Bdellovibrio and the Capitalist Glitch: Microbial Predation, Ultrablack Ontology, and the Metabolism of Consumption
An Essay
ABOUT THE WRITER
Kenji Siratori is a Japanese avant-garde artist who is currently bombarding the internet with wave upon wave of highly experimental, uncompromising, progressive, intense prose. His is a writing style that not only breaks with tradition, it severs all cords, and can only really be compared to the kind of experimental writing techniques employed by the Surrealists, William Burroughs and Antonin Artaud. You can catalyze with his website here.
You can purchase a PDF file of his newest book EXCREMENT here.
Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus does not merely kill its prey; it invades the periplasm, liquefies the host’s cytoplasmic contents, and integrates the extracted nutrients into its own metabolic system. In this sense, Bdellovibrio embodies the logic of capitalism’s insatiable hunger: a system that consumes every available resource, metabolizes it into surplus, and then demands further consumption. Achim Szepanski’s claim that “capitalism treats every registerable difference as a potential resource which can be capitalized or from which a surplus can be extracted” is mirrored in Bdellovibrio’s life cycle. The bacterium does not discriminate—it preys on a variety of Gram-negative bacteria, collapsing all difference into raw material for its expansion. The same can be said of capitalism’s drive to homogenize the avant-garde into commodifiable aesthetics, eroding the boundary between subversion and assimilation. Szepanski’s analysis of glitch music as both failure and function provides a theoretical framework for understanding Bdellovibrio’s role in microbial ecosystems. Glitch, in its disruption of musical continuity, reveals the inner workings of sonic capitalism. The predation of Bdellovibrio operates in a similar fashion—it does not simply consume but reprograms its host’s biochemical processes, interrupting microbial networks and altering ecological balance. This aligns with the notion that “failure develops in the arts into a cutting-edge concept, while at the same time it becomes codified by technology and business as a model for improvement and success.” Bdellovibrio’s predation introduces disorder into microbial communities, but this disorder is simultaneously a driving force of evolutionary change—an echo of how glitch subverts musical norms while being subsumed into capitalist structures. On a cosmic scale, predation is a fundamental force. Galaxies collide and consume each other; black holes devour celestial bodies, transmuting their mass into gravitational singularities. Similarly, Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus reduces its prey to molecular components, metabolizing them into its own structure. In Szepanski’s conceptualization of ultrablack music, we find a striking parallel: “Ultrablack is the sound of formlessness, as black sound it takes on a form as a something, which is also a nothing—to prevent anything from belonging to music.” Just as Bdellovibrio disintegrates its host’s form into a microbial void before reassembling its own body, ultrablack music dissolves sonic coherence into an abyss of entropy, an event horizon from which new structures emerge. The bacterium’s metabolic process is a dark glitch of microbial reality, revealing the hidden predatory violence underlying all life. Rethinking posthumanism through bacteriology necessitates an acknowledgment of microbial predation as a constitutive process of life. Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus is neither merely destructive nor simply beneficial—it disrupts, reorganizes, and subsists in a metastable equilibrium with its ecosystem. This dynamic echoes Szepanski’s interpretation of musical and capitalist metastasis, where sound is omnipresent, hyper-audible, and yet ultimately inaudible due to its continuous consumption. As bacteriologist D. M. R. McAlister notes, “The study of microbial predation forces us to confront an unsettling truth: survival is predicated on the relentless transformation of one entity into another.” Just as glitch music erases and reformulates sonic expectations, Bdellovibrio deconstructs microbial bodies into raw matter for its perpetuation. Szepanski asks, “What if ILOVEYOU is the same as IEATYOU or IBOREYOUTODEATH or IMONETIZEYOURSOUL or IBURYYOUALIVE?” For Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus, love, death, and survival are indistinguishable—each interaction is a metabolic transaction in which the consumed dissolves into the consumer. This microbial ontology aligns with the function of glitch aesthetics in revealing capitalism’s omnivorous appetite, where every rupture, every failure, and every difference is absorbed into the machinery of commodification. Just as Bdellovibrio thrives on the cellular debris of its prey, capitalism metabolizes every form of resistance, glitch, or subversion, rendering even anti-music a resource. The ultimate lesson from Bdellovibrio’s predatory existence is that in both microbial and economic ecologies, consumption is inescapable. The only question that remains is: who eats, and who is eaten? Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus, an obligate predatory bacterium, is an organism that preys upon other bacteria, infiltrating its host, consuming its cytoplasmic contents, and emerging as a replicated entity. This relentless process of microbial predation serves as a biological analogue for cosmic cannibalism—the consumption of celestial bodies by larger cosmic entities. From a philosophical perspective, the dynamics of Bdellovibrio's interaction with its environment mirror Achim Szepanski’s conceptualization of noise as turbulence—an order that both dissolves and re-forms. Just as noise destabilizes structures and is, in turn, assimilated, Bdellovibrio operates at the threshold between disruption and systemic integration. Noise, as Szepanski and Serres propose, is neither merely interference nor simply an aberration; rather, it is an intrinsic element of systemic function. “Noise is the fundamentally unstable ground on which machines and human existence are based,” writes Szepanski, echoing the biological necessity of unpredictable perturbations in microbial ecosystems. Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus, in its relentless attack on bacterial populations, introduces a form of turbulence akin to noise—chaotic, yet essential. Bacteriologists studying Bdellovibrio have long noted its paradoxical role: it is a destroyer and a regulator, a force that eradicates yet enables microbial equilibrium. “Bdellovibrio’s predation is a biological anomaly that challenges traditional definitions of symbiosis and pathogenicity,” notes Katherine J. LeDuc. “It is noise within microbial populations—an agent of disruption that ultimately contributes to the broader stability of the system.” In the same way that financial markets absorb and redeploy noise traders, Bdellovibrio’s aggression becomes part of the microbial economy, assimilated yet perpetually unpredictable. The cannibalistic nature of Bdellovibrio’s existence finds an eerie parallel in the hyperreal consumption of sound and music. Just as Bdellovibrio engulfs its prey and repurposes its components, so too does modern digital culture absorb and reconstitute noise into an operationalized form. Szepanski describes this process in financial terms: “Noise thus becomes a vital component of the system, an unpredictable activity that paradoxically can also support the equations that underpin modern financial theory.” The cannibalization of bacterial entities mirrors the contemporary commodification of disruption—noise is marketized, just as Bdellovibrio’s predation is harnessed in biotechnology for pathogen control. Eldritch Priest’s commentary on noise music further illuminates this paradox: “Music noise has to divide itself from musical practice that it cannot do without in order for its points of deformation to express the nonsense it wants to become.” This description of noise music’s self-referential entanglement resonates with the function of Bdellovibrio: its existence is predicated on other bacteria, yet its destruction of them is what sustains it. The bacterium’s function is both absolute negation and absolute necessity. If “ultrablack music must produce a kind of black noise,” as Szepanski suggests, then Bdellovibrio represents an ultrablack entity within bacterial life—a microbial embodiment of entropy and renewal. Achim Szepanski’s critique of retro as the dominant mode of contemporary cultural production—a system in which past styles are endlessly repackaged, eliminating the possibility of a truly contemporary aesthetic—resonates with the microbial ecology of Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus. Much as Bdellovibrio preys upon other bacteria, perforating their membranes and metabolizing their remains, contemporary culture feeds upon itself in an endless loop of simulated originality. Mark Fisher’s observations on the disappearance of the future reflect the same recursive stasis: “Today, all retro styles are sold as contemporary precisely because there are no truly contemporary alternatives.” Like a bacterial colony undergoing serial predation, culture is trapped in a metabolic loop of self-consumption, producing not new forms but only variations of already-digested matter. In a bacteriological context, such an environment parallels the ecological conditions of extreme resource depletion—an exhaustion of potential that results in the scavenging of prior metabolic outputs. Fisher’s description of a time that has become white—a time that no longer moves but only reflects its previous states—mirrors the neutralization of historical movement that Jean Baudrillard identified in his discourse on hyperreality. If time has been devoured, what remains is a hollowed-out simulacrum: the empty shell of a preyed-upon bacterium, or an exhausted cultural landscape where “nothing is possible anymore because nothing is impossible anymore.” The process of Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus's invasion—attachment, penetration, digestion, and replication—adheres to a rhythm dictated by necessity rather than harmony. This non-musical, non-representational sequence aligns with Szepanski’s discussion of Rhythmight, where rhythmicity is not a structured, predictable order but an emergent phenomenon of dispersive force. The oscillatory movement of Bdellovibrio between host and prey resonates with Szepanski’s articulation of “the tracing of the immanent rhythmicity of the rhythm in the hearing-in-rhythm.” In this sense, bacterial predation is not a melodic event but a wave phenomenon, an act of kinetic impulse rather than structured motion. Bacteriologists have long understood predation not merely as an interaction between distinct entities but as a continuous process of becoming. As Katherine J. LeDuc has suggested in her studies on microbial extremophiles, the aggressive adaptability of certain bacteria “calls into question our categorical assumptions of predator and prey, self and other, consumer and consumed.” In this light, Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus is not merely a predator but a resonant entity within the entropic field of dissolution that undergirds biological reality. In the Ultrablack framework, Szepanski aligns obscenity with maximum visibility, arguing that the hyperreal condition produces an excess of the visible that ultimately collapses into meaninglessness. Conversely, the abyss—the truly black—preserves secrecy and non-signification. The microbial existence of Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus thrives within this paradigm of unseen violence: an invisible executioner, operating beneath thresholds of perception, a molecular agent of destruction that consumes without being consumed. The black radical tradition, as invoked by Szepanski, does not signify merely an opposition to whiteness but a transgressive engagement with the outside—the