The Routledge International Handbook of More-than-Human Studies [1 ed.] 9781032191676, 9781032201788, 9781003262619

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF MORE-THANHUMAN STUDIES

This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the field of more-than-human studies, bringing together contemporary and essential content from leading authors across the discipline. With attention to the intellectual history of the field, its developments and extensions, its applications and its significance to contemporary society, it presents empirical studies and theoretical work covering long-established disciplines, as well as new writing on art, history, politics, planning, architecture, research methodology and ethics. An elaboration of the various dimensions of more-than-human studies, The Routledge International Handbook of More-than-Human Studies constitutes essential reading for anyone studying or researching in this field. Adrian Franklin, Creative Industries, University of South Australia. He trained as a social anthropologist and sociologist in the UK and has held professorial positions in the UK, Europe and Australia. He has longstanding research and teaching interests in human-­ animal studies, posthumanism, new materialism, city life, creativity, art, mobilities, collecting, museum studies, festivals and arts ecologies. He has contributed to the opening up of several new fields within more-than-human studies, including the city, tourism, social and cultural bonds, place, the home, bush fires, the beach/sea, companion animals and human loneliness.

ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MACROECONOMIC METHODOLOGY Edited by: Jesper Jespersen, Victoria Chick and Bert Tieben THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL SOCIAL WORK Edited by: Antonio López Peláez and Gloria Kirwan THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY Edited by: Milan Zafirovski THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF INTERSECTIONALITY STUDIES Edited by: Kathy Davis and Helma Lutz THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MORALITY Edited by: Naomi Ellemers, Stefano Pagliaro and Félice van Nunspeet THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF EXISTENTIAL HUMAN SCIENCE Aubrey H. Fine, Megan K. Mueller, Zenithson Y. Ng, Alan M. Beck, and Jose M. Peralta THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY Dennis Hiebert THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF MORE-THAN-HUMAN STUDIES Adrian Franklin

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF MORETHAN-HUMAN STUDIES

Edited by Adrian Franklin

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Adrian Franklin; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Adrian Franklin to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032191676 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032201788 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003262619 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Lynsday and Fernhayes and all who there dwelt.

CONTENTS

List of figures x List of contributors xi Acknowledgementsxviii   1 The Separation? Adrian Franklin

1

PART 1

Foundations29   2 In the Thick of Things and the Politics of Becoming Andrew Pickering

31

  3 When Species Meet Donna Haraway

42

  4 A Circumpolar Night’s Dream Tim Ingold

79

  5 Planetary Thought and the Much-More-than-Human Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski

103

  6 A Multispecies Ontological Turn?  Anna Tsing

116

  7 Politics, Space and the More-than-Human Condition Steve Hinchliffe

129

vii

Contents

  8 The ‘Shuffle of Things’ and the Distribution of Agency Tony Bennett

141

  9 The Technical and the Political Andrew Barry

158

10 The More-than-Human City Adrian Franklin

189

PART 2

Elaborations203 11 Airports, Affect and Arctic Futures – More-than-Human Thinking of Connectivity and Dwelling Carina Ren

205

12 Meeting and Mingling with Microbes: A More-than-Human Geography of Hygiene, Holobionts and Hospitality Beth Greenhough

219

13 More-than-Human Reflections on Anthropause Adam Searle and Jonathon Turnbull 14 The Virtual Animal in the Digital Anthropocene: Empowered or Subjugated? Erica von Essen 15 Living with Unruly Waste Matter: On More-than-Human Relations Olli Pyyhtinen

232

245 257

16 We Have Never Built Back Better: Using STS to Account for the Many Failures of Disaster Recovery269 Steve Matthewman 17 The More-than-Human Home Emma Power

282

18 Wrapping Things Up: Making Plastic into a Political Material Gay Hawkins

295

19 Histories in, of and for More-than-Human Worlds Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor

308

viii

Contents

20 Making Time for and with Honeybees Catherine Phillips 21 The Long Horizon: Temporal Imaginaries in the More-than-Human Arts Chris Salter

322

334

22 The Cosmopolitics of Urban Planning in a More-than-Human World348 Jonathan Metzger PART 3

Methods359 23 Nine Methodological Principles for the Posthumanities Stephen Muecke, Alessandro Antonello, Tully Barnett, Amy T. Matthews, and Stephen Zagala 24 Knives, the More-than-Human and Speculative Fabrication with/for the Chthulucene Mike Michael

361

376

25 The More-than-Human Micropolitics of the Research Assemblage Nick J. Fox and Pam Alldred

390

26 Towards a More-than-Human Participatory Research Michelle Bastian

404

27 More-than-Human Ethics Franklin Ginn

420

PART 4

Towards a Common World

431

28 Walking into the Future with Bruno Latour Adrian Franklin

433

Index457

ix

FIGURES

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Green Man, Canterbury Cathedral Cloisters. Photo: Adrian Franklin  9 Mermaid, Canterbury Cathedral Cloisters. Photo: Adrian Franklin  10 Carnivalesque woman, medieval Canterbury. Photo: Adrian Franklin  10 River Lydden at Bagber close to Willian Barnes’ birthplace. Photo: Adrian Franklin 16 3.1 Jim’s Dog. Courtesy of James Clifford 43 3.2 Leonardo da Vinci’s Dog. Copyright Sidney Harris, ScienceCartoonsPlus.com45 3.3  Faye Ginsburg and the wolf Remus greeting and playing in Benson Ginsburg’s laboratory at the University of Chicago 49 4.1 Western and Ojibwa models of the person 94 6.1  From ‘How Things Hold.’ Pine trees, a mycorrhizalised seedling, and a rake stand in for the temporal coordinations of pine, fungal, and human practices in the satoyama forest. Illustration by Elaine Gan 123 6.2  From ‘Golden Snail Opera’: a duck with a camera shakes its head. Photographs by Isabelle Carbonell and duck 125 11.1  The Air+Port scenario at the possible Greenland exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2012. Photo: Carina Ren 212 28.1  St Mary’s Church, Patrixbourne which lies in four major pilgrimage routes: Via Francigena, The Royal Saxon Way, The North Downs Way and The Old Way. Photo: Adrian Franklin 441 28.2 Hambledon Hill, Iron Age Hill Fort, Child Okeford, Dorset. Photo: Adrian Franklin 451

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Pam Alldred, Social Work, Social Care and Communities, Nottingham Trent University, UK. Pam researches sexualities, parenting and sex education and has led two large international projects on gender-related violence and then on sexual violence, with European Union co-funding. Pam’s most recent book is Sociology and the New Materialism (with Nick J Fox, Sage, 2017), and she is a co-editor of the Handbook of Youth Work Practice (Sage, 2018). Alessandro Antonello, History, Flinders University, Australia and has previously held research positions at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oregon. Alessandro works on the environmental and international histories of Antarctica, the cryosphere, and oceans, especially in the period since 1945. His work connects environmental and scientific ideas with geopolitics and international relations. He is the author of The Greening of Antarctica: Assembling an International Environment (Oxford University Press, 2019). Tully Barnett, Creative Industries, Flinders University, Australia. Her research spans the disciplinary areas: the study of how society values arts and culture and the politics and cultural implications of digitization work, for which project she is completing an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship. She is a Chief Investigator on the project Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture and co-author of the book What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture (2018) with Julian Meyrick and Robert Phiddian. Andrew Barry, Human Geography, University College, London, UK. He was originally trained in Physics and the History and Philosophy of Science, and previously held posts at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, and the School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford. His books include Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline and (with Georgina Born) Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences. Michelle Bastian, Environmental Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK and Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, Norway. Her work crosses critical time studies xi

Contributors

and environmental humanities, with a focus on the role of time in human and more-than-­ human communities. She is the editor-in-chief for Time & Society (SAGE) and a co-editor of a number of collections, including Field Philosophy and Other Experiments (Routledge) and Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge). Currently, Michelle is exploring seasonal timing in plants and animals (phenology) and how this is changing in a time of climate breakdown. Tony Bennett, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia, and Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the UK Academy of the Social Sciences. His recent books include Museums, Power, Knowledge (2018) and, as a convening author/editor, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government (2017), Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Social Divisions and Inequalities (2021), and The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions (2020). His Habit’s Pathways: Repetition, Power, Conduct will be published in 2023. Nigel Clark, Human Geography, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. His work explores creative and caring ways of living on a richly differentiated but volatile planet. He is the author of Inhuman Nature (2011) and (with Bronislaw Szerszynski) Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (2021) and the co-editor with (Kathryn Yusoff) of a 2017 Theory, Culture & Society special issue on ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’. Nick J. Fox, Sociology, University of Huddersfield UK and Sociology, University of Sheffield, UK. He is a leading UK new materialist scholar, and has researched and written widely on materialist social theory as applied to health, embodiment, sexuality, creativity and emotions. His most recent book (with Pam Alldred) is Sociology and the New Materialism (Sage, 2017). Nick’s current activity is inflected towards political sociology, with work addressing environmental sustainability policy, citizenship, capitalism and the pandemic, and political economy. Adrian Franklin, Creative Industries, University of South Australia. He trained as a social anthropologist and sociologist in the UK and has held professorial positions in the UK, Europe and Australia. He has longstanding research and teaching interests in human-­ animal studies, posthumanism, new materialism, city life, creativity, art, mobilities, collecting, museum studies, festivals and arts ecologies. He has contributed to the opening up of several new fields within more-than-human studies, including the city, tourism, social and cultural bonds, place, the home, bush fires, the beach/sea, companion animals and human loneliness. Andrea Gaynor, History, University of Western Australia. An environmental historian, her research seeks to use the contextualising and narrative power of history to assist transitions to more just and sustainable societies. Her current research encompasses histories of nature in Australian urban modernity, water in Australian urbanisation and community-led land management in Australia. Her most recent book, co-authored with six colleagues, is Cities in a Sunburnt Country: Water and the Making of Urban Australia (Cambridge University Press 2022). xii

Contributors

Franklin Ginn, Cultural Geography, University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Domestic Wild: Memory, Nature and Gardening in Suburbia (Routledge, 2016), and co-edited The Work That Plants Do (Transcript, 2021). Recent research projects have included vegetal politics and nonhuman economy in Pakistan (funded by the Royal Geographical Society) and soil cosmopolitics in Himalayan agriculture (funded by the UK’s GCRF). He is currently researching and writing about the future of plants in space exploration. Franklin is a Rachel Carson Centre alumnus, and a co-editor of Environmental Humanities. Beth Greenhough, Human Geography, Fellow of Keble College, University of Oxford. Her work draws on a combination of more-than-human geography and science studies to explore the social implications of scientific innovations in the areas of health, biomedicine and the environment. Employing a range of qualitative, ethnographic and archival methods, Beth seeks to understand the social, cultural and ethical processes through which humans and animals are made available as experimental subjects for biomedical research. She is the co-PI of the Wellcome Trust funded Animal Research Nexus project (2017–2023) and a co-author of Bodies Across Borders (Ashgate 2015), Health Geographies: A Critical Introduction (Wiley 2017) and Bioinformation (Polity 2017). Donna Haraway, History of Consciousness Department, University of California Santa Cruz, USA. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She has served as a thesis adviser for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Creative Ecologies. Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); Manifestly Haraway (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); The Haraway Reader (2004); Modest Witness@Second_Millennium (1997, 2nd ed 2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004). A feature-length film made by Fabrizio Terravova is titled Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016, available as a DVD). With Adele Clarke, she co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing. Gay Hawkins, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research focuses on the interactions between material and political processes, STS-inflected economic sociology and mundane governance. Her work has been influential in the development of new fields such as discard studies and the plastic humanities. Key books include The Ethics of Waste (2006), Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic (2013, coedited with Mike Michael and Jennifer Gabrys), and Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water (2015, co-authored with Kane Race and Emily Potter). Steve Hinchliffe, Human Geography, University of Exeter, UK. His books include Pathological Lives (2016, Wiley Blackwell) and Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The More than Human Condition (2016, Routledge). He currently works on a number of interdisciplinary xiii

Contributors

projects on disease, biosecurity and drug-resistant infections, focusing on Europe and Asia. He is a member of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at Exeter, and sits on the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Exotic Diseases and on the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Science Advisory Group’s Social Science Expert Group. Tim Ingold, Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022, he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology. Steve Matthewman, Sociology, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau, New Zealand. Research interests include the sociology of disasters, STS and social theory. His recent book projects have been edited collections on COVID-19 and the social sciences, a decade of disaster experiences in Ōtautahi Christchurch (with Shinya Uekusa and Bruce Glavovich), and the third edition of Being Sociological (with Bruce Curtis and David Mayeda). His current work explores the connections between Critical Disaster Studies and Critical Future Studies, with a particular interest in what happens after managed retreat. Amy T. Matthews, Creative Writing, Flinders University, Australia. She is an award-­ winning author, who also publishes under the names Tess LeSue and Amy Barry. Her research focusses on the ethics of representation in historical fiction, gender and feminisms in Popular Romance Studies, and generic possibilities for fictions of climate change. Jonathan Metzger, Urban and Regional Studies, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Most of his research deals with decision making concerning complex environmental issues – generally with a focus on urban and regional policy and politics. In his work, he in various ways brings together planning studies, human geography, science and technology studies, and organization studies.​His two most recent books are Dilemmas of Sustainable Urban Development: A view from Practice (Routledge, 2021, w/ Jenny Lindblad, eds.) and Deleuze and the City (University of Edinburgh Press, w/ Hélène Frichot & Catharina Gabrielsson, eds.). Mike Michael, Social and Political Science, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter, UK. Research interests have touched on the relation of everyday life to technoscience, the use of design to develop a ‘speculative methodology’, and the role of aesthetics and affect in the making of publics. Recent publications include (co-authored with Andy Boucher et al.) Energy Babble: Entangling Design and STS (Mattering Press, 2018), ActorNetwork Theory: Trials, Trails and Translations (Sage, 2017), and The Research Event: Towards Prospective Methodologies in Sociology (Routledge, 2021). Stephen Muecke, Senior Research Fellow, Nulungu Research Institute, The University of Notre Dame, Australia. Recent books are Latour and the Humanities, edited with Rita Felski, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020 and The Children’s Country: Creation of a xiv

Contributors

Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia, co-authored with Paddy Roe, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020. Emily O’Gorman, Geography and Planning, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research is situated within environmental history and the environmental humanities, and is primarily concerned with contested knowledges within broader cultural framings of authority, expertise, and landscapes. She is the author of Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin (2012) and Wetlands in a Dry Land: Morethan-Human Histories of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (University of Washington Press, 2021; 2022 Nautilus Book Award Silver Winner in Ecology & Environment; 2023 Joint Winner Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Environmental History Network Book Prize). Catherine Phillips, Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia. Through combining mixed methods research and social theory, she examines the practices, contestations, and governance of multispecies relations and places. Her research orients around related fields of inquiry: more-than-human geographies and future agrifood systems. An unsettled settler, she lives on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri, and grew up on those of the Anishinaabe. Andrew Pickering, Sociology and Philosophy, Exeter University UK. His work in science and technology studies focusses on couplings of the human and the nonhuman. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science and The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. He is currently completing a book on our relations with nature and the environment. Emma Power, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her ‘Cities of Care’ research programme develops cutting-edge conceptualisations of urban care, bringing new insights into how the urban fabric, markets and governance processes configure and are configured through care. Related work conceptually and empirically reconceptualises geographies of home through new insights into the socio-material nature of domestic practice. Emma contributes to public policy debates and media nationally. She has been the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Housing Policy and is the co-founder of the Housing Journal Podcast. Olli Pyyhtinen, Sociology, Tampere University, Finland. His research intersects social theory, philosophically inclined fieldwork, science and technology studies, economic sociology, and the study of art, and he is the author of The Simmelian Legacy (2018), Morethan-Human Sociology (2015), and The Gift and Its Paradoxes (2014). His current work explores modes of thinking and knowing in and along naturecultural encounters and entanglements with waste. Carina Ren, The Techno-Anthropology Lab, Aalborg University, Denmark, and head of AAU Arctic, her university’s cross-faculty platform for Arctic research. Her research explores how tourism interferes with places, the social and the more-than-human, most often in the Nordics, the Nordic Arctic and Greenland. She has published widely in tourism and Arctic studies and has co-edited books such as Actor-Network Theory and Tourism. xv

Contributors

Ordering, Materiality and Multiplicity (2012), Tourism Encounters and Controversies. Ontological Politics of Tourism Development (2015), Co-Creating Tourism Research. ­Collaborative Ways of Knowing (2017), and Collaborative Research Methods in the Arctic (2020). Chris Salter, Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland, and Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University, Canada. Former Co-Director of the Hexagram network for research-creation in arts, cultures and technology and Co-Founder of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. His artistic work has been seen all over the world at venues such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, ZKM, Kunstfest Weimar, Musée d’art Contemporain, Muffathalle, EXIT Festival and Place des Arts-Montreal, among many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022), all MIT Press. Adam Searle, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, UK. His work applies a more-than-human framework to broadly examine the relationships between humans, nonhumans, and biotechnologies, with a specific focus on cryopreservation, cloning, and genome editing in the governance of ‘life’. Recently, he has been working on a collaborative project concerning the more-than-human geographies of lockdown life and is a founding member of the Digital Ecologies working group. Bronislaw Szerszynski, Sociology, Lancaster University, UK. His research seeks to situate social life in the longer perspective of human and planetary history, drawing on the social and natural sciences, arts and humanities. He is the co-author with Nigel Clark of Planetary Social Thought (2021), author of Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005), and co-editor of Risk, Environment and Modernity (1996), Re-Ordering Nature (2003), Nature Performed (2003) and Technofutures (2015). As well as academic publications, his outputs also include performances, creative writing, art-science exhibitions and events, and experimental participatory workshops. Anna Tsing, Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz, USA. She is the author of The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1994). Tsing is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Niels Bohr Professorship for a multi-year project on the Anthropocene. She is interested in multi-species anthropology; social landscapes and forest ethnoecologies; globalization; feminist theory; and multi-sited ethnography. Jonathon Turnbull, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK. With a broad interest in the geographies of nature, his PhD research took place in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine and examines competing narratives of nature’s recovery in the Zone. His ongoing research projects span topics, including India’s bovine geographies, anthropause environmentalisms, digital ecologies, and the weird. Jonny is a founding member of the Digital Ecologies research group and the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities Network. He is the co-editor of Digital Ecologies: Mediating More-Than-Human Worlds to be published by Manchester University Press in 2023. xvi

Contributors

Erica von Essen, Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden; Applied Ecology, Agricultural Sciences and Biotechnology, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research looks broadly at the ethics of changing human-wildlife relations. Her empirical focus has been hunters and hunting cultures, including their hunting ethics, practices, technologies, discourses and motivations. Von Essen has engaged in depth on drivers behind illegal hunting of large carnivores, and now continues to examine what happens to wild animals that are out-of-place, unwanted, deemed a risk or problems for society. She appears frequently in news media to discuss poaching, wolves and wildlife crime. Stephen Zagala is a writer and curator whose research interests include the history of photography, the anthropology of material culture, and theories of art and aesthetics. He is currently a research fellow in World Cultures at the South Australian Museum.

xvii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to Neil Jordan for his invitation, encouragement and support through the life of this project; to Katerina Bryant for excellent copy editing and formatting of the final manuscript; to Lynn Paddock for support and forbearance during the busy periods and to all the authors for their engagement, creativity and timely production of outputs.

xviii

1 THE SEPARATION? Adrian Franklin

In recent years, what was once considered the exclusively humanities side and the exclusively natural science side of CP Snow’s (2002) ‘Great Divide’ has been bridged. This bridge-building phase started from the social sciences and humanities side of the divide, roughly between 1980 and 2000, and it reached the other side before the sciences had begun in any serious or concerted way. It was a rude awakening for the natural sciences: they found themselves, their labs, their facts, their ‘nature’ and their (unacknowledged) culture written irreversibly into the more-than-human world. The very grounds on which they claimed a privileged access to ‘the truth’ about the world were shattered. Their production of ‘facts’ has been shown to lack a purely objective basis (Woolgar and Latour, 1979), while their foundational theory of matter as neutral and inert was demonstrated to rely more on ‘belief’ than observation (Latour, 2010a, 2010b). Andrew Pickering showed how human engineering interventions in large-scale landscapes provoke profound and unanticipated reactions from lively, not inert matter; that nature is less like putty in human hands to be blueprinted at will than a spirited dance partner with whom we need to partner properly, respectfully and carefully (Pickering, 2008: 1–14). The key observation that Snow made in his Rede Lecture of May 1959 is not inconsistent with Lesley Head’s (2011: 37) objection to his bridge metaphor: for Snow the major problems facing the world hardly ever fall neatly into either the sciences or the humanities. Yet both operated as if they were completely separable domains, each believing that their ‘domain’ – the natural world for the sciences and the human world for the humanities – can be conceptually, theoretically and empirically investigated in the absence of the other. Both agreed to separate humanity from nature. Therefore, more-than-human approaches seek to put them back together – ‘on the same river bank’, as Head put it (my emphasis). More-than-human studies rediscover what the world looks like when nature and humanity are reunited in a common language. This long-established separation flew in the face not only of much recorded human experience of the world but of common sense too (see Muecke et al., this volume; Hinchliffe this volume; Latour, 2010b: 480, 2021; Latour and Schultz, 2022 on this point). Indeed, as I shall show, it took a great deal of effort to extricate humans from the natural world in the first place and to keep them apart thereafter. It was an historical process that Alfred North Whitehead called ‘The Bifurcation’. For Latour (2010b: 476) this was: 1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-1

Adrian Franklin

A way of organizing the division…between appearances and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, history and immutability. A fully transcendent, yet a fully historical construct, a deeply religious way (but not in the truly religious sense of the word) of creating the difference of potential between what human souls were attached to and what was really out there. The ‘bifurcation’ was an objectification that then created two subjectivities and purified them into the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and the sciences, a phrase which Snow himself used for the title of his lecture and book (The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution). By 1959, there were already rival views to the modern ‘bifurcation’: materialisms, most notably by mathematician and later philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (but also Spinoza and Bateson), that demonstrated not separation but the exact opposite: the promiscuous open-ended interpenetration of all entities, human and otherwise, as they create and recreate their world endlessly. These remained relatively obscure and were of course widely considered esoteric until the more-than-human turn got underway during the 1980s. These materialisms were revived and elaborated to form several strands of scholarship now generically referred to as more-than-human studies (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Latour, 1993; Haraway 2003; Halewood, 2005; Stengers, 2011). The making of more-than-human studies was a combined forces operation by a number of disciplines: sociology/science and technology studies (Steve Woolgar; Bruno Latour; John Law; Andrew Pickering; Michel Callon; Mike Michael); philosophy/history of consciousness (Donna Haraway; Gilles Deleuze; Félix Guattari; Keith Ansell Pearson; Isabelle Stengers; Rosi Braidotti; Karen Barad; Manuel DeLanda; Annemarie Mol); human geography (Nigel Thrift; Sarah Whatmore; Steve Hinchliffe; Nigel Clark); cultural studies (Carina Ren; Alexander Weheliye; Cary Wolfe); anthropology (Tim Ingold; Philippe Descola; Anna Tsing; Sarah Franklin); English literature/creative writing/environment humanities (Lesley Head; Jane Bennett; Stephen Muecke; Timothy Morton) and art (Chris Salter). Some of those named above have made significant contributions to this volume, but there is now a burgeoning groundswell of scholarship among middle and early career researchers for whom such a project is felt with a keen sense of urgency as climate change bears down on them as a younger generation and a new rapprochement between humanity and nature is being sought. The great diversity of their work and the matters of concern they raise are also showcased here. Whitehead was crucial to the emergence of more-than-human studies because his ‘philosophy of organism’ developed ‘a concept of nature that was able to incorporate all existence, thereby bringing together the empirical, the material, the social, the aesthetic, and thinking beings’ (Halewood, 2005: 57–58). As Whitehead explained to his son North in a letter written in 1924 as he commenced his tenure as a Professor of Philosophy at Harvard: I am trying to evolve one way of speaking which applies equally to physics, physiology, and to our aesthetic experiences. The ordinary philosophic abstractions won’t do this. (Lowe, 1990: 221) Whitehead succeeded in finding this way of speaking, a new materialist language, most notably in Process and Reality (1929), and it is hard to imagine many other ideas in history

2

The Separation?

promising so much revolutionary potential, in so few words. It has inspired viable ways to envisage the end of the destructive powers of modernity and ways to engender a more modest, common world (Latour, 2010b; Descola, 2013; Haraway, 2016). This was no mean feat. Of course, more-than-human thinking and being has always been a central feature of animistic world views among Indigenous people (Descola, 2013; Nelson and Shilling, 2018; Joks et al., 2020; Muecke, 2022), and that includes ancestral Europeans (Conneller, 2004, 2021; Taylor et al., 2018) from hunting and gathering forebears right up to early modern Europeans who lived before the Great Divide became formalised, institutionalised and defended from around the sixteenth century onwards (Storch, 1982; Durston, 1996; Latour, 2010b). So, while the more-than-human turn has largely been initiated and advanced by recent Western scholarship, spreading out from its first examinations of science, technology and modernity, its connection to indigenous and historical forms of more-than-human thinking provides other important strands for development. How can we reconnect with and learn from indigenous cultures? How can we recover previous ways of living in the West that were destroyed by the ‘Bifurcation’ in order to engender collective efforts to address common problems, not least climate change (Latour, 2017, 2018; Ingold, this volume; Muecke et al., this volume, Franklin, 2023)? For Latour (2010b: 481) we have to look to our past in order to address the future: But there is no way to devise a successor to nature, if we do not tackle the tricky question of animism anew. One of the principal causes of the scorn poured by the Moderns on the sixteenth century is that those poor archaic folks, who had the misfortune of living on the wrong side of the “epistemological break,” believed in a world animated by all sorts of entities and forces instead of believing, like any rational person, in an inanimate matter producing its effects only through the power of its causes. It is this conceit that lies at the root of all the critiques of environmentalists as being too “anthropocentric” because they dare to “attribute” values, price, agency, purpose, to what cannot have and should not have any intrinsic value (lions, whales, viruses, CO2, monkeys, the ecosystem, or, worst of all, Gaia). The accusation of anthropomorphism is so strong that it paralyzes all the efforts of many scientists in many fields—but especially biology—to go beyond the narrow constraints of what is believed to be “materialism” or “reductionism.” It immediately gives a sort of New Age flavor to any such efforts, as if the default position were the idea of the inanimate and the bizarre innovation were the animate. Drawing on Ojibwa ethnography, Tim Ingold’s chapter in this volume demonstrates how to understand animist ontologies as personal, intimate and intelligible thinking, and as wisdom that responds to and respects the places humans live in and the creatures that live there too: And the kind of knowledge it yields is not propositional, in the form of hypothetical statements or ‘beliefs’ about the nature of reality, but personal – consisting of an intimate sensitivity to other ways of being, to the particular movements, habits and temperaments that reveal each for what it is.

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This …. envisages the world from the point of view of a being within it, as a total field of relations whose unfolding is tantamount to the process of life itself. Every being emerges, with its particular form, dispositions and capacities, as a locus of growth – or in Ojibwa terms, as a focus of power – within this field. Mind, then, is not added on to life but is immanent in the intentional engagement, in perception and action, of living beings with the constituents of their environments. Thus, the world is not an external domain of objects that I look at, or do things to, but is rather going on, or undergoing continuous generation, with me and around me. As such primary engagement is a condition of being, it must also be a condition of knowledge, whether or not the knowledge in question is deemed to be “scientific”. (Ingold, this volume: 89) There is every reason to hope that more-than-human studies, which are now firmly and widely entrenched in university undergraduate coursework, among the higher degree research community and through the academic research layers, will provide a powerful ally for a ‘reunification project’. It is one of the most significant academic advances in recent years that continues to have world-wide traction, not least in a world still menaced by a rampant, recombinant virus channelling urban wet markets and mobilised through every vector of human engineering, logistics, mobilities, sociality, media and imagination. If the Great Divide became a 400-year-long episteme, might it be possible to build something like The Great Reunification before it is too late? More-than-human studies align with the building of a new post-carbon civilisation, because it abandons the notion of humanity living apart from and yet endangering the other-than-human and because historically and culturally it is such a widely shared, intuitive ontology that emerges spontaneously from a shared human capacity to prehend other entities in the world (i.e. to perceive, respond to/ interact with them) and to be ourselves prehensible to them. It is not predisposed to thinking that ‘we’ are inevitably and helplessly locked-in to the status quo. This volume will provide those reading into this research field for the first time (as well as those already working within it) with a state-of-the-art and authoritative coverage of content as well as a representative range of authors, instances, fields and case studies. It will cover its intellectual history, its methodological variations, developments and extensions, its applications and its significance to contemporary society, economy, politics, histories, art, culture, research, health, science, environment, technology, mundane objects, homes, cities, hinterlands and wildernesses; pasts, presents and futures. The language of more-than-human studies can be challenging for new readers. Even my best students have struggled reading Latour, Stengers, Braidotti and Deleuze and Guattari. In part this is because they write from philosophical and social theoretical traditions that are little known among readers from disciplines keen to develop more-than-human studies of their own. But arguably, it is also because these writers challenge the very way modern people view the world and are taught how to understand it. It is so strange at first, so at variance with the conception of the world created by those separating humanity from nature, that its ontological language appears incomprehensible – impossible. Indeed, when one of the original and most influential conceptions of it was first unleashed, in a lecture given by Alfred North Whitehead to the philosophy department at Harvard, the room was sent into a spin, a mix of wonderment and bafflement (Stengers, 2005, 2011). As Whitehead himself wrote in Process and Reality (where he wrote up and extended his lecture series at Harvard): ‘The summary statement of Part 1 is practically unintelligible’ 4

The Separation?

(Whitehead, 1978: xi). By this he meant unintelligible to the uninitiated. To the initiated it is a masterpiece. So, right at the beginning of this handbook (the next chapter), I have included what I think is the best ‘initiation read’, the one with whom the penny dropped best among my students: ‘In the thick of things and the politics of becoming’ by Andrew Pickering. It too originated from a presentation given to a philosophy meeting (in Bergen), but I am confident that reading this will give readers a sense of the mission and the relevance of morethan-human studies and a way into all the chapters that follow. The handbook is organised into three parts. Foundations provides an accessible and robust introduction to more-than-human studies from a range of disciplines and perspective by well-known practitioners. Elaborations shows the versatility and scope of more-than-human perspectives as they have been applied to a wide range of topical questions and disciplines. Methods concludes with five lively essays on more-than-­ human research methods and ethics. Taken together, these chapters provide a very substantial coverage that builds momentum and understanding through the use of memorable case studies. Readers will acquire a solid introduction to more-than-human studies and its aim to reunite humanity with nature. In what remains of this introduction I want to introduce in more detail the very grounds on which more-than-human studies became a necessary intervention for the sciences, social sciences and humanities: why and how ‘The Separation’ occurred in the first place. It is another starting point for such a handbook. We can learn a lot about the more-than-human worlds we lost and how we might yet recover them, by considering the attempt to demolish them in the first place.

The Making of the Great Divide How did a world whose elements and creatures were so obviously integrated, interconnected and creative come to be viewed as wrong-headed and bad in the sixteenth century (Latour, 2010b)? Why did this occur to a specific and influential group of people in Europe and America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how did they go about separating humanity from nature? These are very significant research questions that cannot be answered in full here, but some light might be cast on them using materials from just one place: England, where I was born, raised and made all too aware of my animist heritage as well as the tragedies of the great separation. This is not the only separation story occurring in the sixteenth century, and sixteenth century England is not the only time and place where The Separation was imposed. There are countless thousands of separation events and stories from around the world and their temporalities, processes and implications are very different and important to document, because these will provide the basis for a very different kind of world history as well as pathways to recovering from separation. I do think of ‘The Separation’ as something personal that was done to ‘my ancestors’ and me, as well as recognising that the people who prosecuted The Separation in my case were mostly also English or European. While not the sole originators or perpetrators by any means, it has to be conceded that there were many English scientists, agronomists, cartographers, philosophers, theologians, astronomers, artists, engineers, workers and writers caught up in the currents of separation and apartheid. Some of those were also my ancestors. But then, there were also more than just a few English people who opposed it, with 5

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all their hearts, and kept older beliefs and practices alive, either by shapeshifting them or by hiding them in new cultures from which they might resurge. And some of my ancestors were among these too. But I do not straddle the divide, I am standing on the same riverbank with Lesley Head.

Anti-Animism in England At the beginning of Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500– 1800 (1983), the Oxford historian, Keith Thomas, documents the unfolding of an explicit project to separate humanity from ‘nature’ and to effect humanity’s ‘complete ascendency’ over the natural world. Such an ambition became widespread and was backed by significant sections of power – religious, intellectual, economic and secular. The new ‘humanist’ world they created became an established truth to be socialised and standardised into ‘mainstream’ national life and thought. Comprised of interwoven Puritan-Christian, scientific and philosophical elements, Thomas showed how this alliance waged a long and complex battle to achieve at least five interrelated social and cultural changes: to eliminate a lingering paganism/animism from English culture and Christianity; to preserve Aristotle’s ‘Great Chain of Being’ hierarchy favoured by the Medieval church (where humanity was positioned above and distinct from all other ‘creation’); to place increasing emphasis on taxonomic and behavioural separation of humans and non-humans; to subjugate nature for human utilitarian aims and ‘improvement’; and to distinguish, at all times, humanity’s unique creativity, mind and freewill from nature’s causes, mechanisms and instincts. This built on earlier Christian projects to build a singular and hierarchical view of the world to replace the previously heterogenous and symmetrical pagan Roman world view and the paganisms that existed in England before their colonial expansion. Thomas (1983: 22) wrote: Since Anglo-Saxon times the Christian church in England had stood out against the worship of wells and rivers. The Pagan divinities of groves, streams and mountains had been expelled leaving behind them a disenchanted world to be shaped, moulded and dominated…. Man’s domination over nature was the self-consciously proclaimed ideal of early modern scientists. Hills, forests and streams that were once alive and active in the world of English people were thus turned into inert, neutral, dead matter fit only as an exploitable resource base for humans, the only creative entity. Thomas (1983: 18) showed how these ideas were then driven deep into the fabric of English society by clergy of all persuasions, but especially by emergent Puritanism beginning in the sixteenth century such that: ... [their] long established view that the world had been created for man’s sake, and that other species [and things] were meant to be subordinate to his wishes and needs… underlay the actions of the vast majority of men who never paused to reflect upon the matter. However, with the ascendency of Puritanism in England, sermonising soon turned to the religious and governmental condemnation/persecution and legal suppression of animism, most notably before, during and after the English Civil War (c. 1560–1700). This was precisely because so many English people very much DID pause to reflect upon the matter – they 6

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found the Puritan alternative incomprehensible, empty, humourless, soulless and wanting (Durston, 1996; Durston and Eales, 1996). Thomas’s historic separation thesis is reflected most completely and convincingly in the spatial and intellectual separation of the sciences and the humanities in universities and in scholarship. This was not merely an agreed, practical division of labour but a radical philosophical transformation from ontology to empiricism. As Latour argued (2010b), through critique, science gained value from its procedural keys to reveal ‘the truth’, or ‘the facts’ from the mists of superstition, traditional forms of knowledge and animistic cosmology. In the same stroke, human thoughts, feelings, experience and expression about the natural and material world lost value and lost ground to science as mere subjectivity: wishful, wrong/irrelevant thinking. So, in addition to religious legislation and the policing of the new boundaries of everyday life, The Bifurcation was buttressed in positions of power by an alignment of enlightenment science and philosophy in the shape of men like Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, Rene Descartes and John Locke. Although French-born, Descartes was brought up in the Poitou region that was controlled by the Protestant Huguenots (Calvanists), and much of his academic career was spent in Protestant Netherlands from where his influence and renown were readily received in Puritan England. He formalised the world into two categorically unconnected domains, a duality consisting of res extensa and res cognans, material and mental substances, and these became, respectively, the domains for science and the humanities. Descartes associated the mental domain of the senses as prone to the error of self-deception while the material world was governed by logic out of which ‘definiteness’ or truth might be distilled. Such established truth finding had momentous implications for the development of modern science, the prioritisation of ‘human progress’, the ascendency of economics, the enslavement of nature and, most significantly of all, the arrival of modernity. Locke penned influential Natural Rights for civil society that gave, among other things, ‘the right to life’ only to humans and entitled all humans to ‘own all they create or gain through gift or trade’, a master narrative for liberalism and colonialism and a mantra for the addiction to work, capitalism and permanent economic growth (Weber, 1958; Mack, 2009: 37–45).

We Were Never (Fully) Divided From such an influential coalition the established truth also trickled down into everyday experience where it challenged former ways of life and culture. Keith Thomas’s diverse assembly of diaries, poetry, literature, prose, pamphlets, sermons, philosophy and scientific writings was both its great strength and its weakness. Critics have pointed up its linear and selective qualities as well as its missed opportunities (Mills, 1983: 409–410). It may have been a fair reflection of the written record from the religious, literary, scientific and philosophical communities and elites, the enthusiastic drivers of The Bifurcation, but his ‘vast majority’ of others were barely investigated – and they could and should have been because his account is only half of a much more complex story. A great deal of record keeping and writing about popular culture was generated during the early enforcement of separation precisely because so many of Thomas’s ‘vast majority’ actively opposed the imposition of this more-than-human apartheid. Equally, we can find strong evidence that its imposition, and resistance to it, continued up to and including most of the nineteenth century. The suppression of animistic carnival rituals and the poetry of John Clare and William Barnes provide good alternative voices that we can still listen to. 7

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Carnival in England was the ritual celebration of communities and the very specific places/country they lived in through annual cycles of festive events. Deeply structured by pagan traditions these composed what Roud (2008) has called England’s ‘ritual half year’, carnival ritual utterly dominated English life in the quieter agricultural months between Christmas and Midsummer. John Clare and William Barnes were poets whose voices from ordinary rural English village cultures rarely surfaced in official histories, but in both we can detect their opposition to the logic of The Separation of the world they cared about and sought to protect, and also that The Separation had never been complete, because here they were at the end of the eighteenth century and the old ways were still alive and kicking. Both wrote in praise of their heterogenous worlds and were outspoken critics of the Enclosure Acts and associated ‘agricultural improvement/development’ that robbed small peasant farmers of their rights to common land and destroyed intrinsically valued nature and countryside. Both were completely out as entangled promiscuously with nature and writing confidently about it, asserting it against modernising science and economy.

Anti-Carnival In origin, the pan-European carnival cultures described by Bakhtin (1984) were everywhere cultural-material assemblages from pre-Christian animistic sources that coalesced into specifically local forms and traditions, usually co-existing ‘in tension’ alongside Catholic Christianity. That these animistic festive events shadowed and were held simultaneously with, if not in the same space as, the official ‘feasts’ of the Christian Church in England was an artefact of the first Christian mission to England by Augustine in 596. He thought it ‘a better missionary strategy to allow continuities between paganism and Christianity than to effect a complete break’ (Wood, 1994: 12). This is one of the reasons why the Christian celebration of Christ’s birthday in England (he was born in the northern summer) was changed to December, i.e. midwinter, when the most important English (pagan) rituals of the year took place. The Christmas tree, the Yule log, mistletoe, holly and ivy are all pagan material continuities that got entangled with Christianity as it first arrived in England. The synchronising of human ritual to planetary effects such as seasonality and the new sun recognised the significance of the asymmetrical relationships that humans have with Earth as a planet. As Nigel Clark observes, there is a planetary realm that precedes or exceeds human-nonhuman co-constitution yet impacts humanity profoundly (see Clark this volume). To the untrained eye an English midwinter seems a dark, bleak and uneventfully fallow period, but just as soon as ‘daylight [begins] to increase in length’ in late December…birds sensing the onset of spring begin to sing: ‘…properly, constructing considered phrases, full of meaning, and uttering them from high perches and taking their time’ (Couzens, 2011). These are very clearly marked out rituals that birds perform suddenly and everywhere as a prelude to spring, sex and regeneration. At the same time, large numbers of plants flower lavishly, giving the bare woodland floors, grassy banks and hills a flamboyant makeover. In 2018, 532 species were recorded in flower at midwinter (Barkham, 2018). And counterintuitively, some species of English plants fruit at midwinter, including holly, ivy and mistletoe. So, following Lingis (1998: 100) we might say that the English hills, valleys and woodlands resound at midwinter. The sudden, yet unmistakeable outbreak of sex, colour and song was echoed by equally extravagant and sexual human ritual of many kinds. As Nigel Thrift (2000) argued, not only do objects make thoughts do-able, they make them 8

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thinkable. The barely noticeable arrival of the new sun triggering an astonishing festival of life inspired similar suites of human rituals throughout England and Europe. The performative fusion of pagan with Christian religion served to consolidate rather than undermine animistic ritual as a central ordering of English popular culture (Burke, 2009). The interior decoration of twelfth century Canterbury Cathedral, for example, was made replete with rich pagan symbolism and decoration on every surface and it has remained where it was carved, sculpted, moulded and painted to the present day (Franklin, 2014b). Canterbury cathedral is no exception: all 15 eleventh century and 5 twelfth century Cathedrals in England were similarly decorated. Their even distribution around England meant that every locality was orientated to at least one of them and such decoration extended into most parish churches of the period. The Green Man (or Jack-in-the-Green), a half-human, half-plant deity, is probably the most commonly found figure of English animism and carnival ritual. The significance of carnival ritual remained because local communities were its unbroken customary hosts: they were responsible for performing necessary rituals; they controlled its authorship and direction and everyone in the community, regardless of status or rank, performed it. By contrast, the Christian church remained an external, hierarchical authority and was known as such. English carnival was itself a fabulous hybrid, formed from the joining together of many cultural and material strands: locally specific animistic cosmologies (documented by archaeologists back at least to the Mesolithic – from 9,500 cal BC) (Conneller,

Figure 1.1  Green Man, Canterbury Cathedral Cloisters. Photo: Adrian Franklin.

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Figure 1.2  Mermaid, Canterbury Cathedral Cloisters. Photo: Adrian Franklin.

Figure 1.3  Carnivalesque woman, medieval Canterbury. Photo: Adrian Franklin.

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2021: 62–63) combined with Roman influences via Dionysus/Bacchus cults respectively were embedded as ritual assemblages in every landscape, village and town where they grew their own local specificities and art. Expressed in Bakhtinian terms, carnival was the embodied, emotional expression of the presence, continuity, and indefatigability of local communities in their landscapes, where their collective body and belonging were expressed in art and material culture by an exuberant emphasis on the corporeal body: nakedness and sexual licence, giant fecund figures, sexualised theatre, dance, games, feasting and drinking alcohol. Typically, its art and expression (grotesque realism) emphasised the lower half of the body and the connections and exchanges of materials between their bodies and the earth (Bakhtin, 1984; Jervis, 1999). John Jervis (1999: 19) puts this well: . . . the grotesque body transgresses its own limits, is excessive in its very nature: it is dirty, uncontrolled, extended, protruding, incomplete, ugly; its apertures are open, and become points of disorder and interchange, so that its bodily secretions link it to other bodies and to the processes of decline and rebirth; it is regenerative but also . . . destructive. Carnival rituals, especially their rich traditions of theatre, were often identified with local natures and were directed at external sources of authority, both secular and religious, through ritualised mockery and ridicule (Bakhtin, 1984; Bristol, 1985; Webb, 2005). Carnival was socially inclusive and when it was ‘on’, there was no life outside it. Carnival was also unashamedly plebeian: it celebrated the common people, humanity stripped bare of difference and hierarchy. And while this cultural activity was traditional in form and locally specific, it was always inflected to the present, responsive to contemporary times, material issues and other places (Phythian-Adams, 1972; Reid, 1982; Storch, 1982; Bristol, 1985), and in this sense it was a living more-than-human dynamic – both responsive and creative. Those travelling in from nearby localities were always welcomed. In the sixteenth century, puritanism declared war on paganism and its prominent public expression through carnival. Episodically, the culture war between puritans and carnival could envelope an entire city or a theatre world, but there is no doubt that the refusal of the English to surrender their ritual year to puritan reform was also a key component of the English Civil War (Underdown, 2011: 22). The rise of Puritanism through the period 1500–1700 involved ever more severe forms of suppression of pagan carnival, especially prior to and during the English Civil War (1640–1653) and during Cromwell’s ‘Commonwealth Government (1653–1660) when England’s pagan calendar of festivities became a prime target of their “cultural revolution”’ (Durston, 1996: 211). While it is possible to describe this new ordering attempt, in England at least, the socalled ‘puritan cultural revolution’ failed (Durston, 1996). Their attempts to efface the deeply rooted and extensive animisms in carnival by banning May Day fertility rites (‘a heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness’ according to the 1644 Parliamentary Ordinance), theatre, dancing and alcohol and most other much-loved rituals and pleasures were successfully resisted, and this played no small part in the eventual downfall of the Commonwealth Government of Thomas Cromwell and the restoration of monarchy (Charles II) (Durston, 1996: 211). Resistance took many forms, including riots, armed violence, civil disobedience, literature, art and satire. When Cromwell’s ‘Commonwealth’ government (1653–1660) closed all theatres (William Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was burned down), it prompted actors 11

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and playwrights to retreat to the safety of pubs, carnival’s emotional home bases in every neighbourhood and community. There, they responded with new, abridged versions of old plays and new works that mocked the puritans as socially flawed killjoys. Shakespeare’s talent for mockery and ridicule (itself a ritual component of carnival language) resulted in the creation of a new kind of character for his plays: the ‘stage puritan’. These characters and their nightly public humiliation became hugely popular, most notably the characters of Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1601–1602) and Angelo in Measure for Measure (1603–1604). As Huston Diehl (2000: 88) argues: ‘The antipathy between puritans and players in early modern London is intense. Puritan sermons and polemical tracts accused players of infecting their audiences with “this damnable vice of idleness”, and they denounced stage plays as “filthy”, calling them “the bellowes to blowe the coales of lust, soften the mind, and make it flexible to evil inclinations”’. For Bakhtin, authority is always serious and therefore most vulnerable to ridicule, and arguably the theatre crowds of England had ‘the last laugh’ and ‘….laughed longest’ (a phrase also attributed to Shakespeare). Carnival enjoyed unsurpassed popularity and revival in the post-Restoration period (City of London, 1711: 4–12; Storch, 1982; Webb, 2005: 298–317), and it was not until the late 18th to the mid-19th century when the forces of puritanism (who had splintered into competing sects and rebadged themselves collectively as ‘dissenters’) (Spurr, 1996: 234) joined forces with politically ascendant Protestant captains of industry that a final and successful push to ban carnival (as it had been historically constituted) was made (Franklin, 2022). They consistently claimed carnival events and performance as pagan, licentious, drunken, debauched, criminal and morally dubious affronts to the new demands for religion, discipline and civility consistent with industrial capitalist development. Which it most certainty was, but as Storch shows, the greater part of the population, including its key patrons the aristocracy and Royalty, saw this as a familiar attack on tradition (Berlin, 1986). Major events such as Bartholomew Fair in London grew considerably in size and duration in this period. Focused on individual responsibility, emotional restraint and redemption, ascetic forms of Protestantism opposed the collective and communal nature of carnival, as well as its excessive and promiscuous celebration of embodied connections, pleasures and close associations with nature. The carnival culture war did not stop until the non-conformist domination of new local governments had eradicated its presence from the fields, market squares and streets through new legal instruments such as street acts and byelaws prohibiting or emasculating its customary free-range in public space (Storch, 1982), including street music and theatre (Simpson, 2015). The first ever modern police forces were assembled primarily to police these new byelaws and street acts (rather than crime per se) (Storch, 1982; Churchill, 2014; Simpson, 2015). As before, carnival expression proper regrouped around alternative institutional outlets and spatial settings, often through entirely new popular culture formats and arrangements in publishing and literature, satirical theatre, comedy, music halls and seasides, and ultimately in TV, radio, film and literature (Webb, 2005). Since the turn of the twentieth century, paganism has made a gradual comeback, especially through the medium of literature and festivity (e.g. writers such as Mary Webb in the 1910s and 1920s and Fay Weldon in the 1960s and 1970s); carnivalesque ritual revivals (Irvine, 2018) and new festivals such 12

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as Glastonbury (which has become by far and away the most important new festival of all) (Dearden, 2010; Green, 2010). While not representing the numbers of people who subscribe in some way to a more-than-human ontology, a revival of paganism as a religion also occurred with just under 70,000 people citing it as their religion in the UK census of 2011 (UK Census, 2011). Winner of the Prix Femina–Vie Heureuse (a prestigious prize established in 1920 for writers of both genders but awarded by a jury of women) for Precious Bane (1927), Mary Webb’s novels extended the animist past that haunted the English in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a popular national audience with great success. Set in remote Shropshire countryside, these are among the first more-than-human novels to be written in the modern period. Her second novel, Gone to Earth, involved only a few human characters [B]ut there are multitudes of others, for winds and seasons, day and night, God’s Little Mountains, the Callow, Hunter’s Spinney, the house of Undern are as much persons of the drama as men and women. The animate and the inanimate combine to work out tragedy. (Buchan, 1917: 7) Inspiring Mary Webb’s novels and poetry were a new generation of poets who provided rare glimpses of the words, expression, life worlds and ‘naturecultures’ (Haraway, 2008) of the older animist ontology that had survived in rural communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These included John Clare (the son of a farm labourer) and William Barnes (the son of labouring smallholder).

A Detour to Helpston and Bagber If questions of evidence about social issues can no longer be treated as sovereign and separate from matters of natural history, then scholars in the humanities and social sciences have a great deal to learn from Clare’s capacity to hold human and natural history in view simultaneously. (Irvine and Gorji, 2013: 122) It is difficult to read John Clare (1793–1864) or William Barnes (1801–1886) without instantly tuning into the more-than-human character of their worlds. Clare’s poetry paid great attention to the inseparable ways that the human and non-human co-exist and together create interlocking, creative worlds, which, while small in scale, were experienced as all-encompassing intensities, infinitely variable, surprising and expansive in their apprehension. As Bresnihan (2013: 74) put it, Clare: was attentive to the variable and unpredictable relations that unfolded through his encounters with the world around him. For Clare, there was no single ‘nature,’ rather there were ongoing relations that constituted many different natures or, what I call, the ‘manifold commons….’ His poetry was largely focused on the country around Helpston, a village defined by its position on the coastal marshes and wetlands (the Fens) of Northamptonshire, with longevolved ways of life, then in the throes of devastating ‘modernising’ change. Along with 13

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other villages in Fen country, the Helpston Clare knew was in the process of being shut down through Enclosure Acts and massive drainage projects. The new breed of ‘rational’ and ‘improving’ landowners used dubious legal devices to acquire/colonise/privatise traditional common lands and thereby expel labourers and small farmers who had long enjoyed traditional use rights to it – rights that were vital for household self-provisioning. Clare’s poem The Mores demonstrates how local people recognised ‘the inherent value of their country for reasons beyond its potential for human use or pleasure’ (Keegan, 2008: 163), and for whom rationalised, ‘improved’ agriculture on the ancient Fens was anticipated with dread: Far spread the moorey ground a level scene Bespread with rush and one eternal green That never felt the rage of blundering plough Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow Still meeting plains that stretched them far away In uncheckt shadows of green, brown, and grey Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene Nor fence of ownership crept in between To hide the prospect of the following eye Its only bondage was the circling sky (Clare 1984: 167) Unenclosed, this world animated a rich, unlimited life to those who barely wandered beyond it. In his Recollections After a Ramble, Clare (1984: 52) concluded that: Be the journey e’er so mean [mundane], Passing by a cot [cottage] or tree, In the rout [route] there’s something seen Which the curious love to see; In each ramble, tastes warm souls More of wisdom’s self can view, Than blind ignorance beholds All life’s seven stages through. Clare’s nature-with-culture poetry was detailed, overwhelming, ubiquitous, excessive, exuberant, caring, activist and confronting. And his poetry was itself confronted, first by aristocratic patrons who thought its political attack on wealth and enclosure/modernisation was impertinent and inappropriate (McKusick, 1994: 258), and second by an influential fellow poet for its celebration of mundane detail (Bresnihan, 2013: 82). John Keats worked for Clare’s publisher and felt it necessary to advise Clare to tone it all down and instead to make generalising, abstracting inferences from it; to stir his readership with simple, clear and overarching impressions. Clare’s rejoinder to Keats was forthright: ‘[Keats] often described nature as she appeared to his fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he describes’ (Bresnihan, 2013: 82). Here perhaps, we see the source of Clare’s disdainful reference to ‘blind ignorance’ in Recollections After a Ramble? And we are indeed lucky that Clare would have none of this ‘advice’, for he knew it was not his world’s representation, its reduction to ‘meaning’, sentimental abstraction or interpretation 14

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that made it important and beautiful, but its very profusion, its detail, its connectedness, its rhythms, its currents and flows, its mundanity and its intoxicating force across entire years, across lifetimes and across generations. Clare’s publisher John Taylor weighed in on the side of Keats. In a letter to Clare, he wrote: ‘I have often remarked that your Poetry is much the best when you are not describing common things, and if you would raise your Views more generally, & speak of the Appearances of Nature each Month more philosophically’ (Bresnihan, 2013: 81). This advice Clare also distained. The difference between Clare and his detractors is similar to Tim Ingold’s (2022: 3) distinction between wisdom and knowledge: Whereas knowledge treats the world as its object, for wisdom the world is its milieu. Knowing is about fixing things within the concepts and categories of thought; wisdom unfixes and unsettles. To know is to have things accounted for, explained away or embedded in context so they no longer trouble us; to be wise is to bring things back into the fullness of presence, to pay attention, and to care. Living a life enmeshed within the village and countryside of Helpston, belonging to it and being part of it – that was the beauty he and his country folk all knew. And John Clare let us have it with both barrels, with poems such as Summer Evening, his epic five-page/168-line poem of a single moment. It’s an evocation of the simultaneity of the sounds, the exchanges, movements, and actions of a vast community of inhabitants and objects in and through a farmhouse and garden on a perfectly ordinary evening. It’s a good demonstration of Haraway’s (2008) naturecultures, her refusal to see nature and culture separately – and certainly not as binary opposites. It’s written by someone who not only hears it, as indeed a tourist might, but who knows what all of it is, who can name the entities, who knows how each sound relates to their lives and who loves them as the song of a collective ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway, 2016: 12). As the anthropologists Irvine and Gorji (2013: 123) wrote, ‘Clare was always watching’: ‘Watching, in Clare’s work, is borne out of dwelling – out of his extraordinary commitment to the natural features of his home, recognized in their minute detail’. Barnes and Clare were sublime amateurs of ‘day-to-day knowing’ (Ingold, 2021: 153). In more formal terms, the Deleuzian scholar Michael Halsey (2004: 35) argues that the process of any place ‘becoming-known’ involves four ‘modalities of nature’: vision (ways of seeing Nature), naming (categories of Nature), speed (rates of transforming Nature) and affects (relations between natural and artificial bodies). Clare had mastered them all. The son of a poor husbandman, the poet William Barnes, also wrote for and about his village: Bagber in the Stour valley of northern Dorset. From nearby Hambleton Hill, locals had long viewed the sea around the Isle of Wight to the south, but the sea and the coast barely got a mention in Barnes poetry, which is focused on where he lived – the immediate meadows, hedgerows, chalk hills and streams of his village home on Blackmoor Vale. It was interested in the incessant pushing and pulling of a cast of thousands – human and otherwise. His poetry is strongly mounted around verbs (rather than nouns) that detail the actions and reactions of a world always in motion, only knowable by a full-blown sensual experience in the moment. It too is an emergent, immanent, exuberant world; it reanimated the liveliness of groves of trees, hills and rivers so abhorred by the enemies of English animism. His poem Comèn Hwome [Coming Home] is an up-close, careful observation of the ancient connectedness of Dorset’s chalk downs life. Unlike poets from the social elite whose 15

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perspectives held to the prospects of high ground (eyeing up their property), Barnes always chose to see his hills from below (in their lifeworld), where ordinary folk lived. In the passage below, the interlocking creative process of light, shade, wind and shelter caught the attention of Barnes (1984: 180): There hills do screen the timber’s bough, The trees do screen the leäze’s [meadow’s/common’s] brow, The timber-sheäded [shaded] leäze do bear [create] A beäten path that we do wear. The path do stripe the leäze’s zide [side], To willows at the river’s edge, Where hufflèn [blowing] winds did sheäke [shake] the zedge [sedge – river margin vegetation]], An‘ sparklèn weäves [waves] did glide. So, while the centres of university scholarship and research maintained The Separation right up until the present, where it still confronts us, and while this certainly trickled down through education, industry and government, in many spheres the old orderings continued, though often in new modified forms. Far from becoming obsolete and unread, the way of life Barnes, Clare and other poets and writers documented was very much alive in the nineteenth century and their poetic vision remained popular and affective into the future as new ideas were translated from their works. Even when Barnes, Clare and their families

Figure 1.4  River Lydden at Bagber close to Willian Barnes’ birthplace. Photo: Adrian Franklin.

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and neighbours were being edged out of rural livings by Enclosure Acts and agricultural modernisation, and as they documented the sadness of their countryside collectivity being broken up, abandoned to economisation, they kept the old ways alive in words. Barnes wrote poems to winter mosses (in his poem ‘Moss’) that crept over and effaced the surfaces of their entanglements (paths, buildings, etc.), and he wrote sad poems of departure, most notably the very personal poem ‘To a garden on leaving it’ (Barnes, 1984:31): Be still sweet spot, wherever I may be My love-led soul will lead me back to thee In the life (and poetry) of Barnes and Clare there is a heavy ‘emotional investment in familiar things’ (Hertz, 1985: 118), and as Barnes’ daughter recounted, he took great pleasure in revisiting the places of his youth (Wrigley, 1988: 2). As Hertz (1985: 118) argues, ‘In Blackmore as in other places, many people must leave their homes, and all people must die. Barnes’s characters inevitably feel exile and bereavement intensely, because their strongest emotions, happy or not cannot be disentangled’. However, his poems were no epitaphs! They haunted their readers and they lured people back into these landscapes, just as he himself was lured back. They were a cry not to abandon places like Blackmoor, and as I argue below (and in Chapter 28 in greater depth), his very large public responded by inhabiting them temporarily and regularly as walkers and ramblers, who got into step behind Barnes who wrote books luring yet more to come see (Treves, 1905). Despite the charity of Clare’s wealthy admirers who provided him with another cottage and smallholding three miles from Helpston when his family became homeless, the move from his familiar place and the destruction of his world broke Clare who was unable to regain his sense of belonging. He fell into heavy drinking and mental illness: I have had some difficulties to leave the woods & heaths & favourite spots that have known me so long for the very molehills on the heath & the old trees in the hedges seem bidding me farewell’ (Clare, 1985: 258) In 1837 he was admitted to an asylum. In Clare’s poetry the modernisation/improvement of English agriculture was a natureculture catastrophe – for rural humanity and nature together (Irvine and Gorji, 2013) – and Clare saw this process at its most destructive nationally. Almost all (88%) of the wetland region of the East Anglian fens, his entire world, was destroyed and transformed into an agricultural flatland (Irving, 2017). As Irving makes clear, this was for very good economic reasons: once drained, the perfect peat soil produced the highest grade of agricultural land in Britain. With barely any limitations to agricultural application, almost everything from fruit and vegetables to cereals would grow with higher yields and lower variation, and 88% of the region’s 1,500 square miles was put under cultivation. ‘Assessed in this way, the agricultural utility of the region is clear: half of the total Grade1 farmland in England is in the East Anglian fens’ (Irving, 2017: 155). The fens had been drained to create valuable farmland at various times before, from at least the Roman period. But it was not until 1830 when steam engines were first put to work that the scale of agricultural transformation accelerated exponentially. One wonders 17

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whether their appearance and impact so close to home were also factors in Clare’s mental and physical decline. As drainage continued apace, Clare felt keenly for creatures of the fens, notably in the poem To the snipe. The snipe was a fenland bird as perfectly adapted and at home on the fens as he was. Along with many other species and an entire wetland ecology, the snipe no longer had a secure home: when the fens were drained, their living was terminated and shooters enjoyed a brief bonanza killing once-abundant stocks of wildfowl. This infuriated Clare. ‘To the Snipe’ was a personal poem, in common cause: Lover of swamps The quagmire overgrown With hassock-tufts of sedge – where fear encamps Around thy home alone (Clare 1984a: 205) Falke’s (2020) work on Clare’s many ‘bird’s nest poems’ considers ‘the poet-speaker’s embeddedness in a particular moment within that ecosystem’ and how ‘his own vulnerability facilitates empathy with the birds he meets’. Unlike Keats who made no attempt to include the voice of nightingales in his ode to them, Clare makes them the author in a poem documenting their song perhaps for posterity because he feared for their demise (Astle, 2023). Here is an excerpt from his extraordinary nightingale poem: The more I listened and the more Each note seemed sweeter then before And aye so different was the strain Shed scarce repeat the notes again Chee chew chew chew and higher still Cheer cheer cheer cheer more loud and shrill Cheer up cheer up cheer up and dropt Low tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug and stopt One moment just to drink the sound Her music made and then a round Of stranger witching notes was heard (Clare 1984a: 158–159) But Clare made poetry-with many birds in his world, including the iconic fenland bittern in Mirthful Summers Come at Last. The Bittern bumps the Pewit screams The Moor hen patters down the streams And glittering are the sunny beams Those scenes we’ll seek my deary. Full slowly flaps the heron by Uttering her lowly cranking cry The lark is winnowing in the sky And all the scene looks cheery (Clare 1984b: 1077) 18

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Perhaps not quite happy with his evocation of the bittern within the river’s bird chorus, he fleshed it out fully in prose writing and in so doing recorded also the bittern’s onomatopoeic fenland name: the ‘butter bump’. Some describe the noise as something like the bellowing of bulls but I have often heard it and cannot liken it to that sound at all. In fact, it is difficult to describe what it is like, its noise has produced it the above name (the butter bump) by the common people. The first part of its noise is an indistinct muttering sort of sound very like the word butter uttered in a hurried manner and the bump comes very quick after and bumps a sound on the ear as if echo had mocked the bump of a gun just as the mutter ceased. (Clare 1983: 89) Clare clearly felt powerless against the steamroller of modern agricultural ‘improvement’, yet driven to document this disappearing world. The story of the bittern confirms that the future was as bad as he had imagined. In 1886 they became extinct in the fens and across all of Britain shortly after Clare died. Somehow a small bittern population was established by the 1920s in new areas of reedbeds (in the many English gravel pit lakes produced by urban development and roadbuilding), but the population collapsed again in 1997 when it dropped to just 11 booming males (bitterns are so difficult to see in their reedbed homes that the census method is to count the loudly booming males in spring). Owing to dedicated conservation efforts the bitten recovered to 51 males in 33 sites in 2007, the year in which bitterns returned to nest in the fens for the first time since the nineteenth century, including where Clare heard them, in Northborough. It was the result of very significant habitat creation in the area by bird lovers and organisations.

The Natureculture Affect of Clare and Barnes: Continuities in the Kakosmos It is possible to think of Clare’s poetry, especially in his middle and later life, as expressive of the destruction of nature, but, at the same time, part of its redemption. Clare, Barnes and other similar poets of The Separation not only sounded a warning to later generations; they also cultivated a deep, enduring and protective love affair with nature that struggled and held on as its world was threatened beyond the draining of the Fens and the loss of traditional commons. From individual observation and care (e.g. taking part in bird censuses, bird feeding, building and installing nesting boxes) to organisations that carried out ecology-level improvements to habitat, protected nesting sites and lobbied the government, Clare’s example and dedication to birds have long been a foundational aspect of English natural history and conservation (Swann, 2019; Astle, 2023). We might consider Clare similar to those naturalists who later introduced the concept of biodiversity who had ‘no idea that a few decades later they would have to add to the proliferation of surprising connections among organisms the proliferation of many more surprising connections between political institutions devoted to the protection of this or that organism’ (Latour, 2010:480). Two thirds of all British households claim to feed birds (sustaining 133 species); there are 3 million active birdwatchers (Unwin, 2005; Tapper, 2022); over 1.1 million Britons are now members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (one of the world’s largest wildlife conservation organisations), contributing an income of £157 million and sustaining 19

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222 nature reserves. While useful and effective, the scale of the problem birds currently face is growing rapidly with 72 species on the Red List (based on three criteria: they have declined by more than 50% in the last 25 years or longer; are globally threatened or are not recovering from historical decline; have had their breeding range in the UK reduced drastically by at least 50% in the last 25 years or longer). In many other ways the English famously did not abandon their ties to the messy, heterogenous rural life and nature but attempted to maintain, however imperfectly, the connections cherished by Clare and Barnes’ words. The ordering of the countryside into heterogenous ancient patches of farming, grasslands, moor, heath, forest, coppice, hedgerows and coasts carried through, even though huge losses were sustained (Baudry et al., 2000). How different it is to fly over this patchworked natureculture as compared to the geometrically rationalised, modernised agrolands of northern France where trees/forests are planted equidistantly and in straight lines, like bottles in a factory production line. Not exactly ‘wild’, the more-than-human English countryside was not entirely depleted or controlled and continued to be comprised of a diversity of species and habitats, with new organisations and voluntary groups monitoring and responding to adverse change. The local wisdom of Barnes and Clare was translated into a popular passion for natural history in the early to mid-twentieth century and taught/inculcated in schools (Latour and Schultz, 2022; Franklin, 2023). Through an unanticipated, unmodern turn, the English village then lived its own second life as a new model for urban living in England’s fast-growing twentieth century cities. In early twentieth century London, a new suburban railway spur branched off a main inter-city line to skirt around its northern rural edges, making it possible to continue living in the country but travel to work in the city, and it was their promise to enable this preferred way of life that informed their design and made them so popular (Davison, 2005: 9). London’s Metropolitan Line, a 1915 scheme constructed across idyllic countryside, created villages of vernacular English cottages sparingly built around stations set among the streams and contours of the Chiltern Hills. The Metropolitan Railway’s marketing department came up with a new kind of rural place, Metroland – a concept for country living in the city (Forrest, 2015). A 1973 documentary film of its past and present showed off Metroland’s indefatigable rurality and beauty. It was made by Poet Laureate John Betjeman who GM Harvey (1976) called ‘the John Clare of the suburb’. And for good reason: In an important sense, his subversive attack on the values of contemporary society is a corollary of his profound reverence for places. Betjeman insistently questions the validity of the notion of progress, in the headlong pursuit of which the modern world heedlessly destroys both the community and the natural environment. In ‘Dilton Marsh Halt’, for instance, his defence of a small country railway station threatened with closure is not mere sentimental preservationism or debased romanticism. The station is worth preserving, not for economic reasons or even to gratify nostalgia, but because it retains for us in a vital way a close contact with the realities of the natural world, imaged by the red sky and the cedar tree, insistent reminders of our human scale, which we ignore at our peril. (Harvey, 1976: 113) Through new kinds of urban planning that recognised the cultural potential of village and countryside, new towns such as Letchworth (built in 1909 to Ebenezer Howard design for 20

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garden cities) and Welwyn Garden City (built, 1920) dutifully translated the same rural connections identified by Clare and Barnes. The hugely successful and widespread building of ‘garden suburbs’ then became the model for city estate building everywhere and the life they made possible also had its poetic translator – John Betjeman dubbing Philip Larkin ‘the John Clare of the building estates’ (Harvey, 1976: 122). Disliking high rise living, the English much preferred the cottage and the garden (so loved by Clare and Barnes) on sweeping, curving ‘way’s, ‘hill’s ‘close’s, ‘garden’s’ and ‘view’s or addresses that simply preserved their former field names: ‘Home Farm’, ‘Hadleigh’ ‘Lannox’. In places, this replanted rurality seemed forced and perfunctory, but over time as their large garden plots and front plantings matured with shrubs and trees, as their parks grew tall pines and beeches, and as their footpaths overgrew in summer with scruffy urban natures leading onto the open fields they bordered, the distinctions blurred. London currently has 8.4 million trees whose canopies cover an estimated 21% of the city’s land area (Mayor of London, 2023a). But then there are all the parks (3,000, comprising 18% of the city’s land area) and gardens, so many lawns and playing fields. As seen from the air at the cruising height of planes, London is green. Paris is grey. London’s parks and green spaces alone cover more of the city’s land than all its roads and railway lines (Mayor of London, 2023b). The garden cities around London, especially, were heavily invested in tree plantings (they planted 1 million trees and shrubs in Milton Keynes) and were set in open country rather than the edges of older towns and cities. Welwyn Garden City today has matured into something more rural than a town, where nature has slowly covered all but the occasional glimpse of bricks and mortar (Franklin, 2003). These new hybrids of city and country were not ersatz imitations but real enough combinations of both that produced new natureculture subjectivities, sensibilities and practices (Franklin, 2003). Human residents of such places made real relationships and connections with their co-resident non-humans (see Searle and Turnball, this volume); ‘botanising on the asphalt’ as Nigel Clark (2000) put it. This supports Haraway’s (2008) insistence against Deleuze in the case of companion species that such relationships are just as valid as any other and that they too are the result of becoming with many others in their world. Nature was never an externality. In another translation of poets such as Barnes and Clare, the new idea to inhabit the countryside intensely as a visitor took off and has remained popular. Not the fleeting and shallow pattern of visitation to ‘tourist sites’, as at the Grand Canyon, where the average time spent looking over its vastness is 17 minutes (Cross, 1996), but a slow immersive form that was pilgrimage-like; its shrine was the land of a poet and their intimate connection with nature. From early in the twentieth century a prominent book established a pattern for inhabiting Dorset temporarily that emulated Barnes, the rambling man poet. In less than 20 years after William Barnes death, Sir Frederick Treves published Highways and Byways of Dorset (Treves, 1905). Treves begins a book of epic, detailed walks into the heart of everyday rural Dorset by taking readers, fresh from their city homes, to Shaftsbury, where for a day they are slowly attuned to Dorset’s tempos, rhythms, sounds and textures. Then, the first outing is called A Pilgrimage to Mere ‘where William Barnes “the Dorset poet” and one of the most remarkable of men, lived for 12 years’ (Treves, 1905: 20). The life and work of Barnes form something of a structure for the book and there are no less that ten ‘Barnes places’ for the visitor to make leisurely rambles of their own. The book is, of course, partial (Thomas 21

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Hardy has only one mention) and in some ways a personal account of a place where Treves also grew up, but it was Barnes’ poetic capture of place and the experience of the countryside that lured or hailed (interpellated) those who already possessed the capacity to prehend it. There were later ‘literary tours’ (Squire, 1994) of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Wessex’, but like the books themselves they used Dorset as a prop/setting for a story, not a way of living in and responding to the world. Treves loved Barnes, the man embedded in the chalk hills and garden earth of Dorset, and for this his appeal had a wider public; after all, although England was a mature industrial nation, only 27.5% of the population lived in towns and cities in 1801 when Barnes was born, rising to only 43.5% by 1851. And while this rose steeply between 1851 and 1900 to around 78%, many of the people alive when Treves book was published were either rural migrants themselves or their children. This was the kind of timeframe where cultural dispositions and natureculture memory held on assertively, as the popularity of more garden suburbs in the 1920s attests. Treves’ turn of the century volume went through a further two reprintings in 1914 and 1920, went into a Pocket Edition in 1923 and has remained in print to the present day. So, here was the playing out of ontological politics (Law et al., 2014). Seen as an ‘antiprogramme of ordering’ (Crook, 1999: 260), ‘The Separation’ was not only resisted; its success was at best uneven and in some areas (the carnivalesque culture; rural culture) it simply failed, as past ordering programmes held firm against it or moved around it. The notion of competing ordering programmes is, therefore, important here because it brings into view the likely limitations of a monolithic bifurcation on the ground and its impossibility in practice anyway, as Latour argued in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). Indeed, the current period contains the capacity for reunification: Of course, what is entirely lost today is the notion of a harmony between the microand macrocosm. Yet, that there is, and that there should be, a connection between the fates of these two spheres seems obvious to all….. the thirst for mixed connections is the same. Once again, our age has become the age of wonder at the disorders of nature. Four centuries later, micro- and macrocosm are now literally and not simply symbolically connected, and the result is a kakosmos, that is, in polite Greek, a horrible and disgusting mess! And yet a kakosmos is a cosmos nonetheless. . . . At any rate, it certainly no longer resembles the Bifurcated nature of the recent past…. In that sense, we seem to be much closer than ever to the time before the famous “epistemological break”—a radical divide that has always been thought but never actually practiced. (Latour, 2010b: 481) John Law (2009: 141) argues that the diversity of more-than-human approaches (relational materialism, actor-network theory, posthumanism, the new materialism, material semiotics, etc.) is all ‘grounded in empirical case studies. We can only understand if we have a sense of those case studies and how these work in practice’. Studies of specific topics all proceed by following actual processes as they happen or happened in media res (in the thick of things) (Pickering, 2008). These processes go by various names, including: foldings, flows, circulations, choreographies, assemblages, becoming-with, dances of agency and so on. Latour (2010b: 475) described one such procedure in his ‘compositionist manifesto’ as a ‘topic to be carefully studied’, conscientiously avoiding the selective and reductive

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tendencies of humanist and scientific approaches. Fox (this volume) cites Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 372) who offered essentially the same advice through an analogy: ‘rather than observing a river from the bank (the major science model of the disinterested researcher), get into the boat yourself and become part of the action’. More-than-human studies are, therefore, not theoretical in the sense of seeking to uncover/reveal/critique abstracted truths hidden to the senses, such as ‘social structure’, but are doggedly and exhaustively descriptive of observable complex processes only. Such descriptions are used to understand ‘the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects, subjects, human beings, machines, animals, “nature,” ideas, organizations, inequalities, scale and sizes, and geographical arrangements’ (Law, 2009: 141). If they are theoretical at all, It is a theory of a space in which the social has become a certain type of circulation. But then, the consequence is that there is now room for other types of circulations, plenty of places….. It is a theory of the space and fluids circulating in a non-modern situation. (Latour 1998: 3) More-than-human studies, therefore, emphasise the need to produce more mundane, immanent, embodied definitions of the material world if we wish to compose a future common world (Latour, 2010b; see also Michael this volume and the final chapter). Building a body of case studies is the way in which we do this. So, the diversity of more-than-human approaches in this book shares a common ‘world view’, but it is not another in the long line of human-centred perspectives that affect a capacity to see the world from an assumed and privileged external location. It is the opposite, a radically decentred world view only coming into focus close-up in the complex and messy material interplay of heterogenous entities and the many different kinds of existing and potential relationships relevant to an event or entity under examination (Pickering, 2000; Law, 2004). The becoming of all entities is seen as a process which necessarily takes place continually over time, and in which all entities fold in and synthesise aspects from other entities with whom they find material relationships through inbuilt capacities/prehensions/exfoliations (Ingold, 2010, 2013). No entity is ever considered fully or finally formed (or even stable), and all entities have the capacity to be creative and to co-create novel entities/occasions/events. Following Spinoza and Whitehead, Bruno Latour (2021: 13) advised that there is, therefore, no outside, no externality to humans or other earthbound entities: The idea of an environment scarcely makes any sense since you [vous] can never draw a boundary line that would distinguish an organism from what surrounds it. Strictly speaking, nothing surrounds us, everything conspires in our breathing. And the history of living beings is there to remind us that this earth that’s so ‘favourable’ to their development has been made favourable by living beings to their designs – designs so well hidden that they themselves know nothing about them. Blindly, they have bent space around them; they have more or less folded, buried, rolled, balled themselves up in it. One cannot imagine a better way to describe Clare or Barnes in their respective localities.

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So, for example, the abstraction ‘species’ (whether human or non-human) abstracts specific living entities away from their necessarily relational and temporal conditions for their becoming and life and proposes a stable, self-contained ‘essence’ out of time, material connections and ecological contexts. As Latour (1998: 1) argued, we should follow circulations rather than define entities, essences or provinces. Jane Bennett’s research mantra therefore became: ‘“Look Here!”—at this place, at these things, in this context’ (Bennett, 2022: 2). ‘Species’ presuppose discrete, stable and finalised objects, while ‘ecologies’ (and ecology should be a good more-than-human concept) are often formally presented as populated with ‘members’. However, we know that such things are actually unstable, overlapping and arbitrarily bounded abstractions, embodying (undisclosed) political/humanist values (Franklin, 2006, 2011a, 2014a). As Andy Pickering (this volume) says of science and technology studies, The border between the human and the nonhuman is unstable, and that much of the interesting action in the world occurs at or across the interface… And mainstream thought, centred on one pure realm or the other, is just no help at all in thinking about this—in fact it often gets in the way.

‘Drops of Experience, Complex and Interdependent’ We can now leave Alfred North Whitehead to provide a creatively open-ended summary. There is a stark beauty and simplicity to the ‘philosophy of organism’ in his Process and Reality that I believe everyone should begin to read. Here is how he started his summary statement: • That the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities. Thus, actual entities are creatures; they are also termed ‘actual occasions’. • That in the becoming of an actual entity, the potential unity of many entities in disjunctive diversity – actual and non-actual – acquires the real unity of the one actual entity; so that the actual entity is the real concrescence of many potentials. (Whitehead, 1978: 22) For Whitehead (1978: 23), actual entities are ‘the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real’. These are things of every kind in the universe, human and non-human, from the most trivial to the most complex, with gradations of importance and function, ‘yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are like drops of experience, complex and interdependent’ (see also Michael, this volume). Thus, all entities of the earth (trees, gardens, poems, rivers, villages, birdsong, cities and planes) are exposed to the presence and affect of others, which in turn prompts streams of affect and reaction and yet more novelty – or, in Whitehead’s (1978) term, creativity. Crucially here, agency to change and create, to cause, is not a possession or capacity of individual entities, whether humans, plants, animals, rocks, comic books, markets or poets, but given only in the heterogenous relationships they form (Callon, 1999). The arrogant 24

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claim that humanity has a unique (and monolithic) capacity for creativity and that only humanity can change their own environments is thereby dismissed. With Whitehead (1938, 1978, 2015), we see a coherent account of creativity as a fully distributed capacity of Earth without the need for consciousness, intent, direction or a super-species to orchestrate ‘design’. Whitehead calls upon us all to exercise modesty, not mastery; Haraway calls upon us to be kin-keepers, not gate keepers; Ingold calls upon us to be attentive, not know-alls; Tsing tells us to follow the temporal expressions of non-humans; and Latour calls on us to study carefully the world we find, not a world defined.

References Astle R (2023) John Clare and Birdsong. Langdyke Countryside Trust. Available at: https://langdyke. org.uk/john-clare-and-birdsong/ Bakhtin M (1984) Rabelais and His World. Translated by Iswolsky H. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barkham P (2018) Hundreds of Wildflower Species found Blooming in Midwinter. The Guardian, 25 January. Barnes W (1984) The Dorset Poet. A Comprehensive Selection of Poetry and Prose. Introduced and Selected by Chris Wrigley. Wimbourne, Dorset: Dovecote Press. Baudry J, Bunce RGH and Burel F (2000) Hedgerows: An International Perspective on Their Origin, Function and Management. Journal of Environmental Management 60(1): 7–22. Bennett J (2022) Afterword: Look Here. Environmental Humanities 14(2): 2. Berlin M (1986) Civic Ceremony in Early Modern London. Urban History Yearbook 13: 15–27. Bresnihan P (2013) John Clare and the Manifold Commons. Environmental Humanities 3: 71–91. Bristol MD (1985) Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen. Buchan J (1917) ‘Introduction’ to Mary Webb Gone to Earth. London: Constable & Co, pp. 7–10. Burke P (2009) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. London: Ashgate. Callon M (1999) Actor-Network Theory—The Market Test. The Sociological Review 47(1_suppl): 181–195. Churchill David (2014) “I am Just the Man for Upsetting you Bloody Bobbies”: Popular Animosity Towards the Police in Late Nineteenth-Century Leeds. Social History 39(2): 248–266. City of London (1711) Reasons Formerly Published for the Punctual Limiting of Bartholomew Fair to those Three Days to which it is Determined by the Royal Grant of it to the City of London: Now Reprinted with Additions. City of London (England). Court of Common Council. Clare J (1983) Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare. Edited by Margaret Grainger. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Clare J (1984a) John Clare. Edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clare J (1984b) The Later Poems of John Clare, Volume 2. Edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clare J (1985) The Letters of John Clare. Edited by M. Storey. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark N (2000) ‘Botanizing on the Asphalt’? The Complex Life of Cosmopolitan Bodies. Body & Society 6(3–4): 12–33. Conneller C (2004) Becoming Deer. Corporeal Transformations at Star Carr. Archaeological Dialogues 11(1): 37–56. Conneller C (2021) The Mesolithic in Britain: Landscape and Society in Times of Change. London: Routledge. Couzens D (2011) Garden Birds in January: Winter Survival. BBC Wildlife Magazine. Available at: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/birds/garden-birds-in-january-winter-survival/ Crook S (1999) Ordering Risks. In: Lupton D (ed) Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 160–185. Cross R (1996) A Guide to the Grand Canyon. Chicago Tribune, 27 October.

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Adrian Franklin Davison AG (2005) Australian Suburban Imaginaries of Nature: Towards a Prospective History. Australian Humanities Review 37: 1–21. Dearden V (2010) Glastonbury – Another Stage. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag. Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Descola P (2013) Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Diehl H (2000) Disciplining Puritans and Players: Early Modern English Comedy and the Culture of Reform. Religion & Literature 32(2): 88–104. Durston C (1996) Puritan Rule and the Failure of Cultural Revolution, 1645–1660. In: Durston C and Eales J (eds) The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. London: Macmillan, pp. 210–233. Durston C and Eales J (eds) (1996) The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. London: Macmillan. Falke C (2020) Thinking with Birds: John Clare and the Phenomenology of Perception Romanticism 26(2): 180–190. Forrest R (2015) Metroland One Hundred Years On. The Guardian 10 September. Franklin AS (2003) Nature and Social Theory. London: Sage. Franklin AS (2006) Burning Cities: A Posthumanist Account of Australians and Eucalypts. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(4): 555–576. Franklin AS (2011a) An Improper Nature? ‘Species Cleansing’ in Australia. In: Carter C and Charles N (eds) Human and Other Animals: Critical Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 195–216. Franklin AS (2014a) The Adored and the Abhorrent: Nationalism and Feral Cats in England and Australia. In: Marvin G and McHugh S (eds) Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 157–171. Franklin AS (2014b) The Making of Mona. Melbourne: Penguin. Franklin AS (2022) Loneliness - The Decline of Cultural and Everyday Sources of Belonging in Contemporary Societies. In: Jacobsen MH (ed) Emotions in Culture and Everyday Life - Conceptual, Theoretical and Empirical Explorations. London: Routledge, pp. 81–98. Franklin AS (2024) Entangling Early: Rebuilding Passion for Natural and Cultural Terroir for PostCovid, Low-Carbon Societies. In: Picken F and Waterton E (eds) Oceans, Seas and Shorelines in Sports, Leisure and Tourism. London: Routledge, Forthcoming. Green D (2010) Trance-Gression: Technoshamanism, Conservatism and Pagan Politics. Politics and Religion 2(4): 201–2018. Halewood M (2005) On Whitehead and Deleuze: The Process of Materiality. Configurations 13(1): 57–76. Halsey M (2004) Environmental Visions: Deleuze and the Modalities of Nature. Ethics and the Environment 9(2): 33–64. Haraway DJ (2003) The Haraway Reader. London: Routledge. Haraway D (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway D (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Harvey GM (1976) Poetry of Commitment: John Betjeman’s Later Writing. The Dalhousie Review: 112–124. Head L (2011) More Than Human, More Than Nature: Plunging into the River. Griffith Review (31): 37–43. Hertz A (1985) The Hallowed Pleäces of William Barnes. Victorian Poetry 23(2): 109–124. Ingold T (2010) Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods: 1–10. Ingold T (2013) Anthropology Beyond Humanity. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38(3): 5–23. Ingold T (2021) In Praise of Amateurs. Ethnos 86(1): 53–72. Ingold T (2022) On Not Knowing and Paying Attention: How to Walk in a Possible World. Irish Journal of Sociology 31(1), 20–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/07916035221088546 Irvine RDG (2017). Anthropocene East Anglia. The Sociological Review 65(1), 154-170. Irvine RDG (2018) Following the Bear: The Revival of Plough Monday Traditions and the Performance of Rural Identity in the East Anglian Fenlands. Ethnoscripts 20(1): 16–34.

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The Separation? Irvine RDG and Gorji M (2013) John Clare in the Anthropocene. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 31(1): 119–132. Jervis J (1999) Transgressing the Modern. Oxford: Blackwell. Joks S, Østmo L and Law J (2020) Verbing Meahcci: Living Sámi Lands. The Sociological Review 68(2): 305–321. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120905473 Keegan B (2008) British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour B (1998) On Recalling ANT. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster. Available at: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/LatourRecalling-ANT.pdf Latour B (2010a) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press. Latour B (2010b) An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’. New Literary History 41: 471–490. Latour B (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Latour B (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Latour B (2021) After Lockdown. Translated by Rose J. Cambridge: Polity. Latour B and Schultz N (2022) On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo. Cambridge: Polity. Law J (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Law J (2009) Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics. In: Turner BS (ed) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. London: Blackwell, pp. 141–158. Law J, Afdal G, Asdal K, Lin WY, Moser I and Singleton V (2014) Modes of Syncretism: Notes on Noncoherence. Common Knowledge 20(1): 172–192. Lingis A (1998) The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lowe V (1990) Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Mack E (2009) John Locke. London: A & C Black. Mayor of London (2023a) Trees and woodlands. Available at: https://www.london.gov.uk/ programmes-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/parks-green-spaces-and-biodiversity/ trees-and-woodlands Sourced 10 March 2023. Mayor of London (2023b) Parks and green spaces. Available at: https://www.london.gov.uk/ programmes-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/parks-green-spaces-and-biodiversity/ parks-and-green-spaces McKusick JC (1994) John Clare and the Tyranny of Grammar. Studies in Romanticism 33(2): 255–277. Mills WJ (1983) Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500– 1800 (Book Review). Journal of Historical Geography 9(4): 403. Muecke S (2022) After Nature: Totemism Revisited. In: Van Dooren T and Chrulew M (eds) Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 135. Natural England and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (2007) Bitterns Nest in the Fens for the First Time Since Before the Second World War. Birdguides. Available at: https://www. birdguides.com/news/bitterns-nest-in-the-fens-for-the-first-time-since-before-the-second/ Sourced March 15 2023. Nelson MK and Shilling D (eds) (2018) Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phythian-Adams C (1972) Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry 1450–1550. In: Clark P (ed) The Early Modern Town. New Jersey: Prentice Hall Press, pp. 57–85. Pickering A (2000) In the Thick of Things and the Politics of Becoming. Department of Sociology, Bergen: University of Bergen. Pickering A (2008) New Ontologies. In: Pickering A and Guzik K (eds) The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1–14. Reid D (1982) Interpreting the Festival Calendar: Wakes and Fairs as Carnivals. In: Storch RD (ed) Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 133–135. Roud S (2008) The English Year. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Simpson P (2015) The History of Street Performance: “Music by Handle” and the Silencing of Street Musicians in the Metropolis. Available at: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/ the-history-of-street-performance.

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Adrian Franklin Snow CP (2001) [1959] The Two Cultures. London: Cambridge University Press. Spurr, J From Puritanism to Dissent 1660–1700. In Christopher Durston and John Eales (eds) The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. London: Macmillan, pp 234–265. Squire S (1994) The Cultural Values of Literary Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 21: 103–120. Stengers I (2005) Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices. Cultural Studies Review 1(11): 183–196. Stengers I (2011) Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Storch, Robert D (1982) Introduction: Persistence and Change in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture. In Robert D. Storch (ed) Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England. New York: St. Martin’ Press, pp. 1–18. Swann K (2019) The Butter Bump, a Magpie, John Clare. Romanticism on the Net: 72–73, Spring-Fall. Tapper J (2022) ‘You don’t need to travel long distances to spot birds, Britain’s twitchers urged’, The Guardian January 2 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/01/ travel-distances-britain-twitchers-birds-birdwatchers-species-foot-cycle Taylor B, Conneller C, Milner N, Elliott B, Little A, Knight B and Bamforth M (2018) Human Lifeways. In: Milner N, Conneller C and Taylor B (eds) Star Carr Volume 1: A Persistent Place in a Changing World. York: White, pp. 245–272. Thrift N (2000) Still Life in Nearly Present Time: The Object of Nature. Body & Society 6(3–4): 34–57. Thomas K (1983) Man and the Natural World. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Treves F (1905) Highways and Byways in Dorset. London: Macmillan. UK Census (2011) 2011 Census, Key Statistics for Local Authorities in England and Wales. Underdown D (2011) “But the Shows of their Street”: Civic Pageantry and Charivari in a Somerset Town, 1607. Journal of British Studies 50(1): 4–23. Unwin B (2005) Out of Hiding: How Britain Has become a Nation of Twitchers. The Independent, 21st February, 23–24. Webb D (2005) Bakhtin at the Seaside: Utopia, Modernity and the Carnivalesque. Theory, Culture & Society 22(3): 121–138. Weber M ([1930] 1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Whitehead AN (1938) [1925] Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead AN (1978) [1929] Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Macmillan. Whitehead AN (2015) [1920] The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolgar S and Latour B (1979) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. LA: Sage. Wood I (1994) The Mission of Augustine of Canterbury to the English. Speculum 69(1): 1–17. Wrigley C (1988) Introduction. In: Barnes W (ed) The Dorset Poet. A Comprehensive Selection of Poetry and Prose. Introduced and Selected by Chris Wrigley. Wimbourne: Dovecote Press. pp. 1–17.

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PART 1

Foundations

2 IN THE THICK OF THINGS AND THE POLITICS OF BECOMING Andrew Pickering

This paper was presented at the 13th Inter-Nordic Symposium in Philosophy, Bergen, Norway, 18-21 May 2000. It revolves around the stated themes of the meeting: ‘science and technology,’ ‘ethical problems’ and ‘two cultures.’1

• First, ‘two cultures.’ This phrase is a reference to C. P. Snow’s much discussed writings in the 1950s on the yawning gap he perceived between scientists and humanists in British society. The scientists dealt with matter and machines, and were understood to be central to the British economy and, more widely, to be remaking the postwar world (of course, the atom bomb loomed large here). The humanists dealt with people, individually and in groups, and as graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, they continued to run the country. They were the politicians and civil servants who made policy. And the trouble, according to Snow, was that the scientists knew nothing about the humanities (and people), so they were incapable of conceptualising the social transformations they were setting in motion, while the humanists knew nothing about science, so they couldn’t understand the material basis of the social transformations they were dealing with. This, Snow thought, was a recipe for disaster: the world was changing more rapidly than ever, but no one could see the whole picture; no one could grasp the social and the scientific at once; events had escaped traditional democratic forms of control. That was the 1950s. What about now? To an important extent, I think Snow’s critique still goes through. Perhaps scientists are now a bit more knowledgeable about social things. In the US, for example, undergraduate education in science or engineering typically includes a breadth requirement, encompassing a few courses in ‘liberal arts.’ And perhaps humanists know a bit more about science. But even so, the academic disciplines themselves maintain a clean split between people and things. To be a physicist is to know an awful lot about a material world from which people are absent; to be a social scientist is to know an awful lot about people and how they interact with one another in a world that is strangely immaterial—where the materiality of the sciences and technologies is pushed into the margins, appearing in academic consciousness through the filter of meanings, attitudes and 31

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-3

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what have you. Of course, I’m speaking crudely, but I don’t think I’m wide of the mark as far as a great deal of scholarly activity is concerned—let me call it ‘the mainstream’ for short. So, scientists and humanists are probably better informed about each other’s work than they were 50 years ago at a personal level, but the disciplines in which they work are as far apart as ever. The flier for this meeting asks what can be done about bridging this gap. There is a field that has grown up over the past 30-odd years that attempts to do so, which is called science and technology studies, or studies of science, technology and society—either way, STS is the acronym. My field, as it happens! Here, indeed, one tries to hold the scientific, the technological and the social—people and things—in view, all at once. But this proves to be a more difficult task than it might seem. It turns out to involve much more than the kind of eclectic summation of scientific and humanist expertise that C. P. Snow had in mind and that the ‘bridging the gap’ metaphor seems to imply. And the reason for this is interesting. Despite all that divides them, what the mainstream two cultures have in common is an agreement to be dualist. They agree that it makes sense to split the world in two—people vs things— and to centre one’s analyses in one realm or the other. The humanities are humanist, as I define the term, precisely inasmuch as they study and theorise a world of humans amongst themselves; the sciences are antihumanist precisely inasmuch as they study and theorise a material world from which humans are absent. What one discovers in STS, however, is that the border between the human and the nonhuman is unstable, and that much of the interesting action in the world occurs at or across the interface—that the human, say, needs to be studied in relation to the nonhuman and vice versa. And mainstream thought, centred on one pure realm or the other, is just no help at all in thinking about this—in fact it often gets in the way. So, ‘bridging the gap’ between the two cultures creates a different gap. Now the mainstream scientists and humanists appear as a monolithic bloc, united in their dualism, against which STS (at least as I understand the field) appears as a strange nondualist formation, or, as I am inclined to say, a posthumanist one—where the word ‘posthumanist’ denotes a decentred perspective in which humanity and the material world appear as symmetrically intertwined, with neither constituting a controlling centre. I must say that creating a new gap in the process of closing an old one seems like a shame, but I can’t see what to do about it. It goes to show, I think, that the old gap was not just a product of the British class system, as C. P. Snow thought, but rather inhered in the dualist fabric of the mainstream academic disciplines. So, inasmuch as the mainstream remains the mainstream, I want to devote the rest of my talk to the strange posthumanist vision that has been accreting in STS over the past decades. As we enter the third millennium I think we need, paraphrasing N. Katherine Hayles, to become posthuman if we are ever to achieve the unified vision of science, technology and the human condition whose lack Snow decried 50 years ago.

• First, we need an example to hang onto to see what’s at stake in talking about the posthumanist coupling of people and things. The obvious strategy here, for me, would be to discuss some episode in the history of recent science, which is where this line of thought began for me. But I do not want to spend a lot of time discussing arcane technicalities, and, conversely, I want to suggest that the posthumanist perspective can illuminate the world 32

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outside the laboratory as well as inside. So I want to discuss two nonscientific examples instead. The first has to do with the arts in the twentieth century, painting in particular, which I find a surprisingly useful reference point. We can start with the abstract geometrical paintings of Piet Mondrian. Probably we all recognise them; every art museum I’ve ever visited seems to have a few. I want to say that these are perspicuous icons of the dualist split in our thinking which I have been talking about. They thematise a view of the human as an autonomous and controlling centre, and of matter as a passive and neutral substrate. Looking at these paintings, one has to imagine Mondrian mentally conceiving these images in their final form—the black lines go here and here on the white background, laid out on a Cartesian [sic] grid; the patches of primary colour go there and there—and then imposing those images on paint and canvas. These remarks gain their force in a comparison with the paintings of Willem de Kooning. One cannot imagine de Kooning first conceiving these images and then imposing them on matter. de Kooning may have had some idea of where he was going in a given work, but he never held to it. Applying the paint thickly, he would look for emergent aesthetic effects— swirls, vortices of colour, chance juxtapositions. Then he would allow himself to be carried away by these effects, adding more paint, smudging it around and so on. His painting was a continual back-and-forth between perceptions of emergent beauty and attempts to heighten them, leading in an open-ended fashion to canvasses that no one, including the artist himself, could ever have planned or anticipated in advance. It has been said that a de Kooning was only ever finished when someone took the painting off him; otherwise, he was always liable to find some new effect in it and go back to work on that. A work by de Kooning, one could say, was always in medias res—in the thick of things. de Kooning’s paintings, then, can serve as icons for a posthumanist engagement with the world—in two senses, actually. First, there was no controlling centre in their production, neither in the human world (they do not materialise preconceived human plans as Mondrian’s do) nor in the material world (obviously the paint does not assemble itself of its own volition). Instead, the finished paintings emerged at the intersection of the human painter and the nonhuman paints as they happened to mix and adhere to the tooth of the canvas. Second, that word ‘emerge’ is important. There is an intrinsic temporality to de Kooning’s work that is absent from Mondrian’s. Unlike a Mondrian, a de Kooning could only be made in real time, noticing this, then trying that, then noticing something else and so on. The paintings, I want to say, emerged in the time of practice, in a form that neither the artist nor anyone else could have foreseen in advance. So, Mondrian and de Kooning are my first two benchmarks. Mondrian can remind us of dualism in general, humanism in particular and a kind of atemporality that goes with them; de Kooning, in contrast, can stand for posthumanism—a constitutive and productive intertwining of the human and the nonhuman, and the genuinely emergent phenomena associated with that. Today, I am urging de Kooning over Mondrian. But now I want to leave the arts for the mundane everyday world. My second example concerns the history of the Mississippi River, and draws upon John McPhee’s wonderful essay, ‘Atchafalaya,’ in his book, The Control of Nature (1989).

• The Mississippi is one of the world’s great rivers. All of the rain that falls in the midwest of the US drains through it into the Gulf of Mexico. Prior to the colonisation of North 33

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America, the lower reaches of the Mississippi were marked by natural embankments of sediment about three feet high—now called levees—deposited on either side of the waterway. The levees normally served to contain the flow of water, though in extreme conditions the river would overflow them and inundate an enormous floodplain. It appears that the native Americans could live with this. But then came the European settlers, who began to establish fixed towns—most notably New Orleans, as the river’s major seaport. With the growth of such towns, the containment of the river became a matter of increasing importance, and the levees were artificially raised, a few feet at a time. Interestingly, this never worked. The river rose, too; floods continued and the levees had to be raised further. One can think of reasons for this. It appears that the whole floodplain is continually compressing and sinking, but the rate of deposition of sediment on the river bottom can more than compensate for that; downstream branches of the Mississippi were progressively closed off to reclaim land, leading to an increased flow in the main channel; upstream changes in land use increased the magnitude of the total run-off and so on. In any event, the levees continue to rise to contain a river that continues to rise. As a result, New Orleans has become a walled city, surrounded by a ring of earthworks 30 feet high—McPhee rightly compares it to the walled cities of the Middle Ages, though the enemy here is water, not the humans beyond the walls. Relative to the streets of New Orleans, massive cargo boats on the river now pass overhead; as McPhee says, were it not for the obscuring levees, the water traffic would present a surreal spectacle reminiscent of an elevated railway. The US Army Corps of Engineers which seeks to control the river describes its work as a battle with the Mississippi—a battle in which the levees are central and whose outcome is far from certain. It turns out that the Mississippi wants to move. It is now 30 feet above one of the lesser rivers it feeds into—the Atchafalaya River that gave McPhee his title. Left to itself, the entire Mississippi would spill into the Atchafalaya, reaching the Gulf a couple of hundred miles to the west of its present destination, and leaving the existing lower reaches of the Mississippi a mere trickle. This would be a catastrophe for cities like New Orleans that rely on the river water in all sorts of ways, and for the entire industrial conurbation that McPhee calls the American Ruhr. The Army Corps of Engineers has accordingly been fighting the Atchafalaya for decades, reengineering its intersection with the Mississippi. In 1963 a massive, 250,000-tonne sill or weir became operational, designed to control the runoff into the Atchafalaya and to prevent it exceeding its prior rate of around 30%. In the floods of 1972 and 1973, the control structure held, just. If it had failed, the Mississippi would have changed course irrevocably. After the flood, inspections revealed that the structure had suffered massive damage. Part of it had just gone; turbulent flows had excavated holes as big as football stadiums around it; despite massive repairs, it would never meet its design specifications again. The original control project had cost $86 million (not allowing for inflation); after 1973, a new Auxiliary Structure was added for $300 million, consisting of six gates, each 62 feet wide and together weighing 2,600 tonnes. McPhee quotes an engineer on the new project as saying ‘I hope it works’ (52). So far, together with numerous spillways constructed lower down the Mississippi, it has. New Orleans is still a fun city to visit. What should we make of this story? Who does it remind you of, Mondrian or de Kooning? de Kooning, I hope. Like him, the Army Corps of Engineers on the Mississippi has always been in the thick of things, struggling with the river as the river struggles with them. The river, if anything, is livelier than de Kooning’s paints. I want to describe the history of the Mississippi symmetrically as a dance of agency. The human agents, the engineers, 34

In the Thick of Things and the Politics of Becoming

try something—raising the levees—then the nonhuman agent does something—rising still higher and flooding New Orleans. Then the humans do something else—building the weir between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya—and the nonhumans do something else, ripping and tearing away at it. And so on. Just as a de Kooning canvas was the emergent joint product of painter and paint, so the contours of the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya, and the built landscape of levees, weirs, gates and spillways is an emergent coproduction of the dance of agency of the engineers and the water. No one, not even the river, could have known what this fantastic land- and waterscape would come to look like when the dance began. So, if you have the hang of de Kooning and the Mississippi, you have the hang of posthumanism. You can begin to see the world as comprising these weird and decentred human/ nonhuman dances of agency, emergently becoming in time. This is what the world starts to look like if we do C. P. Snow’s bidding; features come into sight that were invisible from the perspective of the traditional dualist disciplines. A new, impure, posthumanist or cyborg, ontology comes into view. This is why bridging the gap between the two cultures is not a simple and cumulative operation; it is why that new gap I mentioned unfortunately looms in front of us. But let’s press on. In a minute I want to strike out in various directions, but first I want to stick with the Mississippi and enlarge my commentary on it.

• I have talked so far about the becoming of the river and of the engineering works around it and of the dialectical interplay of the two. I now want to emphasise that the social world was also constitutively bound up in this becoming. At one level, this is obvious. New Orleans could never have grown into an international tourist centre—the home of trad jazz, wild drinking in the street and French cooking—were it not for the ever-ascending levees and flood-control devices that protect it. Conversely, were it not for the growing importance of New Orleans and the American Ruhr, the Army would surely have let the Mississippi go its own way to the Gulf, via what is now the Atchafalaya. Less obviously, as the levees have become more and more important, the social organisation of the lower Mississippi has become tuned to them—in the shape of regional Levee Boards as major loci of political representation and action. And, indeed, the politics of the area has largely become the politics of water, with different constituencies—urbanites, industrialists, shippers, floodplain farmers and crawfish fishermen—all urging their own and different wateruse agendas on the Army, which, in normal times, controls how much water goes where. So, the posthumanist ontology we need to think about includes the becoming of the social as well as the built environment and natural features like rivers, with the dance of agency emergently connecting all of these terms. And, beyond that, I should say something about scientific and engineering knowledge, too. The army has not acted blindly in its struggles with the river. Plenty of science has entered into its strategies. The picture is not a pure de Kooning; there is a bit of Mondrian in it—the Corps of Engineers actually speaks of ‘stop[ping] time in terms of the distribution of flows.’ For example, through the nineteenth century and up until 1928, management of the Mississippi was based on the principle of ‘levees only.’ The idea, supported by the best scientific hydrology, was that cutting off outflows from the Mississippi would speed up the flow within the river, thus encouraging it to dig into the riverbed and lowering the overall level—and thus bringing the continual raising of the levees to a halt. Needless to say, this 35

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proved not to be the case, and now the science of hydrology is different. Now the Corps has a 15 acre model of the entire Mississippi drainage area on which to test out its ideas. But even this cannot solve all the problems of practice. The best material for simulating riverbeds seems to be walnut shells—the trouble is that they go rotten underwater… And the moral of this part of the story, I take it, is that when scientific knowledge comes into the picture, we should think of it as just another part of these posthumanist assemblages I am talking about, just as likely to be emergently transformed in the dance of agency as the material and social parts. This is not to trivialise the role of science in our dealings with the material world, but it is to cut knowledge down to size—to see it as part of those dealings but only a part, not a controlling centre.

• So, in science and technology studies, we have done C. P. Snow’s bidding, and we have stumbled upon these hybrid—material/social/conceptual—ontologies, as exemplified by de Kooning’s paintings and the Mississippi River. So what? Where does this get us? These are good questions, and to answer them one can try to move in several directions. One is back onto the terrain of the traditional disciplines. I have often done this. One can quarrel, for example, precisely with the humanism of the traditional humanities and social sciences. If the parameters of the human and the social become in relation to the parameters of the nonhuman and the extrasocial, as I have just suggested they do, then the humanities have just got the wrong model of the human. That is why they are in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant as technoscience suffuses and restructures our lives. One can also go back to the ancient problematics of philosophy and see how they are displaced in the move to posthumanism. Take realism, for example. The traditional philosophical problematic of realism revolves around a sceptical fear that knowledge might lose contact with its object. That is why arguments for and against correspondence seem so pressing. If one sees scientific knowledge instead as instrumental to our commerce with material agency, and as sensitively at stake in dances of agency in the laboratory, then the sceptical fear recedes. One can see that our knowledge is constitutively engaged with the material world and what it does, without even necessarily concerning ourselves with questions of correspondence. I have argued that this line of thought leads to a robust form of realism that I call pragmatic realism that is not incompatible with the ancient enemy called relativism, and to an appreciation of the objectivity of scientific knowledge that is not incompatible with its opposite (traditionally understood), historicism. That is what I meant by displacing the traditional problematics of philosophy, and I do think this is a valuable thing to do. The posthumanist analysis breathes new life into tired old topics.

• But rather than going through any of that in detail, in the rest of this talk I want to try to do something new. I want to pick up the word ‘ethics’ that I have ignored since the beginning of this talk. I want to think about normativity. This, of course, was why C. P. Snow worried about the gap between the two cultures in the first place. He wanted to know what we should do about the postwar technoscientification of the world—or, at least, he wanted politicians and civil servants to be able to think clearly about it. And here, we should

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acknowledge, some progress has certainly already be made. Thanks to popular concern about information technologies and, even more so, biotechnology, ethics is the site of a new goldrush within academic philosophy. Here is a little example of what the new field of applied ethics looks like: Question: Microsoft recently offered a $400 rebate if you bought a computer and subscribed to its online service. To comply with a state law, the company allowed California consumers to cancel the service at any time. Many people took the rebate, canceled the service and pocketed $400. Since Microsoft must have anticipated this, is it unethical? Answer: If you signed up for Microsoft’s online service intending to use it, but then canceled because you were dissatisfied, enjoy your $400. But if you signed up only to cadge a rebate, never intending to use the service, then you have behaved badly. . . I reach this conclusion reluctantly, because if the tables were turned and you offered a $400 rebate to Bill Gates, there’s every reason to believe he would take it, and your car, and your house, and your immortal soul. At least that’s the impression you get from the government’s investigation of Microsoft’s business practices. NYT magazine, 20 Feb 2000, 20 This exchange comes from a weekly column that began in the New York Times a year or so ago, in which answers to readers’ queries are given by a man who calls himself ‘The Ethicist,’ Randy Cohen. And what I want to emphasise about the exchange is its humanism. The nonhuman world of technology and computer software lurks there somewhere, but the entire exchange hinges on the qualities of the purely human—the human intentions of the purchaser and Bill Gates and the propriety or impropriety of them. And Cohen’s answer consists in the articulation of a kind of timeless human essence: it is good for us to be honest, it is bad to cheat and lie. Cohen is the Mondrian of ethics. And, I want to suggest with this little example, a lot of ethical thought about science and technology has this Mondrianesque quality to it. So does a lot of social scientific research on science and technology. Two of my colleagues concluded a recent review of the literature on environmental sociology with the sentiment that ‘Sociology is at its best when it tries to understand how new and enduring structures, institutions, and practices exploit and dominate people and nature, as well as reveal new strategies for emancipatory politics.’ Who could be against emancipation in the face of domination? Who could be in favour of lying instead of telling the truth? Not me. But we know these stories. I learned them from my mother, actually, not academic humanists. So the question I want to raise now is, what would it be like to be the de Koonings of normativity, rather than the Mondrians? Can we even imagine an ethics or a politics that would acknowledge that we are always in medias res?—that would not require us to step outside things and appeal to some timeless human essence? Well, perhaps. This is more or less terra incognita in STS, and certainly for me. Description has so far been our forte—getting the hang of how the human and the nonhuman hang together; just seeing it—rather than prescription. There is no party line. But Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Adrian Cussins have all had a stab at the normative, and now I will.

•

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STS has made two interesting discoveries, which are really two sides of the same coin: of the constitutive intertwining of the human and the nonhuman, and of open-ended becoming, the continual emergence of genuine novelty in the world in the dance of agency. Each of these discoveries is difficult to grasp. The traditional disciplines—both of Snow’s ‘two cultures’—make them invisible, and in doing so they simply ratify a certain form of modernist common sense. The failure to grasp either is dangerous, especially becoming—the results of our actions continually betray us: even when we act for good, the unintended consequences of our actions can rebound disastrously. So the evaluative criteria I propose have to do with this difficult ontology: we should favour practices that explicitly thematise—recognise, draw attention to, explore—becoming in time and the coupling of the human and the nonhuman. One could speak here of a politics of becoming or a politics of ontology, depending on where the emphasis falls. And the question is: does either shade of this politics have any content? Does it cut any ice? I think it does, as I shall now try to show by running through a range of examples. We can start where we began, with the arts. Do Mondrian’s paintings do anything for our awareness of becoming? No, they cannot survive the cut. de Kooning’s? Of course. Then we should value them more highly. Anything else? I once tried to think of a painter whose work would thematise becoming for the cover of my book, The Mangle of Practice, and de Kooning was all I came up with. But I was mistaken—there are plenty. Max Ernst traced knots in the wood of his floorboards and constructed beautiful and disturbing surrealist images around them—another example of the production of art in the thick of things. In the 1950s, the eccentric cybernetician Gordon Pask constructed his famous MusiColour machine. Keys activated sounds and lights, but between the keys and the display was some simple electronic feedback circuitry that emergently transformed relations between input and output—delays would wax and wane between cause and effect; the machine could get bored and refuse to respond to repetitive sequences of key strokes. The performer had to engage with the nonhuman machine in a coproduction of each performance—the performer, the MusiColour machine, the lights and sounds were irrevocably in medias res. A MusiColour performance was immediately and inspectably a dance of human and nonhuman agency; there was no question of a Mondrian-style mastery of the instrument. The hi-tech, multimedia, multicomputer, performance art of people like Insook Choi at the University of Illinois follows the path opened up by people like Pask—and, on my criteria, should be valued as such. In the arts, then, the politics of ontology and becoming point to an evaluative rearrangement of the canon: Rembrandt and Mondrian are out; de Kooning, Ernst, Pask and Choi are in. And one does not have to confine oneself to Western art. The other image I thought of for The Mangle of Practice was the figure of dancing Shiva—the Hindu God who dances the world into and out of existence—an image of becoming, if there ever was one. And this observation points to a further rearrangement of the canon, with non-Western and nonmodern art appearing alongside de Kooning et al. The contrast here is with the standard arrangement of art museums, where the non-Western appears in its own galleries, as instances of difference and primitivity. What I have in mind here is a kind of evaluative levelling up and resorting of the traditions of East and West. This idea of levelling up can go a long way in thinking about relations between our culture and the Other. In his later writings, Paul Feyerabend expressed some very interesting thoughts on productive becomings in what he called open exchanges between different cultures, which he contrasted to guided exchanges as exemplified in current museum arrangements. 38

In the Thick of Things and the Politics of Becoming

And one can go on in this vein. Moving from high to popular culture, I think the beautiful rock music of the high 1960s was a spectacular vindication of the politics of ontology. Recycling a phrase form Liebnitz (I think) which tends to come up in these circumstances, the motto of the 1960s might have been ‘who knows what an electric guitar can do?’ Let’s try biting them, kicking them and hitting each other over the head with them; let’s turn up the feedback and make the noise the signal—this is what brought us the sounds, quite unimaginable in advance, of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Neil Young (note, again, a certain evaluative structuring of the pantheon). The 1960s, in general, were, I think, the Golden Age of ontological politics, of wilful, open-ended tracking through spaces of human and nonhuman agency—in the outer reaches of sex, drugs and rock and roll, and just about everywhere else, too. Not all of these experiments—in the finest sense of the word—had happy outcomes, and we should remember that. The politics of becoming carries no guarantees for specific futures. It is tautologous to point this out. The argument is that it is good to explore spaces of becoming, and that we should be on the lookout for the good as well as the bad. And, just in case that reminds you of the Ethicist, Randy Cohen, I should say that the latter understanding of ‘the good’ has to be a situated and emergent one. I could never have known I would love the sound of Hendrix until I heard it; it wasn’t that it matched up to some criterion that had always been hidden inside me; ‘desire only exists when assembled or machined’ (Deleuze). Enough on the arts; what about science? I can be brief here, because I have already answered half of this question. On my evaluative scale, the traditional natural and social sciences and the humanities come out pretty low. They cannot acknowledge the coupling of the human and the nonhuman. Neither are they any good on time and becoming: physics, for example, from Newtonian dynamics to quantum field theory, wants to know it all in advance (and retrospectively to the Big Bang, too). But the other half of the answer is more interesting. There are, in fact, posthumanist sciences of becoming—well, sort of—going under names like cybernetics, complexity theory and self-organisation. These sciences are all about the emergence of unexpected order in complex systems, understood indifferently as human, nonhuman or human and nonhuman. I do not think of any of these sciences as possessing any final answers; their sense of becoming, for example, is much too circumscribed. But still, they have to rate higher on my evaluative scale than the traditional sciences. So, the politics of becoming suggests something of an inversion of the traditional hierarchy of academic knowledges—or, better perhaps, a levelling up of presently marginalised knowledges, to recycle that notion. Two further remarks in this connection. First, it is worth rephrasing what has just been said in order to get back to C. P. Snow. The sciences of complexity dissolve the two-culture gap from the inside; the objects of the sciences and the humanities become one. Again, though, inevitably, the new rift surfaces here again: those same sciences are not continuous with the sciences whose separation Snow lamented. Second, I just want to note that there are intimate connections between the sciences of complexity and the arts and entertainment, my previous topic. Gordon Pask was led into the technical science of cybernetics via his work on the MusiColour machine. Stafford Beer, another leading cybernetician, not only paints and publishes poetry; he also, to widen the topic, teaches yoga and acknowledges an abiding presence in his work of Eastern spiritual beliefs and practices. This rearrangement of the scientific canon thus hangs together with a rearrangement of the artistic canon which itself spills over into orientations to the West’s Other and alternative spiritualities. This begins to sound like New Age philosophy . . . 39

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Quickly, then, back to the mundane world? My last question, I can defer it no longer, is: what does the politics of ontology and becoming have to do with waterworks? I mean, what kind of advice does it offer to engineers or citizens when science and technology impinge massively upon the environment, our daily lives and our social organisation. The message of becoming might seem to be antiscience: however much we calculate and plan scientifically, I do think we will almost certainly get it wrong, thinking about the natural and social impact of technologies, say. That is what temporal emergence and becoming is all about. In fact, though, I think the message is a bit different. It is that we need more science, and we need to trust it less. My reading of McPhee’s essay is that the Army Corps of Engineers has got it just about right on the Mississippi.2 Their engineering work is always enmeshed in scientific calculations and political consultations (not to say controversies and battles). And with the population of Louisiana there to remind them, they cannot help but notice when their calculations come out wrong. They are confronted, whether they like it or not, with emergent phenomena, and, from time to time, at least, they revise their scientific understandings in that light—‘levees only’ is, as I said, no longer the guiding policy. But if the Corps of Engineers can stand as my example, isn’t the politics of ontology redundant, inconsequential in the real world? I can think of two answers to that. Engineers and scientists do not always act like the Corps of Engineers, perhaps most conspicuously not in giant Third World Development projects, but not at home in the West either. One shot scientific appraisals of future impacts plus no provisions for subsequent monitoring might be closer to the rule. And in this is a recipe for finding oneself in medias res in the worst possible sense—in the thick of a disaster. And perhaps, let’s face it, even the Corps of Engineers doesn’t always live up to the exemplary image I have painted of it. So, in a practical sense, I think the politics of ontology does cut some ice after all. My second answer is a bit different. I know that in the philosophy of technology and the environment people speak about something called the precautionary principle, meaning something like: in scientific and technological undertakings that are liable to have significant impacts on people and nature, watch out; be careful; possibly even, proceed slowly so that you can be on the lookout for nasty surprises. It might then be that I have just articulated my own version of the precautionary principle. Which is OK with me—I can claim it, too, as part of a posthuman normativity—except for one thing. The very phrase ‘precautionary principle,’ like the associated notions of ‘risk’ and the ‘risk society,’ smack of the tired, grim and scared negativity of the late twentieth century. As if becoming was necessarily bad; as if nothing good could just happen. Even Bruno Latour, normally a cheery chap, has succumbed to this. His Parliament of Things, he says, would make sure we were more cautious in our dealings with things. I know what he means. If I lived on the other side of a 30-foot embankment from the Mississippi River, I would want the Corps of Engineers to ponder excruciatingly deeply before they messed about with the river at all. But we should not be content to leave it at that. There is no need to see becoming as necessarily threatening. There is something totally new, singular and wonderful about the engineering of the Mississippi delta, with its levees, walled towns and supertankers in the sky. Nobody intended that in advance; it emerged as an aspect of the becoming of the posthuman assemblage I talked about earlier. And we should be on the lookout for such wonderful becomings as well as horrid ones. We are back to de Kooning again. Or, to run the argument another way, perhaps we should be even less like Mondrian. This, too, might be a message from the politics of becoming: why be so obsessed with control? Why not let New Orleans go? Why not let the Mississippi drain itself completely 40

In the Thick of Things and the Politics of Becoming

into the Atchafalaya? The inhabitants of New Orleans might not like me saying that, but it is probably going to happen one day whether they like it or not—either in the so-called hundred-year flood, amidst colossal death and destruction, or we could choose to let it happen more gently—in a time of drought, when the water is low, say.3 I once saw a beautiful mandala made out of coloured sand at an exhibition of Buddhist art in London. It was about 12 feet along the edges, exquisitely drawn in fine detail, totally beautiful. It took a team of monks forever to assemble it. At the end of the exhibition, the monks did what they always do—emptied the sand into the Thames. New Orleans as a sand painting. If we could even begin to imagine that, that would be a world worth living in.

Notes 1 Parts of this paper were subsequently published in my essay, ‘New Ontologies,’ in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 1–14. 2 Note added (May 2022): I would never say that now. I would point instead to the ACE’s continued Mondrianesque insistence on fighting floods with levees (and a later de Kooning-style change in strategy to partially dismantling levees by constructing ‘diversions’ to address their environmental damage). 3 Note added (May 2022): This passage was written five years before New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

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3 WHEN SPECIES MEET Donna Haraway

Introduction1 Two questions guide this book: (1) Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? (2) How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly? I tie these questions together in expressions I learned in Barcelona from a Spanish lover of French bulldogs, alter-globalisation and autre-mondialisation.2 These terms were invented by European activists to stress that their approaches to militarized neoliberal models of world building are not about antiglobalization but about nurturing a more just and peaceful other-globalization. There is a promising autre-mondialisation to be learned in retying some of the knots of ordinary multispecies living on earth. I think we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary. I am a creature of the mud, not the sky. I am a biologist who has always found edification in the amazing abilities of slime to hold things in touch and to lubricate passages for living beings and their parts. I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10% of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90% of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many. Some of these personal microscopic biota are dangerous to the me who is writing this sentence; they are held in check for now by the measures of the coordinated symphony of all the others, human cells and not, that make the conscious me possible. I love that when ‘I’ die, all these benign and dangerous symbionts will take over and use whatever is left of ‘my’ body, if only for a while, since ‘we’ are necessary to one another in real time. As a little girl, I loved to inhabit miniature worlds brimming with even more tiny real and imagined entities. I loved the play of scales in time and space that children’s toys and stories made patent for me. I did not know then that this love prepared me for meeting my companion species, who are my maker. Figures help me grapple inside the flesh of mortal world-making entanglements that I call contact zones.3 The Oxford English Dictionary records the meaning of ‘chimerical vision’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-4 42

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for ‘figuration’ in an eighteenth-century source, and that meaning is still implicit in my sense of figure.4 Figures collect the people through their invitation to inhabit the corporeal story told in their lineaments. Figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material–semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another. For me, figures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all of the force of lived reality. My body itself is just such a figure, literally. For many years, I have written from the belly of powerful figures such as cyborgs, monkeys and apes, oncomice, and, more recently, dogs. In every case, the figures are at the same time creatures of imagined possibility and creatures of fierce and ordinary reality; the dimensions tangle and require response. When Species Meet is about that kind of doubleness, but it is even more about the cat’s cradle games in which those who are to be in the world are constituted in intra- and interaction. The partners do not precede the meeting; species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters. Neither the partners nor the meetings in this book are merely literary conceits; rather, they are ordinary beings-in-encounter in the house, lab, field, zoo, park, office, prison, ocean, stadium, barn, or factory. As ordinary knotted beings, they are also always meaning-making figures that gather up those who respond to them into unpredictable kinds of ‘we.’ Among the myriad of entangled, coshaping species of the earth, contemporary human beings’ meetings with other critters and, especially, but not only, with those called ‘domestic’ are the focus of this book.

Figure 3.1  Jim’s Dog. Courtesy of James Clifford.

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And so in the chapters to follow, readers will meet cloned dogs, databased tigers, a baseball writer on crutches, a health and genetics activist in Fresno, wolves and dogs in Syria and the French Alps, Chicken Little and Bush legs in Moldavia, tsetse flies and guinea pigs in a Zimbabwean lab in a young adult novel, feral cats, whales wearing cameras, felons and pooches in training in prison, and a talented dog and middle-aged woman playing a sport together in California. All of these are figures, and all are mundanely here, on this earth, now, asking who ‘we’ will become when species meet.

Jim’s Dog and Leonardo’s Dog Meet Jim’s dog. My colleague and friend Jim Clifford took this photograph during a December walk in one of the damp canyons of the Santa Cruz greenbelt near his home. This attentive, sitting dog endured for only one season. The next winter, the shapes and light in the canyon did not vouchsafe a canine soul to animate the burned-out redwood stump covered with redwood needles, mosses, ferns, lichens—and even a little California bay laurel seedling for a docked tail—that a friend’s eye had found for me the year before. So many species, so many kinds, meet in Jim’s dog, who suggests an answer to my question, Whom and what do we touch when we touch this dog? How does this touch make us more worldly, in alliance with all the beings who work and play for an alter-globalization that can endure more than one season? We touch Jim’s dog with fingery eyes made possible by a fine digital camera, computers, servers, and e-mail programs through which the high-density jpg was sent to me.5 Infolded into the metal, plastic, and electronic flesh of the digital apparatus is the primate visual system that Jim and I have inherited, with its vivid color sense and sharp focal power. Our kind of capacity for perception and sensual pleasure ties us to the lives of our primate kin. Touching this heritage, our worldliness must answer to and for those other primate beings, both in their ordinary habitats and in labs, television and film studios, and zoos. Also, the biological colonizing opportunism of organisms, from the glowing but invisible viruses and bacteria to the crown of ferns on top of this pooch’s head, is palpable in the touch. Biological species diversity and all that asks in our time come with this found dog. In this camera-begot canid’s haptic–optic touch, we are inside the histories of IT engineering, electronic product assembly-line labor, mining and IT waste disposal, plastics research and manufacturing, transnational markets, communications systems, and technocultural consumer habits. The people and the things are in mutually constituting, intraactive touch.6 Visually and tactically, I am in the presence of the intersectional race-, sex-, age-, class-, and region-differentiated systems of labor that made Jim’s dog live. Response seems the least that is required in this kind of worldliness. This dog could not have come to me without the leisure-time promenading practices of the early twenty-first century in a university town on the central California coast. Those urban walking pleasures touch the labor practices of late nineteenth-century loggers who, without chainsaws, cut the tree whose burned stump took on a postarboreal life. Where did the lumber from that tree go? The historically deliberate firing by the loggers or the lightning-caused fires in dry-season California carved Jim’s dog from the tree’s blackened remains. Indebted to the histories of both environmentalism and class, the greenbelt policies of California cities resisting the fate of Silicon Valley ensured that Jim’s dog was not bulldozed for housing at the western edge of real-estate hungry Santa Cruz. The water-eroded and earthquake-sculpted ruggedness of the canyons helped too. The same civic policies and 44

When Species Meet

Figure 3.2  Leonardo da Vinci’s Dog. Copyright Sidney Harris, ScienceCartoonsPlus.com.

earth histories also allow cougars to stroll down from the campus woodlands through the brushy canyons defining this part of town. Walking with my furry dogs off leash in these canyons makes me think about these possible feline presences. I reclip the leashes. Visually fingering Jim’s dog involves touching all the important ecological and political histories and struggles of ordinary small cities that have asked, Who should eat whom, and who should cohabit? The rich naturalcultural contact zones multiply with each tactile look. Jim’s dog is a provocation to curiosity, which I regard as one of the first obligations and deepest pleasures of worldly companion species.7 Jim’s seeing the mutt in the first place was an act of friendship from a man who had not sought dogs in his life and for whom they had not been particularly present before his colleague seemed to think about and respond to little else. Furry dogs were not the ones who then came to him, but another sort of canid quite as wonderful dogged his path. As my informants in U.S. dog culture would say, Jim’s is a real dog, a one-off, like a fine mixed-ancestry dog who could never be replicated but must be encountered. Surely, there is no question about the mixed and myriad ancestors, as well as contemporaries, in this encrusted charcoal dog. I think this is what Alfred North Whitehead might have meant by a concrescence of prehensions.8 It is definitely at the heart of what I learn when I ask whom I touch when I touch a dog. I learn something about how to inherit in the flesh. Woof …. Leonardo’s dog hardly needs an introduction. Painted between 1485 and 1490, da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the Man of Perfect Proportions, has paved his way in the imaginations of technoculture and canine pet culture alike. Sydney Harris’s 1996 cartoon of Man’s celebrated canine companion mimes a figure that has come to mean Renaissance humanism; 45

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to mean modernity; to mean the generative tie of art, science, technology, genius, progress, and money. I cannot count the number of times da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man appeared in the conference brochures for genomics meetings or advertisements for molecular biological instruments and lab reagents in the 1990s. The only close competitors for illustrations and ads were Vesalius’s anatomical drawings of dissected human figures and Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.9 High Art, High Science: genius, progress, beauty, power, money. The Man of Perfect Proportions brings both the number magic and the real-life organic ubiquity of the Fibonacci sequence to the fore. Transmuted into the form of his master, the Dog of Perfect Proportions helps me think about why this preeminently humanist figure cannot work for the kind of autre-mondialisation I seek with earthly companions in the way that Jim’s dog does. Harris’s cartoon is funny, but laughter is not enough. Leonardo’s dog is the companion species for technohumanism and its dreams of purification and transcendence. I want to walk instead with the motley crowd called Jim’s dog, where the clean lines between traditional and modern, organic and technological, human and nonhuman give way to the infoldings of the flesh that powerful figures such as the cyborgs and dogs I know both signify and enact.10 Maybe that is why Jim’s dog is now the screen saver on my computer.

Professional Meetings That brings us to the more usual encounters of dogs and cyborgs, in which their supposed enmity is onstage. Dan Piraro’s Bizarro Sunday cartoon from 1999 caught the rules of engagement perfectly. Welcoming the attendees, the small dog keynote speaker at the American Association of Lapdogs points to the illuminated slide of an open laptop computer, solemnly intoning, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen … behold the enemy!’ The pun that simultaneously joins and separates lapdogs and laptops is wonderful, and it opens a world of inquiry. A real dog person might first ask how capacious human laps can actually be for holding even sizable pooches and a computer at the same time. That sort of question tends to arise in the late afternoon in a home office if a human being is still at the computer and neglecting important obligations to go for a walk with the effectively importuning beast-no-longer-onthe-floor. However, more philosophically weighty, if not more practically urgent, questions also lurk in this Bizarro cartoon. Modernist versions of humanism and posthumanism alike have taproots in a series of what Bruno Latour calls the Great Divides between what counts as nature and as society, as nonhuman and as human.11 Whelped in the Great Divides, the principal Others to Man, including his ‘posts,’ are well documented in ontological breed registries in both past and present Western cultures: gods, machines, animals, monsters, creepy crawlies, women, servants and slaves, and noncitizens in general. Outside the security checkpoint of bright reason, outside the apparatuses of reproduction of the sacred image of the same, these ‘others’ have a remarkable capacity to induce panic in the centers of power and self-certainty. Terrors are regularly expressed in hyperphilias and hyperphobias, and examples of this are no richer than in the panics roused by the Great Divide between animals (lapdogs) and machines (laptops) in the early twenty-first century C.E. Technophilias and technophobias vie with organophilias and organophobias, and taking sides is not left to chance. If one loves organic nature, to express a love of technology makes one suspect. If one finds cyborgs to be promising sorts of monsters, then one is an unreliable ally in the fight against the destruction of all things organic.12 I was quite personally made 46

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to understand this point at a professional meeting, a wonderful conference called ‘Taking Nature Seriously’ in 2001, at which I was a keynote speaker. I was subjected to a fantasy of my own public rape by name in a pamphlet distributed by a small group of self-identified deep ecology, anarchist activists because, it seemed, my commitment to the mixed organic– technological hybrids figured in cyborgs made me worse than a researcher at Monsanto, who at least claims no alliance with ecofeminism. I am made to recall those researchers even at Monsanto who may well take antiracist environmental feminism seriously and to imagine how alliances might be built with them. I was also in the presence of the many deep ecologists and anarchists who have no truck with the action or analysis of my hecklers’ selfrighteous and incurious stance. In addition to reminding me that I am a woman (see the Great Divides above)—something class and color privilege bonded to professional status can mute for long periods of time—the rape scenario reminded me forcibly why I seek my siblings in the nonarboreal, laterally communicating, fungal shapes of the queer kin group that finds lapdogs and laptops in the same commodious laps. At one of the conference panels, I heard a sad man in the audience say that rape seems a legitimate instrument against those who rape the earth; he seemed to regard this as an ecofeminist position, to the horror of the men and women of that political persuasion in the room. Everyone I heard at the session thought the guy was slightly dangerous and definitely politically embarrassing, but mainly crazy in the colloquial sense if not the clinical. Nonetheless, the quasi-psychotic panic quality of the man’s threatening remarks is worth some attention because of the way the extreme shows the underside of the normal. In particular, this would-be rapist-in-defense-of-mother-earth seems shaped by the culturally normal fantasy of human exceptionalism. This is the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies. Thus, to be human is to be on the opposite side of the Great Divide from all the others and so to be afraid of—and in bloody love with— what goes bump in the night. The threatening man at the conference was well marinated in the institutionalized, long dominant Western fantasy that all that is fully human is fallen from Eden, separated from the mother, in the domain of the artificial, deracinated, alienated, and therefore free. For this man, the way out of his culture’s deep commitments to human exceptionalism requires a one-way rapture to the other side of the divide. To return to the mother is to return to nature and stand against Man-the-Destroyer, by advocating the rape of women scientists at Monsanto, if available, or of a traitorous keynote environmentalist feminist, if one is on the spot. Freud is our great theorist of panics of the Western psyche, and because of Derrida’s commitment to track down ‘the whole anthropomorphic reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the animal order, of the law over the living,’ he is my guide to Freud’s approach on this question.13 Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism. First is the Copernican wound that removed earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut. The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man.14 Science inflicted that cruel cut too. The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems 47

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to hold that blade too. I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well. Is it any wonder that in every other election cycle the Kansas Board of Education wants this stuff out of the science text books, even if almost all of modern science has to go to accomplish this suturing of rending wounds to the coherence of a fantastic, but well-endowed, being? Notoriously, in the last decade voters in Kansas elected opponents of teaching Darwinian evolution to the state board in one election and then replaced them in the next cycle with what the press calls moderates.15 Kansas is not exceptional; it figured more than half the public in the United States in 2006.16 Freud knew that Darwinism is not moderate, and a good thing too. Doing without both teleology and human exceptionalism is, in my opinion, essential to getting laptops and lapdogs into one lap. More to the point, these wounds to self-certainty are necessary, if not yet sufficient, to no longer easily uttering the sentence in any domain, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, behold the enemy!’ Instead, I want my people, those collected by figures of mortal relatedness, to go back to that old political button from the late 1980s, ‘Cyborgs for earthly survival,’ joined to my newer bumper sticker from Bark magazine, ‘Dog is my co-pilot.’ Both critters ride the earth on the back of the Darwin fish.17 That cyborg and dog come together in the next professional meeting in these introductions. A few years ago, Faye Ginsburg, an eminent anthropologist and filmmaker and the daughter of Benson Ginsburg, a pioneering student of canine behavior, sent me a cartoon by Warren Miller from the March 29, 1993, New Yorker. Faye’s childhood had been spent with the wolves her father studied in his lab at the University of Chicago and the animals at the Jackson Memorial Laboratories in Bar Harbor, Maine, where J. P. Scott and J. L. Fuller also carried out their famous inquiries into dog genetics and social behavior from the late 1940s.18 In the cartoon a member of a wild wolf pack introduces a conspecific visitor wearing an electronic communications pack, complete with an antenna for sending and receiving data, with the words, ‘We found her wandering at the edge of the forest. She was raised by scientists.’ A student of Indigenous media in a digital age, Faye Ginsburg was easily drawn to the join of ethnography and communications technology in Miller’s cartoon. Since childhood a veteran of integrating into wolf social life through the rituals of polite introductions, she was triply hailed. She is in my kin group in feminist theory as well, and so it is no surprise that I find myself also in that female telecommunications-packing wolf. This figure collects its people through friendship networks, animal–human histories, science and technology studies, politics, anthropology and animal behavior studies, and the New Yorker’s sense of humor. This wolf found at the edge of the forest and raised by scientists figures who I find myself to be in the world—that is, an organism shaped by a post-World War II biology that is saturated with information sciences and technologies, a biologist schooled in those discourses, and a practitioner of the humanities and ethnographic social sciences. All three of those subject formations are crucial to this book’s questions about worldliness and touch across difference. The found wolf is meeting other wolves, but she cannot take her welcome for granted. She must be introduced, and her odd communications pack must be explained. She brings science and technology into the open in this forest. The wolf pack is politely approached, not invaded, and these wolves will decide her fate. This pack is not one of florid wild-wolf nature fantasies, but a savvy, cosmopolitan, curious lot of free-ranging canids. The wolf mentor and sponsor of the visitor is generous, willing to forgive some degree of ignorance, but it is up to the visitor to learn about her new acquaintances. If all goes well, they will become messmates, companion species, and significant others to one another, 48

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Figure 3.3  Faye Ginsburg and the wolf Remus greeting and playing in Benson Ginsburg’s laboratory at the University of Chicago. Source: Published in Look magazine, ‘A Wolf Can Be a Girl’s Best Friend,’ by Jack Star, 1963. Photograph by Archie Lieberman. Look Magazine Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-L960-8812, frame 8.

as well as conspecifics. The scientist–wolf will send back data as well as bring data to the wolves in the forest. These encounters will shape naturecultures for them all. A great deal is at stake in such meetings, and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no teleological warrant here, no assured happy or unhappy ending, socially, ecologically, or 49

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scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace. The Great Divides of animal/human, nature/culture, organic/technical, and wild/domestic flatten into mundane differences—the kinds that have consequences and demand respect and response—rather than rising to sublime and final ends.

