Scott Gilbert makes the provocative argument that “we have never been individuals.” Referencing Bruno Latour’s “we have never been modern,” he articulates a similar idea, that our conceptualization of individuality is, like the project of modernity more generally, a matter of faith. From a biological point of view, it is quite difficult to separate oneself out from the host of bacteria and other symbionts that support one’s existence. Each of the categories for individuality are deconstructed: anatomical, developmental, physiological, genetic, and immune individuality are all shown to be false in relation to contemporary biology because of the necessity of other organisms, mainly bacteria, that facilitate our development and growth. He undoes the notion of individuality, reasserting Lynn Margulis’ ideas that we are composed of a symbiogenic community of critters. Even what we think of as the integrity of the body is not really ours: of the eight million genes in the human body, only 22,000 are actually human DNA. And it is the symbionts that often cause particular kinds of phenotypic expression. For example, red and green aphids have exactly the same DNA, but different bacterial communities and it is the bacteria that determine their color. As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, “becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation…Becoming is always a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance.”1 It seems that evolution itself carries with it this same involutionary momentum, as Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers have called it. We are not only descended from a particular line, but also of and with the creatures that accompany us. This process concerns ongoing negotiations, alliances that are forged and broken, and diplomats that necessarily seem to betray.
This idea has far-reaching implications, both philosophically and materially. I can’t help but immediately think of our collective relationship to antibiotics and antibacterial soaps, gels and sprays. If we think of our body as composed of bacteria, as requiring them, then how would we approach these other bodies? Perhaps the ‘war on bacteria’ would look more like a process of negotiation, or of diplomacy. This is not to undermine the fact that our lives have been extended considerably because of antibiotics. I don’t think I would be alive without them, but they also take a toll on overall mental and physical health, as we are increasingly understanding. Perhaps we need to learn to discern between bacteria, fostering some while recognizing that others cannot be negotiated with. Similarly, if we extend the metaphor outwards and understand the relation with others as fundamental to existence, how could we reimagine not only our own being, but political life? How might the understanding of democracy, as representing the autonomous agency of singular individuals, be reworked when the individual is actually a host for a multitude of creatures? And how might our interspecies politics be rethought when we are all primarily bacteria? Can there be a bacterial politics of empathy?
As Donna Haraway says, in a far-reaching interview with Thryza Nichols Goodeve, “in [Modest_Witness] I talk about Scott Gilbert’s ideas of biology as the functional equivalent of Western Civilization on the U.S. campus…There is almost nothing you can do these days that does not require literacy in biology.”2 And Gilbert is, for humanities people, like a gateway drug for biology. With wide-ranging publications that intersect art history and embryology, religion, and popular culture, he provides this fundamental bridge to thinking what it means to be human, and as it turns out, we are not all that human after all.