Blurring and drawing bodies lines; the work of metagenomic

To map is to engage with lines. When it comes to the mapping of a body, where do the lines pass? What entities do they circumvent? Are they dotted lines or plain one? And what are their relations with time?
Current genomic works are also shaping the lines of the bodies, affecting their morphology and ontological identity. Genomic, and mode precisely, metagenomic – the act of sampling and analysing the DNA of all the living creatures on a given portion of territory – asks with renewed words the classical question: “Where does a body stop?”.
This article will thus try to elaborate on metagenomic as a scientific practice as well an ontopolitical one that deals with existing bodies as well as with bodies being defined and constructed through this very practice. The questions we would like to ask concern the drawing/mapping of those strange bodies and their capacities:
- Bodies present throughout multiple timelines (i.e: when asserting the presence of a certain body upon a given territory based on the DNA traces).
- Bodies being constituted by other bodies in multiscalable chains (i.e: the concept of holobiont and the importance played by guts micro-population in metagenomic researches).
- Ubiquitous bodies capable of affecting a given territory beyond their direct presence, giving birth to some kind of spread ontology.
How to map those kinds of bodies? Where to draw the lines that could give them some kind of consistency? How, taken seriously, those bodies affect important concepts such as species or individual?
We would also like to investigate the political scope contained in the mapping gesture of the bodies defined here. When described as such, the bodies rendered capable of all the capacities listed above are able to affect in new ways other beings, human and not, with(in) which they live. One of the political questions that might arise could, for instance, concern the ways in which we can seriously take into account the spread of a being? (i.e: how building project can be aborted when a trace of an endangered species is detected in the designated area.)