Companion Species Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells—a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis. I bet if you were to check our DNA, you’d find some potent transfections between us. Her saliva must have the viral vectors. Surely, her darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible. Even though we share placement in the phylum of vertebrates, we inhabit not just different genera and divergent families but altogether different orders. How would we sort things out? Canid, hominid; pet, professor; bitch, woman; animal, human; athlete, handler. One of us has a microchip injected under her neck skin for identification; the other has a photo ID California driver’s license. One of us has a written record of her ancestors for twenty generations; one of us does not know her great grandparents’ names. One of us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called ‘purebred.’ One of us, equally a product of a vast mixture, is called ‘white.’ Each of these names designates a different racial discourse, and we both inherit their consequences in our flesh. One of us is at the cusp of flaming, youthful, physical achievement; the other is lusty but over the hill. And we play a team sport called agility on the same expropriated Native land where Cayenne’s ancestors herded sheep. These sheep were imported from the already colonial pastoral economy of Australia to feed the California gold rush forty-niners. In layers of history, layers of biology, layers of naturecultures, complexity is the name of our game. We are both the freedom-hungry offspring of conquest, products of white settler colonies, leaping over hurdles and crawling through tunnels on the playing field. I’m sure our genomes are more alike than they should be. Some molecular record of our touch in the codes of living will surely leave traces in the world, no matter that we are each reproductively silenced females, one by age and choice, one by surgery without consultation. Her red merle Australian shepherd’s quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors. Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her messages or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and binding outside to inside? We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story on story with nothing but the facts. We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is a historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy.19 In my experience, when people hear the term companion species, they tend to start talking about ‘companion animals,’ such as dogs, cats, horses, miniature donkeys, tropical fish, fancy bunnies, dying baby turtles, ant farms, parrots, tarantulas in harness, and Vietnamese potbellied pigs. Many of those critters, but far from all and none without very noninnocent histories, do fit readily into the early twenty-first-century globalized and flexible category of companion animals. Historically situated animals in companionate relations with equally situated humans are, of course, major players in When Species Meet. But the 50

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category ‘companion species’ is less shapely and more rambunctious than that. Indeed, I find that notion, which is less a category than a pointer to an ongoing ‘becoming with,’ to be a much richer web to inhabit than any of the posthumanisms on display after (or in reference to) the ever-deferred demise of man.20 I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still remains to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences.21 Fundamentally, however, it is the patterns of relationality and, in Karen Barad’s terms, intra-actions at many scales of space–time that need rethinking, not getting beyond one troubled category for a worse one even more likely to go postal.22 The partners do not precede their relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with: those are the mantras of companion species. Even the Oxford English Dictionary says as much. Gorging on etymologies, I will taste my key words for their flavors. Companion comes from the Latin cum panis, ‘with bread.’ Messmates at table are companions. Comrades are political companions. A companion in literary contexts is a vade mecum or handbook, like the Oxford Companion to wine or English verse; such companions help readers to consume well. Business and commercial associates form a company, a term that is also used for the lowest rank in an order of knights, a guest, a medieval trade guild, a fleet of merchant ships, a local unit of the Girl Guides, a military unit, and colloquially for the Central Intelligence Agency. As a verb, to companion is ‘to consort, to keep company,’ with sexual and generative connotations always ready to erupt. Species, like all the old and important words, is equally promiscuous, but in the visual register rather than the gustatory. The Latin specere is at the root of things here, with its tones of ‘to look’ and ‘to behold.’ In logic, species refers to a mental impression or idea, strengthening the notion that thinking and seeing are clones. Referring both to the relentlessly ‘specific’ or particular and to a class of individuals with the same characteristics, species contains its own opposite in the most promising—or special—way. Debates about whether species are earthly organic entities or taxonomic conveniences are coextensive with the discourse we call ‘biology.’ Species is about the dance linking kin and kind. The ability to interbreed reproductively is the rough and ready requirement for members of the same biological species; all those lateral gene exchangers such as bacteria have never made very good species. Also, biotechnologically mediated gene transfers redo kin and kind at rates and in patterns unprecedented on earth, generating messmates at table who do not know how to eat well and, in my judgment, often should not be guests together at all. Which companion species will, and should, live and die, and how, is at stake. The word species also structures conservation and environmental discourses, with their ‘endangered species’ that function simultaneously to locate value and to evoke death and extinction in ways familiar in colonial representations of the always vanishing indigene. The discursive tie between the colonized, the enslaved, the noncitizen, and the animal—all reduced to type, all Others to rational man, and all essential to his bright constitution—is at the heart of racism and flourishes, lethally, in the entrails of humanism. Woven into that tie in all the categories is ‘woman’s’ putative self-defining responsibility to ‘the species,’ as this singular and typological female is reduced to her reproductive function. Fecund, she lies outside the bright territory of man even as she is his conduit. The labeling of African American men in the United States as an ‘endangered species’ makes palpable the ongoing animalization that fuels liberal and conservative racialization alike. Species reeks of race and sex; and where and when species meet, that heritage must be untied and better knots of companion species attempted 51

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within and across differences. Loosening the grip of analogies that issue in the collapse of all of man’s others into one another, companion species must instead learn to live intersectionally.23 Raised a Roman Catholic, I grew up knowing that the Real Presence was present under both ‘species,’ the visible form of the bread and the wine. Sign and flesh, sight and food, never came apart for me again after seeing and eating that hearty meal. Secular semiotics never nourished as well or caused as much indigestion. That fact made me ready to learn that species is related to spice. A kind of atom or molecule, species is also a composition used in embalming. ‘The species’ often means the human race, unless one is attuned to science fiction, where species abound.24 It would be a mistake to assume much about species in advance of encounter. Finally, we come to metal coinage, ‘specie,’ stamped in the proper shape and kind. Like company, species also signifies and embodies wealth. I remember Marx on the topic of gold, alert to all its filth and glitter. Looking back in this way takes us to seeing again, to respecere, to the act of respect. To hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem: all of that is tied to polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species meet. To knot companion and species together in encounter, in regard and respect, is to enter the world of becoming with, where who and what are is precisely what is at stake. In ‘Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,’ Anna Tsing writes, ‘Human nature is an interspecies relationship.’25 That realization, in Beatriz Preciado’s idiom, promises an autre-mondialisation. Species interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect. That is the play of companion species learning to pay attention. Not much is excluded from the needed play, not technologies, commerce, organisms, landscapes, peoples, practices. I am not a posthumanist; I am who I become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of categories in the making of kin and kind. Queer messmates in mortal play, indeed.

And Say the Philosopher Responded? When Animals Look Back ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’ is the title Derrida gave his 1997 lecture in which he tracked the old philosophical scandal of judging ‘the animal’ to be capable only of reaction as an animal–machine. That’s a wonderful title and a crucial question. I think Derrida accomplished important work in that lecture and the published essay that followed, but something that was oddly missing became clearer in another lecture in the same series, translated into English as ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).’26 He understood that actual animals look back at actual human beings; he wrote at length about a cat, his small female cat, in a particular bathroom on a real morning actually looking at him. The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literatures and fables. (374) Further, Derrida knew that he was in the presence of someone, not of a machine reacting. ‘I see it as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, see me naked’ (378–379). He identified the key question as being not whether the cat could ‘speak’ but whether it is possible to know what respond means and how to distinguish a response from a reaction, for human beings as well as for 52

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anyone else. He did not fall into the trap of making the subaltern speak: ‘It would not be a matter of “giving speech back” to animals but perhaps acceding to a thinking … that thinks the absence of the name as something other than a privation’ (416). Yet, he did not seriously consider an alternative form of engagement either, one that risked knowing something more about cats and how to look back, perhaps even scientifically, biologically, and therefore also philosophically and intimately. He came right to the edge of respect, of the move to respecere, but he was sidetracked by his textual canon of Western philosophy and literature and by his own linked worries about being naked in front of his cat. He knew there is no nudity among animals, that the worry was his, even as he understood the fantastic lure of imagining he could write naked words. Somehow in all this worrying and longing, the cat was never heard from again in the long essay dedicated to the crime against animals perpetrated by the great Singularities separating the Animal and the Human in the canon Derrida so passionately read and reread so that it could never be read the same way again.27 For those readings, I and my people are permanently in his debt. But with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning. Derrida is among the most curious of men, among the most committed and able of philosophers to spot what arrests curiosity, instead nurturing an entanglement and a generative interruption called response. Derrida is relentlessly attentive to and humble before what he does not know. Besides all that, his own deep interest in animals is coextensive with his practice as a philosopher. The textual evidence is ubiquitous. What happened that morning was, to me, shocking because of what I know this philosopher can do. Incurious, he missed a possible invitation, a possible introduction to other-worlding. Or, if he was curious when he first really noticed his cat looking at him that morning, he arrested that lure to deconstructive communication with the sort of critical gesture that he would never have allowed to stop him in his canonical philosophical reading and writing practices. Rejecting the facile and basically imperialist, if generally well-intentioned, move of claiming to see from the point of view of the other, Derrida correctly criticized two kinds of representations, one set from those who observe real animals and write about them but never meet their gaze, and the other set from those who engage animals only as literary and mythological figures (382–383). He did not explicitly consider ethologists and other animal behavioral scientists, but inasmuch as they engage animals as objects of their vision, not as beings who look back and whose look their own intersects, with consequences for all that follows, the same criticism would apply. Why, though, should that criticism be the end of the matter for Derrida? What if not all such Western human workers with animals have refused the risk of an intersecting gaze, even if it usually has to be teased out from the repressive literary conventions of scientific publishing and descriptions of method? This is not an impossible question; the literature is large, complemented by a much larger oral culture among biologists as well as others who earn their livings in interaction with animals. Some astute thinkers who work and play with animals scientifically and professionally have discussed at some length this sort of issue. I am leaving aside entirely the philosophical thinking that goes on in popular idioms and publishing, not to mention the entire world of people thinking and engaging with animals who are not shaped by the institutionalized so-called Western philosophical and literary canon. 53

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Positive knowledge of and with animals might just be possible, knowledge that is positive in quite a radical sense if it is not built on the Great Divides. Why did Derrida not ask, even in principle, if a Gregory Bateson or Jane Goodall or Marc Bekoff or Barbara Smuts or many others have met the gaze of living, diverse animals and in response undone and redone themselves and their sciences? Their kind of positive knowledge might even be what Derrida would recognize as a mortal and finite knowing that understands ‘the absence of the name as something other than a privation.’ Why did Derrida leave unexamined the practices of communication outside the writing technologies he did know how to talk about? Leaving this query unasked, he had nowhere else to go with his keen recognition of the gaze of his cat than to Jeremy Bentham’s question: ‘The first and decisive question will rather be to know whether animals can suffer… Once its protocol is established, the form of this question changes everything’ (396). I would not for a minute deny the importance of the question of animals’ suffering and the criminal disregard of it throughout human orders, but I do not think that is the decisive question, the one that turns the order of things around, the one that promises an autre-mondialisation. The question of suffering led Derrida to the virtue of pity, and that is not a small thing. But how much more promise is in the questions, Can animals play? Or work? And even, can I learn to play with this cat? Can I, the philosopher, respond to an invitation or recognize one when it is offered? What if work and play, and not just pity, open up when the possibility of mutual response, without names, is taken seriously as an everyday practice available to philosophy and to science? What if a usable word for this is joy? And what if the question of how animals engage one another’s gaze responsively takes center stage for people? What if that is the query, once its protocol is properly established, whose form changes everything?28 My guess is that Derrida the man in the bathroom grasped all this, but Derrida the philosopher had no idea how to practice this sort of curiosity that morning with his highly visual cat. Therefore, as a philosopher, he knew nothing more from, about, and with the cat at the end of the morning than he knew at the beginning, no matter how much better he understood the root scandal as well as the enduring achievements of his textual legacy. Actually to respond to the cat’s response to his presence would have required his joining that flawed but rich philosophical canon to the risky project of asking what this cat on this morning cared about, what these bodily postures and visual entanglements might mean and might invite, as well as reading what people who study cats have to say and delving into the developing knowledges of both cat–cat and cat–human behavioral semiotics when species meet. Instead, he concentrated on his shame in being naked before this cat. Shame trumped curiosity, and that does not bode well for an autre-mondialisation. Knowing that in the gaze of the cat was ‘an existence that refuses to be conceptualized,’ Derrida did not ‘go on as if he had never been looked at,’ never addressed, which was the fundamental gaffe he teased out of his canonical tradition (379, 383). Unlike Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida, to his credit, recognized in his small cat ‘the absolute alterity of the neighbor’ (380).29 Further, instead of a primal scene of Man confronting Animal, Derrida gave us the provocation of a historically located look. Still, shame is not an adequate response to our inheritance of multispecies histories, even at their most brutal. Even if the cat did not become a symbol of all cats, the naked man’s shame quickly became a figure for the shame of philosophy before all of the animals. That figure generated an important essay. ‘The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there’ (397). 54

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But whatever else the cat might have been doing, Derrida’s full human male frontal nudity before an Other, which was of such interest in his philosophical tradition, was of no consequence to her, except as the distraction that kept her human from giving or receiving an ordinary polite greeting. I am prepared to believe that he did know how to greet this cat and began each morning in that mutually responsive and polite dance, but if so, that embodied mindful encounter did not motivate his philosophy in public. That is a pity. For help, I turn to someone who did learn to look back, as well as to recognize that she was looked at, as a core work-practice for doing her science. To respond was to respect; the practice of ‘becoming with’ rewove the fibers of the scientist’s being. Barbara Smuts is now a bioanthropologist at the University of Michigan, but as a Stanford University graduate student in 1975, she went to Tanzania’s Gombe Stream preserve to study chimpanzees. After being kidnapped and ransomed in the turbulent nationalist and anticolonial human politics of that area of the world in the mid-1970s, she ended up studying baboons in Kenya for her PhD.30 About 135 baboons called the Eburru Cliffs troop lived around a rocky outcropping of the Great Rift Valley near Lake Naivasha. In a wonderful understatement, Smuts writes, ‘At the beginning of my study, the baboons and I definitely did not see eye to eye.’31 She wanted to get as close as possible to the baboons to collect data to address her research questions; the monkeys wanted to get as far away from her threatening self as possible. Trained in the conventions of objective science, Smuts had been advised to be as neutral as possible, to be like a rock, to be unavailable, so that eventually the baboons would go on about their business in nature as if data-collecting humankind were not present. Good scientists were those who, learning to be invisible themselves, could see the scene of nature close up, as if through a peep-hole. The scientists could query but not be queried. People could ask if baboons are or are not social subjects, or ask anything else for that matter, without any ontological risk either to themselves, except maybe being bitten by an angry baboon or contracting a dire parasitic infection, or to their culture’s dominant epistemologies about what are named nature and culture. Along with more than a few other primatologists who talk, if not write in professional journals, about how the animals come to accept the presence of working scientists, Smuts recognized that the baboons were unimpressed by her rock act. They frequently looked at her, and the more she ignored their looks, the less satisfied they seemed. Progress in what scientists call ‘habituation’ of the animals to the human being’s would-be nonpresence was painfully slow. It seemed like the only critter to whom the supposedly neutral scientist was invisible was herself. Ignoring social cues is far from neutral social behavior. I imagine the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something, and asking if that being were or were not educable to the standard of a polite guest. The monkeys, in short, inquired if the woman was as good a social subject as an ordinary baboon, with whom one could figure out how to carry on relationships, whether hostile, neutral, or friendly. The question was not, Are the baboons social subjects? but, Is the human being? Not, Do the baboons have ‘face’? but, Do people? Smuts began adjusting what she did—and who she was—according to the baboons’ social semiotics directed both to her and to one another. I … in the process of gaining their trust, changed almost everything about me, including the way I walked and sat, the way I held my body, and the way I used my eyes and voice. I was learning a whole new way of being in the world—the way of the baboon. … 55

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I was responding to the cues the baboons used to indicate their emotions, motivations and intentions to one another, and I was gradually learning to send such signals back to them. As a result, instead of avoiding me when I got too close, they started giving me very deliberate dirty looks, which made me move away. This may sound like a small shift, but in fact it signaled a profound change from being treated like an object that elicited a unilateral response (avoidable), to being recognized as a subject with whom they could communicate. (295) In the philosopher’s idiom, the human being acquired a face. The result was that the baboons treated her more and more as a reliable social being who would move away when told to do so and around whom it might be safe to carry on monkey life without a lot of fuss over her presence. Having earned status as a baboon-literate casual acquaintance and sometimes even a familiar friend, Smuts was able to collect data and earn a PhD. She did not shift her questions to study baboon–human interactions, but only through mutual acknowledgment could the human being and baboons go on about their business. If she really wanted to study something other than how human beings are in the way, if she was really interested in these baboons, Smuts had to enter into, not shun, a responsive relationship. By acknowledging a baboon’s presence, I expressed respect, and by responding in ways I picked up from them, I let the baboons know that my intentions were benign and that I assumed they likewise meant me no harm. Once this was clearly established in both directions, we could relax in each other’s company. (297) Writing about these introductions to baboon social niceties, Smuts said, ‘The baboons remained themselves, doing what they always did in the world they always lived in’ (295). In other words, her idiom leaves the baboons in nature, where change involves only the time of evolution, and perhaps ecological crisis, and the human being in history, where all other sorts of time come into play. Here is where I think Derrida and Smuts need each other. Or maybe it is just my monomania to place baboons and humans together in situated histories, situated naturecultures, in which all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter. All the dancers are redone through the patterns they enact. The temporalities of companion species comprehend all the possibilities activated in becoming with, including the heterogeneous scales of evolutionary time for everybody but also the many other rhythms of conjoined process. If we know how to look, I think we would see that the baboons of Eburru Cliffs were redone too, in baboon ways, by having entangled their gaze with that of this young clipboardtoting human female. The relationships are the smallest possible patterns for analysis32; the partners and actors are their still-ongoing products. It is all extremely prosaic, relentlessly mundane, and exactly how worlds come into being.33 Smuts herself holds a theory very like this one in ‘Embodied Communication in Nonhuman Animals,’ a 2006 reprise of her study of the Eburru Cliffs baboons and elaboration of daily, ongoing negotiated responses between herself and her dog Bahati.34 In this study, Smuts is struck by the frequent enactments of brief greeting rituals between beings who 56

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know each other well, such as between baboons in the same troop and between herself and Bahati. Among baboons, both friends and non-friends greet one another all the time, and who they are is in constant becoming in these rituals. Greeting rituals are flexible and dynamic, rearranging pace and elements within the repertoire that the partners already share or can cobble together. Smuts defines a greeting ritual as a kind of embodied communication, which takes place in entwined, semiotic, overlapping, somatic patterning over time, not as discrete, denotative signals emitted by individuals. An embodied communication is more like a dance than a word. The flow of entangled meaningful bodies in time—whether jerky and nervous or flaming and flowing, whether both partners move in harmony or painfully out of synch or something else altogether—is communication about relationship, the relationship itself, and the means of reshaping relationship and so its enacters.35 Gregory Bateson would say that this is what human and nonhuman mammalian nonlinguistic communication fundamentally is, that is, communication about relationship and the material–semiotic means of relating.36 As Smuts puts it, ‘Changes in greetings are a change in the relationship’ (6). She goes further: ‘With language, it is possible to lie and say we like someone when we don’t. However, if the above speculations are correct, closely interacting bodies tend to tell the truth’ (7). This is a very interesting definition of truth, one rooted in material–semiotic dancing in which all the partners have face, but no one relies on names. That kind of truth does not fit easily into any of the inherited categories of human or nonhuman, nature or culture. I like to think that this is one treasure for Derrida’s hunt to ‘think the absence of the name as something other than a privation.’ I suspect this is one of the things my fellow competitors and I in the dog–human sport called agility mean when we say our dogs are ‘honest.’ I am certain that we are not referring to the tired philosophical and linguistic arguments about whether dogs can lie, and if so, lie about lying. The truth or honesty of nonlinguistic embodied communication depends on looking back and greeting significant others, again and again. This sort of truth or honesty is not some trope-free, fantastic kind of natural authenticity that only animals can have while humans are defined by the happy fault of lying denotatively and knowing it. Rather, this truth telling is about co-constitutive naturalcultural dancing, holding in esteem, and regard open to those who look back reciprocally. Always tripping, this kind of truth has a multispecies future. Respecere.

Becoming-Animal or Setting Out the Twenty-Third Bowl? The making each other available to events that is the dance of ‘becoming with’ has no truck with the fantasy wolf-pack version of ‘becoming-animal’ figured in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famous section of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, BecomingAnimal, Becoming-Imperceptible.’37 Mundane, prosaic, living wolves have no truck with that kind of wolf pack, as we will see at the end of these introductions, when dogs, wolves, and people become available to one another in risky worldings. But first, I want to explain why writing in which I had hoped to find an ally for the tasks of companion species instead made me come as close as I get to announcing, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the enemy!’ I want to stay a while with ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’ because it works so hard to get beyond the Great Divide between humans and other critters to find the rich multiplicities and topologies of a heterogeneously and nonteleologically connected world. I want to understand why Deleuze and Guattari here leave me so angry when what we want seems so similar. Despite much that I love in other work of 57

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Deleuze, here I find little but the two writers’ scorn for all that is mundane and ordinary and the profound absence of curiosity about or respect for and with actual animals, even as innumerable references to diverse animals are invoked to figure the authors’ anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist project. Derrida’s actual little cat is decidedly not invited into this encounter. No earthly animal would look twice at these authors, at least not in their textual garb in this chapter. A Thousand Plateaus is a part of the writers’ sustained work against the monomaniacal, cyclopean, individuated Oedipal subject, who is riveted on daddy and lethal in culture, politics, and philosophy. Patrilineal thinking, which sees all the world as a tree of filiations ruled by genealogy and identity, wars with rhizomatic thinking, which is open to nonhierarchical becomings and contagions. So far, so good. Deleuze and Guattari sketch a quick history of European ideas from eighteenth-century natural history (relations recognized through proportionality and resemblance, series and structure), through evolutionism (relations ordered through descent and filiation), to becomings (relations patterned through ‘sorcery’ or alliance). ‘Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance’ (238). The normal and abnormal rule in evolutionism; the anomaly, which is outside rules, is freed in the lines of flight of becomings. ‘Molar unities’ must give way to ‘molecular multiplicities.’ ‘The anomalous is neither individual nor species; it has only affects, infections, horror … a phenomenon of bordering’ (244–245). And then, We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes…All we are saying is that animals are packs, and packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion. … Wherever there is multiplicity, you will find also an exceptional individual, and it is with that individual that an alliance must be made in order to become-animal. (421–442) This is a philosophy of the sublime, not the earthly, not the mud; becoming-animal is not an autre-mondialisation. Earlier in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari conducted a smart, mean critique of Freud’s analysis of the famous case of the Wolf-Man, in which their opposition of dog and wolf gave me the key to how D&G’s associational web of anomalous becoming-animal feeds off a series of primary dichotomies figured by the opposition between the wild and the domestic. That day the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, and then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud understood was what a dog is, and a dog’s tail. (26) This gibe is the first of a crowd of oppositions of dog and wolf in A Thousand Plateaus, which taken together are a symptomatic morass for how not to take earthly animals—wild or domestic—seriously. In honor of Freud’s famously irascible chows, no doubt sleeping on the floor during the Wolf-Man’s sessions, I brace myself to go on by studying the artist David Goines’s Chinese Year of the Dog poster for 2006: one of the most gorgeous chow 58

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chows I have ever seen. Indifferent to the charms of a blue-purple tongue, D&G knew how to kick the psychoanalyst where it would hurt, but they had no eye for the elegant curve of a good chow’s tail, much less the courage to look such a dog in the eye. But the wolf/dog opposition is not funny. D&G express horror at the ‘individuated animals, family pets, sentimental Oedipal animals each with its own petty history’ who invite only regression (240).38 All worthy animals are a pack; all the rest are either pets of the bourgeoisie or state animals symbolizing some kind of divine myth.39 The pack, or pure-affect animals, are intensive, not extensive, molecular, and exceptional, not petty and molar—sublime wolf packs, in short. I don’t think it needs comment that we will learn nothing about actual wolves in all this. I know that D&G set out to write not a biological treatise but rather a philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary one requiring different reading habits for the always nonmimetic play of life and narrative. But no reading strategies can mute the scorn for the homely and the ordinary in this book. Leaving behind the traps of singularity and identity is possible without the lubrication of sublime ecstasy bordering on the intensive affect of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. D&G continue, ‘Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool’ (240, italics in original). I don’t think that Deleuze here is thinking of Dostoevsky’s idiot, who slows things down and whom Deleuze loves. D&G go on: Freud knows only the ‘dog in the kennel, the analyst’s bow wow.’ Never have I felt more loyal to Freud. D&G go even further in their disdain for the daily, the ordinary, the affectional rather than the sublime. The Unique, the one in a pact with a demon, the sorcerer’s anomaly, is both pack and Ahab’s leviathan in Moby Dick, the exceptional, not in the sense of a competent and skillful animal webbed in the open with others, but in the sense of what is without characteristics and without tenderness (244). From the point of view of the animal worlds I inhabit, this is not about a good run but about a bad trip. Along with the Beatles, I need a little more help than that from my friends. Little house dogs and the people who love them are the ultimate figure of abjection for D&G, especially if those people are elderly women, the very type of the sentimental. Ahab’s Moby Dick is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it. Lawrence’s becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or domestic relation…. But the objection is raised against Lawrence: “Your tortoises are not real!” And he answers: “Possibly, but my becoming is, … even and especially if you have no way of judging it, because you’re just little house dogs”. (244) ‘My becoming’ seems awfully important in a theory opposed to the strictures of individuation and subject. The old, female, small, dog- and cat-loving: these are who and what must be vomited out by those who will become-animal. Despite the keen competition, I am not sure I can find in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and horror at the ordinariness of flesh, here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist project. It took some nerve for D&G to write about becoming-woman just a few pages later! (291–309).40 It is almost enough to make me go out and get a toy poodle for my next agility dog; I know a remarkable one playing with her human for the World Cup these days. That is exceptional. It is a relief to return from my own flights of fancy of becoming-intense in the agility World Cup competitions to the mud and the slime of my proper home world, where my biological soul travels with that wolf found near the edge of the forest who was raised by 59

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scientists. At least as many nonarboreal shapes of relatedness can be found in these notalways-salubrious viscous fluids as among Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic anomalies. Playing in the mud, I can even appreciate a great deal of A Thousand Plateaus. Companion species are familiar with oddly shaped figures of kin and kind, in which arboreal descent is both a latecomer to the play of bodies and never uniquely in charge of the material–semiotic action. In their controversial theory of Acquiring Genomes, Lynn Margulis and her son and collaborator, Dorion Sagan, give me the flesh and figures that companion species need to understand their messmates.41 Reading Margulis over the years, I get the idea that she believes everything interesting on earth happened among the bacteria, and all the rest is just elaboration, most certainly including wolf packs. Bacteria pass genes back and forth all the time and do not resolve into well-bounded species, giving the taxonomist either an ecstatic moment or a headache. The creative force of symbiosis produced eukaryotic cells from bacteria. Hence all larger organisms—protests, fungi, animals, and plants—originated symbiogenetically. But creation of novelty by symbiosis did not end with the evolution of the earliest nucleated cells. Symbiosis still is everywhere. (55–56) Margulis and Sagan give examples from Pacific coral reefs, squid and their luminescent symbionts, New England lichens, milk cows, and New Guinea ant plants, among others. The basic story is simple: ever more complex life forms are the continual result of ever more intricate and multidirectional acts of association of and with other life forms. Trying to make a living, critters eat critters but can only partly digest one another. Quite a lot of indigestion, not to mention excretion, is the natural result, some of which is the vehicle for new sorts of complex patternings of ones and manys in entangled association. And some of that indigestion and voiding are just acidic reminders of mortality made vivid in the experience of pain and systemic breakdown, from the lowliest among us to the most eminent. Organisms are ecosystems of genomes, consortia, communities, partly digested dinners, mortal boundary formations. Even toy dogs and fat old ladies on city streets are such boundary formations; studying them ‘ecologically’ would show it. Eating one another and developing indigestion are only one kind of transformative merger practice; living critters form consortia in a baroque medley of inter- and intraactions. Margulis and Sagan put it more eloquently when they write that to be an organism is to be the fruit of The co-opting of strangers, the involvement and infolding of others into ever more complex and miscegenous genomes…The acquisition of the reproducing other, of the microbe and the genome, is no mere sideshow. Attraction, merger, fusion, incorporation, co-habitation, recombination— both permanent and cyclical—and other forms of forbidden couplings, are the main sources of Darwin’s missing variation. (205) Yoking together all the way down is what sym-bio-genesis means. The shape and temporality of life on earth are more like a liquid–crystal consortium folding on itself again and again than a well-branched tree. Ordinary identities emerge and are rightly cherished, but they remain always a relational web opening to non-Euclidean pasts, presents, and futures. 60

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The ordinary is a multipartner mud dance issuing from and in entangled species. It is turtles all the way down; the partners do not preexist their constitutive intra-action at every folded layer of time and space.42 These are the contagions and infections that wound the primary narcissism of those who still dream of human exceptionalism. These are also the cobblings together that give meaning to the ‘becoming with’ of companion species in naturecultures. Cum panis, messmates, to look and to look back, to have truck with: those are the names of my game. One aspect of Margulis and Sagan’s exposition seems unnecessarily hard for companion species to digest, however, and a more easily assimilated theory is cooking. In opposition to various mechanistic theories of the organism, Margulis has long been committed to the notion of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is self-making, in which self-maintaining entities (the smallest biological unit of which is a living cell) develop and sustain their own form, drawing on the enveloping flows of matter and energy.43 In this case, I think Margulis would do better with Deleuze and Guattari, whose world did not build on complex self-referential units of differentiation or on Gaian systems, cybernetic or otherwise, but built on a different kind of ‘turtles all the way down,’ figuring relentless otherness knotted into never fully bounded or fully self-referential entities. I am instructed by developmental biologist Scott Gilbert’s critique of autopoiesis for its emphasis on self-building and self-maintaining systems, closed except for nourishing flows of matter and energy. Gilbert stresses that nothing makes itself in the biological world, but rather reciprocal induction within and between always-in-process critters ramifies through space and time on both large and small scales in cascades of inter- and intra-action. In embryology, Gilbert calls this ‘interspecies epigenesis.’44 Gilbert writes: I think that the ideas that Lynn [Margulis] and I have are very similar; it’s just that she was focusing on adults and I want to extend the concept (as I think the science allows it to be fully extended) to embryos. I believe that the embryonic co-construction of the physical bodies has many more implications because it means that we were ‘never’ individuals. Like Margulis and Sagan, Gilbert stresses that the cell (not the genome) is the smallest unit of structure and function in the biological world, and he argues that ‘the morphogenetic field can be seen as a major unit of ontogenetic and evolutionary change.’45 As I read him, Gilbert’s approach is not a holistic systems theory in the sense that Margulis and Sagan lean toward, and his fractal ‘turtles all the way down’ arguments do not posit a self-referential unit of differentiation. Such a unit cheats on the turtles pile, whether up or down. Software engineer Rusten Hogness suggests that the term turtling all the way down might better express Gilbert’s kind of recursivity.46 I think that for Gilbert the noun differentiation is permanently a verb, within which mortal knots of partly structured difference are in play. In my view, Margulis and Sagan’s symbiogenesis is not really compatible with their theory of autopoiesis, and the alternative is not an additive mechanistic theory but a going even more deeply into differentiation.47 A nice touch is that Gilbert and his students literally work on turtle embryogeny, studying the inductions and cell migrations that result in the turtle’s plastron on its belly surface. Layers of turtling, indeed. All of that takes us to the ethologist Thelma Rowell’s practice of setting out a twentythird bowl in her farmyard in Lancashire when she has only twenty-two sheep to feed. Her Soay sheep crunch grass on the hillsides most of the day, forming their own social 61

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groups without a lot of interference. Such restraint is a revolutionary act among most sheep farmers, who rob sheep of virtually every decision until whole breeds may well have lost the capacity to find their way in life without overweening human supervision. Rowell’s empowered sheep, belonging to a so-called primitive breed recalcitrant to meat–industrial standardization and behavioral ruination, have addressed many of her questions, not least telling her that even domesticated sheep have social lives and abilities as complex as those of the baboons and other monkeys she studied for decades. Probably descended from a population of feral sheep thought to have been deposited on the island of Soay in the St. Kilda archipelago sometime in the Bronze Age, Soay sheep are today the subject of attention by rare breed societies in the United Kingdom and the United States.48 Focused on weighty matters such as feed conversion rates, scandalized sheep scientists with an agribusiness emphasis rejected Rowell’s first papers on feral ram groups when she submitted them (the manuscripts, not the sheep) for publication. But good scientists have a way of nibbling away at prejudice with mutated questions and lovely data, which works at least sometimes.49 Scottish blackface hill sheep, Rowell’s numerically dominant ovine neighbors in Lancashire, and the lowland Dorset white-faced breed, mostly on the English Downs, seem to have forgotten how to testify to a great deal of sheep competence. They and their equivalents around the world are the sorts of ovids most familiar to the sheep experts reviewing papers for the journals—at least for the journals in which sheep usually show up, that is, not the behavioral ecology, integrative biology, and evolution journals in which nondomestic species seem the ‘natural’ subjects of attention. But in the context of the ranching and farming practices that led to today’s global agribusiness, maybe those ‘domestic’ ovine eating machines are rarely asked an interesting question. Not brought into the open with their people, and so with no experience of jointly becoming available, these sheep do not ‘become with’ a curious scientist. There is a disarmingly literal quality to having truck with Rowell and her critters. Rowell brings her competent sheep into the yard most days so that she can ask them some more questions while they snack. There, the twenty-two sheep find twenty-three bowls spaced around the yard. That homely twenty-third bowl is the open,50 the space of what is not yet and may or may not ever be; it is a making available to events; it is asking the sheep and the scientists to be smart in their exchanges by making it possible for something unexpected to happen. Rowell practices the virtue of worldly politeness—not a particularly gentle art— with her colleagues and her sheep, just as she used to do with her primate subjects. ‘Interesting research is research on the conditions that make something interesting.’51 Always having a bowl that is not occupied provides an extra place to go for any sheep displaced by his or her socially assertive fellow ovid. Rowell’s approach is deceptively simple. Competition is so easy to see; eating is so readily observed and of such consuming interest to farmers. What else might be happening? Might what is not so easy to learn to see be what is of the utmost importance to the sheep in their daily doings and their evolutionary history? Might it be that thinking again about the history of predation and the smart predilections of prey will tell us something surprising and important about ovine worlds even on Lancashire hillsides, or on islands off the coast of Scotland, where a wolf has not been seen for centuries? Always a maverick alert to complexity in its details rather than in grand pronouncements, Rowell regularly discomfited her human colleagues when she studied monkeys, beginning with her 1960s accounts of forest baboons in Uganda who did not act according to their supposed species script.52 Rowell is among the most satisfyingly opinionated, empirically grounded, theoretically savvy, unself-impressed, and unsparingly anti-ideological people I 62

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have ever met. Forgetting her head-over-heels interest in her sheep, seeing her patent love for her obstreperous male adolescent turkeys on her Lancashire farm in 2003, whom she unconvincingly threatened with untimely slaughter for their misdeeds,53 told me a great deal about how she treats both unwary human colleagues and the opinionated animals whom she has studied over a lifetime. As Vinciane Despret emphasizes in her study, Rowell poses the question of the collective in relation to both sheep and people: ‘Do we prefer living with predictable sheep or with sheep that surprise us and that add to our definitions of what “being social” means?’54 This is a fundamental worldly question, or what Despret’s colleague Isabelle Stengers might call a cosmopolitical query, in which ‘the cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple divergent worlds, and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable, as opposed to the temptation of a peace intended to be final.’55 Eating lunch with the circa sixty-five-year-old Rowell and her elderly, cherished, nonherding, pet dog in her farmhouse kitchen strewn with scientific papers and heterogeneous books, my would-be ethnographic self had the distinct sense that Oedipal regression was not on the menu among these companion species. Woolf!

Living Histories in the Contact Zone: Wolf Tracks Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? How is becoming with a practice of becoming worldly? When species meet, the question of how to inherit histories is pressing, and how to get on together is at stake. Because I become with dogs, I am drawn into the multispecies knots that they are tied into and that they retie by their reciprocal action. My premise is that touch ramifies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions; these mundane, prosaic things are the result of having truck with each other.56 Touch does not make one small; it peppers its partners with attachment sites for world making. Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with—all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape. In touch and regard, partners willy nilly are in the miscegenous mud that infuses our bodies with all that brought that contact into being. Touch and regard have consequences. Thus, my introductions in this chapter end in three knots of entangled companion species— wolves, dogs, human beings, and more—in three places where an autre-mondialisation is at stake: South Africa, the Golan Heights in Syria, and the countryside of the French Alps. At the off-leash dog park in Santa Cruz, California, which I frequent, people sometimes boast that their largish, prick-eared, shepherd-like mutts are ‘half wolf.’ Sometimes, the humans claim that they know this for sure but more often rest content with an account that makes their dogs seem special, close to their storied wild selves. I find the genealogical speculations highly unlikely in most cases, partly because it is not easy to have at hand a breeding wolf with whom a willing dog might mate, and partly because of the same agnosticism with which I and most of my dogland informants greet identification of any largish black dog of uncertain provenance as a ‘half Labrador retriever.’ Still, I know wolf–dog hybrids do exist rather widely, and my dogs’ playing with a few motley claimants tied me into a web of caring. Caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning. Learning something of the behavioral biology of wolf–dog hybrids seemed the least that was required. One of the places that led me, via an article by Robyn Dixon in the Los Angeles Times on October 17, 2004, ‘Orphaned Wolves Face Grim Future,’ was to the Tsitsikamma Wolf Sanctuary on the southern coast of South Africa near the town of Storm River.57 63

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During the apartheid era, in quasi-secret experiments, scientists in the service of the white state imported northern gray wolves from North America with the intent of breeding an attack dog with a wolf ’s smarts, stamina, and sense of smell to track down ‘insurgents’ in the harsh border areas. But the security-apparatus scientists at Roodeplaat Breeding Enterprises found to their dismay that wolf–dog hybrids make particularly bad trained attack dogs, not because of aggressivity or unpredictability (both issues with many of the hybrids discussed in the general literature), but because, besides being hard to train, the wolf–dogs generally defer to their human pack leaders and fail to take the lead when ordered to do so on counterinsurgency or police patrols. Members of an endangered species in much of its former range in North America became failed mixed-blood immigrants in the apartheid state intent on enforcing racial purity. After the end of apartheid, both the wolves and the hybrids became signifiers of security once again, as people terrified for their personal safety in the ripe, still racialized discourses of criminality rampant in South Africa engaged in a brisk newspaper- and Internet-mediated trade in the animals. The predictable result has been thousands of animals unable to be ‘repatriated’ to their continent of origin. Both epidemiologically and genetically categorically ‘impure,’ these canids enter the cultural category of the disposable ‘homeless,’ or in ecological terms ‘nicheless.’ The new state could not care less what happens to these animate tools of a former racist regime. Running on private money from rich donors and middleclass, mostly white people, a rescue and sanctuary apparatus of a sort that is familiar globally to dog people does what it can. This is not an honored truth and reconciliation process trying to meet a socially recognized obligation to those nonhumans forced into ‘becoming with’ a scientific racial state apparatus. The sanctuary practices are private charity directed to nonhumans whom many people would see as better killed (euthanized? Is there any ‘good death’ here?) in a nation where unaddressed human economic misery remains immense. Further, the financially strapped sanctuaries accept only ‘pure wolves,’ though only about two hundred canids could probably have passed that test in 2004 in South Africa, and have no resources for the possibly tens of thousands of hybrids who face, as the newspaper article headlined, a ‘grim future.’ So, what have I and others who touch and are touched by this story inherited? Which histories must we live? A short list includes the racial discourses endemic to the history of both biology and the nation; the collision of endangered species worlds, with their conservation apparatuses, and security discourse worlds, with their criminality and terrorist apparatuses; the actual lives and deaths of differentially situated human beings and animals shaped by these knots; contending popular and professional narratives about wolves and dogs and their consequences for who lives and dies and how; the coshaped histories of human social welfare and animal welfare organizations; the class-saturated funding apparatuses of private and public animal–human worlds; the development of the categories to contain those, human and nonhuman, who are disposable and killable; the inextricable tie between North America and South Africa in all these matters; and the stories and actual practices that continue to produce wolf–dog hybrids in unlivable knots, even on a rompingdog beach in Santa Cruz, California. Curiosity gets one into thick mud, but I believe that is the kind of ‘looking back’ and ‘becoming-with-companions’ that might matter in making autres-mondialisations more possible. Heading to the Golan Heights after running with the wolves in South Africa is hardly restful. Among the last companion-species knots in which I imagined living was one that in 2004 featured Israeli cowboys in occupied Syrian territory riding kibbutz horses to manage 64

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their European-style cattle among the ruins of Syrian villages and military bases. All I have is a snapshot, one newspaper article in the midst of an ongoing complex, bloody, and tragic history.58 That snapshot was enough to reshape my sense of touch while playing with my dogs. The first cattle-ranching kibbutz was founded shortly after 1967; by 2004, about seventeen thousand Israelis in thirty-three various sorts of settlements held the territory, pending removal by an ever-receding peace treaty with Syria. Learning their new skills on the job, the neophyte ranchers share the land with the Israeli military and their tanks. Mine fields still pose dangers for cattle, horses, and people, and firing-range practice vies with grazing for space. The cattle are guarded from the resourceful Syrian wolves, not to mention Syrian people periodically repatriating stock, by large white livestock guardian dogs (LGDs), namely, Turkish Akbash dogs. Turkey does play an odd role in the Middle East! With the dogs on duty, the ranchers do not shoot the wolves. Nothing was said in this Times article about whether they shoot the Syrian ‘rustlers.’ The cattle that the Israelis took over after the expulsion of the Syrian villagers were small, wiry, capable in the same kinds of ways as Rowell’s nonsheepish sheep, and resistant to the local tick-borne diseases. The European cattle who were imported to replace the supposedly unmodern Syrian beasts are none of those things. The Israeli ranchers brought the guardian dogs into their operation in the 1990s in response to the large number of gray wolves, whose number on the Golan Heights grew significantly after the defeat of Syria in 1967 and reduced the Arab villagers’ hunting pressure on them. The Akbash dogs were the prosaic touch that made the story in the newspaper of more than passing interest in the huge canvas of fraught naturecultures and war in the Middle East. I was a kind of ‘godhuman’ to Willem, a Great Pyrenees LGD who worked on land in California that my family owns with a friend. Willem, his human, Susan, and his breeder and her health and genetics activist peers in dogland have been major informants for this book. Willem’s livestock guardian dog people are astute participants in the hotly contested dog– wolf–rancher–herbivore–environmentalist–hunter naturecultures of the contemporary U.S. northern Rocky Mountain region. Willem and my dog Cayenne played as puppies and added to the stock of the world’s joy.59 This is all quite small and unexceptional—not much of a ‘line of flight’ to delight Deleuze and Guattari here. But it was enough to hail me and maybe us into curiosity about the naturalcultural politics of wolves, dogs, cattle, ticks, pathogens, tanks, mine fields, soldiers, displaced villagers, cattle thieves, and settlers become cowboystyle ranchers on still another bit of earth made into a frontier by war, expulsion, occupation, the history of genocides, and ramifying insecurity all around. There is no happy ending to offer, no conclusion to this ongoing entanglement, only a sharp reminder that anywhere one really looks actual living wolves and dogs are waiting to guide humans into contested worldings. ‘We found her at the edge of the city; she was raised by wolves.’ Like her forestimmigrant cousin, this wolf wore a communications pack that was no stranger to the development of military technology for command, control, communication, and intelligence. Of course, by the first decade of the new millennium, that kind of telecommunications pack could be ordinary equipment for day walkers in the mountains, and that is where these introductions will end, but with the printed word rather than a personal GPS system situating the hiker. In 2005, primatologist Allison Jolly, knowing my livestock-guardiandog passions, sent me a brochure she had picked up on her walking tour through the French Alps that summer with her family. The brochure was in Italian, French, and English, already setting it off from unaccommodating monolingual U.S. aids to mountain outings. The transnational paths through the Alps and the urbane, leisured, international hikers 65

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expected on the paths were vividly present. On the cover was an alert, calm Great Pyrenees guardian dog, surrounded by text: ‘Important notice to walkers and hikers [or on the flip side, “Promeneurs, Randonneurs,” etc.]: In the course of your walk, you may encounter the local guarding-dogs. These are large white dogs whose task is to guard the flocks.’ We are in the midst of reinvented pastoral–tourist economies linking foot-traveling humans, meat and fiber niche markets that are complexly both local and global, restoration ecology and heritage culture projects of the European Union, shepherds, flocks, dogs, wolves, bears, and lynxes. The return of previously extirpated predators to parts of their old ranges is a major story of transnational environmental politics and biology. Some of the animals have been deliberately reintroduced after intense captive breeding programs or with transplants from less-developed countries in the previous Soviet sphere, where progress-indicating extinctions sometimes have not gone as far as in western Europe. Some predators reestablished populations on their own when people began trapping and shooting returnees less often. The wolves newly welcome in the French Alps seem to be offspring of opportunistic canids sidling over from unreliably progressive Italy, which never completely wiped out its wolves. The wolves gave the LGDs a job deterring lupine (and tourist) depredations on the shepherds’ flocks. After the near destruction of the Great Pyrenees during the two world wars and the pastoral economic collapse in the Basque regions, the breed came to the Alps from the mountains for which they are named, by way of their rescue by the purebred dog fancy, especially through the collecting practices of wealthy women in England and the eastern United States. French dog fanciers learned some of what they needed to know about reintroducing their dogs to guarding work from the U.S. LGD people, who had placed dogs on ranches in western states in recent decades and communicated with their European peers. The knots of technocultural, reinvented pastoral–tourist economies and ecologies are all over North America too, raising the most basic questions of who belongs where and what flourishing means for whom. Following the dogs and their herbivores and people in order to respond to those questions attaches me again and again to ranching, farming, and eating. In principle if not always in personal and collective action, it is easy to know that factory farming and its sciences and politics must be undone. But what then? How can food security for everybody (not just for the rich, who can forget how important cheap and abundant food is) and multispecies’ coflourishing be linked in practice? How can remembering the conquest of the western states by Anglo settlers and their plants and animals become part of the solution and not another occasion for the pleasurable and individualizing frisson of guilt? Much collaborative and inventive work is under way on these matters, if only we take touch seriously. Both vegan and nonvegan community food projects with a local and translocal analysis have made clear the links among safe and fair working conditions for people, physically and behaviorally healthy agricultural animals, genetic and other research directed to health and diversity, urban and rural food security, and enhanced wildlife habitat.60 No easy unity is to be found on these matters, and no answers will make one feel good for long. But those are not the goals of companion species. Rather, there are vastly more attachment sites for participating in the search for more livable ‘other worlds’ (autresmondialisations) inside earthly complexity than one could ever have imagined when first reaching out to pet one’s dog. The kinds of relatings that these introductions perform entangle a motley crowd of differentially situated species, including landscapes, animals, plants, microorganisms, people, and technologies. Sometimes, a polite introduction brings together two quasi-individuated 66

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beings, maybe even with personal names printed in major newspapers, whose histories can recall comfortable narratives of subjects in encounter, two by two. More often, the configurations of critters have other patterns more reminiscent of a cat’s cradle game of the sort taken for granted by good ecologists, military strategists, political economists, and ethnographers. Whether grasped two-by-two or tangle-by-tangle, attachment sites needed for meeting species redo everything they touch. The point is not to celebrate complexity but to become worldly and to respond. Considering still live metaphors for this work, John Law and Annemarie Mol help me think: ‘Multiplicity, oscillation, mediation, material heterogeneity, performativity, interference … there is no resting place in a multiple and partially connected world.’61 My point is simple: once again we are in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down. Response and respect are possible only in those knots, with actual animals and people looking back at each other, sticky with all their muddled histories. Appreciation of the complexity is, of course, invited. But more is required too. Figuring what that more might be is the work of situated companion species. It is a question of cosmopolitics, of learning to be ‘polite’ in responsible relation to always asymmetrical living and dying, and nurturing and killing. And so I end with the alpine tourist brochure’s severe injunction to the hiker to ‘be on your best countryside behavior,’ or ‘sorveguate il vostro comportamento,’ followed by specific instructions about what polite behavior toward the working dogs and flocks entails. A prosaic detail: the exercise of good manners makes the competent working animals those whom the people need to learn to recognize.62 The ones with face were not all human. And say the philosopher responded?

Notes 1 Reprinted from D. Haraway (2007) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3–45. 2 Beatriz Preciado, who teaches about technologies of gender at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and about queer theory, prosthetic technologies, and gender in Paris, introduced me both to nuances of the terms alter-globalisation and autre-mondialisation and to the cosmopolitan pooch Pepa, who walks the cities of Europe in the French lesbian canine traditions, marking a kind of worldliness of her own. Of course, autre-mondialisation has many lives, some of which can be tracked on the Internet, but the versions Preciado gave me animate this book. In a manuscript she sent me in August 2006, Preciado wrote: ‘Fabricated at the end of the nineteenth-century, French bulldogs and lesbians co-evolve from being marginal monsters into becoming media creatures and bodies of pop and chic consumption. Together, they invent a way of surviving and create an aesthetics of human–animal life. Slowly moving from red-light districts to artistic boroughs all the way to television, they have ascended the species pile together. This is a history of mutual recognition, mutation, travel and queer love…. The history of the French bulldog and that of the working queer woman are tied to the transformations brought on by the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern sexualities…. Soon, the so-called French bulldog became the beloved companion of the “Belles de nuit,” being depicted by artists such as Toulouse Lautrec and Degas in Parisian brothels and cafes. [The dog’s] ugly face, according to conventional beauty standards, echoes the lesbian refusal of the heterosexual canon of female beauty; its muscular and strong body and its small size made of the molosse the ideal companion of the urban flâneuse, the nomad woman writer and the prostitute. [By] the end of the nineteenth century, together with the cigar, the suit or even writing [itself ], the bulldog became an identity accessory, a gender and political marker and a privileged survival companion for the manly woman, the lesbian, the prostitute and the gender reveler [in] the growing European cities…. The French bulldog’s survival opportunity really began in 1880, when a group of Parisian Frenchy breeders and fans began to organize regular weekly

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Donna Haraway meetings. One of the first members of the French bulldog owners club was Madame Palmyre, the proprietor of the club “La Souris” located in the lower reaches of Paris in the area of “Mont Martre” and “Moulin Rouge.” This was a gathering place for butchers, coachmen, rag traders, café owners, barrow boys, writers, painters, lesbians and hookers. Lesbian writers Renée Vivien and Natalie Clifford Barney and Colette, as well as modernist writers such as Catulle Mendes, Coppée, Henry Cantel, Albert Mérat and Léon Cladel gathered together with bulldogs at La Souris. Toulouse Lautrec immortalized “bouboule,” Palmyre’s French bulldogs, walking with hookers or eating at their tables. Representing the so-called dangerous classes, the scrunched-up faces of the bulldog, as those of the manly lesbians, were part of the modern aesthetic turn. Moreover, French writer Colette, friend of Palmyre and customer of La Souris, would be one of the first writers and political actors to be always portrayed with her French bulldogs, and most specially her beloved “Toby- Le-Chien.” By the early 1920s, the French bulldog had become a biocultural companion of the liberated woman and writer in literature, painting, and the emerging media.’ 3 For a larger discussion of contact zones, see Chapter 8, ‘Training in the Contact Zone.’ 4 Thanks to History of Consciousness graduate student Eben Kirksey for that reference and for his organizing the ‘Multispecies Salon’ in November 2006, at UC Santa Cruz. 5 Fingery eyes is Eva Hayward’s term for the haptic–optic join of camera with marine critters, especially invertebrates, at the multiple interfaces of water, air, glass, and other media through which visual touch occurs in art and science. See Eva Hayward, ‘Fingery-Eyes: What I Learned from Balanophyllia Elegans,’ for the Encyclopedia of Human–Animal Relationships, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007). 6 Intra-action is Karen Barad’s term. By my borrowing, I also touch her in Jim’s dog. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 7 Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), argues for the virtue of curiosity, a difficult and often corrosive practice that is not much honored in U.S. culture, no matter my views about obligation and pleasure. 8 A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New York: Mentor Books, 1948). Whitehead writes: ‘An event is the grasping into unity of a pattern of aspects. The effectiveness of an event beyond itself arises from the aspects of itself which go to form the prehended unities of other events’ (111). 9 I discuss these kinds of technocultural images in Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (New York: Routledge, 1997), 131–172, 173–212, 293–309. 10 My alliance with Bruno Latour in Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and in We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) is obvious here and often in my explorations of how ‘we have never been human.’ That suggestive title has also been used to allied effect by Eduardo Mendieta, ‘We Have Never Been Human or, How We Lost Our Humanity: Derrida and Habermas on Cloning,’ Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement (2003): 168–175; and Brian Gareau, ‘We Have Never Been Human: Agential Nature, ANT, and Marxist Political Ecology,’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 16, no. 4 (December 2005): 127–140. I am also indebted to Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), for his readings of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘infoldings of the flesh’ and much else. 11 See Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Arts and Media; and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) for a wealth of worlds no longer beholden to the Great Divides. 12 All of these words, technology, nature, organic, and more generate protean webs of meaning that have to be addressed in intimate historical detail. But here, I want to foreground the still readily heard oppositions and assumed transparencies of meanings in still current idioms. 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’ trans. David Wills, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 121–146, 138. In an e-mail dated September 1, 2006, Isabelle Stengers reminded me that Freud was conducting an exclusionary propaganda war for his own theory of the unconscious by means of his apparatus of narcissistic wounds and their treatment. Human exceptionalism has not been the only Western tradition, much less a universal cultural approach. Stengers was most annoyed by the third wound in which Freud seems to address Descartes and Cie, ‘but which also entails

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When Species Meet blanket judgment about traditional soul healing crafts, which get assimilated to sheer suggestion.’ Derrida does not address this matter because the orthodox Cartesian tradition is his target. The pity is that this tradition stands for the West tout court in so much philosophy and critical theory, a fault of which I have been as guilty as anyone. For a crucial corrective, see Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). The question Derrida takes on is how ‘to break with the Cartesian tradition of the animal–machine that exists without language and without the ability to respond,’ but only to react (121). To do that, it is not enough to ‘subvert’ the subject; the topography of the Great Divide that maps the animal in general and the human in general has to be left behind in favor of ‘the whole differentiated field of experience and of life-forms’ (128). Derrida argues that the truly philosophically scandalous (and psychoanalytically revealing) move in positing human exceptionalism, and so dominion, is less refusing ‘the animal’ a long list of powers (‘speech, reason, experience of death, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughter, tears, respect, and so on—the list is necessarily without limit’) and more ‘what calls itself human’ rigorously attributing to man, to himself, such self-constituting attributes (137). ‘Traces erase (themselves), like everything else, but the structure of the trace is such that it cannot be in anyone’s power to erase it …. The distinction might appear subtle and fragile but its fragility renders fragile all the solid oppositions that we are in the process of tracking down’ (138). 14 A useful analysis of the nonteleological heart of Darwinism can be found in Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 15 Yudhijit Bhattarcharjee, ‘Evolution Trumps Intelligent Design in Kansas Vote,’ Science, 313 (August 11, 2006): 743. 16 In a 2005 survey of adults in thirty-two European nations and the United States and a similar 2001 query of the Japanese, only people in Turkey expressed more doubts about evolution than U.S. Americans, whereas 85% of Icelanders were comfortable with the idea that ‘human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.’ About 60% of U.S. adults surveyed either did not ‘believe’ in evolution or expressed doubts. Over the last twenty years, the percentage of adults in the United States accepting evolution has declined from 45% to 40%. The percentage of adults not sure of their position increased from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005. See Jon Miller, Eugenie Scott, and Shinji Okamoto, ‘Public Acceptance of Evolution,’ Science 313 (August 11, 2006): 765–766; New York Times, Tuesday, August 15, 2006, D2. I do not find it strange that these doubts about the histories of human evolution go along with hypertrophied faith in certain kinds of engineering and in war-making and profit-extraction technologies. Science is not one. 17 With little feet growing from its ventral surface for moving from salty seas to dry land in the great evolutionary adventure, the Darwin fish is a symbol generally understood to be a parodic reply to the Christian Jesus fish (no feet) on car bumpers and refrigerator doors of fellow citizens. Check out www.darwinfish.com; the opportunity to market a commodity is never missed. One can also purchase a fish design with gefilte inscribed in it. As Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Parodies_of_the_ichthys_symbol) tells us, ‘The Darwin fish has led to a minor arms race in bumper stickers. A design was made with a larger “Jesus fish” eating the Darwin fish. Sometimes, the larger fish contains letters that spell the word “truth.” A further step shows two fish, one with legs labeled “I evolved,” the other without legs labeled “You didn’t.”’ 18 John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller, Genetics and Social Behavior of the Dog (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965). For a discussion of this research project in biological, political, and cultural contexts, see Donna Haraway, ‘For the Love of a Good Dog,’ in Genetic Nature/Culture, ed. Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath and M. Susan Lindee (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 111–131. In my account, I drew heavily on Diane Paul, ‘The Rockefeller Foundation and the Origin of Behavior Genetics,’ in The Politics of Heredity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). On August 27, 1999, Faye Ginsburg e-mailed me, ‘Paul Scott was like an uncle to me, and my dad has spent a good part of his life studying the evolution of canine behavior as a social process. [I] played with [my father’s] wolves as a kid, not to mention the coy-dog and other unfortunate creatures…. I should dig out the December 3, 1963 issue of Look magazine with me romping with the wolves and playing with super aggressive inbred rabbits!!!’ The lab also had dingoes. Faye did dig out the article, complete with great pictures of wolf and girl in proper face-to-face greeting and in play. For the photos and more, see ‘Nurturing the Genome: Benson Ginsburg Festschrift,’ June 28–29, 2002, http://ginsburgfest.uconn.edu/. Faye

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Donna Haraway Ginsburg studies Indigenous digital media production and consumption, as well as disability and public culture. See Faye Ginsburg, ‘Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media,’ in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye Ginsburg, Lila AbuLughod and Brian Larkin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). 19 This passage is taken from Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 1–3. 20 I adapt the term becoming with from Vinciane Despret, ‘The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis,’ Body and Society, 10, no. 2 (2004): 111–134. She refigured the story of Konrad Lorenz with his jackdaws: ‘I suggest that Lorenz became a “jackdaw-with-human” as much as the jackdaw became in some ways a “human-with-jackdaw.” … This is a new articulation of “with-ness,” an undetermined articulation of “being with.” … He learns to be affected … . Learning how to address the creatures being studied is not the result of scientific theoretical understanding[;] it is the condition of this understanding’ (131). For a feminist extension of ‘becoming with,’ see Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, ‘Thinking with Care,’ paper delivered at the meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Vancouver, BC, November 2–4, 2006. 21 Foundational theorists of intersectionality have been the U.S. feminists of color, including Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,’ in Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations, ed. D. Kelly Weisberg (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), 383–398; Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Chéla Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Gloria Anzaldùa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); and many others. For a primer, see ‘Intersectionality: A Tool for Gender and Economic Justice,’ Women’s Rights and Economic Change 9 (August 2004), www.awid.org/publications/primers/intersectionality_en.pdf 22 For a trenchant analysis, see Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). The ‘posthumanities,’ however, seems to me a useful notion for tracking scholarly conversations. On ‘conversation’ (versus ‘debate’) as a political practice, see Katie King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). King’s new book, Network Reenactments: Histories under Globalization (in preparation), is an indispensable guide to transknowledge makings and reenactments of many kinds, in and out of the contemporary university. King’s notion of pastpresents is particularly useful for thinking about how to inherit histories. 23 See note 21 for ‘intersectionality.’ Carol Adams, Neither Beast nor Man: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1995), 71–84, argues persuasively for an intersectional, not an analogical, approach to the needed allied oppositions to the deadly oppressions and exploitations of animals and of categories of human beings who cannot fully count as ‘man.’ Adams writes: ‘That is, from a humanocentric perspective of oppressed peoples who have been, if not equated with animals, treated like animals, the introduction of animals to resistance politics suggests that, once again, even in resistance humans are being equated with animals. But again this is a result of thinking analogically, of seeing oppression as additive, rather than comprehending the interlocking systems of domination’ (84). Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed has developed a robust theory of oppositional and differential consciousness that should forever prevent hierarchized analogical moves, in which oppressions are both equated and ranked, rather than made to animate another kind of entanglement of becoming with one another that is attentive to the asymmetries of power. For varied ways of dealing with these issues, see also Octavia Butler, Fledgling (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); Alice Walker, ‘Am I Blue?’ in Living by the Word (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1987), 3–8; Angela Davis, ‘Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,’ in Women, Race and Class, 172–201; Marcie Griffith, Jennifer Wolch and Unna Lassiter, ‘Animal Practices and the Racialization of Filipinas in Los Angeles,’ Society and Animals, 10, no. 3 (2002): 222–248; Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Philosophical Beasts,’ Continental Philosophy Review, under review; and Mendieta, ‘The Imperial Bestiary of the U.S.,’ in Radical Philosophy Today, vol. 4, ed. Harray van der Linden and Tony Smith (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006), 159–179. In his search for another logic of metamorphosis, Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), tracks the brutalization, bestialization, and colonization of African subjects in philosophy and history. In my

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When Species Meet experience of writing on the topic, the readiness with which taking animals seriously is heard to be an animalization of people of color is a shocking reminder, if one is needed, of how potent colonial (and humanist) tools of analogy remain, including in discourses intended to be liberatory. Rights discourse struggles with this legacy. My hope for companion species is that we might struggle with different demons from those produced by analogy and hierarchy linking all of fictional man’s others. 24 Sha La Bare, writing on sf and religion, Ursula LeGuin, farfetchings, Afro-futurism, Scientology, and the sf mode as historical consciousness, taught me to pay attention to the sf tones of ‘species.’ Sha La Bare, ‘Science Fiction: Theory and Practice,’ PhD dissertation in progress, History of Consciousness Department, University of California at Santa Cruz. 25 Anna Tsing, ‘Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,’ in Thinking with Donna Haraway, ed. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming). See also Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), especially Chapter 5, ‘A History of Weediness.’ 26 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),’ trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369–418. Further references to this essay are in parentheses in the main text. This essay is the first part of a ten-hour address Derrida gave at the third Cerisy-la-Salle conference in 1997. See Jacques Derrida, L’animal autobiographique, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999). 27 ‘Confined within this catch-all concept, within this vast encampment of the animal, in the general singular … are all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers.… Animals are my concern…. I will venture to say that never, on the part of any great philosopher from Plato to Heidegger, or anyone at all who takes on, as a philosophical question in and of itself, the question called that of the animal… have I noticed a protestation of principle … against the general singular that is the animal.… The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within this general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking… but a crime of the first order against the animals, against animals’ (402, 403, 408, 416). 28 I highlight ‘once its protocol is properly established’ to differentiate the kind of question that needs to be asked from the practice of assessing nonhuman animals in relation to human ones by checking the presence or absence of a potentially infinite list of capacities, a process that Derrida so rightly rejected. What is at stake in establishing a different protocol is the never denotatively knowable, for human or nonhuman animals, relation of response. Derrida thought Bentham’s question avoided the dilemma by pointing not to positive capabilities assessed against one another but to ‘the non-power at the heart of power’ that we share with the other animals in our suffering, vulnerability, and mortality. But I am not satisfied with that solution; it is only part of the needed reformulation. There is an unnamable being/becoming with in copresence that Barbara Smuts, below, will call something we taste rather than something we know, which is about suffering and expressive, relational vitality, in all the vulnerable mortality of both. I am (inadequately) calling that expressive, mortal, world-making vitality ‘play’ or ‘work,’ not to designate a fixable capability in relation to which beings can be ranked, but to affirm a kind of ‘non-power at the heart of power’ other than suffering. Maybe a usable word for this is joy. ‘Mortality … as the most radical means of thinking the finitude we share with animals’ does not reside only in suffering, in my view. (Both quotations come from ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am,’ 396.) Capability (play) and incapability (suffering) are both all about mortality and finitude. Thinking otherwise comes from the ongoing oddities of dominant Western philosophical conversations, including those Derrida knew best and undid so well most of the time. Some kinds of Buddhist idioms might work better here and be closer to what Derrida meant by establishing a different protocol from Bentham’s to ask about suffering, but other idioms offer themselves from many varied and mixed traditions as well, some of which are ‘Western.’ I want a different protocol for asking about a lot more than suffering, which at least in U.S. idioms will regularly end in the self-fulfilling search for rights and their denial through abuse. I am more worried than Derrida seems to be here about the way animals become discursive victims and little else when the protocols are not properly established for the question, Can animals suffer? Thanks to Cary Wolfe for making me think more about this unsolved problem in this chapter. 29 Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,’ in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 151–153. Lévinas

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Donna Haraway movingly tells the story of the stray dog called Bobby, who greeted the Jewish prisoners of war as they returned from work each day in a German forced-labor camp, restoring to them knowledge of their humanity. ‘For him, there was no doubt that we were men. This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives’ (153). Thus was Bobby left on the other side of a Great Divide, even by a man as sensitive as Lévinas was of the service rendered by this dog’s look. My favorite essay in animal studies and philosophy on the question of Bobby and whether an animal has ‘face’ in Lévinas’s sense is by H. Peter Steeves, ‘Lost Dog,’ in Figuring the Animal: Essays in Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, ed. Catherine Rainwater and Mary Pollack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 21–35. See also H. Peter Steeves, The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). For a full explication of the many ways the dog Bobby ‘traces and retraces the oppositional limits that configure the human and the animals,’ see David L. Clark, ‘On Being “the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”: Dwelling with Animals after Lévinas,’ in Animal Acts, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (New York: Routledge, 1997), 41–74, 70. On Derrida and others in the Continental philosophical canon on animals, see Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 30 The book based on that and subsequent research is Barbara Smuts, Sex and Friendship in Baboons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). I wrote about Smuts in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 168–169, 176–179, 137–176. See also Shirley Strum, Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons (New York: Random House, 1987). When I wrote Primate Visions, I think I failed the obligation of curiosity in much the same way I suggest Derrida did. I was so intent on the consequences of the Western philosophical, literary, and political heritage for writing about animals— especially other primates in the so-called third world in a period of rapid decolonization and gender rearrangements—that I all but missed the radical practice of many of the biologists and anthropologists, women and men both, who helped me with the book, that is, their relentless curiosity about the animals and their tying themselves into knots to find ways to engage with these diverse animals as a rigorous scientific practice and not a romantic fantasy. Many of my informants for Primate Visions actually cared most about who the animals are; their radical practice was an eloquent refusal of the premise that the proper study of mankind is man. I, too, often mistook the conventional idioms of the philosophy and history of science spoken by most of ‘my’ scientists for a description of what they did. They tended to mistake my grasp of how narrative practice works in science, how fact and fiction coshape each other, to be a reduction of their hard-won science to subjective storytelling. I think we needed each other but had little idea of how to respond. Smuts, as well as people such as Alison Jolly, Linda Fedigan, Shirley Strum, and Thelma Rowell, continued to engage with me then and later with a mode of attention that I call generous suspicion, which I regard as one of the most important epistemological virtues of companion species. Out of the kind of respect I identify as mutual generous suspicion, we have crafted friendships for which I am mightily grateful. See Shirley Strum and Linda Marie Fedigan, eds., Primate Encounters (­Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Had I known in 1980 how to cultivate the curiosity I wanted from Derrida, I would have spent much more time at risk at field sites with the scientists and the monkeys and apes, not in the facile illusion that such ethnographic fieldwork would give the truth about people or animals where interviews and documentary analysis mislead, but as a subject-forming entanglement that requires response one cannot know in advance. I knew I too cared about the actual animals then, but I knew neither how to look back nor that I lacked the habit. 31 Barbara Smuts, ‘Encounters with Animal Minds,’ Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, nos. 5–7 (2001): 293–309, 295. Further page references are in parentheses in the main text. 32 I did not write ‘smallest possible units of analysis’ because the word unit misleads us to think that there is an ultimate atom made up of internal differential relatings, which is a premise of autopoiesis and other theories of organic form, discussed below. I see only prehensile turtles all the way up and down. 33 On the creative force of the prosaic, the propinquity of things in many registers, the concatenation of specific empirical circumstances, the misrecognition of experience by holding to an idea of the experience before having had it, and how different orders of things hold together coevally, see

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When Species Meet Gillian Goslinga, ‘The Ethnography of a South Indian God: Virgin Birth, Spirit Possession, and the Prose of the Modern World,’ PhD dissertation, University of California at Santa Cruz, June 2006. 34 Barbara Smuts, ‘Embodied Communication in Nonhuman Animals,’ in Human Development in the 21st Century: Visionary Policy Ideas from Systems Scientists, ed. Alan Fogel, Barbara King and Stuart Shanker (Toronto: publication of the Council on Human Development, 2011). 35 When a run goes awry in agility, I hear my fellow dog sport people say of the canine and human persons, ‘They look like they have never met; she should introduce herself to her dog.’ A good run can be thought of as a sustained greeting ritual. 36 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 367–370. 37 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 232–309. Further references are in parentheses in the main text. I am playing with the tones of the vegetable communication of ‘truck’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s call-of-the-wild version of a wolf pack. The online word detective (www.word-detective.com/) told me that ‘the archaic sense of “truck” means “dealings, communications, bargaining or commerce,” and is heard today most often in the phrase “have no truck with,” meaning “have nothing to do with.” The original form of the English verb “to truck” appeared in the 13th-century meaning “to exchange or barter.” One of the surviving uses of this sense of “truck” is in the phrase “truck farm,” meaning “vegetables produced for market.”’ We will see in a minute what production for small markets has to do with setting out a twenty-third bowl and my sense of becoming with significant others. 38 Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 102–134, has much more appreciation than I do for Deleuze and Guattari’s workings of becoming-animal, but Baker too is annoyed by their treatment of pet dogs and cats. Much as I do care about both literary and fleshly dogs and cats, their well-being is not my core worry in reference to D&G’s becoming-animal. I think Baker misses the systematic nausea that D&G let loose in their chapter in response to all that is ordinary, especially evident in the figural wolf/dog contrasts but not reducible to them. Multiplicities, metamorphoses, and lines of flight not trapped in Oedipal and capitalist fixities must not be allowed to work that way. Sometimes, the herculean efforts needed to dodge various versions of humanism catapult one into empyrean lines of flight proper only to the anomalous gods at their buffed worst. I’d rather own up to the fraught tangle of relatings called ‘individuals’ in idiomatic English, whose sticky threads are knotted in prolific spaces and times with other assemblages, some recognizable as (human and nonhuman) individuals or persons and some very much not. Individuals actually matter, and they are not the only kind of assemblage in play, even in themselves. If one is ‘accused’ of ‘uncritical humanism’ or its animal equivalent every time he or she worries about the suffering or capabilities of actual living beings, then I feel myself in the coercive presence of the One True Faith, post-modern or not, and run for all I am worth. Of course, I am indebted to Deleuze and Guattari, among others, for the ability to think in ‘assemblages.’ 39 Unfairly, because D&G could not have known most of these things in the late 1970s in France or elsewhere, I think of trained therapy dogs working to bring autistic children into a social world where even human touch can become less terrifying, or pet dogs visiting the elderly to bring them back to an interest in a bigger life, or dogs accompanying teenagers with severe cerebral palsy in wheelchairs to help both with practical daily tasks like opening doors and even more with social interactions with other humans. I think of all the conversations among humans watching their canine buddies at an ordinary dog park that lead them to a larger civic and artistic world, as well as exchanges about poop bags and dog diets. These are not about becoming-animal, but they are about ordinary, daily becoming-with that does not seem very Oedipal to me. Claims about either bounded individuation or regression are always worth an empirical check; real dogs are ready to oblige. How world-building relations actually develop between a human being and a dog is the subject of ethological and ethnographic research initiated by Adrian Franklin in Tasmania. See Adrian Franklin, Michael Emmison, Donna Haraway, and Max Travers, ‘Investigating the Therapeutic Benefits of Companion Animals,’ Qualitative Sociology Review (special issue ‘Animals and People’), 3, no. 1 (2007): 42–58. Franklin is also savvy about how animals, including dogs (in this case, dingoes), feature in disturbing colonial and postcolonial nationalisms. See Adrian Franklin, Animal Nation: The True Story of Animals and Australia (New South Wales: New South Wales Press, 2006).

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Donna Haraway 40 The passages on becoming-woman and becoming-child in A Thousand Plateaus have been the subject of many commentaries, both for D&G’s embrace of the feminine-outside-confinement and the inadequacy of that move. However unintended, the primitivist and racialist tones of the book have not escaped notice either. In my calmer moments, I understand both what D&G accomplish and what this book cannot contribute to a non-Oedipal, antiracist feminism. Rosi Braidotti is my guide to fruitfully learning from Deleuze (who wrote much more than A Thousand Plateaus) and, in my view, offers much more toward an autre-mondialisation. See Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). For a wonderful book partly shaped by Deleuze’s sensibilities in Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995]), see Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), which is a subtle backstory of the emergent forces we call things like neoliberalism and advanced consumer capitalism. 41 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Further references are in parentheses in the main text. 42 Who knows if Lawrence’s ‘becoming-tortoise’ referenced in A Thousand Plateaus (244) had any relation to the many versions of the ‘turtles all the way down story’! To track both the positivists’ and the interpretivists’ approaches to this narrative about nonteleological infinite regress—the world rests on an elephant resting on a turtle resting on turtles all the way down—see http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down. Stephen Hawking, Clifford Geertz, Gregory Bateson, and Bertrand Russell all got into the act of refashioning this quasi-Hindu tale. In a chapter of that title, Isabelle Stengers tells a ‘turtles all the way down’ story involving William James, Copernicus, and a savvy old lady, in Power and Invention: Situating Science, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 61–62. See also Yair Neuman, ‘Turtles All the Way Down: Outlines for a Dynamic Theory of Epistemology,’ Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 20, no. 6 (2002): 521–530, available online. Neuman summarizes: ‘The most serious problem facing epistemological research is how to establish solid foundations for epistemology within a recursive system of knowing. The aim of this paper is to respond to this problem by presenting some outlines for a dynamic theory of epistemology. This theory suggests that the most basic unshakeable unit of epistemology is a process of differentiation, which is a self-referential activity. This paper elaborates on this thesis and illustrates its relevance to solving the problem of embodiment in Piaget’s genetic epistemology’ (521). The self-referential part is the trouble. I want an idiom for both–and: ‘self-other referential’ all the way down. 43 ‘“Autopoiesis,” literally “self-making,” refers to the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. No material object less complex than a cell can sustain itself and its own boundaries with an identity that distinguishes it from the rest of nature. Live autopoietic entities actively maintain their form and often change their form (they “develop”), but always through the flow of material and energy.’ Margulis and Sagan, Acquiring Genomes, 40. Their target was the notion that a virus, or a gene, is a ‘unit of life.’ 44 For his critique of autopoiesis, see Scott F. Gilbert, ‘The Genome in Its Ecological Context: Philosophical Perspectives on Interspecies Epigenesis,’ Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 981 (2002): 202–218. See also Scott Gilbert, John Opitz, and Rudolf Raff, ‘Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology,’ Developmental Biology, 173 (1996): 357–372, 368. For reciprocal induction, see Chapter 8, ‘Training in the Contact Zone.’ Lest the reader think ‘turtles all the way down’ is excessively mythological or literary, Gilbert directed me to the Turtle Epibiont Project at Yale, at www.yale.edu/peabody/collections/iz/ iz_epibiont.html. Gilbert writes: ‘Interestingly, the notion that turtles carry the world is a theme found in several cultures. And while they might not support a universe, turtles do support considerable ecosystems on their backs.’ E-mail from Gilbert to Haraway, August 24, 2006. For the relevance of this discussion to the phenomena of immunology, see Donna Haraway, ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 205–230, 251–254. For an update, see Thomas Pradeu and Edgardo Carosella, ‘The Self Model and the Conception of Biological Identity in Immunology,’ Biology and Philosophy, 21, no. 2 (March 2006): 235–252. Pradeu and Carosella summarize: ‘The self/non-self model, first proposed by F. M. Burnet, has dominated immunology for 60 years now. According to this model, any foreign element will trigger an immune reaction in an organism, whereas endogenous elements will not, in normal circumstances, induce an immune

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When Species Meet reaction. In this paper we show that the self/non-self model is no longer an appropriate explanation of experimental data in immunology, and that this inadequacy may be rooted in an excessively strong metaphysical conception of biological identity. We suggest that another hypothesis, one based on the notion of continuity, gives a better account of immune phenomena. Finally, we underscore the mapping between this metaphysical deflation from self to continuity in immunology and the philosophical debate between substantialism and empiricism about identity’ (235). 45 E-mail from Scott Gilbert to Donna Haraway, August 23, 2006. 46 Personal communication, August 23, 2006. 47 Drawing from second-generation cybernetic thinkers such as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Cary Wolfe reworks autopoiesis so that it cannot mean ‘self-organizing systems,’ which is the chief complaint Gilbert and I have. Nothing ‘self-organizes.’ Wolfe’s development of nonrepresentationalist communication is close to what I mean by companion species engaged in turtling all the way down. The word autopoiesis is not the main problem, although I prefer to let it go because I do not think its meanings can be bent enough. What Wolfe and I both insist on is finding an idiom for the paradoxical and indispensable linkages of openness and closure, called by Wolfe ‘openness from closure’ repeated recursively. See Cary Wolfe, ‘In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion,’ in Zoontologies, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), especially 34–48. My thanks to Wolfe for pushing this question in his e-mail of September 12, 2006. In Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), Karen Barad’s agential realism, phenomena, and intra-action provide another vital theoretical idiom for this conversation. 48 The Soay are listed with the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in the United Kingdom, and St. Kilda is a ‘mixed’ UNESCO World Heritage Site, designated for both natural and cultural significance. The North American registry and breeder organization can be tracked at www.soaysofamerica.org/. Soay wool fiber enters Internet-mediated spinning and weaving circuits, and Soay meat is valued in agropastoral local and global practices. A tannery sells certified-organic Soay skins, also by Internet. About one thousand Soay sheep on St. Kilda have contributed DNA samples for an important database. Since the 1950s, an ‘unmanaged,’ translocated Soay population on the island of Hirta, where people no longer live, has been the subject of extensive ecological, behavioral, genetic, and evolutionary investigation. Archaeologists track the chemical residues of ancient tanneries and collect old Soay DNA from hides. From tourism, through modern agropastoralism and opposition to factory farming, to comparative genomics, all of this is technoculture in action. See www.soaysheepsociety.org.uk/; www.kilda.org.uk/; and T. H. Clutton Brock and J. Pemberton, Soay Sheep (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 49 Thelma Rowell and C. A. Rowell, ‘The Social Organization of Feral Ovis aries Ram Groups in the Pre-rut Period,’ Ethology, 95 (1993): 213–232. These ram groups were not her current beloved Soay but hardy U.S. Texas Barbados critters encountered before she retired from UC Berkeley and returned to Lancashire. Note that the article was published not in a sheep journal but in a major biobehavioral zoology journal, in which comparisons to monkeys, even if surprising, were normal scientific practice and not evidence for mental disorder. See Thelma Rowell, ‘A Few Peculiar Primates,’ in Primate Encounters, ed. Shirley Strum and Linda Fedigan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 57–70, for a discussion of the history of studying what Rowell calls the ‘entertaining, squabbling species’ such as people and many other primates (69). Recent evidence from feral Soay indicates that they might shape their grazing patterns as a function of the seasonal densities of parasites lying in wait on tall grass tufts. Big predators aren’t the only ones who count in the evolution of behavior. Michael R. Hutchings, Jos M. Milner, Iain J. Gordon, Ilias Kyriazakis, and Frank Jackson, ‘Grazing Decisions of Soay Sheep, Ovis aries, on St. Kilda: A Consequence of Parasite Distribution?’ Oikos, 96, no. 2 (2002): 235. 50 Contending meanings of ‘the open’ in Heideggerian philosophy and after appear in Chapter 8, ‘Training in the Contact Zone.’ 51 Vinciane Despret, ‘Sheep Do Have Opinions,’ in Making Things Public, ed. Latour and Weibel, 362. I am indebted to Despret’s interview with Rowell and her interpretation of the biologist’s work in terms of ‘making available,’ ‘the virtue of politeness,’ and the role of the twenty-third bowl. Thanks to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa for bringing the research DVD made by Didier Demorcy and Vinciane Despret, Thelma Rowell’s Non-sheepish Sheep, to my graduate seminar in winter 2006. Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Thelma Rowell, and Sarah Franklin all

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Donna Haraway infuse my writing here and elsewhere. With Sarah Franklin, I visited Rowell’s farm in March 2003 and had the privilege of meeting her sheep and turkeys and talking with her and Sarah about worlds of animals and people. For much more on worldly sheep in British and transnational life and technoscience, see Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Stengers’s former doctoral student Maria Puig de la Bellacasa was a visiting postdoc at UC Santa Cruz from 2005 to 2007. Maria and other colleagues and graduate students in our animal studies/science studies/feminist theory grad seminar in winter 2006 helped shape my thinking about cosmopolitics, the twenty-third bowl, the open, and companion species. Thanks to all those in my animal studies seminars in the last few years who meet in this book. 52 Thelma Rowell, ‘Forest Living Baboons in Uganda,’ Journal of Zoology, 149 (1966): 344–644. See also Thelma Rowell, The Social Behaviour of Monkeys (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972). Somewhat to her horror, this little book became very popular among feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, including me, who had a grudge against male dominance–hierarchy explanations of all things primate. Haraway, Primate Visions, 124, 127, 292–293, 420–421. 53 Running a working farm, Rowell accompanies any decision to kill an animal for food or another reason with arrangements for slaughter on her land, to minimize trauma. Therefore, her animals must remain within informal exchange and cannot be sold commercially. If animals are to be marketed, responsibility includes conditions from breeding to the human meal, shoes, or sweater, including travel and slaughter of the animals. In the context of the work to sustain valuable human–animal lifeways in contemporary terms, the Rare Breed Survival Trust tries, imperfectly, to operationalize these responsibilities in the United Kingdom. Legal changes to allow the sale of meat when the working animal has been slaughtered where he or she lived, and not limit homeslaughtered meat to noncommercial circuits, are crucial to animal and environmental well-being in any meat-eating ecology. In the United States, a movement is growing to develop and legalize mobile slaughter units with certified inspectors. Such practices ought to be mandatory, not just permitted. Two consequences would be no longer limiting such meat to upscale markets but making it the norm for everyone, and therefore greatly reducing meat-eating, since such responsible practices are incompatible with factory-scale slaughtering. The naturalcultural changes inherent in both these points are immense. Currently, a mobile unit can kill about twelve hundred cows per year and serves at best small, niche-market farmers. An industrial slaughtering enterprise kills more than that number of large animals per day, with predictable consequences for human and nonhuman brutalization and environmental degradation. Class, race, and regional wellbeing are all at stake here for people; living and dying with less suffering are at stake for meat-, hide-, and fiber-producing working animals. For a point of view in Montana, see ‘Mobile Slaughter Units,’ News and Observer, May 23, 2005, www.mycattle.com/news/dsp_topstories_article. cfm?storyid=17218. On serious work to reform slaughter practices and industrial animal welfare broadly, see Temple Grandin’s Web site, www.grandin.com. Her designs of less terrible industrial slaughter systems, with mandatory auditing for actual reduction of animal stress, are well known. Less well known is her 1989 PhD dissertation at the University of Illinois, focused on the other end of the production process, that is, on environmental enrichment for piglets so that their neural development and behavior can be more normal (www.grandin.com/references/diss.intro.html). Still ‘normal’ actual conditions for pigs are described and documented at www.sustainabletable. org/issues/animalwelfare/: ‘Factory farmed pigs are born in small crates that limit the sow’s mobility to the point where she cannot turn around. As their mother lays [sic] immobile, unable make a nest or separate herself and her offspring from their feces, piglets are confined in the crate together, prohibited from running, jumping and playing according to their natural tendencies. Once separated from their mother, pigs are confined together in concrete pens with no bedding or soil for them to root in. In such conditions, pigs become restless and often resort to biting other pigs’ tails as an expression of stress. Rather than simply giving the pigs straw to play in, many factory farm operators will cut off their pigs’ tails in response to this behavior.’ Four companies control 64% of pork production in the United States. For a soul-chilling analysis of the hog industry, see Dawn Coppin’s science-studies and ethnographic PhD dissertation, ‘Capitalist Pigs: Large-Scale Swine Facilities and the Mutual Construction of Nature and Society,’ Sociology Department, University of Illinois, Champaign–Urbana, 2002. See Dawn Coppin, ‘Foucauldian Hog Futures: The Birth of Mega-hog Farms,’ Sociological Quarterly, 44, no. 4 (2003): 597–616. Coppin’s work is radical in many ways, not least her insistence in bringing the

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When Species Meet animals into research and analysis as actors. Joining scholarship to work for structural change, Coppin has been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. In 2006, Arizona voters (64%) overwhelmingly passed the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Act, which prohibits the confinement of calves in veal crates and breeding pigs in gestation crates, both practices that are already banned throughout the European Union but are the norm in the United States. For the syllabus for my winter 2004 graduate seminar ‘Animal Studies as Science Studies: We Have Never Been Human,’ see http://feministstudies.UCSC.edu/facHaraway.html. See also Jonathan Burt, ‘Conflicts around Slaughter in Modernity,’ in Killing Animals, the Animal Studies Group (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 120–144. Then watch Hugh Dorigo’s film on factory farming, Beyond Closed Doors (Sandgrain Films, 2006). 54 Despret, ‘Sheep Do Have Opinions,’ 367. 55 Isabelle Stengers, ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal,’ in Making Things Public, ed. Latour and Weibel, 994–1003, 995. See also Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, 2 vols. (Paris: La Découverte, 2003; originally in 7 vols., Paris: La Découverte, 1997). Stengers’s cosmopolitics is more thoroughly introduced in Chapter 3, ‘Sharing Suffering.’ 56 On the prosaic and effects through contingent contiguity, see Goslinga, ‘The Ethnography of a South Indian God.’ 57 For Dixon’s November 7, 2004, article on the wolf–dog hybrids of South Africa, see www.wolfsongalaska.org/Wolves_south_africa_exile.htm 58 James Bennett, ‘Hoofbeats and Tank Tracks Share Golan Range,’ New York Times, January 17, 2004, A1, A7. The light tone of this piece is hard to read in 2006, when war upon war upon war tears and threatens to tear everybody and everything apart without end, and it is hard even to imagine what cosmopolitics could look like on this land now. For an unpublished prose poem about three unarmed Arabs who were killed by the Israeli Army when attempting a cattle raid in 1968, see www.janecollins.org/uploads/The%20Golan%20Heights.doc. For pictures, see ‘Raising Beef Cattle in Kfar Yehoshua and the Golan Heights,’ http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~gidon/personal/ cattle/cattle.html. See www.bibleplaces.com/golanheights.htm for a story of the biblical presence of cattle on this land; that kind of story shapes today’s claims of belonging. For the Zionist notion on ‘the people of Israel returning to the Golan’ (not the only position held by Israelis), see www. golan.org.il/civil.html. For hikes on the Golan Heights, see http://galileeguide.com/gguide/etours. html. For a sketch of the complex situation on the Golan Heights after the war in Lebanon in 2006, see Scott Wilson, ‘Golan Heights Land, Lifestyle Lure Settlers: Lebanon War Revives Dispute over Territory,’ Washington Post, October 30, 2006, A1 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2006/10/29/AR2006102900926_pf.html). Annexed in 1981, the Golan Heights supplies about a third of Israel’s water. Wilson reports that in 2006, ‘the population of roughly 7,000 Arabs who remained after the 1967 war has grown to about 20,000. Most of them refused citizenship. Those who accepted are ostracized to this day in the four insular mountain towns where the Druze population is concentrated.’ (All Web sites accessed on May 4, 2007.) 59 When I first wrote this paragraph, seven-year-old Willem was living with an amputated rear leg from bone cancer, and metastases had recently appeared on his lungs. On that day in early November, he was bright-eyed and energetic, if a little short of breath; and he went on an easy walk with Rusten or me when we finished work for the day. This chapter is for him and his human, Susan. The contiguities of the prosaic, indeed. Willem died just before Thanksgiving, 2006. 60 Check out Food Alliance, founded in 1997, as a collaboration among Washington State University, Oregon State University, and the Washington State Department of Agriculture (www.foodalliance. org/). Explore the ‘Certified Humane’ labeling project (www.certifiedhumane.org), and see ‘Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Can Improve the Quality of the Meat We Eat,’ San Francisco Chronicle, September 27, 2006. Then go to the Community Food Security Coalition (www.foodsecurity. org/) for a view of race, class, gender, and—in embryonic form—species intersectional analysis and action. Then go to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (http://albc-usa.org/) and the networks of the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture (www.sustainableagriculture.net/ index.php). The California Food and Justice Coalition (www.foodsecurity.org/california/) prominently states in its key principles that ‘the production, distribution, and preparation of food must be healthy and humane for all humans, animals and ecosystems.’ Brave words, and a lifetime’s work. Not so finally, check out the Intertribal Bison Cooperative, uniting fifty-one American tribes

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Donna Haraway around the restoration of agriculture and the well-being of Indian land, its organisms, and its people (www.intertribalbison.org/). There are also many vegan approaches to food security and justice, for example, track from www.vegan.org/, the Humane Society of the United States, and, of course, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. (All Web sites accessed in November 2006.) I end this list, however, not with my sometimes-allied PETA foe but with vegan colleagues—instruggle—that is, the antiracist, antisexist, justice-oriented, animal-focused vegan Carol Adams, Neither Man nor Beast, and her British counterpart, Lynda Birke, Feminism, Animals, and Science (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1994). 61 John Law and Annemarie Mol, ‘Complexities: An Introduction,’ in Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, ed. John Law and Annemarie Mol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 20. For a beautiful analysis of the inadequacy of humanist, personalist models for worldly human–animal encounters, see Charis Thompson, ‘When Elephants Stand for Competing Philosophies of Nature: Amboseli National Park, Kenya,’ in Complexities, 166–190. 62 Perhaps here, in an endnote at the close of introductions, is the place to remember that apparently friendly and curious behavior from wild wolves directed at people is most likely to be an exploration of a possible lupine lunch rather than an affectionate cross-species romp. Companion species, cum panis, breaking bread, eating and being eaten, the end of human exceptionalism: this, and not romantic naturalism, is what is at stake in the remembrance. Wildlife expert Valerius Geist explained to hunters in the northern U.S. Rockies that as wolf population numbers rise well above the levels to which active extermination reduced them and herbivore populations adjust downward from renewed predator pressure, the competent North American opportunistic canids start acting more like Russian wolves than like remnants of a vanishing species set down in the midst of gustatory excess. That is, they start checking out and then stalking and occasionally attacking humans and their animals. Valerius Geist, ‘An Important Warning about “Tame” Wolves,’ Conservation Connection (newsletter from the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep), 10 (Summer 2006): 4–5. Thanks to Gary Lease for the article and for many generous conversations about hunting, dogs, and conservation.

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4 A CIRCUMPOLAR NIGHT’S DREAM Tim Ingold

Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound, A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire; And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3, i, 97–100)

Introduction: Of Things and Beings1 We are accustomed to calling animals and plants ‘living things’. But we call ourselves ‘human beings’. Let us agree that plants and animals, human and non-human, are all organisms. The question then arises: is an organism a thing or a being? This is by no means an issue of mere semantics, for on the answer hangs our understanding of life itself. If life is a property of things, then it must be reducible to some internal principle, the possession of which distinguishes the class of objects we call organisms from classes of other kinds, and which – from its position within the organism – drives the latter’s development and its interactions with the environment. But if life is tantamount to being, then we have to regard the organism not so much as a living thing than as the material embodiment of a certain way of being alive. In other words, we should think of the organism not as containing life, or expressing it, but as emergent within the life process itself. Now natural science, including the science of evolutionary biology, has developed in the West as an inquiry into the objective properties of things. Thus, the applicability of evolutionary biology to humans depends upon our accepting that they, in a sense, are things as well. Yet, they are us, and were we but things, how would we be able to recognise ourselves for what we are? Paradoxically, if organisms are things, then to see ourselves as organisms, we must be more than organisms. Indeed, it is precisely by this ‘excess’ that we are inclined to define the scope of our common humanity. Whereas an animal such as a bear or a chimpanzee is all organism, the human being is said to be an organism ‘plus ...’ (Collins 1985). Its organic nature is supposedly topped up with some additional factor – call it mind or

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self-awareness – that can be found not by external observation but only by the knowledge we have of ourselves as possessing specific identities, feelings, memories and intentions. Herein lies the curious, split-level image of human existence which is such a characteristic feature of modern thought and science. Surely, as science insists, humans are part of nature. They are biological organisms, composed of the same stuff, and having evolved according to the same principles, as organisms of every other kind. Like other creatures, they are born, grow old and die; they must eat to live, protect themselves to survive and mate to reproduce. But if that were all there is to it, how could there be science? It would seem that the very possibility of a scientific account of humankind as a species of nature is only open for a creature for whom being is knowing, one that can so detach its consciousness from the traffic of its bodily interactions in the environment as to treat the latter as the object of its concern. To be human in this sense – to exist as a knowing subject – is, we commonly say, to be a person. So is the scientist a person rather than an organism? How can we exist both inside the world of nature and outside of it, as organisms and persons, at one and the same time? There seems to me to be only one way out of the paradoxes and contradictions entailed in modern science’s attitude to humanity. This is to build on the premise that all organisms, including human ones, are not things but beings. As beings, persons are organisms, and being organisms, they – or rather we – are not impartial observers of nature but participate from within in the continuum of organic life. In order to demonstrate the possibility of an account of the living world founded on this premise, and to spell out some of its implications, I shall draw in this chapter on one particular anthropological study of how people in a non-Western society perceive themselves and the world around them. This is the account by A. Irving Hallowell of what it means to be a person among the northern Ojibwa, indigenous hunters and trappers of the forests to the east of Lake Winnipeg and north of Lake Superior in Canada.2 Hallowell’s article, ‘Ojibwa ontology, behavior and world view’ (OO), first published in 1960, is in my estimation one of the great classics of northern circumpolar ethnography.3 I have turned to it over and over again for inspiration, and every reading has yielded some new insight. I must emphasise, however, that what follows is not intended as a contribution to Ojibwa ethnography. I have not carried out fieldwork in the region, nor do I have the deep familiarity with the literature on these people that would qualify me for such a task. Rather, I offer some reflections which, though stimulated by a reading of Hallowell’s work, are primarily motivated by the goal set out above – that is, of restoring human beings to the organic lifeworld in a way that does not, at the same time, reduce them to mere objects of nature. These reflections are not, however, entirely without ethnographic substance, for they resonate both with themes that crop up with remarkable regularity in the literature on northern circumpolar societies,4 and with my own outlook which has undoubtedly been shaped by the experience of working in this region.

Animals as Persons It is customary, in the West, to assume that to speak of persons is to tell of the thoughts, intentions and actions of human beings. ‘Person’ and ‘human’ are all but synonyms – to the extent that to ask whether non-human animals can be persons seems almost perverse. Nevertheless, people in Western societies do very often treat animals, or speak of them, as if they were persons. Let me briefly present two examples of this tendency. The first lies in attitudes towards household pets. Many people, who are convinced that, as a general rule, animals cannot be persons, are quick to make an exception of their pets. But if you 80

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ask them why pets are persons, or at least rather like persons, whereas other animals are not, they will probably say that on account of having been raised in human households, virtually as members of the family, these particular animals have become almost human themselves. They are credited with human feelings and responses, spoken to and expected to understand, given names, put through life-cycle rituals and sometimes even dressed in clothing. Thus, far from softening or obscuring the boundary between humanity and animality, the special treatment of pets constitutes the exception that proves the rule: namely that, in the West, to be a person is to be human. Animals can only be persons to the extent that some of our humanity has, so to speak, ‘rubbed off’ on them through a close contact with human members of the household. And just as the animal can never become fully human, its personhood, too, can never be more than partially developed. That is why pets are often treated as somehow retarded, locked in perpetual childhood. However old they are, they are never allowed to grow up, but are rather treated as cases of arrested development. The second example of the Western tendency to liken animals to persons concerns fables, especially those composed for children. Our story-books are full of tales in which human characters are turned or turn themselves into wolves, bears, mice, frogs, birds, fish and a host of other creatures. Some of these stories are of great antiquity. But whatever they may have meant for people in the distant past, for contemporary audiences and readers, there is never any suggestion that they are anything but stories. The animal characters, often depicted in strikingly human form, stand in metaphorically for human ones, and serve to illustrate distinctively human dispositions and foibles – the cunning fox, the innocent deer, the conceited toad, the noble lion and so on. In short, the animal characters are used to deliver a commentary on the nature of human society. Moreover, no child, raised in contemporary Western society, would make the mistake of confusing such animal stories with natural history books, of supposing that ‘The Princess and the Frog’ is an observer’s account of the behaviour of amphibians, or that ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is an account of the habits of the wolf. Children are taught, at a very early age, to distinguish between telling stories and recounting the ‘facts’. Both these examples, of pet-keeping and fables, illustrate a propensity, technically known as anthropomorphism, to ascribe human qualities to non-human beings. In the one case, the ascription is metonymic (the animal is an extension of the human); in the other case, it is metaphoric (the animal substitutes for the human). Either way, so long as we continue to assume that only humans can truly be persons, the attribution of personhood to animals is bound to be anthropomorphic.5 The Ojibwa, however, do not make this assumption. Persons, in the Ojibwa world, can take a great variety of forms, of which the human is just one. They can also appear in a variety of animal guises, as meteorological phenomena such as thunder or the winds, as heavenly bodies such as the sun and even as tangible objects such as stones that we would have no hesitation in regarding as inanimate. None of these manifold forms in which persons appear is any more basic, or ‘literal’, than the others. Moreover, as we shall see, persons can be encountered not only in waking life but also, and equally palpably, in dreams and in the telling of myths. And most importantly, they can change their form. Indeed for the Ojibwa, this capacity for metamorphosis is one of the key aspects of being a person, and is a critical index of power: the more powerful the person, the more readily a change of form may be effected. Though persons may appear in animal form, not all animals are persons. One can usually tell if an animal is a person because its behaviour will be out of the ordinary. But some animals are always extraordinary. One such is the bear. The hunter, on encountering a bear, 81

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will act towards it as a person who can understand what is being said and will respond according to its own volition (OO, p. 36). There is nothing in the least anthropomorphic about this. The hunter is not regarding the bear as if it were human. To the contrary, it is perceived to be unequivocally ursine. Unlike the pet in a Western society, the personhood of the bear does not depend upon its previous contacts with humans – indeed, it need not have had any such contacts at all. For the same reason, the bear is just as much a ‘full person’ as is the human hunter. Ojibwa relate to persons in animal form as grown-ups, not as children. And whereas anthropomorphised animal-persons in the West are treated as beings that need to be looked after and controlled by their human guardians, the animal-persons in the environment of the Ojibwa are considered to be on the same level as, if not more powerful than, human beings themselves. Likewise, the animals that figure as persons in the traditional narratives of the Ojibwa are not anthropomorphic characters. Their tales, like our own, are replete with incidents in which humans turn into animals, or marry animals, or give birth to animals, and vice versa. But these are not fables, nor are they intended to deliver an allegorical commentary on the human condition. They are tales about events that really took place, in the histories of real persons, and in the same world that people ordinarily experience in the course of their quotidian lives. What they recount is based on a detailed, accurate observation of the landscape, of weather conditions and of the behaviour of animals. The mythological figure of the Thunder Bird, for example, can make itself manifest in the form of a peal of thunder or a kind of hawk. There is a striking correspondence between the normal seasonal occurrence of thunderstorms and the period during which migratory birds wintering in the south appear in Ojibwa country. In one myth, a man who marries a Thunder Bird woman and goes off to live with his in-laws (the mythic ‘masters’ of various species of hawk) finds himself having to eat what they call ‘beaver’, but what to him are frogs and snakes – which are, indeed, the principal foods of the sparrow hawk.6 And the nests of the Thunder Birds can be physically identified in the landscape as collections of stones in high, inaccessible locations (OO, pp. 32–33). In short, what distinguishes the Thunder Bird from any ordinary hawk is nothing like what, for us, distinguishes the Wolf of Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf of the forest. The distinction is not between animals of fantasy and of fact, but rather between animals that are persons and animals that are not. Animal-persons are no more fantastic than human ones. Ojibwa do, nevertheless, differentiate between narratives of past experience of these two sorts of person. Hallowell calls them ‘myths’ and ‘stories’, respectively (OO, pp. 26–27). Stories recount events in the lives of human beings, from the anecdotal to the legendary. Myths, by contrast, tell of the lives of non-human persons – or, to be more precise, the myths are these persons, who, in the telling, are not merely commemorated but actually made present for the assembled audience, as though they had been brought to life and invited in. For this reason, the narration of myth is a ritualised event, and there are restrictions on who can tell it and when it can be told. But despite these formalities, myths are no less true, or more phantasmagoric, than stories. The difference is simply that in myths, the protagonists are persons of the ‘other-than-human’ class, otherwise known and addressed by the inclusive kinship term, ‘grandfathers’.

Other-than-Human Grandfathers All persons, whether human or not, share the same fundamental structure. This structure consists, in Hallowell’s words, of ‘an inner vital part that is enduring and an outward form 82

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which can change’ (OO, p. 42). The inner essence, or soul, holds the attributes of sentience, volition, memory and speech. Any being that possesses these attributes is a person, irrespective of the intrinsically unstable form in which it appears. Now while human persons and other-than-human grandfathers are alike in this regard, such that no absolute division in kind can be drawn between them, they do differ in degree – that is, in the amount of power a person possesses and hence in their capacity for metamorphosis. Grandfathers are more powerful than living humans. Most powerful are the Sun, the Four Winds, the Thunder Birds, and the spirit ‘masters’ of all the different species of animals. These beings are immortal, but can change their form with relative ease, appearing now as a human, now as an animal, now perhaps as some meteorological phenomenon – as we have seen with the Thunder Bird. In myth, the Bird can figure as a man or woman, in dreams it shows up as a hawk, in waking life it announces its presence as a thunderclap. By contrast, only the most powerful human persons, such as sorcerers and shamans, can change into a non-human form and make it back again – and then only with some danger and difficulty. Sorcerers, for example, can transform themselves into bears in order better to pursue their nefarious activities. However for most humans, metamorphosis means death: indeed, the only change of form that all humans undergo is brought about upon their demise. As with any metamorphosis, death involves an alteration of manifest appearance, while the vital essence of the person continues its existence in some other form. Spirits of the dead are that much more powerful, and can manifest themselves in the guise of either ghosts (which may be seen or heard) or animals, often birds.7 But whereas the power of human persons always increases when they die, there is only one way in which they can grow in power during their lifetimes, and that is through the guardianship or tutelage of one or more grandfathers. For men in particular, grandfatherly assistance is considered crucial for coping with the vicissitudes of life. In the past, every boy, on reaching puberty, would embark upon a prolonged period of fasting. Alone in the forest, he would hope to dream of his future guardian, from whom he would receive blessings that would see him through all kinds of difficulties in later life – so long as he met certain necessary obligations towards the grandfather concerned. In one account, for example, a boy encountered a human-like figure in his dream, who then turned into a golden eagle. This person was the ‘master’ of the eagles. The boy, too, was transformed into an eagle in his dream – thus winged and feathered, he flew to the south with his new protector, before returning to the point whence he originally departed (Hallowell, Culture and Experience (CE), 1955, p. 178). Now the idea that a human being can be turned into a bear prowling in the forest, or an eagle soaring in the sky, is simply inconceivable within the normal canons of Western thought. Any creature born of human parents, it is supposed, is bound within the limitations of the human bodily frame, whatever environmental circumstances may be encountered during its lifetime. It is these bodily specifications that are fixed and enduring, whereas ways of thinking, feeling, speaking and behaving – adding up to what is conventionally known as ‘culture’ – are variable, even within the life-history of a single individual. This seems to be the precise inverse of the Ojibwa model of the person, according to which it is the variable body that clothes a constant spiritual essence comprising the powers of self-awareness, intentionality, sentience and speech. In their encounter with Euro-Americans, Ojibwa were evidently troubled by the incompatibility between these different ontologies of personal being. John Tanner, a white man who grew up among Ojibwa people during the early nineteenth century and subsequently wrote of his experiences, claimed that the ursine sorcerer, prowling around at night, was actually a man dressed up in a bear skin (CE, p. 177). 83

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This, and other similar statements by both native and non-native informants, may be understood, according to Hallowell, as ‘rationalizations advanced by individuals who are attempting to reconcile Ojibwa beliefs and observation with the disbelief encountered in their relations with whites’ (OO, p. 37). Rendering metamorphosis as a kind of dressing up is certainly one way of explaining it – or rather, explaining it away – in terms that Westerners would understand. The person’s bodily form does not actually change; it is merely concealed beneath an outer clothing, a disguise. Yet as Viveiros de Castro has noted (1998), the description of metamorphosis as an enclothing of the soul, far from being a peculiar response to ontological disjuncture, is very widely reported in the ethnography of native Amerindian peoples. Contrary to Hallowell’s interpretation, it seems that the idea of dressing up is not, in itself, foreign to indigenous understanding. What is foreign is rather the idea that the function of clothing is to disguise or conceal. In Amerindian cosmology, clothing does not cover up the body; it is a body (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 482). It serves, in other words, not to conceal but to enable, furnishing the distinctive equipment – including skills and dispositions as well as anatomical devices – by which a person can carry on a particular kind of life in the world. Viveiros de Castro (ibid.) likens the adoption of a specific bodily form to the diver’s donning of a wetsuit, the purpose of which is not to disguise the wearer as a fish, but to enable him to swim like one. Thus, metamorphosis is not a covering up, but an opening up, of the person to the world. A person who can take on many forms can turn up in all kinds of situations, now in one form, now in another, each one affording a different perspective. The greater the person’s powers of metamorphosis, the wider the range of their practical possibilities of being, and hence the more extensive the breadth of their experience and the scope of their phenomenal presence. The idea that by clothing himself with the bodily forms of one animal after another, the wearer is enabled to proceed through a series of trials calling for diverse strengths and capabilities is beautifully illustrated by an Ojibwa story collected by Homer Huntington Kidder in the 1890s. The storyteller was Jacque LePique, a character of mixed parentage and fluent in English and Canadian French as well as Ojibwa and Cree. The tale concerns a man named Iron Maker who, along with eleven companions, sank to the bottom of a lake after their boat had capsized. Following an encounter at the lake bottom with an old man, an old woman and a snake, Iron Maker found himself gasping for breath at the surface of the water. He thought of the beaver, whereupon the beaver came to him and gave him his body. He swam towards the shore, but before he could reach it, he felt himself losing the power to keep the shape of the beaver. So he thought of the otter. Then the otter gave him his body, and in that form he reached land. There Iron Maker found himself naked in his own body. It was freezing weather... He would have died of cold but for the help of four other animals which, one after another, lent him their bodies to get home: First the bear, in whose shape he went a good way, then the lynx, then the raccoon, and after that the ox (buffalo). When Iron Maker no longer had the power to keep the shape of the ox, he was pretty near his lodge. He ran home naked and fell at the door half dead with cold. (in Bourgeois 1994: 69) Like Puck in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream – whose lines head this chapter, and who threatened to appear in the forms, successively, of a horse, a hound, a hog, a headless 84

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bear and a fire – Iron Maker made it home from the bottom of the lake, first as a beaver, then as an otter, then as a bear, a lynx, a raccoon and an ox. Now all of this leaves us with a problem of the following kind. We may accept that a person can change their form at will, knowing all the while that the character in question exists, like Shakespeare’s Puck, only as a dramatis persona in a masque or play, who is actually being impersonated by an ordinary human actor. But if I were to report, in all sincerity, having encountered such a character as Puck or Iron Maker in real life, I doubt whether much credence would be given to my claims. People would say that if I was not actually lying, then I must be suffering from delusions, leaving me incapable of telling fact from fantasy, or reality from dreams. Yet, these are precisely the sorts of claims that Ojibwa make. Are they, then, lying or deluded? Accusations of both kinds have been levelled often enough, against Ojibwa people and others who think like them, reinforcing the stereotype of the primitive Indian who can neither think logically nor be trusted. Anthropologists, by temperament and training, are inclined to be rather more sympathetic to native accounts. By and large, however, they adopt an expository strategy not unlike that of the theatre-goer attending a performance of Shakespeare’s Dream, amounting to a willing suspension of disbelief. This strategy makes it possible to get on with the job of understanding what people are telling us, without our having to worry about whether there is any foundation in reality for what they have to say (see Chapter 1, p. 15). Hallowell himself does just this, when he argues that what, for the Ojibwa, are attributes of personhood which form part of a comprehensive ‘worldview’ that is projected onto reality-as-we-know-it. His concern is to understand the worldview, not the fundamental nature of reality. Yet, he goes on to stress that Ojibwa do not, themselves, ‘personify’ natural objects (OO, p. 29). For example, the sun is perceived as a person of the ‘other-than-human’ class; it is not perceived initially as a natural object onto which ‘person’ attributes are subsequently projected. It is not, in other words, made into a person; it is a person, period. Now there is more than a hint of duplicity here. It would be a mistake, says Hallowell, to suppose that Ojibwa personify objects; yet from his standpoint as an anthropological observer, this appears to be precisely what they are doing. Evidently, what Hallowell takes to be a particular cultural construction of an external reality is, in Ojibwa eyes, the only reality they know. For the Ojibwa, the sun is a person because it is experienced as such; for Hallowell, the sun is not really a person but is constructed as such in the minds of the Ojibwa. And if it is not really a person, then it cannot really undergo metamorphosis. By this move, Ojibwa metaphysics appear to pose no challenge to our own ontological certainties. Turning our backs on what Ojibwa people say, we continue to insist that ‘real’ reality is given independently of human experience, and that understanding its nature is a problem for science. Must we then conclude that the anthropological study of indigenous understandings, whatever its intrinsic interest, can tell us nothing about what the world is really like, and that it therefore has no bearing on natural scientific inquiry?

Living Things and Being Alive This question returns us to the paradox I raised in the introduction. The notion that persons, as beings in the world, can appear in both human and other-than-human forms may sound strange, but it is not half as strange as the notion that to become a person – to be in a position to know and reflect upon the nature of existence – means taking oneself out 85

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of the world. The challenge for us now is to bring the person, as it were, back ‘down to earth’, to restore it to the primary context of its engagement within an environment. Taking this condition of engagement as our point of departure, can we find some way of making sense of Ojibwa understandings concerning such matters as metamorphosis? Can we, in other words, ground these understandings in the real experience of persons in a lifeworld rather than attributing them to some overarching cosmological schema for its imaginative reconstruction? To begin to address this challenge, we need to go back to a question which is even more fundamental than that of what makes a person. What makes something alive, or animate? Hallowell recounts a fascinating anecdote concerning the nature of stones: I once asked an old man: Are all the stones we see about us here alive? He reflected a long while and then replied, ‘No! But some are.’ This qualified answer made a lasting impression on me. (OO, p. 24) Now Hallowell had been led to ask this question on account of a peculiarity in the grammatical structure of the Ojibwa language. Like other languages in the Algonkian family to which it belongs, a formal distinction is allegedly made in this language between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ nouns. Stones are grammatically animate, and Hallowell was keen to know why. The answer he received, however, was puzzling in two respects. First, there is the general question of how something as apparently inert as a stone can possibly be alive. But secondly, why should some stones be animate and others not? As Hallowell recognises (OO, p. 23), the categorical distinction between animate and inanimate is not one that Ojibwa articulate themselves, but was rather imposed by Western linguists who brought with them their own conventional understanding of what these terms mean. Before attempting to resolve the puzzle of the stones, we have, therefore, to pause to consider the meaning of the animate as a category of Western thought. Ever since Plato and Aristotle, it has been customary in the West to envisage the world of nature as made up of a multitude of discrete objects, things, each with its own integrity and essential properties. These things may be grouped into classes of varying degrees of inclusiveness on the basis of selected properties that they are perceived to possess in common. One major class, known as ‘animate’, comprises all those things that are said to possess the property of life. All remaining things, that do not possess this property, are ‘inanimate’. There has been much debate about what it takes for something to be alive: vitalists argued for the existence of some mysterious life-force that they thought was infused into all organisms; mechanists dismissed the idea as unscientific hocus-pocus, but in their enthusiasm to reduce organisms to clockwork they virtually dissolved the animate into the category of the inanimate. The problem was only resolved, after a fashion, by the discovery of the DNA molecule, popularly hailed as the ‘secret of life’, which seemed to offer a basis for distinguishing living things that satisfied the objective canons of natural science. Throughout all this debate, however, one fundamental idea has remained unquestioned, namely that life is a qualifying attribute of objects. We look for it in a world that already consists of things-inthemselves, whose essential nature is given without regard to their positioning and involvement within wider fields of relations. Now these are the kinds of things – stones, trees, birds and so on – that are denoted by words of the class grammarians call ‘nouns’. Thus to place the Ojibwa word for stone in 86

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the grammatical category, ‘animate noun’ is to assume that so far as the language is concerned, all stones are things with the essential attribute of life. The same would go for trees, the sun and moon, thunder and artefacts like kettles and pipes, the words for which are likewise placed in the ‘animate’ class (OO, p. 23). Judging from his qualified response, this is something that even the old man whom Hallowell questioned on the matter would have found hard to accept. Reflecting on his answer, Hallowell concludes that ‘the Ojibwa do not perceive stones, in general, as animate, any more than we do. The crucial test is experience. Is there any personal testimony available?’ (OO, p. 25). And indeed, such testimony can be adduced: Hallowell heard tell of an instance in which, during a ceremony, a stone was observed to roll over and over, following the master of the ceremony around the tent, another in which a boulder with contours like a mouth would actually open its ‘mouth’ when tapped by its owner with a knife, and yet another where a man asked a particular stone whether it belonged to him and received a negative response! The critical feature of all these examples is that the liveliness of stones emerges in the context of their close involvement with certain persons, and relatively powerful ones at that. Animacy, in other words, is a property not of stones as such, but of their positioning within a relational field which includes persons as foci of power.8 Or to put in another way, the power concentrated in persons enlivens that which falls within its sphere of influence. Thus, the animate stone is not so much a living thing as a ‘being alive’. This immediately makes sense of the old man’s remark, for whether a stone is alive or not will depend upon the context in which it is placed and experienced. It also explains why animacy is attributed to artefacts (like kettles and pipes) that are closely bound up with the lives of persons. But by the same token, it makes a nonsense of the categorical distinction between living and non-living things. It is simply not the case, as Scott Atran confidently asserts, that people universally divide ‘natural objects’ into two classes, such that every object either is, or is not, of a ‘living kind’ (Atran 1990: 56). The point is not that Ojibwa draw classificatory distinctions along different lines, but rather that in their ontology, life is not a property of objects at all, but a condition of being. Indeed strictly speaking, there are no ‘natural objects’ in the Ojibwa world to classify. As Mary Black has shown through a reanalysis of Hallowell’s ethnography, it is not by their natures that Ojibwa identify the objects in their everyday environment, as though each was independently endowed with a fixed combination of distinctive features. Rather, these objects are apprehended ‘in terms of characteristics that define them as unstable, changing and inconsistent’. The nature of the things one encounters, their essence, is not given in advance but is revealed only ‘after-the- fact’, and sometimes only after the lapse of some considerable period of time, in the light of subsequent experience – which of course may differ from one person to another. This Ojibwa way of dealing with perception is, as Black puts it, fundamentally antitaxonomic, reducing to a shambles any attempt to bring it within the bounds of a neatly ordered system of classificatory divisions (Black 1977a: 101–104). Black’s own field research, conducted among the Ojibwa in the 1960s, lends support to these conclusions. The one thing on which her informants were agreed was in their dismissal of the tidy classifications of formal linguistic analysis. They did not regard classes such as animate and inanimate as mutually exclusive, and objects could freely shift from one class to the other, depending on the context (Black 1977b: 143). Most significantly for our current concerns, Black also notes that the Ojibwa term bema. diziwa.d, which comes closest to ‘living things’, literally translates as ‘those who continue in the state of being alive’. Yet, the term might be more accurately glossed, she suggests, as ‘those 87

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who have power’. Now Hallowell tells us that the Ojibwa word for life ‘in the fullest sense’, including health, longevity and good fortune, is pimädäziwim. As such, it is something that every person strives to achieve (OO, p. 45). But life in this sense is not given, ready-made, as an attribute of being that may then be expressed in one way or another. It is rather a project that has continually to be worked at. Life is a task.9 As an ongoing process of renewal, it is not merely expressive of the way things are, but is the very generation of being. And power, in effect, is the potential of the life process to generate beings of manifold forms. Thus conceived, it is a property not of individuals in isolation but of the total field of relations in which they are situated. Only within such a field can a person strive for pimädäziwim (OO, p. 48). Let me return, for a moment, to the case of the rolling stone that followed its master around the ceremonial tent. On what grounds was it judged to be alive? Clearly, the critical criterion was that it had been observed to move. It did not move of its own volition, since it was controlled by the power of the master; nevertheless the stone acted, it was not acted upon – for example, by being pushed or pulled. But once again, in coming to terms with this phenomenon, we must be wary of the characteristically Western assumption that the world is full of things which may or may not move of their own accord, depending on whether they are of the animate or inanimate class. As we have seen, it would make no more sense to the Ojibwa than it does to us to suppose that the stone exists as a living thing, as though the property of life were an aspect of its substantive nature, of its ‘thinginess’, as distinct from its movement in the world.10 The movement is not an outward expression of life, but is the very process of the stone’s being alive. The same could be said of trees, which are included in Hallowell’s list of things formally classified in Ojibwa grammar as ‘animate’ (OO, p. 23). The Western biologist would doubtless be more inclined to regard the tree than the stone as a ‘living thing’, by appeal to some aspect of its substantive nature such as DNA or carbon chemistry. For the hunter in the woods, however, what makes a tree alive are its distinctive movements as they are registered in experience: the swaying of its boughs in the wind, the audible fluttering of leaves, the orientation of branches to the sun. Recall that the winds and the sun are persons for the Ojibwa, and can move trees much as powerful humans can move stones. Different beings, whether or not they qualify as persons, have characteristic patterns of movement – ways of being alive – which reveal them for what they are. The sun, for example, has its own regular pattern of rising and setting, a regularity that, in Hallowell’s words, ‘is of the same order as the habitual activities of human beings’ (OO, p. 29). If we were to consider the sun in abstraction from its observed movement across the sky, then it would indeed appear to be a mere physical body, and its movement a mechanical displacement. But this is not how it is presented to us in immediate experience. Rather, the movement is as much a part of the way the sun is as my own habitual movements are of the way I am. And these movements, of the sun in the heavens, of trees in the wind, of animals and human beings as they go about their everyday tasks, do not take place against the backdrop of a nature that is fixed, with its locations and distances all laid out in advance. For they are part and parcel of that total life process, of continuous generation, through which the world itself is forever coming into being. In short, living beings do not move upon the world, but move along with it.11 I return to this theme in Chapter 11 (pp. 198–201).

The Meaning of Experience At this point, I would like to return to Hallowell’s observation, apropos the vitality of stones, that ‘the crucial test is experience’ (OO, p. 25). What are we to understand by this 88

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key word, ‘experience’? And what, precisely, is being tested? One approach to answering these questions might be to argue as follows. There exists on the one hand a real world ‘out there’, customarily called nature, whose forms and composition are given quite independently of the human presence, and on the other hand a world of ideas or mental representations, which bears a relation of only partial correspondence to this external reality. Some things in the world are not represented in the mind, but some images in the mind have no counterpart in the real world. It is experience that mediates between the two worlds, providing both the raw material – in the form of sensory data – from which ideas are constructed, and the opportunities to test them by empirical observation. Thus at first glance, we might form the impression that a certain stone actually moved; this could then be checked by further examination which would either confirm or refute the initial hypothesis. For the Ojibwa, however, knowledge does not lie in the accumulation of mental content. It is not by representing it in the mind that they get to know the world, but rather by moving around in their environment, whether in dreams or waking life, by watching, listening and feeling, actively seeking out the signs by which it is revealed. Experience, here, amounts to a kind of sensory participation, a coupling of the movement of one’s own awareness to the movement of aspects of the world. And the kind of knowledge it yields is not propositional, in the form of hypothetical statements or ‘beliefs’ about the nature of reality, but personal – consisting of an intimate sensitivity to other ways of being, to the particular movements, habits and temperaments that reveal each for what it is. Indeed, such knowledge, closely analogous to that which the skilled craftsman has of his raw material, is not easily articulated in propositional form, and would seem to be devalued by any attempt to do so – to disembed it from its grounding in the context of the knower’s personal involvement with the known. This is probably the reason why a young man who, through a dream encounter, has secured the blessing of an other-than-human ‘grandfather’ is forbidden under normal circumstances to speak of his experience in any detail (OO, p. 46). You keep such things to yourself – although others can tell, from your subsequent attitudes and behaviour, that you have a new guardian in your life. ‘The concept of the “natural”’, Hallowell tells us, ‘is not present in Ojibwa thought’ (OO, p. 28).12 Experience, therefore, cannot mediate between mind and nature since these are not separated in the first place. It is rather intrinsic to the ongoing process of being alive to the world, of the person’s total sensory involvement in an environment. What then does experience put to the test? Let me try to answer this question by way of another example. Visual sightings of the Thunder Bird in its hawk-like manifestation are exceedingly rare, yet, one boy’s report of such a sighting – initially greeted with some scepticism – was finally accepted when his description was found to match precisely that offered by another man who had encountered the same bird in a dream (OO, p. 32, see also Callicott, 1982: 305). People can lie about their encounters with other-than-human persons, sometimes with dire consequences, but in this case, the boy must have been telling the truth. How, otherwise, could he have described the bird so accurately? However, the conditions of truth, in this case, lie not in the correspondence between an external reality and its ideal representation, but in the authenticity of the experience itself. Rather than confirming the factual existence of the Thunder Bird as an experience-independent datum of nature, the boy’s vision was proof of his exceptional powers of perception. It is these powers that are being constantly tested by experience. Moreover experiences of this kind are formative. They contribute to the shaping of a person’s own sense of self, and of their attitudes and orientations towards the world. Or in 89

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short, experience is intrinsic generative process wherein persons – both human and otherthan-human – come into being and pursue the goal of life, each within the field of their relations with others. And as Hallowell pointed out in his classic article on ‘The self and its behavioral environment’ (CE, Chapter 4), the process is a mutual one. The formation of the self is, at one and the same time, the formation of an environment for that self, and both emerge out of a common process of maturation and personal experience. Through this process, ‘an intelligible behavioral environment has been constituted for the individual that bears an intimate relation to the kind of being he knows himself to be and it is in this behavioral environment that he is motivated to act’ (CE, pp. 85–86). The self, in this view, is not the captive subject of the standard Western model, enclosed within the confines of a body, and entertaining its own conjectures about what the outside world might be like on the basis of the limited information available to it. On the contrary, for Hallowell – as indeed for the Ojibwa who have exercised such an obvious and profound influence on his thought – the self exists in its ongoing engagement with the environment: it is open to the world, not closed in. At first glance, however, this view of the self seems inconsistent with the structure of personhood that Hallowell attributes to the Ojibwa. Recall that this structure consists of an inner part that endures and an outward appearance that is susceptible to transformation. Does this not imply that the self is enclosed within its bodily garb? We have already seen how the Ojibwa, in common with many other Amerindian peoples, liken the body to a suit of clothing donned by the soul. Not infrequently, indeed, it is compared to a box-like container. But just as clothing does not necessarily imply disguise or cover-up, so containment is not equivalent to enclosure, confinement or immobilisation. Rather, the body as a container is conceived as a kind of vehicle that serves to extend the spatiotemporal range of a person’s movement, influence and experience. Thus, what Hallowell, in his characterisation of the Ojibwa person, calls its inner essence is not trapped inside the outward form but rather lies behind it – behind the superficial world of appearances. To penetrate beneath the surface of the person is not, then, to go inside into the mind rather than outside into the world. It is rather to dissolve the very boundary that separates mind from world, and ultimately to reach a level where they are one and the same. Nothing better illustrates this point than the difference between Western and Ojibwa interpretations of dreaming.

Dreaming and Metamorphosis People in the West are encouraged to think of dreams as hallucinations, comprising a stream of free-floating images that exist only in the interiority of the unconscious mind, a mind that is freed during sleep from its bodily bearings in the real world. Thus, we consider the dreamworld to be very opposite of the solid, physical world ‘out there’, just as illusion is opposed to reality, fantasy to fact. For the Ojibwa, by contrast, the world of dreams, like that of myth, is continuous with that of one’s waking life. Just as myths are understood as the past experiences of other-than-human persons, so dreams are among the past experiences of human selves (CE, p. 181). In their dreams, humans meet the grandfatherly protagonists of myth and carry on activities with them in a familiar landscape, albeit viewed from an unfamiliar perspective, revealing secrets of the environment that one may not have noticed before but whose presence is invariably confirmed by subsequent inspection. This is not to say that Ojibwa confuse dream experiences with those they have while wide awake. The difference is that in dreams, the vital essence of the person – the self – is afforded a 90

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degree of mobility, not only in space but also in time, normally denied in waking life. While the body of the sleeper is readily visible at some fixed location, the self may be roaming far afield (OO, p. 41). A sorcerer, for example, may be observed lying asleep in his tent, but in his dream he meets you while you were out hunting in the forest. And sure enough, when you were hunting recently, you had an unnerving encounter with a bear. The bear was the sorcerer, who was ‘bearwalking’ (OO, p. 36).13 Both Western and Ojibwa people might agree that in a certain sense, dreaming liberates the mind from its bodily housing. But whereas in the Western conception, this amounts to a taking leave of reality, for the Ojibwa it allows complete freedom of movement within the earthly and cosmic space of ordinary life (Callicott 1982: 304). The dreaming mind, far from cutting its already tenuous and provisional connection with the real world, is able to penetrate that world to the point where mind and world become indistinguishable. This difference of interpretation has its roots in fundamental ontological assumptions. Mainstream Western philosophy starts from the premise that the mind is distinct from the world; it is a facility that the person, presumed human, brings to the world in order to make sense of it. When it is not busy making sense of the world, during ‘time off’, it dreams. For the Ojibwa, on the other hand, the mind subsists in the very involvement of the person in the world. Rather than approaching the world from a position outside of it, the person in Ojibwa eyes can only exist as a being in the world, caught up in an ongoing set of relationships with components of the lived-in environment. And the meanings that are found in the world, instead of being superimposed upon it by the mind, are drawn from the contexts of this personal involvement. Thus, the dreaming self in its nocturnal journeys, far from taking a break from the demands of coping with reality, sets out in search of meanings that will help to make sense of the experiences of waking life. With these observations in mind, let me return to the problem of metamorphosis. How are we to respond to the objections of the sceptic to the effect that whatever people may say, humans cannot really turn into eagles or bears, or thunder into a kind of hawk, or vice versa? From an Ojibwa perspective, this objection is not so much false as beside the point. Metamorphosis may not occur in ordinary waking life, but it certainly occurs in dreams. And as Hallowell is at pains to stress, ‘there is nothing psychologically abstruse about the incorporation of dreams into the category of self-related experiences’ (CE, p. 96). The awareness of the self is as phenomenally real when one is dreaming as when one is awake, and these dream experiences are built into the constitution of the self by memory processes that are no different from those working on the experiences of waking life. Consider the case of the boy who, in the midst of a storm, witnessed the Thunder Bird in its hawk-like guise. What if he was only dreaming? Even when awake, we too can sometimes let our imaginations wander, and see things that are not ‘really’ there. But from the point of view of the experience of the self, it makes no difference whether the boy was awake, day-dreaming or actually asleep. He still saw the bird, was moved to wonder by its presence and remembered the encounter for the rest of his life. Experiences undergone when asleep are just as much a part of autobiographical memory as are experiences when awake (OO, p. 42). If, then, we accept that whether awake or asleep, the person’s encounters are those of a being-in-the-world, it follows, as Hallowell puts it, ‘that metamorphosis can be personally experienced’ (CE, p. 180). Far from covering over a solid substrate of literal reality with layer upon layer of illusion, what dreams do is to penetrate beneath the surface of the world, to render it transparent, so that one can see into it with a clarity and vision that is not possible in ordinary life. In dreams, for the Ojibwa, the world is opened up to the 91

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dreamer, it is revealed. This is why they attach such a tremendous importance to dreaming as a source of knowledge, for the knowledge revealed through dreams is also a source of power. Of course, this knowledge is of a different kind from what people in the West call science. As I pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, the very project of natural science is premised on the detachment of the human subject from the world that is the object of his or her inquiry. The Ojibwa, starting off from the opposite premise – that the subject can exist only as a being in the world – have arrived at something quite different: not a natural science but a poetics of dwelling (on this contrast, see Chapter 1, pp. 25–26). And it is within the context of such a poetics that Ojibwa ideas about metamorphosis, the personhood of the sun, the winds and thunder, the liveliness of stones and so on, should be understood.

