COVID-19, microbiopolitics and species precarity in the anthropocene

Abstract

The turn towards deep entanglement precipitated by the Anthropocene has seen a rise in probiotic approaches towards microorganisms that highlight human-microbe relationalities. However, COVID-19 complicates this relationality not least considering its staggering effects on human society which have reinforced notions of solidarity and common crisis, as evidenced in the various biopolitical measures or the ‘outbreak narrative’. In this regard, Heather Paxson’s formulation of microbiopolitics as the construction and evaluation of categories of microorganisms serves as a useful model to ask what kind of microbiopolitics the coronavirus pandemic makes possible and what these strategies imply for collaborative human-microbe relations or multispecies flourishing. The microbiopolitics that marks the pandemic as new mutations and strains of viruses are being identified and a future of zoonotic diseases is anticipated shows this microbial relationality as already present. However, to make sense of entanglement in the pandemic is to recognize microbiopolitics as socio-politically contingent and undercut by anthropocentric anxieties for our own well-being but also as a species precarity. This species precarity for humans shows that the pandemic is differentially experienced as a self while negotiating its relations with non-human others. It is what demands of us that we develop strategies for living along with the virus or other microbes for the foreseeable future.