The microbiopolitics of a ‘total‐trans‐species’ social institution

As human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 increases, so do the political, economic and social concerns about how to tackle it. At the biological level, experts describe the new coronavirus as a species of living organism that does not ‘fit’ homogeneously within a taxon, but could be understood as a ‘species multiplier – forming and enacting its identity with others’ (Lowe 2010: 626; original italics). Since a characteristic of the pandemic virus is that it needs to multiply as an entity through humans to survive, we could certainly speak of ‘trans-species entanglements’ between – but not only – virus and humans. COVID-19 emphasises that ‘the “human” that we know now, is not now, and never was, itself’ (Wolfe 2003: xxiii). Human bodies are not the historical product of linear organic development, but the result of symbiosis and mixing between ‘species’ that create new forms of life. In that sense the current coronavirus acts as a pure relational entity (see Latour 1988), something that is also sustained from the institutional and popular discourse. However, and given its high mortality rate, it seems that this is not one of those ‘species’ with which we want to coexist, so the solution to eradicate it is to break the human–virus circularity: to avoid the infestation, the contagion and the propagation. For this reason COVID-19 could be understood – adapting Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) concept to a ‘more-than-human-world’ – as a total-trans-species social institution. The virus, and the social measures of collective confinement or individual isolation, have submerged us into a process of radical transformation that challenges what until now has been the coherence of our daily reality. In others words, ‘switches [our human] worlds’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 176): attitudes, behaviours and relations have been metamorphosed, and well-established values have been threatened, while routines have been altered and certain beliefs even questioned. That the virus will be in all places and in none at the same time allows strong mechanisms to emerge to stop its spread in the absence of a vaccine. A ‘hygienicised’ and ‘biosecure’ reality is gradually being established with the help of governments, health institutions and international organisations. It is a ‘microbiopolitics’ that highlights the diversity of cultural responses, but also ‘the fact that dissent over how to live with microorganisms reflects disagreement about how humans ought to live with one another’ (Paxson 2008: 16). In that sense, the virus is thus becoming a tailor-made cultural product.