The Sounds of Speech I shall return, in the conclusion to this chapter, to the relation between poetics and science. Before doing so, I should like to elaborate further on the contrast between Western and Ojibwa models of the person with particular reference to the criterion which, more than anything else, is adduced to justify claims to the unique status of humanity: namely the capacity for speech. For the Ojibwa, according to Hallowell, the essential powers of personhood include, besides speech, sentience, volition and memory. Those of us brought up in the Western tradition of thought would have no particular problem with this idea. We do have a problem, however, when it comes to the attribution of these powers to non-human animals, and even more of a problem in attributing them to things that we would regard as inanimate. To give a lead into this problem, let me recount one more anecdote from Hallowell’s Ojibwa study. An old man and his wife are sitting in their tent, and a storm is raging outside. There is thunder and lightning. The thunder comes in a series of claps. The old man listens intently. Then, he turns to his wife and asks, quite casually and in a matterof-fact tone of voice, ‘Did you hear what was said?’ ‘No’, she replies, ‘I didn’t catch it’ (OO, p. 34). What are we to make of this? Certainly, so long as we remain with a Western view of the nature of sentience, volition, memory and speech, the story seems incredible. The language of agency that we are accustomed to use posits a being, the agent, who is endowed with will and purpose, and whose existence and identity are given independently of any action that he or she chooses to initiate. Thus, I may or may not choose to speak, or I may decide to say one thing rather than another, but as a being with intentions and purposes – that is, as a person – I am not the same as my speech. Likewise, I may choose to clap my hands, but as a physical event in the world, the clap exists apart from myself – the person who claps. Notice the similarity between this notion of agency, as an inherent attribute of persons as distinct from their overt behaviour, and the notion of animacy built into the Western notion of ‘living things’, which, as we have already seen, construes life as a substantive property of objects as distinct from their movement in the world. Does the thunder, then, clap like I do? Though we might say ‘the thunder claps’, we know perfectly well that we are speaking figuratively, as though there were some being in the heavens with intentions and purposes rather like our own, and who claps like a human person, except on a more awesome scale. In reality, we are sure that there is no such cosmic being. And to get around the problem of how something can occur without an agent to produce it, we may use an alternative form of words, such as ‘there was a clap of thunder’. The point is that thunder does not exist separately from its clap, in the way that I am supposed 92

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to exist separately from mine. Rather, the clap is thunder; it is the acoustic form of thunder’s phenomenal presence in the world. Through the clap, the thunder audibly exists for those who hear it. Let me put this contrast in another way, while keeping for the moment to the terms of the Western model of personal agency. When I speak, or for that matter when I clap, it is because I have an idea. My concern is to communicate that idea, and I do so by means of coded signs or signals which travel in the medium of sound. By converting ideas in the mind into physical impulses in the world, information is transmitted. But the thunder is not transmitting a message. Of course, it affects us; we are moved by the sound, perhaps a little scared. But we do not look for a message in the sound or ask, as did the old man in Hallowell’s story, ‘Did you hear what was said?’ As this example shows, Western thought systematically distinguishes the sounds of speech, along with other sound-producing gestures whose purpose is to give an outward expression to inner ideas or mental states, from the sounds of nature that are just there but have not been produced by anybody. My clap and the thunderclap fall on either side of this division. And the dichotomy between interior mental states and their outward physical or behavioural expression that underwrites this conception of the distinctiveness of speech also applies to the way we tend to think about other aspects of personhood – sentience, volition, memory. Thus, volition implies the intentionality of action, but Western thought sees intentionality as residing not in the action itself but in a thought or plan that the mind places before the action and which the latter is supposed to execute. Likewise, we are inclined to think of memory as a store of images in the mind, rather than of remembering as an activity situated in the world. And we talk about sentience in terms of inner states or ‘feelings’, instead of focusing on the perceptual activity of feeling the world around us. In short, the self, as the locus of ideas, plans, memories and feelings, seems to exist as a substantive entity quite independently of where it is and what it does. Behind all this is a model of the person which, as we have already seen, identifies the self with an interior intelligence, the conscious mind, enclosed by its physical container, the body. According to this model, the body picks up sensory signals from the world around it and passes them to the mind, which processes them to form images or representations. Through a logical manipulation of these representations, the mind formulates plans of action, which are then passed as instructions for the body to execute in the world. The mind itself may be envisaged as many-layered, with outer layers of consciousness covering over deeper, more subterranean levels of the unconscious. Locked up in there, directly known only to ourselves, are our thoughts, feelings and memories, which can only be released, and made known to others, by way of their bodily enactment in speech and gesture. The Ojibwa model of the person, however, is quite different. As shown schematically in Figure 4.1, this model does not posit the self in advance of the person’s entry into the world; rather, the self is constituted as a centre of agency and awareness in the process of its active engagement within an environment. Feeling, remembering, intending and speaking are all aspects of that engagement, and through it the self continually comes into being. In short, the Ojibwa self is relational (Bird-David 1999: S77–78). If we were to ask where it is, the answer would not be ‘inside the head rather than out there in the world’. For the self exists, or rather becomes, in the unfolding of those very relations that are set up by virtue of a being’s positioning in the world, reaching out into the environment – and connecting with other selves – along these relational pathways. Taking this view of the person, as Hallowell does, it is clear that no physical barrier can come between mind and world. ‘Any inner–outer dichotomy’, he asserts, ‘with the human skin as boundary, is 93

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Figure 4.1  Western and Ojibwa models of the person.

psychologically irrelevant’ (CE, p. 88). But this is precisely the dichotomy, as we have seen, by which speech and similar expressive gestures are conventionally distinguished from the sounds of nature. To take Hallowell at his word means having to adopt a quite different view of speech, not as the outward expression of inner thoughts, but as one of the ways in which the self manifests its presence in the world. Thus when I speak or clap, I myself am not separate from the sound I produce – of my voice or the mutually percussive impact of my hands. These sounds are part of the way I am; they belong to my being as it issues forth into the environment. In other words, speech is not a mode of transmitting information or mental content; it is a way of being alive. Now if we take this view of speech, there is no longer anything so odd about supposing, as the Ojibwa do, that thunder can speak, and that other people can hear. The rumbling of thunder is the manifestation of its presence in the world, just as the sounds of human speaking, singing, clapping or drumming are manifestations of ours. Likewise in ‘conjuring performances’ (Hallowell 1942, 1976: 459), when the voices of grandfatherly otherthan-human persons are heard to issue from the interior of a barrel-shaped tent which is constantly shaken about by their activity, each character makes his presence felt, and is recognised by the audience, on account of the peculiarity of his speech, including features of voice, vocabulary and intonation. Thus the world in which the Ojibwa dwell is polyglot, full of beings with their own diverse styles of speaking or singing.14 As people move through the forest in hunting, or hear myths being recited, or sit around the outside of the conjuring 94

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lodge, they constantly listen out for the sounds that are the signatures of these manifold life-forms, and respond with speech-sounds of their own. Non-human sounds like thunder or animal calls, the voices of other-than-human persons, and the speech of human beings are alike in that they not only have the power to move those who hear them, but also take their meaning from the contexts in which they are heard. In these respects, no fundamental line of demarcation can be drawn between the sounds of nature and of human speech. Is there any significance, then, in the fact that the thunder was heard instead of seen? There is a long tradition in the history of Western thought, which I review at length in Chapter 14, of distinguishing between vision and hearing along the lines that the former is remote and objective, cutting the viewer off from things seen, whereas the latter is intimate and subjective, establishing a kind of interpenetration or resonance between the listener and the world. There are some hints, in Hallowell’s account, that the Ojibwa might make a similar kind of distinction. Thus, he tells us that under no circumstances can the inner essence of the person, the soul, be a direct object of visual perception. ‘What can be perceived visually is only that aspect of being that has some form or structure... The only sensory mode under which it is possible to directly perceive the presence of souls... is the auditory one’ (CE, pp. 179–180). This is why the other-than-human persons of the shaking tent ceremony are heard but never seen. So far as the audience is concerned, these persons are their voices, just as thunder is its clap. In both cases, sound is of the essence of being rather than its outward expression. However, there are counter-indications, too, that Ojibwa might not, or at least not always, make such a radical distinction between seeing and hearing. One such indication is that ghosts, the outward form of spirits of the dead, can be heard as well as seen. They are known to whistle (CE, p. 174). But more significantly, the notion that vision presents us with a world of objective forms rests upon an assumption that is incompatible with the relational model of the person presented above. This assumption, which is implicit in most studies of visual perception by Western psychologists, is that seeing things involves the formation of images in the mind on the basis of sensory data drawn from the play of light upon the retinal surfaces of the eyes. Now in an earlier section on the meaning of experience for the Ojibwa, I showed that for a being who is alive to its surroundings, experience does not mediate between things in the world and representations in the mind, but is intrinsic to the sensory coupling, in perception and action, of the awareness of the self to the movement of those features of the environment selected as foci of attention. This view of experience calls for a quite different understanding of vision. It would be premised on the notion of the perceiver as an active participant in an environment rather than a passive recipient of stimuli, one whose vision penetrates the world rather than holding up a mirror to it. David Smith, writing of the Chipewyan of the northwest Canadian subarctic, has drawn attention to the importance of precisely this kind of vision to their ‘bush sensibility’. The hunter and trapper, making his way through bush or forest, has at all times to watch what is going on. Yet as Smith also shows, regarded as a form of dynamic, sensory resonance, seeing does not differ in principle from hearing, and when it comes to people’s pragmatic, first-hand experience of moving around in the environment, they are so closely intertwined as to be inseparable (Smith, 1998: 413–414, see also Chapter 14, pp. 276–81). I suspect that this is as true for the Ojibwa as it is for the Chipewyan, and therefore that vision and hearing are not, in fact, sharply differentiated in their practice.15 Before leaving the topic of hearing and speech, one more issue remains to be dealt with. It arises from Hallowell’s remark, apropos the old man’s questioning of his wife about the thunder, that ‘he was reacting to this sound in the same way as he would respond to a human 95

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being, whose words he did not understand’ (OO, p. 34). We have seen that the Ojibwa lifeworld is polyglot, inhabited by manifold beings each with their own particular pattern of speech. It is tempting to compare these different patterns to the diverse languages of human communities, as though understanding the sounds of thunder, the winds, the various forms of animal life, and so on were a problem of translation, of rendering meanings expressed in a multitude of foreign tongues in terms of one’s own. Was the old man, then, asking his wife to translate for him? Were the words of the thunder spoken so quickly that, with his imperfect grasp of the language, he failed to grasp what had been said? Now the metaphor of translation implies a certain view of language or speech, as a vehicle for the outward expression of inner ideas. To translate is, then, to ‘carry across’ an idea encoded in one expressive medium into the terms of another. I have argued, however, that in attributing the power of speech to thunder, Ojibwa do not suppose that it is trying to transmit ideas to humans, but rather that its presence in the world, like that of other beings whether human or other-than-human, can take an acoustic form. Responding to that presence with sensitivity and understanding is not therefore a matter of translation. It is more a matter of empathy. Consider, for example, the response of a mother to the cry of her baby. Because of the special relationship between them, she hears that cry – it is immediately intelligible to her in a way that the cries of other infants are not. To be understood, the cry does not first have to be rendered intelligible through translation into a language that she and others can comprehend. I would suggest that the old man in Hallowell’s story may have heard the thunder in the same way. He, too, must have had a special relationship with the Thunder Bird. Indeed in one of his last papers on the Ojibwa, first published in 1966, Hallowell adds a crucial qualification to his earlier interpretation of the story of the old man, the old woman and the thunder. ‘By and large’, he observes, ‘the Ojibwa do not attune themselves to receiving messages every time a thunderstorm occurs’. Thus to understand the old man’s response, we have to realise that he had had previous contacts with the Thunder Bird in the dreams of his puberty fast (Hallowell 1976: 459). He was therefore sensitised to the sound of thunder in a way that ordinary Ojibwa (including his wife) were not. He could empathise with it. Of course, total empathy is as impossible to achieve as perfect translation. But they proceed in quite different ways. Rather than shifting into another register of expression, the achievement of empathy means taking on another way of being. Full understanding, in short, is attained not through translation but through metamorphosis. And this happens, above all, in dreams.

Naturalism and Animism Are the Ojibwa animists? In recent anthropology, the concept of animism has had a rather bad press, on account of its liberal use in the past to brand, as primitive superstition, systems of belief which allegedly attribute spirits or souls to things, living or non-living, which to any rational, thinking person are ‘obviously’ mere objects of nature (for a review of these usages, see Bird-David 1999: S67–68). Philippe Descola, however, suggests a way of considering animism that is rather more respectful of indigenous understandings. Animism, he writes, is A kind of objectification of nature [which] endows natural beings not only with human dispositions, granting them the status of persons with human emotions and often the ability to talk, but also with social attributes – a hierarchy of positions, behaviours based on kinship, respect for certain norms of conduct. (Descola 1992: 114) 96

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Though Descola draws his ethnographic illustrations from Amazonian societies, this characterisation of what he calls ‘animic systems’ would seem readily applicable to the Ojibwa case as depicted in Hallowell’s account. Critically, in such a system, relations between persons – that is, social relations – can override the boundaries of humanity as a species. Thus, as Hallowell reports, ‘the world of personal relations in which the Ojibwa live is a world in which vital social relations transcend those which are maintained with human beings’ (OO, p. 43). To this, one might add that a person’s social relations are carried on in the same space as, and are continuous with, relations with other constituents of their environment, that is with non-persons. There is, then, no radical break between the domains of social and ecological relations. Following Descola’s lead, we might set out to draw a systematic comparison between the animism of peoples like the Ojibwa and the naturalism of Western thought and science. Whereas animism takes the relational character of the world as an ontological a priori, against which the ‘naturalness’ of beings – the material forms in which they appear – stands out as unstable and problematic, naturalism takes it for granted that nature really exists, as an ontological domain of order and necessity where things are what they are, in themselves. Against this world of nature, it is the status and the forms of human culture that appear problematic (Descola 1996a: 88, see also Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478). Yet for Descola, animism and naturalism (along with totemism, consideration of which I reserve for the next chapter) may be regarded as alternative ‘schemata of praxis’, in other words as ‘mental models which organise the social objectivation of non-humans’ (1996a: 87). This appeal to the language of mental models, to the idea of accommodating beings that are really non-human into schemes of representation that construct them as social and therefore human, belongs squarely within a naturalist ontology, and it is from this that the terms of the comparison are derived. For what these terms do is to preserve a space for ‘really natural’ nature which is unaffected by the diverse constructions that the human mind might place upon it. Thus, the comparison between naturalism and animism, since it is done on naturalism’s terms, is hardly a fair or balanced one (see Chapter 3, pp. 41–42). My purpose in this chapter has been to redress the balance. Instead of trying to comprehend Ojibwa understandings within a comparative framework which already presupposes the separation of mind and nature, I have been concerned to place the mode of understanding of Western science within the context of the primary existential condition, revealed in Ojibwa thought and practice, of being alive to the world. Let me summarily take stock of these two approaches. The first posits a world ‘out there’ full of objects, animate and inanimate. The life process of animate objects, being the expression of their essential nature (nowadays understood as their genetic constitution) under given environmental conditions, is understood to be purely consequential, an ‘effect’ (see Chapter 1, p. 19). Hence, an additional principle, of mind or consciousness, has to be invoked to account for the powers of intentionality and awareness that we normally attribute to persons. In animic systems such as those of the Ojibwa, these powers are said to be projected onto non-human kinds. So long as we follow Descola in assuming that in reality, they are reserved for human beings, such projection is bound to be anthropomorphic. If, in other words, only humans really have intentions, to represent non-humans such as bears as though they were persons with intentions is necessarily to represent them as human (see Kennedy 1992: 9). That is why Descola builds a component of anthropomorphism into his very definition of animism, as a system that endows natural beings with human capacities. Only beings thus endowed, it seems, can have social relations. 97

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Working from an Ojibwa notion of animacy, not as an empirical property of things but as an existential condition of being, my argument has followed an alternative path. This has been to envisage the world from the point of view of a being within it, as a total field of relations whose unfolding is tantamount to the process of life itself. Every being emerges, with its particular form, dispositions and capacities, as a locus of growth – or in Ojibwa terms, as a focus of power – within this field. Mind, then, is not added on to life but is immanent in the intentional engagement, in perception and action, of living beings with the constituents of their environments. Thus, the world is not an external domain of objects that I look at, or do things to, but is rather going on, or undergoing continuous generation, with me and around me. As such primary engagement is a condition of being, it must also be a condition of knowledge, whether or not the knowledge in question is deemed to be ‘scientific’. All properly scientific knowledge rests upon observation, but there can be no observation without participation – without the observer’s coupling the movement of his or her attention to surrounding currents of activity. Thus, the approach I have followed here is not an alternative to science, as animism is to naturalism; it rather seeks to restore the practices of science to the contexts of human life in the world. For it is from such contexts that all knowledge grows. This approach has two further implications that I would briefly like to explore. The first takes us back to the question of anthropomorphism, the second concerns what I shall call the ‘genealogical model’. Natural science, as von Bertalanffy has put it (1955: 258–9), approaches the world through a ‘progressive de-anthropomorphization’, that is, through the attempt to expunge from its notion of reality all that can be put down to human experience. Thus purified, nature is revealed to a detached human reason as a domain of things in themselves. Now Ojibwa ontology, too, could be said to entail a process of de-anthropomorphisation, but this operates in a quite different direction. Instead of severing the link between reality and human experience, Ojibwa ontology recognises the reality of the experience of other-than-human beings.16 All experience depends on taking up a position in the world, tied to a particular form of life, but for the Ojibwa the human is but one form out of many. This, of course, undermines the core assumption that Descola brings to his characterisation of animic systems as inherently anthropomorphic, namely that experience depends upon powers of awareness and intentionality that mark their possessors as uniquely human. The genealogical model is a way of thinking about the relations between animate beings which rests on the idea that every such being is specified, in its essential nature, prior to commencing its life in the world. According to the model, the elements of the specification are received as a kind of endowment, passed on independently of the being’s interaction with its environment. And it is in the passing on or ‘inheritance’ of this endowment, from generation to generation, that relations are constituted. I shall consider this model and its implications at length in Chapter 8. Suffice it to say at this point that the model is central not only to the way modern biology conceives of species and their phylogenetic connections, but also to the conventional anthropological understanding of kinship. Thus, a simple line on a kinship diagram indicates that some component of the essence of a person is received, by transmission, at the point of conception, ahead of that person’s growth in an environment. Now from the genealogical model, it is easy to derive the following propositions: first, membership of the human – or any other – species is fixed by birth; secondly, the animals most closely related to humans are those (namely the great apes) with which they have the closest genealogical connections; and thirdly, human kinship relations cannot crosscut the species barrier. From the Ojibwa perspective, none of these propositions is valid. We have seen that beings can change from one species-form to another, that the animals closest to humans are 98

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those such as bears and eagles which are fellow participants in the same lifeworld, and that one specific category of kin – namely ‘grandfathers’ – admits persons of both human and other-than-human kinds. Ojibwa ontology, however, is incompatible with the genealogical model at a more fundamental level. For if the forms of beings are not expressed but generated within the life process, then these forms cannot be passed on as part of any contextindependent specification. One cannot, in other words, lay down the form that a being will take independently of the circumstances of its life in the world. Kinship, in particular, is not about handing down components of a person-specification, but about the ways in which other persons in my environment, through their presence, their activities and the nurturance they provide, contribute to the process of my own growth and well being. And since these others may be non-human as well as human, there is nothing in the least strange about the extension of kinship relations across the species boundary, nor do we have to set up a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ kinship in order to accommodate cases of this kind. To receive blessings from my other-than-human grandfathers, it is not necessary to suppose that I am descended from them in the genealogical sense.

Conclusion Ever since Darwin, Western science has cleaved strongly to the view that humans differ from other animals in degree rather than kind. Yet, it is a view that has raised more problems than it has solved. For if we ask on what scale these differences of degree are to be measured, it turns out to be one that places human beings unequivocally at the top. It is the scale of the rise of reason, and its gradual triumph over the shackles of instinct. Where Darwin differed from many (though by no means all) of his predecessors was in both attributing powers of reasoning to sub-human animals and recognising the powerful sway of instinct even on the behaviour of human beings. As he argued in The Descent of Man (1871, Chapters 3 and 4), the beginnings of reason can be found far down in the scale of nature, but only with the emergence of humanity did it begin to gain the upper hand. In short, for Darwin and his many followers, the evolution of species in nature was also an evolution that progressively liberated the mind from the promptings of innate disposition. Moreover in bringing the rise of science and civilisation within the compass of the same evolutionary process that had made humans out of apes, and apes out of creatures lower in the scale, Darwin was forced to attribute the ascendancy of reason in the West to innate endowment, a conclusion that is utterly unacceptable today. Modern science has responded, by and large, by dissociating the historical process of civilisation from the evolution of the species, thereby compromising the thesis of continuity. Humans are made to appear different in degree, not kind, from their evolutionary antecedents by attributing the movement of history to a process that differs in kind, not degree, from the process of evolution! I have been searching, in this chapter, for a way of understanding the continuity of the relations between human beings and all the other inhabitants of the earth which does not fall foul of the difficulties of the argument by degree – an argument that is unashamedly anthropocentric in taking human powers of intellect as the measure of all things, that can only comprehend the evolution of species in nature by supposing an evolution of reason that takes them out of it, and that, if applied consistently, is incompatible with any ethical commitment to shared human potential. I have tried to show that the ontology of a nonWestern people, the Ojibwa, points the way towards a solution. I do not mean to suggest for one moment that the Ojibwa orientation to life in the world is without paradoxes of its 99

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own. Nor would I wish to argue that it offers a viable substitute for science. Earlier, I suggested that what the Ojibwa have arrived at is not an alternative science of nature but a poetics of dwelling. In the past, there has been a tendency to write off such poetics as the outpourings of a primitive mentality that has been superseded by the rise of the modern scientific worldview. My conclusion, to the contrary, is that scientific activity is always, and necessarily, grounded in a poetics of dwelling. Rather than sweeping it under the carpet, as an embarrassment, I believe that this is something worth celebrating, and that doing so will also help us do better science.

Notes 1 Reprinted from Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge, pp. 89–110. 2 Hallowell’s work was carried out in the decade 1930–40 among the people of the Berens River band, numbering about nine hundred. These people were often known as the Saulteaux (derived from Saulteurs, a name given them by French traders which translates as ‘people of the rapids’). In much of his earlier work, Hallowell himself referred to them by this name (Hallowell 1955); moreover it is customarily used as a term of self-identification by the people themselves. Many other authors refer to the people inclusively as Ojibway. An alternative designation, officially adopted by the Bureau of American Ethnology, was Chippewa (ibid.: 115). However Wub-e-ke-niew (1995: xviii), who refers to his people of Red Lake as Ahnishinahbæeótjibway (literally ‘Ojibway people’), claims that ‘Chippewa’ was an entirely artificial category that the US Government created by lumping them together with French Métis people in the region involved in the fur trade. Steinberg (1981) provides a useful summary account of the history, distribution, organisation and nomenclature of the Ojibwa/Saulteaux bands around Lake Winnipeg. For the sake of simplicity and consistency with Hallowell’s later usage, I will continue to refer to them as Ojibwa. 3 All the ethnographic material in this chapter, unless stated to the contrary, is drawn either from this article, or from the earlier collection of Hallowell’s essays, Culture and Experience (1955). Page references will be provided only for direct quotations from these sources, or where I cite very specific points. ‘Ojibwa ontology, behavior and world view’ will be abbreviated throughout as OO, and Culture and Experience as CE. 4 From my (so far) very limited and superficial reading of the ethnography on native Amazonian societies, I have been startled by the recurrence of just the same themes here too. The parallels are extraordinary, and warrant further investigation (see, especially, Descola 1992, 1996, and Viveiros de Castro 1998). 5 This is the assumption that John Kennedy (1992) makes, in branding as anthropomorphic any attempt to attribute to animals such things as mental states, motivations, intentions and feelings. For Kennedy, any attribution of this sort is a ‘definite mistake’, a dereliction of scientific reason, or worse still, ‘a throw-back to primitive animism’ (1992: 9, 32). But in criticising what he sees as the anthropomorphic bias in studies of animal behaviour, he fails to address, or even to notice, the anthropocentric bias in his own thinking, which equates the condition of humanity with the power of rational intelligence to overcome the determinations of nature. This bias has no empirical justification whatever in science; it is, however, a crucial part of the ideological justification for science. On the distinction between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, see Viveiros de Castro (1998: 484–5, fn.11). 6 This is a wonderful example of what Viveiros de Castro (1998) calls ‘perspectivism’, namely the conception ‘according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human or non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view’ (1998: 469). These apprehensions are not alternative points of view of the same world, as orthodox cultural relativism would have it, but rather result from a carrying over of the same point of view into alternative realities. Thus to be a person is to assume a particular subject-position, and every person, respectively in their own sphere, will perceive the world in the same way – in the way that persons generally do. But what they see will be different, depending on the form of life they have taken up. Thus if beaver are food for human persons, then they are food for non-human persons also, such

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A Circumpolar Night’s Dream as for the Thunder Bird and the ‘masters’ of the hawks. But what are ‘beaver’ for the birds are batrachians and reptiles from the perspective of humans. 7 Significantly, while spirits of the dead and grandfathers have the same dual structure, of inner essence and outward form, only the former can appear as ghosts, since the latter never die (CE, pp. 179–80) 8 Nurit Bird-David makes an almost identical point in her analysis of the notion of devaru among the Nayaka, hunter-gatherers of South India. A certain stone may reveal itself to be devaru if it comes towards a person or, as in one reported instance, jumps up onto her lap. Whether it is devaru, or just another stone, will depend on whether it engages in any kind of relationship with Nayaka people. Thus ‘devaru are not limited to certain classes of things. They are certain thingsin-situations of whatever class or, better, certain situations’ (Bird-David 1999: S74–5). 9 The Cree people, neighbours of the Ojibwa who speak a closely related Algonkian language, have a virtually identical word meaning ‘life’, pimaatisiiwin. Colin Scott (1989: 195) reports that one Cree man translated the word as ‘continuous birth’ (see Chapter Three, p. 51). This translation seems to resonate perfectly with Ojibwa notions. 10 In a discussion of the attribution of animacy to stones, J. Baird Callicott suggests that it is just as reasonable to assume that all corporeal things, including animals, plants, and even stones, have an ‘associated consciousness’, as it is to assume that none do (with the singular exception of human beings). He identifies the former assumption with the ‘Indian attitude’, and the latter with the attitude of Europeans and Euro-Americans. But in setting up this contrast, Callicott remains imprisoned within his Western preconception that ‘to be “alive”, i.e., conscious, aware or possessed of spirit’ is a property intrinsic to things as such, rather than thinking of life as the generative movement wherein they come into being through the unfolding of wider fields of relationship (Callicott 1982: 301–2). 11 In his chapter on ‘language’, Wub-e-ke-niew explains that in his native Ahnishinahbæótjibway, ‘rather than acting upon the world . . . one acts in concert with the other beings with whom one shares Grandmother Earth . . . A person harmoniously “meets the Lake”, rather than “going to get water”’ (Wub-e-ke-niew 1995: 218). 12 Since the Ojibwa have no concept of the natural, Hallowell maintains, they also lack any notion of the supernatural. It would therefore be quite wrong to interpret Ojibwa ideas, for example, about the animacy of certain stones or the power of other-than-human persons within the framework of a natural–supernatural dichotomy (OO, p.28). Åke Hultkrantz (1982) disagrees. The distinction between a natural and supernatural reality, in his view, is a universal foundation for human religious experience. It is not, he writes, ‘a distinction in a philosophical sense, between two absolutely separate worlds, but a more practical distinction between an everyday reality and a reality of another order to which spirits and miracles belong’ (Hultkrantz 1982: 179). However, Hallowell’s point, if I understand him right, is that the experience of other-than-human persons is one of superior power, rather than one of a reality that is superior to nature. Such experience amounts to an intensification rather than a transcendence of everyday reality. Smith (1998: 423–4) makes a similar point in a recent essay on the ontology of the Chipewyan. 13 As this example shows, the very openness of the Ojibwa self to the world, especially in dreams, has its downside. For it renders the self peculiarly vulnerable to the potentially hostile intent of other persons. This accounts for people’s chronic anxiety, vividly documented by Hallowell (CE, pp. 250–90), about falling victim to sorcery and other kinds of covert attack, for the mutual suspicion that lurks beneath the placid surface of interpersonal life, and for what – to the outsider – looks like an exaggerated concern to avoid causing offence to others (OO, pp. 40, 47). 14 The so-called ‘shaking tent ceremony’ is common to both the Ojibwa and their neighbours, the Cree. For detailed descriptions of the Cree ceremony, see Feit (1994) and Brightman (1993: 170– 6). The multilingual character of the ceremony is especially clear from Brightman’s account: thus the spirit voices issuing from the tent may speak in Cree, English, French, Saulteaux, Chipewyan, or unknown spirit languages. Since members of the audience differ in their knowledge of these languages, spirits may be intelligible to some listeners and not to others. Animal beings are recognisable from their intonations: ‘bears speak in a low and rumbling voice, lynxes in a hissing voice, and fish with a gurgling intonation as if from underwater’ (Brightman 1993: 174). 15 A further clue to the interchangeability of hearing and vision lies in the prevalence of metaphors of vision and sight in relation to the auditory experience of other-than-human persons in

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Tim Ingold performances of the shaking tent ceremony (Hallowell 1942: 9–10). Moreover among the Cree, as Feit notes (1994: 292), the name of the ceremony, koaspskikan, contains a linguistic root which has been identified as meaning ‘see, vision’, along with ‘try’. 16 In other words, it drops the anthropocentric assumption that automatically renders as anthropomorphic any attribution of intentions and feelings to non-human beings (see footnote 4).

References Atran, S. 1990. Cognitive foundations of natural history: Towards an anthropology of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bird-David, N. 1999. ‘Animism’ revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology 40 (Supplement): S67–S91. Black, M. B. 1977a. Ojibwa taxonomy and percept ambiguity. Ethos 5: 90–118. Black, M. B. 1977b. Ojibwa power belief system. In The anthropology of power: Ethnographic studies from Asia, Oceania, and the New World, eds R. D. Fogelson and R. N. Adams. New York: Academic Press, pp. 141–151. Bourgeois, A. P. (ed) 1994. Ojibwa narratives of Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jacques LePique, 1893–1895 (recorded with notes by H. H. Kidder). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Callicott, J. B. 1982. Traditional American Indian and Western European attitudes toward nature: An overview. Environmental Ethics 4: 293–318. Collins, S. 1985. Categories, concepts or predicaments? Remarks on Mauss’s use of philosophical terminology. In The category of the person: Anthropology, philosophy, history, eds M. Carruthers, S. Collins and S. Lukes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 46–82. Darwin, C. 1871. The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray. Descola, P. 1992. Societies of nature and the nature of society. In Conceptualizing society, ed. A. Kuper. London: Routledge, pp. 107–126. Descola, P. 1996a. Constructing natures: Symbolic ecology and social practice. In Nature and society: Anthropological perspectives, eds P. Descola and G. Pálsson. London: Routledge, pp. 82–102. Hallowell, A. I. 1942. The role of conjuring in Saulteaux society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hallowell, A. I. 1955. Culture and experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hallowell, A. I. 1960. Ojibwa ontology, behavior and world view. In Culture in history: Essays in honor of Paul Radin, ed. S. Diamond. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 19–52. Hallowell, A. I. 1976. The role of dreams in Ojibwa culture (1966). In Contributions to anthropology: Selected papers of A. Irving Hallowell, eds R. D. Fogelson, F. Eggan, M. E. Spiro, G. W. Stocking, A. F. C. Wallace and W. E. Washburn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 449–474. Kennedy, J. S. 1992. The new anthropomorphism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, D. M. 1998. An Athapaskan way of knowing: Chipewyan ontology. American Ethnologist 25: 412–432. Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 4: 469–488. von Bertalanffy, L. 1955. An essay on the relativity of categories. Philosophy of Science 22: 243–263.

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5 PLANETARY THOUGHT AND THE MUCHMORE-THAN-HUMAN Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski

Introduction As of late August 2022, a third of the land-area of Pakistan and some 33 million people are reported to be impacted by flooding. While policy and infrastructural shortfalls have been implicated in the crisis, there is widespread consensus that recent heatwaves, monsoon rains and glacial melt have all been intensified by climate change. The longer-term prognosis is, if anything, more frightening. Together with neighbouring countries, semi-arid Pakistan relies on glacial melt water from high-mountain Asia to mitigate water stress (Pritchard, 2019). While slowing the passage of water through the hydrological system by locking it in ice for decades or centuries, glaciers also provide timely and reliable summertime melt supplies of water. But glaciologists predict that climate change-driven acceleration of glacier runoff may peak as soon as 2030, after which declining long-term stores of glacial ice will significantly decrease melt-water flows, with potentially serious repercussions for food production (Pritchard, 2019). What we call ‘nature’, then, bears a considerable human fingerprint – a familiar claim rehearsed by urban theorist Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), his fiery indictment of the impacts of European imperialism on the monsoonal regions. But Davis quickly added that ‘there is an extraordinary amount of hitherto environmental instability in modern history’ (2001: 279). The point he wanted to drive home is that, if we wish to understand historical socio-economic injustice in the Indian subcontinent, it is essential to understand how the vagaries of the global capitalist economy have interacted with the rhythms of the monsoon and the El Niño Southern Oscillation. And this, Davis insisted, requires taking very seriously new scientific understandings of the Earth’s coupled atmospheric, hydrological and biotic systems (2001: 234): an important aspect of what he elsewhere described as a ‘permanent revolution in the Earth sciences’ (1996). In many ways, the unfolding climatic predicament in Pakistan, like Davis’ late Victorian tropical famines, epitomises the inextricable entanglement of society and nature, the centrepiece of more-than-human thinking. But if we heed Davis’ counsel and dig deeper into the operating systems of our planet, things start to look a little different. Deciphering the way that the Earth system works requires us to look at where the continents are positioned, 103

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the particular conditions of high-mountain Asia drawing our attention to the continuing collision between the Indian plate and the Eurasian landmass, which geophysicists describe as ‘the most significant tectonic event to have occurred in the past 100 Ma (million years)’ (Aitchison et al., 2007: 3). It takes us far beneath the interzone of human-nature encounters: into the great convection currents of the mantle that help propel plate tectonics, onwards to the tilt and wobble of our planet’s axis, and out to the Earth’s shifting orbit around the sun. By a ‘permanent revolution in the Earth sciences’, Davis (1996) referred to a series of research projects from the 1960s onwards that pieced together many of the fundamental workings of our home planet. As historian John Brooke (2014: 25–36) elaborates, the years 1966–1973 alone saw the emergence or maturation of four major perspectives on the dynamics of the Earth: confirmation of the theory of plate tectonics; recognition of the role of extra-terrestrial impacts in shaping Earth history; the concept of tight coupling between the living and non-living components of the Earth; and the thesis that evolution is punctuated by catastrophic bursts linked to major geophysical events. These developments laid the groundwork for the theory of abrupt, planet-wide climate change and the more general idea of an Earth system capable of shifting between different operating states that became a key part of the Anthropocene hypothesis. While more-than-human scholarship typically takes as its focus mutual, reciprocated and co-constitutive relations between human and nonhuman actors, it’s noteworthy that, however much they have helped make sense of human impacts on Earth processes, none of the ‘revolutionary’ perspectives depicted by Davis and Brooke directly address our species. And this could help explain why more-than-human theory has frequently distanced itself from the Anthropocene debate and related Earth-scaled inquiry in favour of approaches that more explicitly revolve around human experience. As political scientist Eva Lövbrand and her colleagues put it: The advent of a truly entangled socio-physical nature emerges as a reason to radically challenge and rethink the possibility and desirability of unified scientific accounts of environmental change, and to experiment with multiple and situated ways of seeing and acting upon the hybrid world that we now inhabit. (2015: 215) Informing this kind of critique is a recognition that there is a long, troubling history of Western knowledge claims which disavow the latter’s own particularity and partiality, and in so doing are implicated in the infliction of epistemic and ontological violence – and oftentimes physical violence – on peoples with other ways of understanding the world. Consequently, acknowledging where we speak from, and what conditions, contexts and powers make our speech possible have become axioms of more-than-human theory and practice. But what does this prioritising of human-nonhuman co-implication – this privileging of the congruity of humankind and its material environment – mean for narratives which probe deeply into inhuman or prehuman processes, such as the accounts of high-mountain and monsoonal Asia that we opened with? Is it possible, we ask in this chapter, to at once insist that knowledge claimants situate themselves and recognise that all situations sooner or later exceed the reach or measure of the human? And can there be a place for planetary rupture and discontinuity in theories that hinge upon the generativity of entanglement and interconnectedness? 104

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We set out by surveying both the nascent planetary thinking that emerged in late twentieth-century continental philosophy and the retreat from Earth-centred themes in post1980s more-than-human social thought. From there, we turn to the relationship between planetary self-differentiation and human difference, and the challenge of negotiating between larger geologic or planetary scales and the more intimate spheres of human life. This brings us to some concluding thoughts on what a confrontation with the excessive forces of the Earth might mean for matters of social injustice and epistemic violence.

Emergent Planetary Thinking It’s worth recalling that even as the rich tangle of threads, linkages and attachments of more-than-human thought were gathering, they were already being unravelled. Philosopher Michel Serres’ Natural Contract, first published in 1990, was a watershed meditation on the mutual implication of human beings and their planet. But towards the end of the book, Serres recounts his personal experience of an earthquake, thereby reminding us that the human domain is always underpinned by the deeper workings of the Earth – and that these supports may be abruptly withdrawn: ‘All of a sudden the ground shakes off its gear: walls tremble, ready to collapse, roofs buckle, people fall, communications are interrupted … the thin technological film tears … A thousand useless ties come undone’ (1995: 124). Serres’ depiction of urban agglomerations as ‘enormous and dense tectonic plates … colossal banks of humanity as powerful as oceans, deserts, or icecaps’ (1995: 16–17) is at once an anticipation of the Anthropocene concept and an indication of his own openness to contemporary Earth sciences. And he went on to make it clear that his thinking about both rising environmental destruction and Earth processes in general was informed by natural science. As Serres proposed: ‘we must decide about the greatest object of scientific knowledge and practice, the Planet Earth’ (1995: 30). Writing in the early 1990s, philosopher Edgar Morin explored the idea of an emergent planetary consciousness that he explicitly related to developments in the Earth sciences. As he reflected: A new cosmos, together with a new Earth, appeared during the 1960s. Plate tectonics made it possible to link together the sciences of the Earth in a coordinated fashion, and the planet … became a complex being with a life of its own and its own history. (1999: 31) Like Serres, Morin was galvanised by human-induced ecological crises, but he too was insistent that the Earth is shaped by its own self-generated turbulence and its openness to the cosmos: Our crust has experienced and will go on experiencing stupendous adventures made of dissociative and reassociative movements, both vertical and horizontal, of drifts, collisions, shocks (earthquakes), short-circuits (volcanic eruptions), catastrophic impacts from huge meteorites, and periods of glaciation and thaw. (1999: 31) Several decades earlier, writing on the cusp of the geoscience transitions identified by Brooke, philosopher-sociologist Henri Lefebvre was already posing questions about the 105

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relationship between social worlds and Earth dynamics. In a 1965 review of fellow philosopher Kostas Axelos’ untranslated book Vers la Pensée Planetaire, Lefebvre affirms the idea of the Earth ‘as a unity of cycles, self-regulating, stable systems’ (2009: 255). But at the same time, we can see him beginning to unsettle this sense of unicity and closure by pointing to our planet’s openness to the cosmos, and, in conversation with Axelos, toying with the idea that philosophical questions about the ‘relation between unity and multiplicity’ might extend to the Earth itself (Lefebvre, 2009: 257). There are echoes here of fellow philosopher-sociologist Georges Bataille, who in the 1940s and 1950s explored the idea of a turbulent and generative Earth pulsed by the unilateral and excessive flux of incoming solar energy (1988). Bataille’s resistance to notions of systemic closure in favour of the idea of an abyssal opening of all terrestrial systems to the cosmos was an inspiration for later post-structural thought. But we shouldn’t forget that his speculative geophysical social thought was strongly influenced by the natural sciences – and especially geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky’s early twentieth-century investigations into the Earth’s solar-charged biosphere. In important ways, we are suggesting, mid-to-late twentieth-century continental philosophy, centred in France, had begun to engage with, and even to anticipate the new generation of geoscience perspectives. What seems to have caught the attention of philosophical thinkers was the move away from stasis and gradualism towards more dynamic visions of Earth processes. With hindsight, it has become clear that novel understandings of the interconnectivity of the different components of the Earth were beginning to fuse into a sense of its ability to reorganise itself – the recognition that the planet could break with its existing mode of operation and shift into an entirely new state or regime. As geologist Jan Zalasiewicz later put it: ‘The Earth seems to be less one planet, rather a number of different Earths that have succeeded each other in time, each with very different chemical, physical and biological states’ (cited in Hamilton, 2014: 6) – an idea we have shorthanded in our own work as ‘planetary multiplicity’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021a: 8, 88–90). In an even more sustained way than Serres, Morin or Lefebvre, it is philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) who began to explore the idea of a planetary body with multiple possibilities beyond its ‘actual’ state. A Thousand Plateaus probes the idea of selforganisation at every level of earthly existence from the geologic through the biological to the socio-cultural, with each ‘stratum’ having its own capacity to move across critical thresholds into new operating states (see Clark and Yusoff, 2017). If in conjectural and sometimes cryptic ways, Deleuze and Guattari anticipate key aspects of the interaction between the more fluid outer Earth systems and the slower-moving stratified lithic layers of Earth’s crust in their extended exploration of the relations between stratification and deterritorialisation (see Clark and Szerszynski, 2021a: 87–90). In turn, they contextualise terrestrial self-organising capacities within the still larger potentiality of the universe, in a series of moves that take us from ‘the ingathered forces of the earth to the territorialized, or rather deterritorializing Cosmos’ (1987: 337). What is also significant about Deleuze and Guattari’s work from a more-than-human perspective is the way they approach the Earth – in both its more structured and more dynamical guises – as ‘the material through which human beings tap cosmic forces’ (1987: 509), a theme we will return to. It’s important to keep in mind that for them, the interaction between human agents and the stuff of the Earth is but one of many articulations and points of transition in the much vaster realm of material existence – and it is by no means

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privileged over any other site. When we turn to the incipient thematisation of the planetary in the Anglophone world (some of which retains French inflections), aspects of this decentralisation of the human persist. However, there is also a discernible re-emphasis on human experience as the gateway to reimagining earthly existence. In his 1984 ‘Perceptual Implications of Gaia’ essay, the US ecophilosopher David Abram engaged with the third of Brooke’s quartet of new planetary perspectives: the hypothesis developed by chemist James Lovelock with biologist Lynn Margulis that the tight coupling between biological life and the inorganic processes is key to the Earth sustaining itself in a far-from-equilibrium state. Abram’s innovative move was to fuse the Gaia concept with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to envisage the human subject as inescapably immersed in the dynamics of planetary self-regulation. If Merleau-Ponty helped him to conceive of an embodied human subject whose powers of cognition arise out of communion with an active and solicitous material world, Gaia theory showed how that physical environment was itself generated by the totality of the planet’s living creatures interacting with the gaseous, lithic and hydrologic components of the Earth. In this way, Abram made use of contemporary Earth and life science itself to undermine the assumption of an immaterial intelligence observing the world as if from outside, in favour of a notion of mutual exchange between sensate human and nonhumans: an ‘ecology of the senses’ predicated on what he referred to in Merleau-Pontean terms as the ‘continuous intertwining, or “chiasm” between one’s own flesh and the vast “Flesh of the World”’ (1984: no pagination). It was Abram’s 1996 book-length elaboration of some of these ideas in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World that popularised the formulation at the heart of this handbook. But already in the ‘Perceptual Implications of Gaia’ essay, key themes that would later crystallise into explicitly more-than-human social thought are prominent: the taking-to-task of the human exceptionalism and society/nature dualism deemed characteristic of Western modernity; the reimagining of what it means to be human in terms of mutual exchanges with the rest of existence; the redistribution of sensing, cognition and agency throughout an inclusive web of interconnected entities of manifold kinds; and the understanding of experience or knowing as inseparable from bodies and the localities in which they are embedded.

Retreat from the Earth Today, as these very perspectives are frequently mobilised to critique geoscience knowledge claims, it’s worth recalling that Abram’s ‘Gaia’ essay was partly inspired by the very discoveries and impulses that generated Earth system science and the Anthropocene hypothesis. Yet for all the intellectual fertility of this ‘earthing’ of the perceptive body, we want to suggest that Abram and many fellow more-than-human theorists made choices that came at a cost – especially with regard to the priorities and themes in Francophone philosophical engagement with planetary sciences that we sketched out above. First, the thematising of a fundamental reciprocity between humans and the rest of existence tends to privilege relationships in which one set of participants is human: a prioritisation expressed in concepts of socio-natures, natureculture and other formulations of hybridity. In practice, this has discouraged concerted attention to planetary or cosmic processes where humans have no or negligible presence (Clark, 2011: xv–xvii).

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Second, and closely related to the first point, what counts as ‘nature’ or the Earth is often contracted to the slender envelope at and around the planet’s surface where organic life is present. As philosopher Manuel DeLanda contends, such unwillingness to conceptually venture beyond the biosphere manifests a deep-seated ‘organic chauvinism’ (1997: 103–104); literary theorist Claire Colebrook concurs that ‘vitality is the dominant motif in Western philosophy in general’ (2010: 43). In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘nonorganic life’ (1987: 411) should be read not as an instance of the bias towards the biologic or ecologic, but as an acknowledgement of the powers of self-organisation and expressiveness proper to the geological or mineral realm (see DeLanda, 1997: 103–104) – in a similar way that Morin interpreted plate tectonics as evidence of our planet having a ‘life’ and history of its own. A planet imbued witha a dynamism that extends far beyond the sphere of the living, however, is also one on which human and other lifeforms are ineluctably exposed to processes over which they have little control or influence – leading to our third point. Of the four revolutionary Earth-life science perspectives identified by Brooke, the idea of closely coupled organic and inorganic processes which Abram focuses on is by far the least catastrophic or disjunctive. For Abram (1997: 63) and many subsequent more-than-human thinkers, emphasis on the more generative and enabling aspects of the human-environment relationship is a corollary of seeking to overcome the modern rational dissociation of subject and world. Affirming relations of mutuality or reciprocity between humans and the rest of the living world in this way has an ethical dimension: it is advanced as a prompt or summons to care for nonhuman others. But in this regard, it can also divert attention from the dissociative or self-divisive aspects of planetary self-organisation and change – leaving little room for Serres’ quake-driven undoing of ties, Morin’s planet-scaled collisions and shocks or Bataille’s solar-powered excess. Finally, and drawing the other three points together, we would suggest that the version of contextualisation of the human subject advocated by Abram and many other more-thanhuman theorists favours a certain perspective on locus and scale. As Abram puts it, ‘one’s senses are … interwoven within a single specific region of the planet…. Gaia reveals herself to us only locally, though particular places’ (1984: no pagination). Such attentiveness to who is speaking, where they are speaking from and to the embedding of all knowledge claims within broader extra-human contexts has become definitive of more-than-human thought and practice. The insistence that positionality matters received a boost from the work of feminist science studies scholarship, not least from Donna Haraway’s copiously cited 1988 paper ‘Situated Knowledges’. Resonating with Abram’s assertion that we speak from within the Earth, Haraway called on those of us offering truth claims not just to acknowledge the situatedness of our working practices but to make a virtue of the insuperable predicament of partiality and particularity, in the interests of producing ‘a better account of the world’ (1988: 579). While Haraway is less prescriptive than Abram about how and where we ought to locate ourselves, she later singled out the extra-terrestrial gaze of scientific-militaristic space projects and their fantasies of ‘escape from the bounded globe in an anti-ecosystem called, simply, space’ (1992: 315) as an occasion to further trouble disembodied, unaccountable truth-telling and to raise the question that still echoes through critical discourse on the Anthropocene – ‘Who speaks for the earth?’ (1992: 318). Although it doesn’t appear to have been Haraway’s intention to put scalar or regional restrictions on knowledge claims – she did, after all, affirm the necessity of ‘an earth-wide 108

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network of connections’ (1988: 580) – many readers seemed to assume that any depiction of the entire planet relies on ‘the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ (1988: 581). Our own guess is that even, or especially, for social scientists and humanities scholars who wished to include a wider range of things into their research, a sense that the planetary scale was a step too far helped to focus the ‘more-than-human’ impetus and prevent it from lurching out of control. As philosopher Timothy Morton reminds us, for all its importance, the will to contextualise ourselves and our objects of concern is not in itself innocent or devoid of selfinterest: ‘contextualization – the search for some cause of what we are studying – wants to contain the context explosion’ (2018: 10). And that risk of the situating or contextualising impulse veering off in directions which are disorienting for most social thinkers is likely to be particularly acute in the case of geologic, planetary or cosmic themes. For, as the nascent continental planetary philosophy of the latter twentieth century had begun to recognise, there are aspects of what our planet is, what it can do or have done to it, about which we may wish to know more; yet, theorising such matters from a position of immersion or entanglement defies human possibility. Indeed, this very unliveability is one of the reasons why we ought to be concerned with our planet in all its geohistorical and cosmic context. For some two decades following Haraway and others’ denunciation of the ‘god-trick’, explicit engagement with the Earth qua planet was rare in more-than-human inquiry. It’s revealing too, that when ‘planetary’ considerations began to make a comeback around the turn of the millennium, a primary impetus was science studies scholar Bruno Latour’s embrace of the relatively ‘non-catastrophic’ Gaia concept. In the following section, we look at what is at stake for more-than-human thought in confronting those events and processes where the Earth veers away from self-regulation, and we ask what the tendency of our home planet to break with its own identity means for understanding human difference and self-expression.

Between Planetary and Human Scales Over the last half-century, as we’ve been discussing, the Earth sciences have alerted us to the propensity of our planet, under certain circumstances, to shift from one operating state to another – a capability that resounds at every level from the smallest region of a planetary subsystem to the entire planetary body. If we are not to foreclose on the lesson of morethan-human theory that our positioning in the world matters, then, we face a challenge: how to negotiate between the realm of localised, embodied or ‘lived’ experience and the domain of larger scale planetary processes – including those ‘unliveable’ upheavals that have brought our planet to its current state. Various styles of more-than-human thought help us to see how quite ordinary human activities make use of energy and materials that have been generated by dynamic planetary processes. Anthropologists Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (2014: 1) offer a cogent example: The story of clay does not begin with the potter, since the material he throws on the wheel has already had to be dug out from the ground.... Before that, it was sedimented through the deposition of water-borne particles, over eons of geological time. 109

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Abram reminds us that when we work with Earth-sourced substances, we not only take advantage of their properties, but incorporate into our own world something that is other to or different from ourselves: Our human-made artifacts inevitably retain an element of more-than-human otherness. … The tree trunk of the telephone pole, the clay of the bricks from which the building is fashioned, the smooth metal alloy of the car door we lean against—all these still carry, like our bodies, the textures and rhythms of a pattern that we ourselves did not devise. (1997: 47) Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz makes a related point, while more strongly emphasising the volatility of the physical processes that human practices connect with and enfold. Human creative or productive activities, she suggests, can be seen as ‘an exploration of the excessiveness of nature …. (t)he territorialization of the uncontrollable forces of the Earth’ (2008: 11). Heeding Deleuze and Guattari’s counsel to experiment cautiously, Grosz speaks of the need to isolate and frame the powers of the Earth in order to bring them down to a liveable, human scale. Just as ‘the living produce a barrier, a cell, an outline, a minimal space or interval that divides it from its world’, she contends, creative human agents must develop ways of setting apart a more hospitable interior from a vast and potentially hostile exteriority (Grosz, 2011: 38). Though he comes from a different lineage of more-than-human thought than either Abram or Grosz, we might view Bruno Latour’s recent work as likewise concerned with negotiations between grander planetary forces and everyday collective life. While his actornetwork theory of the 1980s and 1990s foregrounded co-constitutive human-nonhuman relations, Latour’s later Gaia and Earth system-inflected work moves in directions that dramatically extend more-than-human contextuality. In the paper ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, he announces: ‘(t)he prefix “geo” in geostory does not stand for the return to nature, but for the return of object and subject back to the ground — the “metamorphic zone”’ (2014a: 16; see also 2017: 57–58). This ‘metamorphic zone’, Latour elaborates, is ‘where we are able to detect actants before they become actors … where “metamorphosis” is taken as a phenomenon that is antecedent to all the shapes that will be given to agents’ (2014a: 13). With the geologically inspired concept of the metamorphic zone, Latour admits of a planetary realm that precedes or exceeds human-nonhuman co-constitution. But this zone or region has a more accessible counterpart: the critical zone. The critical zone is a contemporary scientific term for a defined cross-section of the Earth system spanning the tree canopy to the rocky substrate where interdisciplinary teams, including soil scientists, hydrologists, ecologists, biogeochemists and geologists, collaborate with farmers and other practitioners to address environmental challenges (2014b, 2016, 2017: 93). In Latour’s words: ‘critical zones define a set of interconnected entities in which the human multiform actions are everywhere intertwined’ (2014b: 3). While earlier more-than-human theory and practice may have arbitrarily limited the scope of contextualisation, what’s interesting about Latour’s critical-zone focus is that he is now explicit about where cuts are being made. Counterposed with the rest of the Earth and cosmos – or the metamorphic zone – the critical zone is ‘tiny, fragile, slim, contested’ (Latour, 2016: 7). And it’s precisely because of this careful delineation that the critical zone 110

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presents Latour with an appropriate real-world setting for human actors to trial and finesse their relations with the forces of the Earth: ‘a neat empirical site where it is possible through fieldwork to obtain precise answers to speculative questions’ (2016: 4). In our own attempts to navigate between quotidian social worlds and a self-transformative planet, we too have identified particular sites or pockets of potentially effective human agency. While ‘planetary multiplicity’ is our shorthand for the propensity of the Earth (and other planets) to self-organise into new operating states, ‘earthly multitudes’ is our corresponding term for groups of human actors who engage with the dynamic materiality that is available to them. Earthly multitudes, we propose, gather in response to the threats of a turbulent world and take advantage of the structured matter-energy generated by past planetary self-differentiation (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021a: 9, 93–99, 2021b: 81–82). We use the idea of earthly multitudes not to single out clear-cut or bounded groups, but as a particular angle on what it means to be human: most of us being lured and obliged to participate in a variety of earth-oriented practices by virtue of the dynamic worlds in which we live. This includes working with elements such as wood, clay or metal, and interventions in transformative events such as chemical reactions, seasonal changes or animal migrations (see also Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 409–410). While many earthly multitudes develop finely tuned skills and values, we use the term without prior judgement, keeping it broad enough to encompass interventions that may be injudicious, clumsy or exploitative, but nonetheless utilise properties and dynamics of the Earth. We also employ the earthly multitude concept as a way of showing how the Earth’s self-differentiation plays a part in the diversity and differentiation of social lives – without insisting that is the primary influence on who or what we become (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021a: 46–54). One reason for drawing out such connections, following Grosz’s lead, is to make that point that when human agents enfold earthly powers, they not only augment their capabilities but also incorporate something of the excess and volatility of a dynamic planet (see Yusoff, 2013: 781). In Latourian terms, we might say that for us, all activities undertaken in critical zones are infused with the potency and potentiality of the metamorphic zone. In this regard, our notion of earthly multitudes diverges from the stress on reciprocal relationships in other varieties of more-than-human thought – in its acknowledging of fundamental asymmetries between human and planetary or cosmic forces. This incongruity, we would add, is far from overturned by the Anthropocene hypothesis, for the impressionability of Earth systems to human or any other influences is itself conditioned by a vast and anterior geohistory. This is more than a matter of scale or magnitude. The idea of a self-differentiating Earth – planetary multiplicity – is also intended to question the prioritising of the humannonhuman juncture by shifting much of the attention to the divisions, differential forces and conjunctures proper to the Earth itself. A planet in which multiplicity inheres, we contend, is an entity or category of being that explores its own possibilities, organises and reorganises its own components, and finds ways of doing things it couldn’t do before (at certain points in its history, for example, the Earth settled into a series of solid and more fluid layers, developed a system of shifting crustal plates and engendered a biosphere). But such a planet – and to an extent any planet – must also deal with its own internal inconsistencies, endure its own state or regime-shifting, and negotiate its own discontinuities. This does not imply, for us, that relationships between the society and nature or between human collectives and their planet cease to be matters of concern or intrigue. What it does 111

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mean is that our explorations of the human-nonhuman interface are supplemented and complicated by the issue of the differences, junctures and inter-facings that inhere in the nonhuman side of the equation. In the final section, we consider some of the implications of thinking in terms of planetary multiplicity for questions of human difference – including matters of injustice and epistemic or physical violence.

Human Difference on a Differentiating Planet At the outset of this chapter, we spoke of how more-than-human theorists foreground the ways that human collectives co-create worlds with diverse nonhuman others – and how they oppose attempts to overwrite this plurality with singular visions and orderings. This frequently involves attending to the ways that dispossessed or otherwise marginalised peoples affirm their own co-constitution with a panoply of nonhuman partners in the face of the epistemic and physical violence inflicted upon them by domineering Western social and intellectual orders. In such situations, thinking in geologic or planetary terms has often been associated with epistemological and ontological oppression, leading to a marked preference for smaller-scale, place-based ways of doing and thinking. Complicating this reading, we have been advocating an extension of contextualisation to the planetary scale and beyond, on grounds that this encourages us to take account of the more unruly and forceful aspects of material existence. We are keen to acknowledge that alongside and sometimes layered into the diffrerentiated field of the human are profoundly non-unitary and disjunctive planetary conditions. Rather than simply reading ‘nongradualist’ planetary science as a singular, overarching vision, we suggest that it brings new dimensions to thinking about human diversity and divisiveness. In response to the question ‘what makes us, as humans, different from each other?’ the more-than-human planetary thought we have been working up makes room for the trace of geologic, planetary and cosmic processes. We would stress that this is most often a matter of an excess of force and potential as opposed to the restrictive and linear notion of causality that informs environmental and other determinisms. Simply put, there are multiple ways that embracing fire, fibre, any fossilised hydrocarbons or any other element help shape us and our communities. So, too, is it worth considering that when human actors (our earthly multitudes) ally ourselves with planetary processes and powers, we inevitably imbibe something of the latter’s inherent multiplicity and differentiating tendency, their own power to become something other than their current state. Contingency, indeterminism and superfluity, therefore, are not just unintended consequences of what we do with earthly matter; they are matters of the Earth’s own mutability and multiplicity playing out within our bodies or lifeworlds. This includes the capacity of the mineral or inorganic to self-transform, but also the tendency of life to turn against itself or against other life: life ‘fractured from within’ as Colebrook puts it (2010: 13). There is more at stake, we suggest, than a choice between affirming human-nonhuman co-constitution and remaining invested in the violence of modern Western binarism and the ‘view from nowhere’. In this regard, it’s noteworthy that some of the most important proponents of a planetary and thoroughly inhuman nature have been theorists with strong social justice, anticolonial or decolonising agendas. It was postcolonial literary studies scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who introduced the term ‘planetarity’ in a 1997 lecture, summoning fellow social thinkers to ‘imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities’ (2003: 73). Spivak explicitly 112

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contested Western notions of universality by way of advocating a ‘species of alterity’ (2003: 72) or difference proper to the planet itself, and acknowledged that the Earth, while having a temporality of its own, remained ‘inaccessible to human time’ (2003: 88). Subsequently, in an influential paper, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty drew attention to the way that climate change and the Anthropocene debate call ‘for thinking on very large and small scales at once, including scales that defy the usual measures of time that inform human affairs’ (Chakrabarty, 2014: 3). Citing Chakrabarty, philosopher Achille Mbembe (2022) recently called for a ‘planetary consciousness’ that he counterposes to prevailing capitalist modes of planetarisation. Mbembe is clearly comfortable moving between a vision of ‘magma-filled rock topped with the entangled orders of physical, organic phenomena’ and the African animist traditions in which he has an interest. Rather than once more asking ‘who speaks for the Earth?’, he poses the question ‘Does the planet speak for itself? It has to speak for itself before we can listen. And I think it does speak for itself’ (2022: no pagination). Conversing with Mbembe, amongst others, geographer Kathryn Yusoff demands that we think the dehumanising construct of race and the inhuman forces of the geologic together, calling upon us ‘to imagine another subject capable of apprehending the differentiated and differentiating geoforces it is historically embedded within’ (2020: 4). In powerful ways, these interventions insist that thinking through the planet emboldens rather than diminishes resistance to extreme forms of corporeal, social and epistemic injustice. Yusoff’s (2018: 6–7) and Mbembe’s (2017: 18, 40) respective interrogations of the link between mineral extraction and the labour of black and brown bodies are a reminder that oppressed and racialised social groups have frequently been coerced into situations where they bear the brunt of exposure to the most dangerous forces of the Earth (see also Clark and Szerszynski, 2021a: 114–118). But so too can these ‘forced alliances with the inhuman’, as Yusoff refers to them, serve as sources of symbolic and physical power for those denied access to more conventional sociopolitical resources – though such modes of resistance must often operate under cover or underground (2018: 19). Likewise, Mbembe (2017: 156) speaks of the anticolonial ‘volcanic thought’ of writer and politician Aimé Césaire, who poetically transfigured the physical forces of the Caribbean into an invocation of power and potentiality. Or in Césaire’s words: ‘the enormous lung of the cyclones breathes and the hoarded fire of volcanoes and the gigantic seismic pulse new beats the measure of a body alive in my firm blazing’ (Césaire, 1995: 125). In a more workaday sense, a full appreciation of the human-independent dynamism of the Earth directs attention to the long-term, demanding and often self-endangering efforts of so many human collectives (our earthly multitudes again) to learn to dwell amongst the ordinary variability and volatility of the Earth. If this is a matter of supporting and enhancing time-tested ways of riding out planetary change, it is also an issue of recognising and making amends where such strategies and practices have been interrupted, overridden and disavowed (see Clark, 2011: 182–192; Whyte, 2018; Clark and Szerszynski, 2021a: 116–118). None of this is to deny that there are numerous occasions when human and nonhuman agencies are more symmetrical, where influence is more reciprocal, and figures of entwining, entanglement and interconnectivity are wholly appropriate. And it is not always easy to distinguish between radically asymmetrical and more co-constitutive relations, for both are likely to be present in most situations, and a degree of flipping between them is to be expected. One moment fire is adeptly folded into collective life, at another it is a rampaging, 113

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uncontainable force; at one historical juncture, global climate is inaccessibly inhuman, at a later date our own climatic footfall echoes incessantly. What we have been trying to show is that taking mutual relations as the norm or baseline for all human engagement with nonhuman domains can result in serious occlusions and oversights. In the past, we have suggested, this may have discouraged more-than-human theorists from grappling productively with planetary scales, and from engaging with vital and urgent insights from the geosciences. We are not, of course, obliged to read the knowledge claims of physical scientists the same way as they do: if nothing else, thinking with and through planetary multiplicity is an invitation to interpretive diversity, plurality and contrariety. Planets, ours and others, are a useful category of being, we have been arguing, and the planetary is a scale or set of nested scales deserving of attention (see Szerszynski, 2018). How we as collective agents explore, enfold and extrapolate upon the multiplicity of planetary forces is a vital question. But this question, we suggest, needs to be supplemented by another set of concerns: how do planets probe their own possibilities, how do they acquire or sometimes lose the ability to do certain things, how do they hold themselves together even as they turn into something else (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021a: 27–32)? These are questions for more-than-human theorists and practitioners to ponder, but they are also matters for which our planet and other astronomical bodies will go on working out their own responses, regardless of whether or not we are on the scene.

References Abram D (1984) The Perceptual Implications of Gaia. Available at: https://wildethics.org/essay/theperceptual-implications-of-gaia/ (accessed 6 November 2022). Abram D (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Aitchison JC, Ali, JR and Davis AM (2007) When and where did India and Asia collide? Journal of Geophysical Research 112: B05423. Bataille G (1988) The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I. New York: Zone Books. Brooke J (2014) Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chakrabarty D (2014) Climate and capital: On conjoined histories. Critical Inquiry 41(1): 1–23. Césaire A (1995) Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. Clark N (2011) Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage. Clark N and Szerszynski B (2021a) Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Clark N and Szerszynski B (2021b) Planetary multiplicity, earthly multitudes: Interscalar practices for a volatile planet. In Dürbeck G and Hüpkes P (eds) Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity. New York: Routledge, pp. 75–93. Clark N and Yusoff K (2017) Geosocial formations and the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3): 3–23. Colebrook C (2010) Deleuze and the Meaning of Life. London: Continuum. Davis M (1996) Cosmic dancers on history’s stage? The permanent revolution in the Earth sciences. New Left Review 217: 48–84. Davis M (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. DeLanda M (1997) A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve. Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Planetary Thought and the Much-More-than-Human Grosz E (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Grosz E (2011) Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hamilton C (2014) Can Humans Survive the Anthropocene? Available at: https://clivehamilton.com/ can-humans-survive-the-anthropocene/ (accessed 6 November 2022). Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. Haraway D (1992) The promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In Grossberg L, Nelson C and Treichler P (eds) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 295–336. Ingold T and Hallam E (2014) Making and growing: an introduction. In Hallam E and Ingold T (eds) Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–24. Latour B (2014a) Agency at the time of the anthropocene. New Literary History 45(1): 1–18. Latour B (2014b) Some advantages of the notion of ‘Critical Zone’ for geopolitics. Procedia: Earth and Planetary Science 10: 3–6. Latour B (2016) Is Geo-logy the New Umbrella for All the Sciences? Hints for a Neo-Humboldtian University’, Cornell University, 25th October 2016. Available at: www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/150-CORNELL-2016-.pdf (accessed 6 November 2022). Latour B (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lefebvre H (2009) State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Mbembe A (2017) Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mbembe A (2022) How to develop a planetary consciousness. Noema. Available at: https://www. noemamag.com/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/ (accessed 6 November 2022). Morin E (1999) Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Morton T (2018) Third stone from the sun. SubStance 47(2): 107–118. Pritchard H (2019 Asia’s shrinking glaciers protect large populations from drought stress. Nature 569 (30 May): 649–668. Serres, M (1995) The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Spivak GC (2003) Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Szerszynski B (2018) A planetary turn for the social sciences? In Jensen O, Kesselring S and Sheller M (eds) Mobilities and Complexities. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 223–227. Whyte K (2018) Settler colonialism, ecology, and environmental injustice. Environment and Society 9(1): 125–144. Yusoff K (2013) Geologic life: Prehistory, climate, futures in the anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(5): 779–795. Yusoff K (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Yusoff K (2020) The inhumanities. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111(3): 663–676.

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6 A MULTISPECIES ONTOLOGICAL TURN? Anna Tsing

Introduction1 Two prominent approaches of late have asked how anthropologists might explore difference in a world of unequal power relations: ‘the ontological turn’ (Kohn 2016; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017), an approach that moves the analysis through alternative makings of reality; and ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Locke and Muenster 2015), an approach that opens anthropology to the more-than-human. Surveys of each of these developing fields tend to overlap quite a bit in the scholars they cite. Yet, tensions have also emerged, suggesting problems in communicating across these two lines of thought— even as they constantly intertwine. This essay situates itself in this gap, exploring how its tensions might also forge possibilities. Following Strathern (1987), it would be possible to play up the ‘awkward relationship’ between ontological and multispecies to show how the gap itself constitutes some of the more-than-academic challenges of our time. My stakes in this essay, however, are humbler and more practical. I’ve seen scholars and students worrying through the divisions and lashing out at each other in anger and frustration. It is within the sometimes unintended insults of such confrontations that I want to show how it might be possible—even easy—to do both multispecies and ontological anthropology at the same time. To make these approaches accessible as objects of reflection, I allow a certain amount of reification and simplification. Lots of related issues become caught up in the battles I’ve seen, from the question of how scholars should best advocate for indigenous interlocutors to the urgencies of environmental crisis. Every issue raised changes the debate. At the December 2016 ‘World Multiple’ conference from which this volume draws its papers, the quarrel was between ontological theorists, on the one hand, and, on the other, practitioners of a Japanese school of rich empiricism that reaches back to the legacy of Imanishi Kinji.2 Multispecies anthropology was not the issue, per se, and yet it has something in common with Japanese empiricism, in that enthusiasm and curiosity about the world are expected to be co-eval with academic theory in producing the insights of research. Indeed, as often as possible, the former produces the latter. Japanese research traditions in anthropology are worth separate analysis. However, by working through the possibilities of multispeciesDOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-7 116

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ontological dialogue, I hope to navigate not only the tensions that arise in my classes and supervisions but also, perhaps, a group of related tensions, including the one I witnessed in Osaka. Imagining a gap between the ontological turn and multispecies ethnography is artificial, but good to think with, and thus a place to begin. Why is it difficult to work across these two literatures? They reflect differences in what catches practitioners’ attention, exciting reflection. I’m oversimplifying, but bear with me. Ontological turn scholars are fascinated by radical difference. Multispecies anthropologists are amazed that touching occurs despite radical difference. This shapes, too, what ethnographic materials do for each group. Ontological turn scholars ask how practices reveal cosmologies, while multispecies scholars ask how practical encounters work within and beyond cosmologies. The contrast stands out in the work of two respective pioneers. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) shows us the multinaturalism of Amerindian perspectivism through the figure of the jaguar: in Amerindian worlds, the jaguar is a person who drinks manioc beer where we see blood. Viveiros de Castro brilliantly teases out the implications of this way of doing world making. But he is not interested, as Eduardo Kohn (2013, 126) is, in women’s fears in their gardens that jaguars might kill their dogs. Viveiros de Castro is excited by the encounter of humans and jaguars not because of its practical possibilities but rather for the cosmological frames it reveals. In contrast, Donna Haraway introduces Where Species Meet (2008, 3) by asking, ‘Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?’ The thrill, for Haraway, is her ability to engage in call and response with her dog despite their many differences. Where Carla Freccero (2011) traces Western ontological framings of the figure of the dog, as it emerges as a foil for the wolf, Haraway stands in awe of the contact zone in which a dog, multiply constituted, responds to her gesture. This contrast, as I’ve said, oversimplifies to make sense of the conflict I’ve seen whirling around me in classrooms and conferences. In the paragraphs above, I identify scholarship in a nominalist way, referring to ‘ontological turn’ and ‘multispecies ethnography’ in relation to works held up as exemplifying each label. Yet, this introduces problems. Eduardo Kohn, for example, has written a useful review of ontological anthropology (2016), while he is also embraced within the multispecies cannon. Kohn mentions Donna Haraway as a key ontological thinker even as she is perhaps the key pioneer for multispecies work. The dichotomy is always already wrong; everyone relevant is a member of both camps. Yet, there is something to the difference that provokes passion, and this seems worth exploring.3 There is a difference in attention to humans and nonhumans that matters. Julie Archambault’s (2016) rich and intriguing ethnography of young men’s affective relations with plants in urban gardens in Mozambique speaks for many ontological-turn thinkers in stating outright that she is not interested in plants. ‘My inquiry into human-plant relations remains focused on human experience,’ she writes (Archambault 2016, 248). Her focus is the frame of human affect, and not its effect on plants. There are losses, even there: it might matter in regard to human affect’s temporality, for example, that the gardeners she studies keep their plants’ roots in plastic bags, which, if anaerobic, might encourage a short lifetime for the plants. But the plants do not catch her up as plants. In converse, Diogo de Carvalho Cabral’s (2015) amazing account of the role of leaf-cutting ants in limiting colonial agriculture in Brazil ignores the agricultural ontologies of natives versus settlers. His article vividly brings to life the interactions of ants and crops in all their unexpected agency. Yet perhaps attention to indigenous relations to never fully domesticated crop diversity, of the sort Manuela Carneiro de Cunha (2017) offers, might amend our understandings of what happened. 117

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I cite these essays because I admire them—and, while neither has the founding status of Haraway or Viveiros de Castro, they enact key pleasures and dangers of each approach, respectively. Both approaches include humans and nonhumans, but what excites researchers tends to be different. This is an element of the gap that encourages frustration and ire. Giving voice to nonhumans does not move ontological-turn scholars, who criticize their multispecies colleagues for using contaminated Western categories, and, worse yet, ‘bowing down to science.’ Meanwhile, multispecies scholars criticize ontological-turn practitioners for making dead puppets of nonhumans, refusing the liveliness of other beings. And yet the whole point of ontological materialism is to bring those nonhumans to life, but through other means. And one point of referring to science is to demonstrate the importance of contaminated categories in shaping interactions across multiple ontologies. Purification for its own sake is just as problematic as one-worldism. We will have to learn to read each other with more generosity. This is where Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple (2002), to which this volume is dedicated, can make an enormous difference. Mol takes both radical difference and touching seriously. She cares about both metaphysics and enactment, that is, the cosmologies arising from practices, on the one hand, and the conjunctural results of encounters across sets of practices, on the other. Mol starts with the assumption that there are always multiple ontologies in any situation. The job of the analyst is to separate and track the many strands of practice that gather in any social space. These lead to distinct ontologies. The analyst considers the framing assumptions of these strands of practice—the work of the ontological turn. But rather than stopping there, Mol continues by asking questions similar to those raised by multispecies anthropologists about touching across difference. The analyst considers how strands work together, not to form a singular whole, but rather to form a system of power asymmetries, interruptions, and hesitations within which social actors navigate and call out to each other despite their deeply rooted refusals of each other’s projects. On the one hand, then, Mol urges us to look at the ontological specificity of particular sets of practices. On the other, she encourages us to attend to what happens when these sets rub up against each other. This is a useful combination from which to work. Yet, Mol’s study of doctors and patients in a Dutch hospital has two specifying characteristics worth discussing. First, it is inside ‘the West.’ It has been easier for scholars to evoke multiple ontologies involving social institutions in Europe and North America than in other places. Is an analysis of Molian multiplicity suited to places outside the West? Second, it concerns human-to-human interactions. Machines come into the story, but they are there as tools through which humans make worlds with each other; Mol does not focus on an assessment of nonhuman agencies. Would Mol’s approach work if the goal was to understand nonhuman sociality? My answer to both questions is ‘yes,’ but I don’t want to take for granted the ease of stretching Mol’s approach to tackle new challenges. The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to work through what such stretching might entail. In the next section, I lay out some groundwork to give a sense of how I tackle the problem. Following that, I expand these points through a discussion of two in-progress projects. My tentative answers gain or lose traction by what they can do to make ethnographic situations come to life.

Mol and Multispecies: Mixing and Mulling Multispecies anthropology concerns not just what humans make of nonhumans (and their projects for world making) but also what nonhumans make of humans (and our projects of world making). Nonhuman response does not have to involve human-like cognition or 118

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intention; indeed, despite the awkward label ‘multispecies,’ which perhaps might best be read as ‘concerning many kinds of beings,’ the nonhumans do not have to be living at all. The reciprocality of response has been a signature feature of the multispecies approach, differentiating it from ‘anthropology as usual.’ But how should one best study such responses? If nonhumans as well as humans make worlds, might their practices also be open to analysis as ontological frames? This seems to me the necessary next step in bringing ‘multispecies’ and ‘ontological’ into closer dialogue. However, this is not a simple combination. The questions I pose to Mol’s framework about the West and the nonhuman suggest key challenges. If ontological multiplicity of the sort Mol describes is found only inside the West, for example, this would foreclose the possibility of assessing as ‘ontological’ that radical difference offered in nonhuman practices except in those very specified settings. To imagine that nonhumans have any autonomy in framing world making, indeed, would become a subset of Western ontologies, perhaps in the guise of science.4 This is why the location of Mol’s analysis matters—and opens questions. Yet perhaps the commonly practised identification between ethnic groups and ontologies is a problematic habit rather than an analytic necessity. It is hard enough for an anthropologist to find one set of ontological frameworks during the course of fieldwork; how much harder to find more. Indeed, our willingness to stop there, with one ethnic group and one ontology, might be a holdover from anthropological expectations about culture. Despite the differences between ontological and cultural analysis, the former is influenced by the history of the latter. The anthropology of culture asked us to identify coherence amidst a set of disparate practices in a particular place; it is easy to transfer that convention to ontological discussions. Mol, however, shows us quite reasonable techniques for overcoming these blocks. The hospital is a model: differentiating between the sets of practices of medical professionals, on the one hand, and patients, on the other, flows from the ethnographic material. There is no reason that such differentiations across sets of practices cannot be undertaken outside the West; the differentiation is not itself a feature of the ontology, in Mol’s analysis. For earlier guides from the study of culture, I think of the French Marxists who asked whether hunting and agriculture in the same African society might be separate ‘modes of production’ (Terray 1972). While this particular frame has disappeared from contemporary discussion, it suggests that there is precedent for identifying separate strands of practice in any social situation, Western or not. Yet, this changes the work that the analysis of non-Western ontologies can do. Multiple, non-Western ontologies cannot gain their interest only as foils for the West; they will also be foils for each other within a single setting. Furthermore, many of these frames will turn out to have connections with other places, even as they assume local forms. Without the expectation for a singular place-and-ethnicity-making ontology, analysis can note cosmopolitan connections, that is, ways that each ontological frame is emergent, shifting, and travelling within an indeterminate scale. To extend the multiplicity part of Mol’s analysis outside the West requires opening our attention to alternative forms of cosmopolitanism. The ontologies we would learn to appreciate might involve appropriations and translations of projects that seem at first familiar from other places—but are perhaps quite different. There is plenty of precedent among ontological-turn authors for just this move, although I have not seen an explicit discussion of contrasts among practitioners on this issue. Morten Axel Pedersen’s Not Quite Shamans (2011), for example, offers an ontology of post-socialism in Mongolia in which ontology refers to a moving framework in which everything from national elections to unemployment takes on a coherence formed through 119

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cosmopolitan conjuncture. In his analysis, there is no ‘Mongolian’ way of doing things. ­Instead, Mongolian ontologies are formed with the fragments of many cosmopolitan projects, from B ­ uddhism to modernization. This kind of ontological analysis comes to life in motion. Rather than a commitment to a synchronic cosmopolitics, Pedersen’s ontology is always already historical, that is, a practice of world making through time. Shiho Satsuka’s Nature in Translation (2015) also makes this point: Japanese translation of Canadian versions of the Rocky Mountains makes Japanese tourism possible, but it never re-creates ‘Japan.’ Japanese readings of the landscape partake of Canadian discourses even as they shift them into other registers. Their interplay does not offer that homogeneous ‘common world’ mocked in stereotype by ontological critics of analyses of touching. Strands of practice remain separate, sometimes antagonistic, even as they create conjunctural effects in their cross-strand encounters. Those effects are historical trajectories with emergent ontological characteristics. The identification of historically emergent, cosmopolitan ontologies is useful for imagining the conjunction of ontological and multispecies. It suggests a small addendum to Mol’s scheme. Mol calls the touching of alternative ontological frames ‘coordination.’ I reserve that term for temporal synchronization (Gan and Tsing, n.d., discussed below). But the word is not the issue; I stress the way that touching creates effects, even when there is no harmonization of frames or agreement in what counts as real. I call that kind of touching— the kind that has effects—‘friction’ (Tsing 2005). Friction sets off a historical trajectory, emergent from the encounter. Such trajectories are not calm currents; they are full of jolts, false starts, wild rides, and interruptions. New ontological frames may be formed as well as what Viveiros de Castro calls equivocations. Pedersen’s Mongolian ontology is of that sort: drunken aggression, post-socialist unemployment, and shreds of Buddhism and shamanism come together to make a ‘not quite’—a historical trajectory emerging in fits and starts from shifting practical exigencies. Satsuka’s ‘translation’ makes interruption the basis of the possibility for something new. By adding a historical dimension to Mol’s analytical scheme, one can watch the effects of ontological difference as well as encounter as they realign each other—difference shaping encounter and encounter shaping new versions of difference. Marisol de la Cadena offers another important way to track practice-based ontological frames: through watching how one frame can bury itself inside another. In Chapter 2 in this volume, for example, de la Cadena argues that the Quechua speakers she works with in Peru practise ‘religion—but not only’ (see also de la Cadena 2015). Mountains as earth-beings have been transformed into mountains as the abode of the Virgin Mary. This is Christianity, but it exceeds Christianity; its religiosity is contradicted by non-Christian cosmologies. By adding the ‘not only’ to the categories she uses for analysis, de la Cadena shows how scholars might have it both ways: cosmopolitan versions of Western ontologies are there, but, even within them, there is more. This modification of Mol’s insights is an exciting entry into multiplicity. But I have only made it through the first half of my stretching of Mol’s framework. The second half concerns the practices of nonhumans, as they might have their own ontic characteristics.5 Can we analyse a ‘world multiple’ in which nonhumans as well as humans participate in world making? The reason many anthropologists have hesitated to go there, I think, is a down-to-earth bewilderment about just how to study nonhuman ways of being. Luckily, many (although not all) nonhuman practices can be studied in much the same ways anthropologists study humans, that is, by observation and attention to forms, gatherings, and transformations 120

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(Tsing 2013; Mathews 2017). Natural history practices have a close kinship to ethnography. If we can trust ourselves to learn something about unfamiliar humans, we might also learn to trust ourselves in working with nonhumans. It’s a matter of having people show us—and also looking ourselves. This is the same set of knowledge-gathering practices we might employ to study doctors or patients at a hospital. Still, one of the problems we face in following nonhuman practices is that nonhumans don’t speak, at least not in human languages. If we want to appreciate nonhuman suites of practice, we have to move beyond language. As Kohn (2013) argues, we might want to do that anyway: language can be a limitation in how we imagine signification. Kohn’s discussion of the philosophical issues involved is helpful. Here I merely offer a few practical suggestions. The following techniques have proved themselves useful to me in following nonhuman practices. First, the researcher might learn from human informants the enthusiasm and curiosity necessary to get involved with nonhumans in a deep and serious way. In my work with mushrooms, I caught the ‘mushroom fever’ that my human informants described, and it helped me care about the intimate details of fungal life—as many of them did also (Tsing 2015). Scientists were helpful in showing me fungal life, but so too were non-scientists, whose questions were often quite different questions from those of scientists. Only pickers, for example, cared about just when and where mushrooms might appear, and many had detailed observations and theories about this. The idea that learning about nonhumans reduces one’s knowledge base to science is completely wrong. There are many kinds of human knowledge and practice concerning nonhumans—and each is a guide to the practices the researcher might use for his or her own observations and attunements. Indigenous scientists, indeed, have written passionately about overlaps as well as divergences in their tribal and professional training as each promotes attention to the forms of life around them (Kimmerer 2003). Conversely, while cosmological reflection is an important human practice for getting to know nonhumans, it is not the only one. To follow the reciprocal response of nonhumans to human projects, one might want to follow many kinds of vernacular human experiences of getting to know nonhumans through their practices and transformations. Second, non-textual media can be useful in both learning about nonhuman practices and presenting them in ways that hold on to the fragile attunements of the research process. I’ve found myself wandering into projects involving sounds, diagrams, performances, drawings, film, and digital media, not only because of the charisma of such genres, but also because they show things that are hard to get at only using language. Presenting nonhuman practices through non-written media can sometimes better convey both the specificity and mystery of these arenas of practice.6 Non-textual media are hardly a magic bullet, however. Consider the visual: plenty of nonhumans navigate with senses other than sight, and plenty of nonhuman practices do not lend themselves to viewing at all. Even when one presents the most visual of nonhuman practices through visual media alone, viewers often miss what you want them to see. Still, non-textual media can be an opening to what we might otherwise miss. Third, attention to temporalities can guide us to nonhuman practices (Gan 2016). By watching temporal coordinations and disjunctures, it is possible to enter the worlds of nonhuman practice without communicating directly with each nonhuman. Human practices too are amenable to temporal analyses; taken together, a useful symmetry is possible. Fourth, infrastructures can be an opening to understand the relation between materiality and ontology (Morita 2016). Infrastructures can lead us into world-making practices of 121

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humans—but also nonhumans. Sometimes, nonhumans serve human infrastructural needs; sometimes, they thwart human plans. Indeed, noting this makes it possible to consider nonhuman infrastructures, that is, landscape constructions that enable particular forms of nonhuman sociality and livelihood. Infrastructure, like temporality, can be a non-linguistic path to material-semiotic world-making projects. In my own recent work, I’ve used some of these techniques to attend to the fractured becomings of landscapes that are simultaneously human and nonhuman. My ‘landscapes’ are sites of struggle and negotiation among many ways of being, human and nonhuman. Beings need not agree on the worlds they make and inhabit. It’s this feature of landscape, indeed, that makes the questions the ontological turn raises so important: landscapes are sites of radical difference both among varied humans and across species and assemblages, living and nonliving. Landscapes are also sites for touching; no single project of world making wipes out all the others. All this matters because in the course of encounters, some kinds of living beings will die, some will dwindle, and others will flourish. It is the livability of the landscape that most engages me, and no species, including humans, lives alone. Livability raises questions that, to me, need tools of both the ontological turn and multispecies anthropology. I can’t say I’ve worked out all the answers. However, I’ve worried through a few options. In the next section of this chapter, I offer two collaborative projects to open out thoughts on how to care attentively about both humans and nonhumans. My goal here is to make palpable the challenges as well as the pleasures of a both-and approach.

Coordinating Temporalities: ‘How Things Hold’ One way to track the world-making projects of nonhumans is to follow their temporal expressions, for example, their use of seasonal changes, their life histories, and their responses to historical changes involving other kinds of beings, human or nonhuman, and living or nonliving. Although we cannot question nonhumans directly, using language, we can follow their timelines and transformations. Elaine Gan and I do this in our paper ‘How Things Hold’ (Gan and Tsing n.d.). We are interested in both repeated temporal enactments and long-term, non-cyclical changes as each offers clues to the practice-based ontics of nonhuman beings. When temporalities of different living beings come together in a conjuncture, we watch how this has effects, which we call ‘coordination.’ Our project, then, explores both radical difference and touching as it involves humans and nonhumans. At the centre of our exploration stands the good-to-think-with and easy-to-love strangeness of Japan’s satoyama forest, the village forest used for timber, firewood, and charcoal as well as all kinds of non-timber forest products. The term ‘satoyama’ is quite new, introduced by conservation advocates, but it refers to a centuries’ old practice in which farmers coppiced and pollarded trees, raked leaves for green manure, gathered mushrooms, vegetables, and wild fruit, and in the process encouraged certain kinds of ecological formations over others. Satoyama advocates argue that human disturbance is an essential part of the forest; without it, the satoyama formation degrades, and its constituent biodiversity disappears. In contrast to Euro-American conservation truisms, more human disturbance is good for the more-than-human livability of satoyama. Without human practices, the assemblage falls apart. From the first, questions of ‘Whose construction is this?’ emerge in our exploration. I learned about satoyama from Japanese advocates who were already schooled in thinking across cosmopolitan difference. They showed me forests, talking me through their features. 122

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Sometimes, they gestured to international scientific perspectives; yet in the same explanations, they also offered distinctive frames. Advocacy was urgent, they showed, because humans only become fully human within a working relationship with the environment—just as satoyama forest only becomes fully forest through a working relation with humans. The emerging ontologies they showed me were simultaneously scientific, in an internationally legible way, and distinctively Japanese. This is the kind of cosmopolitanism we will have to consider to develop a multispecies ontological approach. Gan and I explore the practices of particular kinds of beings, such as pine trees, oak trees, matsutake mushrooms, and farmers. Following satoyama advocates, we treat them as participants in making landscapes, each engaged in distinctive sets of practices. Humans are not exceptions. The distinctive role of language, planning, and cognition for humans, for example, never came up as a reason to remove humans from discussion of ecological transformation. Instead, advocates told me about raking, the farmers’ practice of removing fallen leaves from the forest, which inadvertently produces the bare mineral soils preferred by pine and matsutake. In considering the sets of practices that formed both disparate ontological frameworks and the possibilities of touching, we were guided to treat humans and nonhumans with considerable symmetry. The ontic enactments of my informants became the basis from which we trace temporalities and coordinations. Following the satoyama advocates I worked with, we do not opt for an exclusively Japanese vocabulary or sphere of reference: we open the project to the cosmopolitan science to which they guided me, but with its distinctive positionings of humans and nonhumans. Following the nonhumans, in turn, requires attention to temporalities. Rather than trying to explain these, we attempt an attunement involving diagrammatic exposition. Gan created a diagram of temporal coordinations. Figure 6.1 is a sample page:

Figure 6.1  From ‘How Things Hold.’ Pine trees, a mycorrhizalised seedling, and a rake stand in for the temporal coordinations of pine, fungal, and human practices in the satoyama forest. Illustration by Elaine Gan.

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This particular part of the diagram shows the coordinations required to keep the satoyama assemblage in place. Our analysis, however, is equally concerned with ruptures and disjunctures, that is, forms of temporal coordination that make particular assemblages impossible. For example, the turn to synthetic fertilisers and fossil fuel among farmers has decreased farmers’ cutting and raking, destroying the pine-oak-matsutake coordination. Coordination, our guide to both difference and touching, can be of different kinds; we turn, then, to questions of more-than-human livability to consider the political valence of varied forms of coordination. Because of coordinations between radiocesium and fungal metabolism, the destruction of the Fukushima reactors raised new problems for satoyama conservation, which had relied a good deal on mushroom incomes. Mushrooms are now radioactive, and radioactive coordination is hardly a recipe for livability. We end our ­chapter with a consideration of such temporal ruptures.

Caring for Ghosts and Other Beings: ‘Golden Snail Opera’ As I was exploring questions of how to attune my analyses with nonhuman world making, I had the pleasure of meeting with Yen-ling Tsai, who told me of how ‘friendly farmers’ in Taiwan—a group in which she includes herself—tackle the problem of the invasive spread of golden apple snails. The snails, introduced from Argentina in a failed plan for a food industry, devour the whole rice crop if farmers do nothing. Conventional farmers use poisons to kill the snails, but there are many reasons not to use these poisons, which spread through the water killing many forms of life. Friendly farmers instead hand pick snails in the middle of the night, when the snails are most active. It’s a lot of work, but the snail picking has mobilised the friendly farming movement, giving it cohesion and national prominence. When we met, Tsai was finishing an article on the vitalization of the friendly farming movement through their focus on snails (Tsai 2016). But as she described the practice, it was clear that farmers get to know many other beings in and around the rice fields together with the snails; friendly farming is an effort at multispecies attunement. We agreed that thinking with snails might be a wonderful way to get to know the world-building projects of the varied beings who make their homes in Taiwanese rice fields. We enrolled the help of Isabelle Carbonell and Joelle Chevrier in a collaboration; together, we made a film and a play that, in tandem, present the world-making projects of many beings—as these offer both the surprises of radical difference and the surprises of touching (Tsai et al. 2016). Among the rice-field beings that stood out in our consideration were the ghosts of people who died in the WWII American bombing of Taiwan, then a colony of Japan. American development further altered the landscape after the war, unintentionally mixing the earth of newly flattened and modernized fields with the bones of the dead. As more recent farmers have turned the soil, the bones have erupted into their attention; the farmers made temples for them and asked for their help in their endeavours. At first, however, all this was lost on the young people who came to the area with the friendly farming movement. Only after the ghosts responded to being ignored by causing a shocking series of traffic accidents did the young people respond in turn by learning the rites to appease ghosts and to ask for their protection. I can’t remember how a ghost became a character in our play, but once it did, we had fun with it. In the process, we learned to think about kinds of beings ignored by observers who pride themselves on modern scientific views. Our ghosts have a double status: they are both objects within a human cosmology and world makers in their own right—as observed 124

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through the practices in which they participate. By sticking close to practices, from the traffic accidents they cause to the ceremonies that attract and appease them, we present ghosts as makers of farming landscapes along with snails and humans. If there is to be a multispecies ontological move, this double status, it seems to me, must be key to it. The objects that emerge from cosmologies must be considered through what they do, and not just in relation to how they cause us to reflect. Ghosts are best appreciated through their practices. This same principle informs our attention to the living beings of the rice fields. There is one difference: since our play’s ghost is a former human, we let it speak; in contrast, the other organisms we follow don’t speak but perform their lifeways otherwise. This is where the film helps us attune to varied strands of practice. Our filming practices allow animals to help us navigate as they do: we have a dog carry a camera so that it can show us the landscape revealed as it runs back and forth across the rice field bunds; we even put a small camera on a snail (admittedly the much larger African land snail, another invasive species, the only one large enough to hold even the smallest camera). Our film does not just look at animals; it tries to look with them. We also explore temporalities through film: this is how we approach the life worlds of plants. Plants seem passive only to those who merely pass them by; farmers know them as dynamic beings—and we follow that lead. Time-lapse photography attunes our attention to the growth of the rice and the response of the landscape to darkness and light as well as to rain and sunshine. We bring into focus the flowering of the rice—in which flower parts shoot out suddenly from the developing heads. These organisms, as with ghosts, are both objects of farmers’ cosmological reckonings and makers of worlds on their own. It is in that double status that we get to know them. We designed our play-and-film as an amateur performance, in which users are asked to read parts aloud while the film is projected simultaneously. With this conceit, we refuse the seamless whole of a coherent and singular world. Each of the parts, oral and filmic, interrupt each other: they force moments of hesitation even as the rice field is composed in the friction of their rubbing together. We include scenes of complete refusal, such as a duck that refused to adjust to wearing a camera, instead spinning and shaking its head (Figure 6.2). We call our project an ‘opera’ in admiration of the hybrid Taiwanese o-pei-la that developed within the forced compliance and subtle refusals of Japanese colonialism, in which genres mix and match creating a story full of interruptions. Our creatures, human and nonhuman, interrupt each other, jolting into contested being a landscape of multiple agendas. And while one version exists as a paper in the journal Cultural Anthropology

Figure 6.2  From ‘Golden Snail Opera’: a duck with a camera shakes its head. Photographs by Isabelle Carbonell and duck.

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(Tsai et al. 2016), it is central to our conceit that other versions are emerging. We have performed in a fieldsite, a classroom, a conference, and a church. A Taiwanese version and an all-film version are being prepared, each shifting the storyline and the meaning of its interruptions.

Theoretical Work in Geographical Motion All this is situated. Writing this chapter in Denmark while reflecting on a conference in Japan offers a particular lens for considering ontological theories in anthropology. In contrast to Americans, both North and South, Danish ontological anthropologists have been playful and irreverent, caring more for the creativity of their interventions than for the political mobilization of advocacy (Willerslev 2007; Pedersen 2011). While this rests in part on the shameful Danish denial of the country’s colonial legacy (Brichet 2012; Andersen 2014), it also offers advantages for decoupling theoretical approaches from particular political strategies, thus allowing the retooling and expansion of each. It is this feature of the Danish position that has opened the possibility of imagining a dialogue among multispecies and ontological approaches. Perhaps such openings can help keep theoretical tools flexible— and thus useful for varied political struggles. In the work described above, I have tried to forge description and advocacy tools for satoyama conservation (‘How Things Hold’) and alternative farming in Taiwan (‘Golden Snail Opera’). In the conference in Osaka, which involved as many international participants as Japanese scholars, the deployment of international theories was colored by differences across national traditions and scholarly generations. Too often, it was hard to build bridges. While not all approaches can find an equitable space of negotiation, this chapter has argued that some can, including multispecies and ontological approaches.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the organizers of the Osaka University ‘World Multiple’ conference, and to all the participants who took the time to try to explain the tensions of the conference to me. Pierre Du Plessis, Zahirah Suhaimi, and Heather Swanson steered me away from my worst interpretations. The Danish National Research Fund and the participants in Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene supported the infrastructure within which I could imagine and write this paper.

Notes 1 Reprinted from Omura, K., Otsuki, G. J., Satsuka, S. and Morita, A. (eds) (2018) The World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds. London: Routledge, pp. 233–247. 2 The most accessible Imanishi in English, to my knowledge, is Pamela Asquith’s translation of The World of Living Things (2002). 3 The question of what approaches count as ‘ontological’ is complicated by divisions among practitioners. As Pierre Du Plessis and Michael Vine pointed out in a recent conversation, some practitioners pursue ontologies to clarify concepts (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017), while others are more intent on practices (Mol 2002). Those working through Latin American indigenous issues use ontologies to motivate politics (de la Cadena 2015). Each approach would require a different nuance in rapprochement with multispecies anthropologies.

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A Multispecies Ontological Turn? 4 Yates-Doer and Mol (2012) refuse this simplification, showing the heterogeneity of ‘the West.’ They do not address non-Western heterogeneity. 5 I use the term ontic following Helen Verran (2007). Nonhumans may not elaborate philosophies, but their practices enact ontics. 6 Moving beyond language using non-textual media can also be useful in learning with humans (Deger 2017; Forssman 2017).

References Andersen, Astrid. 2014. “Islands of Regret: Restitution, Connected Memories and the Politics of History in Denmark and the US Virgin Islands.” PhD dissertation, History, Aarhus University. Archambault, Julie. 2016. “Taking Love Seriously in Human-Plant Relations in Mozambique: Toward an Anthropology of Affective Encounters.” Cultural Anthropology 31(2): 244–271. Brichet, Nathalia. 2012. “Generating Common Heritage: The Reconstruction of a former Danish Plantation in Ghana.” PhD dissertation, Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela. 2017. “Traditional people, collectors of diversity.” In The Anthropology of Sustainability, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 257–272. London: Palgrave Macmillan. de Carvalho Cabral, Diogo. 2015. “Into the Bowels of Tropical Earth: Leaf-Cutting Ants and the Colonial Making of Agrarian Brazil.” Journal of Historical Geography 50: 92–105. Deger, Jennifer. 2017. “Chased by Light: Digital Art, Luminous Ecologies, and Spectres of Rebuke.” Paper delivered at A Non-Secular Anthropocene conference, Copenhagen, June. de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Forssman, Natalie. 2017. “Staging the Animal Oceanographer: An Ethnography of Seals and their Scientists.” PhD dissertation, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego. Freccero, Carla. 2011. “Carnivorous Virility, or Becoming Dog.” Social Text 29(1): 177–195. Gan, Elaine. 2016. “Time Machines: Making and Unmaking Rice.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. Gan, Elaine, and Anna Tsing. n.d. “How Things Hold: A Diagram of Coordinations in a Satoyama Forest.” Manuscript available from the author. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Imanishi Kinji. 2002. A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things. Translated and with an introduction by Pamela Asquith. New York: Routledge. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2003. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Corvalis: Oregon State University Press. Kirksey, Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545–576. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2016. “Anthropology of Ontologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 311–327. Locke, Piers, and Ursula Muenster. 2015. “Multispecies Ethnography.” In Oxford Bibliographies. http:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-97801997665670130.xml Mathews, Andrew S. 2017. “Ghostly Forms and Forest Histories.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, G145–156. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Morita, Atsuro. 2016. “Infrastructuring Amphibious Space: The Interplay of Aquatic and Terrestrial Infrastructures in the Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand.” Science as Culture 25(1): 117–140. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Satsuka, Shiho. 2015. Nature in Translation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Anna Tsing Strathern, Marilyn. 1987. “An Awkward Relation: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology.” Signs 12(2): 276–292. Terray, Emmanuel. 1972. Marxism and Primitive Societies. Translated by Mary Klopper. London: Monthly Review Press. Tsai, Yen-ling (蔡晏霖). 2016. 農藝復興: 臺台灣農業新浪潮. Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies 22: 23–74. Tsai, Yen-ling, Isabelle Carbonell, Joelle Chevrier, and Anna Tsing. 2016. “Golden Snail Opera: The More Than Human Performance of Friendly Farming on Taiwan’s Lanyang Plain.” Cultural Anthropology 31(4): 520–544. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2013. “More-Than-Human Sociality: A Call for Critical Description.” In Anthropology and Nature, edited by Kirsten Hastrup, 27–42. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Verran, Helen. 2007. “Metaphysics and Learning.” Learning Inquiry 1(1): 31–39. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipiti 2(1): 3–22. Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yates-Doer, Emily, and Annemarie Mol. 2012. “Cuts of Meat: Disentangling Western Natures-­ Cultures.” Cambridge Anthropology 30(2): 48–64.

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7 POLITICS, SPACE AND THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONDITION Steve Hinchliffe

What was, or still is, political about more-than-human studies? One answer would be the will to de-centre the human, and to analyse the implications of doing so. Contrary to the lonely and introverted human subject of much modern social science, more-than-humans were characterised as extroverts, their capacities re-distributed, with others of all kinds coming in to focus and, potentially at least, calling the shots. This, for a time at least, passed as a form of politics – undermining accounts that over-played human ingenuity and the historical agency of a minority of mostly white men; unsettling assumptions of human control and demonstrating how nonhumans (as well the marginalised majority of humans) had the power to answer back, to alter events and to resist. There was a widening of the circle of concern to more-than-human others (Murdoch, 2003). There was, too, the start of an a-modern critique (Latour, 1993). The modern project of finding or generating social and human order in amongst the flux of modern urban and industrial life was revealed as a flawed and, in many ways, dangerous project. In its place, more-than-human studies exposed the sexism, androcentricism, triumphalism, exceptionalism and hubris of the modern, Western, colonialising canon (Harding, 2008). Intra-actions became the key term to capture this world of relational becomings (Barad, 2007). The liveliness and effects of more-than-human assemblages were treated as political matters (Braun and Whatmore, 2010). As the languages of de-centring, re-composing and widening all suggest, a spatialised vocabulary was a consistent feature. The fixed lines of the human subject started to unravel; dualisms were blurred. Nevertheless, this extroverted figure of the more-than-human still tended to be narrated within a central and modernist concern with flux and continuous novelty. This second motif of modernity, the sense of a world constantly undergoing change and the need for social sciences to offer a guide to the modern condition (Bauman, 2000), was, initially at least, under-examined in the more-than-human literature. In this sense, there was something peculiarly and consistently modern about more-than-human social sciences in their focus on the complex present. Perhaps as something of an antidote to this ‘presentism’, there has been more attention paid in the last decade or so to matters of depth, duration, radical inflection points and to the long-term processes that contour and shape these more-thanhuman worlds. In place of a continuous present, we have geological-sounding epochs – the 129

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Anthropocene, the capitalocene, the plantationocene, Chthulucene (Castree, 2014; Moore, 2015; Tsing, 2015; Haraway, 2016; Clark and Yusoff, 2017; Lorimer, 2017) – that characterise blocks of consistency and time, or boundary events and discontinuities that change the rules of the game (Haraway, 2015). Colonialism and Imperialism provide the entry points for accounts of pollution (Liboiron, 2021), food insecurity (Guthman, 2019), energy transitions (Malm, 2016), landscape, biodiversity and labour (Tsing, 2015), and bodies and health outcomes (Moran-Thomas, 2019; Marya and Patel, 2022). There is a renewed critical investment in biopolitics, and the historical organisation of human and more-thanhuman populations (Lemke, 2015; Asdal et al., 2016). Inequality is linked to long-term shifts in economic variables, and, in general, the world seems increasingly to be structured or ‘rigged’, via historical formations of race, class, gender, species and so on. The stories and timescales have changed, and the stakes have seemingly become ever higher. There is the desire to generate different political registers and forms of traction in situations that are marked by global heating, pandemic diseases, global extinctions and intra- and inter-generational injustices. For some authors, the historical turn provides all the evidence one needs for social, structural, qua human-centred, accounts of politics. It is the social and economic, they argue, that drive history and environmental degradation. The more-than-human, or nonhuman, seems to revert to a pejorative less-than-human in terms of imagined historical agency. To counter this tendency, this chapter makes the case for the continued importance of more-than-human accounts and politics. In the first part of the chapter, I briefly summarise the spatial form of more-than-human studies, and, in due course, introduce its historical critique. In part 2, I enlist the work of the geographer Doreen Massey in an effort to find ways of drawing these strands together. The aim is to outline resources for studies that manage to think the spatial and temporal together, and to open a form of more-than-human politics that is less bound by the logics of presentist, spatial extension, or by structural or historical determinisms. The question for the chapter is how the space-times of more-than-human engagements can generate radical interventions that are dissatisfied with the parochial, but are similarly able to provide flight-lines away from the overwhelming logics of epochs and structural accounts. Using examples from the history of microbial processes, I will underline the political importance of taking spacetimes seriously in the production of more-than-human studies.

More-than-Human Politics – End Times? More-than-human studies are, or have been, closely aligned to a spatial imagination of what it is to be, or become (Pickering, 2008). When evolutionary and developmental biologists talk of a holobiont (a unit of biological organisation composed of a host and its associated bacteria, Archaea, viruses, protists and fungi) (Gilbert, 2014), they are talking about an extroverted organism. The term displaces the sense of there being discrete organisms of monogenomic differentiated cell lines – ‘we’, like other organisms, are instead far from equilibrium assemblies of highly heterogeneous cells (Dupré, 2021). Science and technology scholars, especially those wedded to the broad areas of work that became known as actor network theory, understood actants, agencies and entities as similarly constituted through their relations with a wide range of others (Michael, 2016). Sociologist John Law’s early work, for example, was concerned with ‘heterogeneous engineering’ – social order was continuously being made (-geneous) with others (hetero-) (Law, 1987). Colonial sailing ships (Law, 1987), physics laboratories (Law, 1994), arms 130

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procurement and fighter jet design (Law, 2002), and the management of livestock diseases and other crises (Law, 2006) – all were matters of human and nonhuman orderings. An accompanying political claim was that things could be otherwise. There was no timeless social or material order, and no foundational hierarchy. Power and agency were revealed as precarious achievements involving and enlisting the partial buy-in of a multitude of human and nonhuman others. In turn, we were offered sobering studies of the limits to human will and ideas. These were always already shaped by the partial accession of other lives, materials and matters. In place of social order, we were given contingencies, simultaneous orderings and, implicitly or explicitly, possible openings for doing things otherwise. The spatiality of this work was most explicit in Law’s work with empirical philosopher Annemarie Mol (Mol and Law, 1994; Law and Mol, 2001, 2002, 2008), and in Mol’s own formative writing (Mol, 1999, 2002, 2008). The refrain that things like Zimbabwean water pumps (de Laet and Mol, 2000), scientific facts and medical diagnoses (Mol, 2002) were made in and through material and social practices was supplemented with a multisited attention to the spatial variety of practices. Things were not only heterogeneous and composite, but also involved the often non-coherent ordering of a complex present. In Mol and Law’s work, practices were relational activities that involved several sites, locations or spatial assemblies and drew on topological forms (which had characteristics like networks, containers or were more fluid (Mol and Law, 1994) and even fire-like (Law and Singleton, 2005)). This produced not only an extroverted sense of identity and place (so we couldn’t understand the requirement to boil pig swill on a British farm, for example, without understanding international trade relations (Law and Mol, 2008)); it also highlighted that a product, fact or decision was a negotiation or struggle between more or less synchronous versions of the same thing. So, a diagnosis for a disease like atherosclerosis required a piecing together of various forms of knowledge, clinical experience and material relations – the clinical encounter, the laboratory tests, the community report, the patient’s testimony, the diameter and elasticity of arteries, blood viscosities, the care package, the practitioner’s skill at assembling these matters and developing satisfactory outcomes – all were part of the care assemblage (Mol, 2002). This was the singular and plural ‘body multiple’, the more than one but less than many that was common sense to clinicians and other medical practitioners (Berg, 1992), but was perhaps news to those used to the hierarchical epistemologies and fact-value distinctions of the natural sciences and to those social scientists more used to dealing only with social forms of critique or focused entirely on clinical practice as a matter of and for interpersonal relations. For Mol, Law and colleagues, this complexity and the ensuing struggles were part of something they called ontological politics. The latter invoked the explicit, and unevenly contested, processes by which realities took shape and how some sites or forms of reality-making tended to efface others, steal the limelight or remain in the shadows. The various modes of syncretism that Law and others suggested for understanding the way in which multiples were managed (from hierarchical domination to coexistence) added a useful analytical device to this ontopolitical analysis (Law et al., 2014). Ontopolitics marked a departure from the modernist tradition of epistemological or perspectival battlegrounds. The anaemic and largely passive nonhuman world that lay waiting for an authoritative and universal view (from nowhere) was replaced by an active world where things could be different and make a difference depending on their ways of relating. The northern universe was displaced by a de-centred multiverse (Law, 2011). If knowledge or epistemological politics had foregrounded disputes between ways of knowing, morethan-human studies and ontopolitics in particular focused on the struggles, or social and 131

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material agonistics, of generating order. And in doing so, there was often the implication that things might be otherwise. No longer tied to a foundational reality (the really real) or the authorisation from a pure, or imaginary non-social viewing platform, we now had a just as real but always in-process world of ontological formations. In other words, this was different to those accounts of the modern world that tended to foreground either a fully enlightened world of pure vision or an a-historical frenzy of equally plausible epistemologies and continuous flux. Instead of a world of crises which could be handled only through the rubric of risk and uncertainty, we were offered a world of material politics as an ongoing and contested formation (Anderson, 2021). Nevertheless, this world of ontopolitics arguably remained somewhat tied to a sense of liberal possibility (of being otherwise). In recent years, things have seemed less open. Issues like health care and health outcomes, environmental qualities, food and innovation policy are more obviously trammelled by the conditions of markets, widening inequalities in incomes, declines in state funding and so on. To take one example, in The Return of Inequality, sociologist Mike Savage (2021) offers a compelling account of the ‘weight’ of the past. The production and continual amplification of inequality through accumulation and the inter-generational bequeathing of assets have, as Savage (2021), drawing on Picketty (Piketty and Goldhammer, 2014) and others, has shown, rendered the post-War consensus on social planning and equality to be something of an historical blip. In this long view, things are rather more predictable, and the modernist as well as more-than-human studies refrain of continuous possibility is effectively eclipsed by the long durée of accumulation by dispossession. In other words, one could argue that in the rush to develop a more extrovert sense of being and becoming, the importance of legacies, uneven inheritances and responsibilities for these temporal relations of ongoing burdens and weights had been underplayed. For Savage (2021), the task is less about fixes and reorganisation of ontological deck chairs in the syncretics of practice, and more about analysing and rendering explicit the gradual and rapidly accelerating sinking of the Titanic. Some of the more trenchant voices regarding the limitations to more-than-human politics have come from those writing within the historical materialist tradition. Andreas Malm (2020), in particular, has offered a dismissive account of the ‘fashion’ for more-than-human or hybrid thinking, arguing that the urgency of planetary demise requires a clear focus on the specifically social drivers of ecological destruction. Starting from an environmental and metabolic tradition, Malm addresses the urgency of the climate emergency through the lens of the colonial, imperial and class-based accumulations that stemmed from the extraction and exploitation of carbon-rich fossil fuels (see also Malm, 2016). His analysis leads to a call for taking direct action against growing inequalities, concentrated forms of accumulation and dispossession that result in planetary despoilation and degradation. They are problems that cannot be left to a global northern elite, increasingly cut off from the devastation they sow. They are not perturbed by the smell from the blazing trees. They do not worry at the sight of islands sinking; they do not run from the roar of the approaching hurricanes; their fingers never need to touch the stalks from withered harvests; their mouths do not become sticky and dry after a day with nothing to drink... After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end. (Malm, 2021: 8) 132

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Malm’s politics relate to more than an impassioned attempt to directly target key levers for action (the message here is that blowing up pipelines rather than preserving the current social order through a green new deal is the most effective course of action). There is in the The Progress of this Storm (Malm, 2020) a detailed defence of a form of historical materialist analytical tradition. Against hybridism, constructionism or any other -ism that blurs the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, or the social and the natural, Malm (2020) advises a form of conceptual clarity in order that we can properly identify the drivers of the current predicament or storm. To do this, he is more than happy to jettison substance dualisms – there is no immaterial soul or mind that exists outside of the material body. But he embraces a position adopted from the philosophy of mind, which upholds the mind/body distinction in terms of their properties rather than their substance. The argument is that, just as the mind can be understood as both material and exhibiting unique properties, so the social can be both material and distinctly social in terms of its character and qualities. So climate forcing is understood as a configuration of natural and social entities (carbon cycles and capitalism, for example), but it is the social properties (of capital) that are worthy of demarcation, analysis and ultimately urgent change. Malm (2020: 55–57, 61) illustrates the utility of this property dualism by describing the Montreal Protocol as a social response to the actions of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). While one of his main critical targets, Latour (1993), opened his influential We have Never Been Modern with a detailed invocation of the inter-mingling of CFCs, upper atmosphere chemistry and global economy, Malm’s argument is that only through the separation of the science of ozone depletion and the (social) production of CFCs could the problem be addressed and solved. The separation of drivers is, Malm (2020) argued, the indispensable premise for any solution to such a combined problem. ‘Contrary to the message of hybridism, it follows that the more problems of environmental degradation we confront, the more imperative it is to pick the unities apart in their poles’ (Malm, 2020: 61). There is much in Malm’s work to be admired (Castree, 2020). And, one could certainly argue that there is a tendency in some of the work he criticises to underplay historical and social science insights into widening and increasingly invidious divisions. Nevertheless, he’s not the first to skate over the nuances of some of the more-than-human work he criticises. While earlier critics tended to mistake constructionism with a form of idealism, Malm’s project tends to miss the important lesson that the material or hybrid turn was not only about distributing power and agency across the more-than-human world; it was also an attempt to take seriously the generative as well as incomplete associations between elements in an assemblage. It doesn’t require us to adopt a partial dualism to acknowledge that actors of all kinds (some we label social, some natural) can emerge and are empowered through their being part of assemblies. Indeed, for Latour (1999, 2004), ‘nature’ doesn’t disappear once we understand the world as formed through associations; it becomes a possibility. And the more activity there is from one side of this modern ‘divide’, the more activity there is from the other. This is not a zero-sum game. CFCs, carbon dioxide, refrigerant manufacturers, corporate oil giants – all become more active agents because of their being mixed up in human-nonhuman affairs. Just as things do not lend themselves fully to all forms of association (Harman, 2002), so they can be amplified, altered and achieve effects that were not possible beforehand. In this body of work, differentiation is the problem to be understood, and a principled analysis starts from the premise that the differentiations and relations (some of which involve things being drawn together, others pulled apart as well as becoming distinct) can have many causes, not all of which 133

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are ‘social’. This doesn’t rule out conclusions around the most effective levers for action being conventionally labelled as social, but nor does it require that we always assume the same answer by default. Indeed, one might argue that the very disaggregation of the natural and the social can serve to perpetuate a misplaced false confidence in reformist and regulatory social solutions to global environmental problems. Latour’s (1993) argument was that the more we imagine that the social and natural are distinct, the more that they form complex assemblages. How many years of climate protocols and conferences of the parties did we need to endure before it was finally realised that this was neither an issue for technoscientific-fixes nor a matter amenable to simplistic accounts of social behaviour and consumption-led change? The problem was not the failure to identify the social drivers; it was the tendency to do so by focusing on the wrong kind of social-material assemblage. As Malm and Latour would no doubt have agreed, the problem was the voracious appetite for using the atmosphere as a bottomless sink. The solution cannot come though social solutions alone – as Haraway (2015) makes clear, to think so is to miss the thorny though critical question of human numbers. And as the history of refrigerants suggests, social regulation can produce consequences if the entanglements of people and atmospheres are not understood as part of the problem. Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a component of the refrigerants devised to replace CFCs after the Montreal Protocol, turned out to be hundreds of thousands of times more effective as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide by unit of mass. The ozone layer was given a reprieve by exacerbating radiative forcing. Contrary to some of his stated intentions, and in its sophisticated narration of carbon capitalism, Malm in fact generates an account of a hybrid monster that entangles culture, colonialism and climate. His diagnosis is not, of course, about technical and social fixes that fail to address the intricate relations between nations, markets, finances, carbon (as well as other greenhouse agents) and climate. Indeed, only by acting and thinking fossilised capital and climate together do his analyses make sense. Likewise, only by considering the social in terms of its current and historical entanglements can we start to think of, or creatively engage with, possible and speculative futures. A hybrid problem. As Haraway (2015: 159) put it: No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too. A key problem of much environmental thought and practice has been an affirmation of human agency and the assumption of abundant human capacities (Lee and Motzkau, 2013). For Stengers (2015), we need to reclaim complexity, rather than sink into barbarism. For Latour (2018), there is a need to redefine politics as that which leads to the earth – to more rather than less attachment, and to compose ourselves differently. This is, after all, exactly what the global elite are not doing – they are the ones unperturbed ‘by the smell of burning trees’ (Malm, 2021: 8). Malm may baulk at the apparent piety of Latour’s definition of politics as that which is closer to the earth, or earth bound, and certainly the climate emergency demands urgency, but the refrain ‘less of Latour, more of Lenin: that is what warming condition calls for’ (Malm, 2020: 118) may mistake a vital corrective that authors in the more-than-human tradition offer to the hubristic politics that accompanied modern social formations, both right and left. 134

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To summarise, a key charge is that more-than-human studies have failed to take history seriously. This may be in the form of the historical structuring of relations such that outcomes are not so much open and in flux, but heavily weighted. This is a vital and important lesson that accompanies projects of decolonisation, postcolonialism and other approaches in humanities and economics that seek to redress an obsession with modernity, and with continuous urbanised novelty, and instead confront the post-welfarist entrenchment of structural inequality through accumulation and dispossession. Malm (2020) reintroduces a form of historical materialism which similarly elevates social relations as the generative drivers of complex environmental issues. The return to history is, then, seemingly the way in which you bring back politics. The concern, though, is that by ceding all the action, and agency, to historical and social processes, we miss the constitutive role of historically altered social and material processes, and by extension the formative role of uneven spatial relations in these changes.

More-than-Human Politics – Space-Times Property dualisms imply that natural processes like the carbon cycle exist outside of social history. But what happens if we suggest that everything is historical (Massey, 1999b)? In this understanding, it isn’t just the entangled form (or climate change) that has history; the carbon cycle itself is historical just as the process of defining and using carbon-rich fuels has evolved. The processes themselves are in formation, and knowledge of those forms and processes is similarly dynamic and changing (not in conditions of our own choosing, of course, this knowledge will itself make sense through its intra-actions with nonhuman as well as human worlds). So, rather than accounting for the form or presence of an entity based on a timeless, mechanical process, we need to trouble the divide between dynamic process and historical form. Let me introduce another topic at this point, antimicrobial resistance (AMR). AMR refers to the increasingly prevalent ability of bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites to thrive despite being exposed to medicines and other chemicals that previously were able to limit their action. The evasion of chemical treatments and therapies that have been devised and used on an industrial scale for over half a century is said by many to be a threat equal in terms of suffering to climate change (Murray et al., 2022). For science studies scholar Hannah Landecker (2016), understanding resistance threats requires not only that we appreciate the histories of biology (or the knowledge about resistance processes, which have changed over the course of the last century from a focus on vertical inheritance of traits to understanding the ability of bacteria to share resistance mechanisms horizontally, within and between so-called species). We also need a ‘biology of history’, or an account of the ways in which the earth and its bacteria have themselves changed (Landecker, 2016: 16). This is ‘the physical registration of human history in bacterial life’ (2016: 19). In short, in recent decades, bacteria have become more adept at sharing and utilising resistance traits. The bacteria of today are not the bacteria of yesterday, whether that change is registered culturally, genetically, physiologically, ecologically or medically. Bacteria today have different plasmids and traits and interrelations and capacities and distributions and temporalities than bacteria before modern antibiotics. It is not even clear that ‘bacteria’ remains the only or the most salient category with which to think about 135

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antibiotic resistance. This biological matter, chewing away its own ontology, is historically and culturally – and materially – specific to late industrialism, produced in and by previous modes of knowledge. (Landecker, 2016: 21) For Landecker, and for the laboratory scientists she works with who are increasingly shifting the very practice of bioscience from the study of life itself to the study of industrialised lives, there is a clear sense that the social and bacterial exist in mixes. Both are historical. And, importantly, it is the appreciation of those mixtures and not their disaggregation into social and natural properties that is key to solving a problem like AMR. For example, the twentieth-century mantra of ‘treat hard and treat long’, using prolonged high doses of antibiotics to control infections, is in part based on old rules of the game. As Alexander Fleming said in 1945, once he had suspected that bacteria could acclimatise to penicillin, ‘If you are going to use penicillin, use enough’ (Llewelyn et al., 2017: 1). While the assumption was based on misinterpretation of the evidence, in a biologically altered world, where resistance traits are common-place, unnecessarily high or long courses of broad-spectrum antibiotics can serve to increase the probability that the pool of potential genes, that bacteria can share, incorporate and use to survive the onslaught, will be greater. Moreover, a long course of medicine may reduce the diversity of microbial life in the host, meaning that the resistance traits, which otherwise might have been associated with evolutionary costs to the bacteria, are now in the ascendancy. In other words, treating long and hard may be adding fuel to future resistance fires. Similarly, it is fatuous to assume that we can simply focus on the social aspects of the resistance issue. To do so, usually by appealing to behaviours and awareness deficits in patients, physicians, prescribers, farmers or others is to miss how antimicrobials have become entangled with and even infrastructural to social life, health care economies, employment and food production (Denyer Willis and Chandler, 2019). So many aspects of life – the ability to show up to work, making social care functional, making food accessible – are now conditional on the economically efficient management of infections. In short, we are not dealing with social and natural properties when we are considering the problem of drugresistant infections. The biology of history and the ecology of social life are hopelessly interwoven. Moreover, it is their imbrications rather than their separate properties that start to help us to understand possible solutions. Agro-ecology (another kind of earth-bound mix) offers more sustainable solutions than further intensification and accompanying biosecurity (Hinchliffe et al., 2018; Hinchliffe et al., 2021). Developing culturally appropriate techniques for reducing bacterial transmission offers more sustainable solutions to resistant infections than vainly encouraging a pastoralist to abandon their cattle treatments at a time of rapid climate related stress to landscape, animals and people (Caudell et al., 2018; Caudell et al., 2019). This historical understanding of processes, knowledges and forms, all of which are subject to change, does not mean that it is time, and time alone, that explains those changes. We also need to emphasise how changes are produced through spatial relations, differentiation, and a production of uneven geographies. Indeed, change cannot be a matter of internal processes alone, or ‘a mere rearrangement of what already is’. Rather, ‘time has to be conceived … as the product of interaction, or interrelations… for there to be difference, for there to be time … at least a few things must be given at once’ (­Massey, 1999b: 274). Just as Massey (1991) emphasised the need to understand place as 136

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an extroverted process (where character is a result of a place’s thrown togetherness and a composite of relations to elsewheres), so we need to understand entities and identities of all kinds as constituted through the quantity, quality and natures of their relations. A resistant microbe is in this sense a product of its spatial (microbiological and sociological) relations. To put it another way, a thing, any thing, has a history – this is something Latour (2004), Landecker (2016) and others have done well to remind us – but they also have geographies. Nothing is self-contained. And it is the power geometries (Massey, 1999a), the uneven nature of those relations, that enable us to engage critically with historical process. In the AMR example, the point is that when it comes to working out ways forwards, one size does not fit all. The blanket-style approach of the last decade to increase awareness and stewardship and so reduce the use of antibiotics is understandable. But reduction of use and resistance threats are conditional on; addressing the social and material inequalities that drive disease emergence, persistence and transmission; making sure that the right medicines are available when needed; and reducing the precarity of farmers and their animals in economic systems that encourage medicine-fuelled production. These are some of the geographical drivers of the biology of history (Hinchliffe, 2022). This spatial production matters. As Massey (1999b) noted, people talk readily about path dependency to convey how one set of changes, a social or technological event, tends to shape the future and so limit further choice. A good example might be investment in antibiotic therapies from the 1950s onwards (Podolsky, 2014), the decline of investment in other promising treatments like phage therapy (Brives and Pourraz, 2020) and the development of cheap, ubiquitous treatments upon which so much of society has become dependent (Kirchhelle, 2020). But beyond this historical analysis, it is also necessary to consider the geographies of biology in order to address the problems generated. There is, for example, little or no talk of the susceptibility of precarious and vulnerable bodies to illness, and the ways in which impoverished holobionts (including human and nonhuman animals) that are already exposed to poor diets (including those reliant on processed foods) are more, rather than less likely, to maintain resistant microfauna or to host and excrete microbiomes that are less capable of absorbing and neutralising infections and resistance traits. We suffer the ills of another species, indeed (Tsing et al., 2017: M4). Thus, historical change and resistance hotspots have been generated from particular time-spaces that include colonial appropriation of resources, gendered and racialised relationships to illness and health, systematic inequalities in food access and industrial processes that marginalise other ecologies of production. Without understanding the spatial drivers of change, we will be incapable of proposing and fostering adequate solutions. Levers for change require not so much the picking apart of unities (or emergent properties in Malm’s (2020) usage) but the analysis of the complexities, the ways in which matters are folded together and the effects that they produce. Indeed, Malm’s reference to emergence may be distracting in this repsect. As Stengers (1997: 12) suggested, emergence is too often employed to denote ‘the appearance of the unanalyzable totality of a new entity that renders irrelevant the intelligibility of that which produced it’. The term sets down prohibitions (you can’t understand this by looking at that), giving emergent matters a set of essential properties that are both time- and space-less. Complexity, or the more-than-human in our terms, however, sets out problems: it marks the entwined worlds of the becoming known and the becoming knowledgeable. Massey’s work offers a scheme for comprehending, or learning to engage with, the dynamism and openness of more-than-human worlds. 137

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Her insistence that space-time is the product of interactions starts to give us partial openings onto the complexity of worlds. This politics: Extends the normal scope of … political science debate, which so often not only restricts its attention to the humanly social but also implicitly or explicitly depends upon a nonhuman background that is harmoniously in balance … That space of agonistic negotiation that is the political should be recognised as including negotiation also with that realm that goes by the name of nature. It will, moreover, be a negotiation that includes within it the very conceptualisation of that ‘nature’ itself. (Massey, 2006: 45)

Conclusions More-than-human politics has unmoored itself from modern projects in two senses. First, through an emphasis on the intra-actions of culture-natures. Second, in terms of the now common-place rejection of modernism as a world of continuous flux, openness or possibility. This historical turn is welcome, but there is a danger if we use this moment to re-inscribe the modern tendency to purify the human and the nonhuman, to re-adopt old dualisms, propertied ones or otherwise. The stakes are now higher than ever. The various epochal names being adopted are markers of boundaries that have been crossed, inflection points, ends of one kind and another. They speak of a world that is less open, one that is weighted and rigged. The historical project to interrogate those changes, and to earth (rather than unearth) the histories of biology, atmospheres and so on, is vital. But it is a project that requires that we simultaneously spatialise, to meet as Massey (2005: 195) termed it ‘the challenge of our continuous interrelatedness’.

