How has science redrawn the boundary between humans and animals?
2016
Science asserts a system of classification of the world that relies on dualisms constructed in theEnlightenment; notably those between human/animal, culture/nature and subject/object (Haraway,1989). Through an epistemological framework embedded within positivist philosophy, science hasestablished itself as the “modern epistemic hegemon” as these dichotomies are thought to be objectiveand incontestable within a naturalistic ontology (Kloppenburg, 1991: 98; Candea, 2013). What Agamben(2004) has termed the “anthropological machine” allows humans to stand above the natural worldthrough science, contiguous to evolutionary awareness. The discontinuity between humans and animalsis hierarchical, wherein humans are set above nature, which is portrayed as a passive, knowable ‘object’subordinate to the human as ‘subject’ in a non-dialectical structure. A genealogy of science reveals howthis division intensified during the twentieth century but that, more recently, technology has provoked atension within science’s philosophical framework (Ingold, 1990; Corbey, 2005). Animals are redefinedaccording to different scientific agendas, yet continue to be ‘made’ and thus remain limited withinEnlightenment discourse (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972; Latour, 1993). According to Latour (1993),however, science’s quest for binary purification ironically produces hybrids as technology disrupts thehierarchical antithesis between human/animal and culture/nature by opening up subject positions(Haraway, 1991; Braidotti, 2013).
Scientific knowledge is founded upon environmental realism, in which nature is perceived as whollyknowable through incontestable reductionist classifications. In this paradigm, nature, and morespecifically animals, are understood to be mechanistic in contrast to humans who legitimise theirdominance over the natural world through their exclusive ability to reason (Horkheimer and Adorno,1972; Hurn, 2012). This perception was saturated in Enlightenment thinking following Descartes,whereby a strict hierarchical dichotomy was established between the mind and the body. Humans weredefined by their ability to transcend their nature with “attributes of personhood, with all that this entailsin terms of language, intentionality, reasoning, and moral awareness” (Willerslev in Candea, 2013: 424),whilst animals were negatively defined by what they lacked (Ingold, 1988: 3). Scientific taxonomy,according to Linnaeus, echoes this distinction whereby ‘Homo sapiens’ translates as “man of wisdom” inorder to identify humans as superior to other primates (Schiebinger, 1993).
However, Linnaeus did recognise that humans were animals, and situated Homo sapiens among otherprimates in the taxonomic order (ibid.; Haraway, 1989: 9; Ritvo, 1995). This was controversial given theEnlightenment context, but followed Darwinian evolutionary science that undermined any boundarybetween humans and other animals by showing that species were not ‘immutable mobiles’ that couldbe defined as absolute (ibid.; Latour, 1986). Physical and behavioural similarities were highlightedbetween humans and other primates which subsequently refused humans of any unassailableuniqueness that previously granted them superiority. In fact, the genetic difference between humansand chimpanzees is much smaller than that between chimpanzees and gorillas (Diamond 1992: 18–21).Yet advances in scientific understandings of evolution and genetics failed to impact the boundarybetween humans and animals, and Linnaeus’ primate order was rejected by many naturalists, includingDarwin, who resisted denying human superiority over animals (Ritvo, 1995; Russell, 2010). Similaritieswere explained away as revealing a linearity in the evolutionary process, along which humans werepositioned a much later stage whereby they acquired the ‘capacity for culture’ (ibid.; Ingold, 1990: 210;Mullin, 1999). Humans thus retained their dominance “in a state of transcendence over animality”according to the nature/culture dichotomy (Ingold, 1988: xxi), thereby avoiding the biologicalreductionism that they mandated on all other animals (Noske, 1993).
Science still rests on the assumption that a definite boundary exists between humans and animals,especially within laboratory conditions. In maintaining this boundary, scientists have criticisedprimatologists such as Jane Goodall (1990) for recognising the individuality of her chimpanzee subjectsby naming them. Anthropomorphising animals by assigning them human attributes contradictsestablished scientific principles that view the animal as purely mechanistic and wholly knowable giventhat emotional and mental states are beyond scientific understanding (Noske, 1993; Taylor, 2011). The‘purification’ of humans and animals into separated realms therefore denies animals of any subjectivity,and the ensuing autonomy, rendering them abstract, analytical objects (Lynch, 1988; Latour, 1993;Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972: 7).
Laboratories “produce a reduced notion of animal being” (Vint, 2012: 188) as part of the “war againstambivalence” (Bauman, 1991: 3) in order to maintain a moral distance that justifies the exploitation ofanimals (Milton, 2005; Noske, 1997: 52). This reiterates Cartesian logic that considered animals to beunable to feel pain (Marsland, R., lecture on Animal Rights, 30/01/17). Derrida (in Haraway, 2008: 77-79)claims that this moral boundary allows for “exterminism” as animals can be killed but never murdered.
