Building on work by David Morris, Peter Atterton ... 2 D. Morris, âFaces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontologyâ, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p.
Facing Animals in Research: Identifying technologies of effacement By Sophia Efstathiou To be translated and published in German, in: Wunsch, Matthias; Böhnert, Martin; Köchy, Kristian (Eds.), Philosophie der Tierforschung, Vol. 3: Milieus und Akteure. Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag 2017
It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person in its first meaning is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role…. It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.1
1. Introduction Pavlo has such a beautifully lithe body, small and wonderfully furry. Every morning when I wake up he jumps in the bed and starts his morning facials, licking into nostrils and eyeballs and all the wrong places –with great care. I take it for granted that humans can and do form close bonds with (some) other animals. Instead I am interested in how this type of communication gets to be blocked during the performance of scientific research –and in the normative challenges this creates for humans in animal research. The key concept I use for my analysis is that of the face. Building on work by David Morris, Peter Atterton and Emmanuel Levinas, I understand a face as a surface that communicates, in part through its sensed aspects, something beyond the sensed, an invisible depth: the being of an Other.2 My understanding extends an ordinary idea of the face, as a “head-‐face” to include other bodily or embodied aspects that can express the inner being of an Other: e.g. voices, smells, or bodily movements. For clarity I will signify this concept by capitals as FACE. So how does human-‐animal communication get blocked? Instead of analysing this as a process of objectification3 (happening to animals) or of distancing4 (happening to researchers), I articulate it as a process of effacement happening to both animals and humans during research. I claim that animal research is populated with technologies which support performative (affective and cognitive) strategies for coming to be an analyst5, seeing an animal as what Michael Lynch calls an “analytic”
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R.E. Park, Race and Culture, Glencoe IL: The Free Press, p 249. Quoted in E. Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1959, p. 19. 2 D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 124-‐ 169. P. Atterton, 2011. “Levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals”, in: Inquiry, 54(6)/2011, p. 633-‐649. E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961]. 3 Cf. M.C. Nussbaum , “Objectification”, in: Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(4)/1995, p. 249-‐291. 4 Lynda Birke, Arnold Arluke and Mike Michael argue that scientists and lab workers “learn to deal with the moral dilemmas” of animal experimentation by developing psychological strategies to distance themselves from distressing situations; they see these psychological distancing strategies as identity transformations resulting from scientific education. Cf. L. Birke, A. Arluke & M. Michael, The sacrifice: How scientific experiments transform animals and people, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2007; esp. p. 127; 78. 5 Erving Goffman understands performance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which
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object, which have moral dimensions.6 I identify five types of what I call technologies of effacement operating to structure these encounters: 1. Built architectures, 2. Entering and exiting procedures, 3. Protective garments and equipment, 4. Identification and labelling techniques, 5. Experimental protocols. I propose that these technologies operate to block animal and human FACE (and often to add a new one): They transform physical appearances, sonic-‐, tactile-‐, smell or other sense-‐scapes, structuring encounters in the lab in ways that help perform research participants’ professional roles and responsibilities. However, effacement is never complete. Experimental design vacillates between conceiving of the animals involved as “faceless”, laboratory equipment, bought, quality checked and discarded once used, and as other animals that humans “face”, whose behaviours, pains and bodies animal researchers can and should relate to their own. This creates a burden for people working with animals in research. Despite established procedures for getting “research ethics approval”, animal research still raises distinct normative challenges, as felt alignments between animals and humans as Others with a FACE get mangled up in the encounters that animal research consists in. What I dub humanimal research ethics flags these encounters as crucial points for ethical attention that get leftover and overlooked by standard animal research ethics guidelines. The chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 articulates a challenge I hope to start addressing here: the normative concerns facing humans involved in animal research. Section 3 introduces a philosophical understanding of the face as an expressive, sensible surface, which attest to the presence of inner depth, life or being, building on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Atterton and David Morris. Section 4 suggests that encounters between humans and animals in the lab operate through what I call technologies of effacement. I conclude with an urge for a humanimal research ethics. But first, allow me to describe how I came to these questions. 2. Background: ELSI, ethics and implicit normative challenges in animal research 2.1 The embedded philosopher in the lab I was employed to work as a philosopher on a project developing systems biology tools. Systems biology is a field of emerging science which (like synthetic biology, or nanotechnology) is considered to be potentially innovative in ways that societies need to anticipate and try to control. In such fields of emerging science there has been a push for philosophers and social scientists to get involved in the research, early on and with a broad aim of anticipating ethical, legal and societal aspects of technologies before they get locked into a production system and become difficult to change. It was as part of such a project that I got to have an office in a medical facility in Norway from January 2012 to spring 2013. In that period I got to follow some animal research, including the training and sacrifices of rodents, for a period of approximately six months7.
serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” who can thereby be characterized as an “audience”, “observers” or “co-‐participants”, cf. E. Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1959, p. 26. My analysis rather focuses on how performances are themselves influenced by a cultural, scientific context. 6 M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 265-‐289. 7 My permission to share empirical material from this research, including interview and photographic data, was withdrawn by participants two years after our work. This followed a YouTube video presentation of this work, which created concerns about the procedure the project followed to get consent and the potential of identifying researchers through contextual information. I thus here share the gist of my philosophical insights
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Systems biology is an interdisciplinary field aiming to bring applied mathematicians and computer scientists together with biologists to develop new ways to do biology: mainly through developing computational models of biological processes and computational tools to manage biological data and information, e.g. knowledgebases or ontologies. The field came out of the success of sequencing the human genome using computational tools. Same for ELSA research: It too is a sister to the ELSI arm of the Human Genome Project, allocated a part of the budget to think of Ethical Legal and Social Issues around the handling of genetic information for different populations. I was drawn to animal research by an interest in philosophy of science: understanding how and why one might transition from “wet-‐lab” models in biology, including cell lines or animal models, to “dry-‐ lab”, computational ones.8 I was specifically interested in how a mundane animal like a rat may become a suitable entity for doing science. I have been writing about how some everyday concepts become scientific, thinking of this process as comprised of finding and founding ideas in science, and of this production as “found science” by analogy to the type of art made of everyday objects, or “found art”.9 What caught my interest though –or rather me, what captivated me-‐ in the context of animal research was not the epistemological dimension of animal modelling, but the practical difficulty of experimenting with animals –what one might call the practical, ethical dimension of this work. Ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, which has a dual significance in Greek (like mores has in Latin). Ethos can be attributed to a person or a practice and refer to the character of that person or practice, but it can also refer to habits or common behaviours of a person or of a culture. Indeed one might say this second significance matters in determining the first. The word character comes from the Greek verb, charazo, which means to carve. One´s character gets carved out, shaped by habitually behaving in certain ways –and it often gets determined by others through examining such repeated behaviours. If I am late to the meeting on Friday, late to the meeting on Tuesday, late to the meeting on Wednesday, you might be justified in saying that “Sophia is bad at keeping time”; or you could make an even more damning judgment, e.g. “She is disrespectful”. We often characterise people by interpreting their behaviour, observed or sampled over some period of time, and this involves noticing how they habitually behave. Establishing the ethos of a practice, then, under this interpretation, becomes a matter of
without this material. 8
There is already considerable literature on this topic –for instance, S. De Chadarevian, “Of worms and programmes: Caenorhabditis elegans and the study of development”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 29/1998, p. 81–105; R. Meunier,“Stages in the development of a model organism as a platform for mechanistic models in developmental biology: Zebrafish, 1970–2000”, in: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 43/3012, p. 522-‐531; R.A. Ankeny, and S. Leonelli, “What’s so special about model organisms?”, in: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 42/2011, p. 313–323. 9
S. Efstathiou, The use of ‘race’ as a variable in biomedical research, UC San Diego: PhD Thesis, 2009. Available at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/18s69193 Last accessed: 07.06.17. S. Efstathiou, “How Ordinary Race Concepts Get to be Usable in Biomedical Science: An Account of Founded Race Concepts”, in: Philosophy of Science, 79/2012, p. 701–713. S. Efstathiou, “Is it possible to give scientific solutions to Grand Challenges? On the idea of grand challenges for life science research”, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 56/2016, p. 48-‐61.
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investigating how “we” (people or communities) carve out the world and ourselves through habitual actions and practices and their interpretations –asking what character we would like to carve out for ourselves or our surroundings. Carving out the world through analytic discernment and classificatory practices, “carving nature at its joints,” as many say science does, involves scientific practices with their own characters, carved out alongside those of the humans or non-‐humans who participate in it and becoming a place where composite ontological-‐epistemological-‐ethical questions may arise. In animal research, faced with entities whose bodies when we pick them apart hurt, this dimension of analytic work becomes vivid -‐ and hard. My question then, which I noticed being answered through work in an animal lab, became not how animals become possible to conceive and work with as if they were scientific models, but rather or also, how do humans become able to approach and handle animals as if they were models? How do people and animals get to be people and animals of/for science?