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Steve Hinchliffe Lemke T (2015) New materialisms: Foucault and the ‘government of things’. Theory, Culture and Society 32(4): 3–25. Liboiron M (2021) Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press. Llewelyn MJ, Fitzpatrick JM and Darwin E, et al. (2017) The antibiotic course has had its day. BMJ 358: j3418. Lorimer J (2017) The anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed. Social Studies of Science 47(1): 117–142. Malm A (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. Malm A (2020) The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. Malm A (2021) How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. London: Verso. Marya R and Patel R (2022) Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. London: Penguin. Massey D (1991) A global sense of place. Marxism Today June: 24–29. Massey D (1999a) Power Geometries and the Politics of Space-Time. Heidelberg: Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg. Massey D (1999b) Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24: 261–276. Massey D (2005) For Space. London: Routledge. Massey D (2006) Landscape as a provocation: Reflections on moving mountains. Journal of Material Culture 11(1/2): 33–48. Michael M (2016) Actor network Theory: Trials, Trails and Translations. London: Sage. Mol A (1999) Ontological politics, a word and some questions. In: Law J and Hassard J (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford and Keele: Blackwell/ Sociological Review, pp.74–89. Mol A (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mol A (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge. Mol A and Law J (1994) Regions, networks and fluids: Anaemia and social topology. Social Studies of Science 24: 641–671. Moore JW (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Moran-Thomas A (2019) Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic. Calif.: University of California Press. Murdoch J (2003) Geography’s circle of concern. Geoforum 34: 287–289. Murray CJL, Ikuta KS and Sharara F, et al. (2022) Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: A systematic analysis. The Lancet. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02724-0. Pickering A (2008) New ontologies. In: Pickering A and Guzik K (eds) The Mangle in Practice; Science, Society and Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–14. Piketty T and Goldhammer A (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Podolsky SH (2014) The Antibiotic Era: Reform, Resistance, and the Pursuit of a Rational Therapeutics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Savage M (2021) The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Stengers I (1997) Power and Invention: Situating Science. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Stengers I (2015) In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Stengers_2015_In-Catastrophic-Times.pdf: Open Humanities Press in collaboration with Meson Press. Tsing AL (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Tsing AL, Swanson H and Gan E, et al. (2017) The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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8 THE ‘SHUFFLE OF THINGS’ AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF AGENCY Tony Bennett

Introduction I take the first part of my title from Francis Bacon’s reference to cabinets of curiosity as places where ‘whatsoever singularity and the shuffle of things hath produced ... shall be sorted and included’ (cit. Henare, 2005: 60). I do so in order to establish a connection with Bruno Latour’s discussion of the similarities between bureau of statistics, the storerooms for the maps produced by Lapérouse’s Pacific voyages, and the collections of natural history museums. These are all places whose occupants can ‘combine, shuffle around, superimpose and recalculate’ the relations between the statistics, texts, and things they gather together to end up with, respectively, ‘a “gross national product” ... “Sakhalin island”, or “the taxonomy of mammals”’ (Latour, 1987: 227). Latour makes the point by way of stressing the importance for those engaged in scientific expeditions of producing ‘immutable and combinable mobiles’: that is, objects and texts which, no matter how old they are or how far distant from the sites at which they were collected, are ‘conveniently at hand and combinable at will’ (Latour, 1987: 227; see also Harrison this volume). It is through their pliable ‘combinability’ that such texts and objects can be assembled into new networks which, although produced at a distance – spatial and temporal – from their points of origin, may nonetheless make possible varied forms of action back at those points of origin, and elsewhere. I will apply this perspective to the networks through which the materials that were assembled in museums during the early fieldwork phase of anthropology were brought together from varied sites of collection and mobilized as parts of both civic and biopolitical programmes.1 I do so in order to explore the new entanglements that these processes of collecting gave rise to and the new forms of combinability they permitted. These were, in the main, entanglements between materials coded as ‘ethnographic’, museums and museum personnel, the institutions and practices of the public sphere, and the apparatuses of colonial administration. My concern will be with the distribution of new forms of agency across the relations between museum and field, metropolis and colony, colonizer and colonized, scientist and subjects, and collector and collected that these entanglements made possible.2

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I shall, though, approach these questions via a detour suggested by the similarities Latour notes between nineteenth-century natural history museums and statistical bureau as centers of calculation: that is, places where objects and data collected from diverse sites are subjected to new forms of classification and ordering made possible by their being gathered together in one place.3 Evelyn Ruppert draws on this perspective in her discussion of the 1911 Canadian Census, the first to attempt a ‘scientific’ enumeration of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Canada’s Far North. There are three aspects of Ruppert’s discussion I want to highlight here. The first concerns her use of the concept of agencement, derived from Michel Callon (2005), to interpret census taking as a practice performed through the interactions between heterogeneous actors whose agency arises from, and is distributed across, the sociotechnical arrangements that bring them together. The particular value of this concept consists in the light it throws on the processes though which such actors come to be endowed with specific, and different, agential powers, and capacities. The actors she identifies as components of the ‘census agencement’ include ‘human actors (e.g., the mounted police, interpreters, the Aboriginal people), technological actors (e.g., “special” population schedules, steamships, trading posts) and natural actants (e.g. ice, snow, seals)’ (Ruppert, 2009: 13). Ruppert’s reasons for including mounted police, trading posts, and seals, to come to my second point, concern their roles as occasions for bringing together the census enumerators and gatherings of Aboriginal people as the to-be-enumerated. Each of these, in constituting temporary gatherings of nomadic groups – around police patrols, visits to trading posts, and seasonal seal hunts – provided contact points for the practice of enumeration. Third, however, Ruppert notes the inability of the census agencement to transform Canada’s Aboriginal inhabitants into ‘census subjects’: that is, subjects able to place themselves, and to be placed within, the census categories. Such identifications were not possible because the Aboriginal respondents could not be ‘fixed’ into place in terms of either their age or place of abode. In view of this, she argues, ‘census taking could not produce or construct a population in the Far North but only a record of a census “other” – an indeterminate multitude that could not identify and could not be identified as part of the population’ (2009: 14–15). There was a census in Australia in 1911 too, and one again in 1921 when, although the 1901 commonwealth constitution had excluded Aborigines from being counted in the census (Povinelli, 2002: 22), Aborigines were included although listed as a separate category, apart from the Australian population. Perhaps the most distinctive and consequential forms of collecting and enumerating in which Aborigines were gathered and collected during this period, however, were those associated with the new relations between anthropological fieldwork and museums. Although initiated in the 1890s (Morton and Mulvaney, 1996), the involvement of museums in organizing anthropological fieldwork expeditions into the more geographically remote parts of Australia – Central Australia, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, northern Queensland – increased significantly in the early decades of the twentieth century.4 This was also when Australia’s major state museums installed their first permanent exhibitions of Aboriginal culture (Jones, 2007: 228). It is no accident that these were also the formative decades of Australian state formation with the development, after the federation of 1901, of programmes and agencies organizing what had hitherto been separate states into a national governmental domain (Rowse, 1998). The new nexus of relationships between museums and anthropological fieldwork that was developed in this period was connected to new arrangements for the management of Aborigines within the emerging space of an Australian nation-state. As such, it was a nexus which enumerated 142

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and collected Aborigines as a race apart, as constitutively different – racially and culturally – from the Australian population and, therefore, needing to be governed differently. While it is important to register these differences, the methodological perspective Ruppert outlines is helpful in considering the relationships between anthropology, fieldwork, and the practices of colonial governance that were developed in this period. Her perspective of a census agencement finds a ready parallel in the concept of a ‘fieldwork agencement’ made up of an equivalent range of different kinds of actors, and the distribution across these of different agential powers and capacities. These included, in the Australian case, the role of the stations on the overland telegraph, newly opened between Adelaide and Darwin, and of railways and government ration depots, in providing points where Aborigines periodically congregated and where, therefore, they might be brought into the orbit of fieldwork investigations (Jones, 1987; Mulvaney et al., 1997). These provided points of contact that situated fieldworkers and their subjects in a new governmental domain – a regularized set of arrangements between government authorities and Aboriginal populations – which (partially) displaced the role that missionary stations had earlier played in these regards. There were the guides and, sometimes, Aboriginal trackers on whom the field workers relied to find their way around often hostile terrain, and the horses and camels that were the main sources of transport for the anthropologists, their equipment, and the food supplies and gifts that proved crucial material mediators of the anthropological encounter. There were tents and camping equipment which marked differential spatial relationships between anthropologists and their subjects: close to the field but not entirely immersed within it as the tents provided the anthropologists with places of retreat into their own culture, and also with places for writing up their observations and with makeshift dark rooms for film development (Schumaker, 1996). Most important of all, perhaps, was the range of measuring and recording devices that mediated the relations between anthropologists and their subjects. These were of two distinct types. First, there were those related most closely the developing field of social anthropology’s concerns focused on the customs, beliefs, and behaviors of indigenous populations. Film cameras and sound recording equipment were the two key new technological mediators here. Photography was important in this context too. However, the camera also remained caught up in another set of technological mediators associated with the concerns of physical anthropology which, although gradually ceding ground to social anthropology, remained important throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Sliding calipers, radiometers, anthropometers, standard weighing machines, steel tapes: these are the items of equipment Roy Burston (1913) records using, at the request of Baldwin Spencer, for a series of measurement he took of 102 Aborigines from different parts of northern Australia. This was not a fieldwork study: Burston records his debt to the keeper of Darwin Gaol for being able to include its Aboriginal inmates in his study. However, it was indicative of the range of measuring devices that continued to inform Australian anthropological fieldwork into the 1930s. Indeed, there were often more: devices for assessing a range of sensory capacities; for measuring body pigmentation; for taking blood samples and finger prints; and so on (Jones, 1987). Spencer collected across the range: photographs, films, sound recordings, artefacts, anthropometric measurements, skin color tests (Batty et al., 2005; Spencer, 1921; Spencer and Gillen, 1899). One of the merits of James Clifford’s elaboration of the concept of the ‘contact zone’ consists in the attention it has drawn to the different modes of indigenous agency that have been exercised in relation to the varied contexts in which Western knowledge practices 143

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and indigenous populations have become entangled with one another (Clifford, 1997). This is true even where such encounters have been mediated by the most extreme forms of objectification. Jones (1987) records the responses of the Aborigines to the procedures they were subjected to in studies organized by the South Australian Board for Anthropological Research. These ranged from bemusement at the physical manipulations they were subjected to through toleration of the procedures because it was believed they might bring benefits to instances of non-compliance: Linda Crombie’s refusal to be photographed without her shirt on, for example.5 The use of film also depended on collective indigenous agency through, first, the preparations required to stage rituals expressly for the purpose of being filmed, and, second, the negotiations that were entered into in granting permission to film such ceremonies was discussed. There was also creative economic exploitation of the possibilities opened up by the new forms of collecting associated with the relations between museums and fieldwork: the ‘invention’ of the toas – believed to be symbolically significant way-markers and location finders placed along Aboriginal routes – is a case in point.6 Increasingly, too, anthropologists felt an obligation, in recognition of the principles of (uneven) reciprocity of the forms of exchange on which their work depended, to send or take back to their ‘subjects’ the results of their work – sometimes in book form, sometimes in slide lantern presentations, sometimes in film showings.7 A significant limitation of the concept of the contact zone, however, is its tendency to focus on the forms of agency that are evident in more immediate and direct forms of encounter. This neglects the broader networks which, although not directly present or perceptible in such encounters, nonetheless significantly affect what takes place in them.8 There are two such networks I want to focus on here. The first comprises the increasingly formalized international networks which affected the forms of interaction that took place within fieldwork encounters. Burston, for instance, records that the measurements he took were those recommended by the British Association Anthropometric Committee in 1909; and Jones notes that the work of the South Australian Board for Anthropological Research was initially modelled on the 1912 Geneva International Agreement for observations on living subjects. The second concerns the different networks through which the varied objects, texts, and images that were gathered from fieldwork sites of collection were circulated on the anthropologists’ return to the centres of collection whence they came. These concerned, first, the networks of the public sphere; second, the increasingly close connections between museums and universities as, progressively, the balance of influence moved from the former to the latter9; and third, increasingly formalized networks of colonial administration. These were closely overlapping networks. The circulation of anthropological fieldwork through the institutions of the public sphere played a considerable role in building up the cultural capital of the anthropologist as a new kind of scientific actor in the public field. The stronger connections between museums, anthropology, and universities lent a new quasi-scientific aspect to anthropology in its concern to model itself on the field practices of the natural sciences, particularly in mimicking the relations between fieldwork site and laboratory. The new forms of public and scientific prestige accruing to the figure of the anthropologist and the development of new, albeit often insecure and contested, connections between anthropology and the training of colonial administrators, similarly helped to produce the anthropologist as a new kind of actor in both colonial and administrative fields. Taking account of these circuits and the forms of distributed agency they involve means taking an equivalently dispersed approach to questions of indigenous agency. 144

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Spaces For and Forms of Agency The Māori population played a variety of active roles in the development of New Zealand’s colonial museums: as visitors, as exhibitors, and as donors in a complex set of gift and symbolic exchanges enacted across the shifting boundaries of the colonial frontier. However, as Conal McCarthy (2007) shows, the forms this agency took oscillated in the context of changing relations between Māori and Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) just as it was affected by changing practices of collection and exhibition. In the mid-to late nineteenth century, Māori people were more actively engaged with commercial exhibitions and world’s fairs than with New Zealand’s emerging public museums. This was partly because the former presented a less restricted context for cross-cultural engagement, and partly because of a greater elective affinity between their more spectacular exhibition practices and Māori conceptions of exhibition as a way of demonstrating power, or mana. By contrast, following the restrictions placed on the export of Māori cultural materials by the 1901 Māori Antiquities Act, the early decades of the twentieth century saw active Māori support for the inclusion of Māori material culture in the development of a national patrimony that was shaped by both Pākehā motivations to preserve Māori culture as part of a salvage operation and Māori aspirations to be included within a project of modern nation formation. Peter Hoffenberg’s discussion of Aboriginal participation in the colonial and international exhibitions that were held in Australia’s State capitals in the 1880s and 1890s similarly testifies to a range of different types of indigenous engagement. On the one hand, many Aborigines from mission stations were keen to visit such exhibitions as an extension of the civilizing dynamic governing their daily lives on the stations. This was often combined with public performances which testified to the fruits of, and a capacity for, civilization via concerts, public readings, and the exhibition of craft products. However, this inclusion usually came at the price of also being called on to perform and exhibit savagery: through the exhibition of corroborees, mock reenactments of frontier combats, and the exhibition of traditional Aboriginal skills – boomerang-throwing displays, for example (Hoffenberg, 2001: 222–229). This tension was worked out, in the public culture of Melbourne, in the history of the Coranderrk Station, which was established in the 1860s. A good deal of Aboriginal cultural and intellectual leadership was invested in this station – originally by Simon Wonga of the Wurundjeri people – as countering the widespread belief that the Aboriginal race was doomed to die out by testifying to Aborigines’ ability to become thoroughly self-civilizing in collaboration with sympathetic white management.10 This involved careful and calculated strategies regarding the role that ­Coranderrk’s inhabitants should play in the public performance of Aboriginality – via film and photography, participation in exhibitions, and their modes of self-­presentation to weekend day-trippers from Melbourne. These strategies sought to negotiate the complex and fraught terrain between, on the one hand, Aboriginal aspirations to self-determination and, on the other, conformity to European conventions regarding the appropriate markers and signifiers of civilization. By the early decades of the twentieth century, waning government support for such civilizing strategies undermined the authority of Coranderrk’s Aboriginal leadership. As a result the station’s main function became that of serving as a tourist destination where Aboriginal performances of similarity and difference, of domesticity (raffia making) and strangeness (boomerang throwing), provided ‘stereotypical souvenirs of Aboriginality that could be subsumed into larger narratives of nation and progress’ (Lydon, 2005: 213). 145

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The ways of exhibiting Aboriginal culture developed through the relations between museums and anthropological fieldwork over the course of the 1910s and 1920s rested on a different logic. These excluded Aborigines from post-federation narratives of nation and progress by interpreting their ‘backwardness’ as a consequence of the new evolutionary terms in which they were racialised as ineradicably and absolutely Other. Perhaps the chief defining characteristic of this disciplinary ensemble was its preoccupation with the (impossible) retrieval of pre-colonial Aboriginal forms of sociality and culture at the price of a more or less complete blindness to both the conditions of Aborigines living in or close to the white centers of population and the history of the interactions between colonizer and colonized. In common with the tendency that characterized the early phase of anthropological fieldwork internationally, the ‘authentic native’ was only to be found in the remote parts of Australia – in the desert regions of South and Central Australia, in the Northern Territory, northern Queensland, and Western Australia. This entailed, Geoffrey Gray has argued, a focus on ‘a “double” reconstruction – the “pristine” (before contact) culture and the “ideal frontier” (at the point of contact)’ – through which the authentic Aborigine, the remnant of a lost past, constituted the ‘idealized space’ of an ‘alternative now’ (Gray, 2007: 24). It was this maneuvre that supported the interpretation of Aborigines as, in Baldwin Spencer’s terms, ‘the most backward race extant’ revealing ‘the conditions under which the early ancestors of the present human races existed’ (Spencer, 1914: 33). Spencer, together with his co-researcher, Frank Gillen, was the most influential representative of anthropological fieldwork in Australia and, indeed, a significant international innovator in this respect (Morphy, 1996). His combined roles as a museum administrator, university professor of biology, and pioneer ethnographer were significant aspects of the new relations within which the public representations of Aborigines and Aboriginal culture at the National Museum of Victoria (NMV) were set. At a time when, as in New Zealand, export restrictions were placed on Aboriginal cultural materials, Spencer contributed considerably to Australia’s accumulating stock of such materials by donating the artefacts, photographs, films, and sound recordings that resulted from his and Gillen’s fieldwork trips to Central Australia.11 As simultaneously the curator of the NMA’s ethnological galleries, Spencer – combining the authority of direct witness, of ‘having been there’ (Wolfe, 1999), of the anthropological fieldworker with that of the natural scientist – mobilized the materials he brought back with him in a variety of contexts: the ethnological galleries of the NMV; the illustrated public lectures he gave on ‘the howling savages’ of the Australian interior; his scientific publications; and presentations at scientific associations. Studies of Spencer’s photographic practices have shown how much his work in the field depended on the active participation of his ‘subjects’ and the enactment of reciprocal forms of obligation (Batty et al., 2005). But these forms of agency and reciprocity did not stretch from the field back to the colonial museum. What Spencer took back from the field were the objects, visual and sonic records, and anatomical measurements. None of the Aborigines themselves were ever ‘taken back’ to Melbourne either to be exhibited or to be consulted regarding the arrangement of their cultural materials in the ethnological galleries. Nor did they ever visit those galleries. Museum and field were, in this sense, radically distinct zones. In contrast to the situation McCarthy describes for New Zealand and to the calculated forms of engagement Coranderrk’s inhabitants had shown in controlling the images of themselves that circulated in Melbourne’s public sphere, this radical separation meant that the NMV’s depictions of Aboriginal culture rested exclusively on the authority of science, uninterrupted by any input from, or the live presence of, the distant peoples they drew upon. 146

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Views differ regarding Spencer’s estimates of the ‘improvability’ of Aborigines. In Henrika Kuklik’s estimation, Spencer represented the liberal end of the spectrum of opinion in attributing to Aborigines a capacity for conscious innovation and gradual improvement, thus rebutting white settler views of Aborigines as a people without a history (Kuklick, 2006: 562–565). While there is some truth in this, it fails to take account of Spencer’s relations to the different wings of the divided legacy of liberalism that he inherited.12 If demonstrating a capacity for conscious innovation satisfied the requirement of will and volition that John Stuart Mill had required for the demonstration of progressive forms of human agency, the historicization of character developed across the human and natural sciences in the wake of Darwin’s work made it possible to both recognize this and yet still place Aborigines on the other side of a historical divide from the white settler.13 In contemporary formulations produced in orbit around Edward Burnett Tylor’s doctrine of survivals, formulations that found their echo in Spencer’s work, the problem was not that the Aborigine was innately incapable of either self-improvement or of being improved, but that he had become so.14 Although the result of a particular set of circumstances (the absence of competition), this incapacity was nonetheless interpreted as racially constitutive, inscribed within a separate bloodline, which meant that the capacity for innovation and volition that Aborigines had once shown could not vouchsafe the race a future. Spencer’s evolutionary museum displays, his public lectures (widely reported in the contemporary press), and scientific texts depicted Aborigines as radically Other – a remnant of prehistory within the present – and as an outsider to Australia’s national and civilizing rhetorics. They stood only for a past that had to be left behind. In his account of the relations between ethnography and the colonial state, George Steinmetz argues that the core business of the colonial state – understood, in Bourdieusian terms, as an autonomous state form that is relatively independent of its metropolitan overseer – is to identify, produce, and reinforce ‘the alterity that is required by the rule of hierarchical difference’ (Steinmetz, 2007: 41). This entailed the production of forms of Otherness that would put back into place the sense of an unbridgeable divide between colonizer and colonized to counter the effects of colonial mimicry. ‘Native policy’, as Steinmetz puts it, ‘was an attempt to identify a uniform cultural essence beneath the shimmering surface of indigenous practice and to restrict the colonized to this unitary identity’ (2007: 43). The early twentieth-century development of permanent museum exhibitions of Aboriginal culture did precisely this by casting Aborigines in the role of a racially defined Other whose primitivism constituted the basis for their exclusion from the dynamics of Australian national development. This had profound consequences for the new systems of colonial administration that were developed in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.

Civic-Public and Biopolitical Assemblages A key aspect of my argument so far concerning the relationship between the ‘shuffle of things’ and the distribution of agency concerns the place that museums occupy as switch points in overlapping networks through which flows – of texts, objects, measurements, and people – are circulated. The NMV constituted just such a switch point. It was the place to which the artefacts, films, and sound recordings that Spencer and Gillen brought back from their fieldwork expeditions were sent to be classified, ordered, and exhibited. And it was the place from which exhibitions of, and discourses about, Aboriginal culture and Aboriginality were disseminated through the broader public spheres of Melbourne, the state of 147

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Victoria, and Australia more generally. It also provided a storehouse of material warrants for Spencer’s and Gillen’s scientific publications.15 These were circulated via international scientific networks that were still dominated by Eurocentric forms of authority in which savants based in London and Paris – notably James Frazer and Emile Durkheim – provided the key intellectual syntheses of the findings that were reported from diverse colonial points of collection.16 The organization of the flows and networks in which museums participate have definite consequences for the distribution of agency, determining the positions at which agency can be exercised and the distribution of different kinds of agents across those positions. The networks organizing the flows of people and things between the centers and sites of collection associated with the early phases of anthropological fieldwork in Australia afforded little opportunity for indigenous agency beyond the fieldwork site itself. There is no doubting the importance of these. Noting that the Arrernte (or the Arunta in Spencer’s orthography) had experienced contact with white settlers from the 1860s, Elizabeth Povinelli interprets the varied performances they staged for Spencer and Gillen as active attempts to communicate across semiotic and political boundaries at a time when they were ‘in the midst of being physically exterminated, having their ritual objects stolen, lost, or destroyed, and watching their lands be appropriated and, with them, their life-sustaining material and spiritual resources’ (Povinelli, 2002: 93). Yet, the routes along which the measurements, artefacts, films, photographs, and recordings that were collected from the Arrernte travelled did not include the Arrernte themselves. Not even their names: Spencer’s and Gillen’s photographs and texts never specified identity beyond age, gender, and tribe – elderly Warumungo woman, and so on.17 This stood in contrast to, and helped to undermine, the forms of agency that had been developed by Aborigines living closer to Australia’s main centres population who, aware of the significance that attached to the public circulation of images of Aboriginality, sought to limit and to direct the form that such images took. Indigenous agency (like any other) differed in its aims and effects depending on the points in different cross-cutting networks at which it was exercised. The modes of collecting and interpreting the materials acquired from Spencer and Gillen’s fieldwork expeditions were also connected to the emerging forms of colonial administration in early federation Australia. This was partly due to the positions that Spencer occupied in the administration of Aboriginal affairs,18 and partly due to the authority that his racialized production of Aboriginality enjoyed in view of its validation by Europe’s leading savants.19 Before considering these matters, however, I want to look briefly at the different set of relations that was developed between museum, field, metropolitan public sphere, and colony during the formative years of the development of the Musée de l’Homme (MH) under Paul Rivet’s direction (1928–1939).20 This will prove helpful in identifying the terms of analysis I want to use when returning to Spencer. I shall limit myself to two aspects of these differences considered in terms of their implications for the distribution of agency. The first concerns the role played by the MH in the development of the ‘anthropological humanism’ that became the main signature of French anthropology during the inter war years. This was partly a matter of the progressive replacement of the earlier paradigms of physical anthropology with those of social anthropology, displacing the focus on collecting anatomical remains and measurements of the earlier tradition, represented by Paul Broca and Paul Topinard (Dias, 2004) in favor of the collection of artefacts and texts as evidence of the distinctive ways of life of colonized populations. It also involved – as a major point of difference between Rivet and Spencer – a break with the principles of evolutionism in 148

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favor of diffusionist perspectives to account for the specificity of the practices congregated together in distinct cultural areas. In truth neither of these shifts was ever carried through to the point of a complete break with earlier forms of racial science in either Rivet’s work or the practices of the MH more generally (Conklin, 2008). There was, however, a significant shift in museum practice from the earlier exhibition, at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, of anatomically grounded racial hierarchies towards a concern with artifactual and textual markers of territorially distinctive ways of life. I want, as my second point, to distinguish two ways in which this concern was manifested at the MH in view of its operations at the intersections of two different institutional networks. These can be usefully identified with respect to the MH’s express conception as a vehicle for realizing the two-pronged programme that Marcel Mauss had proposed for the development of French ethnology and which, through the Institut d’Ethnologie, established in 1925 as the intellectual hub of the ensemble of anthropological institutions that Rivet coordinated around the MH, recruited general support from within the discipline. The first prong of this programme took its lead from Mauss’s complaint that the ‘general public knows nothing of our research.… Scientists must do publicity, since a science can become popular only though vulgarisation’ (Mauss, cit. Fournier, 2006: 214). The MH was in this regard, and quite unusually, established as a museum that was explicitly committed to a program of public pedagogy that aimed to transform public attitudes towards questions of race and the colonized. The second prong took its lead from Mauss’s conception of the role that ethnology should play in support of a new phase of colonial policy governed by humanist conceptions: Colonial policy may be the area in which the adage ‘knowledge is power’ is best confirmed. By respecting and using beliefs and customs, modifying the economic and technological system only with caution, not opposing anything directly, and using everything, [administrators] could arrive at humane, easy, and productive colonial practices. (Mauss, cit Fournier, 2006: 166) These two different conceptions of the MH’s function were performed through two different networks. They also entailed different mechanisms of effect. Michel Foucault’s comments on the differences between governing strategies that operate through the mechanisms of the public and those of the milieu bear on the distinction I have in mind here (Foucault, 2007: 3, 19–21, 297). In the case of the former, governing relates to the population through its beliefs, opinions, and customs, seeking to get a hold on these through public and educational programs and campaigns. Here government relates to the members of a population as subjects of voluntary actions whose conduct is to be changed by persuasive means orientated to recruiting their assent to the aims and objectives of governing authorities. Where government relates to a population via the mechanism of the milieu, however, it applies specific forms of expertise to modifying the material conditions affecting that population— conceived not as subjects, but as an aggregate whose conduct is shaped by its relations to its milieu. Shaped by international initiatives after the 1914–1918 war to develop museums as instruments of democratic education, and by the Greater France rhetorics and policies of the inter war years, the MH formed part of a network of public and civic institutions that sought to transform French attitudes towards the populations of France’s colonies in West 149

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Africa and Indochina. This involved a revision of earlier hierarchically organized conceptions of racial divisions grounded in anatomical differences in favor of a humanistic conception of all races as being ‘equal but different’, separated by different cultural histories and traditions overlaid on a shared substratum of a common humanity. It also involved a revision of attitudes towards the inhabitants of France’s colonies as parts of the rich cultural diversity of Greater France, united with French people as parts of a transnational family.21 While thus saluted as subjects of the Greater France, this made little practical difference to France’s colonial populations since this recognition of a certain kind of cultural kinship was not accompanied by any conferral of citizenship rights. The MH participated in this new civic-public assemblage via its exhibition galleries. After an early period marked by distinctive aesthetic forms for valorizing Otherness associated with the principles of ‘ethnographic surrealism’, these were organized in accordance with the principles of the museographie claire. Developed by Georges Henri Rivière, these aimed to give material expression to the organizing principles of the new ethnography: the exhibition of the relations between the elements comprising the distinctive fabric of different territorially defined cultures considered in their relations to their environments (Gorgus, 2003: 56–60). These exhibition galleries and the special exhibitions of the materials the MH collected through its fieldwork expeditions constituted, under Rivet’s leadership, the most significant material culture contribution to the anti-racist programs of the Popular Front. They were also significant points of engagement for the cultural project of negritude developed by French-trained African intellectual elites who travelled to Paris precisely in order to engage in a politics that was denied them in situ: a politics of culture and identity worked through via the mechanisms of the public and civic spheres.22 That this was so, Gary Wilder argues, was because of a contradiction at the heart of the governmental rationality of colonial humanism, a contradiction in which the MH participated in view of its contribution – particularly through its relations with the Institut d’Ethnologie – to the training of colonial administrators. Established with the support of, and funding from, France’s key colonial and overseas ministries, and committed from the start to providing the legislature with, as Mauss had proposed, ‘a systematic knowledge of the customs, beliefs, and techniques of the populations it is called upon to direct’ (Rivière, 1931), the connection between the differentiating particularism of post-Maussian ethnology and colonial humanism was a double-edged one. On the one hand, in the stress it placed on the distinctive qualities of different cultures, it served as a resource for anti-racist programs of public education within France. As a scientific adjunct to the task of colonial administration, however, the MH conceived and addressed the inhabitants of France’s West African colonies as the objects of a form of colonial rule that was to be brought to bear on them from without through the use of ethnology as a means for the scientific manipulation of the milieus governing the conditions of life of the colonized. This division of functions within the MH was expressed by the provision of a laboratory, set aside from the exhibition galleries, that was reserved for the scientific study of the materials brought to the museum from its fieldwork exhibitions and for consultation, inter alia, by colonial officials and trainees. Although not an exact parallel, it is worth recalling that, for Latour, the laboratory plays a significant role in the field sciences in the relations between sites of collection and centers of calculation by providing a context in which materials gathered from the former can be brought into new relations with one another. The relations between specimens collected from the field, he argues, can be reconfigured as ‘the researcher can shift the position of 150

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specimens and substitute one for another as if they are shuffling cards’ (Latour, 1999: 38). Latour also stresses the respects in which such laboratory rearrangements provide templates which, once relayed back to the original site of fieldwork investigation, serve to organize various forms of scientific administrative action on that site. In this respect, the role of the MH in effecting a new shuffle of things which (partially) dismantled anatomically grounded racial hierarchies in favor of the differentiating particularism of colonial humanism also provided a template for new forms of action on the colonial social. These sought, as Wilder puts it, to combine a humanistic universalism with a respect for African cultural specificities and a residual but still potent evolutionism that would subject African societies to a programme of guided social development to help overcome their backwardness. Here, the expert knowledge of indigenous customs, traditions, and economic and technological systems that Mauss called for provided the resources for programs of social development which failed to address indigenous populations as either subjects or citizens or to cultivate the institutions of colonial civil society needed for this purpose. While providing a point of engagement for the cultural politics of deracinated colonial intellectuals in Paris, the MH was simultaneously an integral component of a scientific-administrative complex that had significant consequences for the governance of colonial populations who had little, if any, inkling of its existence. The same was true of the relations between Baldwin Spencer’s fieldwork, his museum practice, and the forms of Aboriginal administration that prevailed during the inter war years. I have already noted that Aborigines were not counted among the publics of Australia’s museums. If their presence in museums was envisaged at all, it was as specimens rather than as a public. It was still possible as late as 1932 for the University of Adelaide Board of Anthropological Research to apply (unsuccessfully) to the Anthropology Committee of the Australian National Research Council for funding to bring Aborigines from the River Murray area into the South Australia Museum where, in return for a few shillings a week, they might be studied exhaustively (Gray, 2007: 55–61). Nonetheless, although not addressed via the NMV’s public programs, Aborigines were significantly affected by the shuffle of things produced by Spencer’s arrangement of its ethnological collections. These functioned as the material bank and guarantor for the representations of Aboriginality that were put in broader public and scientific circulation by Spencer and Gillen, and they played a part in furnishing new templates for the administration of Australia’s indigenous inhabitants. The logic of these arrangements, however, was quite different from differentiating particularism of French colonial humanism. This is not to suggest that Spencer denied the existences of differences – in appearance, beliefs, and rituals – between different Aboriginal tribes. However, while recognizing these, and as a counter to diffusionist accounts,23 he interpreted them as the result of adaptations to varied environmental conditions encountered by the dispersion of a single racial group through the continent. Diversity was thus retrieved into an essential unity in that Spencer interpreted all Aboriginal customs, beliefs, artefacts, and so on as the expressions of a primitive level of social development that was rooted ineradicably in a shared bloodline. This ruled out the prospect of any future development, whether from within, as a consequence of a built-in propensity for development, or from without, through religious or secular civilizing program. The logical consequence of such conceptions consisted in the development of administrative arrangements, initiated in 1914 and lasting through the inter war years, which combined a program of passive genocide with one of civilization via the bloodline. This was to be achieved by separating ‘half-caste’ Aborigines from their ‘full-blood’ relatives and promoting inter marrying between them so 151

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that, via the dilution of their Aboriginal bloodline, they might, by becoming progressively white, also acquire the ability to be civilized. Meanwhile, ‘full-blood’ Aborigines were to be left to follow the road to extinction that the laws of competition prescribed. It might be tempting to attribute the contrasting consequences of the differentiating particularism of French colonial ethnology and the racially homogenizing orientations of Australia anthropology to differences in the ethical persona of the key personnel involved – as a matter of Rivet’s tolerant pluralism versus Spencer’s evolutionism. Tempting but misleading. For these differences were themselves shaped by the different colonial logics bearing on the relations between fieldwork, anthropological practice, museums, and colonial administration according to whether these formed a part of settler colonialism (the Australian case) or of the administration of overseas colonies (the French case). Where the latter related to the colonized as an economic resource to be developed, the former related to them as rival occupants of the land and, as such, to be eliminated.

Time and the Reshuffling of Things I will in concluding, to go back to my starting point by comparing the processes of collecting indigenous cultures that museums have been a party to with those statistical gatherings of indigenous populations effected by turn-of-the-century censuses in Canada and Australia. These, it will be recalled, failed to produce the indigenous in the form of what Ruppert calls ‘census subjects’, registering them rather as ‘census “others”’. While not dissenting from this assessment, Tim Rowse usefully highlights the use that indigenous Australians and Māori have made of census data in political processes of identity formation by translating their representations as census objects into ‘an ontological politics of “closing the gaps”’ (Rowse, 2009). This politics consists in the use of census data that reveal the respects in which indigenous Australians fall short of average population norms (in terms of health, level of education, employment rates, etc.) to urge the need for policies to reduce or eliminate such gaps. This is, Rowse argues, a politics that also functions as a process of identity formation in lodging claims to distinctive forms of people hood. The indigenous cultural materials that were collected in museums during the fieldwork phase of anthropology have subsequently played a similar role in political processes of identity formation. In her discussion of the distinctive role that museum collections play in the development of particular forms of sociality, Amiria Henare argues that the restricted mobility across space that results from the enclosure of objects in museums serves to enhance ‘their ability to move through time’ (Henare, 2005: 9). They can thus, among other things, function as significant components in systems of distributed personhood that are spread across time, since museum collections have proved crucial to identity formation in view of their ability to enact what Henare calls ‘heritable communities of people and things’ (Henare, 2005: 8).24 While it goes beyond my concerns to engage with these matters in any detail here, the Aboriginal materials that were gathered in Australian museums in the early phase of anthropological fieldwork have since become profoundly politicized objects as museums and, indeed, Western exhibition forms, more generally, have become sites of significant contention for indigenous Australians. The indigenous agencies that have been involved in these struggles have varied in form, in the political stances they have enunciated, and in the points at which they have been applied in the now more complex networks that mediate the relations between indigenous communities, collecting institutions, government bodies, schools, publics, tourists, and, post-Mabo (the judgment that overthrew 152

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the doctrine of terra nullius by recognizing traditional forms of land ownership), the legal system considered in its relations to the politics of land claims.25 Yet, as one aspect of these expanded networks for indigenous practice and intervention, there remains a legacy from the period I have discussed here. Povinelli identifies this in noting how, for Spencer and Gillen as, indeed, for earlier Australian anthropological traditions, the ‘real Aborigine’ had always to be sought elsewhere, a constantly elusive object beyond the contaminations of white contact. This is now, she argues, coded into the complex relations between indigenous Australians, anthropologists, the collections of indigenous materials in museums, and the law in enacting the ‘heritable communities of people and things’ that are the conditions for recognition on which, post-Mabo, the confirmation of Aboriginal claims to land ownership depends. For this requires the demonstration of an effective continuity of tradition and practice that stretches back beyond the settler state, a capacity to somehow still be connected to and embody the lost ancient customs defining the position that indigenous Australians must be able to occupy within the time-space coordinates of the nation state if they are to benefit from its new dispensations. To illustrate her point, Povinelli cites an exchange between a lawyer and an indigenous witness in the Kenbi Land Claim: What was it like before the white man? Lawyer:  Tom Barradjap:  I don’t know mate I never been there. (Povinelli, 2002: 61) The lawyer’s question was, of course, Spencer’s question also, and its continuing force shows how far the historically formative orchestration of the relations between the past, ‘Aboriginality’,26 and the nation that his work established remain points to be negotiated in engagement with such relations today. Barradjap’s response points to a politics that refuses these terms.

Notes 1 Marking a starting point for the fieldwork in anthropology is notoriously difficult, partly because there is no clear dividing line between the forms of travel and reporting that such expeditions involved and earlier travel literatures (Debaene, 2010; Defert, 1982; Fabian, 2000) and partly because, wherever the line is drawn, earlier exceptions can be invoked. That said, anthropological fieldwork is conventionally described as beginning with the Torres Strait Island expeditions led by Alfred Cort Haddon (1888, 1898), Baldwin Spencer’s and Frank Gillen’s fieldwork trips to Central Australia (beginning in 1896/1897), and Franz Boas’s participation in the American Museum of Natural History’s Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902). As Alison Petch (2007) and others have noted, the Notes and Queries, which had played a key role in organiz­ ing earlier, more ‘amateur’ forms of travelling among and collecting the Other, assumed, by the 1912 edition, anthropologically trained fieldworkers as their primary addressee. Henrika Kuklick (2011) also advances a number of reasons for regarding this period as a distinctive moment in the development of anthropological fieldwork practice in view of (i) its adoption of the scientific models for fieldwork developed in the natural sciences, and (ii) its dependence on the transports infrastructures of rail and telegraph and on the pacification of colonial frontiers. However, I stretch this conventional definition to include the fieldwork expeditions organized by the Musée de l’Homme in the 1930s as the first effective period of fieldwork of French ethnology (de L’Estoile, 2007; Dias, 1991). 2 I draw here and elsewhere on earlier engagements with these questions: see Bennett (2004, 2009, 2010).

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Tony Bennett 3 Latour’s assumption that centers of calculation were found only in European and North American metropolitan locations has been criticized for neglecting more localized centers of calculation operating in colonial contexts (Gascoigne, 1996). My approach responds to these criticisms by considering the operations of museums as centers of calculation in both metropolitan (Paris) and colonial (Melbourne) settings. 4 The establishment of a Chair in Anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1925 and its central position in the organization of anthropological research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation marked a shift away from the strong links between museums and anthropology in Australia (Gray, 2007: 55–61). 5 The symbolic significance of such refusals, given the association of nakedness with savagery, is discussed by Jane Lydon (2005). 6 The more or less sudden appearance of toas in the early twentieth century suggests that they were produced in a calculated appeal to the interest in the exotic exhibited by the collectors of the South Australian Museum rather than being ‘genuinely’ ethnographic (Jones, 2007: Chapter 6). 7 See Herle and Rouse (1998) and Mulvaney et al. (1997) for accounts of this in relation to the Haddon and Spencer and Gillen fieldwork expeditions. 8 I have discussed this weakness of the concept elsewhere: see Bennett (1998: 203–206, 210–213). 9 It is important to stress the museum-university interactions during this period to counter a tendency to read back into it the more radical separation between the two that is attributed to the phase of ‘fieldwork proper’, conventionally marked by Malinowski’s work in New Guinea. This is often connected to two other divisions: between the armchair phase of anthropology and the phase of the scientific investigator in the field; and between the collection of artifacts and the collection of textual evidence relating to the social and cultural ways of life of the peoples under study. However, a strong connection between museums and fieldwork expeditions is evident in the case of the Haddon, Jesup, Spencer, and Gillen expeditions and Musée de l’Homme exhibitions. All of these retained a significant concern with the collection of objects, and strong connections between museums and universities were evident in all these cases. 10 The continuing significance of Coranderrk as a key site of Aboriginal intellectual and cultural leadership is testified to by the prominence accorded it in the third program – ‘Freedom for Our Lifetime’ – in the television series First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia, first broadcast by SBS in 2008. 11 The NMV’s ethnographic collections increased from 1,200 to over 36,000 items during Spencer’s period as a director: see Mulvaney and Calaby (1985: 252). 12 John Mulvaney and Howard Morphy have tended to oscillate between praise for Spencer’s (and Gillen’s) liberal deeds and views on certain matters and condemnation of their subscription to manifestly racist conceptions of Aborigines as evolutionary throwbacks. Their equivocations fail to take adequate account of the respects in which Spencer’s views drew on the divided currency of liberal thought – partly on the classical formulations of Mill, but also on the revisions of classical liberalism effected by the post-Darwinian development of the historical sciences. 13 I discuss these relations between the historical sciences and the historicization of character in providing a new template for governmental action on the social in greater detail in Bennett (2004). 14 See, for a fuller development of this point, Bennett (2011). 15 Spencer (1922: 8) made a point of stressing how closely his and Gillen’s books were based on the material evidence gathered from their expeditions and then stored in the NMV. 16 However, as Kuklick (2006) notes, Spencer did protest at some of the interpretations placed on his findings by such savants. 17 I draw here on Mulvaney et al. (1997). 18 He was the Special Commissioner and Chief Protector of Aborigines of the Northern Territory in 1912 and prepared a number of influential reports on the administration of Aboriginal affairs. 19 These played a crucial role in Spencer’s and Gillen’s accumulation of, in Steinmetz’s terms, ‘ethnographic capital’. Spencer had become a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George by 1904. Gillen was made a Corresponding Fellow of the Anthropological Institute in London and in 1900 was the President of the ethnology and anthropology section of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (see Mulvaney et al., 1997). 20 I draw on the following sources in my discussion of these developments: Conklin (2002a, 2002b, 2008); Laurière (2008); de L’Estoile (2007); Sherman (2004); Siebeud (2004, 2007). Although the

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The ‘Shuffle of Things’ and the Distribution of Agency institutions established in this period were described as ethnographic or ethnological, with important divisions of theoretical orientation between them, I use the more general anglophone term ‘anthropology’ here to encompass all these institutional and intellectual tendencies, qualifying it as ‘social anthropology’ to refer to the Durkheim-Mauss lineage which rapidly became ascendant. 21 See also Peer (1998) on the conception of the Greater France and its consequences within France, and Lebovics (2004) for an assessment of the concept’s longer-term legacies. 22 The discussion of these questions in the second part of Wilder (2005) provides a useful guide to the general issues involved, while Clifford’s famous essay on ‘ethnographic surrealism’ (Clifford, 1988) offers some indicators of their relations to the MH. 23 Spencer expressed this opposition in his criticisms of a paper presented by W.H. Rivers to the 1914 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Melbourne in which Rivers argued that Australia’s Aboriginal population has descended from a number of migrant streams from different origins (Kuklick, 2006: 565–567). 24 I draw here, in my reference to systems of distributed personhood, on the work of Marilyn Strathern (1999). 25 For some useful engagement with these questions, see Healy and Witcomb (2006) and Healy (2008). 26 I use the term ‘Aboriginality’ here as the historical pertinent one, but in quotation marks in recognition of the criticisms of this concept that have been advanced and the preference for either more local (Koori) or more general (indigenous) designations.

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Tony Bennett Dias N (1991) Le Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878–1908): Anthropologie et Muséologie en France. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Dias N (2004) La Mesure des Sens: Les Anthropologues et le Corps Humain au XIXe Siècle. Paris: Aubier. Gray G (2007) A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Fabian J (2000) Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Foucault M (2007) Security, Population, Territory: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fournier M (2006) Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Gascoigne J (1996) The ordering of nature and the ordering of empire: A commentary. In: Miller DP and Reill PH (eds) Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and the Representations of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107–113. Gorgus N (2003) Le Magician des Vitrines: Le Muséologue Georges Henri Rivière. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Healy C and Witcomb A (eds) (2006) South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture. Clayton, VIC: Monash University ePress. Healy C (2008) Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Henare A (2005) Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Herle A and Rouse S (eds) (1998) Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Hoffenberg P (2001) An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Jones P (1987) South Australian anthropological history: The board for anthropological research and its early expeditions. Records of the South Australian Museum 20: 71–92. Jones P (2007) Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press. Kuklick H (2006) ‘Humanity in the chrysalis stage’: Indigenous Australians in the anthropological imagination, 1899–1926. British Journal for the History of Science 39(4): 535–568. Kuklick H (2011) Reflections on the history of fieldwork, with special reference to sociocultural anthropology. Isis 102: 1–38. Laurière C (2008) Paul Rivet, le Savant et le Politique. Paris: Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle. Latour B (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour B (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lebovics H (2004) Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Lydon J (2005) Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. McCarthy C (2007) Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display. Oxford and New York: Berg. Morphy H (1996) More than mere facts: Repositioning Spencer and Gillen in the history of anthropology. In: Morton SR and Mulvaney DJ (eds) Exploring Central Australia: Society, Environment and the 1894 Expedition. Chipping Norton, NSW: Surrey Beatty, pp. 29–38. Morton SR and Mulvaney DJ (eds) (1996) Exploring Central Australia: Society, Environment and the 1894 Expedition. Chipping Norton, NSW: Surrey Beatty. Mulvaney DJ and Calaby JH (1985) “So Much That Is New”: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929: A Biography. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Mulvaney J, Morphy H and Petch A (eds) (1997) My Dear Spencer: The Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer. Melbourne: Hyland House. Peer S (1998) France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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The ‘Shuffle of Things’ and the Distribution of Agency Petch A (2007) Notes and queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum. Museum Anthropology 30(1): 1348–1379. Povinelli EA (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rivière, Georges H. and Paul Rivet (1931) ‘Rapport sur la réorganisation général du Musée’, Archives of the Musée de l’Homme, 2 AM 1 G2b: Dossier relative à la reorganisation générale du Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Rowse T (1998) White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Rowse T (2009) The ontological politics of “closing the gaps”. Journal of Cultural Economy 2(1–2): 33–48. Ruppert E (2009) Becoming peoples: “Counting heads in Northern wilds”. Journal of Cultural Economy 2(1–2): 11–32. Schumaker L (1996) A tent with a view: Colonial officers, anthropologists, and the making of the field in Northern Rhodesia. OSIRIS 11: 237–258. Siebeud E (2004) Marcel Mauss: ‘Projet de présentation d’un bureau d’ethnologie’. Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 10: 105–115. Siebeud E (2007) The metamorphosis of ethnology in France, 1839–1930. In: Kuklick H (ed) A New History of Anthropology. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 96–110. Sherman D (2004) “Peoples ethnographic”: Objects, museums, and the colonial inheritance of French ethnology. French Historical Studies 27(3): 669–703. Spencer B (1914) The aboriginals of Australia. In: Knibbs GH (ed) Federal Handbook Prepared in Connection with the Eighty-Fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Australia, August 1914. Melbourne: Commonwealth of Australia. Spencer B (1921) Blood and shade divisions of Australian tribes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 34(1): 2–6. Spencer B and Gillen F (1899) The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan. Steinmetz G (2007) The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German colonial state in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Strathern M (1999) Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press. Wilder G (2005) The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the two World Wars. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wolfe P (1999) Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London: Cassell.

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9 THE TECHNICAL AND THE POLITICAL Andrew Barry

A Technological Society1 In a lecture at the London School of Economics in November 1997, Mme Edith Cresson, the then European Commissioner for Science, Research and Development and former French Socialist Prime Minister, spoke of the need to move ‘towards a knowledge-based Europe’. The theme is a familiar one in European and North American political life. Euro­ American political and social elites have long reckoned that knowledge and expertise are critical to the conduct of government, while European identity has historically been associated with notions of enlightenment, science and invention.2 But if Cresson’s talk repeated familiar themes, it gave them a particular contemporary twist. One theme was technology and training. Whereas in the past, education might have been thought of as a one-off affair, a process of apprenticeship, the rapidity of technological change demanded a different attitude. ‘Knowledge and skills become obsolete and must continually be refreshed’.3 Societies and individuals must be prepared to re-tool, adapt and update. Technical innovation continued apace and neither individuals nor societies could afford to be left behind. The other strand was the threat of what she termed globalisation.4 Europe had, she noted, both an ageing population and, as a proportion of the world’s population, a declining one. At the same time, new actors on the international scene such as India (in software), China (in biotechnology) and Brazil (in aeronautics) were beginning to compete in those knowledge-based industries in which Europe had traditionally had a competitive advantage. It was not so much a question of a declining relative population, but a declining proportion of the number of technologically equipped persons; a fragile technological culture. In the context of the globalisation of technology, Europeans had ‘no choice’. ‘If they wish to survive they must pool their strengths and turn their backs on the limited strategy of protecting national interests’.5 The knowledge-based society of Europe could survive but only if the barriers dividing it were reduced, and new connections were forged. Mme Cresson’s argument echoed those of earlier commentators on European integration. In post-1945 politics, the European Community can be considered as something of a political invention; a remarkable attempt, however flawed, to establish a system of government which operated across national boundaries. But, as her remarks indicate, it has DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-10 158

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also been one whose history is bound up with a sense of both the potential, and the threat, of technology. How should one conceive of the relation between government, politics and technology today? In this book I argue that we should speak of the government of a technological society. In saying this I do not wish to claim that society is simply more technological than it has been in the past, or is becoming more so. Nor do I wish to mark an epochal shift from an earlier form of society (industrial, modern, capitalist) to a later (technological) one.6 Nor do I aim to identify a new stage in the history of modes of government which might be compared to the era of liberalism, welfare-state social democracy or neo-liberalism.7 Rather, in speaking of a technological society I want to interrogate a quite specific contemporary political preoccupation. This is a political preoccupation with the problems technology poses, with the potential benefits it promises, and with the models of social and political order it seems to make available. We live in a technological society, I argue, to the extent that specific technologies dominate our sense of the kinds of problems that government and politics must address, and the solutions that we must adopt. A technological society is one which takes technical change to be the model for political invention. The concept of a technological society does not refer to a stage in history, but rather to a specific set of attitudes towards the political present which have acquired a particular contemporary intensity, salience and form.8 In this book I examine the contemporary preoccupation with technology in political life along two interrelated dimensions. The first is the centrality of technology to the reconfiguration of what one can call the space of government.9 Traditionally, the space of government has been conceived in terms of a relation between a national population and a national territory. ‘Societies’ and ‘economies’ have been contained within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. Here, however, I argue that government operates not just in relation to spaces defined and demarcated by geographical or territorial boundaries but in relation to zones formed through the circulation of technical practices and devices. Practices of government are as much oriented towards the problems of defending, connecting and reconstructing such technological spaces, as with older concerns with the defence and demarcation of physical territory. This sense of a need to create technological connections and maintain technological zones is not confined to national administrations, nor manifested simply in statements of public policy. It also figures in the calculations of firms, international organisations, public organisations and individual persons. In the nineteenth century a measure of population was reckoned to be a key indicator of the health and wealth of a nation, a race or a society.10 Today, however, it is more likely that national, organisational and individual capacities will be judged against a measure of intellectual productivity or property, skill or scientific or computer literacy. This is an era obsessed by a series of interconnected technological problems: with the maintenance of technological competitiveness and the improvement of research productivity; with the need to patent and protect intellectual property; with the dangers posed by the unintended consequences of technological development; with the public understanding of science; with the risks and prospects for e-commerce and electronic democracy; and with the need for life-long learning in the face of rapid technical change.11 Mme Cresson’s anxieties about the threat and the potential of technology to the future of Europe are certainly not original. They have been expressed in different forms and with different rationales from the nineteenth century onwards. But they have acquired a new sense of urgency and centrality in contemporary political life. 159

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The second axis of this book follows on from this. In the second part of the book I argue that a feature of today’s technological society is a concern with the technical skills, capacities and knowledge of the individual citizen. To live in a technological society is thought to require much more than the capacity to make judgements about the prices and quality of commodities, and the suitability of parties and politicians for government office. It also implies the need to possess and develop one’s knowledge and skill. It demands a mind and a body able to meet the exacting demands of new flexible work routines, new technologies and emerging environmental hazards. If it was once thought rational to accept the judgement of scientific experts without question, today a reliance on experts is said by many to be an inadequate basis for good government. The citizen of a technological society expects and is expected to be informed and updated. She should be knowledgeable about the risks of smoking and the side-effects of drugs, be ready to learn about the latest advances and advantages of new information technologies, the strengths and weaknesses of ‘medical’ and ‘natural’ approaches to childbirth, the possible consequences of eating fats, sugars or GM foods, and the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of exercise and diet. She has to be knowledgeable about the multiple intersections and connections between her body and pollutants, drugs and technical devices, and the dangers and possibilities such connections may open up. Her health and her environment are matters of choice.12 Technological innovation forms new artefacts. The government of a technological society implies the formation of new human capacities and attributes. This demand for ordinary citizens to improve their own technical capacities and knowledge comes from diverse directions and has various motivations. Some scientific organisations expect greater ‘public understanding of science’ will act as a counter to the scepticism towards science which is thought to be so prevalent within the wider population.13 Sociologists and others argue for greater public understanding of the limits and weaknesses of scientific expertise. Many environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth reckon that the availability of scientific and technical information will help foster more rational environment policies on the part of government. National governments, international organisations and firms argue that the scientific and technical literacy of a population is a measure of its value as a workforce. Individuals need to be better informed, and continually updated. In reflecting on the place of technology in the shifting orders of government, three considerations should be uppermost. One concerns the complex cross-overs between political and scientific and technical discourses. Today, images and concepts such as networking, chaos, fractal geometry, interactivity, evolution, potential and complexity figure routinely in political debate and cultural criticism, in scientific practice and social theory. This is not a new phenomenon. For example, one can point to the significance of notions of mechanism, of the body, and of organic function throughout the histories of science and government. One can consider the importance of evolutionary theory and of concepts of degeneration in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political thought; and the earlier conception of the body politic; or the more recent prominence of ideas of system and structure; or the way that the state has so often been figured as a machine or an apparatus.14 This book argues, however, that the particular form and extent of the contemporary interplay between political, technical and social scientific discourse demands interrogation. Such an interrogation should encourage reflexivity about our own analytical categories and metaphors and their histories. What does the prevalence of such metaphors suggest about the connections between developments in the information and biosciences and changing forms of government? In these circumstances what is the appropriate analytical vocabulary for the social 160

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sciences? And what is the relation between the conceptual inventiveness of the social sciences and other sites and practices of invention? The second concerns the complexity of technical practices, and their relation to government. On the one hand, as historians and sociologists of science have shown, scientific and technical work is much more an untidy, practical, uncertain and collective business than is often imagined.15 Moreover, despite the ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ character of science and technology the difficulty of applying scientific or technical practices outside very specific sites is often not recognised. Technical practices are often extremely localised in their possible application. Specific technologies, such as diagnostic instruments, may only be used effectively within particular laboratory conditions. On the other hand, rather than conceive of government as an institution, one might view it, following Foucault, as a practice of government or self-government.16 In this way one might speak of the government of populations, of children, and of individual conduct. In Foucault’s account, government is inevitably a technical matter. Practices of government rely on an array of more or less formalised and more or less specialised technical devices from car seat-belts and driving codes to dietary regimes; and from economic instruments to psychotherapy. Moreover, government operates both on and across many distinctions which are so critical to our sense of the terrain of politics: public and private; state and market; the realm of culture (language, identity, cultural institutions) and the domain of nature (the body, sexuality, the environment). In this way, the study of government, in Foucault’s sense of the term, opens up a much broader field of politics to inspection. The political need not be only associated with the control of political institutions, the activities of the state or the formation of social movements. Instead, I take the political to refer to the ways in which artefacts, activities or practices become objects of contestation. The third concerns the relation between government and the politics of protest and opposition. As some critics have observed, research on government, following Foucault, has been largely concerned with what one might call ‘the political mentality of rule’. In studying the formation of objects such as ‘the economy’, ‘the school child’ or ‘unemployment’, researchers have largely confined themselves to the study of the documents of experts and administrators. Such studies have focused On the various incarnations of ... “the will to govern”, as it is enacted in a multitude of programmes, strategies, tactics, devices, calculations, negotiations, intrigues, persuasions, seductions aimed at the conduct of the conduct of individuals, groups populations - and indeed onself .17 In this context, ‘resistance’ has sometimes simply been equated with the inevitable failures of government to forge a correspondence between the idealised objects of political and economic thought (‘the free market’, ‘the responsible parent’, ‘the disinterested bureaucrat’, ‘the self-disciplined student’) and the knowledge that is generated about such objects by experts, administrators and individual citizens as part of the messy practice of governing.18 But to speak of opposition and protest is not simply to talk of the failure of government. For, as we shall see, opposition and protest may itself have their own logic and inventiveness; their own spaces and temporalities; their own forms of knowledge and technique; their own ways of restricting as well as opening up the terrain of politics.19 Moreover, it would be a mistake to think that the characteristic forms of opposition that exist within a technological society are necessarily anti-technological in character, or to draw an opposition between 161

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the rational calculating and technological character of an administered society and more or less romantic and utopian forms of resistance. As we shall see, even the most apparently anti-technological of protests has a certain technical dimension. Moreover, even the most bureaucratic institutions may contain practices and activities which are politically inventive. In investigating opposition and protest it is important neither to romanticise protest nor to view it simply as an expression of a pre-existing antagonism or a manifestation of an underlying historical logic. Nor should we assume that a clear line can be drawn between zones of rational administration and sites of political invention.

The Political and the Technical If government is conceived of not so much as an institution but more broadly as an activity of governing and self-governing, then what of the political? Instead of equating the political with particular institutionalised conflicts – such as those between and within political parties and the state – in this book I propose to understand the political as an index of space of contestation and dissensus. That which is political is that which opens the space of politics. Public politics often remains centred on the conduct of political parties and national government, but this does not mean that the political can be reduced to such conflicts. There can be a politics of national identity in so far as identity is not fixed, but potentially contestable, multidimensional and irreducible.20 There can be a politics to private life given the ways in which the boundaries of the private and the public have been reconfigured and contested. There can be a politics of the body given the complex ways in which the body and its acts are made up. To say this is not to say that there is a politics to every aspect of life, or there should be. Refusing to open up certain questions to political contestation can be an appropriate and necessary response; for there can be an excess of politics; an overproduction of dissensus, an over-evaluation of the political. Rather, it is to say that although, in practice, the institutional and discursive spaces of a democratic politics will always be circumscribed, in principle, where the limits are set is always open to question.21 A democratic politics is not one which demands that every issue should be made a political issue; it is a politics which claims that anything can be political in principle. Whether to make something a political issue, and how to resolve an issue which has been made political, is a matter of judgement. Technology, by contrast, is often regarded as something that exists outside of politics. If we understand technology to refer to any kind of association of devices, techniques, skills and artefacts which is intended to perform a particular task, then the deployment of technology is often seen as a way of avoiding the noise and irrationality of political conflict. From this perspective, if the political is a conflictual relation, technology offers a set of skills, techniques, practices and objects with which it is possible to evade and circumscribe politics. Indeed, there is a tradition in social and political thought which sees technology as a way out of the apparent irresolvability of political controversies – as an anti-political instrument.22 Scientific and technical methods are thought to provide solutions which transcend ideological differences. Moreover, in so far as technical instruments play a critical role in the production of scientific knowledge, technology gives society an access to reality in a way that cannot be contested for interested reasons; a firm foundation on which optimal solutions might be found to practical problems. In those international political arenas in which consensus may be difficult to reach, it is thought that science and technology have a large role to play.23 162

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A great deal of political thinking is certainly untroubled by the idea that technology can provide ways of avoiding political disagreements, or of putting limits on them. Indeed technical solutions are actively sought. Scientific and technical experts are often welcomed as arbiters, and in many cases rightly so. Scientific arguments and technical practices offer ways of reducing controversy and circumventing potential disagreements. In the advanced industrial countries, a whole series of hybrid politico-technical institutions – from expert advisory committees to public inquiries – exist in order to resolve, bypass or defer political disputes.24 Recommendations are made on the considered judgement of experts. But whether such institutions achieve the results that are expected of them, social and political thinkers have rightly been worried by the notion that political controversy can or should be short-circuited through the application of expertise. In response to this danger, a critical alternative is often offered. This takes the form of developing a higher form of reason against which the limitations of what is termed the instrumental rationality of science and technology can be measured, or can be judged impoverished.25 It is a solution which suggests that civil society or the public sphere can, in principle, provide a more rational solution to political controversy than that offered by the application of technical methods. In this view, it is the public sphere rather than science and technology that is the instrument of an anti-political enterprise. In this book I take a different view. This is a view which is certainly ambivalent about technology, but not on the basis of the imagined existence of space uncontaminated by technology. Two points can be made. First, there is no straightforward opposition between technology, on the one hand, and human and social capacities, on the other; nor is there such an opposition between the realm of technology, and the realm of politics. In part this is because technology plays a formative part in making up what we are as humans, and what we take to be social institutions. Social institutions have to be made, and technology is a key element in their make-up. Technology is an integral feature of what we take to be a hospital or a firm, a family, the state or a person. In part it is because there is always a social or human element to technology. A distinction can be made between a technical device, conceived of as a material or immaterial artefact, and a technology, a concept which refers not just to a device in isolation but also to the forms of knowledge, skill, diagrams, charts, calculations and energy which make its use possible.26 The idea that a non-human device or instrument can somehow work autonomously of its multiple connections with other (human and non­human) elements (language, bodies, minds, desire, practical skills, traditions of use) is a fantasy.27 Many have argued that it is possible for machines to be intelligent. But the intelligence attributed to machines hinges on the cultural invisibility of the human skills which accompany them. It is only by making the human invisible that it might be possible to make machines seem intelligent or creative.28 Seen in these terms, techniques and devices can become political – not just in the sense that they are used as instruments in conflicts between political parties or interests (of course they can be), or the sense that the deployment of expertise offers a way of resolving political controversy (for better and for worse, it can do) – but in the sense that technical designs and devices are bound up with the constitution of the human and the social. Any attempt to contest or challenge the social order may then involve – and probably will involve – an effort to contest the development and deployment of technology as well. To say that a technology can be political is not to denounce it, or to condemn it as a political instrument, or to say that its design reflects particular social or economic interests. Technology is not reducible to politics.29 Nor is to claim that technical devices and artefacts are ‘social 163

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constructions’ or are ‘socially shaped’:30 for the social is not something which exists independently from technology. Rather it is to say that the contestation of technical designs and practices may open up new objects and sites of politics. Technical controversies are forms of political controversy, although it is open to question whether, in particular instances, such disputes take place in a public political arena. Second, if we regard the public sphere as a set of spaces within which matters of truth and justice can be raised in public, then there is always a technical dimension to the specific forms that the public sphere can take, and the connection and distinction between the realms of ‘public’ and ‘private’ politics.31 Whether in the public demonstrations of scientific experts at public inquiries, or the televisual form of the studio debate or investigative documentary, or the ‘virtual architecture’ of discussion groups on the Internet, there is always a technology to the public sphere and to the complex configuration of the public and private realm.32 The contemporary public sphere cannot be understood as something like a set of spaces in which rational discussion simply takes place in an unmediated fashion. They are not like the Greek polis of the modern political imagination.33 Rather they are arrangements of persons and technical devices formed in particular settings, within which it is possible to articulate a range of rhetorical forms. It is these socio-technical arrangements that may allow arguments to be made, differences to be recognised and addressed, and which may include and exclude certain categories of person and argument, whether on the basis of gender or race or otherwise. Different arrangements have different advantages and disadvantages. But there is no ideal socio-technical form for a public sphere. The conduct of politics today is a technical matter. Technical innovation has become part of political life.

Arrangements In thinking about politics and government, a concern with technology can be contrasted with the dominant tradition of liberal political thought.34 For whereas liberal political and philosophical thought has had a great deal to say about science as a rational and autonomous enterprise,35 it has had very little to say about the apparently more mundane technical objects and practices which have such a critical importance to everyday life. In political thought, although not necessarily in political practice or public-policy debate, thinking about the technical has been marginalised in comparison both to the scientific and to the human. For many political scientists, there is a clear distinction to be made between the social world of politics and the material world of engineering and the natural sciences. Yet to analyse the conduct of political and economic life without considering the importance of material and immaterial devices and artefacts is simply to miss half the picture.36 Consider, for example, the critical role of a whole series of technical devices – such as computer trading systems – to the development of the capacity of buyers and sellers to make rapid calculations in financial markets; or the function of technologies such as ultrasound and X-ray scanners in the management and representation of the body.37 Or the importance of certain technical devices – from sleeping policemen to video cameras – in forming relations between political authorities and citizens. Or the centrality of photography, television and satellite surveillance technologies in the conduct of international relations. Such artefacts and devices are not merely passive objects of human manipulation. In the production of knowledge they are inevitably manipulated; but they also continually resist manipulation. Nor are they the projection of social forms onto matter. They are not merely social constructs. Material (and immaterial) objects produce effects, depending upon how they are 164

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related to, the forms and circumstances of their use, and the sites and circumstances within which they are situated. Effects emerge from a combination of persons and materials.38 Seen in these terms, instead of drawing a line between the social and the technical, one might instead analyse arrangements: of artefacts, practices and techniques, instruments, language and bodies.39 These arrangements make up what we tend to think of as persons and institutions: states, markets, families and so on. They are collectivities which include technological components. In principle, the complexity of such arrangements is irreducible to their distinct ‘social’ and ‘technical’, ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ elements. In practice, in scientific research, in sociology, and in public-policy analysis, distinctions are routinely made between the worlds of nature, technology, psychology, the body, the economy and social relations. Such distinctions are historically contingent and the boundaries between the categories are also contestable. The lines between what is considered ‘natural’ and ‘human’ and what is not can shift, and may be become difficult to sustain, or are sustained, but in new ways. Yet, as Marilyn Strathern has argued, in an age of artifice, in which the ‘natural’ is artificial, ‘we still act with Nature in mind’.40 In so far as distinctions are made between the ‘natural’, the social, the technical, and may have to be made, they have both costs and benefits.

Networks To be sure, many sociologists and anthropologists of science have emphasised the political character of science and technology. Some radical science scholars, in particular, have been concerned with the critical role of scientific practice in the construction of sexuality and race. Donna Haraway’s work is exemplary in this respect.41 But, with exceptions, mainstream work in science and technology studies has often seemed a rather specialist concern – a specialist interest in the politics of science and technology – with limited relevance to some of the central themes of political and historical debate – such as the origins and future of the nation-state, the need for a political response to globalisation, the development of environmental problems and the fragmentation of political certainties, identities and alignments. Science and technology studies have tended to be dominated by the study of ‘cases’ which become the objects of theoretical arguments about the character of the scientific and technical, but whose significance for the study of politics is obscure. In this way, the connections between science, technology and politics are not interrogated but reproduced. In these circumstances too, writers in international relations, cultural studies and politics have been inclined to see studies of science and technology as of rather marginal interest. Science and technology are just other areas for social or political analysis – and ones which are reckoned to be of markedly less importance than, for example, the economy, environmental security or gender to those concerned with an account of the changing international order, or with the analysis of emerging forms of global politics.42 From this perspective, science and technology studies is a specialist field. In thinking about the connection between technology and the study of politics and government one starting point is the recognition, following the work of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, that the ‘macro’ political order of the state is built up from a complex network of localised technical practices and devices.43 To begin to understand how modern government is possible over extended areas of territory, it is critical to understand the spatial connectedness of technical devices.44 But of what does this connectedness consist? Certainly, it involves technologies of communication and transport. A liberal democracy 165

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is one in which all can expect and are expected to observe and engage with, although not directly participate in, public political debate.45 And in the twentieth century, broadcast media have provided the technical infrastructure of a liberal democratic polity. A capitalist economy is one in which, in principle, the geographical and social mobility of persons, commodities and information is maximised through the development of networks of communication. Such an economy is, it is argued, necessarily too complex, and too dynamic, to be controlled from the centre and any attempt to direct it on the basis of one partial perspective would, in the end, be counterproductive. Centralised control should not necessarily be avoided, but it should be exercised with caution: ‘while markets can be established and regulated by political means, they obey a logic that escapes state control’.46 At the same time, liberal economic government is exercised through the multiple and mobile perspectives of many centres and many members – a series of visions which will always add up to something more than any centralised gaze. In this context, the idealised member of such an economy is a gendered one: a male citizen or entrepreneur who has the time to keep continually informed and in touch, and who is able to communicate and travel anywhere for his business. He is not rooted in a place, but in a web of extended connections;47 able to draw things together without ever forming them into a vision of the whole and without having need to do so. But the technical connectedness of social and economic life is more than just a matter of broadcasting stations, telephone lines, satellite connections and transport systems, and data about the properties of products and public and private services. It is more too than the existence of a more or less universal medium of exchange. For in the modern political imagination there is also a demand for technical practices and devices to be comparable with each other. If an empire or international market is to be formed then some common standards and agreements are necessary. If a nation is to be governed technically, then the technology of government must itself possess a certain degree of uniformity and comparability. Max Weber recognised something of the importance of this in pointing to development of the ethical and technical capacities of the modern bureaucrat – a figure who could perform administrative procedures routinely and impartially.48 In so far as they have been formed in roughly the same mould, it simply should not matter which bureaucrat performs the task entrusted to them. But if this is true of bureaucrats it is also true of a whole variety of more or less scientific techniques which are of critical importance to the functioning of government and the conduct of economic life. One can point to the importance of uniformity and comparability in the practices and techniques from thermometers and police identity parades, to doses of medicine and pollution-monitoring devices. If such technologies are to be relied on they must be in some way comparable to others of a similar kind; and if such techniques and practices are to be owned, patented and reproduced elsewhere they must have more or less comparable and compatible properties. They are expected to have similar effects on the object and persons to which they are applied, or to measure objects and events in comparable ways. Even if there is no visible connection between such devices, there is the possibility of a connection. In an idealised vision, then, technical devices and communication technologies appear to function as the infrastructure of an international economy, or as an infrastructure of the nation – connecting it together. They are the technical base on which social, economic and political life takes place and on which the operation of the law is possible – the base on which the liberal political order and the capitalist economy rests. As such, technical connections appear to form something like a network, and it is perhaps this image of a technological 166

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network which, in part, lies behind the prevalence of the idea of the network in contemporary political and intellectual debate. In the late nineteenth century, it was the notion of evolution which operated so effectively in what Gillian Beer has termed the ‘open fields’ of science, culture and politics.49 ‘Society’ was conceived of by social thinkers as something like an evolving and developing organism which possessed an organic unity and an order. But today, it is the language of information and communication theory that has had an increasingly central place in political and intellectual life. This is an era in which feedback is an important feature of public service, in which education and entertainment are expected to be interactive, and concepts of information, discourse, complexity and translation are deployed across the range of the sciences and humanities.50 But above all, it is the idea of network which seems easily and routinely to crisscross the distinction between the technical and the social. Meanings proliferate in this complex metaphorical space. Social theorists assert that we now live in a society of networks.51 Political scientists talk of networks of governance.52 Firms are said to be evolving into networks.53 Activists, firms and public bodies engage in and encourage networking. Technical connections, it is thought, form social networks; social connections are established technically. To say this is not to say that the metaphor of the network can be easily avoided. Metaphor is an important tool of argumentation and just because the metaphors that we use are historically specific does not, in itself, mean that they should be abandoned. Metaphors are not sinister, nor are they neutral. They are an inescapable feature of scientific and intellectual work and political discourse.54 Assessing the utility of a metaphor involves examining what it does and does not reveal; what effects it has on thought, and on practice. In this regard, it is certainly necessary to be critical of the pervasiveness of the network metaphor. For although the notion of the network appears to capture something of the discursive and spatial connections which technical work establishes, and both the connectedness and fragmentation of contemporary social relations, it is a tool which may, particularly in the proliferation of its meanings, obscure as much as it reveals. Certainly, to view socio-technical connections as a network-like infrastructure is mistaken. For far from being simply the infrastructure of government the question of how such technical connections should be organised, and how new scientific and technical work should be supported, has become a key problem for contemporary government. Far from being outside of politics, technology has become a site of political contestation. The notion of the network may be a useful one in conveying the ways in which a complex of localised technical practices can form a web. But it is a problematic metaphor. It may convey an illusory sense of rigidity, order and of structure; and it may give little sense of unevenness of the fabric and the fissures, fractures and gaps that it contains and forms.55 Here, I shall suggest three dimensions to these problems. First, to view technical connections as if they were something like a smoothly running railway network would be a mistake. Technical connections rarely function smoothly, and, unlike railway lines, they do not necessarily follow well-defined paths.56 Moreover, as both engineers and sociologists of technology know, creating and maintaining a network require work and repair.57 Technical work is always more disorganised and unpredictable than is often imagined, not least because it always involves human elements. The potential difficulties of technical work are neglected at a cost. Consider a routine problem: trying to install a new piece of software onto a computer. In principle, the problem should be straightforward to solve. It should be easy to make a computer work in the same way as thousands of others. But, in practice sometimes it is not. Maybe the problem lies with the particular machine, or with the way that it 167

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has been set up. Maybe there is a fault in the material that has been provided with it, or the user has missed one vital stage in the instructions. There are manuals, but these are seldom clear. There are helplines, but it may be difficult to communicate what the fault is. But this is only a small part of the problem. For the difficulty of communication is also due to the enormous range and forms of tacit knowledge necessary to establish technical connections – knowledge which it is extraordinarily difficult to write down.58 This is a general problem – a problem which is acute for anyone engaged in the use of technology of any kind. It is particularly true of the development of software, which, despite efforts to stabilise it in the form of well-defined packages, is extremely difficult to communicate to others without the mediation of human expertise.59 Making connections is therefore rarely a straightforward matter. Skills, techniques or devices that work in one place rarely work in exactly the same ways in another. Adjustments will always have to be made. Different problems of context or locale or knowledge will have to be taken into account. Failures are to be expected, particularly if rigidly standardised routines are followed. For these reasons, further forms of expertise and technology have developed around the problem of monitoring failure, or helping those who have to deal with it. Indeed, the more sophisticated forms of expertise involve a more or less explicit recognition of their limitations, and of the limitations of their object. In the human sciences, psychoanalysis is exemplary in this respect. In social theory, psychoanalysis tends to be either denounced as a normative therapeutic technology, or used to ground a general theory of the subject. But psychoanalysis can also function, not as a general theory at all, nor as a technology with either a narrowly instrumental purpose or normative agenda, but as a practical reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of using language as a technical instrument, and the inevitability of the limits of psychoanalysis.60 In some versions, psychoanalysis is a form of expertise which is ambivalent about its own status and efficacy as expertise, and which is alert both to its own position within the scene of analysis and to the fantasy of a technological solution.61 The subject cannot be repaired as if she or he were a electronic machine. She or he requires care, not control. An analogy can be made between psychoanalytic practice and sociology. The social world should not be imagined and acted on as if it were a system of networks and flows, which can be grasped and managed as a whole. This is a typically modern political fantasy.62 The specificities and inconsistencies of the social demand careful attention.63 Second, there is a question of where and how networks end or become weaker, or are made more uncertain or contestable.64 At the surface of the skin? At the borders of a nationstate? At the limits of the law? Inevitably, there will be objects and objects, places and persons included in and excluded from such socio-technical networks: whether partially or as wholes, whether discursively or spatially.65 Consider an example used by Michel Callon: a polluting chemical plant. Callon notes that if a chemical plant discharges its toxic waste into a river, it produces what economists call a negative externality, in so far as the interests of others affected are not recognised. The interests of fishermen, bathers and other users are harmed and in order to pursue their activity they will have to make investments for which they will receive no compensation. The factory calculates its decisions without taking into account the effects on the fishermen’s activities.66 In these circumstances, the boundaries of the plant are complex and multidimensional. On the one hand, certain objects (including toxic waste) pass outside the factory’s property. On 168

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the other hand, the plant’s own internal methods of calculation (concerning its effectiveness and efficiency) take little or no account of these toxic flows outside, and the chemical firm’s scientists take no regular measurements of the toxicity of local rivers, confining their metrology to within the plant. In effect, the plant has what Callon terms a frame: a series of mechanisms which filters not only the flow of workers and capital, but also chemical, toxic wastes and measuring devices. This frame is negotiable and contestable.67 For through regulation, or political activism, it is possible that the technological borders of the plant will be reconfigured, and connections drawn between what goes on inside the physical site of the plant and what goes on outside its perimeter fence. New measurements will be made which show how the actions of the plant and lives around it are linked. The way that the boundaries of the plant are made is both a technical and a political matter. Considerable investments may be made in maintaining or contesting the frame of analysis. The term ‘frame’ is both a sociological and a psychoanalytic one.68 The investments that have to be made in forming and maintaining a frame are at once economic, psychological and technical. They have visible and invisible elements. Thus, although there is a sense that technology may change anything and be deployed everywhere, its effects will always be restricted. There will always be connections yet to be made visible; and curbs on what is possible. Particular techniques or devices – whether they are drugs, electronic media, or weapons or forms of psychotherapy – are owned or regulated, or knowledge of how they can be used is only possessed by certain persons. Ownership cuts the network, thereby putting in place a blockage on the lines of possible connection.69 Or they may act on parts of persons, at the expense of other possibilities. Along certain channels knowledge and devices may pass relatively easily.70 Elsewhere technology generally circulates with difficulty. Inevitably, there is a politics to how technical devices form part of the fabric. And there is a politics, too, to how, where and on what basis devices and techniques circulate. Are particular technologies owned? Are they too difficult or too dangerous to be circulated? Does everyone need to possess or use them if they are to function effectively as citizens? Do they establish new forms of exclusion as well as inclusion? Third, there will be intersections and disjunctions between the various zones created through the formation of networks. Networks will always be a part of, and yet not contained by, other collective arrangements or networks. For in so far as technical connections can be thought of as networks, they do not exist in isolation from each other. Technical connections may operate across the distinctions between the private and public, between different scientific disciplines, and across the legal divisions between institutions and between nation-states, but they may run up against technological blockages and impediments. Consider, for example, the technological block that exists between many overground and underground railway systems which prevents overground railway stock running on underground lines; or the technological block between Apple and Personal Computers which may make it difficult to exchange files between computers. At such technological blockages, particular objects and devices may be required to make crossings smooth, or possible, negotiable or avoidable. Blockages are, after all, always complex; they are never absolute boundaries however they are sometimes imagined to be. And negotiating obstacles and blockages is never an easy matter: the appropriate documents, methods and frame of mind will be required. As we shall see in later chapters, the standardisation of objects and technical procedures between initially distinct domains is an important element of such obstacle work. It is reckoned to be particularly important in the development of new information 169

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and communication technologies which depend on the connection between different networks. But the problem of how to negotiate and smooth the points of contact between different socio-technical networks is a general problem in the history of science and technology.71 Standardisation, for a long time considered a problem just for engineers in enabling border crossings or the ‘joining’ of previously distinct socio-technical zones, is increasingly recognised to be of considerable economic and political significance. However, the development of technology involves not just the reduction of blockages through the production of technical standards and other mechanisms, but the development of ways of circumventing or reconfiguring existing impediments and establishing new ones. In the case of devices such the Walkman, the private motor car, and the security camera, technologies may provide methods with which to defend, define and police personal and institutional boundaries. In this way, these technologies displace earlier ways of managing relationships with other persons and institutions, with damaging as well as beneficial consequences.72 Likewise the deployment of satellite-based surveillance systems may be considered, by those subjected to them, as a threat to territorial integrity. Thus, in diverse ways, the boundaries of persons, households, institutions and nation-states, and public and private spaces, may be rethought, reconfigured or, in some cases, undermined through the deployment of technical devices.73 Moreover, forms of political action and regulation may emerge which do not correspond to spaces and territorial regions defined in conventional social or geopolitical terms, but to zones defined by technology.74 While technology is not reducible to politics, the conduct of government is also more than just a narrowly technological matter. The way in which specific technical devices figure in political life is extraordinarily variable. Foucault gave a sense of this in the contrast he made between the exercise of sovereign power and the conduct of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish (1975). The contrast Foucault draws between the two regimes is not a narrowly technological one – although it has many technical elements. Rather it is a contrast between what Deleuze has called different diagrams: between a situation in which force may be exercised more or less arbitrarily by a sovereign, and one in which government is exercised through the proliferation and dispersion of technical devices throughout an entire population.75 Not only do the instruments of government change, but so to do the forms of their use. And not only do the objects of government change, but so to do the justifications and anxieties with which they are associated. If the preoccupation of sovereign power was with the control of territory, nineteenth-century government shifted attention, in Foucault’s account, to a concern with the health and economic well-being and security of a population. The emergence of a series of scientific and moral concerns – with hygiene and public health, with psychopathology and ‘race’, and with economic performance and political economy – are elements of this broader historical movement in both thinking and practice.76 This book is concerned with a different, although not unrelated, set of preoccupations and problems at the end of the twentieth century which have largely been neglected by post-Foucauldian sociologists.77 Here, technology is both part of a set of political problems, and the solutions to these problems. As we have noted, technical practices are considered as problems in so far as they may cut across and undermine the boundaries of existing social and administrative arrangements. They disrupt and reconfigure the sense of the boundedness of persons and states which is so central to the modern political imagination. But they are considered part of the solution to this disruption in so far as they provide the key 170

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element of novel and perhaps more rigid kinds of socio-technical institution. In this way, technologies may be both the catalysts in processes of change, or sources of inertia working against change. In considering these problems, this book centres on one example: the European Union. Europe is a good example as well as an important one. As we shall see, the process of what political scientists call European integration has been a technological one. And technology plays a central part in the European political imagination. To understand the political make-up of Europe one must attend not just to the study of formal political institutions and their interrelations, although these are important.78 One must also address the multitude of devices and instruments which populate the continent, and which figure in European political discourse. The politics of Europe today is, in many respects, a politics of technology. Europe itself is a technological arrangement. The effects that the European Union has in Europe and beyond are an emergent consequence of this arrangement.79

Scale and Perspective How is it possible to study such an enterprise? In researching what anthropologists term complex societies, a set of general problems is encountered. How is it possible to deal with the spatial dispersion of complex social forms and their multiple connections? What methods are available to give an account of a political and economic order in which government operates at a peculiarly local level, but is also spatially extensive? What are the difficulties of giving an account of science and technology, when technology involves the development of connections which are so numerous, diverse, extended, and yet also so localised and partially contained? How can one address the problem of the scale of the kinds of collective arrangements which make up contemporary industrial societies? One solution to such problems is a reductionist one. This is to posit the existence of a macro social order, such as the state, society or the world-system. Through such figures the complexity of institutions and arrangements can be reduced within an overall framework. But this solution is problematic. On the one hand, such abstractions turn local empirical studies into mere instances of wider truths, and mere case studies of ever wider contexts. At worst, empirical studies are viewed simply as exemplifications of a general social theory of the state, or not even referred to at all. At the same time, concepts of society and the state obscure the contestability and instability of the social, either reducing political antagonisms to one or a few well-known social, economic or environmental conflicts; or by suggesting (in the work of some ‘postmodern’ or ‘late’ modern writers) that forms and causes of political conflict used to be simple, but are now fragmented. All too often, postmodernism involves a different form of reduction – a reduction to complete fragmentation or fluidity – in which any sense of texture and difference is lost. Either way, society can easily be summed up in one go. Society is either an organic or a contradictory unity, or it is shattered beyond all possible recognition. The claim that social life is irreducible and complex is not an empty one. It is certainly not a claim that everything is simply messy and featureless, or always in flux, and that no generalisations are possible. Nor is it a form of relativism which says that all interpretations and arguments have equal validity. Such a position suggests that detailed empirical work is futile, and the object of research can be ignored. It also invites the most banal and moralistic of responses by those who wish to continue to bang on their tables and point to the correspondence of scientific concepts to ‘reality’, thereby continuing the most unproductive 171

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and fruitless of academic exchanges.80 Scientific practices are much too interesting, historically variable and complex to have need of such a defence.81 To emphasise the irreducibility of social and political life suggests something different. Certainly it is a way of refusing certain forms of relativism, in so far as they lead to such an ironic detachment that any sense of the value or significance of what is being studied is lost. Everything turns out merely to be a (social or discursive) construct.82 Thus, the object of social scientific research disappears. But it is also a way of refusing an objectivism, in so far as objectivism does not make sense given all that we know about the historical and cultural variability of ways of knowing. A relativity of viewpoint is absolutely essential, one which makes it possible to open up a space to imagine things differently, from a different angle, at a different magnification and with different instruments. This is a perspective which tries to learn something from what is studied, without at the same time being in awe of it. Thus, research can aim to demonstrate and contribute something new – and not simply aspire, mistakenly, to attempt the impossible task of trying to mirror the object. A degree of experimentation in ways of knowing is legitimate and necessary, which is not the same as valuing experimentation or avant-gardism for its own sake. Marilyn Strathern has made the point succinctly: Too often we disparage movement from one position to another as relativity. This disparagement hides the cumulative achievement of social science, which is constantly to build up conditions from which the world can be apprehended anew. That regenerative capacity constitutes the ability to extend meanings, to occupy different viewpoints. More than mimesis - social science imitating its subject matter - it makes a distinctive contribution to the world that in so many other contexts draws on technology for its models of innovation.83 In the light of these remarks, this book is intended to be, in a double sense, empiricist. First, it is empiricist in its emphasis on the detail and complexity of empirical examples. This emphasis is deliberate. For it is through the complexity of the empirical that one gets a sense of the irreducibility and contestability of the social, the disjunctures between the programmatic statements of policy and the messiness of actuality, the contingency of history, and the interference and intersection of diverse historical and geographical movements. Empiricism is, in this sense, opposed to ‘social theory’ in so far as what is called social theory can all too often over-determine what is and can be said about empirical investigations. The empiricist attitude towards evidence is, in this context, both ethical and theoretical; it is one which is alert to, and respectful of, specificity and difference.84 Second, this study is intended to be empiricist in a perspectival sense. I make no attempt to provide a general analysis of government and politics today, but rather through a series of localised observations of specific examples, and through the invention of new concepts, to reveal a dimension to political life which is often neglected.85 In speaking of a technological society, my ambition is not to try to sum up an epoch, but rather to make visible a series of interconnected political preoccupations, anxieties and projects which might be otherwise obscure. But if this is the ambition, what research methods are appropriate? One movement in recent years has been to adopt and adapt the ethnographic methods of anthropologists to the study of complex societies. Laboratories, museums, families, government offices and cultural institutions have all been objects of ethnographic inquiry.86 They have been investigated in detail by anthropologists and sociologists who have spent long periods of 172

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time within such institutions: observing, listening and interviewing. The advantages of this movement towards ethnography are considerable. Professional institutions and their members are, to use Goffman’s terms, experts in the presentation of self. Indeed, they have developed elaborate literary technologies for dealing with the problem of self-presentation: reports, press releases, mission statements, policy documents, brand names, scientific papers.87 Such devices help to divide the inside from the outside. They establish a space within which professional and scientific work and business is possible. But they also serve to protect the expert, and the institution, from public scrutiny of the (inevitably) imperfect exercise of technical skill and expertise. Ethnographic inquiry provides a critical way of interrogating such public presentations, at the same time as it has to engage with them.88 In principle, it can present a different picture. It can be attentive to the internal messiness of any organisation; to the ways in which institutions contain elements which are not part of their self conceptions; to the relations between public presentations and other practices; to the disorder of scientific research in practice; and to the failures of technologies to meet the expectations which are made of them and the ways in which failures are recognised and addressed.89 In short, it can be alert to the specificity of the institution. Indeed, in studies of science and politics, an ethnographic method has a particular relevance. In science, a clear distinction is made between the untidy practical process of laboratory work and the finished public presentation of conclusions and results. The latter appears in public as an embodiment of the rationality of scientific method. The former is generally unobserved. In interrogating the relations and connections between the two, ethnographic studies of science provide a powerful challenge to conventional philosophical accounts of science. That which is made visible through scientific publication can be seen as the achievement of particular historical kinds of technical practice and styles of reasoning, and the contingencies of particular scientific debate. The conclusion should not be a surprising one. The world massively underdetermines what can be said about it. How it is envisaged necessarily depends on what technical instruments, practices and forms of reasoning are brought to bear on it. Laboratory work is a creative activity: it produces new objects. Knowledge is not discovered in the ground like a fossil. Yet there are also weaknesses to ethnography in its classical form. In particular it has tended to be bound to the study of specific, spatially localised institutions or groups. It has tended to treat institutions as if they were, as George Marcus observes, following Raymond Williams, localised knowable communities.90 Such a centring of analysis on one site was problematic in Marcus’s research on American dynastic families. I found that a particular family is a complex construction of a number of different kinds of agencies - lawyers, bankers, politicians, scholars, servants, workers, journalists and family members themselves who are only one such agency. I confronted myself with diverse parallel worlds which must be accommodated by my account.91 Instead of providing a portrait of one community, he sought to draw an account of several in parallel. Instead of producing one ethnographic image Marcus’ solution to the problem was to attempt to produce a montage effect.92 These methodological observations lead to an empirical and historical one. This is that if we are to understand the place of technology in political and economic life, we should not concentrate our attention on research and development and on one site: the research laboratory. Certainly, in the popular imagination, in public-policy documents, and in much 173

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sociological and economic analysis, science and technology are often equated with what is new and with innovation. At the same time, invention is often taken to be synonymous with technological development; and technical invention is thought to be a part, if not a direct cause, of social change. Yet this equation of technical activity with research and development is problematic. On the one hand, much technical activity takes places outside of the laboratory, and by non-specialists. This is not just a plea for the analysis of use and consumption – of the ways in which manufactured technological products are used in the home and the office, for example.93 There is also a need to think of the ways in which innovative activity takes place outside of industry and outside of the laboratory and involves people who would not ordinarily be called technical specialists. On the other hand, much of what professional scientists and engineers do is not straightforwardly innovative; or not innovative in the way that most people – including specialists – would think of as innovative. It involves repairing, monitoring and testing the performance of devices and practices in order to ensure safety and security or to meet regulatory requirements. It involves fixing and determining what technologies do, however imprecisely, whether for the purposes of marketing and selling or for the purpose of making intellectual property claims. Above all, the properties and effects of technologies are measured, and a significant part of the effort expended by natural and social scientists is aimed at developing novel, more accurate and more appropriate forms of measurement: novel ways of demonstrating the properties of technical practices and devices.94 To understand the place of technology in politics, we also need to rethink what technical activity is.

Technological Zones The remainder of this book is divided into two parts. In part one, I examine how technology is a central preoccupation for national and international government and politics. This preoccupation has two dimensions. First, technology is expected to forge connections across and establish boundaries around an empire, a firm or a nation-state. If the territorial boundaries of states are generally fixed, zones of technological circulation are not. In these circumstances, the question of how technological zones can be established and regulated is reckoned to be of enormous political and economic importance. Second, in a technological society, the quality and success and vitality of an organisation, nation or trading bloc is understood to be dependent on its technological capacity and competitiveness as they are manifested in indicators of skill, intellectual property, scientific literacy and invention. Chapter 2 develops an extended discussion of the relation between technology, transnational relations and empire. I examine the question here of whether it is possible talk about technological zones in an analogous way to the way one might talk of geographical territory. Is there a correspondence between technological zones and spaces of political rule? How can we conceive of the blockages and impediments that restrict and channel the circulation of technical objects and practices? What relation exists between what Arjun Appadurai calls technoscapes – the spaces and flows marked by technology – and other spaces of flow – of persons, capital, ideas and media images?95 How is the flow of technology regulated? Chapter 3 focuses on the key problems of harmonisation and standardisation. Many popular and academic accounts of technology focus their attention on either the process of technical innovation or the use or effects of technical change. Standardisation has often 174

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been regarded as a rather mundane issue, barely worthy of much comment or analysis; a minor chapter in the history of industrial development. In this chapter, I follow the work of Ken Alder, Norton Wise, Simon Schaffer, David Noble and others in suggesting that if one is to properly understand the place of technology in modern political life a concern with standardisation must be central.96 Technological standardisation is, I argue, above all a political project. The point is a general one, but the critical importance of technical standards to government and politics is particularly clear in the case of the European Union. For, as I argue in Chapter 3, a significant part of what the EU has come to do is attempt to reduce differences between technical practices and instruments across Europe. This attempt is much more complex and problematic than is often imagined. Sociologists have long recognised the mismatch between social norms and social realities. But technical devices and procedures and material artefacts may also resist normalisation. A materialist analysis of politics is one which must attend to the resistance of matter to political control. My discussion of these issues draws primarily on arguments developed from the history and sociology of science, from anthropology, and from poststructuralist social theory. However, it also intersects with the work of a number of specialists in public-policy analysis. In particular, as I shall discuss further in Chapter 3, there are parallels between my analysis of Europe and that of Giandomenico Majone who has, in recent years, developed the notion of the European ‘regulatory state’. In Majone’s account, Europe is interesting and significant not just because it is a supra-national political entity but because of the way it both produces and reflects a break with the general model of the twentieth-century European state. For Majone, European states have been viewed as centred on two functions: redistribution and stabilisation. They were welfare states, in Majone’s analysis, in so far as they were concerned with the transfer of resources from one social group to another; and they were Keynesian states in so far as they were concerned ‘with the preservation of satisfactory levels of economic growth, employment and price stability’.97 The notion of the ‘regulatory state’ is different from both of these possibilities and is closer to an American model. In this conception, the State can be understood as something like a network of more or less independent regulatory agencies devoted to the correction, in Majone’s account, of ‘market failure’ through, for example, environmental and consumer protection and health and safety legislation. Regulatory expertise plays a key part in the make-up of Europe.98 In Chapter 4 I turn to what has come to be the key term in contemporary political and economic discourse: the network. Firms, states, societies, communities and families are often reckoned to take a network form. In general terms, I take the prevalence of the idea of the network to be both one indicator of the centrality of the information sciences and technologies to contemporary forms of government, and a manifestation of the contemporary political preoccupation with the problem of forming and maintaining technological zones. Yet, in practice, the reasons why the term has become so ubiquitous cannot be understood through such a simple formulation. Again I turn to the case of the European Union as exemplary of the contemporary preoccupation with networks and networking. For if harmonisation has been a central problem for the European Union, the notion of the network has come to provide the key metaphor for the European political project. Indeed, according to Manuel Castells the European Union is a ‘network state’.99 Chapter 4 interrogates the ways in which the idea of the network has become the key term in European political discourse. The chapter explores the multiple, ambiguous and contested senses of the term, and how these are associated with competing spatialisations of the European project. The development of European networks is, I argue, both an index of the complex intersections 175

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between ‘political’ and ‘technological’ developments in Europe and a focus for struggles to define what Europe is to become. Castells’ functionalist account of the European network state both confuses different senses of the term ‘network’, and obscures the critical role of networks in European political life. In Chapter 5, I turn from a consideration of the key function of standards and networks in the formation of technological zones to the role of intellectual property rights. In thinking about the government of a technological society, an analysis of intellectual property is critical. For two reasons. First, the acquisition of intellectual property by technological invention is given a particularly high economic and moral value. Technological inventiveness is a virtue which should be both rewarded and fostered. Today, a whole series of institutions from national governments and schools, to firms and families are expected to foster the conditions within which technically inventive persons can thrive and develop. Government ministers extol the virtues of innovative activity, and the need to realise the value of intellectual property and to forge an inventive culture. Second, despite the growing political importance of intellectual property, it is difficult to maintain a stable legal basis on which intellectual property rights can be claimed. This is not surprising. For technological invention produces both new kinds of objects and new kinds of subjects of invention. Yet the acquisition of intellectual property rights depends not just on the identity of the object but on the identity of the subject; an identity which, as I argue, may be problematic and in flux. The government of a technological society involves forging and managing the relation between persons and objects. The topic of intellectual property shows how problematic that process is.

Politics and Government It is commonplace to note the historical importance of scientists and experts to liberal forms of government. But historically this position has been complex. On the one hand, social, economic and natural scientific expertise has been expected to provide the basis on which government is possible. Whether in relation to the economy, health, education, hygiene or pollution, scientific and technical work was expected both to identify problems for government and to determine solutions. It is no wonder, given the political importance of science, that some critical sociologists and philosophers feared, wrongly as it turned out, that science would displace politics altogether. On the other hand, despite the centrality of scientific and technical work to political life, the scientist was supposed to be allowed some autonomy from political and economic pressures. To be sure, this autonomy was as much ethical as institutional. A scientist who was employed directly by central government, for example, was expected to be able to make judgements which did not so much reflect his or her institutional position, but a dispassionate assessment of the facts. In this view of the relation between science and political life, there should be no a-priori reason to expect that say the scientific judgements of say, a government scientific advisor, a university professor, or a scientist working for a firm or organisation representing the interests of consumers or patients should be any different.100 In comparison to this classical liberal model of the political function of scientific expertise, the prevalent model today is somewhat different. The difference lies less in the decline in trust in abstract systems which is often said to be a feature of contemporary society.101 There is no empirical evidence of such a generalised decline.102 Rather it lies in the sense that not only scientists and experts but ordinary citizens should acquire some kind of knowledge 176

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of technology and nature, even if it is not necessarily of a technical sort. In part two of this book I argue that a characteristic feature of the contemporary technological society is not a decline in trust in science and technology, but rather the expectation that citizens and consumers should be knowledgeable about scientific objects and technical devices: their uses, consequences and effects. This expectation comes from different directions, is addressed towards different concerns and anxieties and can take different forms, some of which are represented as anti-scientific. For scientists concerned about a lack of state funding for research it has taken the form of a demand for more ‘public understanding of science’ or a clear recognition of the difference between scientific and pseudo-scientific expertise.103 For some sociologists this demand is expressed in a modified form in a call for more understanding of the sociology of science and more democratic participation in science-policy making.104 For many national governments, it can take the form of calls for better scientific and technical education, for life-long learning, for skills training for the unemployed or for the provision of computing and Internet facilities in classrooms and libraries. Environmental groups, consumer organisations and individuals request more and more technical information whether about pollution, or the risks of hospital treatment, or the ingredients and origins of manufactured food, or the safety of this or that household device. Others call for more radical rejections of technological artifice, and the return to a more natural order on the basis of different forms of knowledge of the relations between humans and others. The citizen of a technological society is expected to have a certain knowledge of technology, and to make choices on the basis of this knowledge. This does not mean that everyone will be willing or able to meet these expectations.105 How is it possible to adapt and manage within a rapidly changing technological culture? How can individuals become active subjects in a technological society? One dominant set of solutions is itself technological, and is framed by metaphors drawn from the field of information technology: feedback, network, interactivity. Network technology is associated with a network society; interactive technology with interactive relations between authorities and citizens, and between firms and consumers. Today, government ministers in Britain call for a rapid growth in the level of information technology provision in schools while at the same time calling for greater networking between schools, and between schools and parents and local industry. These processes are thought to be interlinked. According to one educationalist, they will foster a culture of permanent innovation: Networks de-privatise the classroom and so are the key to [a] different model of dissemination in which all schools can not be linked through ICT [information and communication technology] and so all can take part in the activities of professional knowledge creation, application and dissemination. Again, the business world provides a model for education. In industries where the knowledge is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed - as is becoming the case in education - the locus of innovation is to be found in networks of learning.106 In this book I focus on a related example. Chapter 6 (‘On interactivity’) revolves around the development of two of the largest European museums devoted to the display of science and technology: La Villette in Paris and the National Museum of Science and Industry in London. Rather than suggest that a concern with interactivity is simply the inevitable product of a shift from an industrial to informational society, for example, the chapter traces the convoluted biography of the concept and the technique as it moves from London and 177

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Paris to the Exploratorium in San Francisco and back again, and the diverse and contingent forms which interactivity takes within the different institutions it inhabits. A central argument of the chapter is that interactivity has become central to the configuration of what we can call, following Foucault, the ‘political anatomy’ of the museum visitor. The visitor is not expected to contemplate the museum collection from a distance, nor to engage in critical reflection on the messiness and complexity of scientific practice, but to have a quite immediate physical and practical connection with the museum display. Thus, as a family of quite diverse techniques, ‘interactivity’ is intended to direct and enhance the activity and engagement of the museum visitor. In effect, too, the museum visitor becomes herself an artefact of the museum. Her activity, too, becomes an object of further research and investigation. For many educationalists and museum designers, techniques of interactivity and networking provide a solution to many of the problems which confront the contemporary school and the museum. They promise to turn museum visitors, university students and school children into more active, inventive and experimental learners, through methods which are simultaneously popular and act as models for later experiments in thought and research. Technology itself, in the form of interactive and networked devices, is thought to provide a significant part of the solution to the problem of forming the kind of person who can exist, manage, compete, experiment, discover, invent and make choices in a technological society. Citizenship of a technological society demands active participation. At the same time, consumers are expected to forge new interactive relations with firms. Interactivity is much less than information technology (for not all information technologies are interactive). But it is also much more than technology; it is a diagram of contemporary social organisation. Disciplinary technology is associated with the injunction ‘You must!’ It forms docile subjects. By contrast, interactive technology has come to be associated with the injunction, highlighted by Slavoj Zizek, ‘You may!’107 It reduces the space for creative forms of passivity. Along with an anxiety that adults and school children are insufficiently engaged with technology and science, there is also a desire for greater quantities of routine technical information. While there is little evidence of widespread mistrust of scientific expertise in general, there is a remarkable demand, articulated from different directions, for more information. Consider, for example, the growing quantity of technical data on food packaging and other media; or the importance given to placing as much information as possible on the Internet so that it is made available to the widest possible public; or the provision of detailed and up-to-date indicators of the performance of schools, hospitals, universities, water authorities and rail companies.108 The idea of publishing technical information for public consumption is certainly not new: but the incessant demand for more detailed and up-to-date information is. Chapter 7 (‘Political chemistry’) interrogates the contemporary preoccupation with the continuous production of technical information through a study of the apparently routine activity of daily air-quality monitoring. In part the chapter illustrates the themes of part one. It shows how a mundane technical device (to measure air quality) turns out to be the only visible representative of the European Union in one area of inner London. In effect, part of London becomes part of Europe through an air-qualitymonitoring experiment. But along with an illustration of the critical place of technology to European government, the chapter also makes a further and more important argument. This is that a concern to produce continuous and precise information on the part of the public authorities displaces the concern of scientists to tell the imprecise truth about pollution. In effect, the contemporary preoccupation with the importance of information production overrides an (older) ethical scientific order. The apparently minor episode discussed 178

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in this chapter has much wider resonances. It points to the way that scientific activity itself, in its orientation to tell the truth, may exist in a conflict with the governmental demand for technical information. It is conventional to equate oppositional politics with public protest, but political opposition can take the most scientific and technical of forms. In a technological society it could be oppositional not to call for more public information, but to defend the ethical autonomy of science. Critical reflection is not necessarily enhanced by more information than by a more nuanced sense of the strengths and weaknesses of different ways of telling the truth. The chapter calls for attention to the displacement effects of the production of information. An overproduction of information can have both anti-political and anti-scientific implications. If scientific and technical activity can have political implications, then politics can also be technical, and inventive. In Chapter 8, I discuss ways of telling the truth which are not scientific. The argument here turns on the concept and practice of demonstration. In English, the term demonstration has referred both to the scientific activity of showing an object or effect and to the political activity of public protest. Here I argue that these two senses of the term are closer together than is generally imagined. Focusing on the conduct of road protests in Southern England in the mid-1990s the chapter makes two arguments. First, it argues that political demonstration involves setting up a site within which the truth can be shown and witnessed. The argument cautions us from drawing a clear line between forms of rule and forms of resistance.109 Second, I argue that the road protests may be considered exemplary forms of political action not based on a fixed identity, or sense of a community. Instead, they may be seen as a political formation which is assembled through a process of action. The two arguments are not unconnected. The credibility of the road protestors to tell the truth depended, I argue, on their success in resisting attempts to fix their identity, whether through processes of internal organisation and political normalisation, or through representation by media external to the protest. Their capacity to act politically, and open up a space for contestation, relied on their capacity and ethical commitment to resist the reduction of their activity to a given political ideology, identity or set of interests. The story has wider implications for the study of the political. Following the work of Georgio Agamben I take the political to be irreducible to politics in so far as politics is understood as a struggle between institutions, political interests or ideologies.110 In Chapter 9 (‘Political Invention’) I draw together the central arguments of the book. First, I return to the themes of Chapters 2–5 and examine the central role of technological in the formation of new zones of political activity. Developing an argument first made by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, the chapter develops an account of the relation between zones and sites of scientific and technical activity. Second, the chapter extends the analysis of Chapters 3, 7 and 8 to develop an account of the relation between politics, science and technology and the political. The chapter argues that scientific and technical practices can have political and anti-political effects precisely because they are not simply expressions of political interests or ideologies. Finally, the chapter returns to the topic of invention, extending further the analysis of technology, invention and government developed in Chapters 1, 5 and 6. In a technological society our models of innovation are dominated by the image of technology. In this chapter I argue that invention should not be equated with technical change, but with forms of practice which serve to open up rather than determine possibilities for further thought and action. Rather than draw a dividing line between technology and politics, sociology should be attentive to the ways in which both technical practice and political action can be both inventive and anti-inventive in their implications. 179

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Notes 1 Reprinted from Barry A (2001) Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–33. 2 See, for example Ortega y Gasset’s comments on the central importance of scientific activity to (European) civilisation [1932] 1964, pp. 81–82. 3 Cresson (1997, p. 3). Cresson’s interest in the ‘knowledge society’ was over-determined. In the Commission she was responsible for both research and education, and the idea of the knowledge society was one good way of making a link between her different responsibilities. 4 Cresson referred, in particular, to the work of Anthony Giddens, director of the LSE, a sociologist well-known for his writings on globalisation and risk. 5 Ibid., p. 3. 6 Such as ‘information society’, ‘postmodern society’ (Harvey, 1989; Kumar, 1995) ‘post-industrial society’ (Bell, 1973), ‘network society’ (Castells 1996), or ‘radical modernity’ (Giddens 1991). Peter Osborne notes that ‘“modernity” is routinely assumed to be an empirical category of historical sociology, used to register certain inaugural breaks or ruptures in the development of societies’ (1995, p. 1). For a political critique of the notion that history passes through stages see Arendt (1964). 7 Rose (1999). 8 In this sense, the concept is a qualitative rather than a chronological category. It is a set of projects and preoccupations rather than a stage in history (cf. Osborne 1995, p. 23) Of course, there has long been preoccupation with technology in the history of political thought; see Winner (1977). 9 Barry (1996a, p. 126), Rose (1999). 10 Cf. Foucault (1997, pp. 67–71). 11 Reflecting on the contemporary preoccupation with continuous education Gilles Deleuze spoke of the emergence of what he termed a ‘control society’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 182). 12 On ‘nature’ as a matter of choice see Strathern (1992b). 13 Irwin and Wynne (1996). 14 On degeneration see Pick (1993); on evolution see Young (1985); on government as a machine see Agar (1998); on society as a machine see Wise (1988); on the state machine see Lenin ([1918] 1992). On the emergence of the idea of the network in political thought see Winner (1977). ‘Even Lewis Mumford, who emphasizes the idea of society as a machine, has changed his emphasis to something called a ‘Power Complex’. What needs expression is the idea of a set of large-scale, complex, interdependent, functioning networks which form the basis of modern life; for this, ‘the machine’ will no longer suffice’ (p. 193). Winner’s reference is to Mumford (1970). 15 Collins (1985). 16 Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1991), Burchell (1996), Barron (1996), Cruikshank (1999). 17 Rose (1999, p. 5). 18 O’Malley et al. rightly criticise the tendency of writers who have followed Foucault’s work on governmentality for focusing on programmatic forms of government, O’Malley, Weir and Shearing (1997, p. 510). 19 Barry, Bell and Rose (1995). 20 Gilroy (1993), Fuss (1995), Dean (1997). 21 Bonnie Honig distinguishes between those political theorists (including Kant and Rawls) who seek to close down the space of the political in the interests of good government and those (including Nietzsche and Arendt) who place a value on political action and dissensus (Honig 1993). 22 In particular, in the tradition of political thought following from the writings of Saint-Simon and Comte. See Winner (1977, p. 441). 23 On the relation between science and the development of international organisation see Murphy (1994). 24 On public inquiries as hybrid politico-technical institutions see Ashenden (1996). 25 This is the solution suggested by Jürgen Habermas (1971). Critical sociologists have often looked to democracy to provide a political solution to the problem of technology. See, in particular, Winner (1992) and Sclove (1995). 26 Deleuze (1988), Akrich (1992).

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The Technical and the Political 27 Such human elements, of course, themselves have to be assembled and fashioned. Individuals are not indivisible and autonomous, but made up of many parts, each of which is highly composite and affected by its environment in different ways. 28 Schaffer (1996, p. 80), Collins (1990). 29 Geoffrey Bennington makes the observation that reference to politics in philosophy and social theory has the effect of closing down the space of the political (Bennington, 1994, p. 3). To claim that an artefact is simply the product of political interests has a similar effect. Technology may be inscribed within a political situation without being reducible to it (Joerges, 1999). 30 Law (1991). 31 Cf. Habermas ([1962] 1989). 32 Thompson (1995). 33 Myerson and Rydin (1996, p. 205). 34 This argument – about the politics of technology has been developed from work in two intersecting areas. One is the area of feminist theory and the history of science. The other is in the area of sociology and anthropology of science and technology (see, in particular, Shapin and Schaffer (1985), Jordonova (1989), Haraway (1989, 1991), Strathern (1992a,b), Latour (1996b), Pickering (1995b)). It has longer roots in Western Marxism, in the work of, for example, Adorno and Horkheimer, Gramsci and Castoriadis (Gramsci, 1971; Adorno and Horkheimer, [1944] 1979; Castoriadis, 1984). 35 In the work of Hayek and Popper, for example, one of the distinguishing features of a liberal as opposed to authoritarian society is the complete autonomy of science from any political control. 36 E.g. Haraway (1991), Law (1991), Pickering (1995a,b.) 37 See Cartwright (1995). 38 Pickering, (1995b, p. 7). 39 Here I prefer Deleuze’s notion of arrangement (agencement) to Foucault’s notion of apparatus (dispositif). As many commentators have argued, one of the weaknesses of Foucault’s work is the sense of an apparatus as something like a mechanical fixed system in which everything is in place. The notion of the arrangement has the virtue of suggesting an entity which is always in process; an ordering rather than a completed order in which agency is emergent (Deleuze 1988, 1995, p. 196). Michel Callon, John Law and Bruno Latour’s notion of the actor-network is similar (Callon, Law and Rip, 1986). However, I prefer the notion of the arrangement to actor-network precisely because the notion of the network has become so closely associated with the idea of direct and instantaneous connection associated with information technology (Latour, 1999c). 40 Strathern (1992b, p. 197). 41 Haraway (1989, 1991, 1997). For related work in critical science studies see, in particular, papers published in the journal Science as Culture, and in the earlier Radical Science Journal (Levidow, 1986). 42 For a good survey of recent work on globalisation which, nonetheless, has very little to say about science and technology see Held et al. (1999). 43 Callon and Latour (1981). 44 Within historical sociology a similar point is made by Michael Mann (1986) in his remarkable study of ancient civilisations. 45 Barry (1998). 46 Habermas (1998, p. 400). 47 See Wolff (1991), Haraway (1997, ch. 2) and Spivak (1998) on the disembodied observer of modern social theory and philosophy. 48 Weber (1948, pp. 196–198). 49 Beer (1996). 50 For further discussion see Serres (1977), Johnson (1993), Tomas (1995), Pickering (1995a), Keller (1995), Hayles (1996) and Thrift (1999). 51 For influential examples of network metaphors in recent social and political thought see Latour (1993), Mulgan (1994a), Castells (1996), Melucci (1996). 52 E.g. Rhodes (1997), Dehousse (1997). 53 E.g. Charan (1991), Peters (1992), Gibbons et al. (1994), Goffee and Scase (1995). 54 Paraphrasing Myerson and Rydin (1996, p. 25) and Derrida (1978, p. 17).

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Andrew Barry 55 Emily Martin (1996, p. 103) makes a similar point in a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome which does not have the rigidity of a network. 56 This is a theme in the work of Ulrich Beck. As Beck argues, a recognition of the possible failure of technological systems, and the scientific and technical uncertainties about the form that failure will take, has become a key focus for political and scientific concern (Beck 1992, 1995, 1999). 57 Nonetheless the study of technological repair has not received the attention it deserves. Sociologists and economists of technology have tended to focus their attention either on the process of innovation or activities of consumption. 58 Collins (1985). 59 Born (1996). 60 E.g. Laplanche (1989, p. 163), Fletcher and Stanton (1992, p. 6). 61 E.g. Phillips (1995). 62 See, for example, Paul Rabinow’s work on social engineering and the modern political imagination (Rabinow, 1989). 63 Scott Lash makes a related point: ‘In reflexive modernity one can never quite know, never quite get a grasp on objects of knowledge. The programmes of social engineering of simple modernity have brought with them their own side effects, their own unintended consequences’ (Lash, 1999, p. 3). 64 Strathern (1996). 65 ‘All social order can only affirm itself in so far as it represses a ‘constitutive outside’ which negated it’ (Laclau, 1990, p. 180). Here I make a distinction between discourse and (non-discursive) space, recognising that spatial boundaries are themselves encoded discursively, and discursive distinctions have spatial implications. 66 Callon (1998a, p. 16–17). 67 On the notion of the frame see Callon (1998b). 68 My thanks to Ann Scott for pointing out to me the psychoanalytic use of the notion of the frame. In sociology the term is developed by Goffman (1974). 69 Strathern (1996, p. 525). 70 On the notion that technology both constitutes and travels down narrow channels see, in particular, the work of Bruno Latour (1987). 71 Star and Griesemer (1989), Wise (1995). 72 See Michael Bull’s work (2000) on the complexity of Walkman use. 73 See, for example, Silverstone and Hirsch (1992), Bull (2000). 74 This is a theme in the work of Harold Innis (1950, 1951) and Paul Virilio (1989, 1991), although the work of both authors tends towards a form of technological determinism. Virilio’s work suggests that technological zones are not just spatial formulations. They also govern the time between objects. 75 Deleuze expresses the relation between technique, arrangement and diagram in the following way: ‘And if the techniques – in the narrow sense of the world – are caught within the arrangements, this is because the arrangements themselves, with their techniques, are selected by the diagrams: for example, prison can have a marginal existence in sovereign societies and exists as a mechanism only when a new diagram, the disciplinary diagram, makes it cross the “technological threshold”’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 40). 76 Osborne and Rose (1997). 77 In drawing on Foucault, social theorists have tended simply to adopt his notion of surveillance and apply it to the study of information technology (e.g. Poster, 1996). At best, this approach does not do justice to the emergence of new ways in which the relations between persons and new information technologies have been configured. In Chapter 6, I argue that many of these new relations are best captured through the notion interactivity rather than surveillance. 78 Ulrich Beck rightly criticises recent theorisations of flows and networks in terms of their lack of concern with the specificity of institutions (Beck, 2000). 79 On the emergent properties of ‘large’ socio-technical arrangements see Pickering (1995b, pp. 234–242). 80 Christopher Norris’s various polemics against what he terms postmodernism are one version of such a moralism (e.g. Norris, 1992). 81 Hacking (1999).

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The Technical and the Political 82 On the limits of social constructivisim see, in particular, Haraway (1989), Butler (1993), Rabinow (1996a,b), Latour (1999a), Hacking (1999). 83 Strathern (1988, pp. 19–20). 84 ‘Even when we find the rule, the particular cannot be subsumed under the universal’ (Lash, 1999, p. 3). On empiricism see Osborne (1998). 85 On the need for conceptual inventiveness see Deleuze with Parnet (1987). 86 See, for example, Law (1994), Born (1995), Macdonald (1997), Mcdonald (1996), Rabinow (1996a,b), Latour (1999a), Knorr-Cetina (1999). 87 On branding see the work of Celia Lury (1993). On the value of Goffman for the anthropology of science see Law (1994, p. 176). 88 See, for example, Macdonald (1997). 89 On technological failure see Latour (1996a). 90 Marcus (1986, p. 170, 1994, p. 51). Marcus takes the term ‘knowable community’ from Williams (1981). 91 Ibid., pp. 51–52. 92 Marcus (1994). 93 On the consumption of technology see, in particular, Schwartz Cowan (1983), Silverstone and Hirsch (1992), Edgerton (1998), Bull (2000), Miller and Slater (2000). 94 ‘When we ask about the most general source of the desire to quantify, we find it more nearly in the requirements for regulating society and its activities than in the search for mathematical laws of nature…’ (Wise, 1995, p. 5). 95 Appadurai (1990). 96 Wise (1995), Alder (1997). 97 Majone (1996b, p. 263). 98 Majone (1993a,b, 1996a,b), Caporaso (1996). 99 Castells (1998, pp. 330–332). 100 The classic statement of science as a liberal and ethical enterprise is Merton (1968). Tom Osborne and Paul Rabinow have re-emphasised the importance of a concern with ethics in studies of science in their recent work (Osborne, 1998; Rabinow, 1996b). 101 See, for example, Giddens (1991). 102 See, in particular, the work of Mike Michael, Michael (1992, 1996a,b). Although there may be a decline in trust in specific institutions (e.g. central government, large firms, professional bodies), in specific countries, and in specific circumstances (e.g. during the BSE crisis of the 1990s). 103 Blume (1974, ch. 7) on earlier attempts to demand that scientists are socially responsible. On the public understanding of science see Irwin and Wynne (1996). 104 Irwin (1995). 105 Michael (1996a,b). 106 Hargreaves (1998, p. 49), my italics. 107 Zizek (1999). 108 Cf. Power (1997). 109 Steve Pile has made the point: ‘[one] effect of thinking through the geographies of resistance,… is [that] resistance is ‘uncoupled’ from domination’ (Pile, 1997, p. 2). 110 Agamben (1993, p. 85).

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10 THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN CITY Adrian Franklin

Introduction1 The notion of cities as humanist citadels successfully designed against ‘nature’, and constituting a purified world of humans among themselves has been substantially revised recently. At one level, as Hinchliffe and Whatmore (2009) put it, ‘it involves ecologies becoming urban and cities becoming eco- logical’. But at another and related level, the humanist space and politics of Ray Pahl’s Whose City? (1975) has been far more substantially unsettled by a complex more-than-human dialectics and scholarship that has introduced new non-human forces, interests, concerns, agencies, associations, alliances, becomings, policy making and politics to a new urban political field, a field that Pickering (1995) called ‘the mangle of practice’, Stengers calls cosmopolitics and Latour has referred to as a ‘Parliament of Things’ (Latour, 1993: 142–145; see also Latour, 2004, 2010; Stengers, 2005; Ingold, 2015). Here, from sociology’s new strongholds in Science and Technology Studies, Materialities, the Sociology of the Body, and others, was a new and radical challenge to the modern order of things, to the sciences and to the humanities as areas of concern, and with especial relevance to the constitution of cities perhaps, where such things are so promiscuously exchanged, messed up and interpenetrated and with such momentous impact. This ontological shift would not have surprised or dismayed Pahl, for as Crow and Takeda (2011) observed, he himself was mindful of having ‘over the years … shifted positions’ (1975: 6) – consistent with an on-going vision of the sociologist as someone who conducts empirical research to challenge conventional wisdom, and to ‘engage with the practical problems of the society in which they live’. So this was not a new constitution limited only to humans or to humans and other life forms, but a new ontological politics in which it was no longer possible to maintain as separable (or as different orders) the things of nature (or science or ‘facts’) and the things of culture (or humanities or values) in any meaningful or functional way, nor subsume as political ecology has tried to do, the entire world of nature and humanity, under one ‘mononaturism’ – or its equivalence in humanism’s ‘monoculturalism’ (Latour, 2004; Pickering, 2008). This is now an established ontological domain in the academy (sociology, environmental humanities, more-than-human anthropology, human geography, philosophy, 189

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animals studies), with new languages that speak of hybrids, becomings, ‘clingings’, cyborgs, becomings-with; ‘strikings back’; dances of agency; a sociology of verbs (rather than nouns), networks, meshworks and naturecultures rather than fixed types, binaries and representations, in which all entities are fluid and promiscuous – and always taking into themselves the relationships they form and enact with others (Latour, 1993; Law, 1994; Law and Mol, 1995; Pickering, 2000; Haraway, 2008; Ingold, 2013, 2015). Both Latour and Ingold remind us that this state of affairs is not new, and despite modern ontologies that have obscured it, it has still been apparent, palpable, expressible and voiced by those who pay attention (modern novelists, alchemists and indigenous people among them). Certainly, city dwellers who write about their cities, such as Virginia Wolfe, Will Self and Tim Ingold, have seen them as overflowing, exuberant, excessive and phantasmogoric rather than safely confined and apportioned into the worlds of nature and culture. It is an ontology for which Aboriginal writer, Alexis Wright, had to create a new vocabulary in English to describe her postcolonial world, in her disturbingly realized The Swan Book (Gleeson-White, 2013). In such views cities are heterogeneously contagious places, constantly messing up and reconstituting technologies, texts, histories, wastes, flows, policies, communities and materialities (Stengers, 2005; Franklin, 2006; Whatmore, 2013). In recent years the narration of city life has demonstrated the ubiquity of heterogenous orderings that contrast markedly with the human ‘blueprinting’ that dominated the urban political, managerial, policy and planning regimes of Whose City? We now recognize that cities teem with life forms, technologies, agencies, materialities and ecological associations and niches whose concatenations comprise a characteristically diverse ‘more-than-human politics’. Entities such as rivers, railway lines, urban forests, wild fires, weather systems, sparrow nesting sites, feral cats, air quality indices, bat populations and sewerage treatment farms enter into urban political life in multiple ways via emergencies, crises, disasters, new technologies (or the collapse of old ones) and experimental situations, through individual, local, national and international spokespersons and organizations. They become matters of concern that complicate, mediate and interpenetrate those of everyday humanist concerns – development, building, planning, health, consumption, leisure and tourism. The arrival of such objects creates new subjectivities, ecological sensibilities and politics with the realization that modernist blueprinting does not take place against an assumed ‘neutral substrate’, that this substrate is itself active, lively, fragile, powerful and connected in ways that matter more than we imagined before (Franklin, 2006; Medd and Marvin, 2008; Pickering, 2008; Clark, 2011). The theory and politics of Whose City? responded to, and was grounded in, the materialist political crisis of the British city in the late 1960s, a crisis of scarce resources and urgent questions concerning the allocation and distribution of life chances after the economic and political shakedown of World War II. However, the more affluent cities of the United States during this period showed how the resolution of materialist politics in the twentieth century was not unrelated to another looming crisis that would ensure that ecology became folded into the urban political field. Raising the pace of urban economic development, standards of living, the scale of the urban footprint and levels of human consumption would precipitate a politics of the environment and other post materialist issues concerned with the quality and sustainability of urban life. By the 1990s and 2000s Mike Davis could write about Los Angeles and urban life in America with titles such as The Ecology of Fear (1998) and Dead Cities (2002). This was a politics of air, water, food, waste, pollution, natural heritage, loss, divergent generational interests and new alignments of class and ethnic interests, of environmental crimes and animal rights, and although this was not the first time these had been the 190

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grounds for political contestation or that new forms of subjectivity and action had formed around them, it was the first time that it constituted an environmental political movement on global dimensions. Davis’s LA was the global city so many of us now recognized as our own. The more-than-human city that came into being on this global scale recognized the human dependence on associations and negotiated settlements with the non-human, but also that the non-human was very far from passive, or merely the malleable resource of Christian theology or Gifford Pinchot’s ‘wise use’ philosophy (Cronon, 1996; Clark, 1999, 2011; Pickering and Guzik, 2008). Pickering (2008) anticipated the events in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina with uncanny accuracy, as arising out of the agency of a very particular kind of river, the Mississippi and its long-term dialectical relationship with the American Corps of Engineers and the so-called American Ruhr that it made possible. To Pickering, the evidence for a looming disaster was clear in a paper he wrote in 2000, but so too was the arrogance of the US Corps of Engineers who believed that by applying the scientific principles of hydrology, the river, any river, could be controlled at will and its valley blueprinted. Pickering saw something different: a dialectical relationship in which the river always responded to each new intervention by the Corps of Engineers and not always in ways that they could predict. Rivers are supposed to erode their way downwards, the Mississippi rose higher and eventually passed over the top of New Orleans. He noted that the political ecology of New Orleans was also organized through a riverine idiom and ordering, which mapped out the eventual scale and pattern of a disaster. New Orleans is not exceptional here and most cities are socially involved with bodies of water that both make them and undermine them – as Whybrow (2015) shows in respect to Venice: ‘the complex interaction of art, tourism and water’ that provides the conceptual link to an understanding of its state of affairs. In the smaller town of Pickering, Yorkshire, flooding was historically anticipated and a way of life, its contemporary form and description as ‘an emergency’ more a function of less commensurate modern domestic technologies than its greater frequency (Whatmore, 2013). Using a materialities approach to water resource management, Medd and Marvin (2008) show that current managerialist practices fail to take into account the ‘hidden work of sociotechnical networks’ and the ‘multiplicity of relations that differentiate as much as integrate the regional space’. They argue that humanist aspirations for ‘integration’ and ‘system’ must give way to process-orientated approaches in which ‘boundaries remain open’ and where change and instability should not be resolved but be brought into productive and fluid practice, or ‘mangled’, as Pickering would say. In the same way, Franklin (2006) showed how burning cities in Australia cannot be understood other than through interfaces between the aesthetics of forest suburbs, the science and technologies of Australian fire management and fire fighting and how these interpellated new practices and subjectivities where fire rejuvenated/reproduced the social as much as it did the natural. Rather than ameliorate (or integrate) an external threat from pyrotechnically adapted gum trees and the bush fires they precipitate, Franklin (2006) shows how the modernization of fire fighting created forms of human dependencies on fire itself, with many firefighters becoming ‘firebugs’. Nigel Clark (2011) has completely changed our notion of nature as a benign and passive other to the agency of humanity, far less a model for human ethics. He has shown just how vulnerable large metropolitan cities are to planetary forces that are essentially turbulent and unpredictably responsive to anthropogenic urban change. Michel Serres (1996: 17) too described the push to achieve a more just and evenly distributed material well-being 191

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across the Western world as amounting to ‘a force of geological magnitude’. According to Clark, this acts on and invokes violent and system changing responses from a wide variety of non-human agencies and yet philosophically we never developed an expertise around this interface – or recognized it as an interface. After the Copernican revolution, the realization of the truly awesome forces of nature changed the Christian worldview of humankind as the centre and purpose of the universe but instead of chastening humanity into a more convivial cohabitation with nature as a series of infinitely and particular configurations, it merely reproduced the Christian worldview on a smaller scale. Under the influence of Kant especially, intellectual aspirations were still channelled through the idea of human ascendency, power and agency but were scaled back to the more immediate localities and forms of agencies within human grasp. Dangerously, we became ‘place’ rather than planet focused. The city especially became the focus of utopian experimentation with a view to blueprint and perfect this ideal, hived off human living space. What emerged was humanism, a world of humans living among themselves, with humanity as the controlling centre – which in modernity became a project that relentlessly pursued an ever-greater sense of power and control over human and non-human ‘resources’ (Pickering, 2008). As it did so, the notion of non-humans having powers to affect human life chances, extensive enough in pre-scientific and alchemic knowledges, rapidly fell away (though never completely). Thus, did environmental and ecological thinking emerge in the very specifically humanist intellectual climate of the 1970s–1990s, prior to the ‘posthumanist’ ontologies of Deleuze and Guatari, Serres, Latour, Law, Pickering, Haraway, Stengers and Clark, as well as the gathering counter-forces of indigenous and post-colonial studies and ontologies (Rose et al., 2010; Benson, 2013).

The More-than-Human City of the Nineteenth Century Although there is logic to Inglehart’s (1971) assumption that new political questions around the quality of life filled the gap vacated by the politics of materialism, it does not follow that nature and ecology would necessarily be included, or at least that if they were that they would be necessarily new or commensurate with urban sensibilities. Britain’s urban designers had long been ambivalent about cities completely purified of nature, their key architects having been influenced by the arcadian, pagan aesthetics/ontology of the classical world, especially the gardened square or piazza and the intermingling of the natural with the cultural. Long before Ebenezer Howard’s hybrid notion of ‘Garden Cities’, London particularly had a love affair with squares of nature, building some 600 by 1850, though the earliest predated the Romantic period by almost 150 years and many Romantic styled parks were added subsequently throughout Britain and its colonial cities. In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century London’s underground railway system extended far out into the rural hinterland linking previously independent villages and becoming the catalyst for a suburban building boom sold on the basis of ‘country living in the city’ to middle class (Franklin, 2003). What now seem to be the very stuff of dense urban infrastructure were originally projects to break down the distinction between culture and nature, or as Pahl (1965) put it, ‘urbs in rure’. In theorizing this continuity in change, it is essential to understand the consequences of this contiguity and cohabitation with non-human elements of the city. We cannot merely leave it as a representation; we need to ask what followed, what happened, what iterations and entanglements occurred with what consequences? One answer was that the extensive 192

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parks and gardens might have been built as representations of true wilderness for humans, or imported classical cityscapes, but that’s not how nature itself was going to act on it.

Exuberant Bats in Botanic Gardens – Melbourne, Australia – and Then Sydney … Parks, gardens, museum and scientific collections belonged to the moral politics and civilizing/ public health projects of the nineteenth-century industrial city and were intended in no small measure to provide improving didactic diversions from the alehouse and revolution, as well as healthy air (Franklin, 2003). They were introduced and supported in all significant cities and their cultural-political foundation have remained largely unchanged, though they were porous spaces and easily invaded from the air by opportunistic natures. Windblown seeds might be weeded out. Fruit bats were a different proposition. In Melbourne, Grey Headed Flying foxes arrived in the Botanic Gardens in 1981, the result of a long and hard drought in their former habitats to the north. They settled at a roost in the fern gulley of the gardens and at first the 20 or so individuals were highly prized and popular. As an orderly colony, they were a delightful didactic addition, and their story was poignant. When their numbers grew to 20,000, their fortunes reversed. They were culled. The issue of concern was how many bats should a city like Melbourne have and how does a large city live with a large bat colony? But also, whose city was it? The Melbourne case showed how arguments against animals typically stress essentialised and polarized notions of urban space as human. Opponents of the bats (the scientists and gardeners of the Botanic Gardens) stressed the primacy of human amenity; in this case, gardens, and the nature of cities as compartmentalized and properly ordered by humans. It was a view that resisted the notion of urban environments as shared. Instead the interests of the gardens, the scientists who managed it as a research collection and those who managed its programme of human visits and events formed an alliance to purify an ambiguous presence that did not belong. Yet they were dealing with entanglements here. Their own plant collections did not ‘belong’ either, yet were acceptable to a native species that did (this was certainly within the historical territories of the bats who regarded the park trees as acceptable alternative nesting materials). At the same time, for urban children and adults habituated to the didactic value of curated collections of non-native species, the scientists’ claims that the bats did not belong made little sense. We might say that the bats themselves added additional amenity vibrancy and didactic interest deemed proper for an urban park. As in so many instances of purification the objection of the scientists was conceptual and abstract but their campaign to remove them was based on spurious and patently untrue claims about what the bats had done in practical terms. According to Thompson (2007), the bats had not damaged or killed trees, had not taken over a large section of the gardens and had not altered in any way the key functions of the gardens. Opponents claimed they were not an endangered species when they clearly were. They did not mention their popularity and ecological centrality as unique pollinators of native plant species. The bats were bullied by a wide variety of technologies to force them to leave and when resettlement was deemed too expensive the only option considered was a cull (Thompson, 2007). Their inclination to see animals’ proper place in ‘so-called natural areas’ created at the same time a subset of urban nature whose place and habitats can be ambiguous, fraught and insecure. The Melbourne Botanic Gardens did not decentre and attempt to see the world from the flying foxes’ perspective, to see that in fact they were refugees and had become increasingly 193

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human focused in their habits; that by their nature now they had become people-oriented – human commensals. Conservation biologists like Tim Low (2002) are now excited about the potential of the city to become home to wildlife and for new historically novel relationships to open up, but they have yet to persuade all cities. Nonetheless, while the Melbourne bats lost their battle, their case created a cause and a new siren call. When exactly the same thing happened in Sydney the issue divided the city. They were moved on as other homeless denizens are but they simply found new urban roosts. Their mass mustering at dusk and their flight out into rural feeding grounds then became a major tourist attraction, an essential and vital part of Sydney’s CBD touristscape. Here, tourism in the form of a harbour full of cruise ships of middle-aged, middle-class tourists and airways full of long-haul Boeing A380s enters the city as a powerful political figure and spokesperson, aligned to the bats and opposed to ‘citizen-only’ botanic gardens (van der Duim et al., 2012). In this example, the cosmopolitics of the botanic garden bats arose from the drought, the direct action of the bats, the convivial relationships between the bats, the park trees, the children and their parents in conjunction with other parties such as tourists for whom bats were now a feature of the Sydney cityscape, and the scientists who had created the very amenity and subjectivities that mobilized the citizens and tourists as supporters of the bats. It was not a skirmish the scientists won: it was not a time to be playing an ambiguous role in not helping an endangered species threatened by anthropogenic climate change. The politics of the issue could not be decided on the scientific facts of the case but by the values, ethics and amenity that science itself had created. It is a story not unlike the Mississippi’s dance with the Army Corps of Engineers.

Muck, Brass and Horsepower In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows.1 In the early nineteenth century, there were around 300,000 horses living and working in London (Morris, 2007; Jackson, 2014) and at least 150,000–175,000 in New York and Brooklyn. London had 11,000 horse-drawn cabs and several thousand buses, each using 12 horses per day. Such working horses lasted only three years on average and their constant dying in the street was also a significant noxious waste problem: in 1880, New York cleared 15,000 carcasses from its streets, 41 per day – the practice being to leave them to rot for some time so as to make the logistics of on-site butchery and their transport more practicable. London and New York would not have been possible without horsepower yet it posed an enormous ‘urban problem’, with significant health, logistical and moral implications. Keith Tester (1991) showed how through their bodies these horses were centrally implicated in a dramatic change in the governance of violence in the modern city and new ethics of civility, via the politics of animal cruelty and its segue into animal rights. Tester traces the genealogy of this shift into new values that have shaped everything from the development of companion animal to conservation biology and animal protection – and why its strongholds are in cities. However, even their dung had the capacity to enact urban change. It raised the risk of a number of diseases, tetanus in particular, and there were plagues of flies and fly-born 194

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problems. According to the 2003 BBC documentary, The Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, the fourth wonder was the London Sewerage System. For such a pioneer of public health, London expressed great concern about its horse dung problem, though its solution was less easily organized or so elegantly fixed with new technology. Horses produced vast quantities of dung but its placement was neither predictable nor easily managed. Its solution was an army of street cleaners, typically youths, whose job it was to race out to freshly produced dung and pick it up before it became trodden in and part of the disturbing slurry that flowed and seeped into the very fabric of the city: into cellars, footings of building, water supplies and all spaces of everyday life (Jackson, 2014). The dung was taken by carts and mixed with dung sweepings from livestock ships and railways as well as animal and fish carcasses and bones. From London it was taken by carts and railways and sold to farmers in surrounding counties, and by sea barges down the Thames to the agriculturally rich county of Kent (Thorne, 1892). Around the coast it was left on the sidings in festering mounds and eventually distributed to farmers. ‘London Manure’ as it was known, was a grievous nuisance, complained of bitterly and moved on with great haste (Thorne, 1892: 26). Yet at one settlement, Queenborough, on the Isle of Sheppey, these manures were considered less objectionable to local inhabitants long used to its already noxious ‘copperas manufactory’ (the production of sulphuric acid from copperas stones or local iron pyrites), an industry established in 1579. Seemingly sensually indifferent to sulphurous emissions deemed vile to others, the ever-expanding supplies of London manure were instead embraced, consolidating a profitable industrial character. From the late nineteenth century onwards, manures formed the basis of glue factories, fertilizer plants as well as tar, chemical and later pharmaceutical industries (Barson et al., 2006). I first became aware of Sheppey’s noxious industrial heritage from Ray Pahl himself (then in the thick of his detailed ethnographic study there). Alongside the Naval Dockyards these noxious industries and the embodied local indifference to their unseemly fumes were actually formative of the community and its life chances – but Pahl went a little further than this, arguing that it gave the Isle of Sheppey its own (more-than-material) ‘personality’ (Pahl, 1985; Duncan, 1989). Thus, as Marx argued, do new subjectivities form around scientific and industrial objects. Garcier (2010) also charts the progress of the concept of water pollution as it applied to the social ordering of France in its nineteenth-century industrializing phase, finding that while many people were indeed suspicious of, and complaining about its increasing presence and impact, on the whole the French tended to condone or at least allow industrial discharges into their watercourses. This quietude was orchestrated by capitalist interests, but it was also masked by a far greater scientific preoccupation with domestic (human) wastes that were perceived to be the main danger to health. Combined with the poorly developed means and scientific techniques for water testing in France, a state of affairs arose that led the French to entertain the notion that through their toxic properties, industrial wastes even usefully neutralized the risks human wastes posed.

The Ecology of Human Waste If the story of bats in the Melbourne botanical gardens illustrate how wildlife is disadvantaged and rendered unwelcome by a sense of the city as an internally bounded human space, the story of Sydney Albatrosses shows how wildlife can also be disadvantaged when 195

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city boundary maintenance restricts them to ‘natural areas’ uncontaminated by the city (Low, 2002). In the 1950s Sydney built colossal pipes at the foot of coastal cliffs to take sewerage and other waste out into the Pacific Ocean. One of the pipes dumped millions of tons of waste in the form of fats and meat scraps from Sydney’s animal processing plants. A plume of floating smelly waste some 60 m wide and several kilometres long trailed out to sea and attracted large numbers of seabirds. Among these were several species of albatrosses including the Wandering Albatross. Breeding over a two-year cycle, their subsequent breeding condition was dependent upon making up body mass very quickly after fledging chicks. In the face of declining squid stocks, most of the breeding colonies of albatrosses became dependent on this plume of fat and waste and their populations remained stable. However, in the name of responsible environmental citizenship and an effort to curb marine pollution, a new system of pipes and distributors was built in 1971. This dispersed the waste and cut the birds off from their nourishing plume and shortly afterwards the global albatross populations plummeted. They had learned to fly to Sydney from colonies as far away as New Zealand, Madagascar and South America. Today they are an endangered species. This example illustrates the largely experimental zone of agency in the ecological/technical times of cities and suggests the value of adopting Latour’s ‘Compositionist Manifesto’ (Latour, 2010).