contingent, the noise, the collapse. Just as Bdellovibrio dissolves its prey into an indistinct metabolic slurry, so too does Ultrablackness dissolve the distinction between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. In the cosmic scale, galactic cannibalism mirrors this microbial process. The slow dissolution of a satellite galaxy into a larger host is not merely an event but a sustained act of consumption, a metabolic absorption that extends beyond representation into the abyssal condition of pure process. As David Roden notes in his work on posthumanism, “The true rupture of the outside is never a moment, never a discrete event, but an ongoing mutation in which the category of the human itself dissolves.” The predation of Bdellovibrio is not merely an event of bacterial death; it is an expression of a greater entropic necessity. Baudrillard’s notion of “integral music”—in which all noise is eliminated in pursuit of an absolute purity—finds its counterpoint in the bacterial realm, where metabolism functions as a non-music, an unstructured improvisation of biochemical rhythms. Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus, in its relentless pursuit of prey, does not engage in a musical composition but rather an oscillatory noise of presence and erasure. Here, the bacterium’s existence parallels the notion that “music will never be music until it stops representing and starts sounding like non-music or monochrome.” Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus, a delta-proteobacterium, thrives in aquatic and soil ecosystems by preying upon Gram-negative bacteria. It penetrates the periplasm of its victim, dissolving cellular components, and consuming its host from within. The process is neither mere destruction nor synthesis; rather, it is a form of radical subtraction, a reduction of bacterial life to the informational blackness of molecular dissolution. The cycle of attack and regrowth ensures that Bdellovibrio exists as a perpetual, consuming force—a microbial embodiment of Szepanski’s ‘ultrablack.’ Szepanski’s ultrablackness does not refer to a mere absence of light, nor to an aesthetic of darkness, but to an ontological principle—an abyssal force that precedes existence itself. It is the radical nothingness, the pre-cosmic hunger that devours and reconstitutes reality. Like the non-music described by Szepanski, Bdellovibrio’s existence is not an act of communicative exchange but of dissolution; it does not merely consume, it reduces its host to a state of non-being. As Katherine J. LeDuc notes, ‘Bdellovibrio does not hunt for sustenance in a conventional metabolic sense—it deconstructs the biological order, revealing a fundamental void at the core of microbial life.’ The predatory mechanism of Bdellovibrio echoes cosmic structures such as black holes, which consume matter and light, reducing them to an event horizon where information is seemingly lost. In the bacterial realm, Bdellovibrio’s feeding mirrors this process: it enters its prey, extracts energy, and leaves behind an empty shell. ‘To study Bdellovibrio is to glimpse the feeding mechanisms of the universe itself,’ writes D. M. R. McAlister, drawing parallels between cryobiology’s focus on suspended animation and Bdellovibrio’s ability to disrupt and restart biological processes. Just as a black hole warps spacetime, Bdellovibrio warps the microbiological environment, forcing the host into a liminal state between life and dissolution. Szepanski, echoing Baudrillard’s critique of digital music, suggests that music’s over-determination by technical perfection leads to its erasure as an event. Similarly, in the microbial world, Bdellovibrio is not an actor within a system but a disruptor that challenges structured bacterial networks. As Achim Szepanski notes, ‘ultrablack is the basis of a non-music, a new musical a-topia rooted in the generic black universe.’ This resonates with Nico Mas’s description of events as ‘collisions, folds, or alignments’ rather than static entities. Bdellovibrio’s predation is precisely such an event—a folding of biological order into chaotic subtraction. The host does not merely die; it is erased, its structural integrity converted into an informational void. Szepanski’s concept of ultrablackness extends beyond destruction into a space of pure negation, a ‘black that precedes light.’ Bdellovibrio, as an organism, does not escape this condition—it is itself susceptible to viral predation and ecological collapse, existing only as long as there is prey to consume. ‘Bdellovibrio’s fate is entwined with the void it creates,’ notes LeDuc, pointing out the bacterium’s precarious reliance on external hosts. The ultrablack hunger does not sustain, it subtracts. According to D. M. R. McAlister, Bdellovibrio’s existence mirrors the extreme conditions of cryobiology and cryptobiosis, where life is suspended on the threshold between persistence and collapse. He describes Bdellovibrio as a "biological singularity, a microcosmic reflection of astrophysical consumption patterns." In McAlister’s view, the predatory mechanism of Bdellovibrio is not just an adaptation but an essential demonstration of how life itself can embody entropy. Its consumption cycle aligns with Szepanski’s concept of ultrablackness: an abyssal force that devours and reconstitutes reality. The predatory mechanism of Bdellovibrio echoes cosmic structures such as black holes, which consume matter and light, reducing them to an event horizon where information is seemingly lost. In the bacterial realm, Bdellovibrio’s feeding mirrors this process: it enters its prey, extracts energy, and leaves behind an empty shell. ‘To study Bdellovibrio is to glimpse the feeding mechanisms of the universe itself,’ writes McAlister, drawing parallels between cryobiology’s focus on suspended animation and Bdellovibrio’s ability to disrupt and restart biological processes. Just as a black hole warps spacetime, Bdellovibrio warps the microbiological environment, forcing the host into a liminal state between life and dissolution.