Such boundary ‘purification’ thus acts to separate the world into what can morally be killed and thosewho cannot (Latour, 1993; Haraway 2008: 79). Similarly, recent scientific developments have producedtransgenic animals that constitute a new form of property that necessitate patents (Cassidy, 2001). Thefirst transgenic animal patent was authorized in 1988 following the creation of “Oncomouse”; a mouseadministered the oncogene that makes it more susceptible to forms of cancer (ibid.; Haraway, 1997).Patenting the animal instituted human ownership over it, thus legitimising an uncritical acceptance ofthe animal as an object (Hobson-West, 2007).
However, Latour remarks that despite science’s attempt to construct ‘pure’ categories of humans andanimals, the boundary is renegotiated in practice (Latour, 2005). Many scientists assert that althoughhumans may be the only animals with the capacity for culture and reason, this does not deny animalsthe capacity for autonomous thought and action (Ingold, 1988). Both Goodwin (1988) and Reed (1988),for example, insist that because animals are able to unpredictably ‘act back’, they cannot be thought ofonly as objects. An animal’s ability to respond has been reiterated by Haraway (2008), who claims thatresponse induces responsibility and thus both humans and animals “as workers in the labs ... areresponse-able in the same sense ... [as] responsibility is a relationship crafted in intra-action throughwhich entities, subjects and objects, come into being” (ibid.: 71). Haraway asserts that animals withinscientific experiments are ‘significant others’ as they are joined to humans in pursuit of a single, sharedpurpose (ibid.). Latour (2004: 76), too, emphasises this shift away from perceiving animals as objects byclaiming: “Objects and subjects can never associate with one another; humans and nonhumans can”.Failing to acknowledge this relation in efforts to maintain the boundary can, in fact, hinder the qualityand efficiency of scientific experiments, as expressed by Down (in Hurn, 2012: 155): “[Scientists] forciblyrestrain and manipulate a monkey as if they were dealing with an object, and then wonder why theanimal showed so much resistances and signs of distress ... Needless to say that the objective of theinteraction ... [would be] achieved much faster and without aggressive defense reactions” if scientistsrecognised animal subjectivity. Accordingly, Holmberg (2008: 322), who conducted an autoethnographyof a university course on animal laboratory science, revealed that lecturers stressed the importance of“habituation” between the animal and the scientist in order to “reduce stress and other complications”.
Animals are thus not wholly “unfree” as the success of the experiment depends on their cooperation(Haraway, 2008: 73-75). Laboratory animals have “encounter value” (ibid.: 46) in their labour whichrenders them “working subjects not just worked objects” (ibid.: 80). Accordingly, both scientist and
animal actualise Hegel’s master/slave dialectic (Heidegger, 1994: 115), in which the subjectivity of eitheractor depends on its relation with the other. The animal gains its own ‘umwelt’ or ‘subjective universe’as it stands in relation to its environment and the human (Uexkull, 2001). Upon recognising thissubjectivity, and the concomitant agency in altering the result of the experiment, the animal reversesthe hierarchy by overcoming their subordination as object or ‘slave’ (Heideggerl, 1994). Similarly themaster’s exclusive dependence on the labour of the slave renders them subordinate to the slave’scontrol, as the scientist is during an experiment. Furthermore, Holmberg (2008) also demonstrates howthe scientist is standardized in the same way as the animal, given that they operate within a frameworkthat advocates specific ways of conducting experiments and interacting with the animal. Nevertheless,both subject and object rely on each other for their existence as they “live in and through the use of oneanother’s bodies” (Haraway, 2008: 79).
The “antagonistic dualism” (Haraway, 1990: 146) in the lab is not as systematic as Hegel’s dialecticsuggests, as the animal’s suffering is never fully acquired by the scientist. Haraway states that althoughthe animal should be perceived as a “significantly unfree partner”, it should be considered as suchbeyond the reductive master/slave, human/animal and subject/object dichotomies (ibid., 2008: 71-72).The relationship between humans and animals is dynamic, and can be more appropriately describedthrough Latour’s symmetrical approach, which does not suggest that humans and animals are equal butthat their relationship is heterogeneous and non-confrontational. This ‘entanglement’ (Ingold, 2006) isevident in Candea’s (2010) ethnography of the relationship between scientists as meerkats and theKalahari Meerkat Research Project in South Africa. The meerkats became so habituated to scientists thatthey began to climb on them as objects. This allowed the scientists to gain meaningful behavioural dataon the meerkats’ subjectivity, whilst simultaneously being interpreted by the meerkats in “a subject-and object-shaping dance of encounters” (Haraway, 2008: 4).
