Captivity and Captivation: Remaking agency and capacity in the

laboratory

Gail Davies, Geography, UCLMaterialities conference II, Durham, 19th December 2007

Introduction

• Conceptual starting points: Materiality – agency – capacity

• Empirical groundings: transgenic animals models - cognitive sciences – behavioural genetics

• ‘“The mice approached the cat, even snuggled up to it and played with it,” Kobayakawa said. “The discovery that fear is genetically determined and not learned after birth is very interesting, and goes against what was previously thought.”’ (Japan Scientists Develop Fearless Mouse, Guardian, Thursday December 13, 2007)

Captivity and Captivation

• Captivation and the practices of scientific observation

• Captivation and the understanding of animal behaviour

• Captivation and being in the world for both humans and animals

• Captivation and desire in contemporary capitalism

Laboratory mice: from object to subject?

• ‘Here we are, our bodies protected over the years by vaccinations and drugs most of which were probably tested on animals … My body, your bodies, are a charnel house; stacked in it are the corpses of millions of rats and mice and guinea pigs and fish and birds and cats and dogs and primates used by doctors and scientists over hundreds of years’ (Kimbell 2005, pp.7-8)

(A) Oral alcohol self-administration paradigm, in which the animal is trained to press a lever to obtain alcohol instead of water. (B) Intracranial self-stimulation paradigm, in which the animal is trained to spin a wheel to receive a current through electrodes implanted in the brain. (Roberts, A.J., and Koob, G.F., 1997, The neurobiology of addiction: An overview. Alcohol Health & Research World 21:101–106)

Modelling mouse depression

• ‘Dangle a mouse by its tail, and it will wriggle and strain to escape before eventually recognizing the hopelessness of its situation. Measure the time it takes to abandon thoughts of helping itself, and you have one of the classic animal tests for depression.’ Alison Abbott (2007) Model Behaviour Nature 450, 6-7 Forced swim test

Standardizing mice models

• Liu et al (2007) Reduced Anxiety and Depression-Like Behaviors in Mice Lacking GABA Transporter Subtype 1 Neuropsychopharmacology 32, 1531–1539

• a) Forced-swimming test results for genotypically different mice.

• b) Tail-suspension test for mice with different genotypes and injected with different drugs.

• The knock-out mouse is most active but is insensitive to Prozac, providing information on specific brain functions.

Troubling standardization

• “Laboratories often employ specialists who show particular abilities at ‘handling animals [… revealing] an empathetic orientation to lab animals as living, holistic, creatures with needs to be attended and reactions to be monitored. […] Scientists who are ‘good with animals’ can sometimes obtain compliance from their subjects which otherwise would be impossible. This is particularly obvious in behavioural experimentation” (Lynch, 1988, p.282).

• “Strains of mice that show characteristic patterns of behavior are critical for research in neurobehavioral genetics [yet] experiments characterizing mutants may yield results that are idiosyncratic to a particular laboratory” (Crabbe et al, 1999)

Troubling interpretation

• Stereotypies include bar-mouthing, jumping, back-flipping and barbering

Images: www.nc3rs.org.uk

Cage enrichment and behavioural diversity

www.awionline.org/pubs/cq02/Cq-mice.html

Stable data and unstable meanings

• “ The difference between normal animals in un-natural situations and animals which have themselves become profoundly abnormal? Between newly-developed ARBs ['Abnormal repetitive behaviour] and ingrained habits? Between different forms of brain malfunction? As yet, we have rather more hunches than we do hard data” (Mason & Rushen, eds, 2006, Stereotypic Animal Behaviour - Fundamentals and Applications to Welfare).

• “The terms 'compulsive behaviour' and 'impulsive behaviour' have been cautiously applied to […] forms of malfunction akin to those seen in, respectively, certain types of human OCD and the hyper-locomotion induced by amphetamine-like drugs” (ibid).

Incorporating human experimentation

• ‘Classical animal tests for psychiatric disorders are based on responses to clinically proven drugs’ (Alison Abbott (2007) Model Behaviour Nature 450, 6-7)

www.nc3rs.org.uk/

(Provisional) conclusions

• Firstly, there is much here that is not novel: ‘The foundations of humanity must contain a continual oscillation between animal captivation, and a human capacity for distraction’ (Agamben 2004, p.70)

• For the animal: ‘The mode of being proper […], which defines its relationship with the disinhibitor, is captivation. Insofar as it is essentially captivated and wholly absorbed in its own disinhibitor, the animal cannot truly act or comport itself in relation to it: it can only behave.’ (Agamben 2004, p.52).

• For humans: ‘Dasein [the concept Heidegger uses to question what it means to be human] is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human’ (Agamben 2004, p.70, original emphasis)

And some final questions

• Yet, there might be a qualitatively different forms of relating in the contemporary biosciences: ‘The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man’ (Agamben, 2004, p.77)

• For Agamben: ‘To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new – more effective or more authentic – articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that – within man – separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness’ (2004, p.92)

• For Latour and others: to recover the role of non-humans as both constitutive of what we see as humanity, and a source of active ‘world making’ in their own right.

• For Deleuze: to engender and value as many manifestations of agency as possible, and to emphasize becomings as processes of increase or enhancement in the powers of one body, carried out in relation to the powers of another.

Acknowledgements

• This presentation arises from a research fellowship funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council on ‘Biogeography and Transgenic Life’ (grant number RES-063-27-0093). I am grateful to the ESRC for this support.