Book review: The Microbial State – Global Thriving and the Body Politic

The Microbial State—Global Thriving and the Body Politic by Stefanie R. Fishel, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 2017.

Book review by Jochem Kootstra.

While Donald Trump withdraws from Paris’ climate agreement, he separates the United States from an inseparable part of human existence, and Stefanie R. Fishel’s book could not have arrived at a better time. Fishel explains in The Microbial State—Global Thriving and the Body Politic, the necessary and vital relation with the Earth, and skillfully simplifies that vitality in the relationship between humans and microbial communities. Fishel refreshes the metaphor of body politic by making microbes a fitting object of study through which she questions human individuality, subjectivity and the current methodologies of International Relations (IR). It offers a lively revelation of a complex, connected world in constant flux. Fishel connects bodies creatively with the material, and vice versa, and succeeds in traversing binaries—subject/object, human/nonhuman, actor/structures—to be able to think beyond disciplinary boundaries that are needed to face hybrid social and political challenges. With this book, full of strong novel metaphors, Fishel wants to put both the ‘I’ and the ‘R’ back on the messy map of IR through a more earthly politics.

The Microbial State can be split into two parts, in which Fishel starts with corporeal metaphors and body politic, and flows into a reflective segment on how a more earthly, interdisciplinary politics can be built. Inspired by ‘a bad case of pneumonia’ (p. ix), Fishel introduces the book with ‘science and technology studies and the biological sciences, paired with the familiar metaphorical constructions of the body politic and state imagined as person’ (p. 4) as her tools of choice for expanding IR’s disciplinary perspectives. By refreshing the familiar corporeal metaphors, she takes microbes as object of study for demonstrating that the relationship between humans and microbial communities give a bodily and material example in which multiple perspectives and objects—beyond human-created institutions and subjects—can be seen as vital and necessary to politics and human survival (p. 5).

To inspire IR with new methodologies of global participation, in chapter 1—Corporeal Politics, Fishel analyzes the state as ‘complex, interrelational, virtual and material, as both object and subject’ (p. 28). She does so with the metaphor of body politic, as it is, ‘in part, how subjectivity binds sovereignty and state’ (p. 31). The metaphors of the body politic have a long history in political life, as the often hidden devices that serve to rationalize choices of conceptual variants and to render plausible the narrative in which our political concepts are embedded […] which can include maximizing wealth and military might for the well-being of the state (p. 50).

Fishel advocates for novel metaphors by stressing that ‘the body in this “lively” world becomes a body by its interactions with the world and the assemblages of which it is a part’ (p. 38). Her argument is an approach toward future-oriented politics as ‘ongoing processes of power relations in an environment of shifting agents, rather than only constitutional or normative’ (p. 43).

In chapter 2—Lively Subject, Bodies Politic, Fishel specifies interactive bodies with the biological study of metagenomics: a study of collective genomes directly from the organism’s environment, as a way to envision political community as an assemblage of multispecies groupings and highlighting analogies born from the relations between humans and microbiotic communities that fosters and creates a sense of deep plurality within communities (p. 56–57).

Fishel calls human bodies lively vessels and superorganisms—‘a unified alliance between the genes of several different species’ (p. 59). However, when it comes to IR, ‘a common way in which we experience the world is through the body as bounded by skin as a kind of wall, and we interact with others across this wall’ (p. 62). The body then is seen as a container that categorizes and quantifies all outside areas ‘as danger zones of Otherness and threat’ (p. 62), such as bacterias trying to traffick in and out, or a flow of immigrants. But Fishel’s emphasis on the vital collectiveness of the biosphere offers new perspectives for IR, by being more flexible and less deterministic, and by interacting with the unknown outside(r) to form relations that are essential to transform and to progress.

Chapter 3—States in Nature, Nature in States, adds more to collective communities and necessary interactions between bodies by using ‘processes of the immune system to address the state metaphorically as contaminated and diverse, rather than pure and homogeneous’ (p. 76). Fishel uses the parasite as beneficial to the body as an invader or interrupter, translating it to the state ‘to define our relations to production and consumption of resources in our communities as fluid and reciprocal’ (p. 93–94). This host–guest relationship produces a change in a homogeneous system by disruption and introduces a different ethos to political relations.

Chapter 4—Posthuman Politics, looks at the posthuman concept and systems biology ‘as a possible partner to aid in understanding IR relations as a complex system’ (p. 99). Fishel’s conceptualization of the posthuman shows global complexity because it ‘cooperates both biological embodiment and human coevolution with technology, tools, and external archives like language and culture’ (p. 102). Fishel’s biology-approach is a successful attempt to show the ‘cruelty that lurks beneath the creation of liberal society and its laws’ (p. 103). She exemplifies that by using the enmeshed posthuman theory to help humanity looking differently at ‘past exclusions from humanity to fuller and more socially and ecologically minded accounts of the human animal’ (p. 104)—such as people of color or women. Fishel explains that it is not her main intention to offer practical solutions; however, her future-oriented book could benefit from more examples that link the bodies (politic) with actual politics. Fishel names highly complex challenges—climate change, flows of immigrants, and such—that could be viewed and approached from new perspectives through her vivid metaphorical examples, but it sometimes misses the link between metaphor to actuality. However, the book ends with a great coda on New Metaphors for Global Living in which she somewhat summarizes the book, and makes the reader understand that the state has metaphorical actancy and emergent properties when considered through its lively internal messmates and tangled, yet productive, connections to outside itself. This, in turn, encourages new disciplinary understandings to rise in response to the dynamic models built […] Inter- or transdisciplinary people will invent new ways to look at the world (p. 111).

There are many insights in this accessibly written book to feel inspired by and to savor. Fishel definitely convinces me with her creativity and analysis of some of the post-structuralist thinkers, which make the book stand out as an influential addition to the ongoing debates of corporeality and new materialism. It is a perceptive book for those interested in expanding the vocabulary of their field of study. Fishel’s style of is not only academic; it shares new perspectives on crossing disciplinary boundaries through IR and biology while it remains enjoyable to read. This amusing book is full of possibilities and raises even more questions when it ends. The necessary questions that would not have come up without her vivid exploration of the novel, yet complex, metaphors of the corporeal body. But as Fishel states, ‘our concepts may need to be as messy and complex as our bodies to understand and survive in the times ahead’ (p. 116).

Published in Journal Politics, Religion & Ideology.