WE THE BACTERIA

“There is some sort of harmony in the jungle: it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And, in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of the jungle, we [humans] only look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences, out of a stupid suburban novel...” — Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams

All life is predicated on its microbial substratum. In our bodies, microbes with distinct, non-human DNA outnumber native human cells 3:1. We are mostly bacteria, and so is our biosphere. Bacteria condition everything from the deepest layers of the earth to the heights of our stratosphere. Topsoil regeneration,cloud formation, and rainfall patterning: all microbiologically implicated. In fact, the earth’s atmosphere itself is the byproduct of a population explosion of microbial effluvia that occurred over four billion years ago, which released untold quantities of oxygen. Terrestrial life has always been microbial, and always will be; so if you appreciate life, the argument goes, you have bacteria to thank.

Microbiology is a young science. Bacteria were first observed under a microscope in the late 17th century, and germ theory was developed just 150 years ago, in the 1860s. Despite the obvious importance microbes play in the lifeworld, our reaction to the discovery of bacteria has been anything but grateful. Ever since we confirmed their role in transmitting disease, we have simply tried to kill them wholesale. The 19th Century Bacterial Revolution, led by Pasteur and Koch, initiated a reactionary Antibacterial Modernism. For Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (professors at Princeton and Columbia respectively), this Modernist mania for disinfection amounts to nothing less than a war on Life itself: a war which we cannot afford to win. This past century’s proliferation of antibacterial interventions — antibiotics, pesticides, plastics, and sanitized building materials  — now threatens our own existence, to say nothing of the many (both micro- and macroscopic) species we’ve already driven to extinction. With their latest book (published by Lars Müller Publishers) We The Bacteria: Notes Towards Biotic Architecture, Colomina and Wigley reframe the lessons of the microbial revolution. Therein they urge us to turn away from an attitude of antimicrobial fear, segregation, and extraction, and towards new forms of symbiotic collaboration: so-called “biotic architecture.”

We The Bacteria marks architecture as the site for its intervention because, “life is the construction and maintenance of an interior.” Microbes thus function as the archetypal  architects — they are the first cells to maintain and reproduce a space of interiority. Human-scale architecture, suggests Colomina and Wigley, has a lot to learn from its microscopic progenitors. Historically, man-made architecture has imagined its ideal interiority as an absolute barrier, hermetically-sealed against dangers; in reality, our buildings (like our bodies) have always already been interpenetrated with interspecies codependencies. In fact, the more that architecture strives to separate itself antibiotically from the lifeworld, the more it tends to exacerbate disease conditions within its own walls. Colomina and Wigley argue that we should try to imagine a pro-biotic architecture which does not struggle to separate from the miasma of life, but “curates” its borders in an adaptive way.

The chief strength of We The Bacteria is in its historical scholarship, which reconstructs the millennia-old ways in which architecture has tried, and failed, to produce antiseptic interiors. Colomina and Wigely take us on a grand tour — from Jordanian whitewashed huts to medieval Black Plague lazarettos to turn-of-the-century Swiss sanatoria — of architectural responses to disease. The various prophylactic methods utilized, whether disinfectant quicklime or straightforward “social distancing,” were not understood mechanistically before the discovery of microbes, but they worked, and so they continued.

However, Colomina and Wigley are not much interested in celebrating these successes. Instead, We The Bacteria is quick to show how the built environment itself is responsible for the virulence of contagion: disease exploded in human communities precisely at the moment when humans began to occupy permanent habitations. Life expectancy dropped dramatically across the prehistoric world once people stopped living as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Later, when cities begin to form, epidemics reach new proportions. Entire populations were decimated in the Antonine and Justinian plagues, felled by close quarters and a lack of sanitation. Likewise, increased urbanism in the 19th century greatly exacerbated the tuberculosis epidemic, which, in that century, killed one person in seven across the United States and Europe. Architecture, concludes We The Bacteria, is at once a response to disease, and its incubator: “Microbial disease is the paradoxical engine of the built environment it so deeply threatens.”

