Bacteria and the Market

Representations of the Other tend to revolve around aliens, terrorists, animals, and cyborgs, and have always been a way to understand how humans see the “not;human” in philosophy. We point to a marked absence of... [ view full abstract ]

Representations of the Other tend to revolve around aliens, terrorists, animals, and cyborgs, and have always been a way to understand how humans see the “not;human” in philosophy. We point to a marked absence of bacteria in these accounts, and show that they are the most ancient, global and strange Other to have ever existed. They present important sites to think through contemporary political and social dynamics; of border; control, identification, the enemy, the family, justice, and community. At the beginning, we track the contemporary turn to species pluralism in social studies, as a source of and for posthuman ethics. There are many ways to look the market. Some people examine prices, some use statistical data. We use images produced by the market as a repository of unarticulated fears and fantasies about these issues listed. We examine anti;bacterial advertising, and examine the dynamic of recurring conventions to draw bacteria into visual regimes – cute, overpopulated, lower;class, uncanny, sacred and promiscuous. The theoretical framework we have drafted in to understand these movements is (auto); immunity, and here we discuss the market of cleaning, and the market of antibotics.