‘A kind of tact’: More-than-human language in Edward Carpenter's critique of vaccination, vivisection, and ‘modern science’

Given the continuing importance of understanding vaccine refusal, Edward Carpenter's anti-vaccinationist beliefs – neglected in the flourishing scholarship on his work – merit critical consideration. This article explores Carpenter's vaccine hesitancy in connection with his anti-vivisection advocacy and critique of ‘modern science’ – depicted as overly arrogant, epistemologically fragmented, and ethically exploitative of animals and humans – while tracing generative connections between these themes and Carpenter's use of language. Carpenter wrote that to understand vaccination, we ‘Must feel our way […] a kind of tact’. I use ‘tact’ to name strategies Carpenter utilised to present these contentious ideas in his nonfiction, including cultivating an informal, accessible prose style. This methodology attempts to restore the subjective considerations he saw as extruded from scientific enquiry, imbuing writing with the vital, immediate, and dialogic qualities he ascribed to speech, in an antivivisectionist attempt to representatively revive the liveliness and holism he saw as lost to scientific materialism. The article explores this project's Platonic assumptions, using Jacques Derrida's theory of the pharmakon to critique the binarism and purity underpinning both Carpenter's logocentrism and his anti-vaccinationist body politics, in conversation with an obscure article where Carpenter models an alternative scientific methodology, rooted in a porous account of interspecies meaning-making.