Deindustrialization and the Wilding of Cities If the industrializing nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid down the foundations for a dramatic enthusiasm for wildlife and closer associations with animals inside and beyond the modern city (Tester, 1991; Franklin, 2003), the deindustrializing period after Whose City? consolidated and deepened this imbroglio. First, the natural world that played other to the cultural world of the city began to lose its distinctive, wilder qualities as a more rationalized and economically pressurized agricultural (and fishing) industry encroached on it and reordered it (Buller, 2004). There was now less tolerance and accommodation for animals that had long lived in great profusion, cheek by jowl with humanity. Stepping around greenbelt legislation, the 1980s saw a massive boom in barn conversions for dwellings resulting in the loss of breeding habitat for owls, bats, swallows, flycatchers and others. Badgers that had long lived in the dairying counties of southern England were blamed for spreading disease to cattle and were killed, their ancient badger sets filled in. In England, agriculture intensified and intruded on ancient hedgerows, fields, woodlands and woodland margins, copses and couverts – all of which had been hitherto cultivated as a unique patchwork of interlocking habitats for useful nature as well as game animals. New intensive crops and farming practices (such as burning stubble, crop rotations, fallowing fields, changed orcharding practices) undermined the connection with many of its long-standing wild species. At the same time marshes and wetlands were lost for housing developments and massive new road and motorway networks ate into some of the wilder margins ringing them with lethal new barriers. The crisis of declining habitats forced more and more wild species into experimental forms of cohabitation with humans (and vice versa) often in the heart of human communities and urban centres among their maturing plantations of trees and suburban gardens. There were considerable resources for them to experiment with. Land and habitat lost to agriculture was substituted by the arrival of substantial urban fallows and wastelands as the deindustrialization of British cities gathered pace through the 1970s and 1980s. Cities 196

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offered distinct advantages to animals in the form of roads and lighting to aid navigation, warmer and more sheltered climates, suitable spaces for nesting, burrowing, and seclusion and access to a wide variety of foraging habitats where they were not in competition with agriculture (and therefore designated as pests). In addition, cities overflowed with food resources in the form of human waste and wasted food. Fox (2013) estimated that 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced (for humans) remains uneaten and the vast majority of this is available to other species in cities and city waste disposal sites and flows. Over a 50-year period, the migration of British wildlife into cities and its growing rarity in many areas of the countryside took place through an astonishing process of experimentation and co-evolutionary accommodations. Between 1965 and the early 1970s, 30% of British railway mileage (5,000 miles) was lost. Although this was a significant amount of land falling into disuse and being reclaimed by nature, its greater significance was as corridors of habitat and vectors of wildlife and vegetative migration. A substantial mileage of British railways was too costly to demolish and so they reverted back to a mix of woodland and scrub – an ecology that was then stabilized by a variety of leisure developments such as footpaths, cycle tracks and non-commercial steam railways (Wildlife Trusts, 2016). Nature rapidly reclaimed these lines of flight that connected the deeper countryside with city centres, making it possible for most animal species to breach modern cities, previously protected by busy roads. Typically, these rail links were connected to the sidings and branches of rustbelt industrial precincts and so newly arriving wildlife often become sole tenants. A significant proportion of traditional British industries were connected to the canal system, and whereas the railways declined during this period, the canals that they had replaced were suddenly brimming with new ‘leisure’ activity, brought back to life by activist cores of boating enthusiasts with the aid of new funding for tourist development. These also became corridors and vectors for wildlife that used them to penetrate the leafier parks and gardens of suburbanites whose postmaterialist values ensured they would be treated as welcome additions. Urry (1990) was among the first to note the seemingly paradoxical connection between the rapid decline of industry and the meteoric rise of tourism. Aestheticized refugee wildlife cottoned on fast to more favourable human attitudes and became embroiled in a new wildlife tourist gaze: Peregrine falcons nesting in central London (on the Houses of Parliament and Battersea Power Station, for example) attracted a new stream of tourists to watch them hunt tourist pigeons of Trafalgar Square; international birder tourists flocked to the massive broad acre sewerage system at Werribee, Melbourne; to see fruit bats fly across the Sydney skyline at dusk was billed by TIME magazine in 2013 as one Asia’s top tourist experiences.2

Urban Ethology Hinchliffe and Whatmore (2009) have shown that the arrival of new species into potentially sustainable urban habitats involves far more than continuing their old way of life. They could never carry on their former life as if the new setting was merely an externality to a life that was ‘acted out according to an internal script’. In new urban settings especially, all species are enrolled into specifically new assemblages of constraints and opportunities that they must respond to, as others respond to them. Always dances of agency. In these circumstances, some extraordinary shifts in their life chances can occur as they encounter new networks of humans and their radically different political economies; as the indeterminacy 197

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of all species become ‘intensified in urban habitats’ (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2009: 110). Their example of water voles of the Bourn Brook in central Birmingham illustrates this, but also how significant they are to city life. The water vole (Arvicola terrestris) is no ordinary small mammal. It has become Britain’s rarest mammal; it barely exists in its ‘natural habitat’ and is only found in a handful of urban areas (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2009: 109). Its putative arrival in Birmingham was therefore cause for some considerable celebration, though the presence of such a politically important animal also surrounded it in controversy because it meant that this ostensible brownfield or derelict site was suddenly recast as one of the most important ecological sites in Britain. It became the subject of an intense debate among conservation ecologists in conjunction with a specifically urban political economy. Part of the problem was that in theory water voles ought not to be there, or at least, for traditional ecologists the much despoiled Bourn Brook, ‘bordered and crossed by canals and railways’, was a surprise place for the water vole to turn up in, not least because of the presence of one of its key predators and competitors, the brown rat. Its presence also seemed to be intermittent, which is unusual, but only in relation to its ideal ‘natural’ habitats, prior to its demise in them. In its urban context too little was known about its new territorial practices but this state of exception (and controversy) was extremely important because the landowners of the area were poised to develop the entire area. If they were able to effectively contest the voles ‘proper’ presence by drawing on behavioural features of the water vole recorded elsewhere, the ability of the Black Country Wildlife Trust to seek legal protection might be compromised. This was not an exceptional example. Just a few kilometres away on a makeshift car park were a number of ancestral breeding sites of Britain’s rarest bird, the black redstart. Some of the most powerful legal protection is available to this Schedule 1 species on the Wildlife and Country Act of 1981, yet providing the necessary evidence for birds nesting in such busy, noisy and inaccessible locations proved challenging for the Black Country Wildlife Trust. The car park was prime development land just across the road from Birmingham’s telecommunications tower. As with the controversy over the water voles of the Bourn Brooke, the routine machinations of its property developers, real estate agents and the other managers and gatekeepers who had comprised the social world of Ray Pahl’s Whose City? had been ecologized; their human monopoly over the allocation of life chances challenged by the territorial aspirations of a migratory bird and the ‘potential’ presence of a small wet rodent.

Kucinta: The Tourist Cats of Singapore The Singapore street cats were such a distinctive feature of the Singapore River that they were collectively promoted to the status of urban icon. In December 1990, the name ‘Kucinta’ (Bahasa Melayu words Kuching for Cat and Cinta for Love) was the winning name for the ‘Name the Singapore River Cats’ contest organized by Singapore Tourist Promotion Board (STPB). Eventually, Kucinta was adopted as a tourism mascot for Singapore. ‘Kucinta, the Love Cat of Singapore’ was introduced in the middle of 1991 as part of STPB’s tourist promotional campaign worldwide. By the end of 2000, the Kucinta was fast slipping into obscurity as a tourist icon and STPB quietly pulled the plug on Kucinta as a mascot. This happened because the cats had spread into and around the city, ‘infesting’ the storm drain system and hanging around 198

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residential buildings. In a replay of the nineteenth-century ‘sanitizing city’, the PAP Singaporean government now viewed the cats as a problem to be controlled. Which was a problem for the government because now the Singaporeans loved them even more. The 2003 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak ‘Provided the Singapore government with an opportunity to renew a historic obsession with hygiene, eugenics and surveillance.’ Faced with accusations from Europe and America that East Asians had become super-spreaders of the virus, ‘the fear, economic uncertainty and shame brought on by SARS combined with the need to display utmost efficiency was displaced onto the body of the cat.’ (Davis, 2011: 186) Unable to do anything rationally related to the SARS outbreak, the Singapore government hit on a sudden spontaneous campaign of cruelty to local cats following a claim that the virus originated from palm civets or civet cats in China. Although these were completely unrelated to local cats, the PAP Government embarked on a systematic cull of Singapore’s street cats, which then triggered a public confrontation between many civil society groups and the state. As Davis shows, this event is a perfect example of how animals and humans become entangled in urban tensions and conflicts and how an animal like the cat can become the conduit for the expression of values and political agendas not easily expressed through normal political or civic channels. The confrontation with the state was a serious one, especially when animal advocacy groups convened a press conference without informing the government first. As the cull continued the advocacy groups mounted a campaign to rescue the cats by keeping large numbers of them illegally in their flats or in caged enclosures. At the same time, many engaged in furtive night feeding of many small feral colonies that live in the city’s storm drain system. This urban conflict located the body of the street cats in a tension that replayed once more the unresolved relationship between gender, ethnicity and class in Singapore. According to Lucy Davis (2011), the PAP Government had earlier used eugenics to realign/readjust the political and economic constitution of Singapore in favour of the ethnic elite by offering financial incentives to women graduates (read Chinese) to leave work to have children while at the same time offering similar financial incentives for uneducated working-class women (read Malay) to limit their fertility. The barely disguised intention of this policy was unsettling to both groups of women whose respective sense of freedom or belonging was challenged by a state considered over-weaning and brutal. So, the governmental cull of cats heightened already-felt sources of tension, namely: freedom of choice, changing definitions of belonging and citizenship and the stewardship of social transition in the city. The attack on the freedom and belonging of the cats enabled women in both groups to take direct action in the hidden, night time world of the cats, to disobey the government through the bodies of the cats rather than their own. The cats expressed three important things. First, that they lived in the city and participated in its life and fortunes and that their belonging to the city had been established by a popular vote. Second, they were also emotionally linked to many people through embodied, familial relationships of mutual care and affection – and Davis carefully documents this. Distinct territorialized groups of street cats collectively identify individual women as ‘theirs’ and scent them as they do each other with the group’s unique scent. Single women and men benefit palpably from these ties and the cats are fed, looked after and protected. Third, the cats had successfully asserted an independent and unruly freedom that perfectly expressed values directly opposed to the governmental programme. As Davis argued: 199

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It would be hard to find a creature more antithetical to government ideology than the street-cat of popular imagination. It does not follow the grid system of the city. It does not walk on a leash and cannot be trained. It is unpredictable, nocturnal, transgressive. It has sex very loudly and uses its sexuality “irresponsibly,” reproducing out of control. (Davis, 2011: 295)

Conclusion To paraphrase Nigel Clark (2010), cities in fast-changing modern times ‘are condemned, as are other creatures, to experimentation and improvisation’, typically in dialectical, material relationships with non-human elements and entities out of which ‘dances of agency’ leave neither quite the same as they were before they began. In these ways the non-human makes its force felt as surely as any other political actor, though the speed and temporal range of the political processes they become entangled in may vary enormously. Pahl’s study was set in the times of post war British materialist politics, but the 1970s also represented a political watershed, the other side of which was a deepening sense of the consequences of anthropogenic change, part of which included the realization that our environment and ecology were very far from passive or neutral backcloths to human will and creativity or that science and technology could be contained within the separable world of the non-human. The more the US Army Corps of Engineers attempted to control the Mississippi the more it rose up against them, flooding New Orleans, provoking political anxieties and ordering the city into a riverine political economy (Pickering, 2008: 6–7). The more Australians used science and technology to prevent bush fires the more fire was internalized into the life of Australian cities and cultures: fires increased rather than decreased and a serious fire could endanger its capital Canberra (Franklin, 2006). The more scientists attempted to control bats in a botanic garden the more they became embedded in the wider spaces and cultural politics of the city (Thompson, 2007). Hitherto taken-for-granted environmental, scientific and ecological qualities and values became matters of concern in a postmaterialist politics that then reconnected city life to air, water and food quality, as it did to a wide variety of other concerns, with the circulation of wastes, with changes and exchanges in biotic communities, with global scale shifts and flows that the tightly governed and protected nation states of the postwar period could not imagine. This politics created a new wider-angled lens through which to examine the city, out of which the focus on relational materialism, posthumanist materialities and morethan-human perspectives would emerge. Apart from introducing the more-than-human city, such perspectives and the cases considered here also served as reminders that cities cannot be conceptualized as humanist islands or citadels. Cities transact relational spaces and networks that secure, for example, sustainable and safe levels of control over water, and studies of the city now need to cast their empirical nets over wider spatial, historical and social frames. It has also been shown how modernity can make non-humans into refugees as well as humans (matter, people and other creatures out of place and on the move). New dances of agency occur when non-humans show up unannounced and in large numbers (such as unwanted bats or well-loved albatrosses), forcing both material responses and a reshuffling of the political pack, creating winners and losers and alliances across the Great Divide. We have become more aware, as the examples in this chapter attest, that engagement or 200

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relationships with non-humans not only result in changes in the nature and distribution of our material world, it also creates new subjectivities around its new more mobile objects, and these may arrive already aligned morally, ethically and politically in new ways, or they form new and unanticipated coalitions: mixtures of Singaporean cats and women aligned around mutual interests in fertility and freedom; Eucalypt species and fire fighters aligned around the rejuvenation of their communities; or children and tourists in Sydney, both concerned with the idea that flying foxes remain defining of and properly present in that city. While Latour’s Politics of Nature develops a better sense of the philosophical basis for a ‘parliament of things’ it is never entirely clear how the constitution and community of things become represented or spoken for or the terrain and habitus of such politics. The cases considered here are valuable in demonstrating that such political terrains are spontaneously embedded in the specificities of their entanglements and are always already political as they are material and social. That their politics are an element of their accomplishment. However, the historically situated framing of these case studies demonstrate an increasing capacity for humans (on the ground or in the academy) to sense such entanglements and to be more consciously reading them, as imaginatively as their sociological imagination.

Notes 1 http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/29/the-horse-manure-problem/. 2 London Peregrine Partnership, http://www.london-peregrine-partnership.org.uk/index.htm (accessed 15 July 2014); Low (2002).

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Adrian Franklin Garcier, R. (2010), ‘The placing of matter: Industrial water pollution and the construction of social order in nineteenth-century France’, Journal of Historical Geography, 36: 132–142. Gleeson-White, J. (2013), ‘Going Viral’, Review of The Swan Book by Alexis Wright [Giramondo], Sydney Review of Books. Available at: http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/going-viral/ Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hinchliffe, S. and Whatmore, S, (2009), ‘Living cities: Towards a politics of conviviality’, in D. White and C. Wilbert (eds), Technonatures, Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Inglehart, R. (1971), ‘The silent revolution in post-industrial societies’, American Political Science Review, 65: 991–1017. Ingold, T. (2013), ‘Anthropology beyond humanity’, Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 38 (3): 5–23. Ingold, T. (2015), The Life of Lines, London: Routledge. Jackson, L. (2014), Dirty Old London, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, New York: Harvester. Latour, B. (2004), Politics of Nature, New York: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2010), ‘An attempt at a compositionist manifesto’, New Literary History, 4 (3): 471–490. Law, J. (1994), Organizing Modernity, London: Sage. Law, J. and Mol, A. (1995), ‘Notes on materiality and sociality’, Sociological Review, 43 (2): 274–294. Low, T. (2002), The New Nature, Ringwood, Vic: Penguin. Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. (1998), Contested Natures, London: Sage. Medd, W. and Marvin, S. (2008), ‘Making water work: Intermediating between regional strategy and local practice’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26: 280–299. Morris, E. (2007), ‘From horse power to horsepower’, Access, 30 (Spring): 1–9. Pahl, R. E. (1965), Urbs in Rure, London: London School of Economics and Political Science, Geographical Papers no.2. Pahl, R. E. (1975), Whose City? 2nd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pahl, R. E. (1985), Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Pickering, A. (1995), The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pickering, A. (2000), ‘The objects of sociology: A response to Breslau’s “sociology after human- ism”’, Sociological Theory, 18 (2): 308–316. Pickering, A. (2008), ‘New ontologies’, in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pickering, A. and Guzik, K. (eds) (2008), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, D., Muir, C. and Sullivan, P. (2010), ‘From the other side of the knowledge frontier: Indigenous knowledge, social–ecological relationships and new perspectives’, The Rangeland Journal, 32 (3): 259–265. Serres, M. (1996), The Natural Contract, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Stengers, I. (2005), ‘The cosmopolitical proposal’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 994–1003, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tester, K. (1991), Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights, London: Routledge. Thompson, M. (2007), ‘Placing the wild in the city: “thinking with” Melbourne’s bats’, Society and Animals, 15: 79–95. Thorne, R. T. (1892), Extracts from the Annual Report of the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board for 1891–92: On Manure Nuisances, London: HMSO. Urry, J. (1990), The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage. Van der Duim, R., Ren, C. and Johannesson, G. T. (eds) (2012), Actor-Network Theory and Tourism, London: Routledge. Whatmore, S. (2013), ‘Earthly powers and affective environments: An ontological politics of flood risk’, Theory Culture Society, 30 (7–8): 33–50. Whybrow, N. (2015), ‘Watermarked’, Performance Research, 20 (3): 50–57. Wildlife Trusts (2016), ‘Exploring Secret Railways’, available at: http://www.wildlifetrusts. org/ forgottenrailways.

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Elaborations

11 AIRPORTS, AFFECT AND ARCTIC FUTURES – MORETHAN-HUMAN THINKING OF CONNECTIVITY AND DWELLING Carina Ren Welcome to Greenland – The Inflight In his book Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (2008), Marc Augé proposed the airport as the epitome of what he termed the ‘non-lieu’, the non-place. In contrast to the dwelling space of the home, with all its affective and emotional investments, Augé saw the airport as a transit space: a homogenous, interchangeable space divested of meaning through which humans flow. It is easy to translate the airport hub of Kangerlussuaq situated on the West Coast of Greenland slightly above the Arctic Circle in such a way. Since the Second World War, where it was established as the American ‘Søndre Strømfjord’ air base, the airport has remained the main airborne entry point to Greenland. Today, the air base has closed, and the civilian airport is now known under its Greenlandic place name, Kangerlussuaq. To the traveller going to Greenland, Kangerlussuaq might at first glance seem like an airstrip stuck in the middle of ‘nowhere’: a dreary waiting room, a cafeteria, the inevitable souvenir shop, and the tourist stands offering trips around the area and passengers awaiting their connecting flights to other towns and settlements on the Greenlandic West coast. The surrounding settlement composed of a few hundred souls depend entirely on the airport, a connected tourism cruise harbour and tourists. To flight passengers on the move, Kangerlussuaq is a parenthesis, a bump reducing air traffic from a seamless and smooth experience to a decelerated waiting around. Perhaps it was this initial view of Kangerlussuaq as a parenthesis, a non-place, that helped along a radical political decision passed in 2018 to build two new international airports in Greenland, thus directing international air traffic away from Kangerlussuaq and directly into larger towns. Kangerlussuaq’s status as the main connection point to and from Greenland will soon come to an end, as the two other international airports in Nuuk and Ilulissat are set to open in 2024 and 2025. Also, a regional airport connecting to Iceland is planned to be built in Qaqortoq in South Greenland. As one of the largest investments

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in Greenlandic history, the infrastructural projects are predicted to radically transform ­Greenlandic air mobility and connectivity to and within the world’s largest island. This essay attempts to engage with the airport beyond the ontological and analytical understanding of it as a mere surface or functional backdrop for the development of places. This is done by closing in on how it is enacted in Greenland. While public debates frame airports as a ‘game changer’ linked to growth and improved connectivity, other but less prominent airport stories and relations foreground the many hopes and fears vested in the project. Other ways of thinking about emergent and withering airport materialities are stitched together by experimenting with personal memories and ethnographic field material. Far from seeing ‘the airport’ as a mere outcome of rational (or in the eyes of opponents, irrational) planning activities, the essay unravels how the imagining, prospecting, maintaining and coming-undone of airports connect to ‘passion-enacting’ practices that generate – or cut – territorial attachments.

The Game Changer By its many proponents, the airport constructions are introduced as a ‘game changer’ for attracting tourists and much-needed investments to the island nation. According to Siumut, the social democratic party currently in the majority in Greenland, the project will create new opportunities for Greenlandic citizens and attract new investors, and business reviews share the story of unique opportunities enabled by the new airports (Baliani, 2022). From a post-colonial perspective, the airport project marks the end of an infrastructural regime in Greenland based on military needs of a foreign (US) power, instead connecting it to new needs of a young Inuit nation. For Greenlandic politicians and businesses – and for impatient passengers awaiting their connection to Nuuk and Ilulissat – the decision to speed up air mobility and strengthen connectivity to, from and within Greenland may seem like an easy decision to reduce travel friction. As explained by Jens Lauridsen, CEO of Kalaallit Airport in charge of constructions ‘most visitors first arrive in Kangerlussuaq and then travel on by domestic flight to their final destination. It is time-consuming and expensive. But with the new airports you will be able to travel directly from New York, Boston, Frankfurt or London to Nuuk’ (Wex, 2022, author’s translation). While politicians and travellers impatiently await the opening of new direct routes to the capital Nuuk and to the tourism capital of Ilulissat, others have fiercely criticised the decision, arguing that new airports will not improve, but in fact deteriorate c­ onnectivity for citizens living outside of those two towns. Some adversaries of the airports argue that the decisions surrounding their constructions are flawed, while others challenge the economic calculations based on which the decisions were made. For instance, Hendriksen et al. (2021: n.p., author’s translation) criticise the socio-economic calculations behind the future airports, asking whether ‘it is not now, that a serious but much-needed pause should be taken, so that a scientifically sound socio-economic analysis can be prepared with real alternatives for the development of the infrastructure’. In their eyes and those of many others, new airports are an outcome of bad politics and miscalculations. Adversaries in the ongoing ‘airport debate’ in Greenland see and assess the situation very differently. However, both parties base their verdict on the existence of indisputable (­although different) social facts: that new airports will either build and improve connectivity

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in and to Greenland or that the planned airports will degrade already existing infrastructure and challenge regions in the Greenlandic periphery even more. As the decision has now been made and constructions have begun, one might say that time will tell whether the airports were ‘a good decision’. Will the actual number of tourists and investors attracted end up fitting predictions and expectations? Did the airports ‘open Greenland for business’? Or, as warned by critics, will they prove to have been failed investments and the predictable outcome of flawed planning? Questions such as these about airports, and infrastructure more generally, assume that  their prospecting and construction are strictly based on rational (or irrational, ­depending  on the view) decisions and see their outcomes as calculatable and observable ‘facts’. But a different understanding is also possible. In this view, airports and their c­ oming ­together  and coming-undone is enacted by a much broader set of actors, creating more vibrant and messy effects than ones that can be assessed – or predicted – as either positive, or failed.

Caring for Airports During the past decade and as part of various research projects, I have visited and interviewed inhabitants in Kangerlussuaq. Discussions have revolved around different topics related to tourism mobility, connectivity and infrastructure: plans for the airport, cruise tourism, destination governance and the possible but so far unrealised construction of an ATV track and gravel road from Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut, Greenland’s second-largest town, which would make it the first road to connect any two settlements in Greenland. During our conversations, we have also touched on other topics: the kids and the school, investments in the community, the future. Conversations were most often lined with one ­recurrent theme: uncertainty. And all this uncertainty revolved around one thing: the airport. Would it remain open, would it close? And what would happen then? These conversations suggest other ways to think about and live with infrastructural changes and with the airport. These concerns suggest that the airport is connected to ‘­passion-enacting’ practices that generate – or cut – territorial attachments, that fuel on and generate affect, hopes and fear and which are able, for better and for worse, to hold uncertainty in tension over decades and perhaps, as a permanent state. By paying more close attention to affective infrastructuring as generative and as a more-than-human endeavour, debates over ‘good’ or ‘bad’ planning could be enriched. This calls for a new and more sensitive engagement with and exploration of ‘the airport’ beyond an interest in whether it ‘does good’ for business, society or travellers. We could think, for instance, about how airports are cared for, as according to Mol (2008: 10), care practices are ‘implicit and embedded in buildings, habits, and machines’. And about how airports are not solid, but places continually in-the-making or becomingundone. In the exploration of the airport as a place, Massey (2005: 140) reminds us that What is specific about place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or the eternity of the hills. Rather, what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and a geography of thens and theres); and a negotiation that must take place within and between both human and nonhuman.

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A place comes together not through the maintenance of a stable identity or physical appearance, but through the multiplicity of encounters and entangled relations between humans and non-human others. Attending to airport as a place, not only as a battlefield for the right facts, numbers or predictions, we could tend to airport through matters of care. To Puig de la Bellacasa (2011: 96), this means unsettling and enriching already objectified matters of fact by offering ‘a speculative commitment to think about how things would be different if they generated care’. According to Metzger (2014: 1004): Caring for place could potentially be of help in focusing our attention on, sensitizing us to, and making us care for the complex more-than-human ecologies of our own existence as a species, further localizing our own situated part in them. This approach would relinquish us from passing final, normative judgements about airport properties or outcomes, as caring for place disrupts the idea of rational planning as a singular practice. Instead, it engenders a sensitivity towards ‘the intimate connections between care for both humans and the nonhuman’ (Lawson, 2007: 6).

More than Infrastructure? So how may we think carefully about ‘the airport’, for instance, as something other than a non-place or a ‘project’. As something constantly in-the-making, as affective – as something, in short, linked to sociality beyond the human? How may we, in Massey’s (2005: 158) words, ‘blow apart the imagination of a space or place to find within it its potential’? Far from seeing ‘the airport’ as a mere outcome of rational (or in the eyes of opponents, irrational) planning activities, we invite a view on its prospecting, construction and comingundone as connected to ‘passion-enacting’ practices that generate, challenge or disrupt territorial attachments (Metzger, 2013). Such an approach suggests airports to be more than merely physical structures and more than an unequivocal ‘good’ or ‘bad’ outcome of human or institutional agency. Instead, airports carry agency through their attachment to bodily sensations and emotions, post-colonial Arctic placemaking and weather systems altered by climate changes. By way of increasing a sensitivity towards and exploration of more-than-human airport connections, we might challenge human exceptionalism and learn about how even seemingly instrumental non-places become-with a multiplicity of other actors. One way to think about physical infrastructure beyond a structural or planning issue is proposed by Lund and Jóhannesson (2014), who analyse a road construction in Iceland and its entanglement to tourist destination development. As they show, roads can join and disconnect places in multiple ways: ‘the road is not only a passive construction that fixes traffic through the region, but also it has creative capacities’ (Lund and Jóhannesson, 2014: 456). In this case, connectivity is not merely a question of connecting A to B. Roads are lively and have creative capacities through which worlds, relations, places and temporalities are crafted and broken. Similarly, in a study about the use of internet in Greenland, Simonsen et al. (2022) challenged the idea of digital infrastructure and connectivity as a question of ‘bad’ versus ‘good’ internet. Introducing the concept of frugal connectivity, they show how community members experimented with online platforms through situated, mundane digital practices 208

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to cope with and negotiate physical and social distance. This view of communication infrastructure as a more-than-technological phenomenon offers, as they argued: An understanding of connectivity beyond merely being connected or disconnected, but rather as a spectrum of ongoing, locally negotiated, enabled and disabled connectivity. This challenges ‘good infrastructure’ as based on a one-size-fits-all model, in which the conditions of arctic connectivity needs drastic changing, but rather opens up for more adaptive, frugal models, which citizens and researchers can ‘tinker’ with. (Simonsen et al., 2022: 77) Such ways of tinkering with connectivity may inspire us in thinking about how planning for physical infrastructure may abstain from repeating existing macro-scale logics that have so far resulted in infrastructural solutions with little relevance for the Arctic populations themselves (Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk, 2019). For this to happen, let us turn to a broader range of messmates partaking in airport infrastructuring in Greenland.

Knowing with the Non-Human According to Despret (2004: 130–131), ‘if we must know more about the non-human, we must know with the nonhuman’. But how to do just that? Studying the more-thanhuman poses a challenge for methodologies that have traditionally placed the human – or ­institutions – at the centre of analysis. According to Dowling et al. (2017: 827), research within human geography: Needs to move beyond only incorporating the ‘voice’ of ‘the more-than-human’ in the methodological doings and toward the implications of decentring human agency for thinking. This entails challenging, and moving away from, the privileging of the speaking, rationally reflective human agent/research that continues, implicitly at least, to frame knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities. This does not mean writing humans out of the equation, but rather, as proposed by Höckert et al. (2022: 181) to nurture ‘curious and caring relations toward our proximate surroundings, beings, and thoughts’ and thus, to pay closer attention to what exceeds the Anthropos and human achievement. More-than-human modes of enquiry tend closely to the rich array of senses, dispositions, capabilities and potentialities of all manner of social objects and forces assembled through, and involved in, the co-fabrication of socio-material worlds (Whatmore, 2006: 604). If, as argued by Whatmore, the more-than-human emphasises the messy heterogeneity of being-in-the-world, then we must learn to notice and tell such messy heterogeneities. Dowling et al. (2017) point to a range of conventional and experimental methodologies to foster new forms of noticing or paying attention to make the more-than-human knowable and to craft, as argued by Ren et al. (2017), collaborative ways of knowing beyond the human. One way of noticing is through Mol’s (2002) praxiography, which meticulously follows and describes how knowledge is created and situated in and through specific sociomaterial settings. In her own work, Mol provides compelling descriptions of how the body is enacted as multiple through the many practices and technologies through which it is handled, scrutinised and represented. 209

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Similarly, the ‘human’ or institutional currently orchestrating and producing airport facts are always enmeshed with other beings, elements, times, forces and objects within dynamic assemblages. As argued by Bennett (2010: 48), these assemblages allow for agency as it ‘becomes distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts’. By exploring airport concerns beyond facts, the airport emerges as a messy alignment or constant reconfiguration of cultural, intangible, geographical, political entities and materialities that extend across the human, the Earth, geopolitics, notions of connectivity and belonging, affect, mourning and loss. In the following, I draw together discourses, materialities and affects through airport stories that seek ‘to enliven rather than report, to render rather than represent, to resonate rather than validate, to rupture and re-imagine rather than to faithfully describe, to generate possibilities of encounter rather than construct representative ideal types’ (Vannini, 2015: 15). Lien and Pálsson (2021: 3) explicitly address how the significance of the other-thanhuman has been toned down by what they call ethnographic omissions, where only small ‘cracks’ of light are able to reveal its significance ‘in spite of disciplinary and disciplining efforts’. To exemplify how the significance of the more-than-human has been neglected, the authors point to a film excerpt of Fredrik Barth recollecting his most precious fieldwork memory, sharing with great joy and passion the close and emotional encounter with Basseri pastoral nomads, their land, and their sheep. Comparing this story to Barth’s more formal work, Lien and Pálsson note how the herd gets attributed with what he refers to as the ‘“Malthusian problem”, and the pastoral landscape is no longer extraordinarily beautiful, but “pastures with limited carrying capacity”’ (2021: 2). In contrast to covering up more-than-human significance, the experimentation with personal memories and impressions from ethnographic field material allows for ‘cracks’, other ways of thinking about emergent and withering airports materialities. In this case through attempts to know-with and story airport encounters and sociality beyond the human. Let us first see how this plays out in and around the passenger waiting room of the airport of Kangerlussuaq by recalibrating research sensitivity towards its materiality and passionenacting practices.

Welcome to Greenland – Waiting or Dwelling? My curiosity and interest in Kangerlussuaq can be traced back to my very first travel to Greenland in the early 1990s as a pre-teen, where I was to spend the next three years of my life. At the time, it was a common story for Danes to take on temporary positions in Greenland, which was led by a Home-rule (now Self-rule) Greenlandic government. It was February as I stepped outside the transatlantic plane and temperatures were approaching minus 30 degrees Celsius in the dark morning. As I walked onto the aircraft steps and into the dry cold air, the small hairs in my nostrils instantaneously froze. I had never encountered that feeling before, a strange tingling feeling accompanied by the sense of breathing extremely cold, dry and pure air. I can still recall the intense sensation and today, I often see many similar stories shared on social media platforms reflecting that sensation of arriving to Kangerlussuaq. Regularly, people I know post about landing in Kangerlussuaq on the first stop en route to home or moving for study or work or visiting as tourists for the very first time. For some, it is a 210

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recollection with air of a well-known kind, for others a first encounter with an unknown sensation. Only this morning as I write this, a Facebook friend made a post from Kangerlussuaq after six weeks on holiday in Europe. In the text accompanying a picture of the runway and taken from inside the airport cafeteria, she writes: ‘The Fresh Clean Air of my country gets me in tear Every. Time’ (Facebook, 2022). These bodily or emotional sensations story the airport as a place to feel and breathe the air of Kalaallit Nunaat, the land of the people. It is about dwelling, at least for a while. Dwelling can turn into idling soon enough, waiting around, also for more than just the time to catch the connecting flight. In comparison with Kangerlussuaq’s highly stable weather zone, storms and bad weather raging elsewhere often cause delays. Outside the waiting room, the weather is calm, but inside people are stuck, sometimes for days. In a conversation with a Greenlandic passenger regularly travelling on the Nuuk-­KangerlussuaqCopenhagen connection, she tells me: It is one of these things and when you live here [in Greenland] you learn to live with it. I have been stuck in Kangerlussuaq! Einstein would be fascinated with Kangerlussuaq because time passes slower than anywhere else in the world. Distant weather systems cause storms, jam flight schedules and slow down time. In the socio-economic reports and discussions in the airport debates, these phenomena are boiled down to ‘regularity’ (a number based on expected flight delays or cancellations due to weather), but its sensation, what ‘irregularity’ feels like remind us of ‘the intimate, sensible, and hectic bonds through which people and plants; devices and creatures; documents and elements take and hold their shape in relation to each other in the fabrications of everyday life’ (Whatmore, 2002: 3). Delays also perform place differently. As storms, fogs or technical problems decelerate travel, Kangerlussuaq opens to idling travellers in new ways, as described by a delayed flight passenger: I would rather be stuck for one or two hours or more than eight hours, because then you can do things. When you know it is longer, then you can go out of the tiny airport. And that is great, because Kangerlussuaq is without a doubt the most beautiful places in the world. I spent three days there in 2016 for a course and I got to see Kangerlussuaq in a different way than before. It is so beautiful. If you drive from the airport past the town there is a lake on the other side of the mountain and there is actually a small restaurant there. It is amazing. They make real good food. (delayed flight passenger, Kangerlussuaq, 2017)

This Is What We Want – The Conjuring of Future Scenarios Airports are not only embodied and sensed, but in other settings also imagined and prospected. During my adolescence in Greenland, I recall discussions – across dinner tables, in the newspaper – on whether to build a new airport. Often, opponents explained the need for a new airport as an elitist interest: ‘Especially in Nuuk, there has been a very active circle of civil servants and businesspeople with a lot of travel activity who have lobbied for an Atlantic airport’ (Hendriksen et al., 2021: n.p., author translation). Much later and as I returned and travelled in Greenland for research purposes as an adult, I began to more 211

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closely follow the airport debate that had continued since then and that had only slightly changed over the decades. I picked up news articles and online discussions about the airports, made notes. In 2011–2012, I was working on a project connected to Arctic futures and in that context conducted fieldwork among Greenlandic and Danish architects and planners in preparation for the exhibition ‘Possible Greenland’ for the Venice architectural Biennale. One of the aims of the exhibition as expressed by the curator from the Danish Architectural Center was to ‘rewire’ colonial discourses about Greenland and set new agendas for the young Arctic nation. Amid these activities, the airport emerged again, this time as a scenario under the name of the Air+Port project. Conceived by internationally renowned architect Bjarke Ingels from BIG architects, it was featured prominently in the exhibition. Introducing the Air+Port project, Ingels stated: Since so far we are trying to inform the public and initiate a political debate, we really don’t want to get lost in very complex details. When you see the Air + Port, it seems almost self-evident and straightforward. This makes it less fragile to a controversial discussion. (Kaltenbach, 2012: n.p.)

Figure 11.1  The Air+Port scenario at the possible Greenland exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2012. Photo: Carina Ren.

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At the official opening of the exhibition in Venice, the proposition of how Greenlanders could take off towards a better (connected) future was seized by the Vice-Premier of Greenland Jens B. Frederiksen. As he entered the exhibition hosted in the Danish pavilion at the Biennale, he walked straight over to the prospects of the ‘possible’ airport and exclaimed: ‘This is what we want!’ (field notes, Venice, 2012). Later, he elaborated in a newspaper interview: There are divided opinions on whether a new airport should be built in Nuuk. Obviously, such a discussion should take place at home in a democratic fashion. It’s not the architects that ought to decide. But their proposals can definitely inspire and give us politicians some tools to be able to make better decisions. (Duus, 2012: n.p., author translation) Through the exhibition, the airport oscillated between working as an imagined, speculative conversation starter and a prospect for politicians. In the interaction with airport scenarios, various actors engaged ‘in a range of rhetorical, organizational and material activities through which the future might be “colonized”’ (Brown et al., 2000: 3). In deliberately reducing complexity, the airport vision and scenario abstains from communicating the known socio-technical, political and public complexity and controversy around ‘the airport’ in Greenland, thus creating very specific grounds for the future and for the ability to engage with it. As a scenario serving, as argued by lead curator of the exhibition, as a tool to guide or lead Greenlanders to make choices, the architect made use of a runway that is not only physically, but also metaphorically straight forward. By interrogating the materialised representations of the future at the exhibition and the practices by which they came to matter, Ren (2015) shows how a specific future and related agencies were enacted into being and how the materialisation of the exhibited scenarios required shortcuts, reductions, and othering, displaying some futures rather than others. While other scenarios at the exhibition addressed the future as complex and unsettled, hence seeking to create what Whatmore terms a generative and disordering event (2009), the Air+Port explicitly sought to cut across or erase complexity and controversy in their accelerating scenario.

Airport Geosociality And speeding up proved to be possible. Not many years after the Possible Greenland exhibition had been held in Venice, airport talks began to intensify, now with a new and growing linkage to tourism, which as a tourism researcher, I had not noticed before. Also, politicians now referred to airports, in the plural. Where only the capital of Nuuk had previously been the subject of airport talks, Ilulissat, the iconic town nestled by the UNESCO world heritage site of the Ilulissat ice fjord, was now included into the equation. At business and tourism conferences and events, presentations about the airport and a projected number of derived, expected tourists, declared the airports as a ‘game changer’ for Greenland. The airports, it was argued, would allow Greenland to compare itself with neighbouring Iceland, whose tourism numbers had increased heavily in a very short time (Jóhannesson and Lund, 2019). Some argued that going from one, to several airports was a political deal to enable any construction:

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Due to opposition from the rest of the country, based on longer travel times and the many weather-related cancellations that an airport in Nuuk would cause, [one airport] was not politically realistic. Therefore, as a compromise, a combined ‘Airport package’ with an Atlantic airport in both Nuuk and Ilulissat as well as a regional airport in Qaqortoq in South Greenland was proposed to get support. (Hendriksen et al., 2021: n.p., author translation) As talk quickly turned into action, a swift political decision – and a considerable loan from the Danish government – replaced decades of discussion. Planning and construction could begin. Not soon after, the pace was once more reduced, this time due to Earthly interference. Building on rocks and permafrost involves a lot of explosives. On the social media platforms of Kalaallit airport, the Greenlandic government company overseeing the airport constructions, viewers were able to follow the work through footage, that quite often involved the blowing away of impressive amounts of rock. But in a time of emergent geosociality, that Pálsson and Swanson (2016: 149) define as ‘the commingling of the geologic and the social and the sensibilities involved’, the geological forces tied to the airport constructions proved strong. Due to permafrost thaw, digging that had been projected into only a few metres had to be expanded down to as much as 18 metres, causing much frustration, delays – and for Kangerlussuaq community members, a little extra time (personal communication, Nuuk, 2022). Climate changes speeding up as much as four times higher in the Arctic than elsewhere (Rantanen et al., 2022), thawing permafrost and a pandemic lockdown disabling the movement of building personnel have made it abundantly clear that airports and related socioand geopolitical practices and discourses are intrinsically linked to geosocial forces. This reminds us of how, as argued by Bennett, geology also has agency: ‘it is not just inert matter under the direction of something nonmaterial, that is an active soul or mind’ (2010: 10–11).

Affective Infrastructuring: Mourning the Airport Many of Kangerlussuaq’s 500 or so inhabitants work in the airport and in businesses derived from airport activities. The airport is the lifeline of the community. On a trip to Greenland that would be the last before the pandemic lockdown, I went to talk to a small business owner, Aviaja. In her souvenir shop across the dusty road from the airport, Aviaja sells woollen products made from musk ox yarn and hand-made souvenirs in bone, tooth, antlers and beads. Over the years spending time in transit in Kangerlussuaq, I had met and talked to her on several occasions about her business, tourism, the plans for the airport and community responses to the situation. At times, the conversation would also touch on her family and children, the community, and the future for them and her business. Aviaja showed concern and frustration about not knowing what was going to happen to the airport once the other airports opened. To her business and that of her husband, to their livelihood. The lingering uncertainty had made members of the community protest on several occasions. As part of a large tourism conference held in Nuuk in 2017, a Kangerlussuaq tourism entrepreneur was awarded a prize for his innovative approach when taking tourists on dog sledges to the Greenlandic ice cap. The prize was planned to be awarded at a ceremony during the closing reception. As a protest, the entrepreneur decided not to attend in person but send a friend to distribute and read out a letter in which he bemoaned and criticised the 214

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difficult conditions that the Kangerlussuaq community and small tourism businesses were under. The year after, in 2018, community members arranged a protest rally calling for the preservation of the airport and the settlement. On Facebook and in the local shop, they advertised for the ‘Save Kangerlussuaq’ protest calling for local citizens to join in the rally going from the hangar towards the hotel, bringing candles and torches. ‘Let us show that we stand together’, the poster stated. The written statement and the rally follow a history of protests against past closings and dislocations of Greenlandic settlements. One was the relocation of a settlement in Northern Greenland as part of establishing the American Thule air base in 1953, another the closing of the Qullissat mine and subsequent forced shutting of the settlement in 1972 by Danish authorities (Sejersen and Thisted, 2021). The affective relation to the airport unravels what Lien and Pálsson (2021: 4) term as ‘more than merely symbolic, utility-based, or the anchor of cultural meaning’. It displays an infrastructure connected to and producing uncertainty, frustration, and loss. While much rhetoric around a new airport infrastructure is bound to Greenlandic future sovereignty, its effect on the ground is tied to a traumatic, colonial history of displacement and relocation through the mourning of places lost or in the process of becoming-lost. The only difference is that this time, a closing would not be forced by a colonising power, but by the Greenlandic Self-Government. At the time of writing, years after the rally, nothing is yet known about what will happen to the airport. Will it shut down completely; will it remain open for the purpose of retaining an airport situated in a stable weather zone in this Arctic region? And if so, will a partial opening enable the continuity of the community? Meanwhile, time slows down, people wait. Not only inside the passenger lounge, but also outside in the hangars, the souvenir shop, the school, and the small tourism businesses as people anticipate an uncertain future. A few years ago, Aviaja made the decision to leave together with her family and her shop is now closed. Living with not knowing what the future would bring had simply become too difficult. But for those that remain, life moves on, somehow.

Discussion – Tinkering with Airport We flew in to Kangerlussuaq: a previous American air base defined by proponents of the future airport constructions as an outdated connection hub, a waste of space and time for passengers awaiting to move on. These supporters welcomed the development and impending opening of new Greenlandic airports to stimulate much-needed tourism, trade and investments and pave the way for Greenland’s full economic independence. Others unravelled a fierce critique of the new airports, seeing them as ‘the doom of Greenland’, as argued by one Kangerlussuaq tourism entrepreneur (interview, 2019), swamping the island with tourists or as an elitist project, benefitting only already privileged citizens of larger, (relatively) well-connected towns. Both sides bring facts to the table that support their claims of airport as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Some numbers suggest that the airports will bring more visitors, increasing economic activity and prosperity to the island. Others, that it might lead to overtourism and an increasing connectivity divide within Greenland between central and peripheral towns and settlements. Beyond good or bad, beyond success or failure, another way of narrating ‘the airport’ is proposed through a thrown togetherness of memories, notes, conversations and impressions, that stories airport infrastructuring as ongoing, in tension, lively and in-the-making. It is a proposition of what it would look like being-with an airport that enables us to 215

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know-with the airport in a way that decentres the human as main actor, that tells of airport sociality beyond the human and beyond institutions: If we take seriously the assumption that social life is a heterogeneous assemblage of human and non-human beings, then ‘the question of political or social change becomes a question of changing our relations not only to other human beings but to nonhumans as well’. (Grusin, 2015: xviii, in Lien and Pálsson, 2021) It also proposes place not as ‘inherently good or evil according to some universal moral register, and therefore deserves neither our unreserved condemnation nor uncritical embrace’ (Metzger, 2014: 1001). Following this, airports, new and old, have not yet, and perhaps never will, prove themselves to be either and unequivocally ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Airport discourses, imaginaries and affects contribute to shaping airports into becoming knowable and prepare places to be lived in, visited, consumed or abandoned in certain ways rather than others (Ren, 2015). It is a part of the ontological politics of places. According to Mol (1999: 74), ‘the reality we live with is one performed in a variety of practices’. This means that we are not only confronted with different realities created through practices and objects but are also (at least potentially) given the option and possibility to choose between them. It is therefore vital to acknowledge that the way that places are felt, envisioned, planned or in other ways enacted by human and non-human actors alike, impacts on how they are in fact made real, made livable in some ways rather than others. If the airport is a non-place in a sociological sense, it is also time- and placeless (Augé, 1995). The unrelated, disconnected non-place has no meaning, no values and ceases to really matter. Consequently, looking at places as non-places literally make us ‘lose site’, lose the ways of knowing that enable us to care. By tending to and storying passion-enacting airport practices, the airport is resituated and made knowable through its relations in time and to place. The airport stories in this essay show us, for instance, how airport messmates emerge and wither in constant tension and in-the-making. Being vested in and living with uncertainty, we must, as Haraway (2016) tells us, ‘stay with the trouble’ and not resort to easy or quick judgements or solutions. In this vein, storying affect and more-than-human agency invites us to think about the airport as more than ‘substrates’ of infrastructure and to explore airport agency – and infrastructuring more generally – in the Arctic. By tending to affective and generative relations to the material world, we can begin to understand how airport messmates become-with physical infrastructures and in this process how places and futures are fundamentally impacted and restructured. Speculating on the airport as a dynamic and affective world-making device inscribes itself into a growing interest on more-than-human worlding in Arctic research (Chimirri and Ren, 2022), which entails reconnecting to messmates and companion species, walking with rocks (Rantala et al., 2020), becoming with muskox (Andersen, 2022) and learning to live with mosquitos (Valtonen et al., 2020). Such studies not only tell us about the entanglement of more-than-humans to sociality in the Arctic, but also draw attention to how the Arctic is not a void ready to be conquered by tourism developers or exploited by extractive industries, but a place populated by humans and non-humans alike. This invites us to more closely ponder the current and future role of more-than-humans in Arctic (and in some instances post-colonial) placemaking, where large-scale projects for tourism, mining and 216

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the green transition land use are currently being projected and causing ontological conflicts (Kramvig and Avango, 2021). By bringing together a range of human and more-than-human actors to facilitate the ‘slowing down’ of reasoning (Whatmore, 2013), this airport study seeks to disrupt dominant human-centred and institutional discourses in Arctic infrastructuring and propose new visions of connectivity as more-than-human. Knowing (with) the airport entails a new recognition of the complex entanglements and dynamics of humans with the Earth, geopolitics, technology, the intangible and non-human life, thus creating a world in which to be human with the more-than-human. This invites us to assess and understand decisions about infrastructure beyond rationality (or reversely, irrationality) and as driven by or singular to human agency but fundamentally, to see agency and change as an outcome of highly distributed practices.

References Andersen AO (2022) Muskox multiplications: the becoming of a resource, relations and place in Kangerlussuaq, West Greenland. Acta Borealia 39(1): 75–94. Augé M (2008) Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. London: Verso. Baliani T (2022) Kalaalit airports new developments bring mixed emotions. Radar. Available at: https:// travelradar.aero/new-airport-expansions-in-greenland-to-bring-joy-and-fear/ (Accessed 23 July 2022). Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Brown N, Rappert B and Webster A (eds) (2000) Contested Futures. A Sociology of Prospective Techno-Science. Aldershot: Ashgate. Chimirri D and Ren C (2022) Tourism worlding. On collective becoming in East Greenland. Polar Record: 58, e33. Despret V (2004) The body we care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis. Body & Society 10(2–3): 111–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X04042938. Dowling R, Lloyd K and Suchet-Pearson S (2017) Qualitative methods II: ‘More-than-human’ methodologies and/in praxis. Progress in Human Geography 41(6): 823–831. Duus SD (2012) Grønlandsk stolthed over eksponering (Greenlandic pride over exposure). Sermitsiaq, [online]. Available at: http://sermitsiaq.ag/node/134649 (Accessed 5 October 2013). Grusin R (2015) Introduction. In: Grusin R (ed) The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. vii–xxix. Haraway DJ (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hendriksen K, Poppel B and Jørgensen U (2021) Forskere: Tag en tænkepause i lufthavnsbyggeriet i Grønland (Researchers: Take a thinking break in the airport constructions in Greenland). Available at: https://www.altinget.dk/arktis/artikel/forskere-tag-en-taenkepause-i-lufthavnsbyggeriet-igroenland (Accessed 7 August 2022). Höckert E, Rantala O and Jóhannesson GT (2022) Sensitive communication with proximate messmates. Tourism Culture & Communication 22(2): 181–192. Jóhannesson GT and Lund KA (2019) Beyond overtourism: Studying the entanglements of society and tourism in Iceland. In: Milano C, Cheer JM and Novelli M (eds) Overtourism: Excesses, Discontents and Measures in Travel and Tourism. Wallingford: CAB International, pp. 91–106. Kaltenbach F (2012) “Possible Greenland” - The earth as common ground. Interview with Bjarke Ingels. Available at: http://www.detail-online.com/architecture/news/possible-greenland-the-earthas-common-ground-interview-with-bjarke-ingels-019886.html (accessed 5 October 2013). Kramvig B and Avango D (2021) The multiple landscapes of Biedjovággi: Ontological conflicts on indigenous land. Polar Record 57: e35. Lawson V (2007) Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97(1): 1–11. Lien ME and Pálsson G (2021) Ethnography beyond the human: The ‘other-than-human’ in ethnographic work. Ethnos 86(1): 1–20.

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Carina Ren Lund KA and Jóhannesson GT (2014) Moving places: Multiple temporalities of a peripheral tourism destination. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 14(4): 441–459. Massey D (2005) For Space. London: SAGE Publications. Metzger J (2013) Placing the stakes: The enactment of territorial stakeholders in planning processes. Environment and Planning A 45(4): 781–796. Metzger J (2014) Spatial planning and/as caring for more-than-human place. Environment and ­planning A 46(5): 1001–1011. Mol A (1999) Ontological politics. A word and some questions. The Sociological Review 47(S1): 74–89. Mol A (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Mol A (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge. Pálsson G and Swanson HA (2016) Down to earth. Geosocialities and geopolitics. Environmental Humanities 8(2): 149–171. Puig de La Bellacasa MP (2011) Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science 41(1): 85–106. Rantala O, Valtonen A and Salmela T (2020) Walking with rocks-with care. In: Valtonen A, Rantala O and Farah PD (eds) Ethics and Politics of Space for the Anthropocene. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 35–50. Rantanen M, Karpechko AY, Lipponen A, Nordling K, Hyvärinen O, Ruosteenoja K ... and ­Laaksonen A (2022) The arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. ­Communications Earth & Environment 3(1): 1–10. Ren C (2015) Possible Greenland: On ‘futuring’ in nation branding. In: Jóhannesson GT, van der Duim R and Ren C (eds) Tourism Encounters and Controversies: Ontological Politics of Tourism Development. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 221–238. Ren C, Jóhanneson GT and van der Duim R (eds) (2017) Co-creating Tourism Research: Towards ­Collaborative Ways of Knowing. Milton Park: Routledge. Schweitzer P and Povoroznyuk O (2019) A right to remoteness? A missing bridge and articulations of indigeneity along an East Siberian railroad. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27(2): 236–252. Sejersen F and Thisted K (2021). Mining emotions: Affective approaches to resource extraction. In: Nord, DC (ed) Nordic Perspectives on the Responsible Development of the Arctic: Pathways to Action. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 369–389. Simonsen MA, Ren C, Leyva-Mayorga I, Stefanovic C, Soret B and Popovski P (2022) Arctic ­connectivity: A frugal approach to infrastructural development. Arctic 75(1): 72–85 Valtonen A, Salmela T and Rantala O (2020) Living with mosquitoes. Annals of Tourism Research 83: 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2020.102945 Vannini P (2015) Non-representational research methodologies: An introduction. In: Vannini P (ed) Non-Representational Methodologies. Milton Park: Routledge, pp. 1–18. Whatmore S (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Whatmore S (2006) Materialist returns: Practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world. Cultural Geographies 13(4): 600–609. Whatmore SJ (2009) Mapping knowledge controversies: Science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise. Progress in Human Geography 33(5): 587–598. Whatmore S (2013) Earthly powers and affective environments: An ontological politics of flood risk theory. Culture and Society 30(7/8): 33–50. Wex C (2022) Nye lufthavne skaber enestående muligheder i Grønland (New airports create unique opportunities in Greenland). Available at: https://businessreview.dk/groenland/ nye-­­lufthavne-­aabner-enestaaende-muligheder-i-groenland/ (accessed August 15 2022)

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12 MEETING AND MINGLING WITH MICROBES A More-than-Human Geography of Hygiene, Holobionts and Hospitality Beth Greenhough Introduction Two key trends have arguably shaped social thought in recent decades when it comes to microbial life. On the one hand, an emerging microbiomania (Helmreich, 2015) holds up microbes as having the capacity to address key environmental challenges, including climate change and environmental pollution, as well as constituting a new ‘probiotic’ frontier for research into improving human health (Lorimer, 2020; Paxson and Helmreich, 2014: 165). On the other hand, in the wake of a series of recent disease outbreaks, the threat of pathogenic microbes remains acute to ‘individual, national and global health security’ (Smolinski et al., 2003: 3). Taken together, these trends highlight the centrality of the microbial to any understanding of more-than-human worlds. We are tied together with other species, and with the environments we inhabit, through the microbes which reside on, in and between us; pathogenic, probiotic, symbiotic or otherwise. ‘Every one of us is a zoo in our own right – a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collective. An entire world’ (Yong, 2016: 3). In this chapter, I want to explore how focusing on microbial life offers insights into what it means to be more-than-human, and demonstrates the value of a morethan-human perspective for conceptualising, engaging and intervening in human-microbe encounters. Within my own discipline of geography, while more-than-human thought and practice have become increasingly central to the way we conceptualise and practise humanenvironment relations, much of that work has been biased towards critters who are ‘big-like-us’, particularly within the lively subfield of animal geographies and work on environmental governance (see Asdal et al., 2017; Barua, 2017; Bastian et al., 2017; Lorimer, 2016b; Whatmore, 2002). Alongside this however, a growing body of work foregrounds microbial agency, as both pathogenic threat (Craddock and Hinchliffe, 2015; Hinchliffe et al., 2013a; Hinchliffe, 2017, 2021) and probiotic opportunity (Brice, 2014; Evans and Lorimer, 2021; Greenhough et al., 2018; Krzywoszynska, 2019; Lorimer, 2017a, 2020; Puig de la ­Bellacasa, 2017). This emerging micro-bio-geography problematises a simple division of microbial life into ‘good germs’ and ‘bad germs’, drawing attention to how whether

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humans experience microbes as conducive to disease or flourishing is dependent on how and where humans and microbes meet (Greenhough, 2012). Below, I provide an overview of some of this work thinking through (i) microbes as a source of bioinsecurity; (ii) microbes as a resource for more-than-human health; and (iii) microbes as companion species.

Bioinsecurities Within Western histories, a modern understanding of disease as microbial is often traced back to germ theory and the emergence of bacteriology in the late nineteenth century, but ideas of contagion have much longer histories (Wald, 2008) and more varied geographies. For example, Herrera’s (2018) claim that Amerindian shamans are the original microbiologists offers an important reminder of how provincial Western understandings of microbes are. Nonetheless, Western outbreak narratives have come to dominate the principles, practices and institutions of Global Health, with implications for how human societies think about microbial socialities, or microbiosocialities (Paxson, 2008). As Wald (2008: 2) observes: [C]ommunicable disease compels attention – for scientists and the lay public alike – not only because of the devastation it can cause but also because the circulation of microbes materialises the transmission of ideas. The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. The current COVID-19 pandemic has served to bring these more-than-human microbial socialities into acute focus as an object of microbiopolitical governance (Paxson, 2008: 17): the classification of microscopic biological agents, the evaluation of the risks they pose and the development of recommendations for how human societies should respond to these risks. For instance, outbreaks of zoonotic disease draw attention to specific configurations of humans, animals, microbes and environments, and their implications for disease emergence. As Richard Gorman (2021: 208) notes: [A]nimals, and our intensified and industrialised relationships with them, have been the focus of much attention throughout the coronavirus event, with the virus “blamed” on human-animal encounters, reigniting discussions about globalised agriculture, meat consumption, habitat encroachment, and the exotic wildlife trade. Similarly, previous outbreaks of zoonotic disease, including Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (HPAI A H5N1) and Swine Flu (H1N1), have brought into question the intensive, industrialised forms of agriculture which provide the ideal ‘breeding grounds’ for zoonotic disease microbes (Hinchliffe, 2017; Wallace, 2009) and which have resulted in both the routinised use of antibiotics and the development of novel microbial communities resistant to those same antibiotics (Hinchliffe, 2022; Kirchhelle, 2020). Microbiopolitics is therefore central to calls for a One Health approach to Global Health, recognising interdependencies between humans, nonhumans and environments (Craddock and Hinchliffe, 2015). A more-than-human perspective on microbial socialites also extends beyond a focus on the lively matter of humans, animals and microbes, to draw our attention to the sites, spaces and substances which are enrolled in seeking to navigate human-microbe entanglements towards healthier futures, allowing humans (or at least those designated valued citizens and 220

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their favoured companion species) to flourish. Farming has been a key site of intervention here, with specific forms of human-nonhuman relations singled out as particularly risky or undesirable. For example, small-scale, local farming systems are often held up as riskier than the clean, modernist aesthetics of large-scale capitalist enterprise, which is perceived to be more easily biosecured (Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008; see also Braun, 2007). Such perceptions arguably owe more to established prejudices towards particular more-thanhuman communities than evidence such arrangements really lead to a heightened risk of disease transmission. Seeking to be pathogen-free also carries significant more-than-human costs. For example, John Law (2010) describes in compelling detail the emotional distress experienced by farmers following the mass slaughter of livestock on farm during the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK. We might also question whether being completely pathogen-free is a desirable state. Scientific research has explored the role of viruses in constituting our DNA (Margulis and Sagan, 2002), while my own ethnographic work in animal research laboratories has brought me into closer proximity (if not, thanks to rigorous biosecurity protocols, contact) with germ-free mice, whose incapacity to flourish outside the strict containment conditions of the lab is a product of microbial absence, and whose bodies show consequential developmental defects which may impair their normal immune function (McFall-Ngai, 2017; Round and Mazmanian, 2009). As Hinchliffe and colleagues (2013) note, being microbe-free is not always good for your health. Microbiopolitical governance further involves reevaluating human-environment relations with a mind to potential routes of pathogen circulation, and how these may disrupt other forms of more desirable circulation (e.g. the global circulation of humans, money and goods; see Barker, 2015). The threat of zoonotic disease has led to a wide array of biosecurity infrastructures which seek to prevent the transfer of disease between species. Infrastructure has long been positioned as key to controlling unruly humans, nonhumans and the microbes that they play host to (McFarlane, 2008). Industrial food production and processing is organised around the removal of microbial contaminants through processes and such as pasteurisation (Paxson, 2008), while biosecurity borderlands are populated by chemicals, PPE, containment rooms and barrier structures which exercise their own forms of agency as they facilitate or limit human, animal and microbial mobilities, and absorb or soak into the surrounding environment. For example, Garnett et al. (2022) have highlighted the role of waste streams (emerging through the disposal of PPE, test kits and even domestic waste) as potential routes for viral transmission and as new targets for public health governance. Furthermore, we have seen how during pandemic outbreaks public health infrastructures, perceiving pathogens to be a foreign threat (Wald, 2008), combine geopolitics and biopolitics when using quarantine at land, sea and air borders to exclude microbial disease. Craddock (2000) notes that such border anxieties sit well with nationalist political agendas, offering a remit for (often pre-emptive) geopolitical interventions in the name of Global Health (Cooper, 2006); tackling the disease ‘over there’ before it comes ‘over here’ (see also Braun, 2007; Brown, 2019; Enticott, 2016; Hinchliffe et al., 2013). In contrast, Hinchliffe et al. (2013) are critical of a biopolitics which focuses on b ­ orders – however defined, established and policed – as they argue it is a poor reflection of the realities of disease. They argue disease is more often the result of a recalibration of human-­animalmicrobe relations inside already established borders, rather than a threat from without. When certain tipping points (such as immune system responses or a growth in susceptible populations) are reached, relations shift from a state of mutual flourishing or symbiosis to a state of dysbiosis, with pathogenic consequences for the humans (and potentially other 221

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critters) involved. Consequently, they argue, we need to ‘think again about the spatial assumptions that underpin the geometry of disease outbreaks, where pathogens are thought to cross over onto healthy lives as if pure space can somehow exist in contrast to an impure, diseased space’ (Hinchliffe et al., 2013: 531). Biosecurity as a form of ‘rigid bordering logic’ might give way to complex processes of securitisation which in and of themselves become new forms and ways of life (Barker, 2015: 357), highlighting how are bodies are always already entangled with microbial lives. As Hinchliffe and colleagues (2013: 537) suggest, ‘[b]eing healthy may not simply mean being free from pathogens, but a matter of immunocompetence; that is, the ability to live with a variety of other organisms that are always in circulation’. In other words, we need to think through the situatedness of infection, and how the capacity for a particular assemblage of humans and microbes to become pathogenic for the humans (or indeed other critters) concerned is the product of a complex relationship between humans, nonhumans, microbes and environments. Disease and health are both more-than-human achievements (Craddock and Hinchliffe, 2015). This has implications for Global Health, where, as Kelly and Beisel (2011) note in the context of malaria control, neoliberal economics, public-private partnerships and the growth of technocentric ‘magic bullet’ solutions tend to target malaria microbes and their vector (the mosquito), but often fail to account for their more-than-human socialites. In contrast, Kelly and Beisel suggest that malaria interventions might do better to pay attention to the specificities of local ecologies, using the case of an intervention focused around creating local maps and knowledges about which kinds of human-animal assemblages serve to ‘incubate’ malaria. Drawing on ethnographic research, they highlight the complex and constantly evolving relationships between humans and mosquitos which shape how malaria is transmitted on the ground: ‘The project relies not on a revolution in synthetic biology, but on evolving local knowledge of malaria-places – the continuous sketching of movements between man and mosquito’ (Kelly and Beisel, 2011: 84). Somewhat counter-intuitively then, responding to the threat of pathogenic infections might entail developing even closer relations with some viruses, bacteria and their vectors, even as we simultaneously work to sever relations with others. For example, in seeking a cure for the Common Cold Virus in post-war Britain, researchers working at the Medical Research Council’s Common Cold Research Unit found themselves trying to develop methods for keeping cold viruses alive outside of the human body, experimenting with different media, techniques and environmental conditions (Greenhough, 2012, 2022). In a similar vein, Kelly and Lezaun (2017: 393) describe the distinctive and complex geographies of entomological research facilities which serve as ‘scaffolding for a distinct interspecies encounter’, helping us to ‘expand our imagination of the ways in which humans can relate to mosquitoes’ and arguably also the microbes they host. Such interconnections are not just social, but embodied and intercorporeal. Consider the important role played by modified viruses in a wide range of medical interventions, for example, the use of viruses as vectors to deliver gene therapy. Far from being a threat to human health, viruses and other microbes might be essential to maintaining it.

Becoming Holobiont In sharp contrast to work which traces the threat of pathogenic microbes is work which explores the probiotic opportunities which emerge when humans and microbes meet. ­ Margulis and Sagan (2002: 76) argue that microbial agency is a key source of human 222

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evolutionary innovation, while Haraway (2008: 3) observes that that ‘human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists...’ (see also Ginn et al., 2014). As holobionts (Gilbert, 2017), we are constituted through our ‘fundamental microbial-ness’ (McFall-Ngai, 2017); we are ‘symbionts all-theway-down’ (Hird, 2010: 37). Furthermore, not only are microbes key to who we are, they also play a central role in keeping us healthy. In post-genomic medical research, the human microbiome (a term used to refer to the community of microorganisms – including bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea and their genes – which live on and around us) is increasingly heralded as the new frontier of precision medicine (Pathare, 2020). Symbiotic microbes (or more precisely their absence) have been linked to a wide range of health conditions, including mental health conditions (via the so-called gut-brain axis), allergies and autoimmune disease. In contrast to the outbreak narrative, in which microbes are associated with dirt, disease and unwanted contamination, we now see the rise of the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, or the idea that sanitised hyper-clean Western lifestyles are actually denying humans the kinds of beneficial exposure to microbial diversity we need to ‘train’ our immune systems (Gilbert and Knight, 2017; Velasquez-Manoff, 2012). Here, the myths told are around the threat not of microbial presence, but microbial absence (Lorimer, 2017b). If pathogenicity can be linked to a moment when previously convivial, or at least liveable, human-nonhuman-microbial entanglements reach a tipping point into disease – a state of dysbiosis – then health is about achieving a state of symbiosis, not only through minimising infection by ‘bad’ germs, but through cultivating relations with microbial allies (Paxson, 2008), ‘old friends’ and ‘gut buddies’ (Lorimer, 2016a). Microbes here are valued not in and of themselves, but in recognition of the services they provide (Cullen et al., 2020; Granjou and Phillips, 2019; Lorimer, 2017b). If we conceive of humans as ‘nested ecosystems’ (McFall-Ngai, 2017) certain microbes or combinations of microbes can be viewed as providing essential ecosystem services. The loss of these microbes, in turn, creates a loss of the functions they provide, producing dysbiosis. Lorimer (2017b) describes how the response is then to seek to rebalance microbial ecologies through the managed reintroduction of ‘keystone species’ who fulfil key functions within the human bodies, in an manner analogous to the wolves reintroduced to manage ruminant populations in rewilding projects. For example: the use of faecal microbiota transplants (FMT) to restore gut microbiotia damaged by infection, antibiotics or chronic intestinal disorders; the inoculation of babies born by caesarean section with swabs from the mother’s vagina to ‘seed’ their microbiome; or the deliberate ingestion of helminths (hookworms) in an effort to control conditions, including hayfever and irritable bowel disease (Lorimer, 2017b). Within more-than-human orientated social sciences these ideas have been extended through ethnographic work examining probiotic relations between humans and microbes in the food chain (Lorimer, 2017b). For example, Heather Paxson (2008) and Jeremy Brice (2014) have explored microbes as allies in the production of raw-milk cheese and wine respectively, while Hinchliffe and Ward (2014: 141) note how farmers combine vaccination with a process of acclimatising new pigs to a herd by gradually ‘exposing them to the full mix of on farm pathogens’ in order to train their immune systems, and turning seemingly bad germs to the good in the process. Lorimer (2017b: 83) terms such interventions as symbiopolitical, in that they ‘aim to modulate symbiotic relationships to deliver ecological functions and services’. One the one hand, this shift towards a more ecological perspective on human-microbe entanglements resonates strongly with arguments for recognising the interdependences of 223

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human and nonhuman worlds (Krzywoszynska, 2019: 622; see also Lorimer, 2012). On the other hand, Paxson and Helmreich (2014: 171) note, while microbiome science researchers are ‘increasingly thinking ecosystemically’, they are ‘doing so with explicitly normative aims’, and often in pursuit of specific anthropocentric political or economic objectives. Microbes are valued not in and of themselves, but as sources of environmental remediation, or enhanced agricultural productivity whereby microbial labour is harnessed to generate economic value in the form of crops (Krzywoszynska, 2019), cheese (Paxson, 2008) and wine (Brice, 2014), as well as pre and probiotic health supplements (Lorimer, 2020). Yet, such entanglements are also more complex than they first appear. Our relations with microbes are profoundly contextual. What in one place emerges as a productive and flourishing assemblage of humans, nonhumans and microbes, in another can be profoundly pathogenic. For example, Lorimer (2017b: 37) notes how hookworm infection, seen as a promising niche therapy for allergy and autoimmune disease for some affluent communities, remains a serious health challenge for impoverished and abandoned often formal colonial agricultural communities elsewhere. Or as Paxson and Helmreich (2014: 183) put it, microbes can be promising only ‘for those people who no longer have to worry about smallpox, polio, cholera, and other agents of infectious disease’. This has led myself and others to argue for the importance of paying attention to the terrain or terroir where humans and microbes meet (Canguilhem, 1991; Greenhough, 2022). Initially borrowed from the French use of the term to describe the distinctiveness of regional produce, the idea of microbial terroir might be expanded from a focus on the way local bacteria and fungi might ‘flavour’ local fermented foods (Evans and Lorimer, 2021: s368; see also Felder et al., 2012), to encompass how humans, nonhumans and microbes interact and the techniques and forms of communication used to cultivate those relations. Microbial terroir thereby ‘emerges from conjunctions of environmental conditions and cultural practices carried out in a particular locale over the duration of successive human generations’ (Paxson and Helmreich, 2014: 176). In other words, it is about the distinct microbial socialities at play (Evans and Lorimer, 2021; Felder et al., 2012; Paxson, 2008). It is these relations which ultimately determine whether a particular human-microbe entanglement is experienced as healthy, unhealthy, or uneventful for the humans (and microbes) involved. If (at least some) microbes are recognised as key to human health and well-being, then questions emerge about the impact of interventions into human and microbial worlds which seek to remove all microbes indiscriminately from human bodies (e.g. the use of antibiotics) and their environments (e.g. the pasteurisation of food or the systematic sanitisation of environments with anti-bacterial cleaners). These interventions, while targeting specific forms of microbial life, can often end up killing rather indiscriminately. As Brice (2014: 184) explains, the process of pasteurising wine to remove laccase (an enzyme ­produced by the botrytis fugus which affects grapes) ‘enacts a killing that overflows its target bodies, whether organisms or enzymes, acting outside and in-between their boundaries to embrace the fluid which contains them’. Such indiscriminate interventions risk killing the bad germs as well as the good. For Brice’s participants, the result was a wine which didn’t become unpalatable (due to the action of the unwanted enzyme), but which was diminished or deadened in quality due to the loss of other microorganisms – yeasts, lactic acid bacteria – which give wine its unique taste. Despite this, the pervasiveness of antimicrobial strategies is fairly easy to understand. ­Indiscriminate killing, such as that achieved by broad-spectrum antibiotics or pasteurisation, 224

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is arguably increasingly necessary in modern industrialised societies. For example, the widespread prophylactic use of antibiotics in agriculture and has become key to helping livestock (and the livelihoods of those who depend on them) survive the kinds of living conditions generated in the modern agri-industrial farming system (Hinchliffe, 2022; Kirchhelle, 2020). Similarly, Brown, in a thought-provoking analysis of posts around antibiotic use on the popular lay-expert forum Mumsnet, describes how for these parents the use of antibiotics seems the only viable option for those with a busy modern lifestyle which allows no time or space for other modes of living: ‘Many contributors write of the impossibilities of arresting time, of slowing life down in order to recover from infection. Importantly, antibiotics are seen by contributors to replace or substitute for the availability of time’ (Brown, 2019: 131). Brown’s focus on the need for time offers a useful starting point for thinking through how we might respond to, or even guard against, states of dysbiosis without resorting to indiscriminate antibiotic approaches. Time provides an opportunity to be a little more discriminating about which microbes we seek to let live, and which we seek to make die. For example, in response to the public concerns around the risks of being too clean, and lacking the exposure needed to beneficial microbes described above, Bloomfield and colleagues (2022) advocate what Paxson (2008) calls a post-Pasteurian approach, where sanitisation and other antibiotic practices are targeted at key sites where there is a known risk of increased pathogenic exposure (e.g. washing the udders of cows and sheep before milking to minimise the risk of ecoli infection from manure). If we cannot continue to fulfil the modern hygienist vision of pathogen-free productive futures, then perhaps we need to find other ways to come to terms with the more-than-human microbial communities within which we are embedded. We might need to experiment with other ways of living alongside microbes; a ‘“post-hygienist” biotic politics’ (Brown, 2019: 128) constituting a new settlement between the human and the microbial.

Conversations with Microbes Post-hygienist and post-Pasteurian approaches suggest more nuanced ways of engaging with microbial life, open to the possibilities of seeking out microbial allies ‘without a priori normative categorisations’ and replacing an emphasis on ‘rationalisation, eradication, and separation’ with ‘cooperation, adaptation, and care in probiotic environmental governance’ (Krzywoszynska, 2019: 662). This perspective has been key for re-thinking human relationships with soil. For example, popular science texts emphasise the importance of making contact with dirt for a healthy human immune system (Gilbert and Knight, 2017; Lorimer, 2020), and social science work examines the interdependencies of humans and soil ecologies (Abrahamsson and Bertoni, 2014; Krzywoszynska, 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Similarly, we might reconfigure eating as a mode of human-microbe relating, as Hird (2009: 142) argues: [A] microbial ethics – an ethics of eating well with bacteria – requires that we remember the first (and last) link in the food chain […] we want to remember that we share (and intimately depend upon) the same microbial system as everything we eat. From a microbial perspective farms and kitchens are re-imagined as multispecies contact zones (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010), ‘where lines separating nature from culture have 225

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broken down and where human and other species can be seen as mutually constituting their shared ecological habitats and one another’ (Wakefield-Rann et al., 2020: 188). Such domestic microbial entanglements are a marker of what Haraway might term our rich multispecies histories. Writing about her relationship with her canine companion, Cayenne, Haraway (2008: 16) notes that: I’m sure our genomes are more alike than they should be. Some molecular record of our touch in the codes of the living will surely leave traces in the world […] Her merle Australian Shepard’s quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils with all their eager immune system receptors. Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her messages or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and binding outside to inside? Haraway’s (2008: 16) description of the ‘forbidden conversation’ or ‘oral intercourse’ she shared with Cayenne reflects a key aspect of human-microbial assemblages we have touched on but not yet fully explored – communication. How do we communicate with microbes? What kinds of questions could we ask and what kinds of response might we invite? As Krzywoszynska (2019: 669) points out, the interests of microbes like the soil biota she studies ‘are not easily sense-able. Soil biota do not have an individual or collective “face” they could present, or a body the farmers could affectively relate to’. Yet at the same time, understanding microbes as not just interesting but interested subjects – asking what they might want – is becoming central to the kinds of negotiations which might allow future collective flourishing. What makes for a healthy living soil (Krzywoszynska, 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), flock or herd (Hinchliffe et al., 2013; Hinchliffe and Ward, 2014)? Or a ‘dirty’ enough childhood calibrated to a well-trained, resilient immune system? (Gilbert and Knight, 2017)? The response, I suggest, is found not in words but bodies; it involves what Haraway (2008: 26) calls embodied communication: An embodied communication is more like a dance than a word. The flow of entangled meaningful bodies in time – whether jerky and nervous or flaming and flowing, whether both partners move in harmony or painfully out of synch or something else altogether – is communication about relationship, the relationship itself and the means of reshaping relationship and so its enactors. Embodied communication plays a key role in shaping how we communicate with microbes. Before the advent of lateral flow and PCR tests, for example, the only way we had of knowing we were infected by the COVID-19 virus was through symptomatic checklists; we learned to attune to microbial presences and absences, to the demands microbes place on our bodies. This human capacity to sense and respond to microbial life has a rich cultured and cultural history. Diverse human and primate cultures have long sought out fermented foodstuffs, their distinctive qualities of smell and taste a learnt signal that fermentation bacteria have made such foods safe to eat (Evans and Lorimer, 2021). Such methods remain central to human-microbe communication in the present. ‘[M]icrobes invite us to know them and interact with them as populations and communities, primarily through smell and taste, sometimes through sight and touch (as with kōji), and always through pleasure and disgust’ (Evans and Lorimer, 2021: s366). Similarly, Paxson (2008) describes how raw-milk cheese makers in Vermont use organoleptic signs to tell when a cheeses has gone ‘bad’ and 226

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will not be safe to eat. Meanwhile, microbes are communing with us: ‘The microbiome and the immune system, in its association with the endocrine and the nervous system, provide multiple two-way channels of action-communication with microbes, with expressions through behaviour, emotions and perhaps also dreams’ (Herrera, 2018: 74). Some forms of communication may only be achieved by proxy. Microbes, as Herrera (2018: 74) reminds us, ‘also mediate our relationship with our surrounding world’; we come to sense microbial presence or absence by the traces such microbes leave in the environment: the laccase enzyme which spoils the wine (Brice, 2014); a quality of soil texture and moisture dug from pits and sifted through fingers (Krzywoszynska, 2019); or the biosignatures left as impressions in fossilised rock which signal to astrobiologists the possibility of microbial metabolic activity (Paxson and Helmreich, 2014). Equally, we might think of ourselves as becoming sensible to microbes through our actions in a process of ‘mutual domestication’ (Abrahamsson and Bertoni, 2014: 134). Contemporary reviews from scientific research, for example, note that ‘human populations profoundly influence the surrounding availability of environmental microbes in urbanized areas, creating non-linear feedback loops that are far from being understood’ (Cullen et al., 2020: 3). Closer to home our practices in farms and kitchens are often premised around narratives about microbial presence and absence (Wakefield-Rann et al., 2020: 186). For me, this was captured beautifully by a comment from an exit interview with one of the participants in our Good Germs, Bad Germs participatory metagenomics study (Greenhough et al., 2018). After six months of collaborating with us to design experiments and generate data about microbial diversity and abundance in their kitchen, one of our participants (exit interview 110, July 2017) described how being given access to new tools and ways of thinking about the domestic microbiome had changed the way she approached domestic hygiene: ‘Whereas before I might have automatically grabbed antibac and now I think [...] absolutely fine’ (exit interview 110, July 2017). Questioning long-held cultural assumptions – or what Wakefield-Rann (2020: 197) terms ‘sensory disorientations’ – that associate the smell of bleach and strong chemical cleaning products with a sense of being microbe-free and therefore healthier, our interviewee’s comment reflects the ‘proxies that have culturally come to represent the presence of harmful microbes (dirt and grime) and chemicals (“bleachy”, “chemically” smells)’. The way in which our kitchen safari participant reflected on her meeting with the domestic microbiome – and specifically her decision not to just ‘automatically grab the antibac’ – also raises another interesting question. Once we learn to sense microbial presence or absence, what might be an appropriate response? The boundaries between care and communication are slippery. Once we become aware of the sheer pervasiveness of microbes in our everyday lives we can no longer fall back on claims of ignorance. To cultivate or not relationships with microbes becomes a political choice, albeit for many one severely constrained by the social, cultural, biological, political and economic relations within which we are embedded (Krzywoszynska, 2019). In the first and second sections, we explored how our encounters with microbes are shaped by human norms and needs: the desire to be pathogen-free, and secure valued forms of life against the threat of disease; the desire to increase agricultural productivity, to produce tasty food, to secure key environmental services or to improve human heath via probiotic interventions. Yet, within more-thanhuman scholarship, an attention to microbial worlds – to practices for learning to attune ourselves to microbial presences and absences, and to the relationships though which we are mutually entangled – also offers grounds for hope; a space-time to remember or seek out diverse ways of being more-than-human. Importantly, this is not a call to abandon practices 227

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of hygiene or the development of new medicines to treat microbial infection, after all, as Lorimer (2017a: 544) cautions, ‘there are plenty of microbes we might not miss’. Learning to live together is an experimental, awkward process (Ginn et al., 2014); not everyone makes it. Rather, I find in the moment of pause before reaching for the anti-bacterial spray space to reflect on ‘who lives well and who dies well under current arrangements, and how they might be better arranged’ (Ginn et al., 2014: 115).

Conclusion This chapter has ranged widely – tracing the intersection of questions of global and planetary health as they shape and are shaped by the mutual domestication of humans and microbes on farms, in kitchens and gardens and in human bodies. It has sought to demonstrate the value of a more-than-human perspective for conceptualising, engaging and intervening in human-microbe encounters in order to explore possibilities for human, nonhuman and environmental health. In conclusion, I’d like to flag six key contributions the literatures explored here offer to our understanding of the spaces where humans and microbes meet. Firstly, the understanding of humans as holobionts, constituted of and through, and dependent on, our relations with microbial symbionts, offers an intimate and compelling example of what it means to understand ourselves as always more-than-human; we cannot be without microbes and to be microbe-free is almost certainly fatal. Secondly, this brings into question biosecurity strategies which seek to protect valued forms and flows of life solely through a hygienist focus on eliminating, or at least securing boundaries against the ‘bad germs’. Thirdly, this is replaced with a more ecological conceptualisation of humanmicrobe relations, concerned not so much with what microbes are, as with the functions and services they provide. Interventions in this vein can be pro- as well as anti-biotic, seeking to minimise exposures to ‘bad germs’ while also seeking to restore and rewild human and animal bodies and their wider environment with ‘good germs’, in pursuit of symbiosis. Fourthly, the environmental and cultural context within which human-microbe encounters take place becomes key; hookworm infection in one place can serve to help rebalance and retrain a malfunctioning immune system, but in another can be the cause of severe disease or even death. Fifthly then, we need to learn to pay better attention to the specificities of human-microbe relations within any given microbial terrain or terroir, attuning ourselves and our bodies to the textures of lively soils, the smell and taste of which fermented foods are good to eat, and the symptomatic prompting to slow down and rest while an infection runs its course. Finally, in each of these moves is an invitation to be a little more open to the possibilities offered by our being in and with microbial worlds: to pause, to hesitate, to experiment and to see what emerges.

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13 MORE-THAN-HUMAN REFLECTIONS ON ANTHROPAUSE Adam Searle and Jonathon Turnbull

Introduction Human beings are the main carriers of the SARS-CoV-2, an infectious virus that has profoundly shaped the 2020s and brought human-nature interactions and biosecurity to the public eye on a global scale (Kirksey, 2020). What might a more-than-human conceptual toolkit offer to understandings of the cultural, political, and ecological implications of the COVID-19 pandemic? There has been a diversity of insightful academic work across the natural and social sciences addressing this question, in both the context of COVID-19 and earlier zoonotic disease outbreaks (see Braun, 2008; Lynteris, 2020). Yet, the reach of SARSCoV-2 through a globalised world had unprecedented implications. Billions of people were forced to pause their usual lives in 2020 as the novel coronavirus spread, necessitating the imposition of mandatory quarantines to constrain its further proliferation. Anthropogenic environmental impacts were called into question as stories of nature’s apparent resurgence gained widespread media attention and spectacular images of wildlife ‘reclaiming human spaces’ circulated rapidly online (Mathur, 2020; Searle and Turnbull, 2020). Natural scientists coined the term ‘anthropause’ to describe the ‘considerable global slowing of modern human activities’ due to restrictions on mobility and industry (Rutz et al., 2020: 1156). Herein, we offer an expanded reading of anthropause through a more-than-human lens. Drawing on a range of empirical materials collected from 2020 to 2022, this chapter discusses the significance of these changed human-nature relations during lockdown. We draw on digital ethnography, focus groups, large-scale surveys, interviews, and discourse analysis of a range of case studies in multiple sites. First, we offer a brief literature review to establish a conceptual framework for a more-than-human reading of anthropause. Second, we consider the increased prevalence of digital technologies in the mediation of more-thanhuman encounters, illustrating our argument with reference to digital nature experiences that became popular during lockdowns. This includes the trend of nonhuman animals being hired as ‘drop-ins’, where paying customers would solicit a range of organisations—our examples include those working in conservation, animal sanctuaries, and working farms— to livestream audio-visual representations of animals into videoconferencing calls.1 We also consider the networks of ‘digital environmentalisms’ that simultaneously emerged, DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-15 232

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connecting people and nature in novel ways, and consider the implications of digital mediation for post-pandemic environmentalism. This follows reflections on a survey distributed to wildlife and gardening enthusiasts at the start of lockdown, and a series of focus groups conducted with members of the online network the Self-Isolating Bird Club (SIBC), who utilised social media and digital technologies in novel ways during periods of physical distancing to connect with nonhuman life, local environments, and each other. Third, we return to the question of ‘resurgence’ in relation to anthropause, following its theorisation by Anna Tsing (2017, 2022). Using the SIBC as an illustrative example, we argue that meaningful resurgence is a more-than-human laborious endeavour which requires careful practices that facilitate benefits for many lifeforms. This case demonstrates that resurgence is neither neutral nor automatic; it is cultivated, emerging cooperatively between diverse lifeforms. Last, we conclude with a series of lockdown lessons for more-thanhuman scholarship. The COVID-19 Anthropause shows that human economic, social, and ecological systems are not only not immutable, but also that they can be reshaped much faster than we thought. We demonstrate core areas where anthropause has had a lasting legacy on more-than-human communities beyond the circumstantial spacetimes of lockdown, and identify future avenues for more-than-human scholarship for the ‘anthropulse’ (Rutz, 2022) as the extractive logics of capitalist ‘progress’ resume.

A Broader Conceptualisation of Anthropause Scientists were quick to present the COVID-19 Anthropause as a natural experiment to ‘provide important insights into human–wildlife interactions in the twenty-first century’ (Rutz et al., 2020: 1156). Yet, the framing of this event from scientific perspectives—in which ‘the pandemic affords an opportunity to build a global picture of animal responses by pooling large numbers of datasets’ (Rutz et al., 2020: 1157)—focused explicitly on the quantitative aspects of these altered more-than-human relations. This runs the risk of overlooking the experiential, affective, and qualitative shifts in these relations: we should be asking not only how more-than-human geographies were altered, but how these alterations were experienced (unevenly), and how they continue to shape environmental politics and environmentalisms after the anthropause. Reductive approaches to quantification concerning the COVID-19 Anthropause, moreover, deal with ecology in the vernacular of statistics. Although of crucial importance for gleaning ecological insight, more-thanhuman approaches supplement these narratives in search for progressive political change. The COVID-19 pandemic was the not the first anthropause event—which vary significantly in spatiotemporal scale and causal agent (see Searle et al., 2021)—yet, it is unprecedented in its disruption to a globalised world. Many representations of the anthropause portrayed it as an unprecedented disruption to human ‘progress’, everyday rhythms, and mobilities. Pausing holds political potentials; in taking stock of the breakdown of everyday life, alternative worlds can be imagined. In this regard, novelist Arundhati Roy (2020: n.p.) referred to the pandemic as a ‘portal’: an enforced ‘break with the past’ acting as ‘a gateway between one world and the next’. The act of ‘pausing’ carries distinctive spatiotemporal implications, which we considered at length in previous work with Jamie Lorimer to offer a broader, geographical conceptualisation of anthropause (Searle et al., 2021; Turnbull et al., 2023a). Drawing upon scholarship in human geography, we expanded the scientific account of anthropause to consider the affective experience of relative stillness and immobility, attentive to mobilities (rather than movement) to consider: the affective experience 233

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of relative immobility (see Anderson, 2004, 2021; Bissell, 2007; Cresswell, 2010); the multiplicity of anthropause as an experienced more-than-human event shaped across lines of gender, ethnicity, age, class, and species (see de Zylva et al., 2020; Kindermann et al., 2020; Bambra et al., 2021; Hitchings, 2021); and the increasing role of digital technologies in mediating more-than-human relations throughout this period (see Fletcher, 2017a, 2017b; Gabrys, 2019; Arts et al., 2021). Narratives concerning anthropause sit in conjunction with a metanarrative in Western environmentalism concerned with ‘the Great Acceleration’ (Steffen et al., 2015) and the Anthropocene (Lorimer, 2012, 2017) in which the interlinked crises of pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate catastrophe are indexed to spacetime compression (Harvey, 1990; Massey, 2008) and its material and economic impacts. A considerable aspect of this narrative relates to the processes of urbanisation and digitisation that have come to shape everyday life en masse, which, for proponents of the narrative, have left contemporary societies ‘disconnected’ from nature and more-than-human conviviality (Pyle, 1993; Louv, 2009; Zylstra et al., 2014). Yet ‘connection with nature’ can be considered somewhat oxymoronic given its conceptualisation of nonhuman nature as ontologically distinct from human cultures (Fletcher, 2017a). The COVID-19 Anthropause can be understood in conversation with the spacetime compression of globalisation in the Anthropocene, in which life slowed down and spatial horizons shrank significantly, leading to many people seeking out novel practices of ‘noticing nature’ on their doorstep (see Despret, 2004; Tsing, 2015). Contrary to the ‘disconnection’ from nature idea, these novel connections during anthropause occurred with urban, scruffy, and mundane natures, and were commonly facilitated through digital mediation, to which we now turn our attention.

Digital Ecologies of the COVID-19 Anthropause Digital renderings of nonhuman life were prevalent way before the COVID-19 Anthropause and have been long deployed in conservation (Adams, 2018, 2019; Arts et al., 2015), ­entertainment (Kamphof, 2011), and surveillance (von Essen et al., 2021). Human-­ nonhuman encounters are always technologically mediated to some extent (Chambers, 2007; Haraway, 1988, 2008), and mediation often takes place digitally (Adams, 2020; Davies, 2000). Digital encounters, particularly those that are livestreamed, allow an increased i­ ntimacy with the everyday lives of animals (Kamphof, 2013; Buller, 2015). In early 2020, quarantine conditions enforced around the world led to the proliferation of digital encounters with nonhuman animals, as humans around the world were driven to spend considerably more time on digital devices in order to communicate, work, and relax. In this section, we offer three vignettes of digitised human-nonhuman relations that flourished during the COVID-19 Anthropause across three very different geographical, cultural, and ecological contexts. Each case study enables illustrates emergent forms of digitised humannature relations during this period. First, we turn to a wildlife webcam that livestreams footage from a peregrine falcon nest in Sheffield, England, to consider the therapeutic qualities of digitally mediated more-than-human encounters. Next, we consider the forms of ‘digital encounter value’ that were made possible during the COVID-19 Anthropause, focusing on the interactions of free-roaming dogs in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone with workers from an NGO that were directly broadcast via videoconferencing software to paying customers from ‘AirBnB experiences’. Lastly, we discuss the SIBC and the growing communities of nature enthusiasts which challenged preconceptions regarding environmentalism and the

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potentials of digitisation to facilitate eco-positive networks with implications for morethan-human communities.

Anthropause Vignette 1: Sheffield Peregrines Two webcams broadcast material from vantage points atop the spire of St George’s Church in Sheffield’s city centre. One peers across a nesting box (‘nestbox’) home to peregrine falcons, where viewers can tune in online to observe the minutia of the daily lives of these charismatic raptors. Peregrines in the British Isles were driven to the brink of extinction during the twentieth century due to a combination of persecution from humans who resented their predatory instincts (Ratcliffe, 1993; Macdonald, 2006) and the increased use of agrochemicals affecting hatching success (Weaving et al., 2021). In the 1960s, UK peregrine populations had fallen by 80% from the start of the century. But later widespread public campaigning, strict regulation on agrochemical use, and legal protection allowed peregrine populations to slowly recover (Ratcliffe, 1972). As their population recuperated, they not only returned to their historical habitats on sea cliffs but extended their range into urban environments, favouring the opportunities afforded by urban infrastructures and the vast food source that cities provide (Drewitt, 2014). The peregrine’s resurgence from extinction in the late twentieth century recast them in recombinant, urban, ‘cosmopolitan’ ecologies (see Hinchliffe et al., 2005; Barua, 2014). Peregrines arrived on the spire of St George’s church in 2012. In an effort to improve the breeding success of the new arrivals, local conservationists erected a nestbox equipped with two webcams. Over the past decade, the peregrines have established a substantial online following from people around the UK and beyond (see Searle et al., 2023).2 However, during a turbulent period of intense social uncertainty and unrest in March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic, visits to the webcam stream increased at least tenfold (Turnbull et al., 2020a). A spokesperson for Sheffield Peregrines recounted that people with a lot more time on their hands in lockdown were finding solace in the stream: ‘anecdotally’, they said, ‘I know people in both my real and online circles are having trouble sleeping and are therefore drawn to places such as the Sheffield Peregrines webcams’. Viewers found comfort in tuning into life ‘just going on’ in an environment they were familiarly acquainted with. The almost-deserted streets below the nestbox echoed with an eerie silence, but the birds acted similarly to previous years against the Sheffield cityscape. The connections people forged with animals on-screen throughout lockdown were meaningful and shaped by acts of care. Individuals who ran the most popular peregrine webcam in the UK, which broadcasts live from the spires of Salisbury Cathedral, reported multiple instances where troubled viewers watching at home would contact the cathedral with concerns of avian safety (Turnbull et al., 2020b). Often, this would be the reporting of poor peregrine fledgling health or the predation of other birds, both natural aspects of peregrine behaviour and life history that are somewhat obscured by the ‘domesticating’ tendencies of technology (see Kamphof, 2013; von Essen et al., 2023). These acts of speculative care highlight the importance viewers ascribed to the peregrines they were watching, pointing towards a form of eco-positive environmentalism that can emerge through the mediating qualities of digital technologies, especially livestreaming technologies. When moments of drama did not distress viewers, the calmness of broadcasts relaxed audiences in a similar vein to ‘slow television’ (see Jørgensen, 2014), providing glimpses of—and partial connections to—landscapes and wild spaces. After lockdowns unwound in 2021, peregrine webcams 235

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retained considerable popularity, as widespread digital engagement with the birds lives in collective memory.

Anthropause Vignette 2: Chornobyl Dogs Both charitable organisations and for-profit enterprises that relied on in-person interactions for the generation of income had to reassess their model of operation at the onset of quarantine conditions. Organisations enrolling nonhuman animals in their modes of value production were no exception to these pressures: animal care sanctuaries, for example, reported the grave financial concerns brought on by the absence of visitors during lockdown, and the realities of redundancies at a time of uncertainty (Turnbull et al., 2020b). Animals which would historically generate value through haptic encounters—i.e., paying customers who visit in situ—were thus enrolled in various forms of ‘digital encounter value’ production (see Haraway, 2008; Barua, 2016, 2017). Digital technologies mediated contact zones between species in the pursuit of value creation, in most instances to enable the quotidian operations of humans actively providing proactive care to other-than-human beings. A perhaps unexpected development was a ‘virtual feeding programme’ in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone that quickly became one of Airbnb’s most popular ‘experiences’ worldwide in April 2020. Such online experiences reflected the mass digitisation of everyday life in lockdown (Iivari et al., 2020), captured by David Pogue in a 2020 New York Times article: ‘two-way video has become our primary social channel. Meetings, parties, concerts, music lessons, exercise classes: any interactions that can be adapted to a Zoom video call, have been. Surely there’s nothing left to be Zoomified’ (n.p.). The nature of videoconferencing platforms meant that these products were not ‘canned videos’, but rather ‘they are live and two-way, and you are with people’ (Pogue, 2020: n.p.). The virtual feeding programme was offered by an NGO that manages, monitors, and cares for the free-roaming dogs living in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, descendants of the abandoned companion animals who remained in the now ghost towns that surround the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (see Turnbull, 2020). The virtual experience consisted of the NGO’s co-founder, Lucas Hixson—who had an already-established rapport with the free-roaming dogs, some of which can be somewhat averse to interactions with human strangers—explaining the dogs’ life histories, their everyday lives, and how his NGO cares for them while feeding them in the Zone. Many people noted that they wouldn’t normally visit the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone due to concerns over health, safety, or the financial incursion; yet, ‘webcam travel’ provided a means for them to ‘go there’, and to interact with its more-than-human landscape (Jarratt, 2021). Lucas, our digital tour guide, told us that ‘no one could have predicted how fast virtual experiences would be taken up… we’re learning what their value is’. He ‘saw the quarantine as a challenge’ and the virtual tours allowed his NGO ‘to adapt and overcome it’ due to the ‘accelerated integration of technology into people’s daily lives’. Value is the key term here: in running multiple visits a day, and charging in excess of 50 US Dollars per attendee, the NGO was in fact able to generate more revenue than before the pandemic. The dogs were thus enrolled in the production of ‘digital encounter value’, where more-than-human assemblages are not necessarily proximate in time or space; yet, the contact zone through which encounters are mediated is facilitated through digital technologies. These assemblages fundamentally alter the nature of how value is produced by involving a range of distributed human, nonhuman, and technological agencies. The COVID-19 Anthropause demonstrated, on a large scale, the potentials for digital encounter value production and 236

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its implications for more-than-human environmental governance, which warrant critical scrutiny regarding the potential commodification of nature through digital means and platform capitalism (see Büscher, 2020). Critical discourses concerning commodification and surveillance hold that digital encounters ‘stimulate and complicate the commodification of biodiversity’, allowing new forms of nature commodification to take place (Büscher, 2016: 726). ‘Lively capital’ (Barua, 2016) is thus complexified in the age of digital entanglement.

Anthropause Vignette 3: The Self-Isolating Bird Club At the outset of the pandemic, anxieties of the future drove many people to notice their local natures in new ways, often facilitated through the use of digital technological apparatuses (see van Houwelingen-Snippe et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2021; Turnbull et al., 2023a). The SIBC captured the zeitgeist of mainstream environmentalism during the COVID-19 Anthropause: founded by well-known British naturalists—Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin—who are regular presenters of wildlife programmes on the BBC, the group mobilised an online community interested in their local natures and conservation, growing to over 50,000 members at the height of quarantine conditions. ‘There can be few better online platforms than this in showing how modern, accessible tech has revolutionised local wildlife reporting’, wrote McCulloch (2020: n.p.), indicating the increased capacities of user-created content regarding wildlife and online communities which are able to form around these shared interests. The SIBC initially revolved around daily broadcasts on YouTube and social media platforms, in which invited guests would lead a discussion on a diverse array of topics pertaining to more-than-human worlds, such as gardening advice to practically increase the presence of pollinators, mindfulness, and well-being through nature experiences, or handy tips on wildlife photography. Quickly, though, the SIBC evolved into a broader network of budding naturalists armed with smartphones and an internet connection, sharing images and videos of local wildlife and discussing conservation issues. Although initially led by the topics which arose during broadcasts, the SIBC social media pages became spaces to collectively learn, get inspired, and make meaningful more-than-human connections. For example, many of our research participants told us that seeing other peoples’ images captured on infrared trail cameras drove them to purchase their own technological equipment, which, in turn, showed them a side to their local greenspaces that was previously unimaginable. Kelsey told us that ‘it just completely blew my mind what was appearing in our garden’, whereas Lisa noted that ‘it was a massive shock to find out we’d missed all this amazing stuff in our own garden because our lives had been so busy with other things’. Importantly, the SIBC pointed towards a novel form of environmentalism that emerged during the COVID-19 Anthropause, one that our participants perceived as considerably more inclusive than both in-person and online wildlife groups that had pre-existed the specific spatiotemporal conditions of anthropause. A range of factors have traditionally excluded many social groups and individuals from mainstream environmentalism, such as particular codes of conduct, technical equipment, and expertise. Such conditioning often leaves wildlife groups disproportionately bourgeois, white, middle-aged, and male (Greer and Guelke, 2003; Tolia-Kelly, 2007; Moore et al., 2008). Yet, the collective, bottom-up nature of the SIBC meant that ‘the ethos right from the beginning was that this is a space for everybody. Nobody is ridiculed for asking the most basic question, and that mixture is extraordinary’, noted Hannah. The localised nature of more-than-human connections during 237

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the COVID-19 Anthropause also led to many SIBC members being drawn to ‘scruffy’, unkept, urban, and feral ecologies that were previously overlooked by many in mainstream conservation such as affection for pigeons or foxes. General ‘slowness’ and the shrinking of horizons, which we conceptualise as the ‘spacetime decompression’ associated with the COVID-19 Anthropause (Turnbull et al., 2023a), changed the nature of nature for SIBC members. The technologies and ecologies of modern life—those same technologies and ecologies often vilified for contemporary environmental crises—were repurposed and subverted towards ends that created opportunities for more-than-human connection and resurgence on local scales through acts of more-than-human labour, to which we turn to next.

Resurgence and More-than-Human Cultivation The anthropause vignettes we offer above share a common trait: the active actions of human beings to forge meaningful relations with nonhumans and environments. They occurred in markedly different forms—passive livestreaming, curated experiences, and collective ­networks—and for different purposes—relaxation and intrigue throughout a traumatic time, entertainment and the production of digital encounter value, and solidarity. The COVID-19 Anthropause showed on a massive scale that ecological, social, and technological systems are deeply interlinked and mutable. We find the concept of ‘resurgence’ ­useful here to think through the implications of these shifting more-than-human geographies, identifying what is at stake for future forms of environmentalism and multispecies conviviality. Our more-than-human framing here clearly exceeds the remit of any one discipline or geographical context, and highlights the crucial nature of epistemic, political, and ontological diversity in responding to environmental matters of concern. Early on in the COVID-19 Anthropause, images circulated rapidly online utilising a common trope of animals ‘­reclaiming’ or ‘returning’ to spaces associated with human practices of habitation, industry, or culture: wild boars roaming the streets of Barcelona, macaques brawling at a deserted temple in Thailand, and wild goats eating the hedgerows of Llandudno. Yet, nature’s resurgence is neither neutral nor automatic; it is cultivated, emerging cooperatively between diverse lifeforms. The human and nonhuman labour necessary for resurgence, moreover, is fetishised by narratives celebrating nature’s automatic return to a ‘world without us’ (Weisman, 2007). The abilities of particular ecologies to resurge, though, are a matter of concern, shaped by the ways in which ecological potentialities are cultivated and fought for. In this regard, Anna Tsing (2017: 62) suggests that ‘if we have any dreams of handing a liveable world to our descendants, we will need to fight for the possibilities of resurgence’. Tsing’s conceptualisation of resurgence speaks to the capacities of Holocene ecologies to resist the ongoing proliferations of the Anthropocene which simplify ecologies and alienate individuals from meaningful more-than-human connection. Resurgence is the return of ‘liveable ecologies’, which is founded on ‘the remaking of liveable landscapes through the actions of many organisms’ (Tsing, 2017: 51). This multispecies labour thus requires ‘negotiating across differences, to forge assemblages of multispecies liveability in the midst of disturbance’ (Tsing, 2017: 52). In contrast to the spectacular images of animals populating the streets deserted by humans in March 2020, resurgence that created opportunities for multispecies liveability was cultivated through more-than-human labour. Often inspired by digital encounters, such as those detailed above, many of our research participants during the COVID-19 Anthropause documented active practices that enhanced liveability for other species. These are supported by the larger national picture 238

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in the UK, where the sale of bird baths or bird boxes increased significantly (by 440% and 867%, respectively; Barrett and Bott, 2020; Davis, 2020). Initiatives such as ‘No Mow May’—where people are encouraged to allow their lawns to grow during late spring to better accommodate habitat heterogeneity for pollinators, small mammals, and garden birds— surged in popularity. Sarah told us that online posts had encouraged her to find means of liveability for ‘the critters, bring in the six-legged and the eight-legged beasties’ in her urban garden. Participants also spoke of do-it-yourself craft initiatives being shared widely on social media, such as make-do methods for creating physical interventions in ecosystems such as ‘pollinator hotels’. Local greenspaces, such as private gardens or urban parks that were long overlooked by mainstream conservation (see Cammack et al., 2011; Hitchings, 2021), became sites where meaningful resurgence was cultivated in a self-organised bottom-up manner. Another important shift during the COVID-19 Anthropause was the realisation that acts of cultivated resurgence can have widespread impacts for more-than-human communities, as everyday life slowed, and horizons shrank. Paul, for example, told us that he realised that there was ‘shed loads of wildlife in the back garden’, which he ‘never knew was there’. Paul recounted that an ‘art of noticing’ (see Tsing, 2015) the natures in his garden developed through daily practice and the use of digital technologies—trail cams, in this instance, that he could watch through his phone. He began to encounter injured hedgehogs locally through this method, enabling him to ensure their rescue through liaising with a local hedgehog conservation charity. Paul and his family took great pleasure in supporting local wildlife, stating: ‘we’ve got a community that we respond to’. The COVID-19 Anthropause thus led to many people re-evaluating their positionalities as part of nature, the most essential acknowledgement for meaningful resurgence to be cultivated.

Conclusions: More-than-Human Lockdown Lessons As lockdowns have unwound across the world—although in an uneven and nonlinear ­fashion—what use are the findings of our research conducted during this period? What lessons can be gleaned from lockdown in terms of human-nature relations, and what might we carry with us through the pandemic portal to cultivate more liveable futures beyond the anthropause context? Four points are worth raising in conclusion, the first of which pertains to the promise of digital technologies for fostering convivial more-than-human relations. As outlined above, one clear lesson we learned from our research was that digital technologies, in certain contexts, can inspire eco-positive communities to come into being. They can also bring publics closer to wildlife, both charismatic distant species and more ‘scruffy’ or mundane urban creatures. Against a backdrop of scepticism towards the ability of digital technologies to engage publics with nature among some sections of the conservation and environmental community (see Fletcher, 2017a), our findings gain significance, showing that both conservation organisations and environmental groups would be missing an opportunity if they were not to take stock of the benefits digital technologies can bring in terms of engaging publics with nature. Whether this be through species identification apps, livestreamed wildlife cams of all kinds, or familiar social media platforms, these organisations would gain from learning from the digital communities that formed during lockdown. Take the SIBC, for instance. Many of our research participants said that they would remain part of the online communities they joined during lockdown, and many told us that they’d continue to 239

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use digital technologies for engaging nature after lockdown. Further research throughout the 2020s is required to understand whether this will happen, but the enthusiasm was there and can be built on. By no means does this enthusiasm involve substituting in-person nature encounters for digital ones, and this is a key point we’d like to emphasise. The distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ which is often associated with online and digital technologies is not useful for understanding how real communities form and encounters take place between humans and nature when digital mediation is involved. Following Jessica McLean’s (2020) ‘more-­thanreal’ framing, we eschew this distinction and encourage practitioners to do so, too, in order to remain open to the convivial potential digital technologies harbour under certain conditions. The task going forward will be working out which of these resurgence potentials should be enacted and under what conditions. Nevertheless, one benefit of finding ways to meaningfully engage publics with wildlife digitally is the reduced need to travel to (and sometimes disturb) distant natures, and the anthropogenic negativities inaugurated by such activities. Javier Caletrío’s forthcoming book, Low Carbon Birding (2022), exemplifies the benefits that digital technologies might play in developing more eco-friendly ways of wildlife watching in the future. There is an appetite for slowing down among large portions of the population for whom the neoliberal economy does not appear to offer a prosperous future. Indeed, as social and cultural geographers have shown, slowness is becoming a guiding principle for several communities seeking progressive social change (Mayer and Knox, 2006; Vannini, 2014). This was evident among our research participants who, despite the anxieties and challenges of lockdown life, were able to find benefits from the extra time they had on their hands. This experience, however, reflects one of privilege: our participants on average were well-­ resourced and supported socially enough to afford the pause which was put upon their lives. Most were also healthy enough to be able to pause without worry. Others, like ‘key workers’, were not afforded this chance, and their lives sped up during the COVID-19 Anthropause, while many were simply unable to cope with this period due to myriad factors from declining mental health to loneliness. Yet if slowing down was enabled not by a global pandemic, but more socially progressive policymaking, both humans and nonhumans would reap benefits. Indeed, this period showed than our social, economic, and political systems are mutable, and emerging evidence suggests, when coordinated intentionally and properly, nature can benefit greatly. Our empirical cases examined the trajectory of more-than-human scholarship with regard to digitisation. The COVID-19 Anthropause rapidly accelerated digitisation across all realms of social life, including human-nature relations as we have shown. At the beginning of the pandemic, the need for a closer engagement between work in more-than-human geographies, digital geographies, and new media studies was evident—disciplines with several conceptual and empirical convergences that remain, for the most part, in separate (sub) disciplinary silos (although see Blue, 2016; Stinson, 2017b). The emerging field of ‘digital ecologies’ (Turnbull et al., 2023b), however, sets out to bridge these disciplines, offering a robust epistemological approach that guides future research in this area. Key to this work is maintaining an openness to the potentials of digital technologies for fostering convivial ­human-nature relations, while remaining critically aware of the toxic and unevenly distributed environmental harms that underpin the materials required to produce digital technologies themselves, as well as the oppressive forms of governance enabled by their use. Such work, we believe, is timely, given the continuing digitisation of all realms of social, 240

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economic, and political life by governments, researchers, and publics themselves. There is scope for this research to be practice-driven and participatory in nature, themes we touched upon during our work during lockdown. And finally, while our research provides valuable findings that we believe can be harnessed going forward, there remains the need for at least two key lines of future research. It is important to track how, in the ‘anthropulse’, quarantine digital enthusiasms persist or subside, among which groups, and why. Longitudinal studies will provide important insights to guide policy, which should always remain reflexive, informed by contemporary research. In addition, the digital enthusiasms we reported on throughout this chapter come from a relatively limited public. It is essential that future research in digital ecologies speaks beyond this predominantly white, middle-class, and Western European cohort. This will allow it to account for a more diverse set of technologies, experiences, and inequalities that exist in relation to digitised more-than-human worlds. These more-than-human reflections on the COVID-19 Anthropause offer useful insights for policymakers and practitioners who could beneficially design policies that account for, and capitalise on, changed sensibilities and enthusiasms for nature. While digital technologies have often been associated with speeding up, they may well be refashioned to help people slow down, connect with nature, and build the eco-positive communities the morethan-human world so desperately needs. Future more-than-human scholarship would benefit from comprehending these burgeoning digital fields of investigation.

Acknowledgements We are incredibly grateful to both Bill Adams and Jamie Lorimer, both of whom have worked with us on projects related to anthropause and digital ecologies, and both of whom have contributed significantly through their involvement in earlier journal articles which are synthesised in this chapter. We would moreover like to thank Katerina Bryant and Adrian Franklin for their generous reading and feedback on this chapter.

Notes 1 This empirical research was conducted with Bill Adams discussed in previous work (see Turnbull et al., 2020a, 2020b; Adams et al., 2023; Searle et al., 2023). 2 The daily lives of the raptors are commented on through social media and blogs, and the ­livestream can be viewed at the following link: https://peregrine.group.shef.ac.uk/.

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Adam Searle and Jonathon Turnbull Arts I, Fischer A and Duckett D, et al. (2021) Information technology and the optimisation of ­experience – The role of mobile devices and social media in human-nature interactions. Geoforum 122: 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.03.009. Bambra C, Lynch J and Smith KE (2021) The Unequal Pandemic: COVID-19 and Health Inequalities. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Barrett C and Bott I (2020) How Britain became a nation of birdwatchers. Financial Times, 29 August. Barua M (2014) Circulating elephants: Unpacking the geographies of a cosmopolitan animal. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39: 559–573. Barua M (2016) Lively commodities and encounter value. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(4): 725–744. Barua M (2017) Nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation: The geographies of a lively commodity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42(2): 274–288. Bissell D (2007) Animating suspension: Waiting for mobilities. Mobilities 2(2): 277–298. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17450100701381581.Blue G (2016) Public attunement with more-than-human ­others: Witnessing the Life and death of bear 71. GeoHumanities 2(1): 42–57. Braun B (2008) Thinking the city through SARS: bodies, topologies, politics. In Ali H and Keil R (eds.) Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City. London: Blackwell, 250–266. Buller H (2015) Animal geographies II: Methods. Progress in Human Geography 39(3): 374–384. Büscher B (2016) Nature 2.0: Exploring and theorising the links between new media and nature ­conservation. New Media and Society 18(5): 726–743. Büscher B (2020) The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caletrío J (2022) Low Carbon Birding. London: Pelagic. Cammack PJ, Convery I and Prince H (2011) Gardens and birdwatching: Recreation, environmental management and human-nature interaction in an everyday location. Area 43: 314–319. Chambers CNL (2007) ‘Well its remote, I suppose, innit?’ The relational politics of bird-watching through the CCTV lens. Scottish Geographical Journal 123(2): 122–134. Cresswell T (2010) Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(1): 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fd11407. Davies G (2000) Virtual animals in electronic zoos: The changing geographies of animal capture and display. In: Philo C and Wilbert C (eds) Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. London: Routledge, pp. 243–267. Davis J (2020) Bird bath sales soar as the UK stops to notice nature. Natural History Museum, 2 September. Available at: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2020/september/the-uk-stops-­ tonoticenature.html. de Zylva P, Gordon-Smith C and Childs M (2020) England’s Green Space Gap. Available at: https:// policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/download/englands-green-space-gap-full-report. Despret V (2004) The body we care for: Figures of anthropo-zoo-genesis. Body & Society 10(2–3): 111–134. Drewitt E (2014) Urban Peregrines. Exeter: Pelagic Publishing. Fletcher R (2017a) Connection with nature is an oxymoron: A political ecology of ‘nature-deficit disorder’. The Journal of Environmental Education 48: 226–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00958964.2016.1139534. Fletcher R (2017b) Gaming conservation: Nature 2.0 confronts nature-deficit disorder. Geoforum 79: 153–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.009. Gabrys J (2019). Sensors and sensing practices: Reworking experience across entities, e­ nvironments and technologies. Science, Technology and Human Values 44(5): 723–736. https://doi. org/10.1177%2F0162243919860211. Greer KA and Guelke JK (2003) ‘Intrepid naturalists and polite observers’: Gender and recreational birdwatching in Southern Ontario, 1791–1886. Journal of Sport History 30(3): 323–346. Haraway DJ (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of p ­ artial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. Haraway DJ (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harvey D (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Adam Searle and Jonathon Turnbull Searle A, Turnbull J and Adams WM (2023) The digital peregrine: A technonatural history of a ­cosmopolitan raptor. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 48(1): 195–212. Steffen W, Broadgate W, Deutsch L, Gaffney O and Ludwig C (2015) The trajectory of the anthropocene: The great acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2: 81–98. https://doi.org/ ­ 10.1177%2F2053019614564785. Tolia-Kelly DP (2007) Fear in paradise: The affective registers of the English Lake District landscape revisited. The Senses and Society 2: 329–351. Tsing A (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsing A (2017) A threat to Holocene resurgence is a threat to liveability. In: Brightman M and Lewis J (eds) The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51–65. Tsing A (2022) Proliférations. Marsielle: Éditions Wildproject. Turnbull J (2020) Checkpoint dogs: Photovoicing canine companionship in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Anthropology Today 36(6): 21–24. Turnbull J, Searle A and Adams WM (2020a) Quarantine urban ecologies. Cultural Anthropology Editor’s Forum: Covid–19. Turnbull J, Searle A and Adams WM (2020b) Quarantine encounters with digital animals: Morethan-human geographies of lockdown life. Journal of Environmental Media 1: 6.1–6.10. Turnbull J, Searle A and Lorimer J (2023a) Anthropause environmentalisms: Noticing natures with the self-isolating bird club. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 48(2): 232–248. Turnbull J, Searle A, Hartman Davies O, Dodsworth J, Chasseray-Peraldi P, von Essen E and ­Anderson-Elliott H (2023b) Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance. Progress in ­Environmental Geography 2(1–2): 3–32. van Houwelingen-Snippe J, van Rompay TJ and Ben Allouch S (2020) Feeling connected after experiencing digital nature: A survey study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17(18): 6879. Vannini P (2014) Slowness and deceleration. In: Adey P, Bissell D and Hannam K, et al. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 116–124. von Essen E, Turnbull J, Searle A, Jørgensen FA, Hofmeester TR and van der Wal R (2023) Wildlife in the digital anthropocene: Examining human-animal relations through surveillance technologies. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6(1): 679–699. Weaving A, Jackson HA, Nicholls MK, Franklin J and Vega R (2021) Conservation genetics of regionally extinct peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) and unassisted recovery without genetic ­bottleneck in southern England. Conservation Genetics 22: 133–150. Weisman A (2007) The World Without Us. New York: Picador. Xu S, Murrell G and Golding SE, et al. (2021) #Springwatch #Wildmorningswithchris: Engaging With nature via social media and wellbeing during the COVID-19 lockdown. Frontiers in P ­ sychology 12: 4259. Zylstra MJ, Knight AT, Esler KJ and Le Grange LL (2014) Connectedness as a core conservation ­concern: An interdisciplinary review of theory and a call for practice. Springer Science Reviews 2(1): 119–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40362-014-0021-3.

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14 THE VIRTUAL ANIMAL IN THE DIGITAL ANTHROPOCENE Empowered or Subjugated? Erica von Essen

Introduction Technologies for remote surveillance enable an increasingly fine-grained look into the animal kingdom. Surveillance has trickled down the sociozoological hierarchy from focusing on domestic and industrial animals to the more elusive wildlife. The practice has progressed gradually, but can be traced back to the Cold War’s Military-Industrial-Ecological Complex (Benson, 2010). During this time, ambitions to ‘keep a round-the-clock vigil on animals, no matter where they wander on land, sea or air’ began to be voiced by scientists (Benson, 2010: 213). It is not until the last decade, however, that wildlife surveillance has been massified. It is now rendered at scales from populations and individuals to microbes, allowing tacking between them (Drakopulos et al., 2022). Scientists declare us to be in ‘a golden age of animal tracking’ (Kays et al., 2015: 1222), in which surveillance is ‘shining a light in the darkness’ (Pschera, 2016: 92) – the darkness being the mystery of the wild. As we learn in this volume, the output of surveillance is also becoming popularised and commodified as livestreams for the broader public to consume remotely via their screens (Turnbull et al., 2020; and Searle and Turnboll, ch. 13, this volume). The desire to know ‘the secret lives of wild animals’ (as per Nick Whitney’s 2013 TED talk on wildlife surveillance) may appear benignly motivated. That is, ‘we survey wildlife’ in order to better inform their conservation and to make more careful decisions about interventions in their species, population and individual lives. Studies also show that broadcasting wildlife from these recording devices has positive mental health effects on viewers. The digital engagement with wild animals afforded by spy-cams, drones and go-pros appears to have boosted the public’s knowledge of wildlife and even changed behaviours and attitudes in relation to the wildlife they encounter ‘offline’ (Altrudi, 2020). A rising group of citizen scientists (Bakker and Ritts, 2018; Greenhill et al., 2014) enjoy participating in everything from sending in wild animal observations and their own footage, reporting on aspects of wild animal lives and partaking in species identification tasks on platforms like Zooniverse that curate the data from various surveillance projects. It’s a win-win for scientists and, as Searle and Turnboll note in the previous chapter, for multispecies conviviality more broadly. 245

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There are arguments that digital technologies for capturing wildlife offer connections of immediacy and intimacy between citizens and wild animals (Blue, 2016; Hawkins and S­ ilver, 2023). This intimacy is now directly delivered by the recording technology, instead of exclusively relying on biologists to select, edit and display wild animal representations for the public (Benson, 2010). Indeed, on this reasoning, livestreaming from trail, nest or waterhole cameras, in particular, have afforded instantaneous accessibility for human viewers, by its capacity to separate the footage from ‘the embalmed nature of edited film’ (Doane, 1990: 222) or what Searle and Turnboll in the previous chapter term ‘canned’ footage. The sociality of forums and databases for curating and sharing s­ urveillance data profoundly add to the experience. Freedom from reliance on others – experts – to tell the story of wildlife forms part of an emancipatory ethos of wild animal surveillance that is said to benefit both civilians and the animals themselves. It is supposedly democratising. For example, it is suggested that digital technologies for surveilling wildlife may allow for ‘new registers’ of human-wildlife relations not ordinarily recorded by experts (Gabrys et al., 2016) as well as ‘new perspective and insight’ (Kays et al., 2015: aaa2478). Furthermore, go-pro cameras on seals’ heads effectively allow these seals to control the narrative (Forssman and Root-Bernstein, 2018). Birds are now mapping their journeys through GPS logging from their receivers (Verma et al., 2016). These technologies supposedly empower these animal auteurs, freeing them from the shackles of human narratives: to be anthropomorphised or Disneyfied (Dale, 2016) by the narration of David Attenborough.1 Haraway’s (2008: 252) crittercams promise: ‘anything can happen when an animal is your cameraman’. Of course, the extent to which these technologies truly enable an animal ‘gaze’ to be transmitted is doubtful. The devices remain configured by humans; they are limited by purpose in terms of what they are set to capture and when; and a majority transmit primarily visual data. For birds, whose sensory umwelten are indeed often strongly visual, this may not be too distortive, even if map coordinates are perhaps not how they would choose to tell their stories. But cameras on mammals, who rely extensively on olfactory and acoustic senses to make sense of the world, may give a particularly partial, Western ocularcentric perspective (Chambers, 2007). In this chapter, I examine the affordances of digital surveillance technology to decolonise and empower wildlife on the one hand, and on the other, its capacity to recolonise, exercise power over and denigrate their privacy. If both of these fates are enabled by surveillance technologies, when, if at all, might surveillance stop being on animal terms to become part of a ‘high-tech narrative of remote control’ (Haraway, 1990: 107)? The question of whether surveillance technology, specifically its accessibility to non-experts and its multispecies p ­ erspective-taking, can truly be said to empower animals is not a ‘yes or no’ question, as it turns out. But discussing some of the ways in which animals do ostensibly benefit or suffer from becoming fed into the Internet of Things (see e.g. Lupton, 2023), reveals key insights on perspective-taking, animal agency and animal privacy concerns. The chapter contributes to discussions in Science and Technology Studies (STS), biosemiotics, environmental humanities, environmental communication and human-animal studies broadly on the implications of digitising human-wildlife relations. There are several manifestations of such digitisation (Turnbull et al., 2020) but I contend that the input of data from surveillance technologies, that is how these animals are captured in the first place, is the bread and butter of these, as they set the premises for subsequent engagement on platforms and apps. ‘Digitisation through surveillance’ engages question of biopower, non-human animal voice and agency, and our responsibilities towards an ethical use of technology in the wild, and for the wild. 246

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Animal Agency: Empowerment and Emancipation? What are the potential ways in which wildlife surveillance might realise goals of a nonrepresentative methodology by allowing for enhanced animal agency? This is perhaps most visible in those extreme cases where wild animals defy subjectification, stealing devices or otherwise disrupting human agendas to capture them. Famous cases include deer making off with hunters’ equipment (von Essen and Allen, 2022), photobombing wildlife on livefeeds intended to capture a different species and Naruto, the macaque monkey who seized the photographer’s camera and snapped a selfie, and set in motion a series of copyright disputes that engaged Wikipedia, the PETA, the human photographer and the monkey. These viral instances illustrate ‘momentary reversal[s] of audiovisual hierarchy’ (Cortés Zulueta, 2018: 239). Beyond these sensational events, other research demonstrates everyday examples of animals sabotaging, manipulating and even deceiving efforts at capturing traces of them (Evans and Adams, 2018; Hawkins and Paxton, 2019) in a way that suggests they do not consent to their subjectification at all. Sheehan (2008) goes so far as to suggest that animals are profoundly ‘anticinema’ insofar as they thwart the techniques of manipulation and control that are the chief operating principles of feature-film production (2008: 121). Wild animals do respond to being monitored and managed (Lorimer, 2010) and they may sometimes monitor us back (Haggerty and Trottier, 2013) or break the fourth wall with their audience in various ways. Whether or not there is any intentionality in these moments, the outcome is a reversal of power relations. Sometimes, humans enable or contribute to the disruptive agency of surveilled animals by going against the purpose of the recording or broadcast. While a case of wildlife in captivity, ShamuCam in Seaworld, for example, was meant to alleviate public concerns over the welfare of orcas, but it became a way for viewers to document signs of aggression or injury to the whales and criticise Seaworld’s handling practices (Dale et al., 2016). In other instances, viewers have alerted managers, zoo-keepers and scientists about the plight of wildlife from watching livestreams, petitioning them to intervene where there has been harm, such as abandoned fledglings, or where there is a suspected risk from poachers (von Essen et al., 2021). The latter case is encouraged by authorities (see e.g. Dasgupta, 2023). While these cases clearly point to human agency on behalf of animals, they are clearly reliant on surveillance technologies to make visible the plight of animals. In this regard, humans use surveillance data to instill it with normative content and further the cause of animals. McCubbin and Van Patter (2020) argue that satellite tracking of Cecil the Lion by WildCRU Oxford directly led to victimizing Cecil in the media upon his death. Giving animals representation online, Pschera (2016) argues, is in itself often enough to protect them from poachers, by putting these animals on the ‘collective radar’ (99).2 While this may be critiqued as asymmetrical transparency (visibility does not equal voice!), the relinquishing of surveillance from expert domains also opens up a broader range of rationalities, with diverse interests and perspectives to involve themselves in and make sense of animal lives (Nash, 2014). Opening up to plurality, access to, and interaction with wildlife livestreams, thus ‘weakens the overt normative claims of a single narrative’ (Ray, 2014: 244). And by showing unedited footage of the brutality of nature, such as when the Pittsburgh Bald Eagle livestream broadcast the parent eagles feasting on a dismembered kitten in their nest in 2013, one also offers a potentially sobering antidote to the romanticisation of nature (Alagona, 2022). Is it more honest? Who is to say? But it is more diverse. 247

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Technology as Deterministic If we extend the premise of Gabrys et al. (2016) that the more citizen scientists are freed from the protocols of big data projects in their surveillance of wildlife, the implication is that the more they have scope to use new registers of relations. However, in reality, most citizen science platforms that crowdsource wildlife data from civilian volunteers have constraining logics that hinder these ‘new registers’ from being expressed or entered into. Hence, while the ‘hard’ recording devices may appear to make visible animal agency, this is restrained by the ‘soft’ architecture of the web. For example, citizens can input their data – a still from a trailcam, a mobile phone snap – but their accounts are to be verified by experts; they achieve rankings based on their accuracy of identification, and a tutorial is required that promotes coherent knowledge production, like at e-Bird (Drakopulos et al., 2022). Even in instances where citizens are free to engage with one another, as opposed to vertical exchanges with experts over wildlife, platform architectures provide rules for action that structure these interactions (Galloway, 2008; Helmond, 2015). You can ‘like’ an animal observation, or upvote it. You can give X number of stars. Hence, the registers with which to relate to animals are partly deterministic (Cantrell et al., 2017). The animals, too, may be at risk from being converted from lively individuals to statistics, commodities, badges, rewards or assimilated in gamification and competition – becoming more about the user than the animal (Greenhill et al., 2016; Woodcock et al., 2017). As Hawkins and Silver (2023) show of the shark ‘Miss Costa’, available to follow in real-time at the OCEARCH platform, viewers are immediately directed to ‘support our seas’ by clicking ‘shop’ (­including co-branded products like Costa sunglasses) or ‘give’ to the cause. Hence, while the hard devices for recording partly provide the foundation for emancipating wildlife, the soft web architecture often serves to recolonise them. Benson (2017) shows that for birding in North America, the increased mechanisation and protocolisation of recording and logging legitimate observations into ‘centers of calculation’ meant reduced flexibility and autonomy for volunteers, prestructuring not only their input but their outings into the field. This has been lamented by citizen scientists who advocate a return to the field and intimate relations with wildlife, which would involve moving from a preoccupation with converting animal lives and movements into binary code, GPS coordinates and what Searle and Turnboll above term the “vernacular of statistics” (p. 231, this volume), to ‘getting down and living with them’ in order to truly get their perspectives (Mitman, 1999). In this way, much of the miniaturisation and gradual removal of human elements from the field through ‘flying about in airplanes, counting animals, or marking them’ (Mitman, 1999) – in a bid to be less invasive – takes us further from truly knowing and connecting with animal lives. Pschera (2016: 55), who by all accounts is pro-digitisation of animals, even advocating outfitting all kinds of wildlife with collars and sensors for their own good, admits that today’s remote-sensing and deterministic surveillance technologies mean ‘nature researchers are no longer dependent on […] their own imagination’ (italics added). Whitney recounts how bird banding volunteers, with corporeal engagement, involved ‘imagining ourselves to be the animal, by conceiving what would be our perception and feelings and desires if we were in the animal’s place’ (Whitney, 2021: 126). On this reasoning, the advent of digital technologies to replace bird banding, such as by remote-sensing, motion sensor detectors or even reliance on algorithms to predict bird paths in a landscape (Kays et al., 2015), minimises relations, entanglements and indeed potentially the animal 248

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itself (Turnboll et al., 2023). Even when it starts with potentially meaningful encounters at the individual level, these data may be converted into composite profiles of species in the datafication journey (Bergman, 2005).

Individualisation of Animals and Counter-Mapping Still, there are ways in which technology and rendering the animal ‘virtual’ has also more clearly brought out the animal in all its complexity. Streams, which show real-time rather than retrospective activities of animals, can clearly broadcast animal mobility and capture their motions, glances, how they engage with materials, as well as their vocal expressions (Collard, 2016). Blue (2016) views such real-time glimpses into wild animal lives as a form of remediation, meaning to remedy or correct something to return it to a previous state. To be sure, livestreams are still a mediation but, I believe, as Blue (2016) would argue, it strips footage of careful curation and editing intended to focus on spectacle. Instead, it has the possibility to show nature more ‘as is’: it involves prolonged periods of nothingness, of waiting, of simple rhythms, which may be appreciated by viewers used to action and quick cuts (Rooks, 2016). The high precision of contemporary recording technologies enables enhanced individualisation of wild animals. Hunters using trail cameras that transmit to their mobile devices report coming to ‘know’ wildlife on their land better, which leads them to make informed choices about harvesting, including sparing individuals they know to be part of family packs – or indeed whose repeated presence has allowed for them to form sentimental attachment to individual (von Essen et al., 2021). Further, a conservation project on the endangered Saimaa-ringed seal in Finland now allows visitors to use their mobiles to scan the fur, pelage, pigmentation and skin features of seals they come across as a kind of QR code, displaying an instantaneous biography of the animal, its family tree, name and other distinguishing features (Chehrsimin et al., 2017). Such features also form part of interactive virtual tours of national parks, where users, after orientating themselves in this landscape digitally, can click on animals for more information (Castellano, 2018). Similarly, the Waldrapp tracker app in Italy, showing the real-time position of these threatened birds, enables the viewer to see an entire life story with one click on a particular animal (Pschera, 2016). Multispecies research also testifies to the benefits of surveillance technologies for knowing animal lives, particularly when combined with ethology and multispecies ethnography (Swanson, 2017). There is no space here to relay all the strides made, the new worlds opened and the convivial interspecies relations that have formed as a result of this research. However, I note how both Van Patter (2021) and Verma et al. (2016), in studies of urban coyotes and birds, respectively, show how tracking technologies coupled with observations, can tell animals’ stories better than human observations alone: ‘It’s the birds that are writing these blogs and making the maps with the aid of technology. They’re out there doing their things, and without any physical input from us’ (Verma et al., 2016: 83). While Verma calls this counter-cartography, it may still be a way for humans to track animals. However, it is a starting point in providing them with a voice through this tracking, if not the choice to opt out of it. All in all, technology has the capacity to set free and to recolonise, to empower and to control. An easy conclusion would be that it depends on the purpose: if surveillance is undertaken to protect a species, does it not also empower them? However, much research shows us about the entanglement of care and control (Gibbs, 2021). Projects aimed at 249

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enhancing the status or lives of some species frequently do so at the expense of either individual animal lives, or of other species deemed to be in the way. Hence, even benignly motivated surveillance initiatives involve trade-offs for the animals under surveillance – trade-offs to which they may not be cognisant – such as giving up some right to privacy for protection. Ultimately, these trade-offs are not unique to wildlife but are manifested also in human surveillance (Lyon, 2001). However, privacy concerns around capturing and broadcasting wild animal lives are under-theorised (but see, for example, Mills, 2010). This forms the topic of the next section.