2.2. Explicated ethical principles in animal research The use of animals in research is highly contested but nonetheless pervasive. The US National Institutes of Health report that 47% of all research grants they award include an animal research component and they estimate that between 12 and 14.5 billion tax dollars go to fund this every year. In the EU, in 2011 only, 11.5 million animals (excluding fish) were used for research purposes. Animal experiments are used as toxicology controls, to approve veterinary and medical applications, and for education purposes but a majority of research goes into basic studies in biology. Principles about the ethical use of animals in research are currently explicated through standards of practice, as well as through law and regulations. In the United States animal research is regulated mainly through the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC International). AAALAC accreditation operates on a voluntary basis –though AAALAC standards are in practice required by all major funders of research in the US.10 In the European context animal care is instead legally binding by European law –the EU Directive 2010/63, ETS 123. According to European law, research aims for a “full replacement of procedures on live animals for scientific and educational purposes as soon as it is scientifically possible to do so”.11 Scientists are expected to look for alternatives to animal models, for instance through the development of alternative wet-‐lab models, such as cell-‐lines or plasma, but also by developing dry-‐lab computational models to simulate the biological phenomena under study. Those who in the meantime do pursue animal-‐based research are urged to follow the so-‐called “3Rs” of animal care: Reducing the number of experimental animals used in a study while balancing the number and type of procedures performed in a single animal, Replacing higher with less sentient organisms and Refining the experimental setup in order to reduce negative impacts on animals and enhance their
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Currently more than 900 institutions in 39 countries are AAALAC accredited and the professed spirit of AAALAC is to respect and go beyond national guidelines for animal care in the contexts where it operates. Some concerns have been reported regarding the higher number of violations observed in AAALAC International accredited institutions compared to publicly funded ones, suggesting that perhaps internal AAALAC oversight is not sufficient -‐cf. D. Grimm, “Animal welfare accreditation called into question: PETA study finds violations more often in approved labs”, in: Science 345(6200)/2014, 988. These results may have to do with the scale of operations in AAALAC-‐accredited facilities compared to other laboratories (ibid.). 11 Cf. DIRECTIVE 2010/63/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes. Available at: http://eur-‐lex.europa.eu/legal-‐ content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32010L0063 Last accessed: 05.06.17.
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quality of life.12 These guidelines have been operationalized into criteria for approving research designs, mostly through “harm-‐benefit” analyses undertaken by institutional, private or public, animal research ethics boards. In animal research like in clinical work, globalisation requires simple enough standards of practice that can be cross-‐checked and harmonised across nations.13 Globalisation comes with a need to explicate the implicit ethics of a practice.14 What is not articulated however in neither voluntary nor legally binding standards for animal research is how to treat human participants in animal research. What are our (social) ethical responsibilities towards humans in this work? 2.3 What remains implicit Animal research is hard. Consider the testimony of the graduate student called “Alex”, recorded by Nicole Nelson: The rats that I was microinjecting in the series of experiments that I’ve done so far, they just –I just couldn’t take it. I was almost in tears over these guys, because they hate it. … And you talk to people and they’ll tell you, “Oh, you know, what you should do is wrap a towel around them so that you get a better grip and they don´t fight as much.” And it’s like, well, it’s not the fighting that’s the problem with me or whether or not it’s wrapped in a towel; it’s the fact that I know I’m causing these animals physical pain right now, and that just really bothers me. And it doesn’t just bother me from a moral perspective –I don’t know if this is what you had in mind– but it bothers me from [a perspective of] “Oh my God, I’m just creating so much stress in these animals right now and then I’m going to go and test them!” How can I realistically say that that super stress that I just gave it –I’m talking about a two minute injection where they’re squirming and squealing the whole time –and then I put them in the box and say, “Hey, show me what you’ve learned, but don’t let stress affect you.” It’s just ridiculous.15 Alex is heard to struggle with his work on multiple levels. First, it is difficult emotionally and practically. Alex begins to talk about the rats he was microinjecting in his experiments, only to flip from the animal to the human subject, “they just” –“I just” “couldn’t take it”. Alex empathises and relates to the rats’ bodies squirming and voices squealing “the whole time”. He describes his own state as being “almost in tears” over “these guys” because “they hate it” –the strong emotional language of hate and tears communicating a state of distress for him, a guy, a researcher, responding to “these (animal) guys” whom he shares the situation with. Performing these microinjections is hard to take, first of all on an emotional level –to keep hurting another animal who you know is in pain. But the work can be difficult also on a second, social/professional level. The felt, embodied struggle
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The 3Rs are based on Russell and Burch (1959), The principles of humane experimental technique, available at: http://altweb.jhsph.edu/pubs/books/humane_exp/het-‐toc Last accessed: 05.06.17. 13 Cf. S.W. Glickman, J.G. McHutchison, E.D. Peterson, C.B. Cairns, R.A. Harrington, R.M. Califf and K.A. Schulman, “Ethical and scientific implications of the globalisation of clinical research”, in: New England Journal of Medicine, 360(8)/2009, p. 816-‐823. 14 D. Matten, and J. Moon, “‘Implicit’ and ‘explicit’ CSR: A conceptual framework for a comparative understanding of corporate social responsibility”, in: Academy of Management Review, 33(2)/2008, p. 404-‐424. S. Granum Carson, Ø. Hagen and P.S. Sethi, “From implicit to explicit CSR in a Scandinavian context: The cases of HÅG and Hydro”, in: Journal of Business Ethics, 127(1)/2013, p. 17-‐31. 15 N.C. Nelson, “Model homes for model organisms: Intersections of animal welfare and behavioral neuroscience around the environment of the laboratory mouse”, in: Biosocieties, 11(46)/2016, doi10.1057/biosoc.2015.19, p. 8-‐9.
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of Alex and his animals does not seem adequately responded to by his colleagues. The “people” you talk to and what “they” tell you comes with “Oh, you know” – as if this is some common routine practice that you (should already) know about. The response is reported to cancel the urgency of the personal, felt struggle which Alex presents to his colleagues. Indeed the advice Alex is given is to devise a technique that will in part block this troubled relating and feeling and instead maintain his force over the animals (and himself), such as “wrap a towel around them”, “get a better grip” –so that the animals “don’t fight as much”. Alex is told to physically insulate himself from the animal – which does not satisfy him. A third type of normative challenge is evidenced from this excerpt: how practical and ethical questions interact with epistemological ones in animal research. Alex counters the advice his colleagues offer as a poor solution to “his problem”: “I know I´m causing these animals physical pain right now, and that really bothers me”, and not “just from a moral perspective”. Indeed besides encounters that are emotionally charged, and how to handle these in a “professional” way there comes the epistemic and physiological significance of the stress felt by the animals (and perhaps by the researchers) in these settings. What are the physiological, psychological or otherwise embodied impacts of the experimental procedures, and how can these be isolated from the conditions under study? As Vinciane Despret has argued, relationships between experimenters and their animals can be mutually constituting, creating and reinforcing expectations through embodied interactions that create the expected effects.16 Note finally that harbouring these interrelated normative questions is communicated by Alex as an experience of duplicity: a fracturing of the scientist’s role. On the one hand he is “creating so much stress in these animals” and suffering himself, and on the other hand, putting the animals in a box and saying to them, in a new voice: “Hey, show me what you have learned, but don´t let stress affect you”. This registers a conflict between the ethics of the experimenter as the person struggling with giving the animals a “super stress”, “a two minute injection where they´re squirming and squealing the whole time”, and those of a “professor”, someone whose role is to supervise the animals, and to be shown what the animals have “learned” irrespective of this stress. Similarly the animals are seen to be fighting, squealing and squirming but also paradoxically expected, like teacher’s pets, to comply with the experimenter’s demands and get him good answers to his questions. A further example of research and technical staff experiencing conflicting identities/roles is found in Mette Svendsen and Lene Koch’s account of animal research in Denmark.17 This exchange takes place during sacrificing piglets born prematurely, removed from their mother, and then used to model neonatal care for Necrotising Enterocolitis (an infectious disease of the intestinal tract). The piglets being sacrificed on this occasion were the few who had survived to day 5 of the experiment with this painful condition. As someone enters the room, Morten [researcher] shouts: “Welcome to the slaughterhouse.” A lab technician, Tina, comments, “You say slaughter. Yesterday, I said to my friend: ´Tomorrow we are going to murder pigs,´ and she answered: ´Can´t you say that you put them down [afliver dem]?´ ´No,´ I said, ´we murder them [dræber grise].´” Laura [lab
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V. Despret, “The body we care for: Figures of anthropo-‐zoo-‐genesis”, in: Body and Society, 10(2-‐3)/2004, p. 111-‐134. Despret uses different examples, including that of Clever Hans: Hans was a horse who fooled his trainer and audiences by his ability to “count” to a specified number by tapping his foot. Hans managed to do this by learning to “read” his human examiners’ body-‐language, recognising in their responses when they expected him to stop tapping. 17 M. Svendsen and L. Koch, “Potentializing the research piglet in experimental neonatal research”, in: Current Anthropology, 54(57)/2013, p. 118-‐128.
