Transient Contingencies: Body as Ecology

Abstract

This paper proposes an understanding of the human body as a plural object. Drawing on the ideas of Bennet, Merleau-Ponty, and Wilson, it envisions the body as a complex ecology in which the human biome, the billions of microbial communities that symbiotically live within our bodies, act as a dynamic system of flows and feedbacks within its environments. This body's spatial experiences are not fixed and static, but continuous, fluid, and permeable, in search of novel experiences and homeostasis. By re-imagining what it means to occupy space, we can re-experience our lives as intimately interwoven with the natural world, catalyzing new biophilia, as our body-ecology seeks contentment with “interiors” outside of itself, at home in a dynamic planetary biosphere.