Wild Animal Expectations of Privacy Paci et al. (2022) recently reviewed the broad range of behaviours animals engage in to manage privacy boundaries, including retreat, concealment, deception, physical separation and private communication, and the stress and trauma they experience when these distancing mechanisms are not available. Two distance-setting mechanisms that register the need for privacy in animals are physical separation (territoriality and concealment) and information management (withholding and deception). The authors suggest the development of first mediated consent to record, by which the humans responsible for the surveillance and who have their best interest at heart allow recording. It is not clear that those carrying out the surveillance and those with the best interest at heart are one and the same. This is especially the case for the monitoring of disease-transmitting animals and invasive species, whose tracking is often coupled to eradication. Surveilling wild boars, for instance, even with hunters’ newfound hobby of individualising them, is done with the goal of culling them (von Essen et al., 2021). Second, Paci et al. (2022) call for contingent consent, a less clear category, but one that would involve animals themselves expressing some willingness to engage with research set-ups and recording. It remains ambiguous as to how willingness would be expressed by wildlife. Given what we already know and continue to learn about animal privacy needs, how do particular devices or vantage points for recording in surveillance measure up? And what forms of consent can animals realistically give to the users behind these devices? Nest, burrow and den cameras, with their minute-by-minute close-ups of activities that wild animals strive to conceal – labour, caching, nursing, tending to their wounds – seem to constitute a breach in privacy, at least in regard to Paci et al.’s (2022) criterion of concealment. If these camera locations are identifiable by geo-tags and metadata, there may also be a breach in the first privacy category: to be left alone in the physical sense. By contrast, aerial drones capture primarily population-level data, by tracking migrations and distributions. They do not, as a rule, offer intimate details of nest life. Drones also announce their presence, and appear not to bother many species of wildlife after a while (Kays et al., 2015). At the same time, there is limited possibility to retreat from drones (apart from very dense forest covers), which can chase animals over terrain, insisting on their capture. Cortés Zulueta (2018) discusses the importance of animals retaining the agency to come close to the camera or stay away from it, to pay attention to the device or to ignore it. This is particularly pressing in the case of go-pros and other wearables, which are glued onto animals. Insofar as this is done with the ambition to minimise the distance between human and animal when it comes to the output to be streamed from this device, it does so at the cost of also cancelling camera distance – the space between the animal subject and the recording device. Go-pros and helmet cams tend to make the tracked animal stand 250

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out from its herd or family members, and in some cases this may involve harm or ostracisation, to say nothing of blisters and ulcers from wearing the device. Animatronics, or cameras disguised as conspecifics, such as a robot penguin posing as a flock member to blend in, are often remotely controlled and mobile. When successful, these robot cameras permit glimpses into pack and herd life from the ground up, as opposed to the sky, constituting perhaps, a kind of ‘counter-images’ (Fitzpatrick, 2018). They gained popularity first from the lion cub cam from ‘Spy in the Den’ (2002), in which a ‘Bouldercam’ posing as a four-wheeled rock captured the intimate lives of a lion pride. In recent years, emperor penguins in the BBC documentary on Antarctica can be seen curiously exploring the robot camera meant to spy on them, a motorised sledge that slides on its stomach to infiltrate the colony. The animals do not recognise it as a camera set to spy on them per se, but they do seem to recognise its otherness. The output that is broadcasted by human viewers from these is often of circular, fish-eye composition with amusing aesthetics, a somewhat questionable appreciation of a penguin’s perspective. Mobile animatronics may be put in contrast to static cameras, mounted on trees or other features, which, in theory, allow the animals to walk away from camera capture. Several such cameras are located strategically at sites where wild animals gather: watering holes, feeding stations or crossings. Africam, for instance, is a popular web-based livestream of wildlife surveillance that offers an ‘unmediated’ view of multispecies assemblages come to drink. It has been observed, however, that many of these wildlife hotspots are contrived by humans to varying degrees. These sites of surveillance draw together animals who come to interact with one another as a result of their surveillance baits, like salt-licks, lures or feed. Inasmuch as livestreams have been heralded as showing the mundane nothingness that characterises much of animal lives in contrast to nature documentaries who distil animal lives to exciting, kinetic action and life-and-death spectacle (Bousé, 2003), a critical question may be asked of these assemblage spaces: do they not also curate and compress action and spectacle, but in space rather than in time? More worrying for animal welfare, these sorts of shared spaces increase disease transmission, but also induce stress from predation risks or intraspecies violence (Cooper et al., 2010). In some parts of the world, feeding wildlife to provide photo ops for tourists (either virtual or physical) is a popular industry, and risks contriving unnatural species encounters. In Finland, large carnivore feeding sites draw together wolves, brown bear and wolverine to promote wildlife tourism. Such an encounter is perhaps not the innocent Bambi-like multispecies assemblage one would expect. How do these large carnivores interact, when the food at the site runs out? The frequency of camera capture is also relevant in terms of knowing and showing wild animal lives. Some devices are set to capture a few stills per day, to broadly monitor activity in an area; others are motion-sensor-triggered and record so long as there is movement, or upon registering movement, captures bursts of ten seconds; others still capture continuous real-time feeds at high frame rates per second. In the past, researchers and managers had to trek out to the camera location and manually retrieve the memory card, upload it to their computer and retrospectively sort through perhaps hundreds of photos at a time. But even today, data from GPS transmitters have to be collected and sent fractionated as bundles at intermittent intervals, meaning that they must be at least temporarily stored in chips. Innovation on battery longevity tries to solve this with different forms of power. Affecting the temporalities of human-wildlife relations, species identification algorithms can ping instantaneous alerts, to software or to a civilian’s mobile phone, when a specific animal enters the frame. One does not, therefore, have to sit glued to livestreams for periods of 251

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nothingness any longer. Many streams even offer skippable parts where highlights have been timestamped and annotated on the feed, like the Great Moose Migration in Sweden. Thus, while Searle and Turnboll (chapter 14) note a slowing down of media consumption during the Great Acceleration, web affordances appear to still deliver instant gratification. Moreover, wearable devices have varying time durations and frequencies for transmitting data to interfaces. Sophisticated ones that triangulate also with accelerometers to study animal movement and behaviour require uninterrupted feeds, at least for the times one is interested in. By contrast, managers may simply wish to track migration routes of, for example, large carnivores, and keep an eye on their mortality, which does not require transmissions beyond a couple of times per day to confirm their existence (Mitchell, 2018). These enable different relations to be formed to these animals, and different affordances to the animal to tell their story or create their maps. Hinchliffe and Lavau (2013) write that watching over, as in keeping a watch on, being on guard, is equivalent to surveilling for threats. For example, hunters and farmers use remote-sensing cameras to keep a watch on wild boars nearing their crop fields. By contrast, watching over as in meaning to keep safe involves surveilling an object for threats to it, befitting, for example, the monitoring of an endangered species. The authors further differentiate between geographical positions for surveillance, including how observation derives from watching among or amidst, corresponding to a situated perspective, whereas surveillance (from French sur, as ‘over, above’) denotes a vantage point from beyond: a bird’s-eye view. Some forms of surveillance of wildlife are massifying, operating at the level of tracking populations, while others operate on anatomopolitical levels of tracking individual animal bodies. There is also surveillance for wildlife operating at the microbial scale in the tracking of contagion in animal bodies, particularly urgent in times of societal anxiety over zoonotic disease transmission (Fortane and Keck, 2015).

JUDAS: A New Generation of Working Animals There are several ways to weaponise surveillance of wildlife and use this for our purposes, or even against the animals. In what he terms translational zoology, Pschera (2016) observes how animal sensoriums, finely attuned to environmental changes, mean that their zoological knowledge can be translated for human use. Bio-logging animals, sometimes called sentinels, are increasingly used by scientists to acquire parameters otherwise inaccessible to us. Today, we can use birds for general ecosystem health (Smits and Fernie, 2013), elephant seal oceanographers (Forssman, 2017), mussel sentinels and albatross cops on the high seas (Turnboll et al., 2023). Is this instrumental enrollment of animals a game-changer? Kays et al. (2015) speak of sentinel animals as ‘providing new insight on our world through the sixth sense of the global animal collective’ (Kays et al., 2015: 1222). It is true that they provide new insights, new parameters and more sensitive data in inaccessible places. But the animal-sensing enterprise may be merely a new iteration of an old phenomenon. Historically, humans have always leaned on animals as a ‘sixth sense’, using them instrumentally as in the canary in the coal mine to detect low oxygen levels and in more abstract terms to signal changes in the environment: catastrophes, season and weather shifts, danger. More abstractedly still, certain species’ presences have constituted omens of things to come. But today, we have the ability to turn such anticipatory sensing into much more concrete data. Rendering animal infrastructure – as collectors of data, as workers – engages discussions on animal labour (Barua, 2019). Heralded as innovative and cost-effective multispecies 252

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labour, there may be a risk that animals become evaluated in terms of ‘sensory-driven utility’ (Barua, 2019: 69), sold to private companies and insurance agencies to inform risk calculations. For the most part, bio-logging individuals collect data to serve their own conservation (Katzner and Arlettaz, 2020). Most bio-logging is directly related to the biology or ecology of the animal it is attached to: its heartbeat, movement, behaviour. A more sinister sensing is that which takes place at the cost of the animal. The so-called ‘Judas’ animal individuals are outfitted with trackers or cameras meant to facilitate finding (and killing) their conspecifics. In Sweden, the racoon dog is considered an invasive species, immigrating through the Finnish border in the north, and hence necessitating extirpation from Sweden. For management purposes, it is relatively straightforward to capture the animals, but much harder to detect where they are in the first place. This is where surveillance comes in. Captured racoon dogs – ironically increasingly captive-bred ones imported from Finland – are equipped with GPS trackers logging their position in real-time, and released into the wild. These racoon dogs are sterile. Some are snow white, as a result of breeding. These Judas individuals lead the hunters to other individuals to cull them. Some individuals they capture and re-release to repeat the mechanism. Project participants term the racoon dogs ‘project partners’ (own unpublished data). By inviting the racoon dogs into a labour relation, technologies may be seen as enacting biologies of betrayal (Wanderer, 2015). This is so because, when captured and outfitted with GPS, these animals receive gentle care. Managers do their best to provide medical care to the captured racoon dogs before releasing them, including treating them for infections and parasites and feeding them well. In Wanderer’s (2015: 4) words, judas animals exist ‘…at one minute [as] individuals with names and personalities toward which scientists feel responsibility and at the next as pests to be eradicated’.

Concluding Thoughts If surveillance cameras and their livefeeds offer a glimpse into the secret lives of wild animals, it may also tell us ‘as much about the people watching them as they do about the animals being recorded’ (Alagona, 2022: 106). This topic was explored by Searle and Turnboll in the previous chapter with regard to ‘civilian’ viewers. In this chapter, I have also argued that the people behind the camera – in the remote sense – are managers and scientists with agendas. In their demystifying of the wild through surveillance technologies, sometimes enrolling citizens to help, they can better care for it but also control it. Devices for recording can be partly emancipatory, if they invite animal agency and consent, but in the data journey of recorded observations, the animal can also be minimised, deindividualised and collapsed into currency or code, in ways that can ultimately be used for or against it. In the latter case, we saw how Judas animals – racoon dogs in Sweden – are enrolled in data collection on their conspecifics. The techno-organic way these animals are made to interact with surveillance technology means that they become cyborgs (Adams, 2020). Judas racoon dogs present an extreme case, helpful for its clarity in showing how surveillance can be a biopolitical tool. Most surveillance of wildlife does not proceed so menacingly. But everywhere it is limited by purpose (even if said purpose may be derailed). It is also limited by current technology to capture animal umwelts. Cameras used to capture animal perspectives remain ocularcentric or, at best, audiovisual in their point of departure. The claim that our current technology invites omnipresence, therefore, must be examined – is this feasible, or desirable? Taken to its extreme, what would omnipresence entail in terms of responsibilities, among other things, to wild animals? 253

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Likewise, it is important to stay abreast of technologies of surveillance that not only observe, but enact. To an extent, all recording devices have an effect. But we can distinguish those where the effect or intervention is secondary – a result of some human middle step, deciding to intervene or change a policy on the basis of observed data – from those that autonomously intervene, thus weaponising surveillance. Increasingly, the A.I. developments in surveillance, coupled with automated tasks to execute on the basis of recorded data, flourish across diverse contexts of wildlife management. For example, consider search-anddestroy drones like RangerBot for eliminating crowns-of-thorns starfish in coral reefs (Dauvergne, 2020), or Tickbot for attracting and poisoning ticks (Gaff et al., 2015), technologies of surveillance and action in the same package. These practices thus promise real-time, automated intervention that bypasses human decision-making steps. Such applications may be termed next-generation monitoring for their action component (Gabrys et al., 2016) and, I suggest, should be problematised as a next frontier for biopolitics.

Notes 1 Wildlife documentaries, for instance, distil animal lives to their visually most interesting forms, focusing disproportionately on eating and hunting. 2 Pedals the bear in New Jersey, US was however killed by a hunter who stalked him on social media and baited him to shoot him with an arrow (Alagona, 2022).

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Erica von Essen Katzner TE and Arlettaz R (2020) Evaluating contributions of recent tracking-based animal movement ecology to conservation management. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7: 519. Kays R, Crofoot MC and Jetz W, et al. (2015) Terrestrial animal tracking as an eye on life and planet. Science 348(6240): aaa2478. Lorimer J (2010) Moving image methodologies for more-than-human geographies. Cultural Geographies 17(2): 237–258. Lupton D (2023) The Internet of Animals: Human-Animal Relationships in the Digital Age. ­Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Lyon D (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Berkshire: Open University Press. McCubbin SG and Van Patter LE (2020) Trophy Hunters & Crazy Cat Ladies: Exploring cats and conservation in North America and Southern Africa through intersectionality. Gender, Place & Culture 28(9): 1327–1350. Mills B (2010) Television wildlife documentaries and animals’ right to privacy. Continuum 24(2): 193–202. Mitchell A (2018) Tracing Wolves: Materiality, Effect and Difference. PhD thesis. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Mitman G (1999) Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Nash K (2014) Clicking on the world: Documentary representation and interactivity. In: Nash K, Hight C and Sommarhayes C (eds) New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 50–66. Paci P, Mancini C and Nuseibeh B (2022) The case for animal privacy in the design of technologically supported environments. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 8: 1611. Pschera A (2016) Animal Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution. New York: New Vessel Press. Ray SJ (2014) Rub trees, crittercams, and GIS: The wired wilderness of Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ Bear 71. Green Letters 18(3): 236–253. Rooks I (2016) Pandopticon: The panda cam & animal surveillance. Spectator 36(1): 43–57. Sheehan P (2008) Against the image: Herzog and the troubling politics of the screen animal. Substance 37: 117–136. Smits JE and Fernie KJ (2013) Avian wildlife as sentinels of ecosystem health. Comparative Immunology, Microbiology and Infectious Diseases 36(3): 333–342. Swanson H (2017) Methods for multispecies anthropology: Thinking with Salmon Otoliths and scales. Social Analysis 61: 81–99. Turnbull J, Searle A and Adams W (2020) Quarantine encounters with digital animals: More-thanhuman geographies of lockdown life. Journal of Environmental Media 1(1): 6.1–6.10. Turnbull J, Searle A, Hartman Davies O, Dodsworth J, Chasseray-Peraldi P, von Essen E and Anderson-­ Elliott H (2023) Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance. Progress in Environmental Geography 2(1–2): 3–32. Van Patter LE (2021) Individual animal geographies for the more-than-human city: Storying synanthropy and cynanthropy with urban coyotes. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 0(0): 25148486211049441. Verma A, van der Wal R and Fischer A (2016) Imagining wildlife: New technologies and animal censuses, maps and museums. Geoforum 75: 75–86. von Essen E and Allen M (2022) Skill or slaughter in ‘fair chase:’ What does animal resistance tell us about modern sports hunting. Between the Species 25(1): 92–110. von Essen E, Turnbull J and Searle A, et al. (2021) Wildlife in the digital anthropocene: Examining human-animal relations through surveillance technologies. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. 6(1): 1–21. Wanderer E (2015) Biologies of betrayal: Judas goats and sacrificial mice on the margins of Mexico. BioSocieties 10(1): 1–23. Whitney K (2021) Bird banding and the environmental humanities: Institutions, intersubjectivities, and the phenomenological method of margaret morse nice. Environmental Humanities 13(1): 113–135. Whitney N (2013) The secret lives of wild animals. Lecture at TEDxSarasota. January 2013. Woodcock J, Greenhill A and Holmes K, et al. (2017) Crowdsourcing citizen science: Exploring the tensions between paid professionals and users. Journal of Peer Production (10): 1–10.

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15 LIVING WITH UNRULY WASTE MATTER On More-than-Human Relations Olli Pyyhtinen

Introduction The world we live in is both a human and a non-human world, a world not only of ideas, meanings, and culture but also of plants, animals, microbes, artefacts, waste, infrastructures, oceans, and the climate, for instance. Yet, our immersion in the more-than-human world and our intimate everyday entanglements with our non-human others has largely remained absent in sociological accounts. Bruno Latour (1992) famously claimed some 30 years ago that the ‘masses’ have been largely missing from sociological analyses. With this, he meant that ever since the birth of the discipline, sociologists had almost exclusively turned their attention to humans at the price of excluding non-humans. This exclusion had much to do with the endeavour to establish sociology as an independent discipline. Foundational authors were eager to find an object of its own for sociology, a purely sociological domain, and this effort rested on a kind of purification. Notwithstanding this urge for purification and exclusion, non-humans nevertheless refuse to disappear. They relentlessly demand to be considered when we study society and social relations. To quote Latour (1992: 153): They knock at the door of sociology, requesting a place in the accounts of society as stubbornly as the human masses did in the nineteenth century. What our ancestors, the founders of sociology, did a century ago to house the human masses in the fabric of social theory, we should do now to find a place in a new social theory for the nonhuman masses that beg us for understanding. However, non-human masses were never completely consigned to oblivion. We can think of Émile Durkheim’s analysis of totems in Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1973), Georg Simmel’s writings on topics such as money, the ruin, the handle, the bridge and the door, senses, exhibition architecture, the letter, and the picture frame (Simmel, 1997), and Karl Marx’s notion of the base as well as his attention to the waste or ‘excretions’ of production and consumption (see e.g. Marx, 1992). The more-than-human perspective is new because it gives non-humans a fairer share in the make-up of our world. Their existence is not 257

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reduced to whatever it is that humans choose to make of them. The classics still more or less regarded the human subject as a sovereign ego separate from the world of non-humans and gave primacy to language, meanings, and culture. Present scholarship, by contrast, takes seriously the effectivity of our non-human or not-quite-human others. Accordingly, more-than-human sociology amounts to much more than simply awareness of the existence of non-humans and adding them into social analysis. In this chapter, I  examine the radical break vis-à-vis the prevailing sociological thinking that the morethan-human perspective presents. First of all, it embodies a way of thinking about nonhuman matter differently. Secondly, the more-than-human perspective reconfigures our notions of relations and relationality. And thirdly, it invites us to rethink what it is to be human.1 More-than-human sociology dethrones the constitutive human subject and attends to the ways in which the human is constituted through its relations with forces, flows, and forms outside it. Not-only-human elements and materials are always already implicated in the human, as an integral part of its make-up. The chapter explores these issues mostly by engaging with the subject of waste. As something which we constantly seek to exclude and which yet refuses to disappear despite all the efforts made to eliminate it, waste presents itself as a most suitable example of non-humans banging on the door of sociology.

The Life of (Waste) Matter The predominant understanding of matter in modern Western culture, as Diana Coole (2010: 92) remarks, is to regard it as ‘essentially passive stuff, set in motion by human agents who use it as means of survival, modify it as a vehicle of aesthetic expression, and impose subjective meanings upon it’. The so-called new materialist thinkers have recently challenged this perception of matter. They reject the idea of matter as passive stuff and ­inert, distinct from active and free human subjects. As Coole and Samantha Frost (2010: 8) suggest in their introduction to the book New Materialisms, ‘an overriding characteristic of the new materialists [is] their insistence on describing active processes of materialization of which embodied humans are an integral part, rather than the monotonous repetitions of dead matter from which human subjects are apart’. Far from being passive and dead, objects and matter are in constant variation and have an ongoing historicity. Every object is a series of events. When arguing against their passivity, in recent years, it has become commonplace to grant non-humans with ‘agency’. Its generosity notwithstanding, this move nevertheless diverts thinking on a wrong path, since it remains captive of what anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013: 100) has called ‘a logic of embodiment’ or, alternatively, ‘logic of inversion’ (Ingold, 2011: 68). The notion of agency suggests that someone or something is capable of acting due to possessing an agency. Ingold (2013: 96) argues that it is utterly ‘perverse’ to causally attribute action to an ‘agency’, of which the action would be the effect. With all its talk about ‘agency’ and ‘actants’, not even actor-network-theory would seem to be entirely free from the logic of embodiment. Contrary to what it alleges and intends, the idea of agency as something distributed along network relations nonetheless tends to treat beings as self-enclosed and separate. Provided that a ‘network’ is conceived in terms of connections between elements, the concept logically entails that the interconnected entities are apart not only from each other but also from their relations (Larson, Petch and Zeitlyn, 2007: 216–217; Ingold, 2011: 70). It assumes a distance, an empty space in-between them, and thereby the network approach is bound to begin with a separation. 258

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Ingold gives us workable means to escape or reverse the logic of embodiment. He proposes a way of considering action not in terms of the possession of agency, but in those of being ‘possessed by’ and ‘immersed in’ action (Ingold, 2013: 96–97).2 Ingold is not alone in insisting this. For example, Karen Barad (2003: 826–827), too, proposes that agency ‘is an enactment, not something that someone or something has’. Further, in his book Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature, STS scholar Mike Michael (2000) suggests that we should not think of action in terms of agents, whether human or non-humans, but we should move away from the grammar of agency altogether. As Michael (2000: 1) puts it himself: ‘Instead of humans and non-humans we are beginning to think about flows, movements, arrangements, relations. It is through such dynamics that the human (and the nonhuman) emerges’. Indeed, instead of understanding relations as connections between fixed entities, it would be better to fathom them as lines of along which things come to be and change (see Pyyhtinen, 2021). By refuting the notion of agency, we can also avoid the tiresome accusations of animism and the criticism that acknowledging the activity of non-humans would somehow be tantamount to saying that non-humans have intentional properties or consciousness. Attending to the concrete occasions in which non-humans, objects, and materials are active and produce effects provides us a way of reconsidering action and activity. Instead of attributing action causally to ‘agency’ (resulting from the faculties of the mind) of which it would be the effect, more-than-human sociology looks at action in terms of relations, assemblages, confederations, and flows. This is not to deprive human agents of intentionality or cognition, nor is it to deny the existence of several crucial differences between humans and non-humans. Humans do have certain specific features such as introspection and the capability to make one’s own experiences the object of one’s cognition, but cognition or intentionality should not be privileged when conceptualising action.3 Intentional action is only one particular case of all the different kinds of action and activity. We would not ascribe intentionality to a heavy wind knocking down trees, to a bridge carrying trains over a river, or to the dose of alcohol going to one’s head; yet, they are active and do have concrete effects. We need to challenge the very privilege accorded to intentionality, free will, mind, and the like when thinking of action and agentic effects. Social scientific waste studies, a field in which I have been working increasingly the past few years, nicely exemplifies this shift in perspective from the passivity to the activity of matter. While waste scholars have always taken an interest in materiality (Moore, 2012), often they have tended to portray discarded objects as more or less passive and inert, just waiting to be endowed with meaning and handled by humans and their social constructions. The pioneering works in the field provided by Mary Douglas (2002 [1966]) and Michael Thompson (1979) embody this kind of social constructionist approach, as they examined waste as a product of classification (though Douglas, to be exact, writes about dirt, not waste). The authors emphasise that nothing is inherently waste, but things may move into and out of the category of waste. Douglas’s and Thompson’s contributions help us in an important manner to understand that waste is not just an occasional, marginal nuisance but an unavoidable and integral product of any order. There is no order without disorder and no cleanliness without dirt. The two are generated in the same gesture of separation. However, the social constructionist approach to waste comes with certain limitations. Most severely, it tends to ignore the brute materiality of waste. Douglas’s perspective represents, to quote philosopher Olli Lagerspetz (2018: 72, 77), an ‘anthropological reductionism’ according to which dirt or waste is primarily symbolic; it has no actuality or positivity 259

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of its own. Yet, waste cannot be reduced to socially constructed meanings, and it is not fully explained by the concept of disorder, either. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, waste does not just embody disorder. Waste is not always and in every situation simply ‘matter out of place’, as Douglas’s (2002 [1966]: 44) famous formulation reads, since there is also a clearly defined, demarcated place for waste. This is actually something which Douglas too acknowledges (see Douglas, 2002 [1966]: 198). In households and in public waste management, this place is the waste container, not the bed, kitchen table, bathroom floor, backyard, forest, or roadside. The bin is a crucial spatial technology of making waste manageable: it tames the uncontrollable, threatening, and disturbing ‘outside’ that waste e­ mbodies by enclosing it. As is characteristic of containers more generally, the waste bin stops things from spilling, flowing, and expanding uncontrollably in space by holding the materials together, in place. A thing, object, or substance placed in the bin is also out of sight and out of mind. The container keeps the waste separate from us, hidden, in the afterlife of useless things that have lost their value. The orderly placement of waste in the container where it belongs does not undo its wasteness; rather, its binning further reinforces its classification as ‘waste’.4 Like dead bodies, garbage is isolated from the bustle and continuity of mundane life in its confined resting place. The bin simultaneously hides the rubbish and indicates its proper place: ‘here lies’. The bin is also a repository of order, in so far as rubbish and waste are sorted. Discarded things are not just thrown away, abandoned into a mess, but mixed waste, biowaste, glass, metal, plastic, paper, cardboard, and hazardous waste are normatively placed in separate containers, in separate orders. There are detailed specifications and instructions to which items and materials can and cannot be placed. For example, in the recycling bin reserved for paper newspapers and magazines, advertisements and brochures, coloured paper, letter paper, and recycled paper are welcomed, but not disposable containers, reproduction paper, copy paper wrappers, gift wrapping paper, wrapping paper, data protection paper, cardboard, or plastic. (It is also forbidden to put organic waste, metal, glass, medicines, or nuclear waste there, but this is not mentioned in the recycling instructions because the risk of confusion is so minimal.) Secondly, waste has its own positivity. Waste is not reducible to meaning and it is not the kind of dead matter that it is usually assumed to be. Waste is self-expressive: it ‘speaks’ or ‘writes’ in terms of overspills, flows, expansions, rhythms, and interactions, and by remaining as a material trace of deterioration, decomposition, and effacement, as a ruin of what is no longer. Discarded materials live on in the afterlife of bins, recycling points, and incinerators; they have found their way to forests, oceans, and mountain peaks, and are ingested – in the form of micro- and nano-plastic – by sea birds, fish, and other organisms, including humans. So, even after having been discarded, matter is still teeming with life. Waste is not just a passive object of human modification, but active in itself: it does something and has an impact on our lives and on the environment (see also e.g. Hawkins, 2006; Gregson and Crang, 2010). By taking up space, stinking, accumulating, and overflowing, discarded materials force us to manage and organise them and place them somewhere where they would cause as little disturbance as possible. The power of a vibrant waste material can sometimes even be dangerous and harmful to health – just think of food spoilage, mould, rotting, food poisoning, or landfill waste mountains that threaten to release carbon dioxide, methane, and toxins into the soil, groundwater, and air. 260

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It needs to be stressed that attending to the materiality of waste instead of reducing it to meanings and social categories does not mean studying it in terms of its mass, volume, or atomic or molecular constitution. It is to focus on what waste matter is capable of, that is, on its potentialities and the ways in which it is effective in relation to us as well as other materials. So, the more-than-human approach examines waste matter not in terms of what it is but what it does. Instead of trying to tell what it is by nature and define its primary qualities, it explores waste in non-essential terms: its properties are defined by its relations and are thus susceptible to change. The emphasis on the activity of matter itself instead of assigning primary dynamism to human agents unsettles the ‘bifurcation of nature’ (Whitehead, 2015 [1920]: 21) into active living beings, on the one hand, and passive and inert inorganic bodies, on the other hand. The notion of ‘material vitalism’ put forth by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987: 411) nicely articulates an attempt at dissolving the life/matter dichotomy: instead of distinguishing living bodies from inorganic ones and life from the mechanism of matter, as the vitalism of Henri Bergson or the life-philosophy of Simmel still did, material vitalism attends to ‘a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such’. It suggests a way of considering life not in terms of organisms but in terms of ‘matter energy’, ‘matter flow’, and ‘matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves them’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 407; see also Bennett, 2010). It understands life as deterritorialised: instead of lurking in the interstices of living individual organisms, life ‘exists everywhere’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 411); it is ‘immanent in the very process of [the] world’s continual generation or coming-into-being’ (Ingold, 2011: 67). To further stress the irreducibility of life to the organic, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 411) propose the notion of ‘Nonorganic Life’ and argue that it is metal that best reveals a life proper to matter. With its effectivity and agentic capabilities, waste, too, provides a fascinating example of such a life. What makes it all the more fascinating is that the vibrancy and dynamics of waste also open up a perspective on the effectivity of ‘bad’ matter, beyond a good and wanted agency of matter (see also Parikka, 2012). Besides circulating through society in ways that are expected to promote economic growth and create new business opportunities – today, the so-called circular economy invites us to realise the potential of ‘waste-based commodity frontiers’ (Schindler and Demaria, 2020: 52) – waste also flows and moves in unwanted and uncontrollable ways. Today, waste is constantly technologically and economically seized and ordered by acts of closure to be recovered and revalued through recycling and reuse along the chain of production and consumption. And yet, despite all the efforts to control it and make its flow circular, waste refuses to be tamed. It is largely in its way of leaking and spilling over that waste escapes techniques that manage, govern, and exploit it. Waste is to a great extent vagabond, unruly, and deterritorialising matter that belongs to a fluid reality. It flows, expands, and spreads all over our living environment. For example, it has been estimated that there are more than five trillion pieces of plastic afloat on oceans, weighing over 250,000 tons (Eriksen et al., 2014). To subjugate waste under the imagery of a perfect circle or a closed circuit of flow thus amounts to ignoring its spillovers and the principle of loss operative in it. All waste cannot be reclaimed. There always remains something in it that does not circulate and cannot be recycled, reused, and exploited. It is only by taking seriously the ‘aneconomic’ side of waste that threatens and disrupts the completion of society and economy into closed loops and by accepting waste as such beyond its translatability into value that it is possible to understand how waste is integral to our everyday life and to the metabolism of capitalism. 261

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Reconfiguring Relations: From Dyads to Triads Given that the world of humans is inextricably entangled with the non-human, the morethan-human perspective also invites us to reconfigure the notion of relation. There are no human relations as such, in a humans-only vacuum, outside the world of matter and materials, but our actions and relationships are inseparably tied with a host of things and materials. When we humans are with each other, we are also with fossil fuels, minerals, microbes, technology, pollution, plastic, foodstuffs, dogs, houses, oceans, trees, the soil, rivers, and infrastructures – just to name a few of the entities that we live with. Thereby, to grasp the full range of our relations and our entanglement with the world, we need to incorporate various non-human or not-only-human things and materials into sociological inquiry. Integrating non-humans into social theory invites us to consider social relations in triangular terms, that is, fathoming them as configurations of three. In sociology and social theory, relations are typically considered in dyadic terms, as relations between two. For example, in his major work Soziologie (1992 [1908]), Simmel regards the dyad, Zweizahl, as the numerically most rudimentary and basic sociological formation. In a somewhat similar manner, Gabriel Tarde (1899: 39) insists in his book Social Laws that ‘the relation between […] two persons is the one essential element in the social life’. The fundamental unit of social life is according to Tarde (1899: 39) ‘a couple consisting of two persons, […] one of whom exerts a mental influence upon the other’. Simmel and Tarde are not alone in insisting on the dyad as the basic, most rudimentary social unit. In fact, twentieth-century social theory has by and large modelled intersubjectivity in reference to the Other, in terms of the dyadic relationship of Self and Other. Michael Theunissen (1984: 6) has argued that the notion of ‘the social’ can be ‘extended to every type of relation to the Other, including the presocial’. Already Hegel (2012 [1807]) asserted the intersubjective constitution of self-consciousness in his theory of recognition. As he writes in a famous passage of Phänomenologie des Geistes (2012 [1807]: 141): ‘Selfconsciousness is in and for itself insofar as, and by virtue of the fact that it is for another which is in and for itself; that is, it exists only as something recognized’. For Hegel, alterity is thus inscribed into the constitution of self-consciousness and identity; self-consciousness presupposes a detour via otherness. In the place occupied by the Cartesian cogito and the solitary thinking subject that it implies, Hegel’s theory of recognition puts the dyadic relationship of I and Other – the subject emerges through dyadic interpersonal encounter (here I will not go into the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic). Dyadic interactions do not, however, exhaust the social world in its entirety. Let us take the gift relationship as an example. While the gift would seem to involve a dyadic relation between the giver and the recipient, in truth, it cannot be ‘reduced to a one-on-one interaction’, but it ‘necessarily includes a third element, a thing from the world’, as Marcel Hénaff (2020: 170) argues (see also Pyyhtinen, 2014). Already the verb ‘to give’ is trivalent: it entails that someone gives something to someone other. Here, we are not dealing with the third-party human agent famously discussed, for example, by Simmel.5 Actually, the thirdparty human agent, as Hénaff (2020: 170) argues, ‘tells us nothing about the third-party thing that bonds together the partners’. The gift object – which can be a material solidified object, but also a mere word or a gesture – is not a supplement added to the relationship between the partners, but it makes their relationship possible. The gift relationship is not a transfer of a good/thing from one party to another, but a relationship mediated by something external to the two partners (Hénaff, 2020). This mediating third element brings 262

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about what Charles S. Peirce (1958) calls the ‘triad’, a relationship among three logical subjects. The argument that Hénaff develops in relation to the mediating role of the gift can be extended to apply to all kinds of relationships among humans. There is a thing of the world implicated and involved in every relationship between two human subjects. The human subject is not the only conceivable third party there is, but there exist many more Thirds than just our fellow humans. To disregard the existence and role of impersonal Thirds (such as non-humans, language, and institutions) unnecessarily narrows down the conceptual field of the figure of the Third. The activities of third persons cover only a few of the several possible operations and figures of the Third. Therefore, the notion of the personal third party is not very helpful in analysing the third-party thing that binds the self and other together. However, to fully acknowledge the effectivity of the non-human thirds involved in social relations, it is important to transcend Hénaff’s more or less anthropocentric perspective. While Hénaff acknowledges that the things from the world play a role in our relationships, he ultimately reduces them to mere symbols, giving primacy to human agency and privileging language, meanings, and culture. This is already betrayed by his vocabulary: the concepts third-party agent and third-party thing are prone to render objects passive, distinct from active and free human agents. When objects and materials are considered as mere symbols, it becomes impossible to see their powers and effectivity to the full extent. The Third introduces alterity to relations. It is placed outside the dialectic or indissoluble dyad of ego and alter (see Esposito, 2012: 105–106); it is something in excess to it. No other phenomenon probably exemplifies this excessiveness more concretely than waste. Since the emergence of mass production and mass consumption, the relationship of Western societies to waste has been based on a logic of expulsion: discarding, disposal, and exclusion. ‘Waste’ has figured as a generic term for a substance that has lost its value and is therefore discarded.6 Yet, we live with waste in a much more fundamental sense than public waste management and the most enthusiastic visions of a circular economy would have us believe. No matter how hard we work to obliterate trash by binning it, flushing it down the drain, burying it in the ground, or burning it, it refuses to disappear. For example, in 2016, the cremation of the more than 1.5m tonnes of municipal waste that were burnt in Finland’s incineration plants generated almost 400,000 tonnes of ash, which is more than any other type of waste generated (Eskonen, 2018). But waste does not disappear through recycling either. Not all surplus can be converted into a useful resource. In fact, the belief in the efficiency of recycling seems to provide the absolution for our ever-accelerating consumption. The paradox of recycling is that, despite increased recycling and careful sorting, the amount of municipal waste generated actually continues to increase. A World Bank report published in September 2018 estimated that annual waste will increase to 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050, up from around 2 billion tonnes in 2016, or roughly 70% (Kaza, Yao, Bhada-Tata and Van Woerden, 2018). We are therefore inextricably entangled with waste – as a Third that both mediates and disturbs our relations and actions – in complex patterns of economic, ecological, political, and corporeal interdependency. Human togetherness always implies being also together with (the exclusion of) waste, and we also share a joint future with it. A waste-free world is nothing more than a technocratic fantasy. We cannot free ourselves from waste once and for all, nor can we take complete control of it. Waste, in its unmanageable form, threatens the self-awareness of the present and the renunciation of the past. The exclusion of waste 263

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is therefore also an attempt to guarantee the independence of the present from the past that overshadows it. Waste is like a spectre (cf. Derrida, 2006; Doeland, 2020): something left behind that should therefore belong to the past, but which refuses to disappear into nothingness and instead haunts us, affecting and disturbing our being in the present. It embodies otherness, something alien and repugnant to us; yet, it is inextricably ‘ours’, both as our creation and as a problem that falls under our responsibility. By its presence, waste prevents us from detaching ourselves from otherness. Waste also calls into question our desire by being something other than how we would wish things to be. If consumer goods are fantasy objects of the good life and of an idealised future, which contain the promise of happiness and wholeness, waste amounts to matter that is stripped of that dimension of fantasy. Waste, in its wasteness, is unproductive excess, drained of its potential, surplus matter that no longer serves any purpose. To live with waste, therefore, requires hospitality towards it, acceptance of useless and worthless matter as an inevitable fact and feature of our environment. Living with waste ultimately comes down to accepting meaninglessness or worthlessness as part of life, perhaps also to opening up to a sense that transcends the human. A life shared with waste is a life that is not in complete control of itself, a life to which otherness and strangeness are constantly entangled (see also Pyyhtinen, 2020). We are formed as individual subjects and as a community in and through multiple exposures to and encounters with Thirds.

The Non-Human as Always Implicated in the Human Besides inviting us to think about matter differently and acknowledge how things and materials participate in, mediate, and disturb human togetherness, the more-than-human perspective also changes our understanding of what it is to be human. Human beings do not exist apart from objects, materials, and material flows, but the latter can even be understood as the other side of the powers of humans, without which our actions would not be possible. The non-human is always implicated in the human. This idea collapses or breaks down that boundary between the human organism and its environment. Interestingly, John Dewey already problematised this boundary in Art as Experience (1980: 59), when he wrote that the Epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins. There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that belong to it de jure if not de facto; that must be taken possession of if life is to continue. The non-human other is always already part of the human self. There is no human as such, pure, simple, and bare, detached from its relations and dependencies, as if in a natural state, but the human only exists in relations. We can think of viruses as one example of the trace of the non-human within us. ­Although we typically think and speak of viruses as if they were entirely external invaders which enter our body only on the occasion of infection, many viruses belong to our constitution and are an integral part of human life (Shildrick, 2022). Scientists believe that about 8% of the human genome is made up of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) (Gandi and Tramontano, 2018), and retrotransposons unanchored genetic chains, make up an even greater share, probably around 40% (Shildrick, 2022: 92). 264

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Yet, those not-quite-human entities that are located outside the human body may be equally constitutive of it. For a blind person, one’s ability to go for a stroll is highly dependent on the stick. The stick is something external to and distinct from his body, and yet, in its very extra-somaticity and supplementary nature, already belongs to their mental system and bodily capability in the act of walking (see Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 465). For the blind, the stick comprises what philosopher Bernard Stiegler (1998) has called an ‘original prostheses’ which he uses to think the relationship of the human with technology. For Stiegler (1998: 141), the human is a creation or effect of one’s technical prostheses. He stresses that not only do humans invent tools, but also tools invent the human. By using the tool, I not only learn something from the tool and from myself but I also become more skilled at using it; I become a skilled user. With the notion of technology as an original prosthesis of the human, Stiegler thus suggests that technology gives rise to their users by redefining their capabilities. Finally, to take up the example of waste again, we can also think about waste as constitutive of the human. The category of waste is an integral part of the human condition, taken that all human activity is bound to generate excess. Despite all efforts to get rid of it, we are not separate from waste. There is no human without waste, but the two co-emerge; the appearance of the human is the appearance of waste, and waste enables particular sorts of humans to emerge. Besides asking what humans can do to waste, it is therefore also relevant to ask what waste does to us; examine the kind of relations, agencies, and spatiotemporal scales it assumes, prompts, enacts, and sustains of risks, responsibilities, and possibilities it presents; think about the futures society commits itself to by its discarding and waste management practices (and about the alternative material and political futures they may foreclose); and envision the sorts of humans that we both individually and collectively become with waste.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to elucidate how the more-than-human perspective in sociology does not simply mean that we acknowledge the entanglement of humans with non-human others and that we grant ‘agency’ to those non-humans. It is also suggestive of a new way to understand non-human matter, relationality, and ultimately what it is to be human. First of all, above I suggested that the more-than-human perspective goes against the tradition of perceiving non-human matter as passive and inert, distinct from active and free human agents. It regards non-human beings and materials as active in themselves and capable of exerting effects. This does not amount to forgetting or ignoring humans and their actions. On the contrary, as Andrew Pickering (1995: 26) puts it, ‘the human actors are still there but now inextricably entangled with the nonhuman, no longer at the centre of the action alone’. More-than-human studies thus decentre action and the idea of an autonomous, constitutive human subject. All action takes place in a relational field and overlaps, conjoins, interferes, and interacts with other endeavours (Bennett, 2010: 101). Secondly, acknowledging our entanglement with a non-human world changes our understanding of social relations. There are no social relations as such, devoid of matter, but all our relations are entangled with and mediated by heterogeneous non-human materials and things that also participate in making the relations what they are. A lot more stuff goes into producing a collectivity than just agents and structure, or even assumedly self-enclosed and distinct humans and non-humans, for both humans and non-humans are assemblages 265

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composed of various materials, relations, and flows. Every relation between two humans, as was suggested, always includes a third element: a thing from the world. Relations therefore need to be considered as triangular configurations, that is, assemblages of (at least) three elements. The point in foregrounding the Third is not that in addition to there being dyadic relations, there also exist relations between three. The Third is not only the sign of increased complexity; it is there in every relation. There is a Third to every relationship between two, either included in it or excluded from it. ‘As soon as we are two, we are already three or four’ (Serres, 2007: 57). Thirdly, and finally, more-than-human sociology also suggests that we are not ­incorporeal minds lurking in the depths of our subjectivity and only afterwards and sporadically coming into contact with external reality, but we gain our capacities and skills through engaging with the world and learning how to become affected, mobilised, and put into motion by it (Latour, 2004). We have no inherent agency. Instead of humans standing as the sole creators of things, the materials and objects with which we are entangled significantly shape who we are and what we are capable of. When we move from one scale to another, we do not move from immateriality to materiality or the other way around. Never and at no point do we exit the world of materials, but we always already ‘swim in an ocean of ­materials’ (Ingold, 2011: 24). As humans, we live in a world of active non-human beings and materials, and with our life and actions we participate in its ongoing formation. We are constituted in the processes that constitute the world, or, as Pickering (1995: 26) put it, ‘The world makes us in one and the same process in which we make the world’.

Notes 1 I have made these three points in a different form and context in Pyyhtinen (2015). 2 The formulation ’immersed in action’ comes from Alfred North Whitehead (1938: 217). 3 See Pyyhtinen (2022) as a case in point. 4 This idea thus comes with undertones of relationality, situatedness, and performativity. Being always implies a spatiotemporal location: what entities are is dependent on where, when, and in relation to which they are to be found. 5 Even though he insisted on the primacy of the dyad, Simmel was also perhaps the first to emphasise the sociological significance of third persons for social relations. The difference between the formations involving two members and those involving three is according to him not only ­quantitative, but also qualitative. Formations of three differ from dyads in terms of dynamics, stability, and by their degree of objectivity. What is more, Simmel argues that any further expansion to the formations of four, then, one hundred, on hundred thousand, and so on does not have the same transformative effect as the addition of the Third (Simmel, 1992 [1908]: 117–118). 6 While landfilling, which was in Finland where I live the prevailing method of managing municipal waste from the 1950s to the early 2000s, sought to relocate and remove waste out of sight to the outskirts of communities, and waste incineration seeks to dispose of the surplus material by ­burning it to ashes, the circular economy ideology presents a total ban on the very idea of excess.

References Barad K (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs 28(3): 801–831. Bateson G (2000 [1972]) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole D (2010) The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh. In Coole D and Frost S (eds) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durhman & London: Duke University Press, pp. 92–115.

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Living with Unruly Waste Matter Coole D and Frost S (2010) Introducing the New Materialisms. In Coole D and Frost S (eds) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durhman & London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–44. Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Massumi B. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida J (2006) Spectres of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New ­International. Translated by Kamuf P. London: Routledge. Dewey J (1980 [1934]) Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books. Doeland L (2020) Turning to the Spectre of Waste – A Hauntological Approach. In Ek R and Johansson N (eds) Perspective on Waste from the Social Sciences and the Humanities: Opening the Bin. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 22–38. Douglas M (2002 [1966]) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Durkheim É (1973) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Fields KE. New York: Free Press. Eriksen M, Lebreton LCM, Carson, HS, Thiel M and Moore C J. et al. (2014) Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea. PLoS ONE 9(12): e111913. Eskonen H (2018) Jätätkö Jätteen Kierrättämättä ja Ostat Hyvän Omantunnon Ajattelemalla, että Polttoonhan ne Kuitenkin Menevät? Ei Kannata, Sillä nyt Hukumme Jätteenpolttolaitosten Kuonaan ja Tuhkaan. Yle Uutiset 7 September 2018. https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10373765 (accessed 21 October 2022). Esposito R (2012) Third Person. Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal. Translated by Hanafi Z. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity. Gandi N and Tramontano E (2018) Human Endefenous Retroviruses Are Ancient Acquired E ­ lements Still Shaping Innate Immune Responses. Frontiers in Immunology. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fimmu.2018.02039 (last checked 15 August 2022.) Gregson N and Crang M (2010) Materiality and Waste: Inorganic Vitality in a Networked World. Environment and Planning A 42: 1026–1032. Hawkins G (2006) The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hegel GWF (2012 [1807]) Phänomenologie des Geistes. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6698/ pg6698-images.html (checked 15 August 2022). Hénaff M (2020) The Philosophers’ Gift: Reexamining Reciprocity. Translated by Morhange JL. New York: Fordham University Press. Ingold T (2011) Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Ingold T (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Kaza S, Yao LC, Bhada-Tata P and Woerden Frank V (2018) What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050. Washington, DC: World Bank. openknowledge.worldbank. org/handle/10986/30317 (checked 21 October 2022.) Lagerspetz O (2018) A Philosophy of Dirt. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Larson F, Petch A and Zeitlyn D (2007) Social Networks and the Creation of the Pitt Rivers Museum. Journal of Material Culture 12(3): 211–239. Latour, B (1992) Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In B ­ ijker WE and Law J (eds) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. ­Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 225–258. Latour B (2004) How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies. Body & Society 10(2–3): 205–229. Marx K (1992) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, 3rd edition. Translated by Fowkes B. London: Penguin Classics. Michael, H (2000) Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature. From Society to Heterogeneity. London and New York: Routledge. Moore SA (2012) Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geographies of Waste. Progress in Human Geography 36(6): 780–799. Parikka J (2012) New Materialism and Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9(1): 95–100. Peirce CS (1958) Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Olli Pyyhtinen Pickering A (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pyyhtinen O (2014) The Gift and Its Paradoxes. London and New York: Routledge. Pyyhtinen O (2015) More-than-Human Sociology: A New Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pyyhtinen O (2020) Elämä Jätteen Kanssa. Niin & näin 27(4): 31–36. Pyyhtinen O (2021) Relations Along, Not Between: Incorporating Becoming into Relational Sociology. Simmel Studies 25(1): 37–72. Pyyhtinen O (2022) Lines That Do Not Speak: Multispecies Hospitality and Bug-Writing. Hospitality & Society 12(3): 343–359. Schindler S and Demaria F (2020) “Garbage Is Gold”: Waste Based Commodity Frontiers, Modes of Valorization and Ecological Distribution Conflicts. Capitalism Nature Socialism 31(4): 51–59. Serres M (2007) The Parasite. Translated by Schehr LR. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shildrick M (2022) COVID-19: Biofilosofiaa ja -Politiikkaa – Pandemian Uudelleenarviointi Reberto Espositon Immuniteettiparadigman Valossa [Bio-philosophy and biopolitics of COVID-19 – Rethinking the Pandemic through Roberto Esposito’s Immunity Paradigm]. Translated by ­Pyyhtinen O. Niin & Näin 29(2): 87–95. Simmel G (1992 [1908]) Soziologie. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 11. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Simmel G (1997) Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Ed. Frisby D and Featherstone M. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Stiegler B (1998) Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Beardsworth R and Collins G. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tarde G (1899) Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Translated by Warren HC. Macmillan: New York and London. Theunissen M (1984) The Other. Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. Translated by Macann C. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson M (1979) Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. Whitehead AN (1938) Science and the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead AN (2015 [1920]) The Concept of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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16 WE HAVE NEVER BUILT BACK BETTER Using STS to Account for the Many Failures of Disaster Recovery Steve Matthewman Introduction In 1993, Bruno Latour published We Have Never Been Modern. His book took issue with modernity’s intellectual division of labour, with the idea that there exist two ontologically distinct domains, nature and culture. The former, dealing with facts, being the proper domain of physical scientists. The latter, dealing with power, the preserve of social science. Latour (1993: 12) critiqued this ‘Great Divide’ as social scientists only ever get to study half of the problem. They consider subjects in society, but objects and non-human others in nature are typically left to those other scientists. Why engage in such acts of ontological ­purity when the cases we confront are so promiscuously combined? Latour urged us to enrol non-human others into our analyses as any empirical case inevitably involves human and non-human, nature and culture, the micro and the macro, the local and the global. He also noted that the various agents, interests and timeframes should be mixed into something more properly called ‘nature-culture’ since everything exists within these hybrid networks (Latour, 1993: 7, 11). Disaster scholarship exemplifies the Great Divide that Latour identified. Hazards (earthquakes, volcanoes, floods) are studied by physical scientists. Disasters are studied by social scientists. Whether or not a hazard results in a disaster is purely a matter of social arrangements (which rests on a conceptual repertoire of exposure, vulnerability, risk and resilience). It is as if matter does not matter for disaster scholars. Yet, ‘[d]isasters are situations when matter is out of control and … out of control on a massive scale’ (Guggenheim, 2014: 5). Moreover, disasters inevitably gather all of the elements that Latour noted: humans, non-humans, cultures, natures, in multiple spaces and at multiple scales. In this chapter, we focus on one of disaster studies’ most enduring challenges, the failure to Build Back Better (BBB) after catastrophe, despite widespread desires to do so (UNISDR, 2015). Echoing Latour, it would seem that We Have Never Built Back Better.1 Why not? The argument will be made that these plans to improve life post-disaster inevitably detail a culture shorn of nature. These humanist fantasies of control over nature falsely assume that humans can impose their will on the world, bringing it into an order of their choosing. This is a supremely hubristic orientation given some of the non-human forces we confront. 269

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As historian Will Durant supposedly said: ‘Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice’ (quoted in Blum, 2010: para. 3). In the discussion that follows, we will counter these humanistic narratives with a morethan-human (MTH) approach drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to try to understand why we routinely fail to deliver what everyone wants.2 This avoids seeing humans as only ever among themselves, whether as a functional whole or in smaller subgroups. All MTH analysts compose a new materialist approach in which things other than humans also have relevant affect/agency and where humanity is never able to blueprint its destiny alone. Narratives of ‘becoming-with’ therefore replace older ones of ‘mastery over’. This general failure to BBB is explored through a specific case study: Ōtautahi Christchurch following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) (2010–2011), since, if no one builds back better, no one builds back better better than this city.3 For the claim is frequently made that Christchurch’s rebuild is the textbook case in how not to recover (Matthewman and Goode, 2020: 77). To give but two examples: Doug Ahlers, an international recovery expert, castigated the government’s command-and-control recovery model for exemplifying ‘global worst practice’ (quoted in Macfie, 2016). Colleagues reported that a keynote speaker at the Association of Pacific Rim Universities’ Multi-Hazards Symposium in Mexico (2019) declared Christchurch the city to have spent the most money on disaster recovery, for the least results, over the longest time. For context, this recovery was a necessary response to the CES which started on 4 ­September 2010. The CES consisted of four main earthquakes and thousands of aftershocks. The initial event was a 7.0 magnitude quake at Darfield, 40 kilometres west of Christchurch. A second 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck on 22 February 2011, this time just to the city’s east. The quakes’ created New Zealand’s costliest disaster. The Reserve Bank estimated property insurance claims of NZD$38 billion [USD$24.5 billion at the time of writing] (Cole, 2021: 2). The earthquakes killed 185 people and injured 7,000. More than 8,000 households were displaced due to land damage. Over 1,628,429 square metres of roading required repair or replacement, while 659 kilometres of sewer pipes and 69 kilometres of water mains were also impacted (Greater Christchurch Partnership, 2015: 10–11). The majority of the Central Business District, some 80%, was destroyed or needed to be subsequently demolished. Consequently, the country’s oldest city is also now its newest. We begin by discussing social studies of disasters. As will be shown, they identify a (limited) range of reasons why we fail to BBB. We then introduce MTH studies drawn from STS. These breach the problematic ‘Great Divide’ that Latour identified. In so doing, they expand disaster studies’ explanatory repertoire and offer a number of theoretical, practical and political challenges to social science as traditionally constituted. Building on this, our final section draws attention to two topics that typically fall beyond the domain of disaster studies, but which would usefully enhance it: ontological politics and temporal emergence.

Why Don’t We Build Back Better? Standard Social Science Explanations Standard disaster studies alert us to some of the challenges for BBB. An established body of scholarship suggests that: (i) Disasters magnify already existing inequalities. In the case at hand, the city’s poor, for example, were more likely to live in environmentally hazardous locations and be less likely to have insurance. (ii) Disasters give rise to ‘emergency politics’, where top-down forms of sovereignty are centralised and consolidated. Some of the earthquake legislation enacted to deal with the CES was draconian and unprecedented in the local 270

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context. (iii) Authorities are confronted by a ‘recovery dilemma’, which pits speed against deliberation. People want to return to ‘normal’ as soon as possible, but better outcomes are achieved through deliberation, which takes time. (iv) While difficult to secure, consensus, when achieved, is the easy part. Implementation is the most challenging. (v) Megaprojects will over-promise and under-deliver. Cost blowouts and delays are normal. In Ōtautahi Christchurch, it is also interesting to see how metrics for BBB have shifted across time. Big builds like the sports stadium and conference centre were justified on grounds of patronage and profit. Across time, the strict business cases have diminished, and different, noneconomic criteria, like amenity value and the ability to give joy have been foregrounded. (vi) What gets build back first is an indicator of power. Locally, one needs to only compare the speed at which the central city art gallery was restored versus schools and sports fields in poorer suburbs. (vii) Physical infrastructure is routinely privileged over social infrastructure, in terms of funding and recovery priorities, even though evidence suggests that the latter is more important for recovery (Klinenberg, 2018). As Ryan Reynolds (2018) of Gap Filler, a creative urban placemaking enterprise that formed in the city after the quakes, told us: And that’s pretty much my experience everywhere is no-one thinks twice about dropping seven figures on paving stones, but five figures on some social infrastructures, even when it does take a physical form like some play equipment or whatever, the budget’s just not there for it. But each disaster has specific features which generic literatures, including those devoted to BBB, resilience and recovery, can fail to capture (Cheek and Chmutina, 2022). In Ōtautahi Christchurch, there are several unique challenges. First, the city is struggling because it is not dealing with a disaster, but with multiple concatenating disasters. There have been tens of thousands of earthquakes. It has also had to contend with devastating flooding (2014, 2019, 2021, 2022)4 and rural-urban interface wildfires in the Port Hills (2017). And now, it is the site of the country’s worst modern terrorist attacks, the shootings at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre which killed 51 people (2019). Ongoing disasters include significant ground and freshwater pollution (linked to the region’s intensive dairy farming), and the COVID-19 pandemic is causing huge difficulties for a city that considers itself the gateway to the South Island. Second, over 600 hectares of land was red zoned. This refers to areas in, and around, the city that were deemed too impractical to rebuild on because repair would take too long, be uneconomic or at risk from further events (like flooding). The Crown acquired over 8,000 properties, the majority of them along the course of Avon-Ōtākaro River. This is the first time that Land Information New Zealand has had to remove streets from the map, and it is arguably the greatest area of managed retreat in an urban setting anywhere in the world. Third, while there are high levels of insurance in New Zealand, the coverage for earthquakes is provided by a mixture of state and private insurance for residential properties, the former via the Earthquake Commission (EQC). This led to what commentators have called ‘the most complicated insurance settlement program experienced anywhere’ (King et al., 2014: 475), which, in turn, led to significant delays and stress for many households. Fourth, there is an obvious structural problem which prevents local authorities from leading their own recovery: they simply lack the resources to do so. Most council income is derived from tax on property. Central government monopolises public expenditure to an extent almost unseen in other OECD countries (Local Government New Zealand, 2019). 271

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While those working in the field of disaster studies have an explanatory repertoire to deal with their subject matter, as detailed, there remains great dissatisfaction with the state of the art. Historically bankrolled by the world’s largest military, disaster scholarship is fragmented by the fetishisation of case studies. It remains fixated on methods, it is in the thrall of a select number of masters and it still shows obeisance to a handful of metropolitan intellectual centres, while languishing in a state of theoretical stagnation (Tierney, 2007). We now introduce STS as a potential way of overcoming some of these perceived problems.

How Might STS Augment Disaster Studies? Terry Austrin and John Farnsworth (2012) offer guidance. They provided an STS reading of the CES, written two years after its commencement, when everything still seemed unstable: circumstances, experiences, livelihoods, living arrangements, the ground itself. Their focus was on mediated representations of the quakes: the distribution of disaster images and narratives through documentary film, blogs and social media. At the time, attention was pivoting from strict recovery efforts towards considerations of the city’s new configurations (and whose interests they would serve). Theirs is an important addition to the STS literature as most of this scholarship deals with relatively stable urban domains undergoing incremental change rather than those experiencing disastrous rupture. When you consider the latter, ‘it opens up significant questions about what we mean by a city in the process of having to rebuild it’ (Austrin and Farnsworth, 2012: 81). Helpfully for our purposes, Austrin and Farnsworth also note the radical implications of STS work. An MTH approach provides us with a new framework which gives us a fuller understanding of the barriers to BBB. As such, it offers theoretical, practical and political challenges to mainstream disaster studies. Theoretically: STS signals a shift from Durkheim’s (1974) sui generis conception of society as a totalising, coherent whole towards Tarde’s (2013) notion of society as a collective composed of contingent connections. This is useful as it helps illuminate the disputes that have arisen around the city’s rebuild. There is no such thing as Christchurch society; rather, there are different individuals, groups, communities, commercial organisations and official authorities (council, governmental and iwi [Māori nation]) with cross-cutting memberships and contesting notions of how the city should be recomposed. Numerous visions for the new city were articulated, including a smart city (which would embed sensor technology into new buildings and infrastructures to monitor such things as air quality and seismic activity); a sporting city (which would reflect the region’s successes, especially in rugby and water sports); a magnet city (which would attract wealth creators and disruptors); a future-proof city (which would be compact, liveable and sustainable) and a post-colonial city (which would acknowledge Indigenous people, enact co-governance initiatives and recognise its place in the world) (Matthewman and Goode, 2020: 79–81). Practically: STS moves us beyond the omnipotent gaze of an all-knowing authority towards considerations of various actor-networks mobilising for their own benefit within their particular domains. Network is the preferred term as it is ‘[m]ore supple than the notion of system, more historical than the notion of structure, more empirical than the notion of complexity’ (Latour, 1993: 3). For STS scholars, things are only as robust as the networks that sustain them. If networks fail to establish or cohere, enterprises fail. This helps us to understand what happened to Christchurch’s district energy scheme (DES) which was to deliver efficient energy, heating and cooling via the burning of 272

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renewable waste materials and biomass. However, after more than five years and millions of dollars spent, what had been touted as the city’s ‘perfect green dream’ (Stuff, 2016: n.p.) was ultimately dismissed as ‘a total failure’ (McDonald, 2016: n.p.). This case illuminates the difficulties involved in aligning multiple actors working with different interests, funding regimes and timeframes. It was not possible to align all the actors’ competing interests in ways that made for a collective workable solution (for example, public institutions like hospitals with private corporations). It quickly became apparent that the only potential market for the DES would be commercial energy consumers, and the real benefits seemed to accrue to property developers. But the failure of the DES is also an MTH story. It shows the problems involved in transferring socio-technical regimes to new regions that are vulnerable to volatile fuel supply and earthquake activity, where there is no local expertise in managing them, and no established market for the biofuel required to run it, as markets, too, must be constructed and performed (Callon, 1998). The DES should have been rejected on the grounds of technology assessment. It was unsuitable in terms of the seismically active ground (the pipes were too brittle), the climate (a baroque cooling component was not required) and the built environment (which had poor energy efficiency and insulation standards). But the network punctured before a fully functioning DES could even get up and running (Matthewman and Byrd, 2020: 181–182). Politically: STS scholars make the point that various publics resist official power and expertise to advance their own interests and goals. While those seeking to impose their own vision of the world onto others may use all manner of strategies to do so, enrolment into dominant programmes of action is not guaranteed. Indeed, the government’s blueprint for the city, the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, was deeply unpopular with locals. The overwhelming majority of those surveyed, some three-quarters of the population, said that national recovery priorities went against their wishes (Allright.org, 2014). And elites have not had it all their own way... The Quake Outcasts succeeded in a judicial review of decisions made by the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery and the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA). The Minister and CERA were faulted for not following the specific statutory regime that they operated under, specifically their decision to discriminate against the uninsured. They offered to purchase uninsured residential properties as well as vacant land in the residential red zone for only 50% of their 2007 rateable value. The Court of Appeal’s found in favour of the Quake Outcasts’ awarding them an increased figure of 80% of their rateable value and a sum ‘to account for the court’s decision and extra uncertainties and costs’ (Truebridge and Small, 2017: para. 4). In another case, the Chief Ombudsman ruled that Regenerate Christchurch (a Crown and Council rebuild agency) did not act unlawfully in declining to include a rowing lake in the Avon-Ōtākaro River Regeneration Area Plan (Office of the Ombudsman, 2019). The East Lakes Trust – who were widely seen as a front for city elites looking to impose their preferred leisure activities on the area – were rebuffed. And if government wishes had prevailed, the earthquake-damaged Town Hall would have been demolished and a replacement constructed in their proposed new cultural precinct. The city’s premier performing arts centre was built by public subscription. It is both a monument to mid-century brutalism and an acoustically acclaimed performance hall with few international rivals. Council responded to the groundswell of local support, voting to repair it at great cost rather than settle for a new centre elsewhere. The ‘victory of local 273

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democracy over central government preference’ saved the main auditorium which has been described as ‘one of the best rooms in New Zealand’ (Walsh quoted in Pawson, 2020: 323).

Further Challenges to Building Back Better: Ontological Politics and Temporal Emergence Austrin and Farnsworth’s (2012) list can be usefully supplemented. STS also notes the significance of ontological politics and temporal emergence. Awareness of both helps explain why BBB is so challenging. Ontologically: STS moves beyond the standard social science notion that our proper domain should be restricted to examination of the purely social relation, unequipped personto-person encounters. As Andrew Pickering (2013: para. 3) put it: ‘The natural sciences themselves tell us stories about how the material world is; the social sciences do the same for the human world; but neither of them talk about performative struggles between the two’. Yet, building back better means repairing infrastructural failure and building collapse as well as damage to the social fabric. In addition to rebuilding physical structures, we must also rebuild lives, neighbourhoods, affective communities, social relations, occupations and aspirations.5 STS work is helpful as it rejects such ontological purification. It simultaneously studies the social and the material, using the same approach to do so. This is important as it admits non-human agencies, meaning that STS does something that standard disaster studies do not: see the work of buildings (Gieryn, 2002), forces of nature (Clark, 2011) and other agents that constitute the MTH city (Franklin, 2017) in all of their interactive complexity. To give a simple example here, if we used aesthetics for a metric, we might say that the copper roofs seen on many of the Central Business District’s new buildings look much better than what went before. But buildings exist within wider networks, and if we connect architectural, atmospheric and hydrological systems, another story emerges. High copper concentrations are found in the Avon-Ōtākaro River following rain events. This is the runoff from copper cladding. It contaminates groundwater, damaging aquatic ecosystems. Smaller organisms, such as trout fry, are particularly vulnerable (Adrian, 2015). Other aspects of the rebuild have proved more favourable to non-human life. The opening of the new riverside walkway in the central city’s Avon Loop attracted more than people. The waterway, open grass spaces, wide paths and lack of riverside planting were also inviting to Canada Geese. Walkers complained that the paths were littered with their droppings, prompting the local media headline: ‘Pedestrians left goose stepping on $2 million “poop loop”’ (McDonald, 2020). What should have been a successful development was instead seen as a failure by local people because this non-human presence was not anticipated. In a piece for television, Federated Farmers spokesperson Simon Williamson called Canada Geese ‘the rabbits of the sky’, while a council worker claimed that they can each produce a kilogram of waste per day, often laced with E. coli, influenza and Campylobacter. Given their numbers and their impacts, Williamson (2022) predicts that ‘it’s going to be a national disaster ecologically what they’re doing to the waterways’. The regional council, Environment Canterbury (2018: 90), considers them an ‘organism of interest’, although there are less loved creatures locally. Bennett’s Wallabies (Macropus rufogriseus rufogriseus), feral goats (Capra hircus), rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus), koi carp (Cyprinus carpio), possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) and rooks (Corvus frugilegus) are all declared pests. The non-humans who turned up in one of ‘Philip Carter’s swimming pools’, as the town’s developers like to call them, were a bit more welcome. Named after the flooded concrete 274

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basements of two now demolished high rises Carter owns, these ruins are reminders of the quakes that so impacted the city. One, which used to be the PWC tower on Armagh Street, became a nesting site for the world’s rarest gull, the black billed gull, or tarapuka, which is only found in New Zealand. The water, concrete pillars and protective fencing attracted 300 birds and made for an ideal, though hitherto unimaginable, inner city nesting site (1News, 2019). Despite bringing some joy to the city, the site was completely netted to prevent their return the following breeding season. A final contribution from STS concerns ontological politics. This is the notion that reality is produced rather than received, that is both performed and manifold. This means that even apparently fixed and stable objects may be more fluid and multiple than is commonly supposed, that even a simple object might have numerous versions (Mol, 1999: 74, 77). We can illustrate this seemingly complex point with a simple example. In 2017, government-rebuilt entity Ōtākaro sought submissions for a new pedestrian bridge over the Avon-Ōtākaro River. Hoping that entries would reflect the river’s own story – its curves, its ecologies, its fluid connections with people and place – it envisaged an architectural statement, an art bridge. A submission by graduate students in fine arts and engineering from the city’s university looked to have captured the brief, a design reminiscent of a hīnaki [Māori eel trap], or perhaps a taniwha [supernatural creature] in repose. Ōtākaro rejected it on grounds of cost. The project was quietly shelved, until media picked the story up (Matthews, 2018). Bridge-building was then put back on the agenda. The comments section below Matthews’ online article, now deleted, revealed numerous realities in play. Some were in awe of the architectural model they saw, but one of the first comments stated: ‘It looks like a giant turd’. What is our metric for measuring better here? Are we to prioritise looks (aesthetics), safety (performance), optimal passage (functionality) or some combination thereof? In quick succession, commenters debated process: Who was consulted? Who made the decision? On what basis? They debated need: Is it in the right place? Is the cost justifiable? Who will pay for it? They debated the bridge’s form: Is it a bridge that accurately reflects Indigenous design principles? Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is it constructed of appropriate materials? They debated its function: Is it positioned in the best place? Some even refused to interpret it as a bridge, stating that in practice it would work better as a pier, a litter bin, a homeless receptacle, or even a folly (since it would connect two riverbanks at a point that pedestrians would find useless). As media subsequently reported, the ‘opportunity to “create one of the most iconic and spectacular pieces of art that just happens to be useful as a bridge”’ (Kerr quoted in Gates, 2019) was not seized. Instead, ‘[a] straight boring bridge’ was built (Drummond quoted in Gates, 2019). Rather than producing an artefact that could only have been constructed here, a generic concrete slab with handrails ultimately crossed the river. Council justified this on the grounds of cost and ease of maintenance. It began to rust shortly before it opened (Gates, 2021). Temporally: MTH language privileges verbs over nouns. Partly, this is because reality is performed. Instead of thinking about states, there is a preference for processes, discursive practices and temporal emergence. While we may try to anticipate actions and reactions in advance, they can never be truly known a priori. Agency emerges in practice and in specific times. Moreover, these ‘dances of agency’ as Andrew Pickering (2013: para. 5) calls them, ‘do not centre on or privilege the human. We are agents, but so are rocks and stones’. This takes us to a consideration seldom, if ever, made in the BBB literature, the ways in which built form acts in our world. 275

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STS scholars define politics as the building of collective worlds (Latour, 2005: 74–75, 161). These worlds combine people, technologies and natures. Once constructed, they are difficult to undo (Callon, 1991: 136). There is an entire literature on path dependency which notes the material constraints imposed by past decisions. Langdon Winner (1980) argues that technologies – buildings and infrastructures included – are ways of structuring the world, of settling disputes and creating order. Issues are resolved in the realm of politics proper, which is to say debates and ideas, and materially ‘in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts’ (Winner, 1980: 128). Similarly, Thomas Gieryn (2002: 35) notes how buildings anchor social life. They give form to social institutions, they help make social networks resilient and they provide defence against time and change. Once constructed, buildings channel social action in three ways. First, people are obligated to use them in order to function in the world. Second, they prevent alternatives, even though the politics of building construction and their subsequent existence are obscure to us. ‘Once completed, buildings hide the many possibilities that did not get built, as they bury the interests, politics, and power that shaped the one design that did’ (Gieryn, 2002: 38–39). Third, they work against change as the costs of altering or transforming them are often too great. This means that we should see socio-technical arrangements like buildings as ‘struggles with the residues of time’ (Sareen et al., 2021: 2). Here, we could look to the city’s new convention centre, Te Pae. Few people in the city see a pressing need for it. Locals frequently refer to it as a white elephant. There is no obvious business case for it. The old convention centre was significantly smaller, and it could never realise a profit. Te Pae’s scale is arresting. It has an auditorium that can seat 1,400, a banquet room that can cater to 1,000 and 24 meeting rooms that can host anywhere between 50 and 1,500 people. It cuts across Gloucester Street, blocking views and access. Some liken it to a Berlin Wall. Others see it as a powerful statement about who the central city is really for. As one local planner quipped: ‘It will be full of dentists from Nebraska and Alabama one day’ (Lunday quoted in Smythe, 2016). Yet, the building is also open to other important interpretations. Given their resourcing, megaprojects are also powerful statements about social futures. Christchurch was roundly regarded as one of the most quintessentially English settlements in the colonial project (Pickles, 2016: 9). The principal Māori iwi [tribe] of the South Island, Ngāi Tahu, made history after the earthquakes, being in a ‘globally unique’ position as the first Indigenous group to be an official partner to recovery following major disaster (Keene, 2013: para. 2). Having formally settled their grievances with the Crown over two decades prior, established their corporate governance structures, invested heavily in their own youth and been on track to become a billion-dollar entity, Ngāi Tahu were well placed to indigenise the Garden City. The Indigenous Urbanism podcast noted that the earthquakes provided ‘a chance to build, more or less from scratch, a post-colonial city, inclusive of everyone; and with a strong recognition of the mana whenua [people with customary authority] of local hapū [subtribe], Ngāi Tūāhuriri’ (Kake, 2018: n.p.). Te Pae is no conventional convention centre. The design brief has been overseen by Ngāi Tūāhuriri through The Matapopore Charitable Trust (Abdel, 2022). The centre’s name is taken from Te Reo Māori [the Māori language], and it gestures towards three phrases: Te Pae Maunga [our mountain views], Te Pae Whenua [the plains we inhabit] and Te Pae Tangata [a place to meet and speak]. Its external appearance mimics the braided rivers that are unique to the region. Close to half a million individually placed panels form its external façade. The building’s design takes on patterns and colours that are part of Ngāi Tahu’s 276

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traditions, including their creation story of Kā Tiritiri o te Moana [the Southern Alps]. Te Pae has a white Ngutu [ceremonial entranceway] called Te Aika [the home people, Ngāi Tahu’s version of Te ahi kā – the home fires burning], and features artwork like Lonnie Hutchinson’s Hana [to illuminate], which is three koru- [folded fern frond, spiral motif] shaped light installations. Aroha Reriti-Crofts, a kaumātua [a tribal elder], said of the building in a 16 January 2020 Matapopore Facebook post: It is absolutely unique. My ancestors had no say in the planning of the city and now our stories are out there in the community and out there in the world. And our natural environment, and what our ancestors had back in the day is coming back and is being acknowledged and recognised. Colonisation was an MTH process. The Canterbury Acclimatisation Society populated the local landscape with the flora and fauna of home, importing clover, grass seeds, deer, game birds, hedgehogs, rabbits and trout, propagating trees like ash, hawthorn, elm, oak and sycamore (Pawson, 2000: 62–63). Decolonisation is also an MTH process. Native planting skirts Te Pae. Indeed, since the CES commenced, over 95,000 new plants have been added to the CBD, and 1,000 trees, including kōkiki, kowhai, maratata, mauku and raupō.

Conclusions In this chapter, we have sought to explain why We Have Never Built Back Better: those looking to enhance post-disaster conditions typically fail to give due consideration to all of the actors that compose worlds. We have used an MTH approach to move beyond standard social science explanations as agency is not a uniquely human quality. Other things and forms of life also have effects. Indeed, a host of non-human others are necessarily also ‘incorporated into the life, subjectivities and structures of modern cities… where such things are so promiscuously exchanged, messed up and interpenetrated and with such momentous impact’ (Franklin, 2017: 202–203). Not that all agents act equally: ‘the impression that deep seated forces of the earth can leave on social worlds’, for example, ‘is out of all proportion to the power of social actors to legislate over the lithosphere’ (Clark, 2011: xvi). In terms of the Christchurch rebuild, the most ‘momentous impact’ was caused by the earthquakes themselves. As Ivan Iafeta (2019), head of Regenerate Christchurch, told us: ‘Essentially, I have heard the experience that Christchurch went through in 2010 described as 50 to 100 years of climate change impact accelerated within 40 seconds; so within 40 seconds, the land stretched and moved sideways, and subsided’. This means that the quakes have undermined the project to BBB in profound senses, confounding the hope for a compact, walkable, sustainable city. Red zoning of swathes of the city’s east pushed populations into satellite towns, entrenching urban sprawl and car dependence, and the quakes have made the place more susceptible to river flooding and sea-level rise. It therefore behoves us to pay attention to the natures ‘that both make … and undermine’ the city (Franklin, 2017: 205). Reminder: there is no nature and culture, only ‘nature-culture’ (Latour, 1993: 7, 11).6 Recovery blueprints belie a false politics of mastery, the erroneous belief that only humans count (and usually only those in official positions), and that all other things can be controlled or ignored. In this sense, they operate as fantasy documents, which is to say, tools ‘of persuasion designed to create the impression of expertise for certain audiences’ 277

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(Clarke, 1999: 137). This is based on the erroneous assumption that reality is stable, universal, given. And it leads to the equally flawed notion that one can proceed unproblematically from city blueprint to execution without encountering a host of unruly agents that may potentially undo such plans. Recoveries cannot be legislated by bureaucratic fiat; they must be achieved in practice, but BBB documents are fixed, and frequently vague, blueprints. These plans tend to gloss significant social schisms, do not take into account the full range of agents (including nonhuman others) that constitute the scene and fail to accommodate temporal emergence (including groups opposed to said plans). Another issue with such presentism is that they do not appreciate the temporality of failure. The Christchurch rebuild is also trying to fix trends that existed long before the quakes: the city’s car dependence (which is the nation’s highest), what to do with – or for – the suburb of New Brighton, and how to rectify the declining CBD (as a place to both live and work). Architect Ian Athfield (2011) argues that car dependency was locked into the city by traffic engineers and transport consultants half a century ago. Others have argued that New Brighton’s raison d’être was removed with the legalisation of Saturday trading 40 years ago, while historian Katie Pickles (2016: 132) has noted that Christchurch had already taken on the form of a doughnut city years prior to the quakes, its centre shorn of useful functions and permanent inhabitants. Instead of being a vibrant living city, within the four avenues that define central Christchurch, it operated more as ‘a colonial theme park’ for visiting tourists. We could go all the way back to the city’s foundation in 1848 (which was a catastrophe for Māori who were displaced to make way for it). Built on a drained swamp, on a flood plain, positioned at sea level, next to a capricious river and close to the boundary of two of the planet’s great tectonic plates, the Pacific and Indo-Australian, it was a disaster waiting to happen.7 Practically, what STS implies, is the requirement for ‘[c]onstant monitoring of worldly performance’ (Pickering, 2013: para. 28) to see if outcomes match intentions, and to revise beliefs and practices accordingly. ‘Seeing the world as performative has important implications for an ontological politics: it means that it can and indeed should be shaped by everyone and that knowledge about the world is contingent and not the prerogative of experts’ (Müller, 2015: 31). What STS teaches those making plans to BBB, then, is that they require more openness (to the range of actors involved), more time (to consider the dances of agencies between actors, and to understand both the temporalities of failure, and success, as regeneration can take decades), and more humility (for you are less powerful than you think).

Notes 1 Glenn Fernandez and Iftekhar Ahmed’s (2019: 3) survey of 372 publications of relevant literature across thirteen years concludes: ‘The promise to not re-create or exacerbate pre-disaster vulnerabilities has generally been unfulfilled. Although the BBB narrative talks about the improvement of communities, translating this narrative into practice is rarely observed’. 2 These are interdisciplinary approaches that first emerged to explain the construction of scientific knowledge and technological artefacts, but whose insights have been subsequently applied to numerous domains since (for a comprehensive overview, see Felt et al., 2017). Pickering, in this volume, describes STS as ‘a decentred perspective in which humanity and the material world appear as symmetrically intertwined, with neither constituting a controlling centre’. 3 This chapter draws on research made possible by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund (22-UOA-018). 4 The first major quake caused subsidence to 75% of the central and eastern parts of the city. The 22 February 2011 earthquake saw over 80% of those areas subside further. With floodplains lowered

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We Have Never Built Back Better by up to a metre beside the tidal stretches of the city’s principal rivers, the prospects for worse and more extensive inundation were increased. Groundwater is closer to the surface. Shaking reduced river channels, while liquefaction, lateral spreading and sedimentation have compounded flooding risk (Hughes et al., 2015). 5 As is often implicitly the case with the term resilience in the disaster literature, the idea of BBB implies improvement as well as repair and recovery. An STS approach might also advocate a notion of cosmopolitics that brings about ‘a good common world’ (Stengers, 2005: 995) from among – and for – a city’s heterogenous elements. Here, the test for authorities would be the extent to which they work with local entities of all kinds or at least convert them into ‘a cause for thinking’ (Stengers, 2005: 1002). The cosmopolitical proposal eschews blueprints and grand plans (Stengers, 2005: 996), meaning that political actors should also shed their (deluded) notions of expertise and mastery in order to embrace complexity and indeterminacy. 6 The Ōtākaro Avon River which runs through the central city is a case in point here. A tourist signifier that adorns biscuit tins and brochures, what appears as a natural river is also assuredly an artefact of culture. Constrained by stopbanks in an attempt to fix its course and regulate its flow, today’s Avon ‘is much different to what it looked like when Europeans first arrived here’, as Joseph Hullen (Ngāi Tūāhuriri, Ngāi Tahu) told a documentary filmmaker. ‘It’s been turned into what I consider is an iconic, but uniform width and uniform depth, drain’ (quoted in Smythe, 2017). 7 Latour’s (2010: 485–487) arguments regarding the Moderns’ temporal orientation – that rather than looking to the future they are fleeing the catastrophes that their past ‘development’ has ­created – make for interesting reading at this juncture.

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17 THE MORE-THANHUMAN HOME Emma Power

Introduction Home, in the Western imagination, is a human place. It is a place of meaning for people and in its ideal form, a place of belonging, security and comfort that reflects social meanings and values and the identities of those who live and belong within it (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Yet, these human-centred understandings of home have been thoroughly upended, not only by the more-than-human turn in the social sciences, but also, increasingly, by the growing incidence of extreme weather and other environmental stressors, as the effects of climate change are felt across the globe. How home is imagined and made in this context is a growing focus of attention for social researchers. This chapter sets out the key ways that more-than-human thinking informs understandings of home. It focuses on the houseas-home, but also recognises home as a place and set of feelings that exist in diverse places and across scale, including from the neighbourhood to the nation. The chapter opens with a brief introduction to home. It sets out an understanding of home as a place that has material and imaginative dimensions, and is made through homemaking practices. A primary way that home has been understood in the Western imagination is as a human place that is made by and for people and that excludes nature and wildness. The chapter connects this dualistic understanding of home with broader cultures of how nature and culture are conceptualised in Western thought. The chapter then moves to the early 2000s and a series of conceptual developments that began to re-write the story of home, informing emergent understandings of home as more-than-human. A growing interest in nature-culture dualisms in the social sciences led to research that identified connections between home and ‘nature’. This work established that home is materially connected to and dependent on ‘natural’ processes such as water cycles and energy production. A second body of work grew from the burgeoning fields of human-animal studies and animal geographies. This work further dismantled the human-focus of existing research through showing how home is also traversed by diverse nonhuman animals (including invited and uninvited companion species) who are active within homemaking, interacting with human residents and coproducing home in lively ways. Work focusing on companion DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-19 282

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animals, or pets, within home, has been especially productive (Franklin, 2006b; Power, 2008; Smith, 2003). It has opened up new ways of understanding both home and the nature of familial relations within home. It has also explored how pets shape housing opportunities and pathways. A third body of work drawing from assemblage thinking and allied areas – ­including ­Science and Technology Studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT) – materialised home and homemaking in more expansive ways. Research by scholars, including Gillon and Gibbs (2019) and Jacobs et al. (2007, 2008), established home as a space that is shaped through agencies that are more-than-human and that include those of the house itself. It established home as a lively place, attending to how housing materialities shape the temporalities of home, the necessity of maintenance and experience of decay and how families, households and communities relate within home. More than a setting or stage for human action, home emerges as a lively place that can never be reduced to the energies of humans alone. This chapter concludes with a reflection on the state of contemporary homemaking in a period of growing global environmental crisis. As environmental extremes shape new trajectories for human life and survival, it reflects on the challenges emerging for those seeking to make and dwell within home.

Conceptualising Home Home is a place and idea that has both material and imaginative dimensions (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). It is imagined as a place of belonging that offers comfort and security to its residents and is made through processes of belonging and exclusion that seek to separate home from undesirable and ‘unhomey’ spaces. This is an ongoing, relational process where, as Blunt and Dowling (2006: 22) remind us, ‘the material form of home is dependent on what home is imagined to be, and imaginaries of home are influenced by the physical forms of dwelling’. A dominant way that home is conceptualised in Western traditions is as a place that is made by and for people. Home can exist in diverse places and at multiple scales, including at the scale of the house and nation (Blunt and Dowling, 2006), but home as a human achievement is a common thread that runs through understandings of home. This view is also part of how homemaking practices have been understood within the popular imagination and in research, with people imagined to make home out of a passive and malleable ‘natural’ environment and control what goes in and out of the home place. The idea that homemaking is a human process has been part of academic and popular conceptualisations across multiple scales. At the scale of the house, ‘home’ is conceptualised as a human achievement that is the domain of people and domesticated species (Kaika, 2004). In this view, companion animals, or ‘pets’, and the material that the house is constructed from appear as domesticated objects that reflect human cultural ideals and homemaking practices. Home emerges as a simple reflection of human identity and culture. The material form and technologies employed in housing ground this separation, the house itself acting as a form of shelter from the outside. Invisible networks that supply water and electricity to the house-as-home consolidate this sense by facilitating a view of home as independent of environmental rhythms and constraints (Hinchliffe, 1997; Kaika, 2004). For example, electric lighting allows the house-as-home to operate separately from diurnal rhythms of daylight and darkness (Adam, 2004) while networks of dams, pipes and pumps cleanse

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water and bring it into the domestic home for cooking and cleaning. At the same time, technologies like heating and air conditioning regulate the internal environment, separating home from less predictable environments outside (Healy, 2008; Shove, 2003a; Chappels and Shove 2005). The idea that home is a human place is also reproduced in everyday homemaking activities like cleaning (Douglas, 1966; Ger and Yenicioglu, 2004). These processes are paralleled at an urban scale. Productive livestock animals have been largely regulated out of urban and suburban landscapes by policies that exclude them from urban space (Gaynor, 1999; Philo, 1998), while ‘wild’ species are excluded through practices that make urban environments uninhabitable for them and when they are seen in cities, they are often recorded as being out of place (Griffiths et al., 2000; Palmer, 2003; Waley, 2000). Understandings of homemaking as a human activity and the house-as-home as a ‘human’ place that controls and excludes nature and wildness are part of the broader way that nature and culture are conceptualised in Western thought. Nature-culture dualisms divide the world in two, with nonhumans positioned as a passive ‘other’ to human culture and activity. This view has been historically important in constructing nature, including nonhuman animals, ‘as a set of passive objects to be used and worked on by people’ (Macnaghten and Urry, 1995: 206). These ideas are central to the extractivist, exploitative logics of colonial expansion and capitalist development. Humans, however, are viewed as having crossed an evolutionary threshold through the development of sentience, sapience and linguistic ability. These capacities situate human activity as the product of a ‘disembodied intellect’ that independently designs and shapes the world without input from the nonhuman world (Ingold, 1995, 2000). Simply put, humans appear as active agents who are the ‘authors of their own designs’ (Ingold, 2000: 175). Viewed from this perspective, the house-as-home, urban environments, companion animals and any other spaces or entities that humans have touched appear as human achievements and simple reflections of human culture (and see, for instance, Tuan, 1984 on the relations of domestication).

Home and the Connection with ‘Nature’ Despite the cultural dominance of ideas that home is a human place, such perspectives fail to account for the presence or agency of nonhuman entities that inhabit, move through and materially structure home as it is made at multiple scales. From the early 2000s, such perspectives began to be unpacked. Early work began to establish that despite the houseas-home’s appearance as a human place, it is connected to ‘natural’ processes and spaces that are fundamental to the house-as-home and that foster its appearance as a safe, secure and comfortable space. Kaika (2004: 266), for instance, uses water as a vehicle to demonstrate this reliance and connectivity, explaining that ‘although natural […] processes remain invisible and are scripted as “the other” to the modern home, they are in fact the precondition for the home’s very existence and remain always part and parcel of its inside’. Her work shows how the material and discursive construction of ‘good water (clean, processed, controlled, commodified) and bad water (dirty, grey, metabolized, non-processed, non-commodified)’ (Kaika, 2004: 267–268) sustains this connection. Rather than conceptualising home as a place that only excludes nature, Kaika (2004: 274) identifies the ‘selective porosity’ of the modern home, in which ‘natural elements … are selectively allowed to enter after having undergone significant material and social transformations, through being produced, purified and commodified’.

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Natural processes and elements are also obscured through dominant practices of housing design that ensure that natural elements are both: Visually excluded from the sphere of everyday domestic life, yet […] are organised in such a way that allows the inside to function supposedly ‘autonomously’. (Kaika, 2004: 275) Water and energy networks are built within the structures of housing, obscured in subfloors and within walls and ceiling cavities in ways that remove them from everyday attention. The invisibility of these networks sustains the familiarity of home. However, as this chapter explores in more detail later, the materialities of housing are never simply domesticated or subject to human control. Rather, they flux and change, including via processes of weathering and decay as well as in moments of crisis, such as climate change. Kaika’s (2004) work was especially significant in identifying how the dual dependence and exclusion of natural processes lay the conditions for the undoing of home in these moments. In crisis, such as periods of drought, when pipes leak or during electrical blackouts ‘hidden elements can surface unexpectedly, and familiar objects can behave in unusual ways’ (Kaika, 2004: 276), revealing the dependence of the house-as-home on elements and materials that were formerly conceptually and materially invisible. Kaika (2004: 276) draws on Vidler (1992: 4) to capture how these ruptures in home give rise to feelings of unhomeliness, of ‘not being at home in one’s own home’. In short, although home is widely understood within Western thinking as a human place, research from the 2000s made it increasingly clear that this was an active construction that is part of how the house is made as home. Recognition of connections between the houseas-home and ‘nature’ was a key initial step in understanding the conditions and foundations of contemporary homemaking and moving towards a more-than-human conceptualisation of home.

Animal Agency and Homemaking In the early 2000s, another body of research further destabilised human conceptualisations of home by uncovering the place of nonhuman animals within home. Emerging from human-animal studies, this work recognised animals (including companion animals and pests) as bringing a lively nonhuman agency into the home. Early work explored urban and suburban landscapes as places inhabited and traversed by diverse ‘wild’ animals, challenging dominant designations of these as human places that are unnatural and uninhabitable for undomesticated species (Emel and Wolch, 1998; Gullo et al., 1998; Wolch, 2002). Research showed that in many cases, ‘wild’ animals gain benefits from these environments, such as the ready availability of food and lack of predators (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006; Thomson, 2007; Whatmore and Hinchliffe, 2003). Research also showed that many animals adapt to the distinct patterns of urban space and alter their living practices to respond to this unique environment. For example, urban badgers live in ways that are distinct from those displayed by their kin in more traditional ‘wild’ settings (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006). Such research established that boundaries between human and wild spaces are never completely stable or clear-cut, but can be blurred

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and challenged by the presence and practices of diverse animals. This was a first step in recognising how places of ‘home’ are never only for people. The domestic home also became a focus of research and Franklin (2006b) was central in turning attention to the place of companion animals in this space. His work charted the growing importance of companion animals within conceptualisations of family, showing how growing familial connections with animals were paralleled by their incorporation into the home itself. While in the 1950s pets are largely believed to have been kept outside, by the time of Franklin’s (2006b) Australian research, respondents reported that pets were allowed into bedrooms (over 50% of households), including children’s bedrooms (35%), were allowed onto furniture (48% of households) and were allowed into the family or lounge room (76%), the main eating room (62%) and the kitchen (66%). In short, ‘companion animals had access to those parts of the house historically reserved for humans’ (Franklin, 2006b: 144). Once inside the home, companion animals contributed to opening up popular understandings of both home and family. My own research (Power, 2008), for example, explored how dogs have come to be recognised within expanded, more-thanhuman conceptualisations of family and home. Where earlier research on domestication suggested that domesticated species like cats and dogs were reflections of human culture (see Power, 2012), human-animal studies and animal geographies brought growing recognition of the independent agency of these animals and how that, in turn, shapes meanings and practices of home. Smith (2003) was amongst the first, sharing the author’s experiences cohabiting with rabbits and reconceptualising the power dynamics that inform human-companion animals’ relations in the home. Challenging accounts ‘that human affection for domestic animals is inseparable from dominance’ (Smith, 2003: 181; cf. Tuan, 1984), Smith describes her efforts to recognise the free agency of rabbits that she cohabits with, focusing on how these relations open new ways of living. While she seeks to control some aspects of home, for example, choosing furnishings that were ‘rabbit proof’ (such as furniture ‘made of metal, electrical cords were fastened behind furniture or covered in hard plastic or metal tubing, and protective wood strips were tacked onto wood baseboards and wood trim around closets and windows’), she also recounts a process of ‘becoming animal’, as she learns to cohabit with rabbit ways of living (Smith, 2003: 187). Observing how rabbits prefer to move along the perimeter of the room, Smith clears the walls. Anything that is moveable is placed in the centre of the room, ‘chang[ing] forever the way I live in my house’ (2003: 89). She accommodates to ‘rabbit ideas of space management’ even when they conflict with her own, valuing them ‘as indicators that rabbits were making themselves at home’ (Smith, 2003: 89). Related research focusing on animal abuse identifies the overflow of bodily smells and excrement and the undoing of home through instances of animal hoarding (see Holmberg, 2014). Companion animals also shape homemaking in more vernacular ways. Franklin (2006a: 154) points to how companion animals affect a range of homemaking practices, including ‘housing choice and design, furnishing and the internal configuration of space’. While in my work (Power, 2008), I have charted how dog-agency inflects family routines inside the home. For example, participants described how dogs challenged and disrupted human ideas of home, asserting their own needs and preferences into the routines of family life. For these participants, while dog discipline and training continued to be important, ‘relationships grew from everyday encounters and knowledge of the other’ (Power, 2008: 547). Frequently, this saw dogs and people negotiate new ways of interacting that reflected the interests and persistence of dogs and that were mutually enjoyed by people and their pets. 286

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In turn, these shaped patterns of domestic life. To date, much of this work has adopted a focus on people’s accounts of their interactions with their dogs. Franklin et al. (2007) propose a trans-species methodology that can inform future work in this space, bringing better recognition and engagement with species-specific communication practices. Growing connections between people and their pets have led to emerging challenges between pet ownership and housing opportunities. Pet-restrictive housing policy is widespread internationally, particularly in rental tenures and institutional contexts such as retirement villages and nursing homes (Stone et al., 2021). Close bonds between people and their pets can be challenged through pet-restrictive policies, with moving house and landlord restrictions emerging as key drivers of animal relinquishment (New et al., 1999; Shore et al., 2003). However, these close bonds can drive housing insecurity. My research focused on the Australian private rental sector, for instance, identifies renting as a pathway to housing insecurity for households that include pets (see Power, 2017). Similarly, at times of natural disaster, pet owners have been reported to risk insecure and unsafe shelter in order to keep pets safe when emergency shelters will not accommodate them (Graham and Rock, 2019). Lack of pet-inclusive housing is also a risk factor for women and children staying in situations of family violence in order to be with pets (Arkow, 2008; Jones, 2008). These are relations that have negative consequences for experiences of home. Homes are also inhabited by uninvited animals. Pests are widely understood as animals that are present in places where they are unwanted, or that cause nuisance or disturbance to people. Many creatures are defined as pests simply through being present in the ‘human’ home. Like many urban ‘wild’ animals, numerous pest species inhabit housing for benefits like shelter and food. While some live from human waste, including discarded food products, others, such as white ants, consume the house itself. The presence and benefits that pest species gain from domestic housing can be destabilising to both imaginaries of home (as a human place) and materialities of home (through the material destruction of housing) (Gregson, 2007; Power, 2007). However, these relationships can also be more complex. Power (2009a) points to an entwining of both homey and unhomey feelings experienced by Australian households living with uninvited native common brushtail possums in the ceiling and wall cavities of their house. While possums destabilised the house-as-home through unhomely sounds, smells and other property damage, their status as a charismatic native species also facilitated connections with national identity, underpinning feelings of home at a national scale.

The Lively House A third body of research materialised home in even more expansive ways. While it was perhaps easy to recognise the agency and presence of nonhuman animal species within home, the lively agency of housing itself took longer to surface. This is a product of Western ontologies that see the nonhuman world as passive and lacking in agency. There were two key moments in the unfolding of this research. The first began to unpack homemaking as a sociomaterial practice, recognising home ‘as a relation between material and imaginative realms and processes’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 22). This work looked at how people relate to and mobilise objects within homemaking practices, investigating the material cultures of homemaking and how people make home through objects, including furnishings, colours and textures (McCracken, 1989). Other research identified the importance of objects that narrate social relations and familial 287

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connections, including furnishings inherited or given by family and friends, and photographs of familiar people and places (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Noble, 2004; Tolia-Kelly, 2004). Home is not found simply in the presence of these objects, but also through making shared decisions about housing design and decoration with significant others, and routines around them, including looking at photographs and cleaning them (Gorman-­Murray, 2006; Rose, 2003). More than just a one-way process where people appropriate objects, furnishings, colours and the house itself to achieve a sense of home, homemaking has been revealed as a multidirection relation where the materiality of the house can also challenge and disrupt the extent to which residents feel at home. Miller (2002) describes this as a process of ‘accommodation’, where people appropriate and change their dwelling so that it suits their living patterns, while also changing themselves and the ways that they live to suit their house. In this process, he argues, agency lies in current and previous human residents as well as in the materiality of the house-as-home. Dowling (2008), for instance, explores how families with children accommodate contemporary, open planned housing. While some prefer open planned living, others describe it as ‘blank’ and experience anxiety that they cannot easily contain and supervise young children. This latter group often changed their living practices or the preferred layout of furniture to minimise the more problematic aspects of open planned design. Miller (2001) similarly described a feeling of being haunted by his house and the legacies of earlier design decisions. These understandings of homemaking recognise the materiality of home but still retain an overarching humanist focus, emphasising not so much the objects as the people and inter-personal relations that they symbolise and suggest. Miller’s (2001, 2002) notion of material agency, for instance, is bound up with the activity of previous human residents and architects (see Hitchings, 2004). In this conceptualisation of home, the material elements of home retain this presence in the dwelling space over time, but do not bring any capacities or properties that are independent of the people who designed, built or lived in the house. From this early start, a further body of work began to consider the activity and agency of housing itself. Jacobs and Smith’s (2008) intervention highlighted a growing separation between housing and home in research. While research on home brought attention to human meanings and cultures of home, ‘housing research’ foregrounded housing itself: from housing units to housing policy, finance and related practices. They challenged researchers to recognise the inherent interconnections between these domains of housing: The acts of ‘housing’ and ‘dwelling’ are a coproduction between those who are housed and the variant technologies that do the work of housing: ornaments and decorations, yes, architecture and bricks and mortar, sanitation and communication technologies, too, but also housing policies and practices, mortgage lending and insurance, credit scores, and all the other ‘lively’ things of finance. (Jacobs and Smith, 2008: 517) Jacobs and Smith (2008: 518) argued for an expanded scope within studies of housing and home, moving away from binaries of housing (defined through materiality) and home (the imaginative space) towards an ‘assemblage of dwelling’ that would ‘capture the dispersed and variant logics of value and valuation that actively constitute not only the field of meaning, experience and practice that is called “home” but also the house that is the locus of its performance’. 288

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Mobilising these ideas in her own work, Jacobs drew on studies in science and technology (STS), including actor network theory (Latour, 1991, 1992), to open the ‘black box’ of housing. Thinking with Red Road, a 1960s high-rise development in Glasgow, Jacobs et al. (2007: 610) considered how the: Architectural imagination that gave rise to this form of housing was motivated by the potentials – economic, formal, social, spatial – of new materials such as steel, innovative construction technologies such as rapid system-building and mechanisms such as passenger lifts and integrated garbage handling systems. Captured in later work through the notion of the ‘building event’, this research identified how the ‘technological and the human co-orchestrate the world’ (Jacobs et al., 2008: 166–167). It developed an understanding of dwelling as a process that unfolds over time in relation with the communities of human and nonhuman actors that constitute, inhabit and interact with them. Mobilising the building event and an analytic of failure, Jacobs et al. (2008: 182) ask what is required ‘under normal circumstances, to keep [buildings] working or holding together’. In the case of the high rise, steel, concrete and asbestos were shown to bring affordances that shaped construction, inhabitation and demolition, with asbestos placing particular demands on those who lived and were involved in demolishing Red Road. Other research mobilises the building event to address the cycles of ageing and decay that shape housing and senses of home. Gillon and Gibbs (2019), for instance, show how coastal environmental conditions (‘architectural practitioners’ in their own right) interact with the materiality of housing to shape the homemaking practices and imaginaries of homeowners in a new coastal housing development. Residents reported how coastal elements, including sand and sea spray, challenged homemaking routines, demanding extra cleaning and the introduction of technologies like outdoor showers to reinforce boundaries between inside and out in order to protect vulnerable materials, including floors, inside the house. The corrosive properties of salt spray outside was also of concern, ‘speeding up the rate of material decay, and showing up on fixtures and finishes as blemishes and oxidised stains’ (Gillon and Gibbs, 2019: 114). Worries about salt shaped the materials that some residents chose when building but was not factored in by others who later reported erosion and the demands of ongoing maintenance and replacement of damaged objects (and see Power, 2009b on the temporalities of decay). Human residents are not just subject to these cycles, they can also actively work with them. Cox’s (2016) work on DIY home maintenance, for example, shows homeowners working with these rhythms, those who favour DIY often prioritising malleable and less permanent materials so that they can re-make home over time. Others have addressed how buildings shape inhabitation. Lees and Baxter (2011: 115) mobilised the building event to explore how one building, a council tower block in inner London, provoked embodied feelings of fear and insecurity for one resident, drawing ‘race, class and personal history’ together with building design. In parallel work, Kraftl and Adey (2008: 215) addressed ‘the capacity of a building to allow inhabitation to take place’, pointing to the ‘ongoing, dynamic encounters between buildings; their constituent elements; and spaces, inhabitants, visitors, design, ergonomics, workers, planners, cleaners, technicians, materials, performances, events, emotions, affects, and more’. These relations shape dwelling practices with consequences for home. 289

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The More-than-Human Home in a Time of Climate Emergency The growing climate emergency brings the more-than-human dimensions of home into sharp relief and shows ways in which this thinking on home might help to shape new futures. Climate change brings elevated risks of extreme weather and environmental crises. Across the globe, the impacts of unseasonal and unprecedented rain, heat, drought and severe storms are already being felt. The domestic house is a key place through which these impacts are experienced, with growing numbers of households negotiating dangerous weather extremes in housing that was designed for a different climate. Households also face displacement from homes that are impacted by natural disaster. As we look to the future, it seems clear that understandings of home as a human place will face growing fracture by these extreme, and yet increasingly normal, events. A growing body of research scopes the future of home in climate changing worlds. Natural disasters such as bushfire and flood are one focus of attention. These crisis events unsettle the safety and security of home through the risk of future crisis while materially undoing home when the crisis hits. In this context, questions of homemaking and re-making become central and growing attention is turning to the role of insurance industries in mitigating and responding to risk. With growing frequency and intensity of crisis, the responsive capacity of the insurance industry is decreasing with growing areas of uninsurable property and extended lags in rebuilding. Such risks are compounded by widespread underinsurance as rebuild costs increase following natural disaster. While climate change brings unhomey ­effects from the global to the local scale, along with the risk of mass relocation of particularly disadvantaged and marginalised populations, there are also highly personal and intimate affects within the house-as-home. In their work with homeowners who lost housing in a bushfire event, de Vet and Eriksen (2020) show how loss of home is compounded through insurance regimes. Widespread underinsurance meant that few participants were able to fully recover costs and it was common for homeowners to suffer extended delays and unexpected costs to rebuild, with consequences for home. For example, for participants Mary and Robert remaking home lagged behind house rebuilding because limited funds reduced the capacity to personalise their dwelling. Another participant, Patricia, describes the decision by her insurer, that she must replicate her old house when rebuilding it, as ‘devastating’, explaining how the new house ‘served as a constant reminder of what was lost’ (de Vet and Eriksen, 2020: 43). Echoing Jacobs and Smith’s (2008) call to recognise home as a coming together of material places and housing policies, De Vet and Eriksen (2020: 47) call for insurance regimes that better support homeowners to reconstruct home, while also calling for more research into ‘the troublesome practicality of insuring against growing social and environmental uncertainty with climate change’. Climate change also brings new persistent risks, such as elevated heat, that challenge new ways of making and locating home. Across the twentieth century, the inclination to create home as a secure, private dwelling that is safe against environmental extremes has been strong in many parts of the world, particularly in wealthy Western and global North contexts with widespread access to climate management technologies and reliable energy sources. Interest in these technologies is also growing rapidly in the global South as wealth and infrastructural capacity builds for some parts of the population. However, while these technologies will be an important dimension of coping in heating climates, access is far from guaranteed. In 2018, one report estimated that ‘1.1 billion people face cooling access 290

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risks, of whom 630 million are slum dwellers’ in hotter climate urban areas with absent, intermittent or too expensive electricity’ (Marvin, 2021: 212). Low-income households in wealthy cities are also at risk, with ‘poor-quality housing, absence of air-conditioning, lack of greenery and trees, low mobility and poor health’ meaning that ‘low-income and black communities [will] disproportionately suffer from the effects of heat events’ in places like the United States (Marvin, 2021: 212) and Australia (Mellick Lopes et al., 2020). For lowincome households, high normal heat and extreme events also threaten to make growing numbers of houses uninhabitable, for at least periods of time, with profound consequences for home that range from discomfort, to ill-health and reduced survivability (Mellick Lopes et al., 2020). Yet despite these risks, cities around the world continue to rely predominantly on private air conditioning to manage heat risks. In this context, Mellick Lopes et al. (2018: 42) address how urban heat might present ‘disruptive challenges to being “at home” in the world’, considering how the necessity of coping with urban heat might prompt a reimagining of urban life and the geographies of home. In response, their work reimagines home ‘as a porous and socially connected space tied to other spaces that enhance community preparedness’ (Mellick Lopes et al., 2018: 54). They consider the importance of shaded outdoor spaces, shared sites of public cooling from public buildings to shopping centres and cinemas, knowledge sharing and the development of purposive social networks that mobilise to support community members at times of heat risk. They also canvas how ‘spare cool capacity’ might be better shared, and imagine new community heat preparedness plans that ‘might involve the design of a purposive social network that is activated on the basis of certain indicators such as weather forecasts’ (Mellick Lopes et al., 2018: 54). The cool urban futures imagined in this work are more than places of technical production, offering the passive thermal monotony that has characterised the twentieth century. Instead, what is suggested is the possibility of cool commons: places, social practices and knowledges that are owned and cared for within communities, stretching home beyond the privatised house in order to facilitate collective well-being.

Summary Home has never been only a human place. This chapter has charted the evolution of research on the more-than-human nature of home, from identifying the constituent place of nature within home, through recognising animal agency and the agency of housing materials. While much of this research has been conceptual, the chapter ended by attending to the practical implications of more-than-human thinking within home. The twentieth century has been termed the anthroposphere, recognising the substantial ways that humans have modified and remade the world. That period has been heavily entrenched in extractivist logics grounded in human-nature dualism. Climate change and the growing incidence of natural disaster are interconnected with this period of human development. Moving forward, there is need for widespread public recognition of the irreducibly more-than-human nature of the worlds that we inhabit and call home. While the climate crisis may force such engagement, a more proactive engagement, recognition and valuing of the more-than-human will be necessary to activate more survivable futures. This chapter has emphasised morethan-human thinking that has emerged within the academy and been dominant in efforts to rethink the house-as-home. Yet, such tools are also critiqued for maintaining Eurocentric mindsets via the erasure of non-European ontologies that have much longer traditions of 291

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recognising and engaging with the liveliness of our worlds (Sundberg, 2014; Todd, 2015). For those, like myself, working on unceded lands across the globe, engagement and learning with these ontologies will be a necessary part of understanding what it takes to seek and heal home in a changing world (Darug Ngurra et al., 2019).

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Emma Power Power ER (2007) Pests and home-making: Depictions of pests in homemaker magazines. Home Cultures 4(3): 213–236. Power ER (2008) Furry families: Making a human-dog family through home. Social and Cultural Geography 9(5): 535–555. Power ER (2009a) Border-processes and homemaking: Encounters with possums in suburban Australian homes. Cultural Geographies 16(1): 29–54. Power ER (2009b) Domestic temporalities: Nature times in the house-as-home. Geoforum 40(6): 1024–1032. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.07.005. Power ER (2012) Domestication and the dog: Embodying home. Area 44(3): 371–378. Power ER (2017) Renting with pets: A pathway to housing insecurity? Housing Studies 32(3): 336– 360. DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2016.1210095. Rose G (2003) Family photographs and domestic spacings: A case study. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 1(28): 5–18. Shore ER, Petersen CL and Douglas DK (2003) Moving as a reason for pet relinquishment: A closer look. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 6(1): 39–52. Shove E (2003a) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. ­Oxford and New York: Berg. Smith JA (2003) Beyond dominance and affection: Living with Rabbits in Post-Humanist Households. Society and Animals 11(2): 181–197. Stone W, Power E and Tually S, et al. (2021) Housing and Housing Assistance Pathways With Companion Animals: Risks, Costs, Benefits and Opportunities, AHURI Final Report No. 350. ­Melbourne: AHURI. Sundberg J (2014) Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies 21(1): 33–47. DOI: 10.1177/1474474013486067. Thomson MS (2007) Placing the wild in the city: ‘Thinking with’ Melbourne’s bats. Society and Animals 15: 79–95. Todd Z (2015) Indigenizing the anthropocene. In: Davis H and Turpin E (eds) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 241–254. Tolia-Kelly DP (2004) Materializing post-colonial geographies: Examining the textural landscapes of migration in the South Asian home. Geoforum 35(6): 675–688. Tuan Y-F (1984) Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven & London: Yale ­University Press. Vidler A (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Waley P (2000) What’s a river without a fish? Symbol, space and ecosystem in the waterways of Japan. In: Philo C and Wilbert C (eds) Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of HumanAnimal Relation. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 159–181. Whatmore S and Hinchliffe S (2003) Living cities: Making space for urban nature. Soundings: Journal of Politics and Culture 22: 37–50. Wolch J (2002) Anima urbis. Progress in Human Geography 26(6): 721–742.

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18 WRAPPING THINGS UP Making Plastic into a Political Material1 Gay Hawkins

Introduction Jeffrey Meikle’s (1995) masterful book American Plastic is subtitled ‘a cultural history’. In it, he develops an account of how this ubiquitous and protean material infiltrated virtually every aspect of life. The book is an exemplary analysis of transformations in the material everyday. It traces how this synthetic material was implicated not only in the creation of myriad new objects but also in the emergence of new economic and cultural realities. But what if that subtitle was changed? What if the focus shifted from cultural history to political history? How could we account for the politics of plastic since its mass application in the post-WWII period? How could we understand the role of plastic materials in generating distinct and very diverse political situations and effects? How could we make a case for plastic as a political material? These are the questions driving this essay. In posing them however, there is a risk of not only homogenising ‘plastic’ but also of triggering a powerful political narrative about its catastrophic environmental effects. Discourses about plastic as a material with destructive and lasting impacts are ubiquitous and over-coded. Not only do they dominate how the politics of plastic are currently framed they also reproduce a very restricted and problematic notion of ‘impacts’. In explaining the relations between materials, politics and environments, impacts are represented as an intrinsic and negative material capacity that must be managed. Reducing plastic to a generic bad material with political and environmental impacts that are written in advance does not aid analysis. It blinds us to the diversity of political processes and plastics and to the various ways in which materials and politics become interconnected. Rather than see impacts in these terms, the argument developed here understands them as material capacity, as part of the biophysical reality of materials and their ability to have effects on other things. These effects aren’t essential or inevitable; they emerge in the process of enacting the capacities of materials in particular situations. Impacts do not exist independently of relations or the ways in which a material is made to matter. As Abrahamsson et al. (2015: 14) argue, things ‘neither “cause” effects nor “act” all by themselves. Materialities work in concert, they are relational’. This more performative and pragmatic approach shifts 295

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the focus away from controversy and human control to diverse material enactments. The political questions then become: what relations are plastic materials and things engaged in; how do these relations provoke effects and what kinds of realities do they assemble? These questions are at the heart of what Mol (1999: 74) describes as ‘ontological politics’. Their value is that they foreground the diversity of processes whereby plastics come to matter and how they remake worlds. They also foreground the contingency of these processes; how alternative worldings are always possible. In the current push to unwrap the world, to ‘break free’ from plastic, understanding exactly how plastic was made to matter in so many areas of social life is a necessary first step to creating worlds with less of it. The empirical focus is the introduction of plastic packaging in Australia and the ontological politics of wrapping things up in this synthetic material. The plastic under analysis here is food packaging. In choosing this ubiquitous material device as the empirical focus, the aim is to understand how it was rapidly normalised in food markets and with what consequences. How it became, quite literally, the skin of commerce. From the 1950s onwards, packaging things in various plastics increased dramatically. This trend began in the US which had a growing plastics industry but it rapidly spread to other advanced economies. While cellophane and other early plastics had been used in food packaging applications before WWII, paper, cardboard, glass and metals were the dominant materials for containing or wrapping food.2 It was not until the development of light and highly flexible thermoplastics, which took off in the late 1940s, that food packaging emerged as a major new application and market for the burgeoning post-war plastics industry. This transformation involved far more than the substitution of existing packaging materials with plastic. Innovations in thermoplastics led to things that were previously unpackaged being wrapped for the first time and acquiring a synthetic skin. It also led to the development of a huge array of new food products and eating practices – from cheese sticks to fast food and leisure eating – that could only be envisaged thanks to the technical possibilities afforded by thermoplastics. Meikle (1995) captures the extent and speed of this significant material transformation. Consider his list of some of the myriad new plastic objects that entered markets and everyday life in this period: In 1952 Americans had first experienced single serving jelly ‘paks’ of vacuum-formed sheet vinyl. Later in the decade they bought shirts packaged in clear polyethylene bags and vegetables packed in flimsy polystyrene trays or wrapped in this film; they ate banana splits from ‘boats’ of thin, rigid, vacuum-formed polystyrene sheet and drank coffee from Styrofoam cups. The following decade witnessed polyethylene bleach and detergent bottles, polystyrene containers for cottage cheese and yogurt, recloseable polyethylene lids for cans of coffee and shortening and cat food … polyethylene bread bags, Styrofoam meat trays, polyethylene six-pack connectors, vinyl blister packs, green polyethylene garbage bags, and Ex-Cell-o’s polyethylene-coated paper milk cartons, which eliminated annoying flakes of wax in the milk but were soon almost superseded by lightweight bottles of blow-moulded polyethylene. (Meikle, 1995: 265–266) In this rich description, we get a sense of first encounters with plastic packaging and the extent of its reach; how it appeared in numerous markets from fast food to dairy to pet food. We also see the multiplicity of minor objects entering everyday life like the resealable polyethylene bottle lid and the Styrofoam meat tray. What we don’t get a sense of, however, 296

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is exactly how the practice of wrapping things in plastic became normalised; what plastic was expected to do in these new situations and how it became a material capable of provoking diverse ontological and political effects. For Meikle, the routine realities of plastic packaging were achieved primarily through the quantitative dynamics of mass application. The plastic packaged economy was part of a major epochal transformation – the rise of the ‘plastics age’ – but there is little explanation of exactly how the becoming mundane of plastic packaging turned it into a political material.

Political Materials The term ‘political material’ has a relatively recent history. Emerging from a lively conversation between science and technology studies (STS) and political theorists, it foregrounds the constitutive role of materials and non-human things in political processes (Braun and Whatmore, 2010). This is much more than acknowledging that materials and technologies are essential elements in enabling politics. It is about understanding how objects, materials and the more-than-human can become potent forces in provoking and configuring political situations. Rather than understanding materials as the passive object of political deliberations, problematic stuff that requires human control, the focus is on how the performance of things becomes implicated in various political dynamics. This includes, for example: how more-than-human elements might prompt various collectives and emergent publics; how they can become implicated in the arts of government or how the enactment of materials foregrounds their mutability and capacity to acquire political agency through their relations with other elements. The idea of political material is more than a question of inclusion, of letting non-humans have a political ‘voice’ alongside humans (Woolgar and Neyland, 2013: 52). Putting materiality and politics together changes what we understand by both categories. Materials have the capacity to affect or shape actions, and understandings of politics shift from an anthropocentric focus on competing interests, critique or the institutions of representative government to a concern with the processes whereby particular realities are composed, enacted or contested. In this framework, politics could be understood pragmatically, as a particular form of qualification that emerges in situations when the everyday ontological status of things is under negotiation (McFall, 2010). As Thévenot (2002) would say, reality is tested. For Thévenot (2002: 59), ‘reality tests’ are central to how new materials, objects or technical devices become implicated in existing social practices and political orders. It is not a question of humans projecting economic or moral justifications or political concerns onto things. Rather, through everyday pragmatic engagements, humans single out and evaluate what is relevant in any setting. And the capacities of materials and objects – their ability to affect things in the world, to equip various actions – influence these reality tests and everyday evaluations. This brief exposition of the term ‘political materials’ informs the empirical analysis that follows. In seeking to understand the impacts of the introduction of plastic food packaging in Australia, the frenzy to wrap things up, the aim is to disrupt the tendency to see this as a straightforward process of material technical innovation followed by social or environmental impacts. Instead, the functional capacities and ontological effects of packaging are investigated as a product of various accounts and reality tests about what plastic could do, what it should do and whether it was good or bad. Acknowledging these ontological dynamics is fundamental to a shift from instrumentalism to a performative and pragmatic 297

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perspective. The issue is: what form did these accounts and reality tests with early plastic packaging take and how did they provoke forms of political qualification? How was plastic packaging enacted as practical, ordinary and capable of remaking realities and guiding conduct in certain situations? Two claims about the interactions between political and material processes will be made. First, that it is necessary to shift from instrumentalism to pragmatism. Rather than seeing the application of plastic packaging to the food industry as a tool for inexorable market growth or social change, the focus is on how specific material capacities of plastic, as a new material and container technology, were realised. These capacities emerged in dynamic relations with a multitude of other material and immaterial entities – from food biology to the spatial organisation of retail spaces, to the invention of the barcode, to consumer habits. As the functions of plastic packaging were accounted for and stabilised, it became a force to be reckoned with displacing other materials and establishing material dominance in the food sector. Within a few years of implementation, plastic was largely unnoticed. This synthetic material had provoked new practices and realities that were now taken for granted. Plastic was neither good nor bad; it was mundane, simply of this world – a significant ontological achievement. The second claim relates to the ways in which plastic packaging acquired various governing capacities particularly in relation to changing human conducts and the biopolitics of food. Not only did plastic provide a new point of articulation between the natural and the synthetic, it also had the effect of transforming consumer habits by convincing shoppers that food wrapped in plastic was better across numerous registers. It was fresher, it was more convenient, it was hygienic, it was modern! The point here is not that ‘government’ has specific objectives and then recruits materials and devices to realise these. Rather, that technical or material devices can become capable of realising diverse and ad hoc forms of social regulation through the practices they provoke. That ubiquitous materials like plastic don’t simply assemble worlds; they are also profoundly implicated in administering them.

Accounting for a New Material One of the earliest attempts to promote plastic to Australian publics was in a special souvenir supplement celebrating ‘Plastics Week’. Included in the October 14, 1954 edition of leading Melbourne newspaper The Argus, it began with the following pitch: From tomorrow until Saturday, October 23, it will be Plastics Week in Victoria. Look for the label in shop windows. It will draw your attention to displays which will open your eyes – wide – to the astonishing growth of the plastics industry. They will help to make us realise how dependent we are already on plastics – this marvellous new group of materials which has come to the service of mankind, joining those age-old servants, timber, natural fibres and metals. (Plastics Week Souvenir Supplement, 1954: 21) The supplement showcased a wide variety of articles directed at different audiences and with different objectives. As one of the earliest promotions of this new material in Australia, it pitched the plastics message far and wide. There were articles addressed to the local packaging industry encouraging it to replace existing materials with plastics or to develop new markets with plastic packages in order to ‘solve your packaging problems’. Others targeted food producers and wholesale distributors explaining the value of plastics in supply chains. 298

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Bulk crates made from plastic were more durable than wood and would ‘last forever’. Then, there were articles addressed to consumers expressing general boosterism about this new miracle material: ‘plastics for everyone for healthier modern living!’ Other consumer articles had an explicit pedagogical intent. They explained how plastics were made and how synthetic materials could be understood in relation to ‘natural’ substances. In a piece titled ‘It’s a New Way of Life!’ polystyrene was described as a plastic made from a combination of ethylene and benzene and used in ‘unbreakable tumblers, spoons, meat covers, wall tiles and other things’. Readers were reassured that: ‘plastics are not substitutes. They are organic materials in their own right, each with its own characteristics and differing from one another just as lead, copper and iron are different’ (Plastics Week Souvenir Supplement, 1954: 22). This classification of plastic as ‘organic’ addressed popular anxieties about the artificiality of the material. These early representations did more than outline how plastic could be enrolled in markets or in manufacturing processes or in the home. They also described the unique capacities of the material and qualified these in relation to existing materials. Plastics’ durability was compared to wood. It was as strong or even stronger than wood but would not suffer from natural decay. Its transparency was equivalent to glass but, unlike glass, it would not shatter. Like organic materials, plastic also came in many different varieties. This comparative account of the unique material capacities of plastic was an attempt to manage a distinct ontological challenge: how to situate plastic in existing realities but also recognise its distinctiveness as a remarkable new material. This process was particularly pertinent in the case of plastic food packaging. In the immediate post-WWII period in Australia, wrapping food in plastic was relatively unusual. While plastic was already in use for packaging household goods and some foods, there was a certain resistance to enrolling it extensively in food markets. This resistance came from limitations in the material itself but also from consumer comfort both with existing materials (paper, cardboard, tin and glass) and with existing practices that did not involve plastic. Developments in thermoplastics, particularly the invention of polyethylene film and related materials such as clingfilm, were central to overcoming this resistance. The question is how? How were the capacities of thermoplastics enacted and with what effects? How did wrapping things in plastic become normalised and change everyday food realities and practices? In an article published in 1980 in the industry newsletter Plastics Digest (Public Affairs Committee of the Plastics Institute of Australia, 1980a), several of the biggest selling plastics in Australia at the time were explained and analysed. Polyethylene film was the top ranked. It was celebrated for making waxed paper and cellophane virtually redundant in food markets; it was also praised for its ability to be colour-printed, stretched around any shape, as well as safely containing frozen goods. A recurrent theme in this article was the efficiency of polyethylene film and the diversity of ‘applications’ for it, especially when compared with other materials. The idea of ‘application’ was used repeatedly in accounts of plastic in the Plastics Digest. In these accounts, application implied that the apparently fixed material capacities of plastics were just waiting to find expression in various aspects of food production and distribution and, once ‘applied’, would automatically enhance them. The positive effects of plastic were intrinsic and simply needed to be discovered. This denied the sociotechnical contingency of plastic’s material capacities. As the extensive debate in STS on the emergence of material and technical capacities has shown, the ability to act in the world, to have effects, is a product of very situated relations and associations that make some capacities 299

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in materials present and potent and marginalise others. In this way, plastic wasn’t applied to food; it entered into various relations and networks that shaped which material capacities mattered in those relations. Central to this process was the identification of distinct responsibilities for the material; what its obligations were in particular relations; what it was expected to do with and for food. These early examples of how plastic was discussed and promoted reflect Woolgar and Neyland’s (2013) argument about the critical role of ‘accountability relations’ in ontological enactment and forms of mundane governance. Accountability relations establish the connections between objects and ontology. Central to these connections are forms of reasoning that constitute specific realities. Accounting for things is one of the primary ways in which they become implicated in shaping and administering worlds. This can involve numerous techniques from locating things in existing classification systems, to the problematisation of existing realities, to moral justifications. The point is that accountability relations generate networks of mutual responsibility. They shape what things are responsible for and how they should be responded to. These relations are enacted or realised in practice and in this way ‘accounts’ are always contingent and vulnerable to negotiation and contestation. For Woolgar and Neyland (2013: 30–34), accountability is at the heart of ontological politics. The work of producing accounts – of deciding what matters in particular settings – is political work because alternative accounts are always possible. Accounts of the remarkable capacities of plastics in the Plastics Digest and how they could be enrolled in food settings didn’t just establish what plastics could do but why these capacities mattered. Implicit in these accounts were interrogations of existing packaging realities and explanations of how plastic could not simply maintain these but improve them. Plastic packaging mattered because it could meet the expected technical and economic obligations of packaging in the food sector but also enable new practices and possibilities. As plastic use escalated, it facilitated expanded economic processes: from improved labelling and branding to better handling in supply chains, to the growth of supermarkets and self-service. It also realised new possibilities around food freshness and safety and extended shelf life – critical concerns in food retailing. The ‘impacts’ of plastic emerged in this complex ontological dance in which an existing reality was sustained but also significantly reconfigured. Plastic’s unique material effects were enacted in this process. What came to matter in food settings was plastic’s plasticity: its ability to give and receive form and therefore wrap just about anything, its transparency, its strength and lightness, and its molecular variability and potential to extend the preservation of various types of food. What didn’t matter, what was denied as it became more and more entrenched, was its material endurance long after its working life was over, its emergent afterlife as solid waste. The Plastics Digest was primarily read by those working in plastics or related industries. Advertisements and articles in women’s magazines had a very different audience: consumers or more particularly ‘housewives’. Promoting the use of new plastic products in the home or explaining how this material fitted into everyday life was a recurrent theme. Often, there was little distinction between the explicit marketing of plastic as a new domestic wrapping and storage technology and informative articles about the correct use of it in the home. Both were focussed on changing everyday consumer conduct and household practices by showing why plastic mattered. Examples from the early history of clingfilm marketing highlight this. In 1966, a leading women’s magazine, The Australian Women’s Weekly (TAWW), ran a full-page advertisement announcing the arrival of a new product ‘Glad Wrap’ – the brand 300

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name for clingfilm in Australia. Celebrated for finally arriving in the country, this material was promoted as an ‘AMAZING new plastic that seals in freshness because it CLINGS’ (TAWW, 1966, emphasis in the original). What is significant about this advertisement is the way that it acknowledges the indeterminacy of this new material, the idea that its technical capacities have to be explained and stabilised by giving an account of what clingfilm is responsible for, what its obligations are to food. In this advertisement the technical capacity to cling and seal was connected to ‘freshness’ and ‘efficiency’, two qualities that were implicitly problematised. Housewives disliked decaying food which could lead to health risks and waste, this was also bad for the household budget and efficiency. In this way, clingfilm was framed as a ‘solution’ to longstanding domestic problems. A new reality was emerging in which the material capacities of clingfilm were accounted for in relation to a redefinition of freshness. The materiality of clingfilm was enacted transactionally; because it could ‘seal in freshness’, food began to appear vulnerable without it. Previous household practices for managing leftovers or storing goods were rendered inadequate and eventually displaced as clingfilm acquired the capacity to provoke new conducts and was gradually normalised. Freshness was now dependent on plastic. This problematisation of existing household practices that informed the promotion of clingfilm could be considered as a reality test. As Thévenot (2002) argues, in these tests, people and objects become caught up in complex processes of evaluation where what counts as ‘real’ or ‘good’ are linked through the dynamics of everyday pragmatic engagements with the world. New materials and practices, like wrapping domestic food in clingfilm, had to withstand reality tests. This material had to be assessed and its technical capacities qualified in terms of what was it good for? In order for these tests to shift everyday practices and become normalised, they also had to generate shared or common justifications for the material. This was sometimes an uncertain process. In some instances, plastic packaging and the use of clingfilm was vigorously resisted. The shadow realities of these new materials and packaging practices were challenged. Central here was the emergence of controversies over the amount of waste new plastic packaging was generating. In an article in The Canberra Times (1972: 7) titled ‘Women Drop Wraps’, a ‘demonstration with a difference’ was reported. In this demonstration, a group of women shoppers removed all the plastic packaging that their just purchased fruit and vegetables were wrapped in and dumped it on the supermarket floor before leaving. For these protesters, plastic packaging was an unnecessary encumbrance contributing to increased household waste and urban pollution. The report described the purpose of the demonstration as ‘not so much to protest as to educate people about unnecessary and polluting packaging and to offer alternatives to carting home huge quantities of plastic packaging with the weekly shopping’ (The Canberra Times, 1972: 7). It is possible to describe this demonstration as an alternative reality test to the clingfilm advertisement. Here plastic packaging was accounted for not in relation to food freshness but in relation to the environment. The plastic reality promoted by marketing was disputed as the new material was held responsible for growing pollution. In this case, other material qualities of plastic packaging were made visible: its unnecessary use, its physical endurance as waste, its accumulation in domestic garbage bins and its burden on the environment. For these protesters, what mattered about the material was not its capacity to maintain freshness but its capacity to pollute. These early discourses about plastic packaging in Australia show how the technical and pragmatic capacities of the material emerged through various accountability relations and reality tests. These often involved identifying the responsibilities of plastic – what it was 301

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obliged to do in various settings and how it should be responded to by consumers, industry, retailers and others. Despite some controversy and contestation about the spread of plastic, these accounts and tests were central to enacting plastics’ material capacities and solidifying its reputation as a superior packaging material. In a relatively short period of time, they had the effect of significantly changing industry practices and everyday consumer conducts to the point where the material was ‘locked in’ (Parsons, 2022: 1296) to food systems. Plastic had become an essential and taken for granted element in food production, logistics, retailing and households. Food packaging was also emerging as a major growth market for the burgeoning Australian plastics industry. These impacts of plastic’s rapid material dominance simultaneously established it as not only better but normal. Wrapping more and more things in plastic became what Mol (2013: 318) describes as an ‘ontonorm’. That is, a process whereby normativities are embedded in practices that create new realities. A significant ontological and political achievement.

Governed by Plastic? If plastic packaging was implicated in changing food industry practices and ordinary habits, is it also possible to say that it became capable of regulating life? Is it possible to see it as evidence of governing through technical objects? (Bruce, 2014). These questions foreground another key insight about political materials specifically, the ways in which modes of governing are materialised or work in and through objects. It is not that government exists and then seeks technologies to achieve its goals. Rather, that materials and technologies can ‘present themselves as potent sites for introducing “economy” or “administration” into everyday life’ (Braun, 2014: 55). For Braun (2014), government does not revolve around states or civic institutions but the diverse and often contradictory ways in which ‘life’ comes to be managed and modulated in liberal societies. In contrast to generic accounts of governmentality and biopolitics, Braun is concerned with how diverse modes of governing are actualised in various situations. ‘Biopolitics’ may describe a broad political rationality, but his focus is on how specific sociotechnical realities reveal the contingency and historicity of ‘life’ as an object of administration. Like Woolgar and Neyland (2013) and Lemke (2015), he is interested in developing a post-Foucauldian analysis of governing, but his focus is the interactions between technologies, devices and emergent forms of regulation of urban life. Braun examines how government is realised through networks of specific practices, objects and institutions. These networks are provisional and contingent – they don’t represent a coherent totality. Rather, they comprise an ad hoc assemblage that is relatively aimless but that has the effect of introducing diverse and minor forms of regulation into ordinary practices (Braun, 2014: 51). This argument is very suggestive for investigating how the expansion of plastic food packaging introduced minor modes of governing and administration into everyday life. It is also valuable for understanding how the synthetic materiality of plastic wrapping interacted with the biological realities of food and changed what was meant by freshness and ‘shelf life’. Following Braun (2014: 55), the critical issue becomes how did these plastic devices become both a ‘means to life and mode of capture’? Two key examples highlight this dynamic. First, the expansion of supermarkets and self-service shopping in the second half of the twentieth century; choosing your own goods was a conduct that came to define and shape the consumer in this period and plastic packaging was central to both enabling and 302

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regulating this conduct. Second, the interactions between the synthetic and the natural that wrapping food in plastic generated and the ways in which these interactions inaugurated a very particular form of biopolitics in food markets. Much has been written about the rise of self-service but little of this research pays close attention to how it was materialised and how it involved new forms of personhood. Du Gay’s (2004) and Cochoy’s (2016) accounts are exceptions. Both explore how a multitude of new technical and cultural arrangements were central to the introduction of this significant economic and technological regime. Self-service involved major transformations in the organisation of retail work and spaces and in techniques of consumption. The transfer of responsibility for selecting goods from shop workers to consumers involved numerous elements and was far from a smooth transition. Central to its eventual stabilisation were pre-packaged goods. Goods that were contained and arranged within easy reach of the consumer and that were reclassified and oriented to their point of view. Packaging also enabled the growth of branding and labelling and fuelled a major expansion in product information and marketing. While the package might have prevented direct sensual contact with the product, labelling provided far more information than direct contact ever could (Cochoy, 2016: 144). Plastic packaging was a continuation of other forms of packaging that had helped realise self-service but also a significant shift. As already outlined, it led to more and more things being wrapped in plastic due to the dynamics of material substitution and the normalisation of plastic as a superior material. It also led to many things becoming subject to plastic packaging that didn’t necessarily need it in order to facilitate the expansion of self-service that accompanied the growth of supermarkets. Central here was the need to signal to consumers that goods were untouched by other consumers and were therefore ‘hygienic’. Fruit and vegetables were key examples of this dynamic. The functional agency of packaging was hard to fathom in this case, as many were already naturally packaged however, as packaging became fundamental to enacting self-service it was anticipated and desired by consumers. In this way, the dispositif of self-service generated dispositions that expected packaging. As Cochoy (2007: 207) argues, the action of serving oneself needed devices that brought into play the disposition connected to the action. The point is not that plastic packaging instrumentalised self-service. Rather, that it was fundamentally implicated in provoking new conducts and experiences of consumer personhood. The consumer left alone to wander the aisles of the supermarket was governable through the specific architectural and technical logics of this space and through their experience of it as a site where they could exercise freedom. The plastic package was one of numerous mediating devices that enabled the consumer’s sense of autonomy. Acceptance of supermarkets as a kind of ‘natural’ environment for the expression of free choice depended on innumerable devices and systems of organisation that were necessarily backgrounded. The challenge for supermarkets and self-service was to mobilise ‘free market behaviour’ while constantly trying to regulate it. And, as Cochoy (2007: 205) points out, regulation is not the same as manipulation. It can involve minor forms of direction that shape actions and dispositions in subtle ways. Plastic packaging is a powerful example of this. It generated critical new relational work in food assemblages that captured both food and shoppers in new bonds and shaped new calculations between them. The plastic package verified the safety of the goods, it was fundamental to staging self-service and it enabled practices that generated new experiences of consumer autonomy. While consumers may have felt that their choices were intrinsically individual, the array of more-than-human elements 303

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implicated in reaching for the shelf belied this illusion. The plastic package was an active participant in modulating conduct and enacting new supermarket realities where the liberal subject roamed ‘free’. The interactions between the synthetic and the natural that wrapping food in plastic generated raise a different set of questions about governing through technical devices. In this case, the issue is how did plastic reveal the contingency of ‘life’? How did its interactions with biological processes of food decay reconfigure the meanings of freshness and commercial definitions of shelf life? According to Parsons’ (2022) analysis of food retailing in the UK, the embeddedness of plastic in food systems in the post-WWII period transformed core commercial values of safety, convenience, hygiene and freshness. In his account, innovations in plastic packaging were not only central to enhancing these values but also to enabling significant advancements in food retailing around issues of quality and the expansion of ‘industrial freshness’ with the growth of cold chain systems. Similar processes occurred in Australia. In food production, innovations in plastic packaging were often represented as miracle solutions to longstanding problems in controlling the biological vagaries of food decay and maintaining quality. A powerful example of this can be found in the May 1980b issue of the Plastics Digest. In this issue, the lead article, titled ‘Foods Ain’t Foods … and neither are the films that protect them’, explained the role of different types of plastic and how they addressed the ‘preservation requirements’ of specific foods (Public Affairs Committee of the Plastics Institute of Australia, 1980b). The focal point of the piece was a table linking specific biological processes of decay with the technical functions of different types of plastics. In the first column various characteristics of food decay were listed under the heading ‘Problem’. These included things like rancidity, mould, discolouration and anaerobic bacteria. Next were columns outlining the cause of these problems and the symptoms. Rancidity, for example, was a problem of ‘oxygen uptake by fats’, and the symptoms were an ‘off colour, lactic smell’. In the final column, headed ‘Solutions’, the theoretical challenge for rancidity was explained as ‘remove oxygen’ and the practical strategy was presented as: ‘use a plastic vacuum pack’. What is significant about this table is how it represented and classified the technical capacities of different types of plastic packaging in relation to the biological vagaries of food as a market good. The ongoing problem for selling fresh food was decay and preservation and managing this was central to making food calculable. In this classificatory schema, plastic was made responsible for ensuring and protecting the ‘life’ of food in the interests of its economisation. A logic of problematisation and scientific evidence was used to justify the technical functions and economic benefits of packaging and to establish its ontological status as an essential preservation and market device. However, it wasn’t just the ontological reality and value of packaging that was constituted here it was also the life of food. The classificatory schema displayed in this table involved a form of mutual accountability. It was the way packaging and food interacted, the exchanges between the synthetic and the natural, that established an implicit governing rationale between them. Packaging was being held to account for food whose ‘natural’ or biological reality was also a market problem. This was a classificatory scheme in the service of a market definition of food life and decay. Biological processes were a matter of concern in food retailing and a matter for regulation. Extending the temporality of edible matter by preventing decay meant that plastic packaging was not simply implicated in managing generic biological processes; it was actively reconstituting them by reconfiguring the life of 304

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food as ‘shelf life’. This is how plastic packaging could be considered as a governing device. By modulating decay and biology in the interests of making food calculable, it materialised a very particular form of biopolitics in food markets. Both Braun’s (2014) analysis of ‘governing through technical objects’ and Lemke’s (2015) account of the ‘government of things’ take the analysis of biopolitics beyond the mere regulation of physical and biological things. For them, the governance of life doesn’t refer to some fixed or static notion of nature or biological vitality. Rather, it involves the myriad processes whereby the more-than-human is articulated within governing practices. As Lemke (2015: 12) says: ‘the idea of a “government of things” addresses the relationship between the physical and the moral, the natural and the artificial as something that cannot be reduced to the domain of the social’. By this, he means that it is how these elements become interrelated that is the stuff of biopolitical governance. These relations are not unidirectional; they are not driven exclusively by human agency, technical capacities or economic imperatives. Instead causes and effects are multidirectional and emerge as agency is materialised. Or, as Lemke (2015: 13) puts it: ‘Causal relations do not pre-exist but rather are produced in agential materializations’. The process of making synthetic materials responsible for controlling natural dynamics in food was complex and highly situated. The ‘Foods Ain’t Foods’ article is one small example where we can see how the synthetic and the natural become interconnected and interdependent; how plastic packaging begins to be understood as a necessary skin not an unnatural synthetic imposition. While the promotional rhetoric inherent in this article frames plastic as a ‘solution’ to food decay, as a synthetic device capable of acting on and remediating the natural, the analysis developed here challenges this instrumental and causal logic. It was only by accounting for the life of food and plastic packaging as fundamentally interconnected that the ontology and agency of plastic as a preservation device was activated. In this way, plastic packaging became central to the ontological constitution of ‘shelf life’, to both enacting and regulating it.

