immanence

“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere?

We can only trust something if we know it to be well functioning. So on the supposition that trusting also means strengthening and maintaining, “trust your immune system” means to treat it as an individual protective shield, a kind of personal atmosphere around the planet of one’s “self,” and to feed it with what it needs — exercise, rest, a diet of nutritious and biotically regulating foods, and the like. In social philosopher Charles Taylor’s words, this individualized immunity represents the “bounded” or “buffered” self, which, as he shows, is the self of modern liberalism.

But this ignores both the biosociality of humanity and the globalizing “anthropocenity” of today’s world, so it is far from enough. Viruses do not respect individuality; they are microbial, and they spread laterally and rapidly across the boundaries of individuality we so treasure. They make individuality porous, not bounded (which, for Taylor, is exactly what religion had traditionally done; see my account in Shadowing the Anthropocene, pp. 164-180, for more on that).

In a world as interconnected as ours, with novelty arising in the hybrid meshings of humans, animals, microbes, and technologies, we can only “trust our immune system” if we are successfully strengthening and maintaining our collective immune system — one that can develop and rapidly disseminate effective vaccines for neutralizing the impact of novel viral agents. Vaccination is part of our collective defense, not separate from it.

There is, of course, an overlap and complementarity between the individual and collective approaches to viruses. Some measure of individual, or rather “pod,” protection – through masking and social distancing – has been necessary to give us the time to develop effective vaccine regimes. But ultimately the two are part of the same system.

There’s a clear lesson here about politics. For decades now, the political model that has been hegemonic across much of the western, developed world, has been a neoliberal one, a Hayekian model of capitalism that sees individual responsibility within an economically rational market as the be-all-and-end-all of everything, with collective responsibility limited to enabling that market to function. The Covid pandemic, like the 2008 economic recession before it, has shown that this model is incapable of providing the immunological supports our global society requires.

For all of his philosophical brattiness, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s writings on the “immunological” basis of human society are very insightful. They are certainly a necessary complement to the more existential analytic of other twentieth-century philosophers (like Martin Heidegger, whose work Sloterdijk attempts in many ways to rectify).

Sloterdijk describes human existence as “spherical” in the sense that we are social and discursive beings who create “symbolic air conditioning systems” — “spheres” or “bubbles” made of interactive habits and rituals, images and narratives, social institutions, and technical networks — to shield us from the elements that would otherwise render collective life impossible. These spheres are unstable and require constant maintenance and renewal. The bursting of these “bubbles” results in “existential uprooting.” When we ponder the end of the world, we are really pondering the “death of a sphere” (Bubbles, pp. 25, 48, 54, et al.).

Over time, our spheres have grown in size — from small “bubbles” to large “orbs,” and most recently into a kind of polyspheric “foam” that is thick, frothy, volatile, and planetary in scale. Civilization, in this sense, acts as a kind of “greenhouse” that provides immunity to a humanity that would otherwise be vulnerable to all manner of invasions, viruses, and elemental incursions. Today’s “foam,” however — with its world market, media networks, and “industrial-scale civilization,” but also its national, local, and transversally subcultural diversities — is polyspherical, multiplicitous, and decentered, yet it is connected at multiple levels, with some things (such as viruses, both the biological and the electronic kind) moving through its connective tissue more fluidly than others. Since the last major world-bridging event, the Columbian encounter, which brought the Afro-Eurasian landmass into contact with the smaller and younger (in human terms) American one and resulted in a massive die-off of humans and other species in the latter, the world has become increasingly interconnected at the microorganismic and bio-immunological level.

The irony is that some of those saying we should “trust our immune systems” (the so-called conservatives) are the same people who have undercut support of the larger immunological networks, such as health and welfare systems, that we require for any individual immunity to be able to function. Immunology is, in this sense, co-immunology; it is a nested set of immunological operations that connect us more than they separate us. Building and maintaining immunity has less to do with “keeping things out” (whether with national borders, gated communities, or personal hygiene regimes) than with timing and spacing things out so as to allow for their appropriate integration. We live within spongy, connective membranes — a network of “co-fragile systems” — that are ultimately coextensive with the world.

That some of our gravest risks, from the Covid-19 virus to climate change, are also being produced by the foamy system itself simply means that there is no “outside” to the foam. We are in the midst of a foam-forming, “aphrogenic” project (from the Greek aphros, the centaurine sea-god whose name came to mean “foam”), one that brings us all together — humans, technologies, microorganisms, and all manner of other cascading subject/objectivations. That project is a scary prospect, once we do away with any illusions of sameness and unity; but it is what we have, and it is all we have. There are ways to learn to love it and do it well. (Failing those, there will be ways to leave it. But we’re not there yet.)