We The Bacteria then goes on to examine the way in which Modern architecture directly inherits the legacy of the 19th-century Microbial Revolution. In their fascinating historical reconstruction, Colomina and Wigley draw a line straight from the sanatorium (retreats primarily in Switzerland, Germany, and Poland, which catered to tuberculosis patients) to the Modernist aesthetic programs of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller.

Before germ theory, there was no understanding that disease was caused by airborne pathogens. With that discovery freshly in mind, 19th-century sanatoria were designed to maximize fresh air, light, and hygienic materials. This ethos marked a decisive break from previous design sensibilities — the kinds of dark, dusty Rococo interiors which had encouraged the spread of tuberculosis. Soon enough, sanatoria were aestheticized by a new generation of architects. Anti-ornamentality, for example, would be taken up by Adolf Loos (who admired English hygiene standards) and Le Corbusier (who cites bacteriology as a chief influence in his 1930 book Precisions). The sanatorium’s high-ceilings and glass architecture, unsurprisingly, influenced the work of Mies van der Rohe (whose influential 1927 curation of Die Wohnung was “in many ways a health exhibition”) and Buckminster Fuller (an extreme hypochondriac, who often cites the etymological pair of “sanity” with “sanitation”). We The Bacteria shows, in detail, that Modern architecture inherits its foundational qualities from the hygienic construction ethos of the sanatorium: un-ornamented white walls, lots of glass and steel, and an emphasis on well-ventilated open spaces and sun exposure.

And yet, even this antibiotic regime of Modernity only succeeded in creating new epidemic conditions. In previous eras, children might be exposed to a disease in infancy, and develop a natural immunity — like with poliomyelitis, for example. When raised in an antiseptic environment, and exposed to polio as an adult, now the virus is able to maim and kill in epidemic proportions. Allergic and autoimmune diseases as well, whose incidence has exploded since the 20th century, can also be traced back to the hyper-sanitized conditions of Modernity.

Colomina and Wigley cherrypick their examples, of course — they make no mention of decreases in infant mortality, increase in life expectancy, or developments in vaccination, which have all accompanied modern medicine. Still, their point is well-taken. We cannot solve all our problems with an antibiotic approach. Sanitization, in fact, often makes problems worse, “Applying a strong disinfectant to a room kills most microbes but encourages the emergence of resistant species that, without competition, can take over the space… Antibiotic architecture breeds antibiotic resistance.” The more we use antibiotics, the more microbes adapt to become antibiotic resistant. Instead of continuing this arms race, We The Bacteria concludes that instead we need a “biotic architecture” that, “learns from microbes rather than resists them… [and] partners with microbes to curate microbes.”

We The Bacteria would like to argue that biotic architecture (which is to say, an architecture that embraces interdependent mutualism by “decentering” the human) is the only path forward for a healthy lifeworld. And who amongst us doesn’t want a healthy lifeworld? The pitch is simple: “Biotic architecture is more equitable, wastes less, and is less toxic, without being virtuous. It is just less stupid.” Sounds great! What’s the catch?

We must be careful here. While it’s clear that We The Bacteria raises many of the correct questions, it is much less clear that their answers are as obvious as the authors would have us believe. In the book’s final chapter, Colomina and Wigley expand on their definition of biotic architecture. Biotic architecture means to “let go of agency.” Biotic architecture means to “abdicate [our] self-appointed position.” Biotic architecture means accepting an ethics that is no longer “singular” or even “explicitly formulated” but is instead fluid, plural, and whose only commonality is to “resist human exceptionalism, in whatever form that takes.”

We The Bacteria stands on the strength of its scholarship and quite rightly points to the ways in which a naive form of antagonistic binary categorization is no longer tenable. As an alternative, the authors draw from cybernetics and posthuman philosophy to propose instead that we embrace the fact that nature is a process-based recursive loop, which intermingles categories at its very core. Instead of framing the problem as living vs. non-living, human vs. non-human, or interior vs. exterior, we must learn the lesson that, “Life was never the production of independent interiors sustained by discreet metabolisms,” but was always, “the vertiginous entanglements of diverse interiors at different scales.” Therefore, “The very idea of the interior, as a stable line between inside and outside, is mistaken… Every inside is made of multiple outsides.” Nature, we are told, is inherently deconstructive and reconstructive, and our architecture should follow suit.

