The infected body is at once, a porous and shared space, as well as the site for an altered embodiment consisting of new states of consciousness, radically divergent perceptual modes, new ways of experiencing time and space, and alternative, expanded, more inclusive forms of attention, attunement, and sensation that orient the self towards those forms of existence and styles of being in the world that are considered or rendered small, precarious, marginal, and obsolete with reference to the horizon of an anthropocentric world. Thus even as the pathogen becomes the catalyst for a major illness that provides Bailey’s memoir with its narrative vantage, the presence of this mysterious microorganism also serves as an occasion to challenge the concept of the biographical self and the anthropological person as a singular and bounded object in a fixed space and time. In Haraway’s words: “Critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each another, get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimilate one another, and thereby establish sympoietic arrangements that are otherwise known as cells, organisms, and ecological assemblages” (2016: 59). Such phenomena not only demonstrate the cohabitation of multiple life-forms, agencies, and temporalities, but also establish the status of so-called ‘individuals’ as “multispecies knots” (Rose, 2012): dynamic ecological networks comprising multiple, overlaid, and coexisting time scales, information, and relational patterns. The virus that inhabits and rewrites the internal script of the human body, along with myriad other instances of what Donna Haraway (2016) has called “sympoiesis,” or “making-with”: from gut bacteria and fleas to the sympathetic nervous system and vestigial anatomical parts testifying to the preservation within the present ‘self,’ of earlier temporal junctures of the hominid evolutionary narrative. Viruses and other microorganisms serve as valuable examples of the fundamental schema of evolutionary processes, and in effect of planetary life-forms as mutually entangled, co-creative, and heterogeneous: a perspective that debunks the notion of rigid boundaries between species, and complicates the hubristic image of the human subject as singular, exceptional, and markedly distinct from other creatures that it shares the earth with. Towards the close of her fascinating memoir of illness and convalescence, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey offers a glimpse into the double role of pathogens in the evolutionary process: as microbial data, what she calls “primordial soup,” from the interaction of which all forms of complex life germinated on our planet, and as deadly parasites that can deploy the same biosemiotic capacity to rewrite the genetic codes of the host bodies that they colonise.

“Primordial soup”: Towards a Multispecies Ecology

The sound of a wild snail eating review