10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17463
The text contributes to the special issue celebrating the 10th anniversary of the journal Tecnoscienza by presenting a reflection departing from viruses, biology and relationships.
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Geoffrey C. Bowker
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
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Immunity and Community: Being Stuck and Getting Moving
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Anniversary Reflections
2020-11-12
2023-06-27
2020-11-12
2023-10-12
65-68
TS
Geoffrey C. Bowker
2020/11/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17463
65
University of California Irvine
2038-3460
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Immunity and Community: Being Stuck and Getting Moving
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17463/16312
11
                                                                     Anniversary Reflection
                                                                                                65




Immunity and Community: Being Stuck
and Getting Moving
Geoffrey C. Bowker
University of California Irvine



    Abstract: The text contributes to the special issue celebrating the 10th an-
    niversary of the journal Tecnoscienza by presenting a reflection departing
    from viruses, biology and relationships.

    Keywords: virus; Covid; biology; relationship; feedback.

    Submitted: May 30, 2020 – Accepted: June 30, 2020

    Corresponding author: Geoffrey Charles Bowker, School of Information
    and Computer Sciences, University of California Irvine - 6210 Donald Bren
    Hall Irvine, CA 92697-3425. Email: gbowker@uci.edu.




                                                     It may also be given to us to invent meta-
                                                     phors that do not belong, or that do not yet
                                                     belong, to accepted patterns (Borges,
                                                     1967/8).

    I had a good friend years ago who died, painfully and slowly, of Hodg-
kin’s lymphoma. There was a metaphor ready to hand for his experience –
“he showed bravery in a long battle against cancer”; “he was another victim
in the war on cancer” and so forth. This is what Borges called a “pattern
metaphor” – one that could generate myriad variations but which freighted
a singular vision. David, though, had another relationship with his cancer
– he wanted to live with it, to share his body with it, to learn how it was
part of him; not some foreign invader out to storm his barricades. I thought
this was so wise, but it has taken me a number of years to begin to under-
stand it. I’ve been thinking of David a fair amount in the context of the war
against Covid-19 (get your battle kit her: https://www.beyondmybat-
tle.org/covid19!) – this silent and ‘evil’ disease which is attacking whole
families.
    Let’s start with the fact that if viruses ‘want’ anything, it’s that we

 TECNOSCIENZA
 Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
 11 (1) pp. 65-77 - ISSN 2038-3460
 www.tecnoscienza.net                                    2020
66                                                             Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

should all just get along. Just in terms of self-interest, a virus has no interest
in wiping out its host – any more I guess than people do in wiping out their
ecosystem… It just looks like it sometimes. Successful viruses, such as her-
pes – which infect more than half the US population – find niche nerve
ganglia and largely lie dormant. Lynn Margulis’ widely accepted theory of
mitochondria (which provide oxygen/energy within cells) is that they are
endosymbionts – ‘invaders’ which did such a good job that were incorpo-
rated into our (in the sense of we eukaryotes’) genetic code.
    It’s easy to think of the world in terms of me in here and the rest of the
world out there – the first line of defense for the self being the skin. This is
an historical construction – in Western Europe, the skin got to close us off
from the rest of the world in the early nineteenth century (Reinarz and Si-
ena, 2007) – earlier it was a porous membrane which took in effluvia and
exhaled waste. Great pragmatist philosopher Arthur Bentley (1941) was
surely right when he wrote that: “Human skin is the one authentic criterion
of the university which philosophers recognize when they appraise
knowledge under their professional rubric, epistemology”, going on to say
that: “if philosophers cease thus crudely to employ it, all their issues of
epistemology will vanish, and the very type of attack they make on cogni-
tion will be discredited”.
    Which brings me to something I’ve been reading for no good reason. A
friend and I were talking about insides and outsides of folks1 and we got
into the immune system – leading to this piece in the Stanford Encylopedia
of Philosophy (Swiatczak and Tauber, 2020). What got me as once was the
idea of the immune system as another sense – not something which is set-
ting up boundaries, but something which – as with our other senses – is
exploring the world. My taste buds don’t just exclude Mars bars – they
work out what to include, and how; similarly, all my other senses. The im-
mune system would be a monumental failure if it merely tried to keep stuff
out: over 90% of the cells in our – and I stress our – bodies are microfauna
and microflora. The digestive system can be seen as the ‘outside within’:
what do we choose to ‘incorporate’ and what keeps sliding down and out.
    The general point for me here about stuckness and knowledge is that
we look at the world wrongly from the beginning if we break it up into
separate entities. The theory of evolution is just wrong if it only accounts
for the origin of species. What is much more interesting is the development
of relationships – as in Michel Serres’ discussion of the parasite form as
central. In a related context, Martin Buber argued that the relationship –
to thou or that – was always prior. We murder to dissect… at any level…
within or without the organism. There are reasons why many biologists say
the species concept is unreal: there is no singular slicing apart of a set of
entities. We interpenetrate. There are also reasons why many cleave to the
species concept. It’s an available and easy background while we do what


1
    A discussion of chiasm and flesh in late Merleau Ponty.
Bowker                                                                          67

we want to do. Like the nation state for historians: it’s nice to have a de-
fined border to scope your history (especially if it’s in one language for the
historians/speciality for natural scientists) but really doesn’t do much to
weave stories of how change happens.
    This stuckness is a mirror image of the Enlightenment. Above all else,
Enlightenment scholars classified – they organized the world and devel-
oped stories about each of its parts. Chapeau! As ever, within the move-
ment were the seeds of it’s change – Claude Bernard with his theory of
homeostasis reimagining relations; Beniger’s Control Revolution privileg-
ing relationship (feedback). Or, much more interestingly, Theilhard de
Chardin’s noosphere and more recent Gaian imaginings. We’ve gotten
stuck along the highly successful strategy of dissection; time to move on.


References

Bentley, A.F. (1941) The Human Skin: Philosophy’s Last Line of Defense, in
   “Philosophy of Science”, 8, pp. 1-19.
Beniger, J.R. (1986) The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins
   of the Information Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Reinarz, J. and Siena, K. (eds.) (2013) A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the
   Surface, New York, Pickering & Chatto.
Serres, M. (2007) The Parasite / Michel Serres, trans. Eng. Minneapolis: University
    of Minnesota Press.
Swiatczak, B. and Tauber, A.I. (2020) Philosophy of Immunology, in E.N. Zalta
   (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (available at
   https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/immunology/).
