How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters

Abstract

I tasted my first oyster in college at a Manhattan dinner party, goaded on by the hostess, who told me it was like eating the sea in its totality. Rather like Alice and her tinctures, the oyster seemed, in its own self-contained container, to say, “Eat me and I'll transform you, midwesterner.” Current scholarly debates about the agency of things, the vibrancy of matter, and the trajectory of posthumanism guide Steel's exploration of medieval conceptions of the boundaries, ethics, and limitations of community. Oysters arrive at the end of Steel's book. As a “border creature,” the oyster's slippery being unravels the perceived division between humans and animals. How can we be certain that we humans are sentient, suffering, and soul-full, whereas animals are not? What distinguishes humans from animals and how we can know is an age-old line of questioning entertained by Aristotle, Descartes, Derrida. And now Steel, happily, turns the question on its head to ask what makes us not human. Or, rather, in what ways are we like—and very much a part of the lives of—pets, worms, birds, and oysters?If we look to pre-Cartesian and, in particular, medieval authors, we find that community need not be defined in terms of difference—of who is inside and who outside—but can instead be experienced through seething, feeling, breeding beings living with, off, and from each other. Drawing on medieval literary analysis, eco-criticism, animal studies, and feminist theory, Steel deftly leads us by way of werewolves and cats, mute and abandoned children, carnivorous worms and birds, and denizens of the ocean floor to understand that we “share the condition of being unable not to be exposed to suffering . . . we all share a fundamental inability.” It is the vulnerability of all creatures that moves Steel to argue for the imbricated nature of all, both now and in the deeper past. Human community emerges among other creatures, in narrative patterns that describe temporary communities defined by networks of care, rather than by sovereign domination scripted as dialectic encounters between the civilized and the wild. Like Boethius coming to understand the fullness of divine intelligence, we are led to the precipice of sensing that another perspective is possible, one in which human exceptionalism, reason-being, and self-sufficiency are myopic and limited ways of seeing. We, as crowds and multitudes, are part of something larger, an already known moment in which social consciousness is not a movement for political ends but a perspectival adaptation—a way of being in this together.