Not Human, Again

Abstract

Not Human, Again Stephanie LeMenager (bio) The "nonhuman turn" implies a movement in academic circles toward appreciating new materialisms, vital objects, animals who are not human, human animality, and the multiform ecological interrelationships that scratch and wear our edges, making us sick, healthy, creative, and merely alive. I greet this statement of academic trending with couched enthusiasm. Couched because, to announce the possible title of Paul Outka's forthcoming book, we've never been human. My enthusiasm expresses relief that a broad swatch of academia [End Page 401] has taken note. If "the human" signifies the uniquely transcendental status of our species, as the only one possessed of soul, or if it implies our monopoly on the production of language and art, or our talent for political aggregation, there are, in every case, counterarguments. The biopsychologist Barbara Smuts, extending the criticism of the animal trainer and linguist Vicki Hearne, notes that the language experiments performed in the late twentieth century on chimps such as Washoe and Nim were equivalent to teaching a foreign language and culture to a person, then judging that person's inability to reproduce the foreign language in its behavioral context as evidence of inferior communicative competency. Embedded with a troop of baboons in East Africa, Smuts becomes attuned, if imperfectly, to a communication regime so subtle and deeply embodied that she begins to move spontaneously with the troop when it—keenly aware of the vital world—perceives a distant, approaching storm.1 Of course it's easy to romanticize animals who have not believed themselves human. They don't seem to suffer the problem of being "beside" themselves, which might be interpreted as self-consciousness or a more educated sensitivity to theological and philosophical questions. To be "beside ourselves in a sane sense" was an attribute of human "thinking" for Henry Thoreau, who imagined us humans as both "driftwood in the stream" and "Indra in the sky looking down on it,"2 material and transcendent, spirit-brutes sometimes dragged low with the woodchucks and sensual sleepers. Thoreau's journals record his half-naked walks in the Concord River, shirt-tails floating and feet sunk in river silt, an attempt to live extravagantly, as he might say, out of the bounds of humanism when that concept is understood as a minimally embodied mode of being. The academic "nonhuman turn" describes an iteration of Thoreau's sane besideness, where humanism as an organizing thematic of Western thought sits self-consciously alongside notions that extend its assumptions. I've decided to drop "the nonhuman" as a diagnostic for the limitations of humanism and simply declare a more interesting and diffuse human turn, building out "the human" in response to theorists who have done a great deal to break down and qualify it. The word "human," in some circles, has long implied something other and something more. "Relationality," while not a sonorous term, brings into focus one aspect of what has been emphasized by science studies and especially feminist science studies after Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, N. Katherine Hayles, and, now, Stacy Alaimo's ecological, material feminism. I [End Page 402] take the term "relationality" from Hayles, who writes that "beginning with relation rather than pre-existing entities changes everything. It enables us to see that embodied experience comes not only from the complex interplay between brain and viscera . . . but also from the constant engagement of our embodied interactions with the environment."3 Haraway's interest in companion species coming into relationship with each other through gene-culture co-evolution, Latour's object actants, Hayles's resistance to technophilic reinstantiations of the Cartesian cogito, and Alaimo's studies of the trans-corporeality of human and other bodies inextricably "mattering" into each other by way of industrial toxins have remapped the human without necessitating its erasure as a name for both a biological type and a shifting aspirational desire. When I set relationality loose in nineteenth-century America in the brief case study below, my primary set of interpenetrative actors are humans, airs, and sunlight. From the instrumentalist side of recent critical qualifications of the human, I also conceive the human as yet another name for energy, in other words a...

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