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technician], who is labelling pieces of intestine, interrupts: “No, you are wrong. What we do is that we put them down.” While the three of them obviously disagree about how to describe the act that has just happened, they also laugh. Lone [researcher] grabs a small container and jokingly begs Morten. “May I have my piece?” “You vulture!” comments Laura ironically. Lone gets her piece of intestine, puts the container in her pocket and leaves for the cell lab [professional roles added].18 This exchange points to the multiple identities that piglets and lab workers are called to assume in this context: The animals are alternately seen as farm animals that would be “slaughtered”, persons “murdered”, companion pets that are to be “put down”, or found kill that would be “scavanged”, while lab workers variously assume or assign to each other the roles of rearers, enemies, guardians, or scavangers of the animals. The moral blame assigned to these roles varies from the minimal blame of a pet owner putting down an animal to someone intentionally murdering an Other. Note also the operation of humour in this exchange: this affective engagement makes it possible to express feelings and personality while shielding participants from feelings of sadness and resisting commitments to what is said. Even if a normative conflict in one’s presumed roles is not directly reported or discussed, a work environment may flag it. In addition to internal uneasiness, animal research professionals often perceive themselves as continuously at risk of social criticism and social stigma, being considered “unprincipled or shameless”, or feeling “stuck behind the barricades”.19 The performance of animal research is often hidden interpersonally, people saying what disease they are working on, e.g. “I work on heart disease”, rather than saying how they work on this, e.g. using pigs. But critique can also come from other scientists, targeting researchers working on what seem to be animal welfare issues instead of “science”. Carrie Friese describes the social ridicule of the researcher she names Elspeth by a graduate student with whom she was travelling to the same conference: The man claimed to his friends in a voice loud enough to be heard across a train compartment, that he was not going to any “ethics” session “all he was concerned about was the science”.20 Elspeth’s work had contributed to “ethics” through the design of a telemetric measurement device to replace a surgically inserted tether. This technique promised to enhance both the experience of the animal and the translatability of research results to human settings (as most humans are not, at least not physically, tethered). In sum, normative challenges emerge on at least four interconnected levels for people involved in animal research: First, on a relational, emotional level: How should you feel? What emotions and what relations should animals and people have in the lab? Second in a social, professional arena: How should you act? What problems should you discuss in a professional context? What is a good professional practice? (-‐Is it OK to wrap a towel around it?) Third on an epistemic level: How should you learn or know from animal experiments? What is “ethics” and what is “science”? Fourth, how should one relate animal research work to others, inside and outside research? In the case of Alex, Nelson reports that he described himself as perhaps overreacting as in the end
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M. Svendsen and L. Koch, “Potentializing the research piglet in experimental neonatal research”, in: Current Anthropology, 54(57)/2013, p. 125-‐126. Note that Denmark has a long and extensive tradition of pig farming. The cultural and historical relationships to piglets may thus be distinctively richer in this context. 19 L. Birke, A. Arluke & M. Michael, The sacrifice: How scientific experiments transform animals and people, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2007, p. 154-‐155. T. Holmberg, “A feeling for the animal: On becoming an experimentalist”, in: Society and Animals, 16/2008, p. 316-‐335. 20 C. Friese, “Realizing potential in translational medicine: The Uncanny emergence of care as science”, in: Current Anthropology, 54(7)/2013, p. 134.
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the test results appeared “normal”.21 Caring, in Nelson’s interpretation, makes for extra “emotional labour” for researchers22, while animal welfare-‐related protocol changes may compromise continuity in experimental methods and affect replicability in science. And yet care is mandated by regulators. 2.3 A “culture of care” Animal testing experts are increasingly conceding that a non-‐caring animal science is not only bad ethics but bad science. This is for two main reasons. First, as popular wisdom has it, “happy animals give better results”. Animals as sentient beings respond to pain, distress or environmental changes in a way that, like in humans, can cause homeostatic responses influencing metabolic, hormonal and neuroendocrine responses that can bias experimental results. Second, it is notoriously tough to extrapolate results from animal studies to claims about humans. And one possible source of confounders here again are stressors or constraints under which an experimental animal is in, especially if these are obviously different in the expected target, clinical setting. Results obtained on severely stressed, confined or, badly treated animals will often not translate validly into human settings, as most humans are usually well-‐cared for as patients. According to the EU: “Care” in connection with laboratory animals kept for breeding purposes, covers all aspects of the relationship between animals and man. Its substance is the sum of material and non-‐ material resources provided by man to obtain and maintain an animal in a physical and mental state where it suffers least, and promotes good science (Commission Recommendation 2007/526/EC Annex; Emphasis added). Not only is care understood in a broad sense, including material and non-‐material resources, it is also increasingly expected of all staff working with animals. Still, as Carrie Friese poignantly discusses, considering animal care as a factor ensuring the validity of research outcomes is “uncanny”.23 It is of course known and familiar that animals must be cared for, and yet care is strange in an environment engineered to make animals sick in specific –humanly relevant –ways and to, usually, in conclusion, kill them. According to the UK National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) “all staff”, in veterinarian, technical and research roles are to receive the right “training, attitude, motivation and skills” which are seen as “key to maintaining a ‘culture of care’”, including: technicians dealing with animal husbandry, feeding, cleaning animal cages and maintaining the animals, veterinarians monitoring the health of the animals, and researchers using the animals to answer scientific questions. This is notable, as these professions have traditionally had different responsibilities once it came to care given to the animals, with technical and veterinary staff being more likely to have the possibility of building caring relations to laboratory animals compared to research staff, whose work usually intrinsically involves making animals sick. Some empirical psychological research suggests that supporting caring relations between staff and animals can enhance the experience of personnel in these roles –besides contributing to animal health and welfare.24
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N.C. Nelson, “Model homes for model organisms: Intersections of animal welfare and behavioral neuroscience around the environment of the laboratory mouse”, in: Biosocieties, 11(46)/2016, doi10.1057/biosoc.2015.19, p. 9. 22 A.R. Hochschild, The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. 23 C. Friese, “Realizing potential in translational medicine: The Uncanny emergence of care as science”, in: Current Anthropology, 54(7)/2013, p. S129-‐S138, here S134. 24 M. Arluke, “Sacrificial symbolism in animal experimentation: Object or pet?”, in Anthrozoos 2/1988, p. 98-‐ 117. Psychologist Harold Herzog recommends that personnel in veterinarian and technical roles should be encouraged to form bonds with animals in their care –though he does not take a position on the relations
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I introduce the idea of humanimal research ethics to articulate normative challenges left out by common ethical accounts of animal research, such as facing conflicts of care. The standard ethics treatment of the research situation speaks of the 3Rs, and neglects the idea that harms might be inflicted on both animals and humans in the research situation. Even if traditional ethics considered researchers it would likely be through the lens of professional ethics, providing principles for specific professions, and types of situation. General principles are great; they can help harmonise standards and monitor research, but they are not enough, and when they work to invisibilise day-‐to-‐day challenges they are a problem. Working towards a humanimal research ethics means considering that the character(s) of research situations are shaped through encounters and interactions between humans and animals in these settings and these specifics matter. 3. Performing care: Technologies of effacement Animal research is hard. It can create normative conflicts for the staff, questioning their roles and how they should respond to animals in their care. A way in which these normative questions both come up, and get stifled, is through the engagement of what I call technologies of effacement. In order to contextualise and better understand effacement as I propose it here, I will relate this account to three others: a. the claim of Michael Lynch that (naturalistic) animals can be rendered into analytic tools25; b. Peter Atterton’s proposal that Emmanuel Levinas offers a concept of the face that can apply to animals26; c. David Morris’s claim that knowing (through) a face comes with its own logic which contrasts that of analytic science.27 By drawing on these views I argue that building analytic knowledge through animals includes effacing animals and humans involved in this work, and that encounters between animals and humans as Others with a face need to be recognised as grounding the essentially ethical dimension of this work. 3.1 Lynch on making animals “analytic” Writing in 1988 in a then emerging practice of laboratory ethnography, Michael Lynch identifies two important understandings of ‘animal’ operating within laboratory research. The first is an understanding of an animal as a natural being to which one can attribute pains, likes and a subjectivity as well as natural behaviours. This concept he calls that of a “naturalistic animal”. Thinking of animals as naturalistic animals, Lynch says, is what animal rights activists or lay people do, when they think of laboratory animals. However, Lynch says, there is another understanding of ‘animal’ within laboratory research –one which comes about through, and based on, knowledge about naturalistic animals. This understanding is a result of careful preparations of animals, what he calls “rendering” the naturalistic animal into “a mathematically analysed complex of data”, a “cultural object” or “artifact” which he calls an “analytic” animal or object.28
between research staff and animals, who may use distancing as a coping mechanism. H. Herzog, “Ethical aspects of relationships between humans and research animals”, in: ILAR Journal, 43(1)/2002, p. 27-‐ 32. 25
M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 265-‐289. 26 P. Atterton, 2011. “Levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals”, in: Inquiry, 54(6)/2011, p. 633-‐649. E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961]. 27
D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 124-‐ 169. 28 M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 273.
