Voracious secularism: emotional habitus and the desire for knowledge in animal experimentation

ABSTRACT

The conventional formula for dividing religious and secular connects religion to emotion and secularity to rationality. However, recent work in what has been called critical secularism studies has challenged this orientation. This scholarship has proposed that the line between secular and religious is blurry, and that we should expect the secular to be determined by embodied emotion just as much as religion. Postcolonial theorist Saba Mahmood calls these ‘secular affects,’ which include the affects of science. This dovetails with recent research in science and technology studies, which has suggested that science itself is driven by feelings, like excitement in the exploration of concepts and information.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal experimentation
• affect
• secularism studies
• science studies
• embodiment
• habitus

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Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2023.2296206)

Notes

1 Lesley A. Sharp offers an extensive discussion not only of the controversy surrounding this monument (2019, 24–25), but a fascinating window into other practices of commemoration of dead laboratory animals commissioned by animal experimenters themselves (2019, 181–185).

2 Barbara and Karen Fields reframe ‘scientific racism’ as ‘bioracism’ to better highlight its status as a form of pseudo-knowledge (Fields and Fields 2014, 4). Although I will make mention of instances of bio-racism, my primary focus in this article will be on animal testing as a site of scientific violence. This is not to downplay the atrocities informed by bio-racism, let alone other zones of violence driven by science, like weapons production or eugenics. Whereas these atrocities are now discussed and universally condemned in a rearview mirror, animal testing remains a live topic and a live practice. But that’s not to say we can’t see the immune response of secular bodies as they face the invalidation of their intellectual pleasures elsewhere.

3 See, for instance: Agrama 2012; Asad 1993; 2003; Berger 1969; Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen 2011; Engelke 2013; 2014; Farman 2020; Fernando 2014; Gourgouris 2013; Hirschkind 2011; Lee 2015; Levine 2011; Mahmood 2016; Ogden 2018; Pelkmans 2017; Scott 2018; Smolkin 2018.

4 See, for instance: Blankholm 2018; 2022; Cady and Fessenden 2013; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Josephson-Storm 2017; Kahn and Lloyd 2016; McCrary 2022; Modern 2011; Pellegrini 2009; Schaefer 2022; Scheer, Johansen, and Fadil 2019; Sullivan 2020; Sullivan 2005; Taves and Bender 2012; Thomas 2019; Wenger 2009.

5 See, for instance, Pellegrini 2009 and Scheer, Fadil, and Johansen 2019.

6 See, for instance, Colombetti 2014; Maiese 2016; Schaefer 2022; Shah 2018; Thagard 2006.

7 In an 1871 letter, Darwin wrote that vivisection ‘is justifiable for real investigations on physiology; but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity,’ adding that ‘It is a subject which makes me sick with horror, so I will not say another word about it, else I shall not sleep to-night’ (Darwin 1871). A recent article suggested that large numbers of animal experimenters experience ‘insomnia, chronic physical ailments, zombielike lack of empathy, and, in extreme cases, severe depression, substance abuse, and thoughts of suicide’ (Grimm 2023), which is consistent with what one of Lesley Sharp’s interviewees (herself an animal experimenter) told her – that some of the studies designed by her colleagues cause her to ‘lose sleep at night’ (Sharp: 2019, 67). While writing this article, I lost a lot of sleep, too.

8 Contemporary uses of the Forced Swim Test often rely on a variation in trials for antidepressant medications. In this version, the length of time the animals swim before allowing themselves is measured. Those that give up hope more quickly are considered to be more depressed, allowing a quantitative measure of the efficacy of antidepressants.

9 I am personally aware of at least one institution where the Forced Swim Test is part of undergraduate instruction.

10 One thing that becomes clear when reading Sharp’s book is that standards of animal welfare vary a lot, and different lab cultures, experimental designs, and oversight protocols lend themselves to very different patterns of overall treatment. This is a caveat, then, that referring to animal experimentation contexts as a singularity papers over some important differences.

11 The history of racialised and vulnerable people abused and exploited for science’s benefit – from Sarah Baartman, an African woman displayed in scientific and entertainment contexts in the nineteenth century, to the Tuskegee University syphilis experiments, which ran right into the 1970s – also illustrates voracious science.

12 LeDoux’s early work emphasises a split between ‘high road’ and ‘low road’ thinking, with the latter bypassing cognitive operations (LeDoux 1996). His more recent publications endorse an understanding of emotion that emphasises the interplay between feeling and cognition. (LeDoux 2014)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donovan Schaefer

Donovan Schaefer is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Published works include the books Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke 2015), The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, The Sciences, and the Study of Power (Cambridge 2019), and Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke 2022), which won the 2023 Ludwik Fleck prize.