Metabolising microbes, meaning and modernity

Spanning the body’s interior and its surrounds, the microbiome presents a fruitful site for challenging modernist notions of discretely embodied individuality, bodily impermeability, and the anthropocentrism of much Western thought. Attending to the microbiome, and the gut microbiome in particular, offers the potential for advancing, instead, a multispecies politics of metabolism that attends to collective well-being across scales from the microbial to the planetary. Metabolism is, most familiarly, that fundamental life-sustaining process that converts food into the energy that fuels us. Here, we argue that it may also serve as an analytic framework through which to understand human-microbial relations anew. Focusing on the interdependencies between human and microbial life, such a framework blurs the boundaries between our embodied interior biological systems and the external, historical, material, and sociopolitical environments that are increasingly both threatening to human life and compromised by it. Placing microbes within the analytic frame of metabolism illustrates potential ways forward beyond the destructive modernist tendencies that have given rise to the poly-crisis of the Anthropocene, while also illustrating some of the enduring legacies of modernist ways orienting towards the non-human world. Drawing on data from a broader programme of research on human-microbial relations in everyday life, and in particular on data from focus groups and interviews with 28 university-aged students of microbiology, this analysis advances the politics of metabolism as they are played out in everyday life to explore some of the paradoxes emerging around the microbiome as a multispecies and transcorporeal assemblage, including its liberatory potential amidst enduring legacies of disciplinary self-governance.