit of corporations and governments. It is a refusal to take beyond our means a promise to give beyond our means. Bad debt cannot be forgiven, only ‘forgotten to be remembered again.’(4) It is an entanglement of selves who owe each other not in reciprocity but in relationality; it is ‘a debt you play, a debt you walk, and debt you love.’(5) This corporeal debt stitches us back together; an undergarment for our undercommons. This stitch complicates the boundaries of our beings up against another’s, the blurriness at the site of surface friction.

Immunologist Burnet explains that ‘the nonself’ is anything that triggers an immune response, and anything that doesn’t trigger this response must be part of ‘the self’.(7) The body is an enmeshment of cellular collaborations, microbial minglings and concurrent contemplations. A ‘self’ is indeterminate and immeasurable. For Thomas ‘a good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts.’  A human’s cellular landscape is 90 percent bacteria and 10 percent cells derived from bacteria, an embodied temporality of bacterial pasts and presents; ‘the “human” that we know now, is not now, and never was, itself.’(8)

Gastroenteritis can be caused by a virus(9), bacteria(10), or protozoa(11). A virus relies upon infection to procreate, assuming control of the host cell whilst bacteria split and protozoa may split or reproduce. A parasite is any being that uses a host for its benefit at the hosts expense; known as ‘parasitism.’(12) These infectionates are in symbiosis with one another. They become a parasite in performance and follow after one another; a virus becomes a bacterial infection allowing for a protozoa.(13) They make room for one another; a microbiotic-mutualism in defiance of the Very Large. When infecting the body, these microbes bury themselves in the walls of the gut, releasing toxins or taking over and purging the life from each individual cell in the wall.(14) This damage to normal functioning causes disruptions in the normal digestion of foods and subsequent imbalance of the by-products of the inconsumable; excrement, urine and gas. This imbalance, accompanied with a bodily urge to purge the toxins exorcised from the microbial parasite, can result in the expulsion of the contents of the stomach through the inbound orifice.(15)

Head down cold floor. It is just us. You don’t let someone watch you vomit. I don’t let someone watch me vomit. It is all too intimate. There is everything that is me, in me, and everything that was me, in front of me. It becomes a cycle of life and death; a visceral answer to the question of post-life; I watch myself dilute into the sewers.

Our bodily boundaries, or surfaces, are illusory; a perceived beginning and end; relying upon human vision as the arbiter of truth. Meraud writes that the surface is an accretion; ‘a localisation of densification, of multiple images/elevations/layers cohering in that moment of perception.’(16) The individual cell, bacteria, mind, fungi, nerve, disappear amongst this density; retreating from visibility behind a wall of symbiotic collaboration stitched so tight they are indistinguishable. 

In the chaos of the destruction of boundaries, my skin finds reprieve in the security of the bathroom tiles. She is an agential actor upon my body that is external rather than internal. A lifeless companion to my quivering. My insides squeeze up against each vulnerable opening of my body, attempting escape. Sweat, spit, piss, shit, bile, heat. My body crawls out of itself. These tiles are a counterforce; she is a cold affliction to an attempted body excavation. The cold sinks into my blood, moving over parts of me it may not even touch. She holds me and coalesces me back together, the spread of chill forces my senses to calibrate. In return, I wipe the tiles clean. Stroking her like she stroked me, softly and slowly. A return to consciousness in mutuality. She is now an extension of my collective being, an undoubtable recipient of my microbial outpouring and provider of re-collectivisation. Her capacity to aggregate parts of me beyond her surface prompts my speculation of the solidity of her surfaces. I wonder of its fluidity, of the many microorganisms that contain her and that she contains. As parts of myself are forced to flee, perhaps her own beinghood becomes mine and mine becomes hers. 

She lets herself go limp to hold me and I am indebted.

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1. Ian Buchanan, “The Problem of the Body in Deleuze and Guattari, or, What Can a Body Do?,” Body & Society 3, no. 3 (1997): 83.

2. W. Ford Doolittle, “Population Genomics: How Bacterial Species Form and Why They Don’t Exist,” Current Biology 22, no. 11 (June 5, 2012): 451, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.04.034.

3. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 63.

4. Harney and Moten, 63.

5. Harney and Moten, 64.

6. See Stefano Harney; ‘those places that are not recognised, not legitimate, among those people … doing something that we neglect or vaguely understand as not really fitting, not really contributing. It’s the undercommons [where] one is always welcome to come and join’ Stefano Harney on Study, interview by Tim Edkins, Video, July 2011, loc. 2:52-3:18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJzMi68Cfw0; as quoted within Matthew Houdek, “(An) Allegory of the Undercommons: A Rhetorical Slipstream into the Fugitive Temporal Horizon,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, no. 3 (May 27, 2023): 354, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2023.2200701

7. Frank Macfarlane Burnet, “Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease,” 1940 as discussed in; Thomas Pradeu and Elizabeth Vitanza, “49The Self-Nonself Theory,” in The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity, ed. Thomas Pradeu and Elizabeth Vitanza (Oxford University Press, 2012), 72, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199775286.003.0003.

8. Cary. Wolfe, Zoontologies : The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xiii; as quoted in Hird, “Microontologies of Self,” 84.

9. “Viral Gastroenteritis Fact Sheet,” NSW Health, 2022, https://www.health.nsw.gov.au:443/Infectious/factsheets/Pages/viral-gastroenteritis.aspx.

10. Saud Bin Abdul Sattar and Shashank Singh, “Bacterial Gastroenteritis,” National Library of Medicine: National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2023, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513295/.

11. “Parasitic Causes of Prolonged Diarrhoea in Travellers,” Australian Journal for General Practitioners 41 (September 27, 2012): 782–86.

12. Melissa Murray, “What Is a Parasite?,” The Australian Museum, 2020, https://australian.museum/learn/species-identification/ask-an-expert/what-is-a-parasite/australian.museum/learn/species-identification/ask-an-expert/what-is-a-parasite/.

13. Dalia S. Ashour and Ahmad A. Othman, “Parasite–Bacteria Interrelationship,” Parasitology Research 119, no. 10 (October 1, 2020): 3145–64, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-020-06804-2.

14. Christina Quigley and Xi Jiang, “Gastroenteritis,” in Metabolism of Human Diseases: Organ Physiology and Pathophysiology, ed. Eckhard Lammert and Martin Zeeb (Vienna: Springer Vienna, 2014), 137–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0715-7_22.

15. Quigley and Jiang.

16. Tavi Meraud, “Iridescence, Intimacies,” E-Flux Journal, 2015, 9.