Although responsibility is never symmetrical, equal or calculable, these discrepancies are important as“response cannot emerge within relationships of self-similarity” (Haraway, 2008: 71). Haraway reframesthe scientist, or the ‘master’, as a “caregiver” with a responsibility to care for the “patient” or animal;illustrated by the relationship between scientists and haemophiliac puppies that needed to stay alive forthe experiment to work, and thus needed to become patients that were cared for by the researchers(ibid.: 59). Ingold (2000: 52) reiterates this, stating that: “dealing with nonhuman animals is notfundamentally different from dealing with fellow humans”. Within this caring relationship, humans
come to share the animal’s suffering, albeit in nonmimetic ways, through an understanding of theanimal as a subject (Haraway, 2008: 75-77). However, this requires an appreciation of the animal in itsown right, without anthropomorphising or ‘ethnomorphising’ their sentiments according to human bias(Tapper, 1988; Midgley, 1988).
The antithesis between humans and animals is further undermined through technoscientificadvancements in transgenics and xenotransplantation that require humans and animals to begenetically similar in order to successfully produce a human-animal hybrid. Xeno scientists originallyattempted to exploit the genetic similarity of humans and other simians in order to reduce the risk ofimmunological rejection when organs were transposed from monkeys into humans (Sharp, 2011).However, upon discovering that primates were, in fact, too similar to humans and so heightened the riskof pathogen transmission, scientists substituted pigs for their analogous size and structure (ibid.;Cassidy, 2001). For xenotransplantation to be successful, the recipient must accept the foreign tissue ashuman ‘self’ rather than animal ‘other’. However, an ethical boundary is required between humans andpigs so as to allow them to be ‘pharmed’ purely for organs (Dengen, 2010). In regards to Oncomouse,Haraway (1996: 82) confirmed that: “these sister mammals are both us and not-us; that is why weemploy them”.
Following the decision to use pigs as a result of their animality, and thus ability to be disposed of as‘objects’, an ethical question lingers in regards to the status of the recipient human. This predicamenteven emerged when primates were used; for example, the transplantation of a baboon heart into ahuman infant sparked public outrage. The infant, under the alias ‘Baby Fae’, was humanised throughphotos of her undertaking human actions, such as “talking” on the phone in an attempt to reinforce herhuman status and purify the human/animal boundary (Sharp, 2011: 50). Moreover, many expressedconcerns that because Baby Fae was too young to consent to the procedure, she entered the domain ofresearch ‘object’ as the surgery was analogous to animal experimentation (Cassidy, 2001). The resultanthuman-animal hybrid resonates with Haraway’s (1991: 222) claim that “Monsters have always definedthe limits of community in Western imaginations" as “the familiar is always where the uncanny lurks”(ibid., 2008: 45).
Baby Fae is a pertinent example of Latour's (1993) ‘hybrid’ between the separate realms of nature andculture. Latour (ibid.: 41) observes that although modern science works to purify these realms,
translation paradoxically “creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature andculture” (ibid.: 10). He highlights how technoscientific developments have been achieved in the “middlekingdom” between nature and culture: “frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, ... and so on” (ibid.: 37, 49-50). The irony of modernity is that “themodern Constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose verypossibility, it denies” (ibid.: 34). Latour refers to these hybrids as ‘quasi-objects’, but by doing so helimits the hybrid within the dichotomy it attempts to overcome as both subject and object positions aremaintained as antithetical. Baby Fae, for example, if defined as a quasi-object, continues to correspondto the ‘object’ position of animals and represents a breach of an existing boundary, rather than anabrogation.
Instead, what technoscientific hybrids really present is a potential to move beyond the subject/object,and thus human/animal, binary in a way that liberates both positions (Haraway, 1991). Haraway uses acyborg to show how this hybrid is not about the machine and the human, nor the human and animal,"as if such Things and Subjects universally exist" (Haraway 1997: 51). Rather it manifests as an anti-subject, wherein the subject is negated given that identity construction “invites the illusion of essential,fixed position[s]”, such that “Who am I?” remains determined by the Other in a dialectic nexus(Haraway, 1992: 300 & 324). Braidotti (2013) refers to the hybrid ambiguity, or negative dialectic, as the‘posthuman predicament’ in which technoscience provokes a disruption of the subject unity. If man isable to transcend his biology as a cyborg, the animal is able to transcend his own subordination withoutsubsequently condemning the human. Braidotti thus reaffirms the “liberatory and even transgressivepotential of these technologies” (ibid.: 58).
The ‘contradictory logic’ in science that requires animals to be biologically similar to humans whilst atthe same time placing them in ontologically separate realms is exactly the irony that Haraway (1991:149) celebrates in pursuit of the cyborg where “both or all [incompatible things] are necessary andtrue”. By overcoming the dualistic subject/object binary, “The cyborg, the monster, the animal – theclassical ‘other than’ the human are thus emancipated from the category of pejorative difference andshown forth in a more positive light” (Braidotti, 2006: 204). Technoscientific developments, therefore,have not only shifted the boundary between humans and animals, but rather have “erased the animalother altogether” (Molloy in Taylor, 2011: 276), whether that be the nonhuman or human animal.
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