Political Materials: Pervasive and Profound In the plethora of contemporary concerns and controversies about plastic and its catastrophic environmental effects, there is a constant demand to control the material. This anthropocentric notion of control denies the ways in which the plastic controls us, how materials and other non-human things are irreducible elements in the becoming-being of the human. How, as Braun and Whatmore (2010: xix) argue, ‘the genesis of the individual … is necessarily also a technogenesis’. What historical analysis of plastic packaging enables is an understanding of the processes whereby plastic’s diverse material qualities and its capacity to effect things, human and otherwise, emerged in situated and complex relations. At the heart of these processes were the dynamics of ontological configuration that enacted the sociotechnical responsibilities of the material and shaped how it should be responded to. When plastic packaging was introduced into food markets in Australia, from the mid-1950s onwards, its use was relatively rare, so it had to be justified and accounted for in order to be enrolled in markets, homes and the packaging industry. In many of these accounts balancing the novel with the routine was central. Plastic had to be explained as both innovative and also capable of maintaining existing realities. It had to be simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary. 305

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Industry newsletters, advertisements and public promotions all in different ways sought to make explicit the various technical capacities and social benefits of plastic because in the 1950s and 1960s the material was far from mundane; it was novel and highly visible. It was also occasionally contested as different aspects of its emergent reality were problematised as matters of concern. However, these other accounts of the material and alternative reality tests did little to slow the inexorable spread of the material. More significantly, in the process of becoming mundane, plastic packaging became a political material by acquiring governing capacities in some situations. This claim draws on an approach to governing that puts things and devices at the centre of the picture. Not as mere resources for realising pre-established governmental objectives but as provocative (Muniesa, 2014). As capable in certain situations of acquiring governmental dimensions that capture and orient activities in certain ways to achieve particular ends. These ends involved co-ordinating relations between people and things in ways that realised new practical, moral or economic orders. As plastic packaging began to be normalised, it acquired the capacity to suggest changed conducts, to materialise free choice and to provoke new meanings for the biological life of food, from ‘sealing in freshness’ to extending shelf life. It also provoked new calculations of economic efficiency both in markets and in households. These dynamics can be read as powerful evidence of mundane governance at work (Woolgar and Neyland, 2013). That is, the localised and recursive enactment of ontologies in which entities are done: in which relations with them are established that have the effect of seeming inevitable, just the way things are. As plastic became more pervasive, invisible and unnoticed, as it was incorporated into daily habits and used without a second thought, its political capacities were most potent in the sense of being able to shape or guide conduct unnoticeably. Governing was happening through plastic packaging and the changed relations and human conducts it provoked.

Notes 1 This chapter is a substantially revised version of my essay: Hawkins G (2018) The skin of commerce: governing thorough plastic packaging. Journal of Cultural Economy. 11(5): 386–403. ­Reprinted with permission of Taylor and Francis. 2 Key accounts of the early history and effects of packaging include Hine (1995), Strasser (1989), Twede (2012) and Cochoy (2016).

References Abrahamsson S, Filippo B, Mol A and Martin R (2015) Living with Omega-3: New materialism and enduring concerns. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(1): 4–19. Braun B and Whatmore S (2010) Political Matter: Technoscience. Democracy and Public Life. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Bruce B (2014) A new urban dispositif? Governing life in an age of climate change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(1): 49–64. Cochoy F (2007) A brief theory of the ‘captation’ of publics. Theory, Culture & Society 24(7): 203–223. Cochoy F (2016) On the Origins of Self-Service. Translated by Topley–Lira J. London: Routledge. Du Gay P (2004) Self-service: Retail, shopping and personhood. Consumption, Markets and Culture 7(2): 149–163. Hawkins G (2018) The skin of commerce: Governing thorough plastic packaging. Journal of Cultural Economy 11(5): 386–403.

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Wrapping Things Up Hine T (1995) The Total Package: The Secret History and Hidden Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Other Persuasive Containers. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Lemke T (2015) New materialisms: Foucault and the ‘government of things’. Theory, Culture & Society 32(4): 3–25. McFall L (2010) Pragmatics and politics. Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2): 205–223. Meikle J (1995) American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Mol A (1999) Ontological politics. A word and some questions. In: Law J and Hassard J (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 74–89. Mol A (2013) Mind your plate! The ontonorms of Dutch dieting. Social Studies of Science 43(3): 379–396. Muniesa F (2014) The Provoked Economy. London: Routledge. Parsons R (2022) The role of plastic packaging in transforming food retailing. British Food Journal 124(4): 1285–1300. Plastics Week Souvenir Supplement (1954) The Argus, 14 October. Public Affairs Committee of the Plastics Institute of Australia. (1980a) Goodbye Seventies hello eighties. Plastics Digest 3(2). Discontinued publication available from Trove, National Library of Australia. Public Affairs Committee of the Plastics Institute of Australia. (1980b) Foods ain’t foods. Plastics Digest 3(4). Discontinued publication available from Trove, National Library of Australia. Strasser S (1989) Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon Books. The Australian Women’s Weekly. (1966) AMAZING new plastic that seals in freshness because it CLINGS. The Australian Women’s Weekly, 16 November. Available from: Trove, National ­Library of Australia (accessed 4 July 2017). The Canberra Times. (1972) Women drop wraps. The Canberra Times, 19 June. Thévenot L (2002) Which road to follow? The moral complexity of an ‘equipped’ humanity. In: Law J and Mol A (eds) Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 53–87. Twede D (2012) The birth of modern packaging: Cartons, cans and bottles. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 4(2): 245–272. Woolgar S and Neyland D (2013) Mundane Governance: Ontology and Accountability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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19 HISTORIES IN, OF AND FOR MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor

Introduction What might it mean to write more-than-human histories? This chapter examines new ways of doing environmental history that engage with interdisciplinary more-than-human and multispecies approaches. These more-than-human histories point towards new possible modes of historical, and wider scholarly, analysis. We contextualise these engagements within broader changes in environmental history since its emergence as a self-conscious sub-discipline in the 1970s, including responses to the growth of the relatively new field of environmental humanities within which more-than-human approaches have flourished. Here, we outline an established approach to ‘more-than-human histories’, in which ‘morethan-human’ is a way of foregrounding the fact that humans are never ‘just people’ but always entangled with other organisms, elements and forces. It also signals the primacy of relations over entities, the need to be reflective about one’s own ethics and interests, and the importance of foregrounding the lenses through which the objects of our histories become known or obscured. We describe how this approach can be further extended through an attentiveness to processes of multispecies ‘worlding’ and ‘the arts of noticing’ in historical methods and analysis, then provide two case studies of more-than-human histories from our own research.

Environmental History, the Environmental Humanities and More-than-Human Approaches Among all the historical sub-disciplines, engagement with more-than-human approaches has been led from within environmental history. In broad terms, environmental history had many antecedents but consolidated as a distinct field of historical enquiry in the 1970s, initially in the USA, where it emerged as part of New Left History, alongside gender history and black history. In 1972, Roderick Nash enthused that environmental history would ‘be history from the bottom up, but here the exploited element would be the land and the biota itself’ (363). This was a radical departure from R.G. Collingwood’s view in 1946 that ‘there is and can be no history of nature, whether as perceived or as thought by the

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scientist’ (302). Environmental historians sought to reveal the active role of ‘nature’ in shaping h ­ uman histories and aimed to address some of the many pressing concerns of the global environment movement at the time (Hughes, 2001). The field has since developed as a dynamic area of study, gathering distinct regional concerns influenced by specific intellectual trajectories, while continuing to engage with broader public and policy spheres (Griffiths, 2003; Winiwarter et al., 2004; Sutter, 2013). It has remained continually in dialogue with other fields, particularly historical geography and the biological and earth sciences. For many early environmental historians, the sciences provided a way to know an unfiltered ‘nature’ and thereby defend it. Social constructivism significantly transformed the field from the 1990s, when some environmental historians joined feminist philosophers, STS scholars, and others in thoroughly critiquing concepts such as ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ (Cronon, 1996). These concepts were shown to be not only culturally specific, but also implicated in Western colonial violence towards and silencing of Indigenous people, harmful gender relations and damaging notions of human exceptionalism. Environmental historians debated the implications and relevance of these approaches and concepts for their field, with tensions surfacing over differing views of ‘nature’ in various forums (Worster et al., 1990; Sutter, 2013). The field’s close relationship with the history of science helped it navigate these questions and find new ways of engaging with the sciences. As noted by Paul Sutter (2013), these debates led to a ‘thorough troubling of “nature” as a category of analysis’ (96) and to environmental historians moving away from positivist understandings of the nonhuman world. Sutter argued that the field was instead tending towards ‘hybrid’ approaches that examined the entanglement of nature and culture, seeking more complex accounts of human and nonhuman interaction and agencies. These approaches were in many ways grounded in a re-orientation towards materiality within the humanities and social sciences. They also reflected environmental history’s ongoing concern with the influence of biota, elements and forces on historical events in human history, and the continued influence of animal history and studies (Crosby, 1986; Wilson, 2010). However, Sutter (2013: 97) noted that these multifaceted ‘hybrid’ accounts did not ­always navigate difficult moral terrain and mixed consequences successfully, arguing that ‘environmental historians must better contend with and communicate the cultural, material, and moral complexity’ attending a time of environmental crises. Further, Gregg ­Mitman noted in his response to Sutter that, ‘as a field deeply committed to relationality, environmental history is also a field deeply resistant to embracing a relational ontology in which things exist not in themselves’, but are only visible and knowable through ‘changing material, social, and symbolic relations between and among human and non-human actors’ (2013: 130). In the early 2000s, some environmental historians called for a more sustained engagement with the work of scholars in STS and feminist studies (Asdal, 2003; Sörlin and Warde, 2007; Carey, 2009), such as Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledges’ (1988) and ‘companion species’ (2003) and Bruno Latour’s ‘Actor Network Theory’ (2007); however, few responded to these calls. The new field of environmental humanities has brought environmental history into closer proximity to scholarship that is centrally concerned with these questions of ethics and relational ontologies. Environmental humanities emerged in the early twenty-first century, seeking to consolidate and amplify perspectives from the humanities and social sciences to address mounting socio-ecological crises. It has served as an umbrella for environmental

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sub-disciplines like environmental history, environmental philosophy, eco-criticism and others. However, it is increasingly an interdisciplinary endeavour with its own concepts and approaches (Rose et al., 2012; Emmett and Nye, 2017). Interdisciplinary more-than-human and multispecies studies have flourished within the environmental humanities, seeking to bring together emergent approaches in cognate areas and create dialogue between specific disciplinary approaches around questions of shared concern. Grounded in the work of feminist studies, STS, and environmental philosophy, this scholarship has been deeply influenced by the work of Sarah Whatmore (2006), Jamie Lorimer (2010), Heather Paxson (2008), Anna Tsing (2010) and Stefan Helmreich and Eben Kirksey (2010), among others. In broad terms, this scholarship has argued against dominant Western notions of human exceptionalism and advocated for relational approaches. It aims to situate particular ways of knowing and acting within dynamic more-than-human relationships, examining shared and divergent modes of understanding within and between diverse human and nonhumans, and revealing how power – including questions of race, class and gender – shapes more-than-human worlds. Scholars in this field have been concerned with how specific more-than-human relationships have been co-constituted, and their consequences. This mode of examination has led some to begin to rethink histories in more-than-human terms, for example, anthropologist Heather Swanson’s (2022) examination of the transnational networks from the mid-nineteenth century that ultimately shaped fish bodies, human lives, and entire landscapes in Japan. They have also started to consider not only plural notions of time within and between human cultures, but also how time might be experienced differently by different species and what this means for more-thanhuman relationality (e.g. Bastian, 2017). In recent years, more-than-human histories have started to foreground dynamic, relational ontologies within more-than-human worlds and are finding new pathways through material, cultural and ethical complexity. Environmental historians have simultaneously been influenced by changing approaches in animal history and studies, which have begun to consider not only diverse and situated understandings of animals but also animal perspectives and shared meaning-making with humans (Ritvo, 2022). More-than-human approaches and animal studies are overlapping areas of enquiry, with some shared scholarly influences, like Haraway, and questions, for instance, of nonhuman cognition and emotion. However, there are also discernible differences. Perhaps the most obvious is that work in animal studies has tended to focus on human-animal relationships, whereas more-thanhuman approaches have sought to consider relationships between a much wider variety of nonhuman actors, including fungi, microbes, plants, rivers and so on. Indeed, some have argued that distinctive agencies of plants need to be better accounted for in more-than-human research (Head et al., 2014). Importantly, more-than-human approaches – even when they might centre a particular element or organism, even an animal species – aim to position these within a much wider array of shifting more-than-human relationships. Animal studies scholars have also identified a shared concern with animal rights and welfare, whereas more-than-human approaches tend to have a more situated, contextual approach to ethics and politics (Gruen, 2018; Ritvo, 2022). Below, we outline an approach to more-than-human histories that has aimed to consolidate and define recent work in this area. It seeks to foster further dialogue between environmental history and more-than-human scholarship so as to enrich these fields and identify the opportunities and challenges they present to each other.

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More-than-Human Histories Co-Constitution More-than-human approaches emphasise relationality and the co-becoming of entities. While recognising the agencies of specific humans and nonhumans, these approaches foreground connections and disconnections in forming worlds and experiences (Giraud et al., 2018). More-than-human histories, then, are grounded in an approach defined by co-­constitution: that organisms, elements and forces cannot be considered in isolation, but must always be considered in relation. Importantly, this includes the co-creation of particular human and nonhuman understandings, knowledges and cultures that, in turn, shape actions and help to create worlds. Specificities are crucial in examining situated relationalities, and historical research and approaches are important in examining the specificities of changing relationships (see Tsing et al., 2019). Historians reveal why and how particular relationships formed within more-than-human worlds and what the consequences have been and for whom. This approach calls historians into a view of the past that positions humans, along with their particular ontologies, within dynamic more-than-human relationships co-created with many other organisms and forces. Environmental historian Diogo de Carvalho Cabral (2021), for example, recently argued that leafcutter ants compelled English colonists in Brazil in the nineteenth century to reflect on how they were being interpreted by the ants. The colonists cleared the forests for agriculture. The ants responded to the removal of the forests as ‘semiotic selves’ (55), ultimately turning to colonial coffee plantations as a source of leaf material, thereby destroying the colonists’ crops. De Carvalho Cabral examined historical documents that seemed, almost reluctantly, to describe the dynamic responses of the ants. He urged historians to take seriously Ewa Domanaska’s approach to an expanded notion of document authorship – of ‘multispecies co-authorship’ (cited in de Carvalho Cabral, 2021: 71) – in interpreting this kind of archival material, to acknowledge that the ants elicited a response. Building on this foundation, we advocate for more thoroughgoing attention to ­historical co-constitution, in which all manner of unlikely subjects, as well as the usual suspects, are always with us. Because how we understand our shared past and choose to represent it plays a role in shaping the present and future, we need historical narratives and analyses in which politics, relationships, cultures, experiences or technologies are never just ‘human’.

Multiple Species, Multiple Voices More-than-human histories emphasise diversity and multiplicity of beings, relationships, experiences and cultures. This includes an emphasis on multiple agencies, including of ­species – and communities or individuals of a particular species – as well as other nonhuman entities, and forces, many with their own projects and modes of acting as well as responding. It is an expansive view that is always considering which other relationships and agencies might be at play. This resonates with Asdal’s (2003) call for historians to adopt a radical openness to diversity and difference. Importantly, this also means considering how different humans and nonhumans might be divergently situated within particular historical situations and relationships (van Dooren et al., 2016). Here, an emphasis on the particular, with multiple species – and diversity within species – as well as multiple perspectives and voices, demands our attentiveness to issues of justice and inequity in multispecies worlds. 311

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As historians go about repositioning the human within multispecies entanglements, we must continue to attend to human diversity (Nash, 2000). Class, race and gender, for example, have been given both meaning and materiality through entanglement with nonhumans. From the elaborate feathered hats that signalled the class and gender of Victorian women (Merchant, 2010) to the exploitation of pregnant mares for human hormone replacement therapy (Haraway, 2012), questions of gender are deeply entangled in multispecies worlds. An attentiveness to specific sets of multispecies relationships can help to shed new light on to the ways that ideologies, including that of race, have helped to create particular worlds and have been challenged. For example, human-lion relationships were used by colonial governments in Namibia to further racist ideologies (Heydinger, 2021), while the Georges River in Sydney helped to facilitate the activism and continued presence of Aboriginal people in the area, as they resisted British colonisation and racist government projects of assimilation (Goodall and Cadzow, 2009). In many ways, inequities based on gender, race, species and other divisions rest on establishing and maintaining firm boundaries and hierarchies that are both revealed and overturned with a focus on the particular, including nested sets of relationships between humans and nonhumans. These kinds of multispecies entanglements and their differential consequences have been engaged with and distilled by environmental historians in three main ways. Firstly, a focus on specific kinds of organisms has revealed broader sets of multispecies relationships and the varied consequences of particular ways of being and acting, such as the movements of birds between parts of Africa and Europe (Jacobs, 2016). Secondly, there are studies that have focused on particular sites, like Western Australia’s Stirling Range National Park (Gaynor, 2017). Thirdly, a range of studies have identified and elaborated global multispecies networks, such as the growing, processing and distribution of tea in Ceylon/Sri Lanka within and beyond the influence of the British Empire (Melillo, 2014). For historians, thinking in the multiple is not just about constructing single histories from multiple organisms, perspectives and voices, but showing the way we all (including different organisms) inhabit histories differently, sometimes in ways that clash. Indeed, it draws us into a consideration of multiple historicities, only some of which are human. Further, specific animals and plants, as well as rivers, volcanoes and other landforms may be ancestors, shape shifters, creators and spirits within some cultures, including Indigenous cultures. In Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demuth (2019) examines the multiple agencies that have shaped the Artic Beringia region that stretches between Russia and Canada from the midnineteenth to late twentieth century. She examined the way the Chukchi, Iñupiat and Yupik Indigenous people navigated American capitalism and Russian communism, highlighting the roles of animals such as whales and walruses as well as gold and oil. Demuth further examines nonhuman cultures and understandings, for example, that of whales who have responded to changes to their environments, including humans hunting them. This history centrally grapples with Indigenous cultures and concerns, including both using animals and respecting them, questions of labour and class, cross-cultural interactions between Russian, American and Indigenous communities, and tensions between views of some animals as resources and efforts by others to conserve them.

Situated Ethics and Politics More-than-human histories draw us into particular ethical and political considerations (Giraud et al., 2018). We call these situated ethics and politics as they are grounded in an understanding that we are all embedded within particular sets of relationships that together 312

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shape our collective worlds. This includes a recognition of different kinds of ethics and politics that can shape historical approaches and understandings of the past. Importantly, more-than-human histories ask researchers to recognise the situated perspectives not just of their research subjects, but of themselves, in which their values and actions inform the historical questions they ask and the kinds of historical practices with which they engage. A recognition of multiple situated perspectives, ethics and politics in which diverse morethan-human agencies inhabit the world differently can potentially lead to a description of complexity and entanglement as an end point (Sutter, 2013). This can obscure the particular values, ethics, and politics at stake and detract from a clear argument, though this need not be the case. Within more-than-human and multispecies scholarship, scholars have argued that a consideration of entanglement and mixed consequences forces us to take responsibility in arguing for some worlds over others (Castree et al., 2014; van Dooren, 2014; Giraud et al., 2018; Haraway, 2018). These are necessarily arguments for particular multispecies worlds which must consider a broad range of consequences and relationships. Ginn et al. (2014: 115) argue that we need to ask, ‘who lives well and who dies well under current [and past] arrangements, and how they might be better arranged’. Multispecies and more-than-human approaches further expose a range of inequities rooted in essentialist and hierarchical ideas of race, gender and class, as well as species. Such approaches often provide new perspectives on these kinds of inequities and show them to be not just social or environmental but rather part of wider, contested bio-cultural terrain. Rather than removing attention from important histories of colonisation, race and gender, such approaches can re-focus attention on them. As others have noted, narratives – which are central to historians’ craft – can convey connectivities and multiple causes necessary for more-than-human histories (Griffiths, 2007). Yet, inevitably we must focus on particular sets of more-than-human relationships and subjects. Here, there is an ethics and politics to consider too, as in illuminating some subjects we consign others to the shadows. It is important to consider which perspectives are being foregrounded and which are being ignored, along with which worlds are being argued for and why. In fact, Asdal (2003: 73) has argued that a key contribution of Haraway might be to provoke historians into asking of their work, and with not only human actors in mind, ‘[t]o whom are we giving voice and agency, and at whose expense?’ More-than-human histories attend to which lives and relations are remembered, and which are forgotten.

New Sources More-than-human approaches draw historians into specific methodological considerations. How can nonhuman historical agencies be studied? Are these agencies able to be found at all in historical sources? Some historians engaging with these perspectives have started to approach traditional sources, like archives and documents, in new ways and thereby reveal diverse more-than-human agencies. Historian of science Etienne Benson (2011) has argued for greater attention to ‘the animal trace’ in archives and historical documents. Indeed, Benson argued that we cannot escape the fact that archives and documents have been co-created with animals, and that ‘to see even the most human of texts as nothing but human… is to succumb to one of the most powerful modern humanist illusions’ (2011: 4). If we accept that everything is co-created in more-than-human relations, then we must also regard archives and documents as co-created in this way – and not just in the materials that make them up but also the stories within them. De Carvalho Cabral and Andre 313

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Vasques Vital (2021: 2) have argued that animals ‘are both products and participants in the embodied co-performances of writing, which makes documents relics of more-than-human encounters. Thus, when we read accounts from the past, we are actually listening to anthropographically edited multispecies chats’. Might these sorts of methodologies be useful in approaching more-than-human histories? Can historians use these to be more attentive not only to animals, but plants, waters, fungi? In examining these more-than-human worlds, historians might not only approach archives in new ways but also use different sorts of archives, like wood carvings within museum collections. In treating these as material-semiotic nodes, historians might learn, for example, more about the intertwined lives of particular people, cultures, and trees within wider sets of more-than-human relationships, along with revealing power dynamics informing particular collecting practices. Historians might also look to other sorts of archives, like fish ear bones, in order to know more about the lives of particular nonhumans. Environmental historians have often combined archival research with oral histories and site visits (Holmes and Goodall, 2017). These methods might incorporate insights and techniques being developed, for example, within multispecies ethnography. These kinds of approaches to more-than-human histories might be further extended through ‘the arts of noticing’ and an attentiveness to processes of multispecies world-­ making in historical methods and analysis. Anna Tsing (2015) has argued for using ‘the arts of noticing’ in her multispecies ethnographic research (see also Tsing, 2010). This approach seeks to challenge narrow historical narratives of modernisation and progress by constantly attending to multiple agencies and voices, both human and nonhuman, thereby drawing our attention to the diversity and consequential actions of the multiple more-than-human agencies that make and remake the world in relation. As Tsing (2015: 21) notes: ‘the modern human conceit is not the only plan for making worlds: we are surrounded by many world-making projects, human and nonhuman’. Elsewhere, Tsing has argued for rethinking histories in more-than-human terms using these sorts of approaches (Tsing, forthcoming). Might we consider the ‘arts of noticing’ an environmental humanities methodology that can be used in undertaking different methods, with different sources? In dialogue with Tsing and others, anthropologist Pierre du Plessis (2022: 49) has argued for ‘tracking’ as a methodology that ‘represents a way of noticing the assemblages of more-than-human relations that make up landscapes’. Might environmental historians use ‘the arts of noticing’ to track more-than-human traces in their research, archival and otherwise?

Case Study: Children and Birds By way of an example, consider a more-than-human history of the entanglement of children’s and birds’ lives in post-war Melbourne. Childhood is a form of human difference that entails a lesser presence in the historical record, but this history draws on sources produced by the Gould League of Bird Lovers, which was instigated in the early twentieth century to engage children in bird protection. On joining the League, children pledged to protect native birds and not collect their eggs, and to prevent others from injuring native birds and destroying their eggs (Beck, 1953–1954). Launched in Victoria in 1909, Gould Leagues were

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subsequently established in other states. By 1935, over 750,000 memberships had been dispensed (Age, 1935). The Leagues were not child-led, but often provided a framework within which children established bird clubs and set their own agendas for action. In 1948, the Victorian League inaugurated an annual magazine, the Bird Lover, which tapped into school children’s flourishing interest in birds, encouraged by enthusiastic teachers in a range of city and country schools. The first few issues of the Bird Lover are dominated by adult contributions, but increasingly the pages feature contributions from children. Some of these were likely submitted for publication at the behest of teachers, though many are notes and observations from the bird clubs that the children themselves ran at their schools. The Bird Lover reveals a mix of dispassionate observations and emotionally involved stories and vignettes along a spectrum from noticing, to knowing, to caring. There is abundant ­anthropomorphism – permitted in print, presumably, as an indulgence of children’s imagination and immature scientific consciousness. But Catherine Johnston (2008: 643, 646) has argued for the benefits of a ‘responsible anthropomorphism’, based on ‘our actual relationships’, and ‘the understandings which come from direct experience within relational environments’. Children’s anthropomorphising of the birds they lived with facilitated the development of ongoing relationships by making these nonhuman animals and their behaviours more familiar. This had quite material outcomes, in the children’s associated care and provision of food for the birds – and also a decline in egg collecting as the birds entered the children’s sphere of moral engagement. Children were particularly drawn to what birds ate, and to feeding them. The Gould League encouraged all forms of non-destructive bird observation and interaction and recommended that members install bird infrastructure in the form of nesting boxes, bird baths and feeders, as well as planting trees for nectar and shelter; birds could be ‘befriended’ with food (Bird Lover, 1965, 1967). Feeding was undertaken at various levels of sophistication. The Bird Club at Clayton South primary school, located in a rapidly urbanising south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, reported in 1966 that they encouraged native birds by offering dripping and nectar, rather than the bread and seed that appealed to introduced birds (Bird Lover, 1966). However, Jennifer Cook, writing from a recently established eastern suburb of Melbourne, reported in 1958 that Many of us feed the birds in our gardens with food scraps from the kitchen. While robins like soaked bread, thrushes like cold mashed potatoes or pieces of rice pudding, and sparrows will eat anything — the starlings’ favourite kitchen foods are all the fatty pieces. (Cook, 1958: 19) The twentieth century was a difficult time for many birds in Australia. Many native birds suffered from destruction of habitat as vast swathes of the country were developed for agriculture. Introduced predators and competitors took a toll on many species, as did hunting, poisoning and shooting. Others, however, flourished in the growing habitats of towns and cities.

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Most urban contributions to the Bird Lover in the 1950s and 1960s were from children living in suburbs on the rapidly urbanising fringe of Melbourne. Here, birdlife was in flux, as avian homes were destroyed and replaced with human housing. Birds that had previously lived in the area were no longer able to live there, new species moved in, and some existing species changed their behaviour. It is difficult to study urban birds scientifically because of the number of confounding factors, but a growing body of research suggests that urbanised bird populations often behave differently from their non-urbanised counterparts. In particular, they tend to become less flighty, and more tolerant of the presence of nearby humans (Møller, 2008). There’s little scientific research on the effects of wild bird feeding in Australia, though studies elsewhere suggest that supplementary feeding by urban residents can potentially influence almost every element of bird ecology, and effect long-term changes in population dynamics (Robb et al., 2008). It therefore appears likely that while some changes in urban bird assemblages and behaviour in urbanising areas on the fringe of Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s were due to the effects of clearing bushland and building on farmland, the bird feeding practices of many new human residents of the area, including Gould League members, also played a role. They were part of a historical process of birds becoming urban birds: the birds’ fearlessness, their prevalence, sometimes their survival, were facilitated by interactions with children who wanted to befriend them. Of course, children were not alone in this – many adults fed birds too – but it is important to recognise that children within and beyond the Gould League, independently and in collaboration with adults, played an active role in this transition and enculturation of (some) birds to an urban life. While parts of our story about children and birds are necessarily speculative, we know from the pages of the Bird Lover that birds in several districts on the urbanising fringe of Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s developed close, if impermanent, relationships with Gould League children; these entanglements shaped the lives of both in an urbanising environment.

Case Study: Wayilwan Women’s Weaving, Plants and Wetlands Another example centres on Wayilwan Aboriginal women’s weaving practices and the Macquarie Marshes, a Ramsar-listed wetland of international importance in north central New South Wales, Australia (Kingsford and Thomas, 1995).1 Here, an engagement with contemporary Wayilwan women’s practices draws us into a more-than-human history that is often entirely absent from documentary archives formed within British colonial power structures. One of the authors first travelled to Wayilwan Country in 2017, where she began discussing the Macquarie Marshes with Wayilwan woman Danielle Carney Flakelar. Later, Danielle told her that weaving with semi-aquatic reeds and sedges from the Marshes is one way that Wayilwan women continue to connect with Country and with multiple generations. Wayilwan women have used these plants to weave baskets, mats and other items for many generations.

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Weaving is co-becoming. These connections are shaped by the plants themselves, which flourish within particular Country. Danielle explained that in the Macquarie Marshes, there are particular Properties of weaving with the sedge from the Marsh, because you harvest it right, it’s straight out of the ground, it’s green, you weave it, and then as it dries it becomes tight on itself and it has its own personality I suppose. You know, you’ve got this item here and it’s green and lovely and it becomes. (Flakelar, 2018) The weaver and the plant have determined the new form together, but with a range of other influences – human and nonhuman – that have shaped the plant and the person (see also Ingold, 2002; Kimmerer, 2013). The importance of the properties of particular plants in shaping woven items have meant that in many places Australian Aboriginal people have encouraged plants to grow in particular ways through burning, which shapes the characteristics of the plants. ‘Cool fires’ can encourage stronger fibres, which create a different, stronger, weave to that of fibres from plants that have not been burnt in this way. Danielle emphasised that for Wayilwan people weaving cannot be separated out from other aspects of caring for Country, and there are other knowledges and practices that must be nurtured alongside weaving, like burning, language and medicine (Flakelar, 2018). Knowledge exchange within and between different Australian Aboriginal cultures is an important part of fulfilling responsibilities in tending Country. Sharing knowledge between women, including through and about weaving practice, is particularly important, Danielle noted, because of the cultural knowledge that is specific to women (Flakelar, 2018). It also helps to ‘build leadership confidence’ among women (Flakelar, 2018). Accessing parts of the Macquarie Marshes can be difficult, with some parts encompassed within grazing properties and other parts under New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service state government management. In recent years, weaving as a cultural practice has become a way to gain access to wetlands like the Macquarie Marshes that have been managed as protected conservation areas. Wayilwan woman Danielle Carney Flakelar explained that ‘weaving is a way we open the door [to Country]… To say that we as Aboriginal people want access for cultural practice’ (Flakelar, 2018). Issues around access to the Marshes have been ongoing since British colonisation in the region, spearheaded by pastoralists in the 1830s (Gammage, 1983). By the 1880s, the Marshes were hemmed by pastoral properties and in 1900 parts of the Marshes, totalling 40,000 acres, were declared a game reserve by the New South Wales state government (Masman and Johnstone, 2000). Some pastoralists were granted Occupiers Licences for these ‘marsh blocks’, which became concentrated into the hands of a few people (Masman and Johnstone, 2000). These gave them government authorisation to graze their stock there, predominantly cattle before the introduction of sheep in 1927 (Masman and Johnstone, 2000). By then, grazing cattle in the wetlands was acknowledged by many to be damaging the vegetation. Large sections

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of the Marshes became a Fauna Reserve in 1955, with many of the birds listed as protected under state acts (Masman and Johnstone, 2000). Parts of the Marshes were listed in the Ramsar convention in 1986, with the areas extended in 2000 and 2012 (Masman and Johnstone, 2000). Throughout this period, Wayilwan people’s access to and use of the Marshes was limited in various ways, compounded by government policies of surveillance and forced removal, a practice that extended from the colonial era well into the twentieth century, and arguably to today (Masman and Johnstone, 2000). However, Wayilwan people used a variety of strategies to maintain connections to Country, including working on pastoral stations (Byrne and Nugent, 2004). We might consider contemporary disputes about management of wetlands as naturalcultural places as a continuation of disputes about Aboriginal people’s legal rights to Country (see also Weir et al., 2013; Langton, 1995). Danielle emphasised that despite government policies supporting Aboriginal people’s access to and use of areas under National Parks and Wildlife jurisdiction, in her experience access has not always been easy: ‘In the past it depended on the manager at that park at the time and their attitude as to whether you get access to sedge and [other] plants out there as well’ (Flakelar, 2018). Her experiences point to ongoing effects of ‘fortress conservation’ (Brockington, 2002) approaches within government agencies rooted in both ideas of wilderness and a range of colonial-era legacies that clearly still need to be challenged. Relationships with landholders, especially graziers whose properties border the Marshes, have become important in accessing particular areas, including for ceremonies. She said: ‘We’re right in the heart of the Marsh, still getting access through just a hand-shake agreement with the landholder there who we’ve had a good long relationship with’ ensuring that ‘the next generation [is] connected with responsibility to maintain our connections to Country’ (Flakelar, 2018). Wayilwan and many Aboriginal people throughout the Basin continue to exercise their responsibilities to care for Country, even when access is difficult or near impossible. Country, like weaving, is woven into the world in multiple ways. Danielle explained that ‘Aboriginal women are still very connected to our roles and responsibilities from traditional law, we just have to adapt in the role because we can’t get on Country; our purpose is to nurture Country, people, and culture’ (Flakelar, 2018). Being in discussion with Danielle, going to the Macquarie Marshes, and researching the history of this wetland draws us into a consideration of the more-than-human histories and futures of British colonisation, protected area management and Wayilwan women’s past and ongoing connections to Country.

Conclusion People are never ‘just human’. Our lives, our politics, our stories – even our bodies – are always constituted in more-than-human relations that include plants, microbes, animals, storms and many others. More-than-human histories home in on specific relationships, formed from a suite of manifold possibilities, with reflection on how our stories privilege some lives and worlds over others. They attend to diversity within and across different species, forces and elements, attending to particularities and foregrounding the consequences of specific multi-natural entanglements. And they reject the conceptual division between 318

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‘society’ and ‘environment’, ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, highlighting the fact that there is no external ‘environment’ with which humans interact, only multiple and overlapping sets of relationships. The direction we have outlined here builds on existing work in environmental history, some of which already incorporates elements of a more-than-human ­approach. What we are proposing is a more comprehensive embrace of particular kinds of questions, approaches, methods and sources to produce fully fledged more-than-human histories for our times. There is much to be gained from bringing environmental history into closer conversation with new work in more-than-human and multispecies studies, and the ­environmental humanities more generally. The notion of the ‘more-than-human’ seems to have struck a chord within a range of ecologically oriented academic areas and is becoming more commonplace, though there is still a tendency to use the term to refer to nonhumans (or to ‘nature’ or the ‘environment’ more generally), rather than using it to destabilise the idea of the standalone, ontologically stable ‘human’. More-than-human histories highlight our inextricable entanglement with the living planet; deliberately connecting us to other lives and processes, many of which are currently under threat. In this time of environmental crises, we urgently need histories that are attentive to being in, of and for more-than-human worlds.

Note 1 For a fuller account of this case study, see O’Gorman, 2021.

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20 MAKING TIME FOR AND WITH HONEYBEES Catherine Phillips

A Short Visit It’s a big blue-sky day. A light breeze, the odd fluff of cloud, and leafy trees take the edge off the bright sun and warmth of the day. I am sitting on the grass in an out-of-the-way part of what’s called the System Garden on the University of Melbourne campus. The Gardens were laid out in 1856 as a space for botany studies, a few years after the University’s founding, and about thirty years after British colonisation of the area. Few reminders remain – a small conservatory tower as well as some older palm and cabbage trees. The plants are arranged in beds of related groups. The space is still sometimes used for teaching but for the most part they are experienced as recreational greenspace. The Gardens are a bit out of the way of my usual travel to and from the office, but occasionally I take the detour or wander this way for a break in the day. Today, my time in the Gardens is dominated by observing bees. On the way in, I investigate the bee ‘hotel’. Increasingly popular in Australian gardens, these human-provided habitats combine things like bamboo stems, drilled wood offcuts, and so on to target solitary native bees who like living in small hollows. The one in the Gardens is in a recessed, sealed doorway. It was built in 2021 with the intent of highlighting action that can be taken in the face of declining native bee numbers. Like the beehive, it is also monitored as part of on-campus biodiversity accounts. On previous visits, I have seen native bees in the Gardens – blue-banded, masked, resin – though I don’t know if they stayed at the hotel. This visit, though I’m sure they are around, I see none. There are honeybees1 in the Gardens – feral visitors and residents of the Garden’s chimney hive.2 What I’ve learned from beekeepers is a ‘happy buzz’ comes from the hive. I hear many bees as they seek food. It’s a good day for foraging. Some of the trees and bushes I passed on the way here seemed to vibrate with bee activity. The hive entrance is a high traffic zone. Honeybees swoosh in, check-in with guards, deliver their load of pollen and/or nectar, and get back to gathering. Others in different times-of-life stay hidden within, doing the evaporating and capping, feeding, and cleaning. Today, I’m not beekeeping, not opening the hive to check on bees or collect honey. Instead, I sit back and feel the thrumming

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of their back and forth, back and forth. The breeze wafts the hive’s smell my way. Sourness would point to disease and a need to intervene, but today there is none of that. I can’t quite describe the smell – sweet, warm, somewhat musky, spicy. Inimitable. An opportune afternoon, for me, and for the bees. My time to visit is up. It passed quickly. The bees are indifferent to my departure, but I carry the thrum and scent with me throughout the day. Spending time with bees – whether in a garden (as above) or as a beekeeper – raises plentiful questions, not least of which concern the timings involved. This chapter is an exploration of, and call for further attentiveness to, the more-than-human temporalities that comprise our world.3 What might it mean to understand time and temporalities as more-than-human? What might such understandings reveal about the significance of relations through which we live, whoever ‘we’ are? Which experiences and understandings of time come to matter? How does a temporal lens offer insight into the ‘complexity of specific culture-nature intersections in their in/visible and im/material expressions’ (Adam et al., 1997: 81)? My wager is that attending to more-than-human temporalities will enable deeper exploration of the experiences and negotiations involved in the practices that constitute our worlds, and offer another means of considering the ethico-political implications of human-nonhuman relations. The idea that time is experienced and made through diverse and imbricated relations and, further, that such relations are more-than-human, is gaining attention (see Bastian, 2012; Brice, 2014; Gan, 2017; Neimanis and Walker, 2014). We might note, for instance, the immediate and enduring destruction evident in extinctions, hazardous waste, or oceanic pollution (Adam, 2005; Neimanis, 2018; Phillips, 2017; Van Dooren, 2014). Or the cycles and durations involved in managing plants (Head et al., 2015; Jones and Cloke, 2002), producing wine (Brice, 2014), or caring for soil (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015). In addition to detailing complex relations, more-than-human accounts reveal other possibilities, signalling what figures might serve as an inspiration for alternative senses of time (Bastian, 2012) or questioning conceptual and methodological habits through attention to non-linear, relational experiences of time (Bawaka et al., 2017). As these examples suggest, accounts of multi-species co-constitutions of time offer a means to disrupt notions of unitary time and straightforward accounts of ecosocial challenges. I understand temporality as embodied and enacted, emergent through and with practice. Time, in this view, takes shape through lived, situated experiences and particular expressions. This understanding builds on Ingold’s (2000) sensibility that time emerges through repeated, collective activity. Importantly, there is multiplicity here. Edensor and Holloway (2008) point to this with their notion of ‘polyrhythmia’, or the varied rhythms that manifest through the duration of a journey, building and waning in consistency and intensity throughout. Tsing (2015) reiterates such thinking in her suggestion that, in considerations of how to live with today’s multiple ecosocial crises, there is a need to notice both multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories, and their moments of reinforcement or conflict. Such accounts indicate the multiplicity and complexity needed in developing accounts of morethan-human temporality. Without such understanding, more-than-human coexistence, and more importantly solidarity, is unlikely. Thus, it is vital to examine the varied temporalities of humans and how they affect, disrupt, accommodate, and/or ignore those of nonhumans (and vice versa). To ground this chapter, I explore intertwining multiple temporalities and timescales through attention to one more-than-human practice: beekeeping. Attention to these

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temporalities offers useful insights into how beekeeping is known, felt, and reproduced. Recent social studies of beekeeping offer important insights into the complexities of the practice (Adams, 2018; Moore and Kosut, 2013; Phillips, 2014) and the politics of knowledge involved in related ecological damage and extinctions (Lehébel-Péron et al., 2016; Lezaun, 2011; Maderson and Wynne-Jones, 2016; Watson and Stallins, 2016). Emerging research also explores how ‘saving the bees’ manifests in particular places (Andrews, 2019; Lorenz and Stark, 2015). However, the importance of time and temporality to beekeeping is less explored. In the partial stories of beekeeping told here, a patterning of lived temporalities emerges – refrains are told, remade, and reiterated through negotiated action. In addition to demonstrating the complications of more-than-human temporal experiences, I gesture to how different senses of time and temporality become conveyed, coordinated, and contested. As the overture above suggests, the times told through this chapter travel not only with bees and keepers but resound in wider worlds swayed through tales of (among other things) catastrophe and loss, slow violence and quick kills, and learning to coordinate tempos and rhythms.

Crisis: Death and ‘Saving the Bees’ Insectaggedon. This is how Monbiot (2017) characterises reports of declining insect life. The notion is built on concern about a crisis of pollinators, especially honeybees, that has been stewing since unexpected losses were reported as ‘colony collapse disorder’ in the United States a decade earlier. As it turned out, the US experience with unexplained bee losses was not isolated. There are debates over the extent and degree of insect losses but worrying declines in the diversity and abundance of insects are being observed around the world (see Montgomery et al., 2020; New 2022). Concern about these losses orients around not just the insects themselves, but the wideranging implications for human food systems and for ecosystem health. For example, 75% of crops are pollinated by insects, while 40% of pollinating insects face extinction (especially butterflies, bees, and moths) (IPBES, 2016). In relation to bees in particular, bees’ products – honey, wax, venom – provide significant benefits for humans, but the most valued service they provide is pollination. Of the 100 crop species providing about 90% of the food worldwide, 71 are at least partially bee-pollinated. Honeybees remain the most commonly managed pollinator worldwide (UNEP, 2010: 1). A public focus for urgent action is clear from the many ‘save the bees’ campaigns, media reports, policies and programmes, and films. It is an important reason for the beehive in the System Gardens. And although honeybees (at least managed ones) are unlikely to become endangered soon, publicity around the need to ‘save the bees’ may spotlight the larger challenges facing pollinators and insects around the world. With its reiteration over time, these bee/pollinator/ insect losses have become a global crisis. But crises happen at various scales. In Australia, the crisis occupying most beekeepers is the arrival of Varroa destructor. This mite is a parasite for bees that is considered ‘the most serious threat to apiculture globally’ (UNEP, 2010). Without chemical treatment, Varroa can kill a honeybee colony in just a few years (Rosenkranz et al., 2010) and even with treatment they weaken a colony. Each country where the mite has migrated reports bees with shorter lifespans, declining brood survival, altered behaviours, exhaustion, malformations, increased viruses, and high vulnerability to other threats (Boecking and Genersch, 2008; Kralj and Fuchs, 2006). Varroa alone cannot be blamed for recently observed mass losses 324

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and increased death rates for honeybees, but it is clear they are a major factor (Potts et al., 2010; vanEngelsdorp and Meixner, 2010). In Australia, this mite garners much attention for those thinking about the future of beekeeping, and bees. As one long-standing urban beekeeper remarked: ‘You know, bees are fantastic. It’s good, wanting to save bees. But saving our bees is going to be, going back to Varroa mite, preventing that from coming here. That’s gonna be saving the bees’. Australia was the only major honey-producing country without the mite, until June this year. Although beekeepers felt its arrival and establishment was inevitable, vigilance and anticipation of the mite were deemed vital to the future of bees and Australia, resulting in biosecurity restructuring (see Phillips, 2020b). Previous arrivals of the mite were confined to port areas; however, the mite now has a foothold in New South Wales having spread along the coast and inland. Regaining Varroa-free status is the current priority. A state emergency was declared, entailing bounded zones with varied biosecurity measures including limited movement, required monitoring and reporting, and the killing any colonies located within ten kilometres of an infected hive. Before its arrival, the estimated agrifood costs of Varroa were estimated at AUD0.63–1.31 billion over 30 years (Hafi et al., 2012). This is likely an underestimate, as the killing of thousands of colonies in the eradication zones was not considered, nor were any ecological, recreational, or ethical considerations. As this suggests, the threat to bees (and corresponding solutions) may be differently defined but the sense of urgency to ‘save the bees’ remains. The future is understood to be catastrophic, unless humanity can lead the world out of the mess. In each of the narratives of crisis outlined, bees condition human survival. Humans may shape bees’ possibilities of living through colonial dispersals, industrial agriculture, habitat destruction, and anthropogenic environmental change. But, we are told, bees would not leave this world alone. The message is: we must save the bees to save ourselves, now. Yet, this ‘now’ is conditioned by assumptions about the past and concerns for the future. In the past, it is assumed, bee lives were not so precarious or at least pollination (and therefore human lives) was less at risk. The hope for the future, then, becomes a return to a time when this present disruption is resolved and the norm re-established. Even as bees and people are living amid losses – projected and real – the message is reiterated. There is a sense of a future rushing towards the present, reshaping it, demanding action before it becomes ‘too late’. Within this defined crisis, there is also a (somewhat contradictory) linear understanding of time in which ‘time is divisible into a static past, a given present, and a predictable future’ (Grosz, 1999: 9). In this sense, humans make progress, step-by-step, towards a desired future. Anticipating the ecosocial disaster of pollinator loss not only shows the future as something that can be enacted in the present, it supports particular pursuits and materialisations of envisioned worlds. Anderson (2010) highlights anticipatory action as undertakings to create an interval in time that enable the conditioning of futures-yet-to-come. As exemplars, arguments for particular solutions may: favour endurance through sustainability measures like planning bee-friendly flora or transitions to multifunctional agriculture (IPBES, 2016); hasten an imagined future without reliance on bees through techno-scientific innovation such as manufacturing drones capable of pollination (Potts et al., 2018); or seek to extend the present through biosecurity measures and regulatory changes (Phillips, 2020b). Achieving such futures, however, is not straightforward. One suggestive example is how the desire to retain bees into the future spawned a surge of new urban beekeepers in many Western countries, including Australia (Clarke and LeFeuvre, 2021). Yet, with this surge came 325

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questions about whether cities have enough flora, not only for the health of managed hives but for other creatures that rely on the same flora (see, for example, Antonelli et al., 2020). Despite desire and action aimed at progressing to a future of living with bees, this points to the limits of a solely linear understanding of time rather than accounting for iteration, pauses, false starts, and so on. It is worth pausing to consider the gains and losses made by viewing the future only through a lens of catastrophe, and by addressing crisis only through asking how to halt its progression. Desirable, dangerous, inevitable, unpredictable – however futures are conceived they serve to problematise the present through a moral process of valuing one future while discarding others through rearrangements of politics, technologies, ethics, and society. To study such past-present-future dynamics is to question what lives and ways of living are being protected, and how. As Tsing (2015: 19) argues, ‘neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival’. Heeding this warning, we might work to turn times of crisis into collective stories, but that need not mean being confined to such tales.

Productivism: Fast Lines and Slow Devastation For some, ‘save the bees’ campaigns can lead to ‘solutions’ (adopting a hive, growing ­pollinator-friendly urban gardens, etc.) that obscure the real causes of the crisis: industrial agriculture (see Nimmo, 2015; Shanahan, 2022). Honeybees are susceptible to the same threats as many other creatures – declines in habitat and food, increased chemical exposures, spreading pests and diseases, and changing climate. Their use as semi-domesticated service animals in industrial agriculture increases these pressures. The rates of exposure, disease, and death for honeybees can be exceedingly high in such systems (Shanahan, 2022). Further, the attrition of multiple stressors over the lives of bees, colonies, and habitats continues to confound scientific, public, and regulatory thinking about how to address pollinator declines. It seems that though managed honeybees are not endangered, they may still need ‘saving’. Industrial agriculture is underpinned by a notion of productivism – continual growth in product and profit – that relates to notions of time as controlled in measure, linear in progression, and abstracted from biophysical context. In an exploration of remakings of time, Adam (2005) suggests that ‘industrial time’ shifts time to become a quantifiable resource that can be managed and commodified. This version of time is characterised by the clocks and timesheets, factories and labs, productivism and efficiency, that has spread globally with expanding capitalist accumulation. What is sold by beekeepers (honey, propolis, wax, pollination services) is not just the product of the time of beekeepers, but the time of bees. It is bees who labour in creating honey and, incidentally, pollinating crops. Beekeepers facilitate and scale up this work. Beekeeping is fundamental to industrial agricultural systems; worldwide, honey production is over 1.7 million tonnes (FAO, 2018), and global crop pollination services are valued at USD235–577 billion annually (Potts et al., 2010). Beekeeping is industrialising as it develops alongside, and serves to support, industrial agriculture. Producing food in industrial systems involves simplification, standardisation, and mechanisation, with the aim of continually increasing yield and/or efficient resource use. Monocultures, chemical inputs, and large scales are characteristic of this kind of agriculture. Although there are many other pollinators, the characteristics of honeybees make them particularly well-suited to keeping, 326

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and industrial food systems. Honeybees live together in large colonies (tens of thousands of bees), forage a wide variety of plants, and work relatively large areas (commonly travelling five kilometres). Because of their manageability and performance, honeybees are the most commonly managed pollinator worldwide (Potts et al., 2010). The industrialisation of beekeeping is far more advanced in North America than elsewhere; yet, its influence is felt globally as bees, ‘best practices’ of keeping them, and the fruits of their labour travel the globe. ‘Slow violence’ is a term coined by Nixon (2011) to signal the enduring and hidden destruction wrought by this shift towards industrialisation. He explains this concept as ‘delayed’, ‘incremental’, ‘accretive’ violence that is not easily perceived and ranges across spatial and temporal scales. Reiterating this thinking in consideration of beekeeping in the United States, Nimmo (2015) explains the ‘apis-industrial complex’, suggesting that the same industry supported by and relied upon by beekeeping fosters the devastation confronted by honeybees (and other pollinators). For instance, large monocropped fields require kept bees to be brought in to ensure fruit set is widespread, yet these fields offer forage that is briefly available and lacking in diversity, contributing to poor nutrition that requires redress (Durant, 2019). This means either moving hives to more diverse forage to rebalance nutrition or feeding them with sugar water and pollen patties that, again, undercuts nutrition but keeps them going.4 Reflecting ‘industrial time’, beekeepers (commercial or not) often take steps to enhance productivity, efficiency, and convenience. The first, perhaps most obvious, step is keeping bees in hives rather than hunting for nests. Estimates suggest that honeybees became semi-domesticated (or kept) about 7,000 years ago (Preston, 2006; van Engelsdorp and Meixner, 2010). In Australia, honeybees arrived as part of settler-colonial agriculture in 1822 (Hopkins, 1886). Spreading with settler-colonial extension and their own swarming, bees became part of Australian socio-ecological systems as kept and feral creatures. At the time, straw domed hives (or skeps) were used for beekeeping. They provided a clean, dark, sheltered place for bees, but harvest meant killing the inhabiting bees. In 1852, L.L. Langstroth introduced a new hive design – stackable wooden boxes with moveable internal frames (Hopkins, 1886). This new design provided more control and speed for hive management and honey harvesting – frames could be removed for harvest without killing the colony, colonies could grow by stacking boxes (avoiding swarming) and checking on bees was made easier. This meant more honey could be produced, harvesting occurred more than once, fewer bees were lost (i.e., labour retained), and more hives could be managed, all of which provided a basis for industrialising. Although often tweaked (e.g., the addition of a ‘chimney’ as in the System Garden), Langstroth hives remain the standard for commercial and hobbyist beekeepers alike. This hive’s possibilities for production, however, was not without implications. Hive living can limit a colony’s immunity; the high-densities and limits on swarming enables accumulation of some pests and diseases and bees struggle to counter the impact (Kohl et al., 2022; Loftus, Smith and Seeley, 2016). Even without additional pressures in agricultural or urban places, there is a slow violence to life in a hive. Another common practice involves controlling the queen. Although colonies are collectives, the queen has much influence on the personality and success of a colony. Once reared and mated, a queen lays all the eggs in a colony. Depending on genetics, fertility, and signals from the colony, the queen lays in greater or fewer numbers, for shorter or longer durations, with better or worse characteristics (hygiene, temperament, etc.). As she ages and her stores of semen decrease, she becomes unable to fertilise as many eggs. To retain 327

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the needed numbers, the colony may choose to create another queen to contend for the ­position. A ­beekeeper may also make this decision and ‘re-queen’ (i.e., remove and replace the queen). A queen’s life is long compared with other colony members, but her death is quick and violent. She ends either in a fight with another queen or with a head crushed between beekeeper fingers. Most commercial operators I spoke with requeen quite regularly – every 18 months or so – to ensure their hives remain full and productive. Hobbyists tend to wait and see for longer (three to four years). Given the importance of the queen, a sub-industry of queen breeding has emerged. The ‘best’ queens can be expensive and often queen supplies are limited, leaving beekeepers to pursue other options – less skilled breeders, breeding themselves, letting colonies rear a queen, or even merging queened and unqueened hives. To meet commercial and hobbyist beekeeping demands, queens, honeybees, and hives are now shipped around the world, (hopefully) arriving ‘just-in-time’ for colony survival. A rethinking of time as ‘industrial’ does not obliterate but may obscure, challenge, or reiterate other temporalities, entwining through practices. Based on my work with beekeepers and bees, setting up dualisms of ‘industrial’ versus ‘natural’, ‘commercial’ versus ‘amateur’, etc., rarely hold up to scrutiny. The worlds faced and remade through beekeeping are more complicated than such configurations indicate. Further, an industrial sensibility of time does not confine itself to industrialised factories or fields. Instead, it spreads through society. As such, it is not just industrial agriculture but industrial time – as it manifests variously in places and practices – that needs interrogation.

Learning and Coordinating with the Colony A lot of beekeeping is about timing. Is the weather right? The time of day? How are the bees, and I, feeling? How’s the hive been doing? I have learned to ask all these questions before opening a hive. And the actual checking of a hive takes focus. Masses of fuzzy bodies wiggling and waggling, being born and giving care, returning with pollen and nectar, going about their lives. Visiting with bees outside their hive, as in the chapter opening, can be compelling, but opening a hive is something else. I become rapt, almost immersed in another world. Watching, listening, touching, smelling. Occasionally tasting a bit of honeycomb. But there are practical issues when keeping bees, and that means getting on with it. Watching, listening, smelling, now for potential problems. Drawing on previous experience, using diverse resources but especially previous interactions with beekeepers and bees, I continue to learn the ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015). The colony tells me whether it is time not just to visit, but to intervene. The physical and emotional work of beekeeping means becoming attuned to hives over time, altering one’s rhythms to coordinate with those of bees, and feeling how one is altered through repeated encounters. Brice (2014) uses a case of viticulture temporalities to explain the need for wine producers to ‘work with’ vines, as it is only through attuning to plant temporalities that a good time to harvest is discernible. Similarly, beekeepers, bees, and the plants they rely upon must find a means of coordinating their varied temporalities to achieve healthy bees, pollinated plants, and successful beekeeping. During their lifetime, worker bees take on a series of tasks based on their age, moving from cleaning when they are a few hours old, through nursing, cooking, constructing, and guarding, until they begin foraging in their early 20s (days not years). Bees tell it is time to change jobs by more than age; it is about colony condition, which shifts with weather, nutrition, colony age, genetics, and season (Huang and Robinson, 1996). The activity beneath 328

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a hive roof also involves bees sharing news about food, tasks, their queen, and general hive living. Bees bump, stroke, joggle, dance, and dart, among other things. The directions, tempos, and durations of their moves convey much of the goings on (Seeley, 2009). Beekeepers often speak about slowing down – slowing their bodies, focusing on bees, and enjoying the distance from monitored and measured times. For example, one commercial beekeeper (and bee broker) explained that his favourite time is: ‘When I’ve got time to just go out and observe. A nice, sunny day when the blossom is full out, the aromas is in the air, and the bees are coming… That’s a good day’. Slowing down and its associations with peace, calm, and mindfulness are frequently mentioned as motivations for continuing to keep bees. For several beekeepers, being a ‘good beekeeper’ meant not just observing but being patient. Working well with bees was understood to involve slow, careful movements with minds open to learning from bees, over repeated visits. For some, time recedes while watching bees resting, playing, and (mostly) working. My own notes are reflective of becoming rapt, moments drawing out, and time passing quickly. Other captivated beekeepers I interviewed, commercial and amateur, indicate that they become absorbed such that time stops, passes without notice, or is unexpectedly consumed. Commenting upon enthralling bees, one hobbyist (and hive broker) said: I think we don’t respect bees enough for what they do. […] It’s just fascinating. I could just, you could just open a hive, just have it open all the time and be looking at stuff. We [names deleted] get quite carried away actually; sometimes when we’re doing that. Though their fascination creates a desire to keep a hive ‘open all the time and be looking at stuff’, they can get ‘carried away’ so enthusiasm must be tempered. Continuous observations can be difficult, even dangerous, for bees. The respect this beekeeper advocates means not only slowing movements but also not overstaying one’s welcome. It is a compelling world that can provoke pauses as well as demanding action. This beekeeper continued by explaining that, ‘when they’ve had enough, the bees say “Come on! Move on! Close up the hive”’. The bees, then, remind a keeper of the time. They signal when ‘time’s up’, at least until next time. The temporalities of beekeeping do not end with the combined labour of colonies and beekeepers. Rather, broader rhythms and histories live within such encounters. Attuning to the rhythms of seasonal changes, growth patterns, and circadian cycles that colonies rely on and shape, beekeepers felt both the persistence and the dynamism of broader environments. One key example is ensuring that bees have access to a sufficiently diverse flora (nectar and pollen) that is vital for healthy colonies and beekeeping success. Chatting with a long-time hobbyist, they explained, ‘you’ve got to be looking out at the weather. I think, definitely for me, it makes me more aware of nature. Trees, you’ve got to look at trees’. Beekeepers rely upon flora – remnant, weedy, cultivated, conserved. This is a result of complex pasts including over 130 million years of insect-plant collaboration as well as human land management and planting preferences. Most commercial beekeepers move their hives to ensure nectar and pollen access (see Phillips, 2014), while hobbyists’ hives mostly remain static. This difference alters the focus – across a series of sites or on one place. Either way, an understanding of plant seasonality is necessary. Flowering frequencies, durations, and intensities vary with species, and with their reactions to environments. In Australia, Eucalypts serve as the main flora for most honey and though they can offer abundant flows, they are erratic; blossoming relates more to rainfall events than to seasonal cycles 329

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and involves time scales ranging from one to five years (Sommerville, 2010). This is distinct from other places, like North America, where floral seasonality is more consistent. In this context, beekeepers develop an event-focus to track potential nectar flows, sometimes over years. This learning and connecting with ecological temporalities is reiterated again and again by beekeepers as part of the appeal of their practice. Decreased accessibility of floral resources makes bee keeping precarious (Durant, 2019). Current efforts to engage publics in planting bee-friendly flora and disputes over access to state forest for apiaries (compare EPA, 2007; DEPI, 2013) suggest this kind of reliance. Disrupted relations between trees and bees raised by climate change further complicate matters. One experienced urban beekeeper I interviewed reflected: Things don’t flower at the right time, when they’re supposed to. It rains when things are blossoming and they [bees] can’t get out to forage. If the system’s kind of out of whack, bees aren’t getting the nutrition that they need in their hives. Such disruptions discerned by individual beekeepers, also appear more broadly in projections of likely decreases in honey and increasing pests (Gordo and Sanz, 2005; Nürnberger et al., 2019). Feelings of disruption, crisis, and un/avoidable futures are far from missing in the intimate encounters of beekeeping. Repeated visits spent patiently observing, becoming captivated and finding a mode of coexisting that beekeepers and bees can sustain takes time. Moore and Kosut (2013) explain that good beekeeping involves feeling bees’ ‘affective buzz’, a sense built through gestures and reverberations but not necessarily understood by all those involved. To achieve honeymaking, pollination, or just maintaining healthy hives, there is a need for human, bee, and plant tempos and rhythms to coordinate – even if this coordination is always incomplete. In its delights and challenges, learning with bees to be a good beekeeper is an unending endeavour.

Ongoing Thoughts Times and narratives of crisis may bring bees – and beekeeping – into focus. The long and intimate history of honeybees with people and plants, in combinations with their vital ecological and agricultural roles, may give traction to the warning of shared vulnerabilities and futures. The time made for and with bees may inhibit the attention given to other worthy creatures and worlds, but there is hope that the spotlight on bees might spread and prompt thoughtful questions and actions generally. I have argued that those questions and actions need to include pausing to consider time – how it is lived and what we tell ourselves and others about it. To explore this notion in a situated way, I detailed some rhythms and tempos of honeybee lives and deaths, as well as beekeepers’ efforts to learn, manage, and coordinate with them. A moment’s pleasure and a lifetime of labour; expected sequences and surprising variations; long- and short-term strategies; tempos of disruption and timings of flow; linear progress, repeating cycles, erratic irruptions, among others, feature in this account. Practices like beekeeping are shot through with multiple temporalities that tangle and split in ways that reinforce, ignore, or erode their resonance. Beekeeping is not exclusive in its temporalities; rather, it demonstrates a diversity of temporalities that refuse any reliance on universal or unitary notions of time. 330

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Recognising the temporalities of nonhumans, such as bees, is just a small step to gaining insight into their worlds. Thinking time in a more-than-human mode reveals the value of a temporal approach involving varied spans, scales, and rhythms. It also indicates that collective understandings of temporal forms and relevance emerge, with and without engagements with humans. Differentiated temporalities relate in complex ways – reiterating, contradicting, disregarding each other, raising possibilities and limitations. Only some resound, while others stutter, fall silent, haunt. Times that are lived and shared (or not) have practical, affective, and ethico-political implications that require careful interrogation.

Notes 1 In deference to those who shared their time and knowledge with me, throughout this paper, I use the colloquial ‘honeybee’ rather than the scientific ‘honey bee’. 2 Aiming to minimise potentially negative encounters, the chimney hive modifies a Langstroth hive with a ‘chimney’ at the entrance so that the bees’ flight path is above head-height. 3 Parts of this chapter are (sometimes slightly modified) excerpts from Phillips (2020a). 4 Urban beekeeping comes with its own risks to bee nutrition; though the flora may be more diverse, the massive increase in urban beekeeping is raising concerns about how many hives can be supported by available flora and impacts on other foragers (see Antonelli et al., 2020).

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21 THE LONG HORIZON Temporal Imaginaries in the More-than-Human Arts Chris Salter

In 1987, the American composer John Cage wrote a work for organ entitled Organ2/ ASLSP – an acronym for the expression ‘As Slow as Possible’. Cage, already a master of stretching listeners’ understanding of what could count as music, did not specify the piece’s duration in the original score, writing only to play it as slow as possible. Yet, the work was later adapted to be performed on a more unusual organ, one built for the German village of Halberstadt’s main cathedral in 1361. Specifically adapted for this instrument, the composition was proposed to initially run for 639 years, beginning in 2001 and concluding in 2640, with chord changes happening every eight to ten years (ASLSP, 2001). ASLSP is not the only musical work designed to elasticize the human lived experience of time. In the late 1990s, the London-based experimental cultural organization Artangel commissioned Jem Finer, British musician and founding member of the 1980s Irish punkfolk band The Pogues, to create a musical composition that would play even longer than ASLSP: 1,000 years. While Cage’s still ongoing performance in Halberstadt used age-old organ technology, Finer resorted to computational trickery to produce what he called ‘different flows of time: from a glacial crawl to the almost perceptible sweep of an hour hand’ (Longplayer.org, n.d.). Consisting of a series of precise rules applied to six short sections of music, ‘Longplayer’ was written in an algorithm in the Super Collider digital audio synthesis programming language. Longplayer is designed as a hybrid mix between metal and silicon: ‘composed for singing bowls – an ancient type of standing bell – which can be played by both humans and machines, and whose resonances can be very accurately reproduced in recorded form’ (Trinity Buoy Wharf, n.d.). Derived from different musical contexts and traditions, these two examples nevertheless have something in common: they both aim to use technical systems to create artistic works that defy the limited time horizon of human perception. While there are certainly historical examples of composers that attempted to stretch the temporal limitations of classical music’s duration (Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, which lasts approximately 15 hours or Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seven-day Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche cycle, which lasts more than 29 hours), music performance, the live temporal articulation/expression of music before an audience, is usually designed to fit into the perceptual limits of both public and

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venue: 2 minutes, 2 hours or, in another one of Cage’s works (the notorious ‘silent’ piece), 4”33. Asking the provocative question of who will be around to listen in 696 years or, in Finer’s case, 1,000 years serves as a strategy to launch a broader set of issues which form the context of this essay: how the concept of the more than human is being manifested not only in the social, natural and human sciences but also in contemporary artistic practice. Over the last decades, the so-called ‘new materialist’ focus on the non-human, more than human, other than human or, as anthropologist Irving Hallowell described in a 1964 conversation with an Ojibwa (Anishinaabeg) elder, ‘more-than-human persons’ (Hallowell, 1964: 69), has run wild in Science Studies, anthropology, sociology and the environmental humanities. It is important to remember that these recent debates around posthuman (Braidotti, 2013; Hayles, 2005), more than human (Whatmore, 2006; Abram, 2012; Tsing, 2013), non-anthropocentrism (diSalvo et al., 2011) and non-human (Latour, 2009; Grusin, 2015), however, predominantly developed in the (then) emergent field of Science Studies or (later) Science and Technology Studies (STS) more than 35 years ago. Discussions in Science Studies were centered around larger epistemological-political questions of what (and who) were considered as part of the practices of ‘science in the making’ (Latour, 1987: 4). But the concept has wandered, not only from STS to other disciplines. Indeed, more recent debates around decentering human action in favor of a ‘dance of agency’ (Pickering, 2010: 78) between humans and more-than-human persons have also been rearing their heads in design/ art contexts around the world. For example, one needs to only examine the questions posed by Cecilia Alemani, curator of the 59th Annual Art Exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, to cut to the heart of this debate. How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates animals, plants, humans and non-humans? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and the different organisms we live with? And what would life look like without us?. (Alemani, 2022) As another case in point, ‘Biomedia’, a 2022 exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany argues that In the 21st century, the idea of media simulating life becomes even more realistic: real motion and an input–output relation, which we call “participatory interactivity”, are very like a living organism which responds and adjusts to actions by living beings or the environment. (ZKM, 2022: n.p.) As these knotty descriptions reveal, discussions in contemporary art discourse and practice have been situated within a larger ecological context – the enmeshing of different life forms coupled with the ever-growing environmental crises that entangle both biosphere and the technosphere (Haff, 2014), threatening planetary survival. Dozens of exhibitions in the last decade have attempted to focus on this newly emerging period not only in human but more importantly, geological history. These include, for example, the late Bruno Latour’s Critical

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Zones (n.d.) at the ZKM (2020) or the eco-social renewal initiative ‘Driving the Human’ in Berlin involving a ‘non-human design lab’ (Driving the Human, 2022). More direct is that of the ‘Anthropocene’ exhibition originally at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, featuring work from the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The geological history these exhibitions focus on is one that the paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz describes where ‘the unintended consequences of human activities … have fundamentally changed the Earth System’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2019: 2). The human impact on the Earth System coached under the larger conceptual term of the Anthropocene is certainly not a given. According to Zalasiewicz, scientific bodies in the Earth System science community long rejected the idea that a human era could constitute a new geological or stratigraphic epoch (through interpreting rock records) since importantly the ‘great forces of nature that drove Earth’s geology were considered to operate on a vaster and longer-term scale than any kind of “puny” human impact’ (Zalasiewicz, 2019: 2). In other words, contrary to arguments emerging in the environmental humanities that the Anthropocene is symbolic of Industrial and Post-Industrial capitalism’s impact on the planet, the geological discussion of the term has been focused on the Anthropocene as ‘as an epoch of Earth time, just like all Earth’s previous epochs’ even though ‘it so happens that its distinctive characteristics have up until now been driven largely by a variety of human actions’ (Zalasiewicz, 2019: 3). As Zalasiewicz’s (2019: 2) description reveals, the role that geological time scales play is key to understanding the ‘material signals of the geological Anthropocene’. This interplay of temporal dynamics is essential to understanding what researchers have called the different scales of ‘Gaia time’ (Latour, 2021: 178) which involve multiple, interlocking and potentially self-regulating feedback loops that constitute how different environmental behaviors operate across different ecosystem-based scales (Lenton et al., 2018). But these shifting and overlapping time scales in the so-called ‘biosphere’ also find expression in the other term that brackets this essay: that of the technosphere. According to Peter Haff, the American environmental scientist who coined the term, the technosphere is an autonomous global system that essentially acts as a driving force for the geologically shaped Anthropocene. As Haff argues, the ‘sphere suffix calls attention to similarities between the technosphere and the classical Earth spheres – atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2019: 139). The technosphere ‘metabolizes not only energy and materials, but also information and knowledge’, while its ‘global and ubiquitous’ scale by way of technological systems, networks and structures spans the Earth (Haff, 2014: 301). What Haff suggests is the emergence of entirely new political, scientific, technological and economic strata that operate in complex interlocking feedback loops, and constitute new states and scale of existence. But the technosphere is also Janus-faced – it never functions completely outside of human control but also never completely within it either. In this sense, as Haff argues in much of his work, the technosphere’s complexity, fed by fossil fuels and with operations ultimately inaccessible to the meddling of human agents (even though we are partially responsible for its existence) suggest that it functions autonomously from human meddling. Although humans who are essential for its operation and maintenance must influence the technosphere, we are, alas, only subordinate parts (Haff, 2014b). What this interrelationship between the different biological and social-technical spheres reveals is that problems that we think are separate – for example, the relationship between neural-network-driven data analysis methods and global warming – are actually tightly 336

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coupled. This coupling between atmo, bio and techno is also articulated by sociologist of science Helga Nowotny (2021: 4) when she writes: The process of digitalization and datafication coincides with the growing awareness of an environmental sustainability crisis. The impact of climate change and the dire state of the ecosystem upon which we depend for survival call for urgent action. But we are equally in thrall to or anxious about the digital technologies that are sweeping across our societies. From a cultural standpoint, what lurks unspoken in this collision between the Anthropocene and Technosphere are the more-than-human actions that mark many current artistic practices. If we return to this essay’s opening, the artistic works suggested by Cage or Finer are clearly not aligned with these contemporary environmental-technoscientific issues. Yet, they acutely demonstrate how aesthetic acts that challenge the limited time horizon of homo sapiens’ immediate perception might bring larger anthropogenic questions to the forefront. In this context, the acts of those more and also less than human (those cast aside from our humanity) can thus be more fruitfully examined across different temporal and spatial scales: micro, meso and macro. At the same time, what these strange sounding paradigms suggest is that artists are increasingly attempting to escape the bubble of human exceptionalism (Pickering, 2008; Bauman, 2014; Galloway, 2017) by creating artistic and design-based works in which plants, animals, cells, bacteria, viruses, physico-chemical phenomena and machines framed by larger ecological-technological contexts become central protagonists in aesthetic actions. Given that temporal dynamics are key to grappling with the agency of such more-thanhuman phenomena, what then are the imaginaries of time that these artistic works express? How has temporality been scaled, staged, organized and technically produced in the emerging ‘more than human arts’, that might consequently put forward ideas of the different time horizons that are present in such new ecological-technical hybrids? To answer these questions, I will examine three different spatio-temporal scales in which current artistic practice with the more-than-human operates. The microtime scale focuses on what Jens Hauser and Lucie Strecker (2020: 12) have termed ‘microperformativity’ – strategies that seek to ‘decentre the human performer’ and ‘replace them with the performativity of a large panoply of other-than human agencies, biological and technical ones alike’. Examples include projects ranging from microbacteria on display in museums to the workings of computational models of neurons, At the second scale, that of the meso, we find the human body entangled with other more-than-human entities. The core question here is how do we think about the doings of actions (Austin, 1975), what linguist J.L. Austin called ‘performatives’, among human bodies and more-thanhuman forces and how do such performatives operate in artistic frames and sites such as the gallery and the stage. Finally, the third scale, that of the macro, encompasses the larger contexts of what Paul Edwards (2017: 3) names ‘knowledge infrastructures’ which display qualities of ‘modularity, scale and organization’, such as complex architecturalscale environments. Here, performative acts depart from the registers of both micro and meso performativity and move upward to a planetary scale, taking the Earth and sky themselves as scenographic-political-social and environmental backdrops. Hence, by focusing on these three scales, we might get closer to understanding not only how the more-than-human produces and performs its own unique sense of temporality but also 337

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how these forms collide with our limited anthropocentric perception of time, duration, change and dynamics.

Microtime The experience is disconcerting to say the least. After passing a wall filled with curatorial gibberish which states that in the artwork ‘mental images [are] produced by using a brain-computer interface, which captured a subject’s brain activity as she imagined elements she was prompted to think of, such as biological entities, prehistoric tools, machines, code and artworks among other’ (Huyghe, 2021), I enter into a massive old train depot. There isn’t much to see in the sprawling space, with the exception of several large LED screens whose light is so bright that they sear my eyes. Instead, it is what I don’t see that marks the encounter with this installation so uncanny. Inside this old depot, the French visual artist Pierre Huyghe has installed the flotsam and jetsam of our material world. Bees, salt, sugar, agar, ants, mycelium, bone, glass and resin are joined to form eerie anthropomorphic sculptural forms that sit adrift in the space. Images on the screen rapidly flash by in pulsing tempo. The fluctuating cascade of human, animal and machine forms is produced by a machine learning process called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a favorite of artists due its production of strange, shifting forms. At the same time, tiny, almost delicate sounds like scratching a piece of wood or shuffling loose paper interrupt the cavernous silence of the hall. In the curatorial notes on the entrance wall, Huyghe’s installation is described as a mix of ‘organic and inorganic matter, inanimate objects and technical apparatuses’, producing an ‘immersive, constantly changing environment, in which humans, animals and nonbeings learn, evolve and grow’ (Huyghe, 2021). But more important is what keeps this whole ecology in motion, namely a microscopic organism – an incubator of living HeLa ‘immortal’ cells that endlessly divide and thus, act as a central clock for the synchronization and desynchronization of events in the space, from the GAN’s tempo to the amount of noise that interrupts the vast space of the depot. What is interesting is that After Uumwelt, the title of Huyghe’s installation in a reference to the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s appropriation of the German term umwelt or ‘environment’, can only bring these temporal cycles of bio matter and technological calculation into the limited frame of human perception through contemporary display technology. The periodic morphing of ‘mental images’ generated by the GAN is due to mathematical steps through the algorithm’s ‘latent space’, a mathematical space which maps the features or characteristics that a neural network learns from a set of data (in this case an image). It produces an oscillating representation that moves from one set of features to another as the algorithm attempts to optimally reconstruct the initial image, thus producing a new distribution of samples from the original information. This is what one set of scholars refers to as a kind of ‘epistemic oscillation’ between one set of data points and another set, which is constructed from the original data distributions (Shen et al., 2019). Yet, the algorithm’s opaque temporality lies beyond our ability to perceive it. We thus need to visualize its output in a matrix of pixels as a human readable image despite the fact that such representations are only temporal mathematical calculations on high-dimensional vectors that in actuality have no direct humanly perceivable visual output. 338

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One could argue that the temporal process generated by the GAN in Huyghe’s work exemplifies what Jens Hauser and Lucie Strecker (2020: 1) term microperformativity – ­strategies that seek to ‘decentre the human performer’ and ‘replace them with the performativity of a large panoply of other-than human agencies, biological and technical ones alike’. To prove their point, Hauser and Strecker (2020: 2–3) detail an almost absurdly long list of materials potentially available for microperformative encounters, from ‘extra-terrestrial matter’ to DNA sequences, cynobacteria, yeast, ‘microbiomes sourced from breast milk or Pygmy populations’, ‘jelly fish, xenopus, zebra fish and mealworms’, and ‘last but not least, viruses’. Indeed, as international interest in work with such multi-species interaction between humans together with everything from mushrooms and plants to deep learning algorithms has taken off, how then does such microperformativity temporally materialize? To get a sense of this, we can examine several artistic works since 2010 that involve the production of chemical processes whose durational behaviors are based on laboratory time rather than the time of participants entering a gallery or exhibition framework. For example, US artist Adam Brown and microbiologist Kazem Kashefi’s The Great Work of the Metal Lover (2012) sought to create ‘microbial alchemy’ by feeding a particular strain of microbacteria liquid a substance of toxic gold chloride. By way of the bacteria ingesting the liquid’s toxins and waste, the substance then produced tiny and solid 24-karat gold nuggets over the course of a week. What the public experiences of the installation in the exhibition space is, however, entirely something else: a setup typical of many artworks using biological material that features laboratory objects and equipment, including a glass alchemical bioreactor, a gas manifold and carbon-dioxide and hydrogen-filled tank. While a curatorial text declares that the process is ‘documented in real time by a USB microscope and a real time video feed’, clearly one week is quite a long period for human visitors to perceive such metabolic transformation (Brown, n.d.). Thus, one can say that the key element of the performance, the transformation of the bacterial waste into tiny gold nuggets, takes place without the presence of onlookers. Similarly, in the artwork BBa_K221000: First volume of teenage gene poems, a team of young Indian artists and designers from the Srishti design academy called ArtScience­ Bangalore used Escherichia coli bacteria to synthesize a microbial metabolite called Geosmin: a metabolite that is responsible not only for the smell of moist soil or freshly plowed earth but more specifically, the smell directly after a monsoon. Like The Great Work of the Metal Lover, ArtScienceBangalore’s attempt illustrates an interest in staging biochemical processes whose temporal expressions are mainly hidden from public view (ArtScience­ Bangalore, n.d.). Another work that forces the question of a more-than-human temporal horizon is architects’ Daniela Mitterberger and Tiziano Derme’s Degrees of Life, an artistic research project focused on ‘human, machine and microbial entanglements’ (Mitterberger and Derme, 2022). In a real-time spatial installation, human visitors aim to communicate with three different types of bacteria (Cyanobacteria, E. coli and Sucrofermentas). Via a range of human-machine interfaces, including pupillometry (eye tracking). In one part of the installation, the visitors’ blinking is captured by eye-tracking hardware and software ‘to activate specific machine parameters in order to visualise, stimulate, or direct bacterial growth and behaviour’ (2022). Yet such growth (and indeed, human communication with bacteria at all) is not instantaneous but rather operates in a temporal cycle that lies outside of the span of human attention and concentration. 339

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These works aside, it is rare that the durational microtime of stuff (let alone people, if we witness the work of artists like Marina Abramovic) that is staged before a perceiving public is enough to remind audiences of the different time horizons of the more-than-human world. In fact, the deliberate exhibition of such temporal processes that occur in biologically driven life is problematic for cultural institutions that create exhibits for viewers’ time perception that is calculated for minutes, rather than the required days, weeks, years or even centuries to grasp the unique temporalities of other life forms. ‘The notion that the art object is eternal, static and commoditized is still deeply rooted within the art museum ethos…indeed, the museum can be equated with a necropolis – a resting place for dead things’ (Catts, Salter and Zurr, 2021: 116). Moreover, the larger issue is that many of the entities whose temporal evolution is being put into public view, from mealworms eating plastic to slowly growing tissues, are, in fact, themselves ontologically unstable because they have been either removed from their given milieux or artificially created to produce action. In fact, as Catts, Salter and Zurr (2021: 118) argue in a 2021 article examining the problematic of biologically based artworks in rapid need to assimilate museum or exhibition contexts, ‘there is the long outstanding assumption that artwork which emerges in the studio and is subsequently transferred into the gallery or museum is fully stabilized because it is under the artist’s control’. Yet, clearly many of the more-than-human entities that are put onto public display are, in fact, only ontologically given or emerge over time. If the site of the laboratory gives us the permission to produce these others that are not in our image, however, the museum wants to keep them at bay because our monsters somehow challenge the belief that what is displayed comes knowingly, solely from human minds and hands. (Catts, Salter and Zurr, 2021: 127)

Meso Time In an exhausting and durational 2015 performance lasting between 12 and 20 hours, an audience bears witness to the Slovenian new media artist Spela Petric standing motionless in near darkness and doing…nothing. Exploring the issue of what Petric calls ‘plant-human intercognition’, the performance involves the artist standing before a large plot of live cress on the ground which is illuminated by a powerful light. As the artist’s shadow blocks the cress from receiving light, she interrupts the plant’s process of photosynthesis, resulting in a strange deformation of the cress – eventually leaving a browned out silhouette where Petric’s shadow once stood. This deformation is a literal physical elongation of the cress as it tries to respond to the lighting conditions through a process calls etioliation – the blanching and whitening in plants that take place when the process of photosynthesis is disrupted. While the cress attempts to grow away from the shadow, however, another imperceptible change is said to occur: the real physical body of the artist is claimed to shrink since ‘standing still for a prolonged amount of time decreases the artists body height due to fluid loss from the intervertebral disks’ (Petric, n.d). Petric’s installation Confronting Vegetal Otherness: Skotopoiesis (‘created through darkness’) aims to confront two seemingly opposed kinds of temporality: that of human and plant time. As Petric (n.d.) states on her website, plants as vegetal beings need to be seen as ‘complex, continuous multi-species communities operating at time scales and in expressions 340

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not perceptible with the innate human sensorial apparatus’. Indeed, as the artist wants to make patently clear, post-anthropocentric visions not only should connect plants with humans but also ‘recognize the distinct properties of each organismal type as well as their relational context in ecosystems’ (Petric, n.d). Petric’s desire to confront a human perceiver with phutonic (plant-like) principles is not the only example of such a theatricalized-aesthetic confrontation between humans and plants. Over the last ten years, as more-than-human life has become a new object of knowledge and performance, dozens of artistic projects have featured plants, trees, soil, mushrooms and plantimal-like life forms in interaction with human bodies. In a deliberate critique of the apocalyptic tones of the Anthropocene, for example, the anthropologist and STS scholar Natasha Myers names the new plant-animal regime the ‘Planthroposcene’, declaring that the main force that made the planet ‘livable and breathable’ for us are the ‘photosynthetic ones’: ‘photosynthetic organisms form a biogeochemical force of a magnitude we have not yet properly grasped’ (Myers, 2021). Myers’ call to arms to escape the homo sapiens-dominated Anthropos with planthropos has been taken up by dozens of artists and projects, from the trans-feminist ‘Trans-Plant’ performances of the nomadic lab Quimera Rosa (n.d.) or the dance works of the international collective ‘Dance for Plants’, which involve actively ‘unfolding the human-plant relationship through dancing, writing, drawing and singing’ to a 2020 Barcelona musical performance by conceptual artist Eugenio Ampudia for an audience made up only of 2,292 plants (Guy, 2020). But unlike the hidden scientific apparatuses necessary to bring the infra-sensorial effect of microperformativity into the human perceptual range, the meso scale of such more-than-human artistic events creates a continual tension between the time of the human body before an audience and the time of other entities in co-relation with such bodies, whether plants, animals or machines. The position of plant, animal and machine actions in relation to human bodies in artistic projects introduces ethical questions about the role of agency in such work and who really has control over it. This issue is strikingly articulated in a 2016 Frieze magazine article on how plants might help us live more ethically when the author pointedly asks: What is the status of these organisms? Are they a material for artists to work with or are they collaborators making a creative contribution to the finished piece and, consequently, deserving of recognition? And can these questions usefully be posed about the use of non-human living entities in artworks? (de Wachter, 2016) Sharing the stage with the photosynthetic temporality of plants is not the only type of meso scale for more-than-human artistic acts. From the presence of the mechanical crane of the deus ex machina on the Greek stage to more recent projects with autonomous machines like robots, androids and automata, the arts and particularly the performance-based ones have historically been occupied by machines which move in their own time. Perhaps one of the most interesting examples of machine-time in relationship to human time is the 2018 android opera Scary Beauty by the Japanese composer Keiichiro Shibuya, the Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro and the Japanese artificial life researcher Takashi Ikegami. Performed by an artificial android named Alter who is endowed with a complex of interconnected algorithms that enables the machine to conduct an orchestra and sing in its own synthetically constructed language along with the musicians, Scary Beauty directly 341

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confronts the human audience with a multi-scalar and polyphonic experience of multiple forms of temporality (Scary Beauty, 2019). While the android Alter organizes its initial chaotic movements in time with the music based on a series of computationally drive artificial neural networks called SNNs (spiking neural networks) that drive the machine’s sensorimotor movements, the human musicians adjust their playing according to the tempo of the machine as non-chaotic movements from it emerge. According to Ikegami, this is not a trivial task. So we have the android conducting the orchestra. If you put a metronome in front of an orchestra, it’s very stable, but it doesn’t mean that the orchestra becomes fantastic as players. The metronome is not good enough to bring the orchestra together. Maybe the metronome instead needs to couple with the orchestra. What kind of coupling? Maybe the robot cannot be a stable metronome; it’s a more adaptive metronome, resonating with the orchestra. That’s why the movements of Alter and their periodicity are not a perfect metronome. The orchestra and the robot have to be coupling with each other, resonating together. (Salter, 2022: 122) Scary Beauty is the latest example of technologically organized time expressed by way of a quasi-autonomous anthropomorphic body. Yet, other artistic performances of more-thanhuman phenomena take a different tactic. These projects consciously stretch an audience’s temporal perception by confronting them with the behavioral possibilities of physicalchemical phenomena adapting to its environment by way of sensing and effectors; what Simon Penny (2008: 3) has called an ‘aesthetic of behavior’. Such an aesthetics of behavior normally refers to practices ‘that exhibit dynamic real-time behavior, or responsiveness to their environment and require real time computation’. These examples of phenomena that exhibit dynamic responsiveness to their environment (with or without computation) in fact, constitute a whole genre of physics-based artistic works, ranging from the actions of vibrations, fog, rain and water, patterns of caustics on light, air, soap bubbles, ice and gas to microfluidics and hydrodynamics. Indeed, many of these works self-consciously aim to address crucial ecological and environmental feedback and coupling processes which also unfold over differing temporal regimes. While there are countless performances of physico-chemical phenomena in artistic practice that feature the temporal unfolding of complex dynamic systems of weather, environmental turbulence or physics-based actions, one particularly notable example stands out: the fog sculptures of the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. Inspired by her Japanese upbringing together with the scientific work of her father, a well-known Japanese physicist who first created artificial snowflakes, Nakaya’s more than 50-year artistic career chiefly revolves around the creation of artificial fog sculptures produced through the means of a specialized high-pressure pump/motor irrigation system that sprays micro-droplets of water into the air. Nakaya’s (2012: 7) works generate what she has called ‘not only a potent dialogue with nature but with oneself’. The experience of being immersed in Nakaya’s time driven work derives from being placed in a compressible form of waiting and perceiving for multiple overlapping time windows: the microtemporal change in atmospheric conditions, the mechanical periodicity of the pump, and the speed of droplet diffusion based on the site of action. At the same time, Nakaya’s work, which the Japanese media studies scholar Yuriko Furuhata (2022: 2) labels 342

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climatic media, also shifts the inhabitant’s attention to the temporal flow of the environment that such ephemeral sculptures occupy, particularly when such work takes place outdoors. As the artificial fog envelops a space outside, one experiences a continually shifting environment, one composed of media that ‘includes the architectural, scientific, and artistic techniques and technologies of producing climate-controlled bubbles and modifying weather’ (Furuhata, 2022: 4). For example, sunlight, filtered by way of water droplets, gradually oscillates in ever changing patterns from pencil-like beams to an overwhelming white out. Simultaneously, one experiences a fluctuating sense of presence as the bodies of fellow observers/participants gradually become occluded by the mist’s own temporal behaviors. The fact that both Scary Beauty and Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculptures come from Japanese culture is perhaps not surprising. As the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his own paean to the non-human time of the film frame, ‘the Japanese could be said to be trying to master time aesthetically’ (Tarkovsky, 1989: 47). Indeed, Japanese art, both technical and traditional, in tune and in tension with the natural environment, uses temporality as its material. From the sudden suspension of temporal flow during the rests in the classical Gagagku orchestra to the hypnotic, circular rhythms that turn the 600-year-old ritualized Noh theater into a continually repeating and yet, always slightly different flow, the more-than-human acoustic/spatial/textural and dramatic structure of Japanese art is wholly produced by a time horizon that becomes the form, function and expression of the artistic work itself.

Macro On September 2, 2022, the largest manmade contemporary artwork in history opened to the public. In a space almost 1.25 miles long and a quarter of a mile wide (2 km by 0.4 km), this object by the American land artist Michael Heizer is considered to be potentially one of the largest sculptures ever created. Constructed from dirt, rock, concrete and sand from the local Nevada desert where the work is installed and put together by a battery of construction equipment, Heizer’s appropriately named City, with a price tag of nearly $40 million, was in development for 50 years. City looks nothing like a contemporary megalopolis like Delhi, Tokyo or Dubai. Instead, its enormous Ziggurat-like structures are influenced by pre-colonial Mesoamerican cities: Chichen itza, Machu Pichu, Teotihuacan (Greenberger, 2022). The tension between an artwork that attempts to operate on a temporal scale close to stratigraphic time and the actual time one gets to spend with the work is equally mind boggling. City’s temporal scale is almost staggering yet; the time scale of a coveted visit at $150 a person for less than a few hours is more extraordinary. But Heizer’s entire oeuvre, which has long sought such monumental scales, is not the only example of artwork that aims to invoke the planetary time scale that we began this chapter with. During the defense of his Doctorat d’Etat, the twentieth-century composer Iannis Xenakis (1985: 5), who became famous for his transformation of sound through probabilistic (so-called ‘stochastic’) and statistical processes, declared that there was no reason that art could not follow the example of science. Art could rise up ‘from the immensity of the cosmos and, as a cosmic landscaper, modify the demeanor of the galaxies’. Xenakis was referring to his own works which he labeled polytopes, large-scale architectural light and sound environments that the composer created in the 1960s–1970s in such expansive locales as the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis in Iran, the Cluny vaults 343

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in Paris and the ancient site of Mycenae. Yet, Xenakis’ vision went further than enclosed spaces. He went further by proposing a cosmic polytope which would cast ‘spiderwebs of colored laser beams over cities and countrysides’ and could even use ‘artificial satellites as reflecting mirrors so that these “webs” rise in space and surround the earth with their phantasmagorical, moving geometrics; joining the earth and the moon by filaments of light’ (Xenakis, 1985: 5). If a more-than-human art at the microscale of insects, mushrooms, bacteria, phytoplankton or electronically computed mathematical models has intersected with the presence of human witnesses (if no longer human actors), the vast majority of these works still operate at the spatio-temporal scale of human perception: the stage, the gallery or the festival hall. In other words, too small for Xenakis’ cosmic vision. But since the early 2000s, under the growing shadow of a ‘interlinked set of communication, transportation, bureaucratic and other systems’, including human components, that ‘act to metabolize fossil fuels and other energy resources’ (Haff, 2014a: 301), the long running tradition of artistic work at planetary scale begun in the Earth Art of Heizer, Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, and Agnes Denes, among others, is being radically revised. In a series of artistic events that question the spatial and temporal boundaries between public and private space, light, sound, lasers, architectural structures and more recently, even drones have turned the sky itself into a new stage. One of the most interesting projects in recent years was a performance-event staged by the French/German/UK duo HeHe. The pair’s 2010 performative action Nuage Vert (Green Cloud) used an industrial green laser to trace out the shape of a cloud of changing emissions emanating from the suburban Salmisaari CHP (Combined Heat and Power) power plant in Helsinki. Here, the sky over the Finnish capital itself became the site for a chemo-scenography at an environmental time scale. Through a large community-based campaign, some 4,000 local residents reduced their energy consumption by 800 kVA on one designated evening of the week-long evening performance, thus shifting the size of the emissions cloud and temporally visualizing the reduction of energy consumption. Unlike Nakaya’s artificially created yet environmentally tuned fog, the tempo of change in HeHe’s green cloud is only made temporally actionable by a phalanx of invisible forces: from infrared cameras detecting changing amounts of particulate emissions to the unforeseen actions of everyday energy consumers (HeHe, n.d.). The view from the sky to the ground has also a spatio-temporal continuum to record time’s indelible scale of passing in the entangled context of the Anthropocene-Technosphere. Internationally recognized for his aerial photography of anthropogenic sites in which ­nature-cultures have become fundamentally entangled with each other, Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky’s work constitutes a lexicon of long term, beyond human time scales represented in the elements and effects of the Earth’s fossil fuel-driven past, present and future: Oil, Mines, Water, Quarries, and Tailing ponds (Burtynsky, 2016). In the 2016 ‘Anthropocene’ titled series, Burtynsky’s (2016) massive imaging captures what the photographer himself calls ‘civilization’s cumulative impact on the planet’. Despite the freezing of time through the photographic medium, Burtynsky’s images of strip-mined land, clear-cut forests, colossal fuel refineries and neon-colored toxic sludge pits instantiate the violent separation between deep geological time and the compressed, sped up temporality of industrial capitalism. The relationship between sky and ground time, the heavens and the Earth, finds perhaps its ultimate expression in the work of the Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno whose Aeroscene initiative, a ‘synthesis of art, science and environmental activism’ proposes the 344

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creation of ‘a new era for the air, to free the air’ (Saraceno, n.d.). Less an artwork than what Saraceno on his website has called an ‘active community movement’, the myriad of the Aerocene projects all involve ‘fossil-free flight’ by way of floating transparent Mylar sculptures held in the air solely by heat from the sun, infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface, and the sensing and the dynamics of atmospheric currents. In one of Saraceno’s aerosolar performances entitled Fly with Aerocene Pacha (2020), the artist, collaborators and representatives from 33 Indigenous communities lifted a 250kg hot air filled, balloon-like flying sculpture together with human passengers above the Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina, one of the largest lithium deposits in the world. In many ways, Aeroscene directly ties the technosphere-driven obsession for conflict minerals like Lithium, rich in the deserts of Argentina and Chile, to the range of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere. But named after the Indigenous concept of Pacha which describes the linkage between the ‘subterrestrial, terrestrial and celestial realms in Incan cosmovision’ (Saraceno, n.d.), the Aerocene project is more ambitious than a simple theoretical critique. Instead, the project literally aims to connect the time scales of the Earth’s ground with those of the sky.

Conclusion: World Times beyond Us Have the Technosphere and the Anthropocene so thoroughly enmeshed themselves in our cultural mindset that we can bid farewell to human presence in the arts without shedding a tear? Does the contemporary need to create artworks that operate below and above our limited human time horizons demonstrate the belief that art with more than humans can salvage the less than human world that we seem bent on eradicating? Or, is perhaps the proliferation of new entities at these different temporal scales an opportunity to experience what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn (2013: 5) calls a new ‘anthropology of life’ which involves the ‘enchanted world’? This enchanted world is not a ‘meaningless one made meaningful by humans’. Instead, such meanings will ‘emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these’ (Kohn, 2013: 5). It is in this sense that artists’ harnessing of the micro, meso and macro times of entities and stuff in a world that is undeniably occupied by other than human persons might then provide us with new ways of sensing and experiencing that world that lies truly beyond ourselves.

References Abram D (2012) The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage. Alemani C (2022) Curatorial statement for the milk of dreams. Available at: https://www.labiennale. org/en/art/2022/statement-cecilia-alemani (accessed 1 July 2022). ArtScienceBangalore (n.d.) Available at: https://archive.aec.at/prix/showmode/42357/ (accessed 4 September 2022). ASLSP (n.d.) Available at: https://www.aslsp.org/ (accessed 15 October 2022). Austin JL (1975) How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bauman W (2014) Religion and ecology: Developing a planetary ethic. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti R (2013) Posthuman humanities. European Educational Research Journal 12(1): 1–19. Brown A (n.d.) Available at: http://adamwbrown.net/projects-2/the-great-work-of-the-metal-lover/ (accessed 10 July 2022).

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22 THE COSMOPOLITICS OF URBAN PLANNING IN A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD Jonathan Metzger

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in. Proverb commonly ascribed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Troubled Co-becoming in Shared (Urban) Space Patsy Healey famously defined spatial planning as the ‘practices of managing our relations of co-existence in shared spaces’ (1997: 68). Underpinning this definition of planning is the assumption that such co-existence in shared space isn’t something that automatically sorts itself out, but actually might require some degree of foresightful active management. In later work (see Healey, 2010), Healey to an increasing degree stressed that these shared spaces are not exclusively human habitats but are also shared with other species and existences. This begins to recognise how the spatial throwntogetherness (Massey, 2005) of various types of human and non-human existences can generate social and ecological frictions (Tsing, 2005), resulting in situations of ‘fraught co-existence’ (Wilson, 2022) in the more-than-human city (Franklin, 2017). And according to Healey, it is the fundamental task of planning practice to make such confrontations a little less painful and destructive. But how to do so? In this chapter, I will build upon recent work on how planning theory and practice deals (or fails to deal) with potential incompossibility (Hillier and Metzger, 2021; Metzger, 2016; Metzger and Hillier, in press), that is: the impossible co-existence in space and/or time of certain phenomena. The chapter attempts to chart out a route through which one may navigate the ethical and political dire straits of thinking planning through the lens of incompossibility. The argument proceeds from an understanding of urban planning practice as always including a cosmopolitical dimension. Cosmopolitics is a term coined by Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers to denote politics, struggles and conflicts that relate to the composition of a (good) common world (see, e.g., Latour, 2004a; Stengers, 2005). Farias and Blok (2016: 14) bring these ideas about cosmopolitics to the urban realm, proposing that a cosmopolitical approach opens up questions about the ‘gradual and contested DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-24 348

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composition of urban life’ and suggesting that Stengers’ concept helps direct attention towards the ‘multiplicities haunting every urban site’. They further suggest that it is ‘in short, what happens at the interstices, in the conflictual clashes and tentative accommodations of multiple urban worlds’. To recognise this processual side of the manifestations of urban life, this chapter adopts the Bawaka collective’s conceptualisation of the coming-together (whether felicitous or not) of different existences in urban space as co-becomings of/in more-than-human place, thus highlighting processes of emergence and the relational constitution of life and existence in shared space (Bawaka Country et al., 2016). Relating to Stengers’ work on cosmopolitics, Hinchliffe et al. (2005: 651) have suggested that a cosmopolitical understanding of urban multispecies conviviality entails a redirection of attention from ‘subtle shifts in our epistemology’ towards ‘ontological struggles’. However, a cosmopolitical approach perhaps need not be so quick in completely jettisoning an interest in questions of knowledge and representation (epistemology) in favour of concerns regarding what exists in the world (ontology). Instead, it may be interpreted as suggesting that we rather, in the spirit of Gregory Bateson (2000), ask how epistemological issues are inextricably linked to ontological as well as ethical and political concerns. Following from the above, the overall argument in this chapter goes something like this: spatial exclusion is sometimes a necessary condition for flourishing to be possible. Therefore, all places cannot be for everyone at the same time. Sometimes, the well-being of different entities simply does not go together very well. So, no matter how hard we try to create inclusive local environments, planning cannot produce spaces that are for all and everyone at all times. Not all environments are universally welcoming, and neither are they designed to be so. An upshot of this is that sometimes difficult, even heart-wrenching decisions must be made regarding which entity’s well-being and flourishing we choose to privilege at a specific time and place. However, to ensure that such choices are not made covertly or are made to come across as self-evident, Metzger (2016) suggests that planning processes should entail practices that bring these choices into the open. This would render them active decisions that demand decision-makers and professionals become accountable for the grounds and implications upon which such life-and-death choices are made – thus demanding that they assume responsibility for the exclusions that inevitably will follow. In this chapter, I remain committed to the importance of making such life-and-death decisions and their related stakes as explicit as possible. However, deliberations on these issues still run the risk of getting stuck in the wheel-tracks of established knee-jerk responses to apparent incompossibilties between human and other-than-human flourishing. Two particularly ingrained responses in such situations are the exterminationist and segregationist tendencies that are always present in the shadows of the collective cultural subconscious of human collectivities. If left unchecked, such tendencies may result in the enactment of antagonistic or even annihilatory ‘lebensraum’ politics against other-than-humans who too readily become deemed incompatible with some cared-for collective or value: ‘we’ cannot co-exist felicitously with ‘them’ here, so they must be expelled or destroyed. Therefore, while maintaining a desirable general ontological recognition of incompossibilities between the flourishing of different lifeforms, care must be taken to avoid sliding into an all-too-hasty epistemological assumption about what these incompossibilities specifically consist of at any given place and time (‘these specific life forms cannot co-become felicitously here’). For this reason, Metzger and Hillier (in press) have proposed the deployment of the thought-device of ‘going upstream’ as a possible way of slowing down action. The practice of going upstream emphasises the importance of investigating and mapping 349

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how problematic conditions of collective becoming generate correlate infelicitous confrontations between different types of existences in a shared local environment. While recognising the existence of incompossibilities in the world, this practice simultaneously always holds open the question whether a specific apparent incompossibility is a necessary, general incompossibility or a contingent, local incompossibility generated by conditions that are potentially amenable. Thus, instead of succumbing to exterminationism or segregationism, the practice of going upstream attempts to nurture an ethos that enacts a weaving-together of Isabelle Stengers’ (2005: 996) injunction ‘bethink that you may be mistaken!’ and Steve Woolgar’s (1991: 24) ‘it could be otherwise’. The suggested practice of going upstream thus aims to identify potentially unnecessary tragedy by investigating how infelicitous local conditions of multispecies co-becoming are produced and possibly can be changed. Such a practice may help ameliorate unnecessary pain and suffering and further serve the purpose of staving off all-too-quickly made tragic choices of life and death, flourishing and withering.

More-than-Humanism and the Problem of ‘Well-Being for All’ Planning theorists have been somewhat slow in engaging substantially with more-thanhuman thinking, but there are now an increasing number of texts that probe its implications for planning thought (see, e.g., Fieuw et al., 2022; Hillier, 2015; Houston et al., 2018; Jon, 2020a; Metzger, 2014). Metzger (2019) describes more-than-human thinking as a type of political ecology which differs from more traditional forms of ecological philosophy through its radically relational approach. It proceeds from an understanding of the human as a relational creature whose genesis, existence and development is irrevocably bound with a limitless jumble of constitutive relations with other entities of both human and other-than-human kinds. The recognition of such trans-scalar, constitutive ecological entanglements implies that caring for ‘one’s own people’, no matter how broadly or narrowly we define that grouping, inevitably also demands extending that care to a plethora of ‘significant others’ (Haraway, 2008). Metzger (2019) further argues that it can be very difficult – if not impossible – to fully grasp how all the life-sustaining webs on this planet are woven. Therefore, humans would be wise to tread delicately ahead, keeping in mind that we can do great – even existential – harm to others, which also risks hurting ‘ourselves’ (however, we define this fluid term) in ways that may have been difficult to predict before it was too late. To stand any chance of foreseeing and minimising such (self-) destructive harm to life-supporting systems on this planet, it is crucial that humans highlight and scrutinise the ecological systems that we are a part of – those that shape us and that we are dependent on. This is a way of living and thinking ecologically here and now through what Hache and Latour (2010) have described as a ‘moral sensitization’ towards beings and existences other than recognisable humans. Such practices could help facilitate new understandings of the places that humans and other existences hold on Earth – and to what extent ‘we’ are not only dependent on ‘them’, but how the well-being and fate of any ‘we’ is fundamentally and inextricably tied to the fate and well-being of numerous ‘others’ such as other species, both near and far (see also Houston et al., 2018). This approach to planning is thus a political perspective that to some extent still puts humankind in the central focus of care – but in a world inhabited by a myriad of other creatures and beings to which our destiny as a species is intimately linked. In turn, ‘they’ rely on us for their future existence as much as ‘we’ rely on them. However, 350

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the particularly wicked aspect of this insight in relation to environmental planning and governance is of course that ‘we’ do not always know from the outset, or ever fully, exactly how these relational webs of co-dependence are woven, and what actions will affect whom in which ways. A more-than-human approach to planning thus stresses the importance of becoming conscious and mindful of how we enact geographies of responsibility and care that selectively include and exclude both humans and other beings and existences (Massey, 2004; see also Jon, 2020b; Metzger, 2014). In relation to questions of exclusion and inclusion, an ideal of limitless inclusivity appears to be a salient component of much of the early more-than-human literature, perhaps most succinctly expressed in philosopher Karen Barad’s positing of an ethical imperative to work towards a ‘world based on values of co-flourishing and mutuality […] that is more livable, not for some, but for the entangled well-being of all’ (Barad 2011: 450). However, critical planning theorists have questioned the practical feasibility of limitless inclusion (see, e.g., Connelly and Richardson, 2004), and the pollyannaish approach to inclusion in much previous more-than-human theorising is a sore spot that has been pinpointed and insightfully problematised in work by, e.g., van Dooren (2011), Barua (2014) and Ginn (2014). These authors have highlighted instances of troubled multispecies co-becoming in shared space, taking up ‘the task of considering how multispecies flourishing works when the creatures are awkward, when togetherness is difficult, when vulnerability is in the making, and death is at hand’ (Ginn et al., 2014: 114). Metzger (2016) mobilises Gilles Deleuze’s readings of baroque philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s concept of incompossibility to grapple with such troubling situations (primarily Deleuze, 2004). Deleuze utilises the concept of incompossibility to denote future developments that are possible in themselves, but which nonetheless are mutually exclusive, signifying that they are not necessarily ‘compossible’ with other possible developments (Bowden 2010: 303; see also Hillier and Metzger, 2021). Metzger argues that in relation to local environmental planning work, an awareness of potential incompossibilities would entail reflexivity over how the active care for certain things (such as favoured paths towards the future or the embryonic sketches for a future urban landscape) always inevitably demands the neglect, othering or active eradication of other beings, things and/or potential developments. Relatedly, coming across as almost a direct comment to Healey’s definition of planning, Ginn et al. (2014: 117) soberly note that ‘managing togetherness requires excluding some organisms and processes, prioritizing one possible assembly, while leaving another behind or exposed’. If such insights are accepted one obvious upshot is that planners cannot possibly aim to produce the ‘entangled well-being of all’. To the contrary, planners must face up to and engender a sense of collective responsibility for tough decisions that inevitably will demand choices which will support the flourishing of some at the expense of others, and – perhaps most dauntingly – to confront the monumental question of who is to pay a price for the well-being of others – and who has the right to decide.

Staving Off Exterminationism and Segregationism: Going Upstream to Probe More-than-Human Incompossibilities Even if we recognise that all planning processes inevitably produce some exclusions, it is nonetheless crucial to stay attentive to how different ways of planning can be dramatically variegated as to the degree of violence and exclusion they produce – and that some are immensely more violent and exclusionary than others. Relatedly, facing up to and confronting 351

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incompossibilities can mean very different things, and can be done in dramatically different ways. Metzger and Hillier (in press) suggest that two well-established and particularly problematic modalities of response towards perceived incompossibilities in planning processes are either enacting an exterminationist or a segregationist approach. Metzger and Hillier suggest that an exterminationist approach to perceived incompossibilities is a way of thinking and acting that seeks out incompossibilities confrontationally and assumes a heroic-decisionist stance with the objective of joyfully annihilating those that are perceived to be different. The exterminationist approach thus casts ‘the Other’ as ‘the Enemy’: ‘if it’s either your flourishing or mine, I will not flinch in having you exterminated’. Exterminationist approaches to human-animal incompossibilities have existed and still exist in aspects of planning practice in different places around the world, particularly in relation to ‘invasive’ and ‘undesired’ other-than-human species (see also Hubbard and Brooks, 2021; Lynteris, 2020). In contrast to exterminationism, Metzger and Hillier suggest that segregationism is an established ‘softer’ way of confronting perceived interspecies incompossibilities. In a generic sense, segregationist approaches entail the attempted separation of elements that are believed to be incompatible in the same local environment. Metzger and Hillier argue that the segregationist approach is how modern planning theory and practice has generally dealt with such cases – even arguing that a generic ethos of segregation has been a key tenet of much modernist planning ideology. In relation to other-than-humans, segregationist approaches have generally served to enforce and uphold the ‘Great Separation’ (Atkins, 2012), whereby other-than-human animals were, to as large an extent as possible, expelled from Global Northern urban areas.1 Although segregationist responses to perceived interspecies incompossibilities are not in themselves annihilatory and violent, they nonetheless risk breeding hostility and fear for the other due to the sense of disconnectedness that comes with the separation from those ‘on the other side of the fence’. Metzger and Hillier therefore argue that an unproblematised and habitual enforcement of such an approach as a ‘go-to-solution’ for troubled interspecies co-becoming and perceived interspecies incompossibility is fundamentally problematic in an era in which humans, perhaps more than ever, are in need of establishing a sensibility of interconnectedness and mutual ecological dependence. So, if we would like to see planners face up to incompossibilities and assume responsibility for the consequent exclusions that are performed in the planning processes that they work within, what other ways of proceeding are available? Metzger (2016) proposed that planning processes actively ‘cultivate torment’ relating to questions concerning what existences are enabled to flourish or whither in a specific local environment, and by whom and on what basis such decisions are made. However, with its focus on the purposeful production of reflexive anguish, there is a risk that such an approach merely engenders brooding passivity and fatalism. Therefore, Metzger and Hillier (in press) propose another path which they hope could be more forward-facing and enabling. The proposal sketched by Metzger and Hillier draws on the work of Bruno Latour, organisation theorist Robert Chia and philosopher Francois Jullien’s (2004) reading of classical Chinese philosophy in his Treatise on Efficacy, in which he discusses the Chinese philosophical tradition’s celebration of the capability of going ‘upstream’ to find the difficult-to-discern moment ‘that will imperceptibly incline the situation in a particular direction’ (Jullien, 2004: 42). According to this tradition, Jullien (2004: 124) argues, ‘regression is not set in opposition to progression. On the contrary, it safeguards the possibility of 352

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progress farther downstream’. Drawing upon the work of Latour, Chia and Jullien, Metzger and Hillier outline a practice of ‘going upstream’ which involves investigating the production of conditions of becoming – what happens before a definite situation actualises itself in the form of manifest friction or conflict? The purpose of such active exploration of concrete and immanent conditions in particular nexuses of contentious interspecies co-becoming would not be to make killing easier (as the exterminationist response) or attempt to avoid any coming-together that may evoke friction (as in the segregationist response). Rather, it would attempt to explore when and how, in the immanent and concrete, conditions for interspecies co-becoming in local environments can be made slightly less infelicitous.

Concretising Upstream Travel: Some Examples The above-outlined proposal of ‘going upstream’ as a response to troubled interspecies cobecoming in shared space is, admittedly, vague. Therefore, the following section will collect and highlight examples of what such an approach could potentially imply in practice by drawing upon previous work on troubled interspecies co-becoming. An interesting example of an investigation in this vein can be found in Sarah Whatmore and colleagues’ Flood Apprentices project (see, e.g., Whatmore and Landström, 2011). In this project, social and natural scientists worked together with local residents in Ryedale (UK) to interrogate the science that informed local flood management, and to intervene in the controversy that had arisen around proposed flood-protection measures. External experts had previously claimed that the only viable solution to the local flooding problems was the erection of a hugely controversial flooding wall around the small town of Pickering. As a response, the Flood Apprentices project assembled a co-creative ‘competency group’ which brought together residents’ and scientists’ different types of expertise. The group performed a new investigation of possible alternatives to the wall, and managed to present a viable proposal for an alternative flood obstruction model, based on the construction of a number of overflow magazines higher up in the catchment area. In addition to the fact that the Flood Apprentices project thus went upstream quite literally, it is also a good illustration of the proposed approach in how the team carefully investigated how human and non-human components came together to produce the infelicitous conditions of becoming (in this case, recurrent flooding). On the basis of this work, they then open-mindedly queried which of these components could be altered to avert the floods in a manner that still avoided doing serious damage to local socio-ecological systems and forms of life. Another interesting aspect of this case relates to questions regarding the perception of the ‘necessary’ and the ‘contingent’, which is a crucial aspect to consider in relation to perceived incompossibilities. In this case, multiple previous external expert assessments claimed that there simply did not exist any alternative to the construction of a massive flood-protection wall. Yet, with the help of the careful and passionate intervention of the Competency Group, such an alternative emerged. This points to the importance of always questioning whether perceived incompossibilities are necessary and unavoidable. Perhaps, what comes across at present as an unavoidable incompossibility may upon closer scrutiny appear to be contingent, and thus, potentially amenable.Another example from work performed by Steven Hinchliffe and colleagues illuminates this latter point even better (Hinchliffe et al., 2005). From a participatory observation of ecological inventories of threatened water voles in the Birmingham area, it appeared that water voles and brown rats were cohabiting in an observation area. This was a surprising result considering that 353

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the received wisdom among ecologists was that these two species could not successfully live together, and that the presence of brown rats would lead to water vole population decline due to competition for food and territory. As noted by Hinchliffe et al. (2005), something different seemed to be happening there. Could it be that urban water voles – or at least those in Birmingham – were actually different from their rural counterparts in terms of their ecological relations? While the established understanding was that the flourishing of rats and water voles was spatio-temporally incompossible, which would imply that rat populations must be managed (eradicated or at least kept separate from water voles) for the latter to flourish, it now turned that – under certain circumstances – it may not necessarily be so. Through this insight, questions are shifted from considering who must be killed, or at least left to die, to questions regarding the conditions of potential co-becoming. Under what circumstances can rats and water voles felicitously cohabitate in a shared local environment? And how can the production and maintenance of these conditions be supported? A third example of ‘going upstream’ is Maan Barua’s (2014) meticulous investigation of human-elephant relations in rural India. In his fieldwork in the village of Sundarpur, Assam, Barua delves into and carefully maps the political ecology of human-elephant frictions in this setting. At the time of his investigation, crop raiding and house damage by elephants was on the rise. An important driver behind this trend was the deforestation of elephant habitat, escalated through development projects, expanding agriculture, and illegal encroachment. Under these circumstances crops became an important food source for elephant herds and crop raiding increased dramatically. To protect their small rice paddies, on which they were dependent for their subsistence, local farmers confronted raiding elephants at risk of their own lives, armed only with firecrackers and burning torches. Injuries and even fatalities were not uncommon outcomes from such human-elephant encounters. Crop guarding, conducted for almost four months of the year, thus involved risk-taking and chronic fatigue due to poor sleep and intensive daytime labouring. Here, alcohol comes into the picture. The role alcohol plays in this ecology of relations is twofold. First, it gave farmers the courage to brave elephants at night. Second, it enabled them to cope with fatigue. However, the illicit distilleries that emerge as a response to this rising local demand for alcohol become sites that contribute to further intensifying humanelephant conflicts in the villages. Reports of elephants entering villages specifically in search of alcohol are pervasive throughout landscapes where they cohabit with humans in India. It is broadly claimed that elephants purposely seek out illegal stills in the villages with the aim of ransacking them for the stored alcohol, which is thought to be particularly attractive to stressed elephants due to its psychologically calming effects. However, after intoxication, elephants have been reported to run amok, damaging rows of houses, injuring or even killing people, thus amplifying conflict. Barua notes that the mediating role of alcohol is problematically overlooked in mainstream conservation studies, thus obfuscating its place in a set of infelicitous ecological relations profoundly shaped by a postcolonial legacy of suffering and degradation. This example comes across as a vicious spiral of interspecies confrontation. However, from Barua’s careful examination of these conditions it become obvious that this troubled co-becoming is by no means due to some form of general or universal, ontological, incompossibility between human flourishing and elephant flourishing in this location. The next example brings the idea of ‘upstream thinking’ to urban development-induced conditions of co-becoming between humans and the mosquito. In the eyes of most people, human and mosquito co-flourishing is simply impossible, and mosquitoes are not generally considered to be worthy of our sympathy, especially where mosquito species function as 354

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zoonotic vectors of dangerous disease (Hawkes and Hopkins, 2022). As noted by Mutero (2022: xviii), ‘we typically prefer to take the easy way out when we hear that irritating whining sound: grabbing a can of insecticidal spray and aiming short bursts at the tiny vampires as they flit about’. Hillier and Metzger (Hillier, 2021; Hillier and Metzger, 2021; Metzger and Hillier, in press) have investigated a concrete case of an industry-awarded, riverine residential estate development, on the south-west fringes of the Perth metropolitan region. It comprises areas of native vegetation with some understorey cleared for trails, firebreaks and for farm cattle to roam. Development of the 52-ha site commenced in 2008 and has now reached Stage 4 of a projected seven stages. House and land packages feature a 0.9-ha artificial lagoon and the lower reaches of a significant river. In-force local planning procedures did not stipulate that mosquitos were an issue that needed to be taken into consideration in the planning process, and hence, it wasn’t. Consequently, according to the regulations in force, dealing with unwanted non-human ‘intruders’ or ‘pests’ is primarily the householders’ responsibility. As a result, mosquitoes are locally regarded as a ‘particular nuisance’, with local residents protesting that they feel like ‘prisoners in our own home’ and ‘being eaten alive at home’. One local resident reportedly contracted the serious and untreatable mosquito-borne Barmah Forest Virus in 2013. Calls for extensive local chemical extermination of mosquitoes, ‘fogging’, have since – ­understandably – been vocal and unabating. It is important to be clear here that Hillier and Metzger’s argument is not that local human residents should accept being infected by serious mosquito-induced illness. However, they do stress the importance of paying attention to how the conditions are produced that generate situations which make it expectable that humans will be put in harm’s way of the disease. In this case, an upstream examination of events and decisions evince the crucial influence of extant dynamics of capitalist value-extraction and related land-value speculation. Consequent pressure to develop new residential areas on land that was previously deemed ecologically unsuitable for human habitation has generated quite expectable concerns from residents. Thus, by going upstream and not accepting as given or inevitable the apparent incompossibility in interspecies flourishing in this case, but rather probing how and why infelicitous conditions of co-becoming are concretely produced, it becomes obvious that a great deal of suffering could have been avoided if greater care had been taken to consider probable patterns of human-mosquito interaction in the planned local environment.

Concluding Discussion This chapter has raised questions about how to act in the face of troubled interspecies cobecoming in shared spaces, where ‘flourishing for all’ – at least at the same time and place – does not appear to be a viable option. It has been argued that planners should ‘face up to’ and not deny or ignore the existence of such incompossibilities. But how to do so? In the Global North, apparent incompossibilities between humans’ and other-than-­ humans’ flourishing have traditionally been dealt with in two ways: either through an exterminationist politics of annihilation or through segregation which strives to keep nature in its ‘proper place’ (and only there). In attempting to find an alternative standard response to situations of troubled interspecies co-becoming in shared space, this chapter has advocated for the development of practices for ‘going upstream’. Such practices would work towards tracing and mapping how infelicitous conditions of troubled multispecies co-becoming are 355

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produced, with the purpose of uncovering potential leverage points where such conditions may be shifted or changed. This chapter provides no definite, detailed specification of what is and isn’t ‘going upstream’. The proposition is still tentative, and what has instead been offered are a few examples that illustrate different forms of such practices. From these examples, two concluding points stand out: the relevance of differentiating between epistemological and ontological dimensions of incompossibility, and the importance of remaining suspicious of situations that appear to demand harsh and tragic choices. With regard to the first of these points, it appears critical to differentiate between – on the one hand – a general philosophical acceptance of the incompossibilities in the world (there are many different possible futures, beings that may flourish, etc. – but they do not necessarily go together), and – on the other hand – not too readily accepting that any specific conflictual situation in fact constitutes an incompossible impasse. We would do well to be wary of immediately accepting at face value what comes across as an incompossibility in flourishing and to remain suspicious if this really is a fundamental ontological incompossibility. Perhaps the situated conditions of interspecies co-becoming can be shifted to produce a more felicitous situation? Such insights speak to the importance of not separating ontological from epistemological concerns, but instead to take an interest in uncovering ‘ecologies of bad ideas’ (Bateson, 2000: 492) premised on problematic epistemological assumptions and carefully examining how epistemological and ontological dimensions intersect to produce more or less felicitous conditions of becoming at specific times and places. When faced with an apparent incompossibility it is therefore crucially important to recall Isabelle Stengers’ (2005: 996) injunction ‘bethink that you may be mistaken!’ and Steve Woolgar’s (1991: 24) maxim: ‘it could be otherwise’. Consequently we must ask ourselves: is there any way to change or shift these seemingly infelicitous conditions of co-becoming so that what currently comes across as an incompossibility becomes less so? However, after having gone through an investigative and reflexive loop of ‘going upsteam’ there is no guarantee that the situation will come across as more easily resolvable. How to act well in the aftermath of an upstream exploration is an open question, and perhaps the only reasonable answer is: ‘it depends’ (cf. Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Sometimes, we might, after long deliberation, come to conclude that there indeed appears to exist a fundamental state of enmity between the flourishing of two types of existences in a particular local environment, which is difficult to see past. This sort of situation may indeed call for a form of segregation, such as in the case of humans and mosquitoes in the presented example from Perth, or – in view of the recent COVID-19 crisis and pandemic – for instance by banning wild animal markets in densely populated human settlements. Sometimes, we might even—not without trembling—arrive at the conclusion that extermination is called for. What is of critical importance, however, is that such conclusions are not too readily or hastily arrived at, and if segregation or local extermination comes across as the only viable answer, it is crucial to remain committed to continuously revisiting this decision while exploring under what new circumstances such a policy could potentially be shifted or lifted (see further Latour, 2004b).

Note 1 However, we must not forget that there are other societies in which this movement was never as fully implemented as in many parts of the Global North. For instance, in many parts of Indian society, where a strict separation of humans and animals would be unimaginable, and even considered immoral.