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The central claim of Lynch’s article is that sacrifices performed in scientific experiments warrant that name because they follow three steps common in cultural sacrificial practices: 1. Preparing a victim in such a way as to create and sustain an orientation to coordinates in an abstract space; 2. Destroying the victim in order to establish a mediating link between visible and invisible realms; and 3. Constituting the victim as a bearer of human attributes.29 In the case of science there is no religious significance to these procedures.30 Still there is an expectation that these processes offer access to the “onto-‐theological order of what Heidegger calls ‘the mathematical’”.31 The analogy between sacrifices in anthropological cultural sites then and experimental animal sacrifices draws on what Lynch says is a shared interest in transgressing, through ritual, the realm of the profane to reach that of the sacred or of the scientific. Lynch writes: In order to establish and sustain the victim’s role as an intermediary –a communication channel between visible and invisible domains –exact sequences of procedure are followed, and careful attention is focused on the victim’s place in an abstract system of coordinates.32 Lynch notes the importance of the naturalistic animals, and of the “subjugated” knowledge of animal handling in the creation of the analytic animal. However he pays little attention to what happens to the humans involved. Lynch reports that his informants repeatedly emphasize that they feel empathy and compassion for the animals they handle: scientists “candidly, and even avidly” discuss how to handle animals practically, even if this comes across as a “humorous sideshow to laboratory activities”.33 Scientists need and develop skills for how to relate to their experimental animals, how to make them more docile and accepting of their interventions, and how to get the “right” results out of them. However none of this information finds its way into their articles, Lynch comments.34 Nowadays this is changing: the ARRIVE publication guidelines (Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) include housing and husbandry conditions, as well as information on the experimental and handling procedures followed and are increasingly accepted as crucial for ensuring the validity and reproducibility of animal research results.35 However, the (amused) frustration, which Lynch communicates, of the scientists and how to handle and empathise with the animals, remains. 3.2 Facing animals Now, others –important and famous others-‐ have written about the capacity of humans to become disciplined, obedient and to perform unpleasant or even morally “dirty work” under specific roles36. The power of authority, of culture and social context to shape human behaviour and to sort out people who sort themselves has been studied by artists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists,
29
M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 276. 30 That is, not if we follow a narrow understanding of religion here. 31 M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 276. 32 M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 275. 33 M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 280. 34 M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 280. 35 C. Kilkenny, W.J. Browne, I.C. Cuthill, M. Emerson, D.G. Altman, “Improving bioscience research reporting: The ARRIVE guidelines for reporting animal research”, in: PLoS Biol, 8(6)/2010, p. e1000412. Available at: http://www.nc3rs.org.uk/ARRIVE Last accessed: 06.06.17. 36 E.C. Hughes, “Good people and dirty work”, in: Social Problems, 10(1)/1962, p. 3-‐11.
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philosophers. Stanley Milgram (in)famously studied obedience by misleading people to think that they were administering electric shocks in the context of an education study ran by a professional in an eminent university (Yale). Milgram’s experiments would not be allowed today, but understanding how Nazi officials could have been disciplined to harm others was such a pressing question in postwar times that to settle it warranted stressing and misleading some research participants. (Common sensibilities about what research is ethical or unethical, warranted or unwarranted, do change.) I do not offer a theory of obedience here. But I do propose that faces matter. Disciplining involves developing and habituating ways to efface oneself and others –and to add on new, appropriate faces. But first, let me say what a face is not. Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life discusses the development of a “front” something like a façade of a building, through which we meet others in our professional lives.37 He specifically discusses medical doctors and nurses as assuming different fronts vis-‐à-‐vis patients.38 Pierre Bourdieu relatedly proposed the concept of habitus,39 of a way of habitually inhabiting our bodies as well as of perceiving the world around us through our bodies. Habitus is understood as shaped by physical and social –class, cultural-‐ environments, and as in turn shaping how distinctions and classifications are made: “a structured and structuring structure”.40 In the context of the knowing professions and the academy Bourdieu´s notion of disciplinary habitus has been elaborated to consider interdisciplinary work, as epistemic habitus: This aims to capture how professionals from diverse academic disciplines may still seem to share a certain habitus according to the types of methods and epistemological paradigms they are trained to follow.41 These notions are crucial for understanding the social constitution of the embodied and habitual enactment of profession-‐specific beliefs and practices. However, they differ from that of the face, which I examine here. An important dimension of a face is that looking at it can raise a moral question: How are you doing? This is not only of descriptive epistemic significance, e.g. how are you acting, how are you moving, and what does that say about your role or training, your social or cultural background. The face (unlike one´s habitus, or front) holds the capacity to convey information that can call me or bind me to you as a unique, though undoubtedly multiply characterise-‐able, classifiable or conditioned, animal. Emmanuel Levinas has written about the face as holding that sort of power: to beg a response from an Other, even without asking. Faces speak when habitus breaks down; indeed, faces can break habitus down. The next section is based on Peter Atterton’s reading of how a Levinasian ethics of the face can extend to cover our moral responsibilities towards animals.42
37
E. Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1959, esp. p.34-‐36.
38 E. Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1959, p.51-‐53. 39
P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, New York and London: Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group), 1984. 40 P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, New York and London: Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group), 1984, p. 170 and figure on p. 171. 41 M. Albert, S. Laberge and B.D. Hodges, “Who wants to collaborate with social scientists? Biomedical and clinical scientists’ perception of social science”, in: B. Penders, N. Vermeulen and J. Parker (eds.), Collaboration across health research and medical care: Healthy Collaboration, London UK and Burlighton VT: Ashgate, 2014. 42 P. Atterton, 2011. “Levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals”, in: Inquiry, 54(6)/2011, p. 633-‐649.
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3.2.1 Levinas: The face as direct expressiveness or moral/communicative qualia Levinas makes a quite ingenious contribution to ethics: He claims that the basis for an ethical claim is not sameness or kinship, but rather radical Otherness.43 By Otherness Levinas means a radical uniqueness that each Other qua Other holds. Levinas calls this interiority “secrecy”: The real must not only be determined in its historical objectivity, but also from interior intentions, from the secrecy that interrupts the continuity of historical time. Only on the basis of this secrecy is the pluralism of society possible. It attests this secrecy. We have always known that it is impossible to form an idea of the human totality, for men have an inner life closed to him who does, however, grasp the comprehensive movements of human groups.44 (emphasis added). Social theorists then, like Goffman or Bourdieu, need to grapple with something leftover and inexplicable or incommunicable when individual behaviour is described as part of a culture or social whole. The Other for Levinas is a who with a secret inner life –and determinations of reality need to take account of this secrecy. Importantly, Otherness is radical for Levinas. It is not a matter of degree. We cannot order entities in relation to us in terms of how much “more Other” than us they are, because doing so would presuppose that there is some dimension or way along which these are the same or at least comparable as such.45 The alterity of the other does not depend on any quality that would distinguish him from me, for a distinction of this nature would precisely imply between us that community of genus which already nullifies alterity.46 But how can we tell whether/when someone is an Other? For Levinas the basic relation to the Other is not effected via epistemology but ethics. Relating to an Other is not an epistemic process, justified by the senses, e.g. seeing or recognising a similarity in another person´s body that thereby supports an empirical inference that they too are another mind.47 Rather, the relation is one of a direct experience of a self in the physical or otherwise experienced expressiveness of the Other. This primary expressiveness we are met with Levinas calls “the face”: The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum –the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these
43
Bear in mind that Levinas was himself imprisoned and held in a concentration camp, as part of a totalitarian regime. Radical alterity offers a response to the potentially totalizing, holistic theories that functioned as vehicles for Nazi ideology. 44 E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961], p. 57-‐ 58 –emphasis added. 45 This, Atterton argues, disqualifies Derrida’s claim that animals are “more” Other than humans. Cf. P. Atterton, 2011. “Levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals”, in: Inquiry, 54(6)/2011, p. 634-‐ 636. 46
E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961], p. 194; quoted in P. Atterton, 2011. “Levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals”, in: Inquiry, 54(6)/2011, p. 635. 47 P. Atterton, 2011. “Levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals”, in: Inquiry, 54(6)/2011, p. 637.
