The Human Microbiome as Visceral Commons: Resisting Rhetorical Enclosure

ABSTRACT Exhortations to tend to the flourishing of one’s gut microbes have increased in past years and can be recited by rote: consume pre- and probiotics, diverse plants, and fermented foods; avoid unnecessary medicinal antibiotics and antimicrobial products. Recognizing that all frontiers of enclosure require corollary rhetorical enclosures, this essay locates the human microbiome as an imminent frontier of simultaneous capitalist and rhetorical enclosure. Human microbiome rhetoric encodes microbial life as a contained asset and narrowly frames human-microbe relations as the concern of responsible neoliberal consumers. Individual health as the ambit of concern should give way to the understanding of human-microbial relations as a shared multispecies concern—a visceral commons. Foregrounding the rhetorical dimensions of the practices that manage a crucial relational resource, a visceral commons coheres by means of intense feeling regarding the ways in which an always already distributed yet crucial resource irrevocably entangles us. This essay borrows concepts from commoners to close with four gestures resistant to the rhetorical enclosure of the human microbiome.