Theory & Event

We all try to muster defensible claims about the nature of the human subject, even if much of this work remains implicit or unproblematized. After settling on some philosophical anthropology in one form or another we can then think about what humans are capable of accomplishing, and why they might act to achieve the ends they pursue. But as we pursue questions about the nature of the human subject many of us get extended between two opposed extremes: between the position that there is no human nature, to more definitive biologistic claims. The "nature/nurture debate," then, by and large frames the issue in a way that overdetermines how we think about the range of possibilities. In Biocultural Creatures, Samantha Frost bridges the divide that we so often stumble over. Human beings, she demonstrates convincingly, are both biological creatures and capable of becoming. For instance, we are meaning-making animals. But how that happens is constrained by and made possible because of biological mechanisms and nonhuman processes. In elaborating the basis for why nature/nurture is a false dualism, Frost reminds us that understanding the political construction of the domain of biology enables us to begin to be able to understand the nonhuman, nature, the creaturely, the animal, outside of our ideological construction of it and in so doing better understand ourselves.

What, then, does the biocultural suggest about how we should think about questions of agency, responsibility, embodiment, and the broader question of the nature of the political worlds that humans construct? It is from here that this symposium proceeds.

The contributors to this symposium were chosen because each have offered important contributions to the biocultural project in their own right, and in their own ways – that is, from their own disciplinary perspectives and training, the authors have engaged with biological resources constructively by thinking about how to do this well rather than by insisting that those doing this work justify why they are doing so in the first place. The thinkers gathered here are contributing to an emerging research agenda that enables two much needed interventions in the nature/nurture impasse: against presumptions that "biology" is entirely internal whereas "environment" is entirely external, the biocultural cultures (to use Frost's terminology) biology as such and, as a result, provides some of the tools necessary to think about biology as [End Page 485] a space of possibility, of emergence, rather than as a new determinism. This symposium, inspired by the biocultural project more generally, also aims for something novel in the current academic environment, where narrow specialization is often conflated with the demands of rigor: a transdisciplinary forum for thinking with and through the concept of the biocultural using Biocultural Creatures as a shared launching pad. Shared is the appropriate word here because it gestures toward what is necessary to study what is an impure, heterogeneous human reality. To state the premise of Biocultural Creatures more boldly than Frost herself does: the human subject and politics more generally can't be meaningfully understood from within any single discipline. One can always make these subjects fit into some regime or another by constraining reality in a way that makes it easier to study. Or you can allow the messiness itself to dictate which methods we make use of. In other words, transdisciplinary exploration is an approach to knowledge production that, as Jane Anna Gordon writes, acknowledges "what it is both to remain painfully aware of the most salient of meaningful differences while paying equal attention to how they might be effectively synthesized in solidarities," which enables us to "foster the stitching together of answers we could not otherwise fathom."¹ In this symposium we pursue such a project.