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qualities, but kath’auto [i.e., in person, per se]. It expresses itself.48 For Levinas then, the face attests to the impossibility of comprehension and containment –to another’s interiority or inner life. The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched –for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content.49 Though a face can be seen or touched, what makes it a face is rather what happens when encountering a face, through a seeing or touching, which exceeds them. The way in which the face is “given to me” Levinas calls “speech” (parole): “The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse”.50 Note that this is a saying that need not involve language. This is an important point once it comes to considering animal faces as Peter Atterton stresses: “Saying opens me to the other, before saying something said, before the said that is spoken in this sincerity forms a screen between me and other. It is a saying without words… silence speaks”.51 A quintessential way in which the face can speak without words is through the eyes. “The eyes break through the mask –the language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks”.52 Ethics then becomes the accomplishment of breaking up my spontaneous (though possibly habituated) behaviour, through the presence of the Other: “The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics”.53 The Levinasian face is a face-‐who, an Other, a radically alter whose uniqueness we are called to, yes, perhaps through the physical face, or its eyes but only in order to go beyond that thing or our sensing of it as a thing to the incomprehensibility of who this is. On the flipside, this incomprehensibility of the Other can take a negative expression. The face’s call to ethics is also why it can inspire murder –total negation. Levinas writes: Murder exercises a power over what escapes power. It is still a power, for the face expresses itself in the sensible, but already impotency, because the face rends the sensible. The alterity that is expressed in the face provides the unique “matter” possible for total negation. I can wish to kill only an existent absolutely independent, which exceeds my powers infinitely, and therefore does not oppose them but paralyzes the very power of power. The Other is the sole being I can wish to kill.54 I am not sure exactly who wishes to kill experimental animals, but people certainly do kill them. It is
48
E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961], p. 50-‐ 51. Quoted in P. Atterton, 2011. “Levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals”, in: Inquiry, 54(6)/2011, p. 637. 49 E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961], p. 194. 50 E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961], p. 66. 51 Levinas, quoted in P. Atterton, 2011. “Levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals”, in: Inquiry, 54(6)/2011, p. 639. 52 E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961], p. 66. 53 E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961], p. 43. 54 E. Levinas, Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961], p. 198.
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perhaps this lack of a wish to kill individual animals, which indicates that the killings are results of an effacement. Levinas implies that recognising an Other in the face of an experimental animal involves recognising, and perhaps questioning, a wish to murder him or her. In this case, the discussion in Svendsen and Koch55 on whether or not the act of killing premature piglets is one of murder can be interpreted as the flipside of having recognised each piglet as an Other. Without a wish to negate the Other, murder becomes a problem, seen instead as putting down, or scavenging the remains of a someone else is responsible for killing. 3.2.2 Morris: The face as coming with its own logic David Morris56 proposes that the face is central in how we know, using our logic as animals. He asks: What would nature be like êlle-‐meme, as the French might say, before we conceive it as conforming to our mathematical and mechanical models? Can we find a logic in things themselves? With what sort of logic or principles does nature structure itself, its processes, its interactions?57 The answer Morris develops through the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-‐Ponty is that we meet the world, as animals, and make sense of it, as animals, through what Morris calls a “logic of the face”. Morris starts his analysis by discussing animal faces, and how important faces are for understanding each other. Following Merleau-‐Ponty he claims that faces have a peculiar function of being visible surfaces that make sensed (seen) something about the invisible, inner, experienced, aspects of another living being´s being. This is a different type of logic, a different means to make sense of, give reason for or give speech to (logos) another entity than what natural science proposes to use as its logic. Morris uses a nice example to illustrate this: even if you were able to see through my skin and measure all the little neurons firing and brain areas lighting up, or look at the hormones pumped around my body, and even if scientific knowledge was advanced enough that you might be able to say something about my current mood through these readings, looking at my face would still offer you another type of intimate, immediate knowledge about how I am doing, Morris claims. These kinds of intersubjective qualia, if we may call them that, of animal-‐animal communication that get sensed, mediated by or accessed through facing each other are of a different nature to the logics of analytic science. Evoking the Levinasian shiny eyes Morris says: An animal face is the face of a body, and expresses the whole of that body. This is vivid in the human case: I face all of you in your face. When I look at your face I don’t just see your face, I see you, your feelings, your thinking, your attention, a further whole of you, shining in your face.58
55
M. Svendsen and L. Koch, “Potentializing the research piglet in experimental neonatal research”, in: Current Anthropology, 54(57)/2013, p. 118-‐128. 56 D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 124-‐ 169. 57 D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 126. 58 D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 132. Note that this attitude seems to diverge from Levinas’s position that the face speaks of an Other who cannot be comprehended. Perhaps here one can have a conciliatory reading of Morris and Levinas, by understanding “seeing” as conveying a witnessing as opposed to a comprehending, or objectifying gaze.
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Morris says that this is the case also with other animals. I see them and they also see me: as something more than just a surface, their seeing of me as an animal scanning ahead, planning to move, an animal threatening or non-‐threatening. Of course, I see this not just in the face in the usual sense, but in the animal body as a whole –the whole body serves as what I call a “greater face”.59 Morris follows Merleau-‐Ponty in noting that this is somewhat paradoxical: “the depths of your being are shown nowhere else than in the surface of your face (and greater face), but [that] these depths are nowise the same as that surface –and yet are not somewhere else”.60 He says there is something metaphysically peculiar about the depth discussed here. A mural painting is not on the surface of the wall in the same way as the cracks of the wall are –but it is not not on the wall, either. We do not see paintings in the same way as we see cracks: paintings come with a way or an order of seeing (up to a point) we see according to them. “Similarly”, Morris says, “with the face: if you just see it as surface, you are not really seeing a face; you have to see through the face, according to it, you have to see who it is the face of”.61 Morris takes this point further, talking about faces in general as surfaces that indicate the presence of unique individual entities, and that give us information about the world around us. The presence of a whole cup on my desk is inferred through looking at, in fact, only some part of its surface. My animal logic fills in the rest. To put it more profoundly, in his words: the reality and veracity of things, their truth as things, hinges on the impossibility of grasping or having them be present in their entirety. Truth hinges on a perceptual inexhaustibility. This inexhaustibility could not of course be fully presented all at once or in exhaustive detail. Yet, paradoxically, this inexhaustibility is indicated in aspects that things do make present to us.62 Morris contrasts the logic of the face to what he calls a “frontal logic” which reduces things to fronts for other things, as lacking inner depth or life. Articulating Elisabeth Behnke’s notion of “frontality” 63 , Morris identifies it as “an attitude in which nature, being, space, duration and so on are posited as objects, over-‐against a subject who surveys them from above or the outside, and in which nature is posited as a totality of things that are spread out outside of one another, with no internal relations” 64 –a logic that infuses the ontologies of modern science.
59
D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 133. D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 140. 61 D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 140. 62 D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 142-‐ 143. There is an exercise which I have used with students on this point: You give people tokens of a type, e.g. one match from a box of matches, and ask them to look at their token match so carefully that they can identify it from a pile were they to hand it back. Then you ask them to name their match and give the match a story for how it got these identifying marks. Then they hand back their match. It is remarkably possible for them to identify their match from a pile. The exercise reflects on the levels of information available to us, the explanatory accounts possible to develop to account for this information, and how this is implicated in facing/knowing entities in the world around us. 63 Cf. E.A. Behnke, "From Merleau-‐Ponty's Concept of Nature to an Interspecies Practice of Peace", in: H.P. Steeves (ed.), Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, p. 93-‐116. Page 95 here. 64 D. Morris, “Faces and the invisible of the visible: Toward an animal ontology”, in: PhaenEx, 2(2)/2007, p. 145. 60
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4. Effacement On the one hand, following Levinas, one can think of the face as anchored in the physical face but going beyond it, speaking of an Other’s inner life; on the other, following Morris, the face can include expressive bodies, and even aspects of inanimate beings that communicate a kind of qualia of being, the excess and inexhaustibility of what is real. The common thread between Levinasian and Morrisian faces is that they are sensed surfaces or aspects of (living/inanimate) beings which help communicate something beyond the sensed, the inner, secret being of an Other. This calls one to a special ethics, an ethics of the Other -‐and to a logic of the face. It is tempting to break down Morris’s discussion about different “logics” for knowing into a. holistic methods, versus b. analytic, experimental ones: for instance, a. the “natural” observation of an organism in its full behaviour amounting to facing her, versus b. picking a factor about an entity and devising setups to test specific behaviours in different individuals again and again amounting to a frontal encounter. However, Morris seems to propose a heavier metaphysics of autopoietic inter-‐ implication which would make even “natural” observation inadequate as a source of knowledge, as this too is inherently directed vs. “spread out”. This is certainly beyond the scope of the chapter.65 Yet I still see a way in which, in a more pedestrian and more concrete way, we do negate faces in the performance of analytic experimental science. Animal research involves living beings found within scientific research settings that rely on them working as analytic animals or as analysing humans. The face encountered as a call for ethics between people and people, and between people and animals, turns into a call for ethos for researchers to handle each other “properly”. Thus the ethics of the Other gets substituted by an ethics of the Ordered, the scientifically professional, the known or knowable, the regular or regulate-‐ able. A rat, her beating heart, her femur, a slide with her bone material on it do not get to “speak” the same way and perhaps they ought not to –founding living beings within scientific contexts amounts to developing new found scientific entities with add-‐on faces. Perhaps the face, the individual and individuality, should get lost or transgressed here to help support a project of analytic knowledge which has been of much use to us humans. Still, I find this process troubling and I want to articulate how this happens in order to help consider why/when it should. To do this, I keep my conception of the face closer to the Levinasian one, focusing on the face of living beings, but I embrace and extend Morris’s proposal to consider a “greater face”, by considering bodies and also body-‐based sense-‐scapes as parts of an Other’s face. I understand the face then as expressive bodily surfaces and sense-‐scapes –looks, smells, sounds, movements– which speak of the presence of an Other with an inner, secret life. I will flag this conception by using the capitals: FACE. Operative in making something scientific, or analytic are technologies of effacement: These include
65
Also outside the scope of our discussion yet evocative is Karen Barad’s metaphysics of matter as mattering both along material and normative dimensions and as existing by virtue of in intra-‐actions between agents that are therefore always to be considered as bound up in mutual response-‐abilities. According to Joseph Rouse’s analysis, Barad’s view differs from more commonly accepted naturalist metaphysics in weaving normativity into the fabric of matter, as opposed to assuming it as arising from social fiat or contingency. This brings to mind Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s understanding of “matters of fact” as, also at the same time, “matters of care”, deepening Haraway´s notion of multiple performed naturecultures and making it so that care is of metaphysical significance itself –perhaps itself implied within a logic of the face, as Morris would have it. Though such connections would have to be developed elsewhere. See: K. Barad, "Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter", in: Signs 28(3)/2003, p. 801-‐831. J. Rouse, “Barad’s feminist naturalism”, in: Hypatia, 19(1)/2004, p. 142-‐161. M. Puig de la Bellacasa, “Ethical doings in naturecultures”, in: Ethics, Place & Environment: A Journal of Philosophy and Geography, 13(2)/2010, p. 151-‐ 169.
