Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History

Abstract

Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrial-scale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes of their own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today.

Marked ‘h’ for human: Chimeric life and the politics of the human

“…Readily accepted since the nineteenth century, such assumed boundaries between microbes, plants and animals are now subject to renegotiation (e.g. Haraway, 1991;Ingold and Palsson, 2013;Landecker, 2015). Within this milieu, chimerism has emerged as a way to understand ourselves and other life forms (Hird, 2004;Landecker, 2007;Dupre, 2010;Margulis et al, 2011;Lappé and Landecker, 2015).…”

Gods, Germs, and Petri Dishes: Toward a Nonsecular Medical Anthropology

“…Social scientists have begun to note the resonances developing between social science and life science approaches (Lock 2013;Meloni 2014), but only a few have noted the material politicaleconomic reality producing this alignment (Fortun 2012;Landecker 2015;Murphy 2011). These few have suggested that these transformations are not a coincidence of intellectual trends, or merely discursive, but are part of the contemporary constitution of reality itself, a consequence of the biopolitical industrial projects within autonomous existence that have deeply altered life processes on this planet.…”

“…Kim Fortun (2012) described the need for ethnography that explicitly loops in on itself, a process that mirrors how the degraded infrastructure and exhausted paradigms of the postindustrial present loop into bodies and ecosystems. Likewise, Hannah Landecker (2015) wrote about how widespread antibiotic use, produced through a material reality of individually applied therapies, has literally resulted in new bacteria, a new biology of mass antibiotic resistance that renders it nearly impossible to maintain a sense of individual microbes or people. If we are to take historical material difference seriously, we do not need to argue that the large-scale use of antibiotics was based on a faulty logic or an escape narrative but should instead pay attention to a reality where, for a time, a very few of the world's inhabitants lived an autonomous existence as individuals who could control nature and excise gods.…”

“Loving the alien”: a post–post-human manifesto

“…I explore a set of related arguments in the essay drawing particularly on an article by the feminist science and technology studies scholar Hannah Landecker (2016). The issue explores how in different areas across science, philosophy and the humanities we witness a contemporary trend where there is an assumption and exploration of some of the common ontologies emerging across the sciences and humanities, which emphasise the complex, processual, indeterminate, contingent, non-linear, relational nature of phenomena constantly open to effects from contiguous processes-the beginnings of a non-body politics perhaps.…”