We The Bacteria inherits its philosophy from that school of postmodern, posthuman thought which includes Donna Harraway, Bruno Latour, and Rosi Braidotti. For contemporary Deleuzo-Derridean thinkers such as these, the imperative is to deconstruct “centrism” of every kind — Eurocentrism as much as anthropocentrism. Invoking a politics of multiplicity, they try to break down false binaries and even falser unities. In the end, they imagine their project as one of emancipation. Instead of a normative universalism, they would prefer a patchwork of “minor” identities. But we must ask: who (or what) is emancipated, exactly, when this project is taken to its final conclusions? Unintentionally, that is the problem that We The Bacteria exposes. Clearly, in the last instance, it is not the emancipation of a human subject. Is it even life which is here being set free? Evidently not, because that distinction, too, has been effaced, “Living is permanently inhabited by that which doesn’t live… There is no sharp line between no-life and life.” When you’ve dispensed with normative, universalist reason, there are thus no grounds by which to prioritize the goals of humans above non-humans, or life above non-life. Instead, when distinction becomes horizontalized into difference, a kind of competitive free-for-all ensues.

At the limit of life itself, we see, in its fullness, the deepest level of We The Bacteria’s deconstructive microscope: “Viruses, not discovered until 1892 and not seen until [...] 1935, are particles one thousandth the size of bacteria that float randomly around [...] and reproduce by infecting bacteria they encounter. Technically, they are not living organisms but zombie-like packages of genetic information that dissolve the cells they hijack to reproduce and evolve.”

The virus is an un-living mechanism which at once makes life possible, while simultaneously threatening its existence. It cannot be excluded a priori but, if given the chance, it will cannibalize the organism completely. Like living cells, viruses reproduce themselves; unlike cells, however, viruses lack a metabolism (an internalizing self-relationship) and need to co-opt the metabolism of others in order to reproduce. The distinction between the virus and the living cell, you could say, is the difference between mechanism and organism. These categories are never fully independent, nor entirely collapsible. The living organism is haunted, at all times, by an undead mechanism; the mechanism does not exist, in and of itself, except to the extent that it expresses itself through an organism.

If the idea of the self-sufficient organism, hermetically-sealed, is what We The Bacteria argues against, then it is a kind of mechanistic virus that the authors would like to emancipate. While the organism falsely imagines itself as a self-sustained unity, the viral mechanism honestly admits that it is nothing outside of its relationships.

Viral relationality certainly can be a kind of symbiosis: kindness is contagious, pass it on. However, it’s naive to think that this would be the necessary conclusion. More often, when self-relating reason retreats, or is defeated, the door is opened for an ever-more virulent nihilism to come in and colonize the lifeworld. Mechanism, emancipated, usually looks like competition — and competition, we must never forget, is also a form of relation. In political terms, then, the problem of the viral mechanism, emancipated, is precisely the problem of capitalism. It is the freeing of the market.

We The Bacteria, all told, does a great job in showing that an asocial, individualistic view of the organism and the environments that it constructs are no longer tenable: we exist in relation, in context. However, it ignores the fact that the individualized human subject’s ability to reason and make judgements is itself already a kind of networked collective intelligence. We are never alone when we use rationality. Rationality is a genuinely symbiotic form of relating — mechanistic competition will never have life’s best interests in mind.

Ironically, in the last instance, then, it’s precisely because the rational human subject does not have total control over itself and its environs, that We The Bacteria rejects the rational human subject’s claim to hegemonic legitimacy as false and hypocritical. It’s an unfortunate conclusion, drawn from basically correct premises. Just because our house has dust or bugs or ugly rococo wallpaper, doesn’t mean that it’s not still a home. History might be a tragedy, but it’s our tragedy.