Insensate Oysters and Our Nonconsensual Existence

The earliest version of this paper, deliveredat the Oceanic New York symposium, tried to change the way people normally write about oysters. Oyster books love to talk about pearls and Chesapeake Bay’s oyster war; they love how oyster middens chart the passage not of cavemen but of “covemen,” who followed the beds of oysters around coasts in a kind of gustatory cartogra-phy.2 These same writers happily accept the oyster’s fleshy invitation to aphrodisiacal excess. And when they look to New York City, they love to mourn the loss of its oyster beds, closed by pollution and over-harvesting, perhaps for good, in 1927, once home to trillions of the creatures, a seedbed for nostalgia for the grittier appetites of New York’s presumably populist past.3 I asked us to remember the oyster itself by remembering its shell, calcium carbon-ate, particularly important now to offset the increasing acidification of the oceans; likewise, I asked that we appreciate how prodigiously a living oyster filters water. What they ingest and don’t eat, oysters eject as pseudofeces, which, coated in mucous, fall to the ocean floor to be processed by anoxic bacteria. The cleaner, deacidified water oysters leave behind is what just about everything else needs to live. I wanted us to look to projects to use bring oysters back to New York, like the architect Kate Orff ’s call for “oystertecture,” an “invertebrate architecture” to help abate the force of hurricanes, to keep New York City safe from our future’s inevitable Sandies.