The Human As (and Through) Imbrication: Frost’s Biocultural Creatures

Reading Samantha Frost’s Biocultural Creatures, I am reminded of the giraffes of Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Writing at the turn of the 19^th century, Lamarck held that exposure to and experience of one’s environment provoked changes in physiology that were then passed on to future generations. This was emblematized by the necks of giraffes being gradually elongated by a life spent stretching for leaves. At least in my day, these giraffes featured in biology textbooks as the naïve precursor to Charles Darwin’s widely accepted theory of evolution.

Biocultural Creatures brings these giraffes to mind for two reasons, each of which signals the distinctive endeavor and contribution of the book. First, Frost’s sustained investigation of contemporary life sciences seems to redeem them from the status of quaint first foray in evolutionary thinking, for at the heart of her book is the revelation that—from atom to protein to cell—living creatures are wholly imbricated in, interactive with, and dependent upon their environments, so much so that the notion of a distinct dividing line between human and non-human, self and context, seems to all but dissolve entirely. While her final chapter reestablishes a sense of distinction, this is still only achieved by considering such interaction with one’s environment over time as well as space—indeed, by a ‘theory of inheritance’ very akin to that proposed by Lamarck so long ago. Ultimately, Frost gestures to a notion of the human that is achieved without recourse to clean and final distinctions to either given context or ‘non-human’ counterparts. In doing so, the book finds a conceptual language and scientific grounding to offer a truly ‘new theory of the human.’

Second, Lamarck’s giraffes—and their contrast to both Darwin’s theory and his place of esteem in Western science—draw attention to a theme that explicitly and tacitly runs throughout Frost’s book: the cultural-historical nature of scientific inquiry, attested to by the radical retractions and reversals of position that each, in their time, are asserted with relief to finally discover the truth. If Lamarck, albeit in more nuanced form, reappears today in just such a reversal of ostensible fact, this raises certain questions regarding how scientific findings might be engaged by and brought to bear on political theory, and indeed the presumed relationship between these fields of inquiry that so often imbues the former with a primary authority. Biocultural Creatures engages with contemporary science as resource and authority, and yet works actively and dexterously to circumvent the conventional reduction of theory to “become the ‘so-what’ brigade tasked with elaborating the policy, regulatory, or administrative ramifications of particular experimental findings” (19). What Frost does with these findings as a political theorist presents the most fascinating and important dimensions of the book.

This book is a natural extension of her previous work on materiality, insofar as it addresses a persistent gap in a scholarship that largely still cleaves to abstracted or general notions of the body even as it asserts the significance of material bodies. Hesitance to engage embodiment in terms of biological processes and materials is understandable—Frost is all too aware of the risk of reducing living beings to their biology—but to take materiality seriously is, for Frost, to demand an understanding of the actual matter that composes and sustains human life. This book is also the culmination of eighteen months of intensive study of life sciences, from molecular genetics to environmental toxicology, in an effort to “fac[e] that scandal [of being a living being], an effort to begin thinking theoretically about humans as alive, as living bodies, as biocultural creatures” (24).

In this, Frost pits herself against two looming myths: on the one hand, presumptions of human exceptionalism that set us apart from other species by virtue of reason, morality, autonomy, or speech; on the other, an equally pervasive and tenacious scientific myth...