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tools, rituals, techniques or architectures whose engagement results in a loss of FACE (and often in the creation of a new one). Technologies of effacement are defined by their operative use in interceding and impeding the direct experience of a FACE, by modifying the sensual, visual, olfactory, tactile, auditory or sonic features it presents with, and by in effect scripting engagements with an Other’s FACE. Technologies of effacement include at least five types of preparation: 1. built environments, 2. entering and exit routines, 3. special garments and equipment, 4. identification and labelling techniques, 5. Experimental protocols or scripts. Why I call these technologies, and not simply tools or techniques, is that they are enveloped in -‐logos, in one or more fields of study that provide rationales for why these tools, spaces or techniques are constructed and used they way they are, and also embedded in social and economic infrastructures supporting and providing these materials.66 If we follow Morris we might say they are governed by a “frontal” logic, but the technologies often have their own histories and lives for how and which fronts they get to show. What is relevant for my claim is that the use of these technologies contributes to a process of effacement, understood as not simply removing a FACE, but as a process often resulting in the addition of a new (possibly “happy”, more palatable or appropriate) FACE for humans and animals participating in research. In the following I will provide some examples of effacement in animal research procedures, corresponding to the preparations mentioned above. What follows is based on my own experience in these spaces. 4.1 Architecture and built environments Animal laboratories are often built in ways that maximize their security for fear of activist protests or sabotage. Hosted in unmarked or peculiarly named locations (cf. Vivarium, the animal facility in University of Bergen), animal houses are often located underground, or otherwise spatially secluded. The space of the lab often follows the aesthetic tropes of a medical, surgical or clinical space, with an interior design utilising colder, green or blue colours that annul the reds of flesh and blood. The rooms may lack windows and convey a space that is secure, secluded and exclusive. The laboratory materials are mostly non-‐organic, featuring metallic objects and surfaces that are easy to sterilize. This conveys a space that is akin to a clinic, the home of professionals and machines involved with exploring bodily interiors, as opposed to a milieu for the healthy, integral human or animal. Animals are not visible outside secure rooms that lack windows as they are controlled in temperature and lighting cycles –and animals are not usually audible either. The corresponding soundscapes include metallic or automatic noises, such as those of doors opening and closing or beeps of security codes getting punched in; these can be both alarming and reassuring (routine), at once sharp and muffled, contained, given the intimacy of such places. Built architecture can limit what and how FACES are encountered. The distinctiveness of the architectural, spatial, visual environment brings people into a special moral space, where common and spontaneous feeling and moral sentiments get suspended.67 By structuring animal facilities in ways that “protect” animals and humans from the external gaze, these buildings can also block humans and animals from looking back or reflecting at each other from “the outside”. I recall how happy I was to see a window looking towards a river and a slice of the outside while in the animal facility common room. The window was filtered so that only we could see out. It was a longing gaze.
66
Perhaps they could be characterized as “technomoral” technologies –Tsjalling Swiestra uses this term to talk of technology as implicated in moral change, and to capture how morality and technology co-‐evolve. Cf. T. Swierstra, “Nanotechnology and Technomoral Change”, in: Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics, XV(1)/2013, p. 200-‐219. 67 Dante's famous inscription at the entrance of the Inferno (hell) was: "Leave behind any emotions, all ye who enter here".
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In the lab, looking at the animals does not happen for its own sake. Unlike in a zoo, where animals are to be exhibited, perhaps admired, animals and humans in the lab are rather to operate together inside experimental rooms, interacting with each other in seclusion and as dictated by the experimental situation. In this environment animal noises, squeals, screams, purrs, barking, etc. can punctuate an otherwise quiet, un-‐“natural” as in, artificial and mechanised, environment: in those instances the animal FACE may shine through –speaking through the animal voice or bodily sounds, but the sounds will stay within the room, unless one makes an effort to speak of them later. 4.2 Entering and Exit Rituals and Special Garments Key for entering and leaving animal facilities are liminal, in-‐between spaces. In these rooms both the outside and the inside co-‐exist. Half of the room is devoted to storing and holding the mess of everyday clothes, shoes, umbrellas, jewellery of the staff entering, and the other half offers staff the neatly folded, clean uniforms and sterilised equipment that they will need to wear before entering the experimental rooms. The two parts of the room separated symbolically by a curtain will still signify a transition, and a difference.68 Staff entering these facilities will have to be in possession of the right clearance or be escorted by people with such clearance. In-‐between-‐spaces aim to limit the traffic of bacteria or other agents between the “outside” and the rest of the laboratory or research space and the sanitised animal facility. Both before entering and before leaving the animal facility staff need to sanitise themselves to some degree, for instance by washing and disinfecting their hands, or even by taking a shower. Animals housed in the facility are often bred to develop particular conditions, and they may be susceptible to infections and other conditions, as may staff. Further as the animals share genotypes, possible problems can spread to whole populations. Thus before entering the animal house humans need to remove their outer clothes and before leaving they need to remove their scientific, laboratory garb. Whatever cute blouses, jewellery or other identifying or individually chosen items one may have on are taken off before working in the animal house –and put back on, once outside. Personnel instead wear standardized uniforms, in selected sizes, colours and cuts and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). The lab-‐specific clothing and equipment is there to guard human and animal from each other’s biological contaminants. However, the effect of donning these clothes is dual. First it manages to remove a layer of personally, or otherwise individually expressive clothing, second it replaces that with clothing chosen centrally by the clinical or other research facility administration, for the purposes of the scientific work at hand. This conveys, through an external sign, something about the intentions and role of the person bearing it. Whereas your own clothes will usually fit you the way you have intended them to fit, these clothes or shoes can feel too big or too small, or in other ways unfitting to one’s FACE, understood as what Morris calls the “greater face” including the body. Hair, along with haircuts and hairstyles will be obscured by hats, and facial features like the nose, mouth and eyes shielded by masks and glasses, hands and fingers sheathed in gloves, feet wearing the same style plastic clogs. This process of de-‐personalisation/branding through uniforms is also common in non-‐medical work-‐ spaces, e.g. in fast food restaurants, for various service professionals, or also in correctional facilities. In all these cases, the removal of one’s personal items may be seen as pursuing interests of hygiene while disciplining the self. A lab coat though could be seen as also conferring higher status. However,
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These routines evoke a “rite of passage”, consisting of separation, liminality and incorporation, though this is not commonly recognized as such. Cf. A. van Gennep, The rites of passage, trans. M.B. Vizedom and G.L. Caffee, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960.
