Guinea Pigs

Creating Laboratory Animals and Humans

Abstract

Power relations between humans and animals in scientific experimentation have been investigated to test the hypothesis that certain concepts, such as discipline, biopolitics, and device, may help think about the reality of animals and humans in the laboratory context. It starts from the premise that powers are subtle rather than explicitly violent. First, we validated the hypothesis through an online focus group analysis of the discourse of lecturers, graduates, and bioethicists. Second, we noted the importance of affections, the notion of responsibility, and care. There is a human-animal relationship characterized by ambivalence: instrumental knowledge and practices, on the one hand, care, affection, and emotions, on the other. Therefore, animals have a double ontology since they are objects (they must be studied) and subjects (they must be respected). From this ambivalence, we discuss the guinea pig device, a set of discourses and practices that involve instrumentality and affectivity and transform animals into guinea pigs through its techniques. It is argued that this ambivalence, as vital as it is to keep the animal in the subaltern place of the guinea pig, also has the potential to create other forms of relationship, other forms of experimenting that escape the device, that is, the logic of sacrifice to produce docile and killable lives.