| Description |
The human microbiome has generated surprise at the extent and constitutive role bacteria play in human biology. As a critical/cultural communication scholar, I merge two turns in the humanities - the animal turn and the social biological turn - to understand our surprise at being more bacterial than human. Recent scholarship in "the new biologies" takes up developments in the biological sciences (e.g., the genome and increasingly the microbiome) for analysis of "brain-body-world-entanglements." This includes coordinating the biological with technical, cultural, symbolic, material, economic, and immaterial processes and practices. The human microbiome fits very much in this turn to the sociality of biology. However, before being swept up in the "new biologies," we need to turn to critical animal studies to recognize the agency of our bacterial companion species in constituting the human. To interrogate our contemporary "endosporic moment," this dissertation utilizes critical genealogy to trace relations between bacteria and humans by focusing on a specific bacterium, Clostridium difficile. Through analysis of C. difficile discourses, I map this bacterium as it transforms from part of normal fecal flora, to antibioticassociated disease, to a recurring infection treatable by fecal microbiota transplants (FMT). Throughout this dissertation, Clostridium difficile communicates the need for change in the ways bacteria and humans relate, especially within medicine. I argue that the contemporary problematic of human and bacteria relations can be understood as a conflict between the germ theory of subjectivity on the one hand and the emergence of the possibility of some other way of being-with bacteria on the other. Clostridium difficile forces a human confrontation with our own bacterial selves, and it deconstructs the long held germ theory of subjectivity as filth and bacteria become cure. iv |