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it seems that medical uniforms and lab coats convey status when they are in fact not mandatory to wear, i.e. outside a work situation. I recall having worn my assigned, as a member of a medical lab, lab coat on a day that was especially cold, as an extra layer of clothing.69 I did so also during our common lunch, only to be reprimanded afterwards by our group leader who said that it presented a health hazard and “only doctors” can wear their lab coats outside work. I responded that I did not actually do lab research, as was commonly known, and asked in turn why MDs would wear their coats in the common areas after having been in contact with patients.70 There was no clear answer to that, though we shared a realization of the symbolic status of this garment. A uniform need not make a person unrecognizable to those who know her, nor inhuman, in an animal research setting. However, there is a step difference and possibly a difficulty in immediately figuring out who is who in these locales, also because more of the face is obscured. The effort at a uniform appearance extends to the experimental models. It sounds absurd to even suggest that an experimental animal might wear a hair-‐bow or a sweater –but such accessories are not unknown for pet animals. And further in a deeper sense, the animals are often bred from specific genetic lines, creating individuals that share both genetic and phenotypic traits. The FACE is obscured physically but also through the filtering of the senses: through gloves, the sense of touch, through masks, the sense of smell and taste and one’s voice, through hats the sense of hearing and through glasses, one’s sight. The possibility to directly experience another face does not thereby vanish! Still, sense experience becomes mediated; to hear, see, touch, smell people or animals happens in a context of the scientific operation, mediated by technologies that muffle signals and that act symbolically to register Others either as fellow recruits or as subjects to the scientific operation. It is notable that, perhaps due to this mandated obscuring of one´s face through the use of standard garments, gender and personality may become extra important to express and show off in these locales, with people making an effort to be nice, charming or funny. Evidence of flirtation among medical staff in acute situations or performances of group spirit, including singing, dancing, or joking may be understood here as adding a new, happy “face” to oneself or to the operation, as a ways of enacting the work as more human or palatable for human staff working in these situations.71 4.3 Identification and labelling techniques As Michael Lynch claims, identification and labelling techniques are key for rendering of a naturalistic animal into an analytic object: The same inscription [the animal’s identifying number] was previously written in a number of different places: on a tag affixed to each rat’s cage while the animal was still alive, on the rat’s tail (written with a marking pen) just prior to its sacrifice, on a jar of preservative fluid in which the decapitated head was placed, on a disk of plastic in which dissected fragments of the brain were embedded, and on the container in which electron micrographic sections were stored. Each of these sites marks a stage in the selection and processing of the animal’s
69
Ironically one of the reasons for non-‐compliance once it comes to the use of PPE is that one can get too hot in them –but not in Norway. Cf. H. Cameiro Cunha Neves, A.C. Silva e Souza, M. Medeiros, D. Bouttelet Munari, L.C.M. Ribeiro, A. Ferreira Veiga Tipple, “Safety of nursing staff and determinants of adherence to personal protective equipment”, in: Rev. Latino-‐Am. Enfermagem, 19(2)/2011, p.354-‐361. 70 Indeed, a recent study in India suggested that long sleeved coats facilitate the transmission of disease. E. Fernandes, “Doctors and medical students in India should stop wearing white coats”, in British Medical Journal, 351/2015, h3855. 71 K. Watson, “Gallows humor in medicine”, in: The Hastings Center Report, 41(5)/2011, p. 37-‐45. G. Koksvik, “Laughing in the face of clinical dirty work: Humor in two French intensive care units”, Unpublished draft. See also E. Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1959, p. 25, on “disruptions” of a projected definition of a situation that may include jokes and humour.
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remains.72 The number or other sign attributed to the animal to tell it apart is communicated through the experimental process as pertaining to selected containers holding body parts or organs or tissues. It is nothing about this rat that is used to identify it, but only something about the selected animal’s function or order within the experimental setup, which assigns it its identity. Preferred ways of identifying animals will often be in terms of numbers, or abstract graphical signs, such as drawing lines on a rat’s tail, or punching holes in an animal’s ear. Interestingly, in fields of research such as in behavioural biology or with animals of a “higher” species, such as primates effacement need not be necessary, or may even be unwanted. In these cases the use of personal names to identify the laboratory animals is more common. But even when animals are identified numerically one could get to know them, thereby attributing a new meaning to some of the numbers. Still, giving proper names is reported to affect how closely animal research staff relate to an animal.73 Names are given to Others in human societies, and having a personal name calls attention to one’s claim to an identity and face –the naming of pets or farm animals is here a good example. The likelihood of experiencing an animal as an Other, can also vary across animal models. Some species are said to be easier to handle in experiments, precisely because they all look alike –for instance rodents or fish –as opposed to dogs or cats, in whose eyes one can see those of one’s beloved pet. Thus, reasons for selecting a model organism may extend to the ease of effacing a member of this species –the ease of muffling the animal’s FACE, eyes or body and of meeting an undifferentiated token of a known type instead of a radically alter individual. 4.4 Experimental protocols and scripts Experimental protocols will describe how and when to handle the animals, providing a routine that can be documented, followed up, and replicated (to some extent) from time to time, from animal to animal. Protocols may however not only script the performance of scientific procedures but the rest of the engagement with animals as well. If an engagement is not included in the protocol, for instance spending time talking, singing, petting or playing with animals, this would most likely not be documented in laboratory reports and could even be considered a confounder of research validity. Further, certain techniques for handling rats may be preferred because they shield or limit the exposure of the researcher to the FACE of the animals. For instance, rats may be picked up from the root of the tail as opposed to held in the palm of the researcher, even though the latter technique is recommended as preferred by the animals. Picking up a rat from its tail minimises the contact between the warm flesh of animal and that of the human, preventing the rat from grasping back with its tiny nailed claws (the nails might cut through the latex!) while treating the rat as if it were an object with a handle, a kind of tea-‐cup you hold by the tail, and creating the impression that the rat is disembodied –not there. In the example of Alex, in section 2, we see that the technique recommended by his colleagues for making the microinjections easier involves wrapping the body of the animal in a towel. Following the notion of the FACE as the bodily expressive surface the towel would here function not only as a material muffling or bondage of some sort, but also create a material barrier between the face of the researcher and the animal –shielding the Other’s face from speaking against one’s grip. It is telling in this context, that animal research students are taught to encounter animal FACES in a
72
M. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences”, in: Social Studies of Science, 18(2)/1988, p. 271. 73 H. Herzog, “Ethical aspects of relationships between humans and research animals”, in: ILAR Journal, 43(1)/2002, p. 27-‐ 32.
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“frontal” manner, as an image or text to be decoded. “Reading” animal faces is understood as possible to fit along generalised scales, for example, the “mouse grimace scale”,74 or the “rat grimace scale”.75 The scales were developed with the aim to better enable pain research, using rodents in order to recognise the pain of the rodents and relate it to humans, versus as important in itself. But the scales are used to train researchers to recognise when an animal should be euthanised. Still utilising a grimace scale structures the encounter with animal FACE through an analysing, categorising gaze: this is premised on an expectation of the familiar –an item that will fit somewhere in the scale. This is different to the encounter of a radical Other –a secret. Indeed software can automatically “read” a face according to such a scale; indicating that this type of reading obviates a human gaze: Rodent Face Finder® “successfully automates the most labor-‐intensive step in the process”.76 What is this? The step of “grabbing individual face-‐containing frames from digital video, which is hampered by uncooperative subjects (not looking directly at the camera) or otherwise poor optics due to motion blurring”.77 It is hard to treat the animal as a front, when it does not sit still, and does not look in the camera –for instance, when she looks directly at you and you at her. Laboratory equipment that hold “inscriptions” of the animal operate in a similar manner.78 The ready-‐labelled containers, test tubes, vials, or spreadsheets help to “capture”, frame and sort through an experience involving the animal’s FACE, its body and organs. This inscriptional equipment orders the gaze or interaction, on what “knowledge” is considered relevant to abstract from the experimental situation. There is no proper spreadsheet for documenting a bad dream, an inability to eat meat, a desperate look, a haunting memory in the experience of the humans involved in this work. You are to move away from the touch of a soft, warm body, or her movements, from the smell of her flesh, or the hardness of her bones, from the stickiness of her flesh on the bones as you try to separate the two –and keep the tissues and numbers, preserved, documented, put away, as interpretable, expected and known. Inscriptions thus understood do not only function to turn the naturalistic animal into analytic data, meaningful in the symbolic practice of science, but they may inhibit scientists and animals from encountering each other as the secret, radically Other –or else, to hold a borne burden of a murder hidden, and heavy.
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D.J. Langford, A.L. Bailey, M.L. Chanda, S.E. Clarke, T.E. Drummond, S. Echols, S. Glick, J. Ingrao, T. Klassen-‐ Ross, M.L. LaCroix-‐Fralish, L. Matsumiya, R.E. Sorge, S.G. Sotocinal, J.M. Tabaka, D. Wong, A.M.J.M. van den Maagdenberg, M.D. Ferrari, K.D. Craig, and J.S. Mogil, “Coding of facial expressions of pain in the laboratory mouse”, in: Nature Methods, 7(6)/2010, p. 447-‐449. 75 S.G. Sotocinal, R.E. Sorge, A. Zaloum, A.H. Tuttle, L.J. Martin, J.S. Wieskopf, J.CS Mapplebeck, P. Wei, S. Zhan, S. Zhang, J.J. McDougall, O.D. King and J.S. Mogil, “The rat grimace scale. A partially automated method for quantifying pain in the laboratory rat via facial expressions”, in: Molecular Pain, 7(55)/2011, doi: 10.1186/1744-‐ 8069-‐7-‐55. 76 S.G. Sotocinal, R.E. Sorge, A. Zaloum, A.H. Tuttle, L.J. Martin, J.S. Wieskopf, J.CS Mapplebeck, P. Wei, S. Zhan, S. Zhang, J.J. McDougall, O.D. King and J.S. Mogil, “The rat grimace scale. A partially automated method for quantifying pain in the laboratory rat via facial expressions”, in: Molecular Pain, 7(55)/2011, doi: 10.1186/1744-‐ 8069-‐7-‐55, page 1 of 10. 77 S.G. Sotocinal, R.E. Sorge, A. Zaloum, A.H. Tuttle, L.J. Martin, J.S. Wieskopf, J.CS Mapplebeck, P. Wei, S. Zhan, S. Zhang, J.J. McDougall, O.D. King and J.S. Mogil, “The rat grimace scale. A partially automated method for quantifying pain in the laboratory rat via facial expressions”, in: Molecular Pain, 7(55)/2011, doi: 10.1186/1744-‐ 8069-‐7-‐55, page 2 of 10. 78 I have elsewhere called this type of equipment ”founding tools” as they are used to establish, or institute a non-‐scientific thing as part of science. Here I am interested in the loss of the naturalistic, and specifically of the face incurred during such a founding process. Cf. S. Efstathiou, The use of ‘race’ as a variable in biomedical research, UC San Diego: PhD Thesis, 2009. Available at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/18s69193 Last accessed: 07.06.17.
