Anthropocene biopolitics - Microbes

Event details

Anthropocene Biopolitics is an interdisciplinary seminar series based at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity designed to investigate the ways in which life is governed, managed and maximised in the Anthropocene. 

The first seminar examines relationships and co-constitutions between humans and microbial others in two contexts: cold war biological weaponry and quotidian relationships with bacteria, archea and yeasts. We’ll think together about how microbial imaginaries necessitate a reimagining of how the human relates to the biodiversity that criss-crosses its boundaries. 

Speakers:

Nik Brown (Sociology, York)

Something in the air tonight: the nature of the atmosphere, the spiders from Porton Down and the breathless weirdness of the cold war biological weapons programme. 

During the course of the 1950s / 1960s, British and allied military scientists became increasingly concerned that their biological weapons behaved very differently in indoor laboratory conditions, compared to the outside air. Weaponised pathogens, once released into outside conditions died off far more rapidly than when released in indoor environments. Something in the air was killing their BW pathogens, threatening defensive and retaliatory BW programmes. This was first attributed to what they called ‘Fresh Air Factor’ and then later ‘Open Air Factor’ (OAF). Throughout the 1960s, much of the military investment in BWs was directed at establishing what it was in the air that was responsible for this biocidal effect. 

We think we know what the air is and what makes up its composition. We think we know how the air gives us life, sustaining us and other organisms large, small and microbial. Well, that turns out to be not quite the case. ‘In fact,’ the aerobiological nature of the air is arguably more enigmatic, ephemeral, mysterious and strange. The paper reflects on the philosopher and feminist Lucy Irigaray’s entreaty that we ‘turn towards the air’, that we ‘start with the air’ and dwell on the problem of the air’s ephemerality and our relationship to the atmosphere. 

This paper is also set against the contextual backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis in which the air suddenly becomes an immaterial ‘matter of concern’ (Latour), an ‘airquake’ (Sloterdijk) that renders the atmosphere profoundly suspicious. It’s also located in the crisis in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in which the air is newly recognised as both a medium of epidemic transmission ‘indoors’, and remedial healing ‘outdoors’ in the ‘fresh air’. This paper situated alongside a ‘turn to the air’ triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement and a set of events in which ‘I can’t breathe’ becomes a racialised expression of atmospheric violence and vulnerability. 

This story is based largely on a forensic archival analysis of declassified top secret scientific and intelligence documents from the 1960s British biological weapons programme, shared at the time with American and Canadian allies. 

Kaajal Modi (Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre, York)

Embodying microbial relations 

In this session, participants will be invited into a short embodiment exercise sensing into our metabolic relations as a speculative practice of becoming attuned to the responsibility we have for our environments and the microorganisms we share them with. These invisible bacteria, archea and yeasts are everywhere; in the air we breathe, the surfaces we touch, the food we ingest and the water we drink and bathe in. They colonise our skin, our mucus membranes, our intestines and our vagus nerves, mediating the signals between our guts and our brains and influencing our thoughts, emotions and even behaviours. Through the exercise, we will breathe and become-with these micro-others with whom we share our bodies and (indoor and outdoor) environments, imagining our body as a holobiont that extends beyond our skin. 

Following the exercise, kaajal will discuss past and current artistic research projects with communities around themes of microbial relating, how we as humans have lived with, imagined, and negotiated with bacteria and yeasts, and how these relationships have informed cultural, scientific and spiritual practices. Participants will be invited to share their own stories of microbial relating, and you will have the option to donate your story to a microbes library being curated by the artist.