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4.5 Added faces The removal or obstruction of the animal FACE is not simply a negation, but may come with a substitution of the face by another new, more appropriate FACE. One is tempted to call this, using Goffman’s term, a front. The analytic object would indeed provide a front for the experimental animal. However, what I am referring to here is meant to operate as if it were a face: as a symbol of inner, emotional or moral being which does not immediately strike one as developed as part of a professional practice. I would thus rather keep calling this an “added FACE”. Added animal FACES may extend across all the dimensions and preparations mentioned. Altering the built environment may involve decorating the animal facility with images or objects that aim to make the space more “animal-‐friendly”, to convey feelings of love, care or admiration for the animals (or humans) involved in this work. For instance, images of animals in the wild, close-‐ups of snow bunnies or hares are framed and hung on the walls of an animal facility I visited, providing an image of an animal as healthy, free and wild –as admired; in stark contrast to the animal relatives of these animals, bred and held in one controlled facility. Perhaps an image of wilderness in the home of discipline is an aspiration of nature and freedom, for the animals but also for the humans –an attempt to show that outside the laboratory environment researchers can still engage with the FACE of wild animals; perhaps reassuring themselves that their moral capabilities are bracketed, but by no means lost,79 or simply offering a look “out” (Figure 1).
Figure 1 – A cyclist in the wild; depicting an aspiration, while confirming what is missing [University gym-‐ author’s own]. Added faces could instead also focus on the scientists working in these laboratories –perhaps amplifying marks of the importance of this type of research for society through a framing of scientific credentials, or alternatively by personalising standard type clothing or the working spaces. Though, I did not witness such added FACES in the case of the animal research personnel I encountered. Added faces include the use of images and cartoons as aids for the execution of scientific work. For instance, a blow-‐up image of Disney’s cartoon character in Ratatouille with holes drawn on his ears directs staff on how (how many, where) to punch holes on the experimental rats’ ears in order to tell different cohorts apart. The styrofoam block where rats’ palms are pinned on, chest up, once
79
Thank you to Giovanni De Grandis for this suggestion.
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anaesthetized so that the first incision can happen has a smiley drawn on it –you see it smile back at you when you pass the rat body onto the next person harvesting her organs. Scientific presentations of results obtained from animal experiments will often include standard images of the breed of animal used, depicted healthy, in clear pixilation, instead of images of the actual animals undergoing the experimental procedures. It is not uncommon that an animal cartoon or image with a speech bubble may come up, as part of such a presentation. For instance, this could be a rat wearing a lab coat, featured as an “agent” or “participant” in the work, saying something nice and polite such as: “Thank you for your attention!”. 4.6 Staining and Remaining Faces Effacement is never total. Though one may become habituated to this as to any other type of work, this habituation needs to constantly overcome the touch, smells, looks and sounds of an Other – ethos meets ethics. The cages holding the animals one knows feel harder to bring into the sacrifice room. The touch of the warm flesh of the animal whose organs are being harvested as it progressively dies, the wooing noises of the ovariectomised rat as the researcher massages its belly, the squealing of the rat that tries to escape the gloved hand of the man who lifts it into the anaesthesia chamber (possibly having smelled the blood of its cage-‐mates on his hands), the pumping heart one carries in a tiny plastic container –which keeps going, without a body. Once the animal is open and its insides reveal themselves, the intricacy of organs and pumping veins capture the attention and the animal becomes overlooked for its organs –the scientific task at hand. But when one glances back to the animals still in the cage, awaiting their turn, the heart can still clench. The sacrifice captures this vacillating gaze: both transfixed by the animal on the table, being processed -‐its eyes glazed over by the anaesthesia, its body progressively emptied of fleshy, bloody organs -‐the fascinating fascias! Yet called up immediately by the rat who tries to claw out of the hand of the man transporting it to the anaesthesia chamber. Her resistance is futile –if not to call you to your own mortality and captivity in the face of preventing hers. 5. Conclusion: Facing faces in philosophy I argued for two main points: First, working with animals in research involves several normative challenges mangled up with the encounters, emotional, social and epistemic, between people and animals in the lab (Section 2). Secondly, a concept of the face and of how animals and humans get effaced through “technologies of effacement” can help articulate this as a tension between an ethics of the Other and an ethics of the Ordered, of scientific ethos. My main assumption was that knowing through animal research is inextricably tied up with the possibility of knowing animals through their ‘face’, faces and bodies, that call us with experiences that exceed the visual, the touched, heard or smelled to speak of the presence of an Other being with an inner life. A humanimal research ethics involves facing both humans and animals working in animal research and exploring how a loss of face affects those involved and the research done. Perhaps one option for approaching animal research is what Donna Haraway calls “sharing suffering”.80 Haraway proposes that it is not possible to overcome the necessity of killing animals, as it is deeply implicated in the ways in which humans and animals are raised, live and die, in companionship with each other. However, she envisions a killing of animals that resists making animals “killable”. This killing of an animal that is not killable would be an action bringing its own share of suffering, sorrow or guilt perhaps, for the human besides the animal. A murder, that is a burden to bear, perhaps –and what would follow from a Levinasian ethics of the face.
80
D. Haraway, When Species Meet, MN Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 69-‐94.
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A humanimal research ethics emphasises the relational nature of animal research. The relevant states (suffering/joy) and the normative implications (that should be avoided/fostered) cannot be considered for one side alone (only the animal or only the researcher). They are mangled up and create tensions between the experience of doing research, its pathos, and its ethos. The researcher can suffer more when a rat suffers more, even if her research aims get achieved. So a humanimal research ethics cannot be an ethics for just one side, but only an ethics of the relation itself.81 I want to conclude by noting that what happens to rats and to researchers studying rats also happens to socio-‐humanists studying people studying rats. Consider the languages of animal research ethics. “RRR”, shorthand for Reduce, Replace, Refine, is the “motto” commonly used to capture the key tasks one should consider in order to conduct animal research ethically. But the explication of ethical principles into rules and regulations, and into such general mottos or harm-‐benefit balances, or checklists can backfire when making it harder (unscientific, unprofessional, silly, sentimental, etc.) to act in an immediate manner with an Other, muting rather than facing the complications of these encounters. Though ethicists have developed very smart positions and arguments once it comes to how we should relate to animals, in some ways these philosophical tropes can also lack a face. As Niklas Forsberg so eloquently asks: Is it possible that we sometimes turn to arguments to hide our own weaknesses? Do we at times turn to abstract theorizing in order not to face reality? And, if so, how does that affect philosophy, how we do philosophy? (These are questions, not answers. I´m asking, not asserting.) This much seems to be true: philosophical clarity may require a form of writing that enables us to absorb the intimate details of our lives in language.82 So to finish with two texts facing each other: My dog has a small warm soft silky body. When I wake up I go to him, and I kneel on the floor by his pillow and I embrace him, I cover my body over his body, my head on the crook of his belly, his head in the crook of my neck, his face breathing into my heart. And we rest there happy to not be fully woken up. I read somewhere that dogs do not like hugs. But mine seems to envelop me instead.
The orchestrated movement of humans, animals and organs within the sacrificial dance is impressive, timed, precise and exhausting. The joking atmosphere, the calling out of organ names, as they are repeatedly extracted, weighed and preserved, the carrying forward, singing (instead of crying or screaming) is no antidote to how heavy one feels. Afterwards. The red that takes over the white as rats get cut open, again and again –that is what I see. And the one who tried to escape.
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Thank you to Robert Meunier for stressing this point. N. Forsberg, “Different forms of forms of life: A philosophical introduction”, in: N. Forsberg, M. Burley and N. Hämäläinen (eds.), Language, ethics and animal life: Wittgenstein and beyond, London: Bloomsbury, 2012, p.1-‐ 15. Page 6 here. 82
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