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PART 3

Methods

23 NINE METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES FOR THE POSTHUMANITIES Stephen Muecke, Alessandro Antonello, Tully Barnett, Amy T. Matthews, and Stephen Zagala Produced by five human beings in a particularly fertile and collaborative context at Flinders University in South Australia, this chapter is an experiment in style as well as content, keeping up a collaboration through multiple authorship, stressing not the results of our research, but the processes by which ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004b: 35) could emerge fictocritically, that is, by making imagination and argumentation work together in the writing (Muecke, 2016). We have taken literally Rosi Braidotti’s injunction that ‘Research in the humanities should be structured as the work of fundamental laboratories with collaborative investigation around the key terms and concepts that are at play in shifting towards a Posthumanities perspective’ (Braidotti, 2019: 146). She adds that this ‘sharable workbench’ should produce work that is as ‘rigorous’ and ‘experimental’ as the hard sciences (Braidotti, 2019: 146). Some of us in our group were new to the posthumanities, gathering under the heading of Flinders’ ‘Posthumanities Research Theme’ to find out what this relatively new field had to offer. Our group decided to think about this field in terms of methodologies, a pragmatic approach that asked what the posthumanities makes possible in terms of thought and in terms of practical problem-solving initiatives. What does it make possible, we asked ourselves, that is not quite as possible for other fields and disciplinary formations that might have preceded it? So, we approached the field head on, reading into it as much as we could, and asking ourselves more questions as we went, initially as simple and direct as: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ This raised a laugh, around the table in room Hums 234, because, of course, it doesn’t mean anything at all to be human. Be aware that all the attributes that were once thought to make humanness meaningful – using language and tools, exercising compassion and empathy – are now recognised in a range of non-human animals and even plants. We tried again by asking, ‘OK, what is the nature of “the human” as a problematic?’ We thought such a question could have both ontological answers, or it could have answers in the field of the history of ideas. Ontologically, the nature of human being could be approached philosophically, or it could be answered in terms of biological sciences where one might raise questions like, ‘How is it we’re only 1.2% genomically different from chimpanzees?’ Or, in terms of the breadth of life on earth, how far have we got in terms of our human adventure? How 361

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-26

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far have we evolved? The planet that we live on is five billion years old and it will be, we guessed, winding up in about another five billion as the sun starts to get colder. Human life has emerged on Earth in what feels like a sweet spot halfway through that trajectory. We have evolved, originally, from single-celled organisms or maybe even viruses. And these have co-evolved with all other life on Earth to reach the form we take at the moment. By the time the sun starts to cool off, in another five billion years, we might be as different from our current selves as we are now from the single-celled organisms that shared our watery beginnings as we began that co-evolution process. That’s taking a long view. But in terms of much shorter trajectories, the other way in which we thought one can problematise ‘the human’ is in terms of the history of ideas. That, of course, meant we had to start thinking about humanism, about the emergence of philosophical questions that isolated the human as an appropriate object of knowledge. We tabled the famous quotation from Michel Foucault (1994: 421–422): One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. … As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared …then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. He originally published that quite poetic conclusion to The Order of Things in 1966, quite a long time ago. Foucault’s thought had emerged in that productive period for French Marxism and post-structuralism where anti-humanism was the order of the day. So, this particular line of thought was reacting against liberal humanist generalisations, such as ‘We are all human, we’re all in this together’. The Marxist response at the time, especially with figures like Louis Althusser, was along the lines of, Well, we’re not all just human, we’re fiercely divided into social classes. Talking about humans in general makes no intellectual sense; it is an assertion that has no descriptive power, and instead can serve to efface real social and economic inequalities for reactionary purposes. Althusser’s contemporary, Roland Barthes, had just this critique of humanism in his famous essay ‘The Great Family of Man’ (Barthes, 1972), in Mythologies, a fine early example of how critical writing can incorporate myth, later attracting the generic label of ‘fictocritical’. So, it was anti-humanism that was feeding into post-structuralist thought and then postmodernist thought, and so it makes us wonder what the status of this field of the posthuman is today. Is it just another iteration of those kinds of intellectual ‘fashions’ – as the sceptics like to call them? We are tempted to ask, if people took post-modernism very seriously at the end of last century, is posthumanism not rather like that? And why is it not just an anti-humanism anymore? Perhaps posthumanism is more positive, pluralist and various in the ways in which it is approaching problems to do with contemporary thought, especially in an ecological sense. If we are rigorous about our methodology, perhaps we can make posthumanism more useful and less ‘fashionable’ by pragmatically exploring our methodological principles. 362

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So, the first of these is: 1 Describe before theorising (but a good description might ultimately need theory). In Latour’s Reassembling the Social, there is an instructive debate, a kind of staged dialogue, between Latour and a student who comes to see him because the student wants to ‘apply’ actor-network theory (Latour, 2005: 141–156). And Latour, in his ironic exchanges with the student, insists that ANT not only can’t be applied to anything, but it has no explanatory value either: I’d say that if your description needs an explanation, it’s not a good description, that’s all. Only bad descriptions need an explanation. It’s quite simple really. What is meant by a ‘social explanation’ most of the time? Adding another actor to provide those already described with the energy necessary to act. But if you have to add one, then the network was not complete (…) I have never seen a good description in need of an explanation. But I have read countless bad descriptions to which nothing was added by a massive addition of ‘explanations’. And ANT did not help. (Latour, 2005: 147) Description is pragmatic, because when the researcher asks, with an appropriate ethnographic attitude, ‘What’s going on in this situation?’ she or he is looking at the actors and their connections. Availing oneself of ‘shorthand’ explanations (like ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘feminist’) would be ‘lazy’ according to Latour, because At best they apply equally to all your actors, which means they are probably superfluous since they are unable to introduce a difference among them. At worst, they drown all the new interesting actors in a diluvium of older ones. (Latour, 2005: 147) For him, it seems that it is the totalising perspective that theory or explanation provides, that is one of the contentious issues. Describing sounds easy, but in practice, it is necessarily full of complications. And it turns out that as you proceed to describe something, you might, we thought contra Latour, end up needing a theory (just one more actor) to help you in that description. So, it is definitely not an anti-theoretical argument we are making here, but rather a kind of procedural one: first describe, then theorise, and possibly describe again, coming up with the theoretical tools that you might need as you go along. Think, for example, of the #MeToo phenomenon that has spread around the world. It’s a phenomenon that could obviously be described, not with any great ease, but it could be described. But imagine trying to describe that without the concept, or a good part of the theory, of feminism. So, clearly, ‘shorthand’ or not, it’s a thing, a very powerful actor, that you need in order to do that kind of description. Conversely, many are familiar with those kinds of situations where the theory precedes description, producing, in its crudest versions, what everybody expects it to produce. The French sociologist, Antoine Hennion, has a critique of the kind of sociology that knows in advance that it’s going to use concepts like ‘society’, ‘language’ or ‘ideology’. His example was a famous sociologist writing a book called The Love of Art (2020). Hennion picked on 363

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this because he is himself interested in the sociology of art, but he promotes (sociological) pragmatism, and he was taking amateurism seriously. Revealing that The Love of Art happens to be by Pierre Bourdieu, Hennion says: No one reading Bourdieu’s 1966 The Love of Art would have thought for a moment that the book would actually speak about the love of art: come on, you are not going to take the artwork “itself” seriously, are you? That would mean falling back into aesthetics… (Hennion, 2020: 64) So of course The Love of Art was about class and other aspects of human society, not what works of art could do (as actors) to make you love them. It showed readers how to do a version of Marxist sociology. Fine, if that’s what you want, we concluded, but it’s still a case of the putting the theoretical ‘cart’, and its baggage, before equine common sense! 2 ‘Stay with the trouble’ (Donna Haraway’s principle of beginning in the middle of things, rather than looking for originating causes). Haraway (2016) embraces the ‘milieu’, which also has an environmental meaning in the original French, as well as beginning in the middle of things, or ‘in medias res’ as Pickering puts it (Pickering, 2008). Staying with that trouble is not unrelated to the debate arising with agency, which is a way of posing the problem of who caused what in the first place, a linear logic of cause to effect. Milieu, in this methodological application, has a kinship with Isabel Stengers’ ecologies of practices (Stengers, 2005). What, one might ask, is the set of heterogeneous factors, in this milieu/environment that make it possible for this kind of thing to be going on now? Methodical and intensive observation is often lacking in poor descriptions – also not keeping an eye on all things equally as they are party to the trouble in the milieu (Haraway, 2008: 19–26). Because this trouble is being caused not by one point of origin but by continuing in an environment that enhances this kind of behaviour or enables these kinds of issues associated with these kinds of practices. Let us give an example: the practical ‘troubles’ caused by racism. We know very well that people aren’t born racist, but rather that racist subjectivities are formed. Racist subjectivities might be formed in what we might call toxic environments. And as one goes about the description of what makes up this toxic environment, there will be all sorts of actors involved. One tries to sort out, perhaps even rank, the various agencies. And then, given that racists are made rather than born, one wouldn’t necessarily want to focus the blame, for instance, on the parents of children who become racist, zooming back onto one source. Our method might be more one of dealing with, describing, the environment that enables this racism to continue: the ‘available discourses’ (Muecke, 1992: 19–35), the ‘public feelings’ (Berlant and Stewart, 2018: ix), encapsulated by phrases like ‘peer pressure’, not to forget amplifications through various media (Titley, 2019). And then, conversely, one’s descriptive report could include, by way of useful contrast, the kinds of environments designed to turn people into non-racists. Schools, we assume, are typically places where nonracist subjectivities are formed. Teachers themselves are instructed, as part of their job, to produce kids who don’t have racist attitudes, even though their ‘milieu’ may also embed them with racisms, and lead to re-inscriptions and re-enactments of racism in practice, displaying the entanglement of description, theory, ideology, and actors. Staying with the 364

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trouble acknowledges the ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973: 160–166) inherent to ecologies of being. So, we thought the posthumanist principle that centres around the work that can be done on people to turn them into, or allowing them to persist as, non-racists, is staying with that particular trouble and not assuming that that kind of subjectivity, once attached to someone, is permanent. It can be shed in a different kind of environment. The humanities, for instance literature classes in schools, often have this agenda. Literature and art that work on this kind of trouble offer versions of human, and non-human, character, where readers can ask themselves (moral) questions: Would I like to be like that person? Is it possible to be like that? Would I do what that person is doing, for example, hunting animals for sport? Those litanies of questions go into the formation of subjectivities that are central to the work of the humanities. And Kay McKittrick highlights the importance of narrative in this process: ‘The story, as interdisciplinary method, is thus tasked with immense and hopeful possibilities’ (2021: 9). We think that the techniques and the teachability of those sorts of sensibilities are not only important but necessarily negotiable. And they are posthumanist to the extent that we reject ‘human nature’ in favour of the human as ‘work in progress’. The (post)humanities are the experimental field creating future subjectivities by changing the human story: ‘as an interdisciplinary methodology, the story – theoretical, creative, groovy, is a verb-activity that invites engagement, curiosity, collaboration’ (McKittrick, 2021: 9). The posthumanities thus invite collaborative reading, knowing and creating, resisting the concept of the individual in favour of the entanglement of human and non-human beings giving a ‘new continuity to practices’ (Franklin, 2007: 3549). 3 Use imagination. Artworks can effectively synthesise the concepts and methods of the posthumanities, while dramatising the real-world issues involved. And thus from literature to art in general, with its multiply layered techniques of resensitising human capacities to be delighted, instructed or surprised. In our collective, we debated and argued at length on the importance of embracing the multi-valent possibilities of what artworks can offer us. It’s somewhat in parallel with the argument relating to climate change, where scientists might have thought, two decades ago, that the demonstration of the facts of the matter, the scientific facts, based in the established authority of the sciences, would be enough, as in the An Inconvenient Truth film. They kept saying that the facts could ‘speak for themselves’ and that everybody would understand and do what was necessary to do about climate change. But no, it’s never been the case that facts have spoken for themselves, they’ve always been performed, dramatised and made eventful. Think, for instance, of scientific experiments that have changed the world, like those of Alessandro Volta, with his experiment making frog’s legs twitch with electrical currents. Volta’s impact gave his name to the volt, and his dramatic demonstration of the effectivity of electricity fired the imagination of people observing, and had all sorts of effects in scientific and non-scientific fields. As we said, the same sort of dramatisation, synthesisation, should also happen with artworks that are trying to bring about the posthuman ‘convergence’, as Rosie Braidotti (2018: 31) calls it, where artworks are valuable because they’re multi-valent. They all, in different ways, embody feelings, ideas, myths, politics and values. They even touch on legalities, if they are seen to be transgressive, as they often are; they are praised for being risky, and for doing things that other beings can’t do. 365

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Let’s look at a couple of artworks. Tara Donovan’s, ‘Untitled (Styrofoam Cups)’, 2004/2008,1 incorporates an object, a disposable plastic object, recomposed into a form, a very beautiful form: a huge number of Styrofoam cups glued together to make a cloud-like object, the artist gathering the industrially reproduced multiple commodity-containers together. The multiplication of the cup, as object is a product of mass consumption, intensifies the alienating forces of capitalism that had the practice of scattering the cups as individual objects. But the artist has, in a way, herded them back together to create an organic community of things, so that the mass-consumption function is now defamiliarised. A defamiliarisation that can stand as a critique of an object that induces eco-anxiety when discarded in the environment. The Styrofoam cup is toxic in its own objective (chemical) way, but here it’s synthesised and turned into something naturalistic. It performs naturalism by simply flipping the bad into the good, a process of aestheticisation. And it is done economically with a limited number of actors: the gallery networks, the cups, the artist as transforming composer, the cloud-form. Contrast it with a green plastic bucket which appeared in Melbourne’s Victoria Museum in a collection to do with the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.2 It is critically discussed by Braidotti in Posthuman Knowledge, where she picks up on Fiona Cameron’s critique: This item is both framed by, and helps us to contextualize, the survivors’ accounts of their ordeal. It is consequently presented in function of the human subjectivities involved, as a static element in a natural disaster in service of the human. This constitutes for Cameron a double disadvantage: firstly, because it reinstates the binaries between nature and culture, humans and non-humans, and secondly, because it narrows down the scope of the event, denying the other material, discursive, technological, biological and non-human aspects of surviving the bushfires. (Braidotti, 2019: 134) While we may be missing something about the contextualisation, we see this surprising objet trouvé quite differently. What this composition is doing, we think, is showing us the palpable agency of the fire itself, bearing the scars of a particularly dangerous environment. A bucket is a water container, a device for fighting fires, in this case made pathetically functionless. It’s not a beautiful object in itself, but one presented as a non-human witness, moulded by the pain and burden of the disaster, like Haraway (2020: 440) talking about Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bags’, containers as the most fundamental of tools. The morphology of the plastic is like melting flesh. And it also carries the fraught politics of the Green movement, perennial would-be protectors of bushland. If it had been a red bucket, a colour symbolic of fire, it wouldn’t have worked in that ironic tension. The green colour is thus another actor in the particular kind of synthesisation that this artwork brings about, something missed in Braidotti and Cameron’s theoretically orthodox critique. And of course, with a posthumanities’ aesthetic, subject and object are not opposed: the ‘object’ seems to ask the artist for a certain kind of collaboration, so that subject and object co-create, for which Haraway (2017: M23) has a word: ‘Sym-poiesis’ … ‘a simple word; it means “making with”. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really auto-poietic or self-organizing’. 4 Accept entanglement, problematise emancipation. Experiment with avoiding transcending, critiquing, ironically distancing, observing things with which one claims to have no involvement at all. We can start with attachment, with what we think we must have, or, 366

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conversely, what we can or should relinquish. Doing an inventory of such attachments is a posthumanist methodology. While the concept of ‘entanglement’ has become something of an Environmental Humanities cliché, there are nonetheless good grounds for its success. The so-called totemism among Australian Aboriginal peoples is illustrative of it (Muecke, 2022). Born with a totem and forever connected to it, it is an attachment supported by practices of caring for another species. Only relentless modernisation would seek to free these people of totemism, as it has, along with other cultural practices seen as barbaric at the height of colonisation. Aboriginal people might have been promised ‘freedom’ within colonisation and assimilation, but it meant relinquishing totemism’s quite sensible ecological management practices. So, while emancipation has been a powerful political concept, it may not in fact be either a universal good, or an adequate description of changing alliances. Often, it turns out, when one thinks one is freeing oneself from something, one is in fact attaching oneself to another network. People can extricate themselves from one unhappy situation and then find themselves in a happier one because they have formed new, more viable, attachments with other humans and non-humans. Descriptions of such entanglements are clearly based in ecological analyses of species interdependencies or symbioses. But it also has effects in the form of the writing of post-critique, which has some affinity with posthumanism, after Bruno Latour’s influential ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’ (2004a), which joined forces with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provincialising of ‘Western’ thought (2007), both tendencies antitranscendental and calling for a greater awareness of the situatedness of knowledge. Attachment is something we obviously live with all the time and, usefully in terms of method, it is the kind of thing one can do an inventory of: ‘What do I need to keep going the way I am?’ Or, ‘What sorts of things would I like to jettison, or what other new things would I like to attach myself to in order to persist into the future?’ It is deployed as a social scientific method in Latour’s After Lockdown, where people in a regional French community were literally asked to position themselves in relation to their attachments and to debate their interconnectedness (2021: 78–90). So, this is a process of responding sensitively to the world, and describing realistically how one is situated in it. Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway, 1988) is foundational here, a move she made early in her career when she was talking about situated knowledge as an honest political positionality that feminism at the time was advocating, most basically with the ‘personal is political’ slogan. Being positioned in a certain place nonetheless means you are in dialogue with others and you may even come to negotiate agreement on some powerful, universalising concepts. But each actor should acknowledge ‘where they are coming from’, what they feel attached to, weighing up what they may potentially relinquish as they negotiate. There’s a diplomatic symmetry in saying where you begin and are initially attached, and to exactly what specific, practical things, because you are forced to think as you make an inventory of where you find yourself. And this description is necessary to understand what attachments you have or don’t have, which makes political moves like Brexit seem absurd, because those who embraced the idea of Brexit were not thinking about what they were literally attached to. They thought they were attached to the idea of an autonomous Britain or England, but if they had looked around at what practically made their lives possible, they would have realised that it was not commonly English or British stuff. They were drinking wine that came from France, of all places! Their bananas might have come from North Africa; their pasta 367

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might have come from Italy; their electronics might have come from Asia. Nearly, everything surrounding them in their houses was not local. The idea of pulling away from the world and creating a new national autonomy was absurd in the context of an England that was already globally entangled. Of course, trade will continue, albeit in a more complicated and expensive way. And if Brexiteers do find a way to be more territorially sustainable, that might indeed be a good thing, but the motivation of the Brexiteers was most ideological among those more ‘attached’ to the immaterial financial sector. 5 Are you sure you are secular and modern? Can reduction to that language fully describe ‘reality’? The posthumanities is an expansive rather than a reductive project for the humanities. For Braidotti it is ‘transdisciplinary’, ‘nomadic’ and ‘critical’ and encompasses every ‘radical’ field of the new humanities from queer and subaltern studies to science and technology studies (2018: 38). For us, the main reduction that was limiting the Eurocentric humanities was the political reduction to the human: only humans mattered in our negotiations for survival, as if ‘nature’, or climate change, were not a part of democracy, mere ‘externalities’. This enlightenment legacy, with its centralisation of human reason, had very good reasons to abandon religious dogma, not to mention religious oppression; much ‘progress’ was indeed made. And when this secular language of human rationality met others (eventually via anthropology) with their ‘pagan’ gods or their ‘beliefs’ in totemism, it had handy explanatory terms (such as ‘fetish’ (Latour, 2010), or ‘symbol’), useful for reducing an ancient culture to the size of an academic monograph in three short years of study by one European scholar. But if this dialogue with others is to remain open and diplomatic, the situation of the interlocutors might have to be explicit, and the ‘Westerner’ might have to admit that his or her strictly secular language only belongs in universities, while elsewhere in the culture churches continue to thrive, and many corporations have ‘tricks of the trade’ that have little to do with being reasonable. The non-Westerner, seeking to familiarise herself with this exotic French or German culture, could not do better than to immerse herself in its literature, where a whole panorama of the culture is on display. For Bakhtin, the novel is an expression of the dialogical imagination, of many different perspectives, drawn into dialogue, for instance in the panoramic social realist novels of an Émile Zola or a George Eliot. But with the posthuman, the platform has immensely increased the numbers of communities in dialogical contact, such that the positing of one unitary hegemonic voice has become even less tenable. Now, with posthumanism, even non-human voices and forms of reasoning are also admissible, such as forests (Kohn, 2013), along with non-Western, non-modern ones. How does this methodological principle change what we do? What can we now do that we couldn’t do as easily before? A glib answer is that we can now represent situations more novelistically, polyvocally, as texts rich with alternating dialogue, narration and description. Non-humans are now significant actors, rather than being in the ‘natural’ backdrop to our human dramas. The white whale in Moby Dick will be a real character, the storm in The Tempest as well. But since not all our academic outlets can be NTROs (Non-­Traditional Research Outputs), we can develop better descriptions that include such non-human agencies more equitably. For instance, as Timothy Mitchell has done so well with mosquitoes in Egyptian history (Mitchell, 2002). We can also treat the secular as just one particular institutionally based way of representing the world, while acknowledging that many people 368

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continue to worship in churches and mosques untouched by the self-importance of secularist critique. In principle, our academic writing has no pretence to be sacred writing (despite the odd metaphysical lapse, an inheritance from the ‘spiritual exercises’ of our clerical ancestors (Hadot, 1995)), but it will denounce others’ religious bias, as it strives for objective descriptions of present situations (ethnography) and past ones (history). By avoiding such reductions, it will turn out that each institutionally based description now has more modest limits. The most realistic view of the world may be the one that allows for multiple, but situated, accounts to co-exist. 6 Work towards correcting modernising destruction. Indigenous territorial modes of belonging, with their techniques of ecological management, may be instructive. The literature on posthumanism sometimes acknowledges Indigenous knowledges and cultures as ways of thinking before and beyond that historical bracket that was the development of European post-enlightenment humanism (Bignall et al., 2016). As we have seen, that version of modernism and modernisation had powerful universalising tendencies, as it succeeded, after successive waves of imperialism, in installing itself as a global hegemon, a hegemonic position no under challenge by recent climate change and related crises. In that context, a new respect for Indigenous ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge’ (TEK) has emerged, but not without hundreds of years of violent struggles by Indigenous protectors of country resisting the extractive and exploitative practices and logics of colonisation. The imperial spread of modernist and modernising practices, out from their European ‘provinces’ (Chakrabarty, 2007), with their progressive script of making life better for everyone, was powerful and pervasive in a global world seemingly without limits. It was a set of mobile cultures that didn’t listen to those who were tied to their territories for good ecological reasons. Today, the slowdown of the carbon acceleration, the uptake of more sustainable energy sources, and new-found territorial foci, have brought Indigenous knowledges into serious contention, both politically and scientifically. That Indigenous communities across the globe have been able to form alliances is a sign of the potential universalisation of their counter-imperial and sustainable, strategies (Nelson and Shilling, 2018). Indigenous peoples are able to agree on universalisable principles to do with attending to what they know each territory can sustain, after millennia of experience, according to its subjective attributes. Indigenous peoples entwine their lives in places with other beings in those places in mobile and multiple ways, and the artefacts they produce enact this entanglement. Stephen Zagala, researching at the South Australian Museum, finds what he calls ‘shell valuables’ from the Solomon Islands to have both ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ values. Apparently harnessing the fecundity of the giant clams from which they were hewn, this ‘jewellery’ (for want of a better word) proliferated in various forms and assumed multiple functions. These objects could operate as symbolic placards, magical objects, units of currency or ‘land title deeds’ (see images in Richards and Roga, 2004). Looped over limbs, threaded through noses and earlobes, bound together on carrying sticks and tethered to canoes, their mobility was constitutional. They had what the French call an ‘élan vital’, and were often left broken on burial sites at the end of their lives. But, significantly, with jewellery and other types of mobile ornamentation, like hair styles and even tattoos; they go through so many secondary adaptations and interpretations that asking what they might mean is to 369

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miss the point. They are traits of expression that trace the forces of a material world in motion. They are always moving to make new connections rather than remaining anchored to a static code. Over countless generations the Solomon Islanders and the clam shells link the land and the sea in a mutual becoming, or rather a mutual belonging: the people are ‘sea people’ and the crafted shells accompany humans in multiple ways. There is none of the kind of distancing symbolism that early anthropology espoused (‘this design is symbolic of…’) because there is a continuity expressed here that precedes any nature-culture dichotomy. 7 Give non-humans the vote, or at least agency (in politics, as in everything). For example, carbon has stabilised human politics for a long time; now it is destabilising it. Nonhuman rights are the legal consequence of taking seriously these non-human agencies. This is a major principle found across the posthumanities’ literature and it’s not without associated debates. For instance, the whole question of agency of non-humans is fairly pervasively debated. Some argue that agency can’t exist without intentionality, a fairly conservative position found both among Marxist critics of posthumanism (Malm, 2018), and among more conventional critics of posthumanism. Only humans, they say, can have intentions or plans to do things. A cyclone might destroy a city, but how could it have agency if it has no intention of destroying that city? Our brief response would be to point to how this critique depends upon lines of causality. It depends upon an imaginary spatial metaphor. We would rather think about the agency of non-humans as a situation (imposing a new metaphor of the network here), where one never knows what something is going to do next or from which direction the agency will come. This can apply to living things and nonliving things. Nonliving things are not necessarily sitting around passively, because they are as full of surprises as humans. We don’t know what, for instance, a virus might be going to do next. We don’t know, even with objects as stable as the furniture in our houses, what they might get up to. We might assume we’ve stabilised our environment, that everything’s going to be fine, but the next thing we know there’s an earthquake and our furniture is not behaving in the way it should. With such occurrences, one is tempted to think differently about the agency of the nonhuman. This is a methodological move (or, if you prefer, an attitudinal one) of not reducing things to their intentionality, but saying everything in the world is necessarily full of unrealised potentialities; there are surprises in everything. Just as anti-humanist critique woke liberal humanism from its slumbers, this move is one way of not letting thought go to sleep, as it were, around the idea of only humans having effective agency and non-humans as passive, dead or about to be dead. That kind of attitude towards the non-human world is precisely the one that enables things in that world, often called Nature, to be considered mere materials ready for exploitation. Carbon is a good example of something that has enabled Western democracies to energise and stabilise their politics in a particular form. But this is a complicated situation because the extraction of oil, gas and coal have also destabilised other parts of the world via a political process that has coincidentally, and conveniently for some, prevented them from becoming democratic. Timothy Mitchell’s (2011) book, Carbon Democracy, brings out the complications of carbon as stabiliser of Western democracies and destabiliser of non-Western non-democracies. One could say that carbon has stabilised the acceleration of economic growth. It stabilised the possibility of something called the global economy 370

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which previously didn’t exist. But now we’re in a situation where it’s doing the opposite and is destabilising it. The question of where we get our energy from, once carbon’s toxicity is fully understood, is therefore crucial. Agency and legality are partially linked. Animals deemed to be doing useful things have been traditionally protected as property or as having intrinsic rights, and these kinds of rights are extending to other non-human entities like rivers (Fisher and Parsons, 2020). In the UK, whales, octopuses and crabs have recently been acknowledged as sentient and granted rights under animal welfare laws. The legal consequence of giving rights to nonhumans is, we think, also an important question that emerges from attributing different sorts of agency to them. If non-humans aren’t purely objective, if we can attribute to them a certain sort of subjectivity, that means we understand that they have singular attributes. With that perspective guiding our posthumanist methods, a river ‘rivers’; it does singular things that ‘we’ may never master. In other places and times too, non-human subjects of law take us by surprise, even if the architects of those laws weren’t prepared for it. In Antarctica, any human animal that visits is required to abide by treaty-based rules preventing ‘harmful interference’ with non-human animals; for example, one can only get within 50 metres of a breeding or moulting emperor penguin. But did the diplomatic architects of these rules consider how a disruptive or eruptive non-human agency might actually destabilise or surprise their geopolitics? Could a single penguin march into a scientific station and force the human scientists off Antarctica (Antonello, 2019)? Humans drafting such laws were initially more anthropocentric. Confident that they were in their own society and knew what it was, they asked questions of outsiders like, ‘can we live happily with you?’ Rivers, penguins, or any other non-human other, all have certain forms and modes of subjectivity, and some laws are starting to recognise these different kinds of personhood, not merely giving human rights or rights to categories or non-human others, but to particular non-human others. The character of river X is different from river Y; they have different capacities to act and should be recognised as different. 8 Accept that the Earth has limits, meaning we now have to change the means of production, rather than arguing about the distribution of its benefits (wealth, taxes, property). Once you accept limits, production can no longer be the overriding principle of our relationship to the world. The narrative of progress and economic growth is so hegemonic that it is hard to think in terms of earthly limits. But Pierre Charbonnier’s idea, in his recent book, Affluence and Freedom (2021), is one of changing the means of production rather than arguing about the distribution of its benefits in terms of wealth, taxes, and property. Once one accepts limits, production can no longer be the overriding principle of our relationship to the world. The idea of limits to growth has been around for a long time, but Charbonnier’s recent reiteration explicitly goes beyond the classical pact among freedom, democracy and affluence. Accepting Latour’s critique of modernity, he too wants to make a political ecology out of correct evaluations of what the Earth is able to offer. So, it is not a repetition of existing critiques of capitalism, as much as a positive re-evaluation of emergent possibilities once one accepts that political ideas were conditioned from the start by ecological constraints. We have to think once again, he says, about the whole idea of production. Imagine a scenario where you come across a piece of territory and your attitude towards this piece of land or territory is, ‘how much can I get out of it as quickly as possible’? Then this 371

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would be a kind of productivist attitude towards a piece of country. It’s a bit like a neoliberal attitude of ‘getting away with it’; freedom to exploit is getting away with it. Take stuff out, extract it, and turn it into money and go somewhere else. But where to, exactly? Once you think of the earth as having limits, you have nowhere to hide with your money. Although, the recent spate of billionaires wanting to head into space suggests a persisting denial of limits, a last tantrum of the oligarchy against ideas of entanglement or shared fate. 9 Hesitate before continuing to reinforce the nature/culture binary; conversely, look for concepts that seem to slide easily across that division. The infamous nature-culture binary has been deconstructed endlessly, but our methodological principle of hesitation before talking or writing in a way that might reinforce that binary is designed to induce the search for new concepts. The nature/culture binary is reinforced every time human exceptionalism or centrality is reintroduced or ‘nature’ is taken for granted. It seems to us a lot of the work that’s being done in the posthumanities is made possible by using a number of concepts that can be made to slide easily across that natureculture binary. Agency would be one of them, because it’s neutral or agnostic when it comes to what kind of actor is producing the agency. Well-being or health might be a concept that pertains to any living thing and it often stresses interconnectedness and symbiosis. The Anthropocene is another, a concept that reconciles geology and human life. It slides easily across that division, as does the concept we have already talked about, attachment or belonging, which again is agnostic when it comes to which sort of life is doing the attaching. One could also use the concept of value as opposed to wealth, in order to move away from wealth as defined by classical economist Adam Smith in terms of the wealth of nations, which made sense at that time. But in a globalised and ‘earthbound’ world, the broader concept of value gives worth to varieties of sensory experience. The nature-culture binary is obviously deeply embedded in Western thought. One could find its origin in Christian thought, for instance the story of Genesis. The myth of the Garden of Eden is a situation in which God is inviting Adam and Eve to ‘have dominion’ over ‘every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’. So, handed down from above is the right for mastery or dominion over the non-human world. The nature-culture binary finds itself embedded deeply in Western mythologies. One only has to go to other parts of the world which haven’t been subject to this particular myth (of human supremacy or exceptionality) to find contrasting ones. Australian Aboriginal totemism, which we touched on above, is a concept that we could say not only slides easily across the nature-culture binary, but doesn’t even recognise the nature-culture binary. Totemic thought would have Aboriginal people saying, ‘My totem is the pelican’, which is like saying, my life essence is the same as the pelican’s. I am inalienable or indistinguishable, in terms of my fundamental life, from that other being. It proposes a solution to an all-too-simple philosophical problem: one looks at a pelican wondering, ‘How is it I’m in the same world as this weird animal, this animal some call “pelican”?’ And the ‘Western’ answer is, well, very easy: pelicans are in nature and we humans are in culture, and we are going to fight to maintain that distinction, to the point where a lot of our Western figurative language is in the form of animal metaphors that serve to reinforce it. Of course, the totemistic answer is a different one. It’s an answer that says: 372

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‘The same life force is running through me and the pelican, through both of us, and we’re going to look after each other in this world, that we share, for very good reasons’. The relationship is not arbitrary or symbolic. It is real and an aspect of stewardship or management of Country. It induces not only mutual responsibility, but posthumanist ways of being ‘reasonable’. If you think not just as a human, but as a pelican/human, a lot does change. So, our concluding discussion is about the potential monstrousness of rationality. Goya famously said, ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’ in his 1799 etching, but Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983: 122) contradict him: ‘It’s not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but a vigilant and insomniac rationality’. It is a rationality ingrained in the culture, something South African environmental humanist, Lesley Green, has dramatised in her 2015 essay, ‘The Changing of the Gods of Reason’. The gods of reason have to be changed because of the monsters they are producing, as Deleuze and Guattari say. Some of these are, and here she is borrowing from Bruno Latour: scientific objectivity, technical efficiency and economic profitability (2015: 5). These are multi-valent, powerful assemblages, god-like in their tentacular reach and their ontological multiplicity, yet seemingly rigorously secular. If these are the gods of reason, why do they have to be changed, and how? If one persists with these gods of objectivity, efficiency, profitability, perhaps the ‘unintentional’ consequence (in the environment thus created) is the production of a certain kind of ‘monstrous’ human: for example, a security officer deemed necessary to protect these gods, a figure barely recognisable as human because its outer skin is black Kevlar and titanium armour, with colourful patriotic symbols. Its helmet has its own secure oxygen supply; its limbs bristle with weapons and communication devices. If this kind of posthuman character is not to everyone’s taste, then maybe one needs a disarming critique of the hypervigilant rationality that produced it, that serves to protect everything within the narrow orbit of efficiency, profitability and objectivity. If this rationality ends up producing monsters, then perhaps one might decide that these particular gods of reason are not being reasonable. And then we might plant new concepts into places where they can thrive. For instance: ontological plurality, responsibility in human-non-human relations, enjoyability of life on Earth. The diversities of humanity are imminent and inescapable. Bids continue to be made to define what the human is from outside of the self, and these are resisted, for the most part, except among the most factional of humans, those who have not learned to think of themselves beyond colonisation dynamics. The question of ‘What does it mean to be human?’ is contested territory, and there is no longer the distance between ‘us’ (the many forms of life on Earth) to ratify the fiction of the civilising coloniser. Our collaborative project, then, cannot be one that recolonises the task of defining what it means to be human, but expands it through methodological devices such as our nine. The figure of ‘man’, we think, is less likely to be ‘erased’ as in Foucault’s famous text, but is more likely to be extended and varied through realisations of the interactions with non-humans that were always there anyway. Each being is a singularity, a character made of heterogeneous lives. Each is enmeshed in multiple expansive systems, all of which are in flux. This is not necessarily a new conception since it was envisioned in Spinoza’s Ethics. But since humanist, rationalist and secularist traditions have dominated for a long time now, it seems that we are still only starting to emerge from the torpor of our human self-centralisation. 373

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Notes 1 https://www.frieze.com/article/tara-donovan 2 https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/1712046

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24 KNIVES, THE MORE-THANHUMAN AND SPECULATIVE FABRICATION WITH/FOR THE CHTHULUCENE Mike Michael Introduction In this exploratory chapter, I examine the more-than-human and its prospective relationalities (what I call pre-propositions) through a given mundane artefact. Specifically, I address how classes of knife, understood in terms of their more-than-human entanglements, are indicative of distinctive versions of naturecultures and their respective spatio-temporalities. Further, the chapter addresses what it means to embroil a mundane artefact in complex more-than-human – and hopeful – future naturecultures. I ask how the speculative re-design of the knife might illuminate the more-than-human possibilities (or pre-propositions) entailed in Haraway’s Chthulucene? The chapter begins with a compact survey of treatments of the more-than-human, in order to situate itself within a particular tradition, namely post-actor-network theory. Treated as compositional (or concrescent), more-than-human hybrids will be understood as ‘actual occasions’ which thereby entail particular pre-propositions, that is, potentialities that extend relationalities. This will be illustrated through a consideration of the mundane artefact, the knife. Taking three exemplars – the Swiss Army Knife, the mushroom knife and the hunting knife – it will be shown that enactment of each of these entails both a version of the humanenvironment relations and their associated spatio-temporalities. This will be followed by an account of a more experimental or speculative perspective on the more-than-human. Projecting the knife into Haraway’s Chthulucene, and drawing on the emergent ethos of speculative design (as well as on the three types of knives already discussed), the chapter develops a tentative design brief for the speculative fabrication of a Cthulucenic knife. The purpose of speculating on the design of such a knife is to enact and explore Chthulucenic naturecultures with their peculiar ‘pre-propostions’ and the spatio-temporalities these implicate.

On the More-Than-Human… In Bruno Latour’s (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, a revision of Western history was presented in which modernity is characterised as peculiarly marked by the discourses and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-27 376

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practices of purification in which human and nonhuman are rendered separate. This stands in contrast to the actuality that humans have always been embroiled with the nonhuman. We are constitutively more-than-human, quasi-objects and quasi-subjects as Serres (1991) put it. Latour (1992) famously illustrates this entanglement with the ways in which mundane technologies such as the door closer (or groom) shape people’s comportment. And he argues that awareness of this more-than-humanity – this hybridity – is being raised with increasing exposure to innovative (bio)technologies and their impact on the composition of the ‘human’. I begin with this particular version of the more-than-human because my interest is in the mundane – both its role in reproducing routines and its capacity to be generative, that is to say, engaged with potentiality. To borrow a phrase from Rosi Braidotti’s (2017: 8) articulation of the posthuman, we need to multiply ‘the present along these parallel plateaus of actual and virtual’. Of course, approaches to the more-than-human are now widespread and increasingly urgent as scholars grapple with the complex ethical and political ramifications of technoscientific transformations of the human (Haraway, 1991; Lupton, 2016), shifting human-animal relations (Latimer and Birke, 2009; Whatmore, 2002) and anthropogenic environmental destruction and degradation (Haraway, 2016; Rodríguez-Giralt et al., 2014). In tandem with this work, there have been various endeavours to conceptualise the multiplicity and politics of the inter-relations between human and nonhuman. A quick survey of relevant terms might include alongsideness, attunement, conviviality, care and intimacy (see Hinchliffe, 2007; Latimer, 2013; Latimer and López Gómez, 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Stewart, 2011). With all this – broadly post-actor-network theory endeavour – in mind, for present purposes, I will draw inspiration from AN Whitehead (1929) who has been a major influence on many of the key theorists of the more-than-human, including Latour, Haraway and Deleuze. This is because his metaphysics are particularly apt for addressing the not-asyet and the speculative (Debaise, 2017). Accordingly, I suggest that mundane technologies are understood in terms of actual entities (or occasions) that are complexly composed of heterogeneous elements (or prehensions) that straddle the human and nonhuman, and whose combination (or concrescence) entails a process of co-becoming, and the emergence of the prospective that can also be generative of new relations. This process of becoming is propositional (Latour, 1999) insofar as it ‘proposes’ prospective connections (or ingressions in Whitehead’s terms) into subsequent actual entities and occasions. Further, the specific nature of these connections can be grasped through Serres’ (Serres and Latour, 1995) terminology of ‘prepositions’. In other words, prepositions allow for an engagement with the specific sorts of relationalities (and configurations of relationalities) proposed by an actual occasion – relationalities that straddle the human and nonhuman, the material and the semiotic. Putting these together (see Michael, 2021), we can suggest that actual entities and occasions entail pre-propositions: attending to these allows us to explore (patterns of) relationalities that emerge as an actual occasion unfolds. For example, the concrescence – or eventuation – of a particular sort of knife pre-proposes a set of relationalities that can encompass the elements of human and the naturecultural. In the next section, this example is elaborated through three versions of the knife.

On Grasping the Knife To begin: an obvious question to ask is ‘why the focus on the knife’? After all, there has long been a concern across disciplines to unravel the part played by disparate technologies 377

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in the enactment of naturecultures. Technology, in this respect, has taken diverse forms ranging across: technologies typically considered mundane such as climbing shoes (Barratt, 2011), trains (MacNaghten and Urry, 1998), air conditioning (Shove, 2003) and plastic bottles (Hawkins et al., 2015); technologies recently become mundane such as mobile phones (Michael, 2006), other GPS-enabled devices (Lorimer and Lund, 2003) and energyuse monitoring devices (Marres, 2013); and technologies that, though becoming mundane, retain an element of exoticism such as smart homes (Strengers, 2013), geoengineering (Bellamy and Lezaun, 2017), self-tracking (Pink and Fors, 2017) or globalised environmental sensing systems (Gabrys, 2016). As should be obvious, the contrast between mundane and novel is highly porous. The novel can rapidly become domesticated into the ordinary (Lie and Sorensen, 1996). Conversely, an everyday artefact can become strange, not least when unforeseen risks become associated with it (Michael, 2006) – arguably, this is the case for the plastic bottle. The knife, while undoubtedly mundane, also embodies this porosity insofar as it too can become novel. For instance, the mushroom knife while ‘traditional’, may well appear strange to certain groups, the Swiss Army Knife has new functions regularly added to it (such as an altimeter and a barometer), and the hunting knife is subject to continuing innovation in its design and materials. The knife is thus a good object ‘to think with’: its apparent everydayness allows us to examine how it pre-proposes more-than-human embroilments with a variety of naturecultures (and their spatio-temporalities).

Three Knives, etc. The Swiss Army Knife From its origins as Modell 1890, the Swiss Army Knife first took on its basic form (once tools could successfully be attached to both sides of the handle) as the Officer’s and Sport knife patented in 1897 by Karl Elsener. He went on to form the company Victorinox, adopting the now famous Swiss cross and shield logo in 1909. Wenger, its main rival in Switzerland, was eventually acquired by Victorinox in 2005. Throughout their respective histories, Victorinox and Wenger have developed and added tools to their pocket knives. This is perhaps best embodied in Victorinox’s iconic Swisschamp model which has eight layers and 33 functions, and almost parodied in the Wenger 16999 Swiss Army Knife Giant comprising 87 implements and 141 functions (including various blades, saws, files, screw drivers but also mineral crystal magnifiers, removable spoke adjustor, telescopic pointer and flashlight). For present purposes, it is key to note the discreteness and specificity of these functions. For instance, amongst the screwdrivers are flat head bits 0.5 mm × 3.5 mm, 0.6 mm × 4.0 mm, 1.0 mm × 6.5 mm and Phillips head bits 0, 1 and 2. This discreteness is neatly illustrated in the US pharmaceutical companies’ promotional distribution of Swiss Army Knives to doctors in the late 1980s. News stories that these were used to perform emergency tracheotomies during air flights prompted the development and inclusion of a tracheotomy tool (Victorinox, n.d. a; Wenger, n.d.). Considering the Victorinox Swiss Army Knives 2017 catalogue, it is obvious that there is a wide variety of types of pocket knife (the company also produces kitchen and cutlery knives, amongst the other products including luggage and watches) catering for different sets of activities. While several of these invoke urban-based work (e.g. including a USB or a money clip) and are given names such as Manager, Executive, Ambassador or Jetsetter, 378

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others are oriented towards engaging with – in one way or another – the ‘natural environment’ and are dubbed, for instance, the Rambler, the Walker, the Hiker, the Explorer, the Fieldmaster, the Expedition Kit, the Pioneer, Forester Trailmaster, Climber, Huntsman and Adventurer (Victorinox, n.d. b). Especially in the cases of smaller and medium knives, there is a specificity to the selection of implements and functions that apparently make these knives, to draw on Clarke and Fujimura (1992), ‘the right tools for the job’. On this score, it is noteworthy that these jobs by and large concern leisure activities, some of which are distinguished along some very fine lines: in what ways does the inclusion a Phillips screw driver render a knife a Hiker rather than a Rambler? Needless to say, this question is rhetorical: the names of these knives are as much a matter of branding as of function. Nevertheless, the point stands that natureculture is primarily a space of leisure that can be ‘disaggregated’ into generic functional categories. Let us briefly expand on some of these points. The actual occasion of each Swiss Army Knife pre-propositions a ‘natural environment’ that evokes a sense of circumscribed selfsufficiency: circumscribed because the pre-set multi-functionality of the knife suggests that the pertinent tasks – its affordances, so to speak – have been determined elsewhere. In other words, these have been specified, disaggregated, itemised, distilled and collected into a range of tools embodied in a single knife. Spatially, this ‘natural environment’ is resolutely technonatural not least insofar as some of the knives’ tools are as much about working on other tools and technologies which then – in principle, at least – can go on to work on ‘nature’ (for instance, the Explorer incorporates several screwdrivers). In sum, the practices associated with the knives are pre-designated, discretely ‘excorporated’, as Latour (1992) would put it, into the knife by its designers. We might further propose that this excorporation is cumulative, progressing over time as new circumstances and opportunities arise. This is best evidenced in the Cybertool range of medium pocket knives. As such, the temporalisation that attaches to the Swiss Army Knife might be understood through its punctualised innovation: here, naturecultures are enacted through a temporality that progresses through discrete phases of innovation of (ranges of) tools within a spatialisation that is indissolubly natural and technological. In terms of the user, invention lies not in their corporeal and practical creativity but in the hands of the manufacturer. To reiterate, the tasks and their technological solutions are pre-designated (though, of course, in actuality, we can expect considerable inventiveness on the part of users who might well only a deploy limited set of the tools provided) and naturecultures are characterised through a range of distinct tasks.

Mushroom Knives The obvious contrast between the mushroom knife and the Swiss Army Knife is that where the latter has a multitude of functions, the former has only one. Comprising a wide, curved blade and a – usually – wooden handle which often incorporates bristles that serve as an integrated cleaning brush, the mushroom knife’s sole purpose is the cutting (and cleaning) of mushrooms. For convenience, I focus on one French manufacturer, Opinel, that is renowned for craft knives (as well as cutlery). Opinel (n.d. a) promotes its long history of knife-making (especially its wooden-handled folding pocket knives, first produced in the late nineteenth century) and its commitment to traditional forms (the Opinel knife has not changed in over a century). In relation to the mushroom knife, the Opinel version has a blade of steel, a French oak handle, and a brush made of boar bristles (Opinel, n.d. b). Now, there are several other companies that also manufacture – or at least, brand – mushrooms 379

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knives (for example, see ForagerChef, n.d.). Across all cases, the general format of steel curved blade, wooden handle and brush applies. If the Swiss Army Knife reflects forms of technical innovation, the mushroom knife seems to invoke a resistance to such innovation: it has been and always will be the ‘right tool for the job’. Now, if tasks were excorporated into the Swiss Army Knife, in the case of the mushroom knife, a key task – the identification of edible mushrooms – remains with the user. This is evidenced in the sometime inclusion of information about safe mushroom picking with the knife’s packaging or the typical bundling of mushroom knives with mushroom foraging manuals (as with Amazon). In Anna Tsing’s (2015) Mushroom at the End of the World, we encounter mushroom picking as embroiled in a range of globalised flows – migratory, financial, environmental. Mushroom picking is traced in its various specificities as reflecting a way of living amongst ruins in a systemic state of precarity. Tsing’s pickers take ‘advantage’ of the fact that their matsutake mushrooms appear in degraded environments – in Tsing’s (2014) terms, ‘blasted landscapes’. We see none of this in the general image of the mushroom knife traced above: the forager’s mushrooms appear in a ‘natural nature’, seemingly unsullied by capitalism’s excesses. In other words, the spatialisation and temporalisation of the ‘natural environment’ is not a progressively, globally ruinous one, but local and circular, indeed, romantic. There is an immemoriality and localism to the natural environment that is partially reflected in the ostensibly traditional, static design of the knife. Finally, while diverse mushroom pickers might share the need for relevant local knowledge (where and when to go seeking mushrooms), Tsing’s pickers pick often out of economic necessity, while foragers pick because it is ‘fun’ or ‘romantic’, or in order to revive a lost art of mushroom foraging or cooking: in the chef Alberto Carluccio’s (2003: 9) words, mushroom picking entails ‘the joys of collecting – and eating!’ In sum, if matsutake picking implicates globalising sociomaterial flows, then the mushroom knife as enacted in the foregoing examples preproposes a local, circular nature and a restricted movement between romanticised forest and idealised kitchen table.

Hunting Knives It is not always easy to categorise hunting knives not least because they bleed into other classes of knife such as survival or combat. Moreover, there is an enormous range of knives in terms of, for example, their blade shape or handle materials and a sizeable number of websites which sell hunting knives. A core aspect of the hunting knife (one touched on by many sites – see, for example, Richard, 2022; Stoffell, 2022): in the end, the choice depends on the user’s preferences. While pros and cons can be attached to the type of steel (stainless or carbon) and the type of handle (e.g. wooden, leather, horn, canvas micarta), and one can also take into account matters of reputation, warranty, aesthetics and so on, in the final reckoning, a knife’s value lies in what the user finds most comfortable and effective. In part, this focus on the user (as opposed to the set of functions as in the case of Swiss Army Knives, or the specific object of use, as for the mushroom knife) reflects the fact that a hunting knife is put to many uses, including cutting, stabbing, scraping, whittling, carving and so on. The hunting knife, on this reading, pre-proposes a user whose particular skills become realised and potentially enhanced. Indeed, one can suggest that the hunting knife serves in the expression of individuality. This is especially evidenced in the way some hunting knives 380

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(and here they begin to shade into branding as survival and combat knives) are associated with specific media figures found in films such as Rambo, The Expendables, and Predator (see Knife Warehouse, n.d.). On this score, we can note the Bear Grylls (the British television presenter and adventurer) ‘survival series’ of knives produced by the US Gerber company. This individualisation of the knife is perhaps best instanced in the provision of a laser-engraving services though which Gerber knives could be customised by having the owner’s name inscribed on the blade. It would seem that the ‘natural environment’ that is enacted through these knives is one of danger and opportunity, skill and risk. Nature generates challenges that are never predictable, that call on the adaptability, inventiveness and intelligence of the hunter. These challenges cannot always be disaggregated into discrete tasks: the hunter’s knife is thus a multi-use tool that, if carefully chosen, allows the hunter pliably to exercise their embodied capacities in order to deal effectively with these challenges. Here, accomplishment rests not just in the efficient identification of a task or the realisation of a tradition, but in the skilful expression of individualised selfhood in an act of hunting. In other words, the ‘natural environment’ is grasped not though the punctuated innovation of functions identified elsewhere, or through the stasis of tradition recovered and rehearsed, but the ongoing practical and pliable skills of the individual hunter. As such, the ‘natural environment’ entails at once a spatialisation characterised by danger and opportunity which cannot necessarily be pinned down, and a temporalisation that is marked by continuous possibility, unceasing alertness and ongoing skilful application. In the foregoing, three categories of knife have been analysed to derive – albeit superficially – their respective more-than-human pre-propositions for the ‘natural environment’, or rather natureculture, each with its own distinctive spatio-temporalisation. Needless to say, this is an analysis limited by the restricted range of materials that have been collected and analysed, and the neglect of such data sources as accounts and observations of knife use. Nevertheless, if it is agreed that these various knives are suggestive of diverse naturecultural spatio-temporalities, can the knife also serve as a vehicle for exploring how prospective naturecultures – such as Haraway’s Chthulucene – might be mediated? In other words, what sort of knife might be designed – speculatively fabricated – to embody pre-propositions that can implicate, and become with/for, the speculatively fabulated Chthulucene?

Haraway’s Chthulucene: Speculative Fabulation In Donna Haraway’s (2016: 136) Staying with the Trouble, we are presented with an argument for speculative fabulation – a complex and collective process of ‘participat(ing) in a kind of genre fiction committed to strengthening ways to propose near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real nows’. Such social, semiotic and material practices are grounded in, and resourced by, a ‘rich terran muddle’ (Haraway, 2016: 53) characterised by tentacularity, laterality, heterogeneity, multispecies becoming, and captured in the figure of ‘a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm’ – a compost pile in which humans are thoroughly immersed (Haraway, 2016: 55). What does speculative fabulation afford? It is a means – a lure – that enables the Proposing (of) the Chthulucene as a needed third story… (that) unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene… is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and 381

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practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished… (Haraway, 2016: 55) Accordingly, there is a contrast with The dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, (insofar as) human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene…human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story. (Haraway, 2016: 55) Here, Haraway (2016: 55), in her contrast between the Chthulucene and the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, moves away from the ‘too-big players and too-big stories of Capital and Anthropos’. These trigger ‘apocalyptic panics and even odder disengaged denunciations… cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the “game over, too late” discourse…’ (Haraway, 2016: 55–56). Instead, Haraway (2016: 56) counterposes an engagement with the specific complexities and dynamics of the more-thanhuman (say coral and lichen symbionts): in this way, we might be brought into ‘the storied tissues of the thickly present Chthulucene, where it remains possible – just barely – to play a much better SF game, in nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle’. This is also a process of making odd kin with others who are more than ancestral or genealogical, who might be neither individuals nor humans but are nevertheless persons (Haraway, 2015). In this composing of kinship connections, there is both a ‘join(ing of) forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning of irreversible losses’ (Haraway, 2016: 101). The speculative fabulation that (along with others) Haraway so expertly muddles – The Camille Stories: Children of the Compost – narrates a potential unfolding of the Chthulucene into the twenty-fourth century. It powerfully and troublingly conjures a biological-cultural-political-technological muddle that painfully and joyously entails ‘the layered, curious practice of becoming-with others for a habitable flourishing world’ (Haraway, 2016: 168). To reiterate, this fabulation is a lure, a pre-propositioning: it is a speculative opening up of potentialities that are more hopeful than those too-easily associated with the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene (see also Wilkie et al., 2017). Were we to abstract a spatio-temporalisation for the Chthulucene, we might say – crudely – that it is marked by naturecultures whose spatiality comprises topological, heterogeneous involutions that temporally unfold with increasingly nurtured complexity that, in turn, reflect both loss of species and habitat but also inflect with the reconstitution of naturecultural refuges and a proliferation of kin-making. For present purposes, I want to supplement Haraway’s speculative fabulation with the notion of ‘speculative fabrication’ (see Michael, 2021). In particular, I want to explore whether we can also design mundane objects, things and technologies that might similarly serve as lures for more hopeful more-than-human potentialities, prospective naturecultures and their spatio-temporalisations, as they are evoked by the Chthulucene. In the next section, I consider the practice of speculation as found within design disciplines as a potential resource in pre-propositioning Chthulucenic futures. 382

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Speculative Fabrication: ‘Design-with’ and ‘Design-for’ Design has always been concerned with bettering the future (Ginsberg, 2017), whether this future be concerned with local matters of functionality, convenience and pleasure (Norman, 2013), or oriented towards wide-scale social, political and environmental transformation (Papanek, 1984). These are examples of ‘designing-for’ particular futures in which specified possibilities are envisioned and pursued. Needless to say, there are all sorts of unintended consequences that follow the introduction of new designs, not least when these are manifested as market failure. By comparison, there are also traditions of design that are more concerned with opening up future possibilities. These might be said to entail a ‘designing-with’ the future, in the sense that the future emerges with the design process and the implementation of designs (rather than being a discrete identifiable domain into which designs are introduced). Of the various design traditions that do ‘designing-with’ the future, we can point to three exemplars (though these are by no means distinct). Participatory design (in which potential users contribute directly to the design process) facilitates the emergence of futures and designs through the interactions of potential users, designers and artefacts of one sort or another (see Binder et al., 2015). Critical design, in contrast, troubles existing futures (projected by product designers, technoscientists and policy-makers as well as others such as journalists) by designing artefacts that critique the assumptions underpinning those futures. As key proponents of this perspective, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (Dunne, 2006; Dunne and Raby, 2001) have designed ‘what if’ objects and scenarios that do not fit into, and indeed interrogate, mainstream futures. The speculative dimensions of this design practice have more recently been productively highlighted by Dunne and Raby (2013) and neatly summarised by Auger (2013: 32) when he suggests, ‘Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life. It is more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a method’. A third tradition of speculation in design can be found in the works of Bill Gaver and his collaborators (Gaver et al., 2008; Sengers and Gaver, 2006). In this case, speculative artefacts (whose functionality is not at all clear) are designed and implemented, in the sense of being given to users to live and interact with. These users are subsequently visited and their experiences with, and thoughts about, the artefact and related elements (such as the complexities of domestic space, or the multiple meanings of energy and community) are ethnographically documented. Over and above this empirical aspect, this version of speculative design is distinguished by the fact that it does not operate in opposition to, or critically towards, mainstream technological futures. Rather, it leaves more open how such futures might be enacted, not least through interaction with the speculative design artefact. At base, the foregoing can be understood as exercises in ‘speculative fabrication’: these designed objects (and the settings that are sometimes designed with them) are sufficiently indeterminate, troubling, and even nonsensical, so that, ideally, they prompt a practical speculative engagement with the future. On this score, they are supplementary to the mainly narrative, speculative fabulations of Haraway and others. We might additionally note that, in some ways, designing in relation to the Chthulucene straddles ‘designing-for’ and ‘designing-with’. On the one hand, the Chthulucene as delineated by Haraway is a future characterised by a series of features and spatio-temporalisations, albeit open-ended ones (see above). One is designing-for this projected future, even though its parameters 383

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are themselves unfolding. As such, and on the other hand, there is a designing-with the Chthulucene which is decidedly pre-propositional, potentially drawing in and on design as a mode of exploring and expanding the Chthulucene’s tentacular, multispecies, processual kin-making.

Re-De-Signing the Knife: A Re-De-Brief In this section, there is an attempt at sketching how we might put together a brief for ‘re-de-signing’ ‘a knife with/for the Chthulucene’. On several levels, this is a rather ‘idiotic’ exercise: after all, cannot any knife be turned towards Chthulucenic ends? Does it really need a re-design? However, treating idiocy more technically (Michael, 2012a, 2012b; Stengers, 2005a), it becomes an opportunity to stand back, slow down and re-address our assumptions, to explore pre-propositions in relation to the Chthulucene. This entails both a ‘de-signing’ of the knife, in the sense of opening up and rendering more ambiguous the elements (prehensions) that enter into the eventuation of the knife (Michael, 2012b). But there is also a re-signing of the knife such that it points towards the emergent pre-propositions that derive from Haraway’s Chthulucene. In other words, in what follows I outline what we might call a re-de-brief, that is to say, a series of parameters for a re-de-signing that is both an ambiguation and a delineation of the knife oriented towards enacting and exploring the Chthulucene. To this end, I also draw on the three types of knife discussed above: how might the Swiss Army, mushroom and hunting knives each furnish means for the re-de-sign of the Chthulucenic knife? To begin with, we might address the relationalities out of which a knife with/for the Chthulucene emerges both materially and semiotically. How might such knives’ production process resonate with the Chthulucene in terms of its materials, its design and its manufacture? Here we might consider how various practitioners (in the widest sense – see Stengers, 2005b) can be brought together in an ecology of practices to explore how to design, test and make a knife with/for the Chthulucene while at the same time beginning to make kin across domains (included amongst these practitioners might be farmers, foragers, walkers, hunters, as well as social and natural scientists, and knife designers and makers). If a crucial dimension of such a gathering is the co-design and collaborative prototyping of knives with/for the Chthulucene, one of the necessary accompanying ingredients is the storying of such knives. Such a process of fabrication is also a narrativisation or fabulation of such knives’ potential misuses as well as uses, failures as well as successes, of its threats as well as promises. Drawing on the uses of the mushroom knife, pickers and foragers might provide very different narratives of the Chthulucenic knife as a marker of, respectively, precarity or pleasure. This divergence raises potentially interesting questions about the Chthulucene as a site of survival and/or flourishing, however these are defined and enacted. In regard to the ‘openness’ of such knives, we can include in their design an indication of the incompleteness of this ecology of practices: a reminder of those who might have a stake but for some reason are absent(ed). Here, incompleteness can be considered constitutive: as Law (2004) reminds us in relation to social methodology, a positive account necessarily entails various modes of othering. One simple way of signifying this necessary incompleteness is to draw on the design of the Swiss Army Knife, specifically on its compartmentalisation of functions. By always leaving a section – or compartment – of the knife empty, this could serve as a reminder that there is something or someone inevitably missing. But further, this could also point towards the openness that the Chthulucenic knife would enact insofar as 384

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there is always something or someone that escapes ‘our’ plans, or is indeed ‘othered’ by them; there is always something or someone to be embraced (even if that process entails further othering). Put otherwise, this simple design element reminds us – pre-propositions – that the Chthulucene is always already emergent. Such Chthulucenic knives would also need to possess a different sort of openness, one that is invitational in relation to their ongoing use. For instance, they could serve in facilitating perspectivism in which self-identity comes to be reconfigured and redistributed through the perspectives of others, both human and nonhuman (Kohn, 2013; Viveiros de Castro, 2014). This could be made possible by incorporating sensors that are sensitive to signals beyond human perception (infra-red or ultra-violet; very high- or low-frequency sounds; various chemical signals such as pheromones). For example, these would trigger a hunting knife’s handle to glow, or, better still, to vibrate in order to physically indicate that one is being sensed, even as one is sensing the presence of others. In other words, by extending the sensorium of the Chthulucenic hunter, they become entangled with other creatures (by effectively sharing aspects of their sensorium). The pre-proposition here is to embed and emplace – to reconfigure – self within an assemblage that ranges beyond the more ‘usual’ naturecultural byways: proprioceptively, their sense of positionality is extended more fully to engage with their environment. In the process, there might emerge the prospect of exploring – if not making – new kinship connections. This might be further complemented by an ‘eco-historicizing’ of place: a GPS-enabled knife might trigger messages to a smart phone that relay the history and changing ecology of a place as one moves through a particular naturecultural scape. This need not be simply ‘factual’ – but entail folk stories, anecdotes, memoirs, etc. Again, ideally, there might be a refreshed spatio-temporalisation of naturecultures: a topological entanglement of past, present and future in relation to the history of a natureculture’s human and nonhuman fauna and flora. Moreover, this opens up the possibility of acknowledging and mourning the loss of fauna, flora and habitat. This ‘eco-historicizing’ could also take other forms. The mushroom knife of course only harvests the fruiting body of the fungus. Beneath lies the mycelium – the mycorrhizal network that makes up the main part of fungus and which serves as a conduit for communications amongst other species, notably trees. Indeed, as Simard (2018) frames it, this network mediates a collective memory which shapes the relationalities between fungi, trees, bears, salmon and people. In this regard, Simard hopes that a sensitivity to this holistic inter-connectedness will encourage more empathy towards ecosystems such as forests. A Chthulucenic knife can promote this holistic sensibility (even if it needs to be modulated: as Tsing (2012), notes, fungi are not always so benign) by, for instance, fetching up imagery on a smart phone of the mycelium (or other like networks) when pressure is applied to its blade. Additionally, there is a need to engage with the actual users of this knife. From their accounts, we might derive a sense of the extent to which the re-de-signed knife does indeed afford some version of kin-making, or whether it turns out to detract from, or dilute, the possibility of kin-making. In any case, the knife operates processually – its utility, or lack thereof, will feed back into the ecology of re-de-sign practices (say, through users’ storytelling, possibly recorded through some in-built facility of the re-de-signed knife itself). The divergent accounts of different users thus complexify the knife and enhance its pre-propositionality. Now, it goes without saying that this attempted actualisation of the re-de-brief is at most minimally suggestive (and I am in no doubt that it could have been more productively 385

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and elegantly rendered, not least by actual designers). There are several avenues that the re-de-sign might have followed but which remain underdeveloped (e.g. around matters of composting, death and memorialisation). Nevertheless, in spite of the present paucity of imagination, we can still abstract some key elements of the Chthulucenic knife. Firstly, to re-de-sign and speculatively fabricate knives with/for the Chthulucene, we also need to address ourselves to the sort of kin-making that needs to be attempted in order to pursue such speculation. That is to say, in pursuit of the Chthulucene we are also enacting – making – it. However, secondly, given that such an enactment is speculative, it prepropositionally opens itself to ongoing reflection and refinement with/for the Chthulucene. Further, the re-de-signed knife can serve in the exploration of the Chthulucene’s possible spatio-temporalisation. So, thirdly, we might reconfigure the spatialisations of the Chthulucene’s naturecultures through ‘perspectivization’ which takes the (minimal) form of an expansion of the human sensorium with the aid of the re-de-signed knife. And, fourthly, as we have hinted, the knife, by importing and exporting eco-histories, can topologise temporality, linking past, present and future in potentially unexpected and inventive ways. Finally, putting these together, we can suggest that such a knife can reconfigure fruitful kinship-making in Haraway’s sense, extending it along new trajectories (or tentacularities) both temporally and spatially.

Concluding Remark This chapter has attempted to think a number of types of knife in terms of how they might enact naturecultures, and especially their spatio-temporal qualities. This has been at once an analytic exercise in the sense of empirically tracing how the more-than-human elements of the actual occasions out of which these knives have (partially) emerged (partially) perform naturecultures, and speculative in the sense of exploring the processes entailed in designing a knife with/for a potential future (the Chthulucene). Along the way, a series of new terms have been suggested: design with/for, speculative fabrication, re-de-sign and re-de-brief. These are of course tentative, and their function is heuristic. They are means – or pre-propositions – through which to explore what it means it to engage with potential futures in ways which acknowledge those more-than-human futures’ openness. More generally, there is a case to be made for a sort of speculative fabrication oriented towards the mundane stuff of everyday life as it enacts different future possibilities. Instead of the knife, we could re-de-sign other everyday objects with/for a possible future other than the Chthulucene. In a vein similar to the foregoing, we could, through the process of making and telling – fabricating and fabulating – re-de-sign what we might call ‘hopeful objects’, that is, objects that in their more-than-human composition and unfolding preproposition hopeful futures.

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25 THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN MICROPOLITICS OF THE RESEARCH ASSEMBLAGE Nick J. Fox and Pam Alldred

Introduction In the post-Enlightenment era, scientific research has been regarded as foundationally a human activity or practice. In this anthropocentric perspective, the human researcher is centre-stage, with non-human matter – from the tools and instrumentation used to generate ‘data’ to the material substrates that constitute the subject-matter of research – relegated to marginal significance. Within social research, a humanist emphasis has extended to encompass research subjects, with acknowledgement of the need to accommodate the interests and rights of respondents during the research process (Berger, 1966: 188; British Sociological Association, 2017: 5–6; May, 1993: 44–47). This, however, has further marginalised the part that other matter plays in the research endeavour. The emergence of more-than-human (MTH) ontologies in recent social theory has posed challenges to the privilege accorded to human agency in modernism and humanism, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world. This has fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and methods. An MTH perspective on research entirely transforms not only how this enterprise is to be understood, but also challenges the underpinning objective of scientific inquiry as an effort to supply an accurate representation of the world – natural and social. This chapter sets out how an MTH ontology of the research process supplies an understanding of researchas-assemblage, in which the micropolitics of a multiplicity of human and non-human materialities produce the research findings, outputs and ‘knowledge’ that scientific inquiry generates during research. However, this MTH and micropolitical perspective upon research is not simply a matter of adopting a post-humanist or post-anthropocentric terminology. An MTH understanding of research poses more fundamental questions about scientific inquiry itself. To explore these issues, the chapter situates an understanding of the research assemblage upon the distinction made by Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 291–292) between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ science, and addresses the challenges in recent MTH and new materialist ontologies to the view that research can accurately represent the realities that it studies (see, for example, Barad, 2007; Lather and St Pierre, 2013; St Pierre, 2021; DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-28 390

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Thrift, 2008). Consequently, the chapter first explores these two models of scientific inquiry, and how an MTH perspective on scientific inquiry can replace representationalism with a model of science that ‘follows the action’ rather than attempting to discern truths or causality. We then apply Deleuze’s (1988: 124–126) ‘ethological’ toolkit of affects, assemblages and micropolitics to make sense of the research assemblage as MTH engagements between the object of study, the tools of research, research contexts, research outputs and the human participants in the research process, including researchers, respondents and audience. We conclude by considering the implications of the research assemblage for the practical endeavour of social inquiry, and offer a framework for MTH social inquiry methodology and methods.

Social Inquiry beyond Humanism Approaches to social inquiry have often been differentiated in terms of a constructionist/realist dualism (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2018; Lau and Morgan, 2014: 574). From a constructionist/post-structuralist perspective, social inquiry and the resulting knowledge generated are part of the process that constructs the social world we live in. Human actions, interactions, systems of thought, cultures and micro-processes of power together produce a socially constructed universe of multiple, relative realities (Fox, 2014). By contrast, from within a realist epistemology, social inquiry involves generating knowledge not only of surface phenomena of everyday life, but also revealing underlying mechanisms that generate these phenomena, which are not immediately accessible by simple observation. It is knowledge of this deeper objective reality, the realist argues, that is the main aim of social inquiry. So, for instance, critical realist investigation of well-being in older adults concluded that causal mechanisms associated with autonomy and control explained poor health outcomes (Danermark et al., 2002: 190–191). However, these radically different epistemologies of research obscure a commonality between them: an ontology of social inquiry that privileges human agency within the research process. This anthropocentric inflection establishes a distinction between a human researcher and their object of study: with the former the active party, and the latter (whether chemical, biological or social) the passive material to be measured, observed, interrogated or otherwise subjected to scrutiny. Meanwhile the tools and techniques of research – from the test-tubes, scales and scientific instruments of the laboratory through to the survey instruments, interview schedules and statistical techniques of social research – are also passive components within a human research endeavour. Ontologies are often chosen in order to bolster the beliefs, commitments or needs of scholars or other interest communities (Morgan and Smircich, 1980: 499). As an ontological child of the Enlightenment, humanism – with its emphasis upon human reason as the means by which truths about the natural and social world could be gleaned – bolstered the emergence of scientific inquiry. Such human-driven scientific inquiry supplanted prior religious ontologies that treated such knowledge as something only to be revealed by the gods. As Carroll (1993: 117) suggests, in this Enlightenment era: (W)here truth illuminated the way, there was no need for religion. … It formed and developed the major science of physics, chemistry and biology. It did the same with the new sciences of man, psychology, sociology, history and economics. 391

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Carroll’s assessment ignores the later sidelining of humanism within science, as positivism’s emphasis upon observational data became the driving force behind the development of the natural sciences (Tibbetts, 1982). However, as noted a moment ago, anthropocentrism remains central to scientific inquiry and research methodology. Indeed, anthropocentrism is at its most apparent in positivist scientific inquiry, in which a human researcher is considered the sole protagonist, with the tools and techniques of research simply the means whereby evidence about the workings of the world may be extracted in the form of ‘data’ from the passive object of research. From within this anthropocentric ontology, it is thus perhaps unsurprising that those working within scientific epistemologies (including realist and constructionist social scientists) have little to say (bar the broadest of commentaries) about the micro-workings of the research process. To ask, for example, what precisely goes on when applying stratified sampling or a telephone questionnaire? How does thematic analysis or the use of multivariate statistics produce particular kinds of knowledge about the researched topic? For natural science positivists, assessment of these micro-workings is limited to considerations of how to apply rigorous scientific methodology to counter ‘bias’, ‘extraneous variables’ or other ‘threats to validity’ (Park et al., 2020: 692). For social science post-positivists, concern with the unintended consequences of the research process is restricted to the impact of the human actors (researcher and researched), and how knowledge of the social world is inevitably ‘constructed’: first by research subjects’ interpretations of the events in which they are involved, and then subsequently by the researcher’s interpretations of these constructions (Fox, 2008: 661). Rather than describing how the social world, research and scholarship actually contribute to social realities. Thus, for example, Kitzinger (1987) argued that scientific research on non-normative sexualities has produced a series of contingent knowledges over time: from pathology to deviance to diversity. By contrast, in this chapter, these micro-processes and micropolitics of research are the core focus in the critical analysis of research, via a posthuman, post-anthropocentric or MTH materialist ontology. While supplying insights into the power imbalances within the research process, and into the culture of social inquiry, this will also provide a means to peer into the detailed workings of social inquiry. Central to this MTH ontology is the conception of a ‘research assemblage’ constituted from a multiplicity of human and non-human materialities, and held together by the capacities of these constituent elements to affect or be affected (Fox and Alldred, 2015a, 2015b). Many of these capacities are beyond the direct control or intentionality of human actors. Fox and Alldred’s development of this analysis of research-as-assemblage has been developed within the relational, post-anthropocentric and monist ontology of the range of perspectives in social theory known variously as new materialisms (Coole and Frost, 2010), vital materialism (Bennett, 2010) and ‘renewed materialism’ (Braidotti, 2022: 108). These materialist threads within social theory have emerged over the past 20 years as an approach concerned fundamentally with the material workings of power, but focused firmly upon social production rather than social construction (Coole and Frost, 2010: 7). It radically extends the scope of earlier materialist analyses beyond structural and ‘macro’ level social phenomena (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 159), to address issues often regarded as the remit of ‘micro-sociology’ because of their association with how thoughts, desires and feelings contribute to social production (Braidotti, 2000: 159; DeLanda, 2006: 5). As well as this collapse of the micro/macro dichotomy, new materialist theory puts in question social theory dualisms, including culture/nature, structure/agency, reason/emotion, human/ 392

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non-human, animate/inanimate, inside/outside and perhaps most importantly, mind/matter (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 157). Furthermore, new materialists such as Jane Bennett and William Connolly proclaim the vitality of all matter (Bennett, 2010: 2; Connolly, 2013: 400), displacing human agency as the prime mover of social production. This understanding flattens out distinctions between human and all the other stuff conventionally treated as our ‘environment’: all the disparate materialities that may assemble together within an event have capacities to affect – or to be affected by – other assembled matter (Deleuze, 1988: 101). More specifically, the conception of a research assemblage derives from the ‘ethology’ of Gilles Deleuze (1988: 125–126, see also Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 256–258). In this ethological ontology, assemblages rather than single bodies become the unit of analysis, as it is only when a body or a thing assembles with another body or thing that its capacities for action or reaction emerge (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 88–89). Any event or interaction may be considered as an assemblage of ‘affective materialities’. Later in this chapter, the application of this ontology of assemblages and affects to research is fully developed. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s work also supplies a broader context within which to set out an MTH perspective on social inquiry. Before exploring the research assemblage in detail, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988: 367) contrast between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ scientific traditions, and their consequent critique of efforts of science to ‘represent’ the world it researches, provides an MTH foundation for the remainder of the chapter.

Major and Minor Science For Deleuze, both singly and in his collaboration with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, the world that humans inhabit is dynamic and endlessly in flux. Furthermore, this world is enacted entirely upon what they called the ‘plane of immanence’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 35ff), that is, the singular yet infinitely variable arena within which all events natural and social, all interactions, all desires, all lives are played out (Deleuze, 1997; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 47–48). In this monist ontology, there is no ‘other level’, above, below or beyond the everyday that make things happen ‘behind the scenes’, as has often been suggested in those sociologies (from Marx to Parsons to Luhmann) that call upon ‘social structures’ or ‘social systems’ to do the theoretical heavy-lifting when it comes to explaining social continuity (Connolly, 2011: 178; Fox and Alldred, 2018; Latour, 2005: 5–6). In this ‘flat’ ontology (DeLanda, 2006: 51), without structures or systems to fall back upon as explanations of phenomena such as social stratification, inequalities or exploitation, the workings of power in new materialist theory is micropolitical, operating at the level of the everyday event. Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence is founded on his (1988) exegesis of Spinoza’s ‘monist’ philosophy, which rejected any notion of the transcendent, or of base/superstructure or surface/depth dualism. This ontology considers human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities as relational, gaining contingent capacities in their interactions with other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas (Deleuze, 1988: 123; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 261). Translated into social theory, a monist world-view focuses exclusively upon the forces and affects operating at the level of actions, interactions and events. Moreover, it shifts attention from essences and ‘being’ towards concern with matter’s (human and non-human) capacities for becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 256). Consequently, the question to be asked is not what matter is, but what it can do (Fox and Alldred, 2017: 24). 393

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Politically, this focus on change and becoming-other (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 238) underpinned the emphasis throughout Deleuze’s work upon the ‘minor’ and minoritarian strands in social life. Minor literatures (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 105), minor philosophies (Massumi, 1992: 2) and – pertinent to this chapter – minor science (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 368) are all in opposition to what Deleuze and Guattari called variously the ‘major’, ‘State’ or ‘Royal’ mainstreams. These minoritarian strands challenge majoritarian privilege and oppression (for instance, patriarchy, colonialism and anthropocentrism) in favour of the conventionally deprivileged, such as women, animal, child and person of colour (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 291–292). Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 291–292) sought to up-end this hierarchy, to promote becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible. This re-privileging of becoming and the minoritarian chimes with a range of other concepts with which Deleuze and Guattari pepper their writing, such as nomadology (1988: 23), de-territorialisation and lines of flight (1988: 277), smooth space (1988: 371, 478), the rhizome (1988: 7–10) and multiplicity (1988: 8–9). However, Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian emphasis not only challenges majoritarian privilege in social phenomena such as patriarchy, racism, colonialism and humanism, but also offers a new perspective on scientific efforts to reveal ‘the truth’ by providing definitive representations of the world through theories and axioms (DeLanda, 2016: 87–88; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 372). Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 364) described this neat equation of truth with representation as the basis of major science. This enterprise has the objective of creating universal explanatory ‘laws’ (DeLanda, 2016: 91), often rendered mathematically, as in Newtonian and Einsteinian physics (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 376). Deleuze and Guattari suggested that alongside this model, a minor strand of scientific inquiry has run in parallel with major science for much of its history. Minor science, in their view, applies an alternative model of inquiry to representation: ‘following’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 368). This approach attends not to the stable and homogeneous, but to the flows and fluxes of unfolding phenomena (Jensen, 2018: 38). It is grounded firmly in observation of singular events (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 372) and to practical problems concerning how to intervene in the natural or social world (for instance, to forge iron or build a bridge). Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 372) offered this analogy: rather than observing a river from the bank (the major science model of the disinterested researcher), get into the boat yourself and become part of the action. Such a model of science as ‘following the action’ is actually a fairly accurate description of many social sciences, which have been either unable or unwilling to formulate ‘laws’ of social action and interaction, and have questioned on epistemological grounds the capacity to ‘represent’ a social reality that is highly mutable, and largely mediated via language, concepts and ideologies (St Pierre, 2013: 647–649). Indeed, as DeLanda (2016: 87–88) has pointed out, classical physics is possibly the only true exemplar of a major science. Even a natural science such as chemistry has ‘followed’ the materiality of chemical phenomena for much of its history, rather than axiomising its subject-matter (DeLanda, 2016: 99; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; 367–369). In the contemporary period, this doubt over science’s claims to ‘represent’ the world accurately by means of theories and laws has been a feature of much new materialist and posthuman scholarship, which – generally speaking – has been ‘post-representational’ as a consequence. Apart from Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of minor science, other examples of this are Karen Barad’s (2007: 73) suggestion of ‘diffraction’ as an alternative to 394

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representation, Nigel Thrift’s (2008) non-representational theory, and St Pierre’s (2021, 2023) eschewal of all pre-determined methodology. While these latter scholars regard any effort to shift social science towards a major key as foundationally misguided (see, for example, Barad, 2003: 815; St Pierre, 2021), it is worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari explicitly stated (1988: 372) that following is ‘(n)ot better, just different’ from representation. DeLanda (2016: 100–101) has developed this last point further, suggesting that within sciences, including social sciences, there are continual processes of becoming-major and becoming-minor, as methodologies develop and evolve. In the spirit of DeLanda’s commentary, it is consequently appropriate to acknowledge a dynamic between minor and major social sciences, with some branches endeavouring to axiomise the fuzzy findings of minor science, while others continually undermine the certainties of major science. Indeed, this minor/major dynamic has been played out endlessly in the continuous evolution of social research methodologies, some of which (most notably, in economics and psychology, but also in quantitative sociology) have sought a social science knowledge that can reproduce the social world accurately and generalisably, while others aimed to undermine such efforts and promote a social science that is contingent, inventive and reflexive about its own biases. Within the social sciences, there is a long tradition of engaged research that acknowledges multiple perspectives on ‘truth’. What the Deleuzoguattarian analysis of major and minor science adds is an ontological and micropolitical basis for methodologies that are fully engaged with the phenomena they research. In contrast with the anthropocentric, researcher-driven emphasis of major science, a minor social science entails an MTH focus on the assemblages and affects that constitute the flows and fluxes of the social and natural world and the research process itself. With this in mind, this chapter will set out a perspective on research-as-assemblage. Before that, the next section establishes a conceptual framework within which to develop this understanding.

A More-than-Human Conceptual Toolkit Recent social theory has variously acknowledged MTH ontologies in which human actors are displaced from the centre-stage of anthropocentric and humanist ontology. Actornetwork theory (ANT), originally developed to inform empirical studies of science and technology studies (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1999, 2005), ascribes agency not to humans or other entities, but to transient relational networks (Law, 1999: 4) comprising both human and non-human ‘actants’ (Latour, 2005: 54). These networks are consequently heterogeneous and extend beyond what is traditionally considered ‘social’, to include ‘texts, devices, architectures’ (Law, 1992: 379). In Karen Barad’s (2007: 73) ‘onto-epistemology’, matter – both human and non-human – does not possess prior fixed attributes, but rather capacities that emerge in the context of ‘intra-actions’ between these materialities. The Spinozist philosophy of Deleuze (1988; Deleuze and Guattari, 1984, 1988) focused upon transient and unstable assemblages of animate and inanimate entities whose affective capacities emerge only in relation to other (similarly contingent and ephemeral) elements (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 260–261). All social production, social formations, power relations and resistances emerge from these affective flows, which bring together micro and macro, personal and geopolitical (Deleuze, 1990: 207; Gatens, 1996: 169). Given the earlier discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) acknowledgement of minor and major scientific threads, there is some logic in applying the latter Spinozist ontology. 395

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Moreover, Deleuzian ontology has the potential to inform social inquiry, partly because of its empirical focus on processes and interactions, but also because it addresses social science interests in both power and resistance, and offers a means to move beyond structure/ agency and culture/nature dualisms (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010). In an interview (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 21), Braidotti described the Deleuzoguattarian project as ‘a method, a conceptual frame and a political stand, which refuses the linguistic paradigm, stressing instead the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power’. The key concepts of Deleuze’s ‘ethological’ ontology and its differentiation from a traditional ‘anthropocentric’ social ontology can be summarised in a few paragraphs. Firstly, Deleuze shifted from conceptions of objects and bodies as occupying distinct and delimited spaces (Law, 1999: 6). Instead, human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities are relational, gaining capacities only in their relationships with other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas (Deleuze, 1988: 123; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 261). Assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 88) of these materialities develop in unpredictable ways around actions and events, ‘in a kind of chaotic network of habitual and non-habitual connections, always in flux, always reassembling in different ways’ (Potts, 2004: 19), and operate as ‘machines’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 4) that do something, produce something. Assemblages develop at sub-personal, interactional or macro-social levels (DeLanda, 2006: 5), and have an existence, a life even, independent of human bodies (Ansell Pearson, 1999: 157–159; DeLanda, 2006: 40). Deleuze’s second move was to replace the conventional conception of human agency with the Spinozist notion of affect (Deleuze, 1988: 101), meaning simply the capacity to affect or be affected. In an assemblage, there is no ‘subject’ and no ‘object’, and no single element possesses agency (Anderson, 2006: 736). Rather, an affect is a ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 256) that represents a change of state or capacities of an entity (Massumi, 1988: xvi): this change may be physical, psychological, emotional or social. Affects produce further affective capacities within assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 400); and because one affect can produce more than one capacity, social production is not linear, but ‘rhizomatic’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 7), a branching, reversing, coalescing and rupturing flow. Thus, for example, a sexual desire is an affect that may have multiple and unanticipated effects on bodies, resources, interactions and even social institutions such as monogamy. Third, assemblages and the affects within them constitute the entirety of the natural and social world; there is nothing beyond this immanent universe. In place of top-down power, there is a micropolitics that flows through the world, rendering assemblages constantly in flux. Specifying or ‘territorialising’ affective flows stabilise an assemblage, while other affects generalise or ‘de-territorialise’ what it (and its constituent MTH elements) can do (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 88–89). Affects may also aggregate matter within assemblages, while other affects are non-aggregative or ‘singular’, affecting a single body or other materiality in an assemblage in a unique way. So, for example, naming a new pet kitten is a singular affect, while categorising it as tabby or tortoiseshell is aggregative. These fluxes within and between assemblages create an ‘economy’ of affects (Clough, 2004: 15) and are the process by which lives, societies and history unfold, ‘in a world which is constantly becoming’ (Thrift, 2004: 61). These concepts assemblages, affects, capacities and micropolitics together supply the means to launch an MTH analysis of social research. Conventionally, social inquiry (like 396

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other scientific inquiry) has been anthropocentric, regarding the researcher as the prime mover in the research enterprise, whose reason, logic, theory and scientific method gradually imposes order upon ‘data’ to supply an understanding, however imperfect, of the world (and its social construction). By contrast, a materialist ontology of assemblages and affects treats the researcher and the researched event, plus the many other materialities involved in social inquiry such as the tools, technologies and theories of scientific research, as elements in a research assemblage. This research assemblage is productive of a variety of capacities in the human and non-human matter thereby assembled. The following sections develop this MTH concept of the research assemblage.

The Research Assemblage From within the ethological perspective just outlined, every interaction, every event is to be understood as an MTH assemblage, brought into being by the affects between the different materialities that are interacting. So, for instance, a shower of rain is an assemblage, constituted from affects between the Sun, wind, clouds, seas and the land and organic matter it falls upon. If this shower falls upon humans, then they too become part of the assemblage, perhaps along with raincoats, umbrellas, places to shelter and so forth. From within this same perspective, it follows that meteorological or social research into rain needs to be able to explore these affects and the capacities that it produces in constituent elements of the assemblage. A further consequence of this ontology is that research must itself be acknowledged as an assemblage with its own affect economy. A research assemblage (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013: 17; Fox and Alldred, 2015a, 2015b; Masny, 2013: 340) will comprise research tools such as questionnaires, interview schedules or other apparatus; recording and analysis technologies, computer software and hardware; theoretical frameworks and hypotheses; research literatures and findings from earlier studies; and of course, researchers. To this may be added contextual elements such as the physical spaces and establishments where research takes place; the frameworks, philosophies, cultures and traditions that surround scientific research; ethical principles and ethics committees; and the paraphernalia of academic research outputs: libraries, journals, editors and reviewers, and readers. The affects assembling these disparate MTH relations are those needed to conduct ‘research’: that is, to gather ‘data’, analyse it and produce a report that makes some claim to ‘knowledge’ about the event studied. Importantly, once research begins, the events to be researched also become part of the research assemblage. This insight has significant consequences for what a research assemblage can do, but also for the micropolitics of research, as the affects in an event and the affects associated with the research process intermingle. To explore this interaction, consider an MTH event E, such as sexualisation and online pornography use among teenagers reported in Fox and Bale (2018). The human matter in this event assemblage included teenagers, family, teachers, school/college and celebrities. Non-human matter included parties and social events; alcohol; media and pornography; contraceptives; sex education classes and materials; and paraphernalia of youth culture such as music, vehicles, skateboards and mobile phones (Fox and Bale, 2018: 399). These human and non-human materialities affected each other, thereby establishing the event assemblage that was sexualisation. When E became the focus of a research study (which is itself another event R), the aim of the research was to apply methods that could document the affects (‘ABC’) within the 397

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E assemblage and assess the capacities that these affects produce. However, the research assemblage R included all the MTH paraphernalia of academic inquiry described earlier in this section, assembled by the affects (‘XYZ’) that enable social inquiry and the translation of ‘data’ into ‘knowledge’ about E. However, if R was to successfully document, analyse and eventually textually report E, it must necessarily have possessed the capacity to be affected by the event affects ABC, in the sense that a research instrument or conceptual tool must be sufficiently sensitive to be useful as an indicator. So during research, the research assemblage encompasses the affects of the event that it is studying. This ‘hybrid’ assemblage is brought together by the affects in both R and E, namely A, B, C, X, Y and Z (Fox and Alldred, 2015a). However, this capacity of a research assemblage to incorporate event affects poses two opposing hazards for any research study, including the study of sexualisation and pornography (Fox and Bale, 2018). First, if the XYZ affects in the research assemblage R are puny, then the ABC affects in the event E will overwhelm them, generating research outputs that are anodyne or merely descriptive, theoretically uninformed, journalistic rather than critical. Alternatively, if the affects XYZ within the research assemblage R are too powerful, then – as the research seeks to analyse, apply theory, summarise, generalise and assert knowledge of E – the flow of affect in the event assemblage could be submerged by the research affects. In this latter circumstance, the ‘knowledge’ of E that is produced will be more a product of the research process than of E itself. For instance, some scholars of sexuality have suggested that the affects within modernist human science research have been so overwhelming that contemporary ‘sexuality’ has been entirely constituted by expert ‘knowledge’ (Foucault, 1981; Kitzinger, 1987). This analysis of the hybridisation of event and research assemblage affect economies sheds light on the challenges faced by all research studies, but also brings this analysis back to the earlier contrast between major (representational) science and minor (following) science. Arguably, the second hazard just described (a research assemblage whose affects overwhelm an event assemblage) is particularly problematic in the axiomatising affect economy of major science, while the following model of minor science risks falling into the first hazard (an inadequately robust research assemblage). However, this analysis also permits a sophisticated further exploration of the research assemblage, which has the potential to chart a course between these hazards, or at least to acknowledge their consequences for the ‘knowledge’ that research produces. The next section develops this assessment.

The Micropolitics of the Research Assemblage How event, instruments and researchers interact will depend upon the affective interactions within a specific research assemblage. Fortunately, the ethological conceptual toolkit of affects, capacities and micropolitics enables a more granular analysis of these interactions. Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 4) described assemblages as constituted from a collection of simpler ‘machines’ that link elements together affectively to do something, to produce something. They consequently suggest a very practical question for analysing assemblages: ‘given a certain machine, what can it be used for?’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 3). This question offers a way into the analysis of how different research methodologies and methods work. The stages in social research (design, data collection, data analysis and reporting) can be seen as a series of such simple machines, linked by a flow of affect that takes an ‘event’ (defined as any interaction between bodies, things, settings and social formations that 398

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causes matter to assemble and affects to flow) as its focus for study and produces ‘knowledge’ in the form of research outputs. A data collection machine turns aspects of an event into ‘data’, while an analysis machine processes this data according to specific rules of logic, deduction or inference to produce ‘findings’ in the form of generalities or summaries (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013). A writing machine takes these outputs of data analysis and creates knowledge products for dissemination: theory, policy and practice implications and so forth. These methods and techniques will vary from discipline to discipline and from methodology to methodology. For instance, meteorological research into a severe event such as a hurricane will employ physical apparatus to measure rainfall or atmospheric pressure; a social inquiry of the same event would use interviews, questionnaire or observational methods to explore the effects of the storm upon humans. The former may make use of the ‘laws of physics’ and mathematical formulae to analyse the phenomenon; the latter might interpret the data using social science theories of collective behaviour or risk-taking. This machinic analysis opens to scrutiny the micropolitics of affects as a research assemblage interacts with its object of study. Different methodologies, methods or theoretical frameworks will specify what research can or cannot do, and what kind of ‘knowledge’ they produce (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013: 263). Analysis of research methods and techniques as machines designed to shape how affect flows between elements in the research assemblage means that a change of methodology (for instance, from survey to ethnography) or of data collection or analysis method will significantly alter these flows, and thus upon what emerges from the research assemblage. First, these micropolitics act at the level of research designs. For example, in a randomised controlled trial of pharmaceutical versus psychotherapeutic treatments for erectile dysfunction, controlling the experimental conditions and use of statistical techniques together limit the affective capacities of those ‘confounding’ elements (such as cultural or sub-cultural beliefs) found in ‘real-world’ settings, enabling a researcher to model the ‘uncontaminated’ effect of independent upon dependent variable. By contrast, a ‘naturalistic’ study of sexual behaviour would aim to limit the affective influence of the researcher upon the research process by allowing respondents to ‘speak for themselves’. Second, there is a micropolitics associated with each and every method or technique used in research. For instance, analytical strategies in much social research can impose order or otherwise shape conclusions. Consider, for example, the MTH affects in the simple research machine that enables a questionnaire to gather data. These affects require a question to be asked, an answer to be supplied, this answer to be recorded and possibly allocated to a pre-coded category, and the instrument to be applied consecutively and independently to each respondent, in turn, generating completed questionnaires ready to be fed into an analysis machine. Micropolitically, this questionnaire machine acts as a filter on the affect economies of study events, extracting only certain data, and categorising it according to the affect economy of the instrument rather than of the event itself. Similarly, thematic qualitative data analysis is a machine that (manually, or via software) organises and reduces non-numerical data, making it more manageable and amenable to systematic reporting. A pre-analysis code-generation affect first allocates a code to a range of similar textual occurrences, while a second aggregating affect takes each piece of data in turn, and codes it according to this scheme, thus imposing an analyst-defined aggregation upon the disparate data from an event. Both these methods/machines thus use aggregating affects that categorise or simplify event-assemblage affects; this is a feature of many other 399

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machines commonly used in social inquiry (Fox and Alldred, 2015b). Analysis of a wide range of commonly used methods, tools and techniques in social inquiry has revealed the micropolitics associated with each (Fox and Alldred, 2015a). Unsurprisingly, many of these research machines shifted control of events studied firmly towards the researcher, confirming that research is in no sense a ‘neutral’ event. However, while acknowledging that (as both assemblage and event) research possesses an affect economy that inevitably imposes itself and thereby alters the flows it would study, insight into the micropolitics of research assemblages and machines offers the potential to design research-assemblage machines that can limit their territorialising and aggregative effects. Each machine in a research assemblage, the data collection machine, the validity machine, the analysis machine and so on, may be reverse engineered to identify affects that may influence what ‘knowledge’ a particular research design or method generates. Wherever possible, efforts can be made to reduce aggregating affects, substituting wherever possible singular flows that do not disrupt the existing affective flows of the assemblage being studied. For instance, a machine that simply counts occurrences of specific human or non-human matter or the affects between these materialities has no immediate effect upon what is counted other than to produce a number. Those aggregations that remain can be subsequently acknowledged and their impacts predicted, probabilistically if not absolutely. This can alert both researcher and research users to the limits of a research study and its conclusions.

Discussion By exploring research as an MTH process, this chapter has shifted understanding of research from an anthropocentric perspective towards an acknowledgement of the part that the non-human and the inanimate play in scientific inquiry, while down-playing an emphasis on human behaviour, experiences and subjectivities. Situating this re-assessment firmly within the immanent ontology of Deleuze and Guattari has enabled an elaboration of this insight into what research does, and how it turns an event into ‘knowledge’ or policy. First, it has enabled exploration of research as an MTH and relational assemblage that engages with the myriad assemblages that comprise the entirety of the natural and social world, sans structures, systems or mechanisms. Second, it attends to the impersonal flows of affect in these assemblages and the capacities they produce, suggesting that the task of research is not to disclose or represent an underlying and stable ‘reality’, but instead to attend to the production and becomings of fleeting, unstable assemblages. Finally, it unpacks the complex assemblages that constitute scientific research, and further dis-assembles these into a series of machines, each of which can be subjected to micropolitical assessment. The third of these is perhaps of greatest methodological significance, as it supplies a means to peer deeply into the ‘black box’ of scientific inquiry, to identify not only the intended consequences of particular research designs or methods, but also the MTH unintended consequences, including the ways in which particular methods and designs shape the ‘knowledge’ that they generate when a method or other research technique engages with the event being explored. This is a direct opportunity afforded by the application of a Deleuzian ethological toolkit, one not available in other MTH ontologies such as Baradian ‘diffractive methodology’ (Fox and Alldred, 2023), or indeed constructivist critiques of research as productive of the very events it attempts to represent (Gergen, 2004: 184). To reiterate, what is enabled is the micropolitical assessment of each element of a research design, in 400

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terms of the balance between event and research process. Every method, tool or technique used in a piece of (social) scientific research may be evaluated to assess its effects on ‘data’. Where the affect economy of a method or technique threatens to overwhelm the affects in the event, it may either be replaced, or alternatively, its effects on the findings of a research study acknowledged. This MTH analysis of the micropolitics of the research assemblage points back to the previous discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ science models, and the contrast between the axiom-driven approach of the former and the ‘following’ methodology of the latter. Readers will recall that earlier in the chapter, two opposing hazards in scientific inquiry were identified. If the affect economy of a particular research assemblage overwhelms the affects in the event studied (for instance, by imposing a researcher-driven selection bias or an aggregating structure upon data), then the research will re-construct the findings of the study in its own image. By contrast, if the affects in the research assemblage are inadequate to provide more than a surface account of the phenomenon being studied (for example, by exploring a very limited sample, or asking anodyne questions in an interview), then the conclusions drawn by researchers are unlikely to provide novel insights in the topic of study. Identifying these two hazards in many ways re-makes the poles of Deleuze and Guattari’s major/minor opposition. The first of these describes the kind of ‘major’ axiom-driven research of a natural science such as physics or astronomy or even economics, in which data are quantified and fed into mathematical formulae in order to represent the topic studied. The second reflects the following model of minor science, in which researchers effectively become part of the phenomenon they are exploring, losing their purported ‘objectivity’. However, the micropolitical analysis of the research assemblage and its constituent research machines has supplied far more granularity to an MTH account of research than this simple dichotomy of major/minor. It has suggested that a research assemblage comprises a complex affect economy and that within any specific research assemblage there may be affects that contribute to a major science, representational paradigm, while others promote a minor, ‘following’ agenda for a research project. This more nuanced account chimes with DeLanda’s (2016: 100) suggestion that – rather than a strict distinction between major and minor sciences – within any scientific discipline there are continuous fluxes of becoming-major and becoming-minor. The analysis of the research assemblage indicates that the enterprise of research is shot through with this flux of becoming, even down to the level of the specific research machines that comprise a particular research design. This assessment cuts through simplistic distinctions between the natural and social sciences: even in a discipline such as physics or chemistry there are moments of becoming-minor; even in sociology or social geography research methods and techniques may shift research towards becoming-major. On occasions (such as when assessing policy or practice options), there may be utility in pursuing scientific rigour at the expense of depth of insight into phenomena; on others (for instance, when conducting exploratory research or surveying a new phenomenon) the insights that derive from a ‘following’ methodology can be far more important than generalisability (external validity). As such, this ontology of the research assemblage has the potential to overcome the long-standing rhetorical opposition in social research methodology between realism and constructionism. In its place, it invites a more holistic understanding of what a social science can do. In conclusion, this chapter has picked up and run with the proposition that research can usefully be understood as an MTH assembling of multiple materialities, rather than 401

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an anthropocentric enterprise in which a researcher is pre-eminent. With this shift in ontological focus, research is revealed as underpinned by an affect economy that is complex and sometimes contradictory, but whose critical assessment is crucial to any effort to make sense of – and change for the better – the natural and social world.

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26 TOWARDS A MORE-THANHUMAN PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH Michelle Bastian

Introduction1 In Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea, participatory action researcher Peter Reason (2014, p. 71) tells the story of a seminar offered by philosopher Henryk Skolimowski at the University of Bath. While supporting the participation of a wider range of people in research has been, and continues to be, a significant challenge to academic norms, this seminar offered further challenges by exploring participatory ways of engaging with the more-than-human world.2 As Reason writes, ‘this was strange, even to me. In the abstract world of university seminars, participation was still what one did with other people. It had nothing to do with the natural world’ (2014, p. 71). While recognising the strangeness, a core question for this chapter is how participatory research (PR) might move in this kind of direction. Arguably issues like climate change, biodiversity loss and increasing rates of extinction create conditions where it is possible to put nonhumans explicitly on the PR agenda, and to ask how the commitments of PR – to situated knowledges, a wider recognition of agency and an expansive sense of stakeholders—might be revisited. That is, these crises invite participatory researchers to explore whether the injunctions of Western anthropocentrism might have unnecessarily restricted how participation is imagined, and to reconsider to whom its commitments might be made. One way of supporting such enquiries is to bring PR and emerging more-than-human approaches into direct conversation. As noted in the introduction to this collection, both Henry Buller (2015), and Timothy Hodgetts and Jamie Lorimer (2015) argue that morethan-human geographies should seek methods that enable researchers to ask ‘what matters’ to nonhumans (e.g. Buller 2015, p. 7). For PR, this kind of question has been continually at its core, as participatory researchers seek ways of working with specific human communities to identify and respond to issues that matter to them. They do this by breaking down the boundaries between researcher and researched, ideally working in partnership to set research questions, determine which methods to use, analyse data, co-create outputs and develop dissemination strategies. In the process, broader questions of ethics, voice, knowledge and power are explored both practically and theoretically. Related questions also reside at the heart of more-than-human approaches, with issues of ethical relationality, the problem DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-29 404

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of representation, of exchange across different perceptual worlds and anthropocentrism constituting some of the area’s most pressing issues. These potentially fruitful overlaps between PR and more-than-human research (MtHR) were explored in a project called In conversation with…: co-designing with more-thanhuman communities, which took place in the UK in 2013, and which will be the focus of this chapter. Its two key objectives were first to ask whether participatory methods might extend towards a consideration of the more-than-human, and second whether the wealth of experience gained by participatory researchers, from working across social, cultural and other boundaries, might helpfully illuminate issues faced by more-than-human researchers. In order to respond to these questions we trialled the use of participatory methods, such as participatory design and participatory action research, as frameworks for two-day workshops with nonhumans. We wanted to know what might result from attempting to work with particular animals, insects, plants and elements specifically as research partners, rather than as subjects of experiments, for example. This chapter will therefore share some of the insights generated by the project, as notes towards a more extended conversation about the possibility of more-than-human PR (MtHPR). First, I outline the design and implementation of the project. I then place the project into conversation with PR literatures in order to highlight some of the ways that participatory approaches may indeed be open to working with wider understandings of who could be involved. Crucially, these literatures also offer cautions against the assumption that certain forms of inclusion are necessarily a good, and so this chapter will also discuss potential pitfalls of uncritically taking up the promise of participation.

Speculative Field Experiments In looking for ways to describe the overall approach of the In conversation with… project, I would suggest that it might be thought of as a kind of philosophical field experiment (Bardini 2014, Frodeman et al. 2012), a form of speculative design (Dunne and Raby 2013) or perhaps even as a fantastic ethnography (Galloway 2013). That is, the project was not designed to establish MtH-PR as a definite possibility, since we were only at a preliminary exploratory stage. Instead, we were drawn to the speculative ‘what if?’ What if you could do participatory design with dogs? What if you could do participatory action research with bees? That is we primarily saw the workshops as putting ourselves in a position where we would be confronted with what it might mean to even try to include nonhumans in PR processes. In particular we were inspired by Clara Mancini and her colleagues, who argue that in seeking to conduct interspecies research there needs to be a willingness to explore the issues raised ‘with genuine curiosity, no matter how challenging or ironic they may appear’ (2012, p. 9). Thus even while recognising the stretching and cracking our questions might create within mainstream conceptions of what PR is and what it can do, we sought to take the tenets of both participation and the more-than-human as seriously as possible, put them into action and see how this speculative experiment might play itself out. Specifically, the project involved four exploratory workshops that took place between April and October 2013 in various locations in the UK. (Descriptions of each of these workshops can be seen in Boxes 26.1 and 26.2.) Attendees came from three main groups. First were members of a core team that included researchers from computing, environmental arts, forestry, geography, philosophy, sociology, theatre and women’s studies, with further diversity in terms of the interdisciplinarity of their backgrounds and research methods used. 405

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Almost all were involved in the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme, which has a particular focus on PR and which funded this project. Second, there were the nonhuman participants. In broad terms they included animals, insects, plants and the elements; more specifically dogs, bees, trees and water. The focus on these four was partly shaped by the expertise of the team and our pre-existing links with potential partner organisations. However, we were also interested in pushing the boundaries of who, or what, could potentially be considered as an active research partner, and so the workshops focused on nonhumans across a range of (commonly assumed) levels of sentience, even though we also sought to trouble this hierarchy. Third were human intermediaries, such as dog trainers and beekeepers, who shared their expertise and facilitated engagements with the particular nonhumans that they worked with. Here we drew parallels between our project and the role of community leaders or community experts within PR, as well as more general discussions of border-crossers who are able to link different social worlds (Anzaldúa 1990). As for the specific content of the workshops, we aimed from the outset to support diverse ‘ways of knowing’ (Graham et al. 2015), and so avoided the usual focus on academic presentations in favour of learning from the nonhuman participants and human intermediaries via inductions, practical/experiential activities and facilitated discussion and reflection. The workshops thus included at least one day of exploration, which was experiential and hands on. This included inspecting beehives, wild swimming and wood carving. These activities were analogous to the project initiation phase of PR where potential research partners spend time getting to know each other and exploring issues that are important to the community partners. Next, the core team and participating intermediaries articulated issues that arose during these activities and tried to identify which ones might develop into research questions, again drawing analogies with the later stages of project initiation. We then workshopped a particular participatory model (see Box 26.1), keeping our commitment to our speculative approach always in mind. This often meant working through a specific PR handbook or toolkit and identifying what affordances or frictions might arise if groups tried to apply the guidelines in a project with a specific nonhuman partner. Some conversations that resulted included: the possibilities of data-gathering with bees, where we felt there might be some interesting approaches that could be developed; or asking whether core principles of participatory ethics, such as privacy, would hold when working with water, where we found it almost impossible to develop any kind of coherent response. Both of these kinds of responses were important as they helped to shape our understanding of how PR might extend towards a consideration of the more-than-human and how it might not. They also highlighted which nonhumans might be more readily included than others and in what ways. Finally, each workshop also included a session where we stepped back from the speculative experiment and critically reflected on the process. Here we explored the differences between the ‘what if’ and the ‘what was’. While some of these reflections will be discussed below (and see also Heddon, in this volume), an example of an issue that arose was around the freedom of nonhumans to participate. Questions that came up included the following: Was inspecting a hive really analogous to meeting a community partner? What did it mean that we wore protective suits and used smoke to avoid being stung? Was wood carving a useful way to participate with trees and learn about their qualities, or was it more similar to a dissection? These questions were indicative of the generative nature of our discussions, and the impossibility of any quick and easy answers. 406

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Box 26.1  The In Conversation with…Workshops 1 In conversation with animals (April 2013) was organised by computer interaction researcher Clara Mancini and philosopher Michelle Bastian and drew on a participatory design framework. It was conducted with the team from the Open University’s Animal-Computer Interaction Lab and dogs and people from Dogs for Good (formerly Dogs for the Disabled). Activities included train the trainer exercises and interacting with service dogs and dogs in training. 2 In conversation with insects (May 2013) was organised by geographer Phil Jones and drew on a participatory action research framework (specifically, Pain et al. 2012). It was conducted with bees and people from the Evesham Beekeepers Association, as well as the Vale Heritage Landscape Trust. Activities included hive inspections and bee habitat maintenance. 3 In conversation with plants (September 2013) was organised by landscape and forestry researcher Richard Coles and drew on a community participatory arts perspective. It was conducted with the trees and people from the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Wildwood Coppice Crafts. We explored techniques used by the Wye Valley InsideOUT project to connect excluded and under-represented groups with the forest. Activities included wood carving, materials collecting and making, as well as individual time spent in the woods. 4 In conversation with the elements (October 2013) was organised by geographer Owain Jones and artist Antony Lyons and used a set of ethical guidelines on community-based research developed within the Connected Communities programme (Banks and Manners 20 I 2). It was conducted with water, specifically the River Torridge and its catchment area, and the people of the North Devon Biosphere Reserve, Devon Wildlife Trust and skipper Dave Gabe. Activities included field trips to the culm grasslands and a search for the river source, a boat trip up from the river’s mouth, salinity sampling to see the mixing of fresh and sea water in the river, and wild swimming. Detailed accounts of each of these workshops, including images and films, are available on the project website (www.morethanhumanresearch.com).

Box 26.2  A Detailed Look at In Conversation with Dogs When starting to plan the workshops themselves, we found that turning the wider inspirations and approaches for the In conversation with... project into a programme of activities required its own kind of translation work. Faced with the task of designing the first workshop, both Clara and I found ourselves puzzling over what we were actually going to do. Our plan was to build on work Clara had been doing with the Animal Computer Interaction (ACI) Lab at the Open University (see Mancini, this volume). ACI arises out of the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which focuses on designing interactions with technology that are experienced positively and respond to the needs of specific user groups. However, it is rarely acknowledged that nonhuman animals can also be users of technology. For example,

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service dogs can learn to use kettles, washing machines and even cash machines. The ACI Lab thus seeks to design for specific nonhuman users by taking into account their physical and perceptual abilities, how they learn and what constitutes positive feedback for them. We were also lucky to have keen and interested partners for the workshop. Namely, Dogs for Good, including service dogs Winnie and Cosmo, as well as Helen McCain, Head of Canine Training, and Duncan Edwards, Head of Client Liaisons, both of whom acted as our human mediators. A core participatory approach within HCI is participatory design and so this was taken as our framework. Our building blocks were the core steps of the design development cycle, which include collaboratively identifying requirements, proposing designs, prototyping these designs and evaluation. As with the participatory methods we drew on for the other workshops, these steps require considerably more time than is available in a two-day workshop. However within design there are also a range of methods that can create quick initial responses to a design problem. These include techniques such as paper prototyping, where initial design proposals are mocked up on paper, or design challenges where participants may cycle through the design process in a few hours to explore new ideas. Methods like these allow participants to get an initial sense of what kinds of tactics might work as well as what potential problems or blocks might arise. Given that our aim was principally to explore the potential for a dialogue between MtHR and PR, these kinds of approaches resonated well. As became customary for each of our workshops, the teams were first sent a series of preparatory readings. These looked at issues of dog perception and evolution (Range et al. 2008, Honeycutt 2010, Taylor et al. 2011, van der Zee et al. 2012), examples of design focusing on dogs or human-dog interactions (Resner 2001, Mankoff et al. 2005, Wingrave et al. 2010, Higgin 2012) as well as texts on participatory design itself (Kensing and Blomberg 1998, Muller 2009). The first day was spent ‘identifying requirements’. This including presentations from Clara about HCI and ACI, as well as from Helen and Duncan who talked about the service relationship, how dogs learn their tasks, the different technologies they may interact with and some key issues that service dogs may face in their work. Helen and Duncan then led us in ‘train the trainer’ type activities where participants took turns being a ‘trainer’ or a ‘dog’ in order to practice clicker training, as well as attempting to navigate the workshop space using a wheelchair. After finishing our induction, Winnie and Cosmo joined us in the workshop to work on ‘problem definition’. This time was relatively brief since Helen and Duncan did not want to overtax the dogs by bringing them into an unfamiliar environment or involving them in activities for too long. Even so, we were able to include a session where the human and nonhuman participants were able to interact relatively freely, as well as the dogs working with the human participants to demonstrate some of the interactions that occur within a service relationship. Around mid-afternoon the Dogs for Good team wrapped up their contributions to the workshop and the remaining participants articulated problems encountered in these interactions, as well as broader issues, difficulties and complications as part of further refining the problem definition stage. Day Two encompassed the remaining stages of the design development cycle, namely by proposing designs, prototyping these designs and evaluation. For this, Clara developed two design briefs in consultation with Helen and Duncan and arising from our problem definition work from the day before. Two challenges for service dogs with Dogs for Good include operating doors and buttons, since they can operate in a variety of ways and are not designed in a uniform way. We split into two teams and used the knowledge we had gained so far to propose

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a user-centred design solution to these challenges, including developing paper-prototypes. After feeding back to the wider group we then split up again to think through how we might work with the dogs from Dogs for Good to evaluate and refine the proposals. One suggestion was to offer a dog a series of options for operating doors and see whether one was selected more often, or could be used more quickly and easily. Our last activity was to step back from the design experiment and reflect on the activities and processes overall, and particularly what insights our experiences might offer into the possibility (or not) of more-than-human participatory research.

Analogies and Diffractions: Approaches to Reading PR and Mth Together Having set out the project itself, and before analysing it in more depth, I want to briefly suggest some frames for understanding the kind of claims I will be making about potential inter-relationships between PR and MtHR. Drawing on my background in philosophy, one way this field experiment in MtH-PR can be read is as a particular form of analogical argument.3 That is, it sheds light on both fields by exploring their similarities and differences with the other. As philosopher Paul Bartha notes, analogies can play ‘an important heuristic role, as aids to discovery’, in part because they can be used ‘to generate insight and to formulate possible solutions to problems’ (2013, n.p.). In this sense an analogical reading of the two fields might open up unexpected proposals, such as drawing on PR to address more-than-human researchers’ interests in asking ‘what matters’ to nonhumans. Further, Bartha suggests that analogies can also be important when proposing something that might at first appear strange, or even nonsensical, from common sense points of view. That is, ‘often the point of an analogical argument is just to persuade people to take an idea seriously’ (2013, n.p.): For example, taking seriously the idea that all those affected by research have a stake in the research, including nonhumans. Within philosophy the key to a convincing argument-by-analogy is that there are enough parallels between the two cases to support the extrapolation of characteristics from one to the other. That is, a known similarity between the cases is used to extrapolate other points of similarity and sameness. One such similarity may be found in the respective commitments of MtH and PR approaches to including those traditionally excluded from research processes. Within traditional forms of analogous reasoning developing such points of connection encourages one to seek out further examples of congruence. This would suggest that recognition of an inter-relationship between these approaches rests on proving their similarities to each other. However, a move towards proving similarity would arguably be antithetical to practices of working across difference and diversity in ways that are attentive to multiple and conflicting needs (e.g. Reagon 1983). Thus it is also important to look to contemporary reworkings of analogous reasoning which offer more felicitous approaches.4 One particularly well-known reworking is Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’s development of diffractive logics, which contrasts with an optics of reflection by enabling a shift away from a problematic emphasis on static identity, towards the processual effects each might have on the other (Haraway 1992, p. 300). Under this logic, the aim would not be to prove that MtH and PR approaches are sufficiently similar to each other to support exchanges of ideas between the two, but rather to ask whether the process of producing an ‘interference pattern’ between 409

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the two can create beneficial insights into ‘how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter’ (Barad 2007, p. 30). In this way, diffractive logics retain the benefits of analogies outlined by Bartha (i.e. as aids to discovery, generators of insight, persuasive supports) while avoiding the expectation of sameness. With this in mind I want to now tum to an analysis of the project itself.

Broadening Participation The first interference pattern I offer here is created by reading a recent review of PR with an eye towards the more-than-human. My focus is Jarg Bergold and Stefan Thomas’ (2012) ‘Participatory research methods: a methodological approach in motion’, which provides an overview of the field and suggestions for development. Focusing on a review article enables me to engage with attitudes and approaches that are widely accepted and thus generally representative of the approach overall. This is important because I want to suggest that core features of the participatory approach, when viewed in light of the In conversation with... project, do indeed resonate with efforts to explicitly include nonhuman participants. In this way I want to suggest some initial ways that an explicit focus on the more-than-human (as research partner) might help to move participatory research in ‘strange’ directions.5 The first two suggest ways that the entanglements of human participants in PR with nonhumans could be made more explicit, while the second two open up possibilities for an explicit engagement with nonhumans specifically.

Expanding Life-Worlds In their review, Bergold and Thomas’ initially define PR as being ‘geared towards planning and conducting the research process with those people whose life-world and meaningful actions are under study’ (2012, §1). While the focus is clearly on humans, the latter part of the definition, which emphasises meaningfulness and differences between life-worlds, suggests a shared epistemological approach with more-than-human research. This shared approach emphasises foregoing the search for universal truths and instead attending to specificities of experience and context. Indeed the reference to life-worlds calls to mind Jakob von Uexkull’s (2010) notion of ‘umwelt’ and his observation that ‘We comfort ourselves all too easily with the illusion that the relations of another kind of subject to the things of its environment play out in the same space and time as the relations that link us to the things of our human environment’ (2010, p. 54).6 Such an observation resonates with PR’s own critiques of hegemonic knowledge production and of the ability of objectivity and detachment in social scientific research to work with the diversity of human experience. However, beyond this conceptual link, which draws an analogy between theoretical approaches, a diffractive view also points to what potentially gets excluded from the PR concern with people’s life-worlds. In our project a key observation was the way that the lifeworlds of our human intermediaries were not radically separated out from the nonhumans that they worked with. A good example of this was during the In conversation with insects workshop where the beekeepers suggested that working with bees had changed their behaviours, and their perceptions of the environment. For example, because of their concern for the bees’ welfare, their life-worlds now included a greater awareness of the weather and the availability of forage. Thus, our project highlighted the way people can be ‘differently human’, as Niamh Moore (2013) put it, depending on how their lives are shaped by the 410

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various human and nonhuman agents that play a role in their life-worlds. When ‘planning and conducting the research process’ with the people under study, then, a MtH lens would challenge the exclusion of this more expansive field of stakeholders. Instead a diffracted PR might more explicitly recognise the nonhuman actors that also participate in and shape the life-worlds of the people in question.

Supporting Cognitive Estrangements A further aspect of PR that Bergold and Thomas’ outline is the ability of PR to create experiences of estrangement. This is important because it makes room for challenging embedded assumptions about how the world works, particularly assumptions held by those with more power. That is ‘the participatory research process enables co-researchers to step back cognitively from familiar routines, forms of interaction, and power relationships in order to fundamentally question and rethink established interpretations of situations and strategies’ (Bergold and Thomas 2012, §1). Here too we can make analogies with MtH research, which challenges fundamental assumptions of human exceptionalism and the ‘forms of interaction’ with the more-than-human world that it supports. Thus, when MtH and PR were brought into conversation in the context of the project, we found that the power relationships between humans and nonhumans could also be foregrounded and questioned. This is illustrated first by a further example from the In conversation with insects workshop. In reflecting on the session one of the beekeeper participants, Martyn Cracknell, President of the Worcestershire Beekeepers Association, commented: I have been an amateur beekeeper for over 40 years, and I have always considered myself to be quite caring and empathic. I am very fond of my bees. When a colony requires management, e.g. to avoid losing a swarm, there are often several different strategies that might be used to achieve the desired end result. Ordinarily my choice would have been made by considering the efficacy of the method, the convenience for me, the timeframe for the operation and so on, but as a result of the workshop discussions I am now more mindful of how closely my intervention accords with the bees natural behaviour, and whether my intervention is sympathetic to the bee’s needs. I had never really stopped to think about this before. (Personal communication, 13 May 2016) Second, in some cases, established cognitive frameworks were so thoroughly challenged that they were rendered almost absurd. Our efforts to think though the ethics of ­community-based research with water (i.e. Banks and Manners 2012, see also Banks et al. 2013), for example, which included discussing issues such as informed consent and anonymity with research partners (in our case, water), provoked as much silence as discussion. That is, the participatory framing pushed us so far away from familiar ‘forms of interaction’ that we found we had almost no conceptual frameworks to draw on. While this may raise the criticism that we were trying to apply frameworks in contexts where they were simply not suited, this disorientation proved fruitful in that it allowed us to ask questions of the guidelines themselves. For example, having moved towards a position where our watery project partner was seen as inseparable from the other systems it is a part of (i.e. from an abstract ‘water’, to the specific Torridge watershed, supported by our shared reading of Linton [2010]), some participants wondered to what extent liberal 411

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notions of individual rationality might persist in the guidelines, which in our context were deeply problematic. This potentially opened up broader critiques of the way the subject is traditionally conceptualised within PR and illustrates a further way that PR might benefit from its interference pattern with MtH research.7 Most importantly for us, however, this challenge could potentially be met by emphasising resources internal to PR, specifically the emphasis on cognitive estrangement. The two preceding discussions of life-worlds and cognitive estrangements suggest potential ways that PR approaches can highlight the entanglements of human participants with more-than-human worlds. However, a further interest of the In conversation with... project was in the possibility of working with nonhumans directly. As such, the fundamental question remains of whether nonhumans could participate in research in ways that might be recognised as a form of PR. While this seemed highly doubtful during In conversation with the elements, other workshops suggested greater possibilities. This in itself points towards the need to augment our research questions further, and to attend to questions of which nonhumans are potentially involved, and what kinds of ways participation might be reconsidered for each of them. As moving from animals to insects to plants to the elements demonstrated for us, the question of what PR might offer to specific nonhuman actors needed to be asked again within each hoped for collaboration. More generally, then, finding responses to these questions requires exploring whether particular nonhumans have competencies that could support their involvement in PR, and whether PR could develop methods that would support any such competencies. Continuing with our diffractive reading of Bergold and Thomas’s paper provides support for both explorative forays.

Challenging Assumptions of Competency As Bergold and Thomas discuss, within PR there is a long history of rejecting claims that particular groups lack the competency for engaging in research. This includes challenging suggestions that they may have deficits in ability, or lack the appropriate social capital. Recognising that claims of a deficit are most often made by those in power, Bergold and Thomas suggest that from the perspective of PR ‘the difference between the academic worldview and that of the research partners from the field is actually an asset which must be exploited in the exploration process’ (2012, §42). Indeed they suggest, in reference to some of Bergold’s earlier work, that ‘participatory research can be regarded as a methodology that argues in favour of the possibility, the significance, and the usefulness of involving research partners in the knowledge-production process’ (2012, §2). Within PR, then, competency is not a fait accompli, but an open and evolving question that further requires researchers themselves to reconsider their own competencies and develop capacities appropriate to the specific research context. For the In conversation with... project, starting from an orientation towards possibility, rather than assuming from the outset that nonhuman participation was impossible, led to a number of insights into ways that different nonhumans might potentially contribute their worldviews to a research project. At In conversation with animals, for example, we explored the possibility that assistance dogs could provide feedback on prototypes designed to respond to issues they encounter in their work. Mancini and other members of the ACI Lab reminded us that there are already ways of working with pre-verbal or non-verbal humans that might provide useful insights, but also that situations could be designed that would suggest a dog’s preference for one prototype over another. When discussing this at 412

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our In conversation with insects workshop, in a session on working with bees during the evaluation stage of a project, one of the beekeeper participants pointed out that assessing preferences for prototypes had also been adopted by biologist Thomas Seeley (2010) to try to understand which design of beehive particular hives might prefer. Understanding the significance and usefulness of MtH-PR (for the nonhuman as well as the human partners) may very well draw on the initial orientation towards competency-as-possibility that is at the core of PR, particularly in combination with the ‘genuine curiosity’ that Mancini and her colleagues have argued for.

Designing Methods for Inclusion Building upon a basic curiosity in relation to competency requires the further step of developing methods and frameworks that are suitable for working with a research partner in light of their specific capabilities and needs. Such a statement would not be unfamiliar within PR circles, with Bergold and Thomas emphasising that PR places the onus on those designing a project to find ways for stakeholders to be involved, even if this means developing new approaches and techniques in order for them to do so. One example they discuss is mental health and disability PR where concerns have been raised about the tendency to work with health professionals rather than with those directly affected by an illness or disability, in part because the latter may be ‘in a very poor position to participate in participatory research projects, or to initiate such a project themselves’ (Bergold and Thomas 2012, §20). However, self-advocacy groups of mental health service users have argued for the need to produce research that is independent of professional and institutional providers because of concerns around the hegemony of the medical model or entrenched economic interests within health-care (Bergold and Thomas 2012, §22). Thus the ideal of participation continues to push PR to develop ways of including those who have been rendered ‘quasiinvisible’ (Bergold and Thomas 2012, §26) and to innovate methodologically in order to do so. The In conversation with... project pushes such questions even further by highlighting the way that whole hosts of ‘earth others’ (Plumwood 1993, p. 156) have been rendered ‘quasi-invisible’ (if not just plain invisible) within PR. However reading PR diffractively also suggests that the ideal of doing research with those who are often unseen by dominant actors may very well support the experiments with method and approach that would be necessary to recognise the specific interests and needs of particular nonhumans.

The Dangers of Participation The discussions above highlighted the ways that core ideals underpinning PR might be reread as opening onto a much wider field of ‘participants’ than is usually supposed. Even so, while the ideal of participation emphasises inclusion and empowerment, critics of PR have pointed out that it can often be mobilised in highly programmatic and narrow ways. For example, Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari’s (2001) collection Participation: the new tyranny?, has called attention to its problematic institutionalisation within the development context. Contributors to their collection question the presumption that participatory methods always unlock hierarchies and suggest that, in fact, they can maintain them. As Cooke and Kothari set out in their introduction, the aim of the collection is take a step back from the internal critique that is a core part of the participatory model itself, and instead ask fundamental questions about the approach as a whole (2001, pp. 1–2). Given the unclear use of 413

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terms such as participation, co-production and co-design within MtH research (see Introduction), the second interference pattern I want to set into motion draws on these types of critiques to focus on some of the potential dangers of using participation as a framework for working with nonhumans. That is, while the sections above used insights from the In conversation with... project to pose questions to PR about what is excluded from it, here debates within PR encourage a deeper questioning of the project itself.

Assuming Participation Is Beneficial In her contribution to Cooke and Kothari’s collection, Frances Cleaver (2001) asks perhaps one of the most fundamental questions for PR, namely whether participation can be considered to be intrinsically beneficial. Discussing common understandings of the types of incentives for involvement in development projects, she notes that it is generally assumed that participation is in people’s rational interest either because of the ‘assurance of benefits to ensue’ or because it is ‘socially responsible and in the interests of community development as a whole’ (Cleaver 2001, p. 48). Cleaver argues, however, that these assumptions are simplistic and more attention needs to be paid to the costs of participation and the benefits of refusing to participate. Indeed she points out that ‘there are numerous documented examples of situations where individuals find it easier, more beneficial or habitually familiar not to participate’ (Cleaver 2001, p. 51). Indeed within all human-based research there is a duty to support non-participation as an option. Participant information sheets often carry phrases like ‘you are free to withdraw at any time without negative consequence’ and contributions to a research project (participatory-based or not) are supposed to be free of any kind of coercion. That this is not always the case for humans, as Cleaver argues, suggests that attention to the option of non-participation should be even more important with nonhumans who are often in positions of significantly less power and autonomy.8 Arguably then, prior to focusing attention on ‘what matters’ to animals as Buller suggests, there should first be a consideration of the negative consequences such an investigation might have for the animals (and indeed other nonhumans) themselves. Indeed, as was noted at the time, within the In conversation with... project, smoke was used to pacify bees in order to inspect their hives, a cherry tree was cut down to provide wood for our wood carving activity and dogs had already been trained (and bred) to consent to the activities. As Clara Mancini suggested in our discussions (see also Mancini, this volume), the ‘right to withdraw’ could be understood as one of the key dividing lines between collaborative knowledge seeking and animal experimentation. In what way these considerations might apply to plants or elemental partners remained an open question. This suggests that any MtH-PR would need to ask to what extent participation is simply being assumed to be a ‘good thing’ and to interrogate the initial impulse toward ‘inclusion’ further.

Overlooking Wider Inequalities A further critique posed by the Cooke and Kothari collection centres on the scope of participatory projects done with marginalised communities, and particularly the narrow focus of many development projects. The worry is that ‘an emphasis on the micro level of intervention can obscure, and indeed sustain, broader macro-level inequalities and injustice’ (Cooke and Kothari 2001, p. 14). lf PR is to challenge entrenched power structures then it cannot focus on the smallest or easiest interventions. This kind of claim resonated with some of 414

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our own questions in the project. In conversation with animals for example, focused on involving service dogs in co-designing tools that made their work easier, but had less room for exploring the service relationship itself. Our experience of ‘meeting the bees’ during the hive inspections was also based on a prior relationship between bees and beekeepers that some (though not all) might argue is fundamentally problematic. An important question for our project then was that in focusing on issues that seemed manageable (in part because what we were doing felt so unconventional) did we close off the option of tackling macro issues to do with the very nature of the relationship between the humans and nonhumans at the focus of our workshops? Overall, I would suggest that there was an awareness of these kinds of broader issues, in part because of the wide variety of participants and the emphasis on physical interaction and critical reflection. In conversation with insects, for example, ended with discussions of the power structures within beekeeping associations and suggestions for the development of forms of ‘co-responsible beekeeping’ within them. However, given that ours was an explorative project, where we were speculating about tangible projects, a more concerted effort at a potential MtHPR may very well encounter different pressures around what seems reasonable to tackle and what does not. Here then it would seem useful to draw on work in PR that explores how groups can tackle both the macro and the micro, as Virginia Eubanks (2009, p. 113) discusses in her work on popular technology.

Pseudo-Participations Earlier I suggested that the emphasis within PR on approaching competency in an open way, and innovating methods to support varying needs and interests seemed promising for a potential MtH-PR. However, by returning now to Bergold and Thomas’ paper we can also see that in practice there has been a disparity between these ideals and who PR is most often done with. That is, they argue that PR is more common with and amongst professional practitioners, such as with mental health professionals, than with ‘the immediately affected persons’, such as mental health service users (Bergold and Thomas 2012, §19). This is in part because, despite aspirations for inclusion, the competencies of practitioners are still more likely to support their participation in, or initiation of, PR projects. An awareness of this dilemma seems particularly important for a MtH-PR since it also appeared in the In conversation with... project. As some readers might have already noted, for all the project workshops the human mediators participated more fully over the two days, than did the dogs, bees, forest and river. Indeed for all of the workshops, our nonhuman partners were involved in the initial information gathering phase only, and the later stages of data-gathering, evaluation, dissemination and so on were completed by trying to imagine or extrapolate what might happen if researchers tried to support the inclusion of nonhumans in them. In this speculative attempt at imagining what MtH-PR might mean in practice we focused on what Bergold and Thomas refer to as ‘so-called “early” forms of participation, such as the briefing of professional researchers by those who are affected by the problem under study’ (2012, §32). This could possibly be thought of as a step in the right direction, particularly if understood as ‘preparatory joint activities that may facilitate participation in the research project at a later date’ (2012, §32). However, it should also not be discounted that what took place could alternatively be understood as ‘pseudo participation’ mobilised for ends other than those that seek to benefit the participant (2012, §32). Indeed in the later 415

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sections of the workshops many human participants commented on the difficulty of retaining a sense of what, for example, a bee’s perspective might be in relation to the issues at hand. While further attempts at MtH-PR might still retain certain divisions of labour (again see Eubanks 2009, p. 115), it would seem important to identify any tendency to avoid the hard task of working out the possibilities of working with specific nonhuman partners or overly relying on human mediators.

No Wider Context of Support My fourth and final point is also suggested in Bergold and Thomas’s review and raises the question of what kind of context might be needed in order to support these kinds of participatory experiments. At the outset of their review they argue that ‘every type of research calls for social conditions that are conducive to the topic and to the epistemological approach in question’ (Bergold and Thomas 2012, §32). They use this assumption to suggest that only within a broader political context of democracy is participation a viable research method. While these claims are made rather quickly in their article and would need to be explored more fully, the issue they raise is important for thinking about what broader social and political contexts might be necessary for MtH-PR to both appear legitimate and be viable. As suggested above, we had already found that some questions are easier to ask than others (e.g. the micro rather than the macro). Further, the beliefs that nonhumans could (or indeed should) be treated as knowledgeable agents in their own right, and that they might have a stake in broader knowledge making processes, not only challenge political and social contexts but also many of the fundamental assumptions of Western ontological and epistemological frameworks, including the assumptions of many PR approaches. Indeed, as suggested previously, in the In conversation with the elements workshop we often felt that we ended up in a context where it was impossible to find frameworks or terminologies that could orient us when seeking to answer the strange questions put to us when drawing on PR approaches to work with water. These discussions in particular highlighted the liberal frameworks that many PR approaches draw on (e.g. justice, rights and inclusion being predicated on individual autonomy, agency and shared rational dialogue) and the ways that a potential MtH-PR would provoke questions around the humanism underlying them. As my colleague Franklin Ginn asked me, could the very idea of seeking to include nonhumans in PR not itself risk becoming what Cary Wolfe (2010) has called a ‘humanist posthumanism’, where their inclusion is judged according to humanist ideals? This again suggests that an MtH-PR would need to tackle macro issues, such as those of epistemology and ontology, at the same time as meso issues of methods and approaches, and micro issues of developing specific interventions in specific contexts.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted the potential of a diffractive reading of PR and MtHR for reconsidering the methodological possibilities of each. Adopting elements of the ethos underlying PR, such as insisting on the responsibility of researchers to ask which stakeholders are being excluded from the process, and on the non-neutral character of determinations of competency, could add a certain kind of boldness to MtHR. Further, internal and external

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critiques of PR could help MtHR think through the fraught nature of participation and the gap that can exist between theory and practice. While for PR, MtHR could push these approaches to question their focus on the human, and also to explore the differences between the liberal frameworks common to PR and frameworks of mutual entanglement more common within MtHR. Moreover, issues such as inclusion and exclusion, the contextual nature of knowledge, and the relationship between power, voice and agency have been central to both PR and MtH approaches and yet have been approached in very different ways. The In conversation with... project suggests that these interconnections are worthy of exploration, and hopefully future research will delve further into the strange patterns produced by the diffraction of each with the other.

Acknowledgements Thanks to the whole project team for a brilliant year of explorations, challenges and laughter. Thanks to my friends and colleagues who have commented on this paper so carefully, including Niamh Moore, Emma Roe and members of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network writing group. Thanks also to attendees at seminars where parts of this has been presented, including at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales, two RGS-IBG conferences and at the University of Edinburgh. Finally special thanks to the AHRC’s Connected Community programme for supporting In conversation with... (AH/K006517/I) and allowing us to take risks with our research.

Notes 1 Reprinted from Bastian M (2017) Towards a more-than-human participatory research. In: Bastian M, Jones O, Moore N and Roe E (eds) Participatory Research in More-than-human Worlds. London: Routledge, pp. 19–37. 2 See Reason in this volume, for further details. 3 Noting that other project participants have used different frames (see, for example, Goto Collins and Collins, Heddon, Pigott and Lyons in this volume). 4 Thank you to Affrica Taylor for making this point and reminding me of the importance of diffraction in this context. 5 Here I want to note that these ‘strange’ directions might also draw on heritages within PR, such as research focused on sustainability and the environment, which, while not explicitly including the more-than-human as participant, often have the aim of making a positive difference in these morethan-human worlds. Further, participatory work with indigenous peoples has also emphasised the participation of the more-than-human (see Coombes et al. 2014, pp. 849–851). Thanks to Niamh Moore for prompting me to think about this more explicitly. 6 Importantly this should not be read as suggesting that we therefore occupy radically separate spaces and times. That is, even while Uexkull likens the umwelt to a soap bubble this is still in a context where ‘relations between things expand and mesh with one another in intricate webs of life’ (Buchanan 2008, p. 25). 7 During our discussions it was also recognised that the practice of PR often enacts more complex and fluid understandings of the subject (e.g. Eubanks 2009), and of processes such as consent (e.g. Dewing 2007). However, some also commented on a seeming disconnect between this and the subject that was assumed in the handbooks, toolkits and guidelines that we drew on for the project. 8 Although as we discussed in the In conversation with the elements workshop, nonhumans can also be much harder to coerce (see Bastian 2013). For example, those working with water ignore its capacities at their peril.

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Towards a More-than-Human Participatory Research Mankoff, D., Dey, A., Mankoff, J., and Mankoft- K. 2005. Supporting interspecies social awareness: Using peripheral displays for distributed pack awareness. In: Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 23–26 October, Seattle, WA. New York: ACM, 253–258. Moore, N. 2013. Genealogies, promises/dangers and modest interventions. Presentation at In Conversation with... reflective workshop. Birmingham. Muller, M.J. 2009. Participatory design: The third space in HCI. In: A. Sears and J.A. Jacko, eds. Human-computer interaction: Development process. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 165–186. Pain, R., Whitman, G., Milledge, D., and Lune Rivers Trust. 2012. Participatory action research toolkit: An introduction to using PAR as an approach to learning, research and action. Durham, NC: Durham University. Plumwood, Y. 1993. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London and New York: Routledge. Range, F., Aust, U., Steurer, M., and Huber, L. 2008. Visual categorization of natural stimuli by domestic dogs. Animal Cognition, II (2), 339–347. Reagon, B.J. 1983. Coalition politics: Turning the century. In: B. Smith, ed. Home girls: A black feminist anthology. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 356–368. Reason, P. 2014. Spindrift: A wilderness pilgrimage at sea. Bristol: Vala. Resner, B.L. 2001. Rover@Home: Computer mediated remote interaction between humans and dogs. Thesis (MSc). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Seeley, T.D. 2010. Honeybee democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taylor, A.M., Reby, D., and McComb, K. 2011. Cross modal perception of body size in domestic dogs (Canis jamiliaris). PLoS ONE, 6 (2), e17069. van der Zee, E., Zulch, H., and Mills, D. 2012. Word generalization by a dog (Canisfamilian’s): Is shape important? PLoS ONE, 7 (II), e49382. von Uexkull, J. 2010. A foray into the worlds of animals and humans. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Wingrave, C.A., Rose, J., Langston, T., and La Viola, Jr., J.J. 2010. Early explorations of CAT: ­Canine amusement and training. In: CHJ’/0 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems,10–15 April, Atlanta, GA. New York: ACM, 2661–2669. Wolfe, C. 2010. What is posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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27 MORE-THAN-HUMAN ETHICS Franklin Ginn

Ethical Gestures Over the last 25 years scholars have theorised nature, materiality and life across multiple disciplines and in many different ways. What unites this diverse field of more-than-human studies is the idea that the world comprises skilful, embodied and affective entanglements between people and nonhumans. This scholarship also coalesces around a radical sense of immanence; that is to say, we abide in a world that is truly secular, in Bruno Latour’s (2010) terms, where secularism is defined as the absence of ultimate authority, be it God, Nature or Capital – nothing but event following event following event along vectors shaped by, but not reducible to, the material and energetic propensities of organisms and their ecologies. Accordingly, more-than-human studies have oriented themselves towards the play of difference as the engine of the Earth. Species – and indeed rocks or technologies – are strategic essentialisms, knots of becoming with no given essence. As the key theorist of new materialism, Karen Barad (2012: 59), put it: Eros, desire, life forces run through everything, not only specific body parts or specific kind of engagements among body parts. Matter itself is not a substrate or a medium for the flow of desire. Materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, a reiterative reconfiguring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening. As a corollary, there is a deep suspicion that the human is a pre-given matter of concern. Scholars of the more-than-human have sought epistemologically to move beyond humanistic critique: to animate rather than deaden life and matter. This has led anthropology to new forms of multispecies ethnography; geography to fruitful engagements with ethology; the environmental humanities to creative forms of writing and curation; animal studies to shift from symbolism to the uneven material presence of animals in social life. These ontological positions beg ethical questions. How to organise what matter matters without Nature as a guide? If we have never been human, what moral principles can guide deliberation? More-than-human studies have made rather modest ethical noises: asking for conviviality (Lorimer, 2015), co-flourishing (Haraway, 2008), enchantment (Bennett, 2010) DOI: 10.4324/9781003262619-30 420

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or transformative forms of grief or mourning (Cunsolo and Landman, 2017; van Dooren, 2019). Most prominent and undercutting these ethical ideas is the assumption that the goal of more-than-human studies should be to highlight, analyse and foster forms of care across species lines (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). The modesty of more-than-human studies’ ethics contrasts the epochal scale of challenges and crises facing planetary life: from the littleunderstood mass extinctions of soil microbiota to microplastics in benthic organisms; from creatures – human and nonhuman alike – pushed passed the point of possible adaptability to changing climatic regimes, to the more familiar problems of resource exhaustion, pollution and ecocide. Most recently, the challenge of decomposing colonial natures – land, lives and ways of being shaped over 500 years of extractive colonial capitalism – has renewed the sense of ethical and political challenge facing the field. Yet, the modesty of more-thanhuman ethics is part of its foundational argument. More-than-human studies’ task, as I see it, is to understand and suggest ways of being better planetary denizens. In approaching this task, more-than-human scholars stick with particular, tangible incarnations of entangled planetary life. More-than-human ethics are resolutely situated (eschewing grand metanarratives and free-floating principles) and resolutely relational (emerging from entangled creaturely lives). This chapter assesses the braided history of ethical claims made in more-than-human studies. I offer a typology and sympathetic critical exposition of the main forms of ethical gesture made within this diverse field. I draw attention to the relationship between the ontological claims being made and the ethics that follow from this. I will suggest that more precision is needed in how the field mobilises its ethical claims, as well as greater critical transparency on the relationship between ontology and ethics (never an easy or straightforward one). I call these ethical ‘gestures’ for several reasons. First, a gesture is corporeal, rather than verbal, with greater instability of meaning and much greater contextual understanding required for its interpretation; this seems to fit a more-than-human ethos. Second, a gesture is a way of enfolding a relation: a gesture doesn’t do much if performed alone, it needs an audience. Third, the importance of a gesture is always up for debate: is it a token gesture, a meaningful, heartful gesture or a deceitful gesture? The term gesture, then, seems to capture something of the uncertainty, situated nature of ethics in more-than-human studies. In what follows I address different three ethical gestures. The order is not chronological, nor is it definitive. By focusing on selected key works rather than offering a review it reflects my own idiosyncratic geographer’s path through reading the literature. The chapter then turns to how these ethical gestures deal with capitalism and coloniality. In conclusion, I reflect on whether the ontological model informing these gestures is in fact a parochial one based on historic understandings of animal subjectivity, before finally I point to future directions the field might take.

Ethics of Revealing Hybridity The most long-standing and now most basic gesture for articulating more-than-human studies’ ethical concerns for nonhuman life can be described as revealing hybridity. By this I mean conducting analysis to show that what was formerly perceived as belonging to ontologically separate domains (nature and culture), was in reality always a hybrid of the two. Emerging primarily from the insights of actor-network theory, work in early more-thanhuman studies empirically explored theoretical claims about relationality and the work of purification (producing myths and organising spaces and lives into distinct domains). One 421

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touchtone is geographer Sarah Whatmore’s (2002) Hybrid Geographies. This book was in many senses ‘revelatory’, that is, an attempt to bring nonhumans into our descriptions of the world to reveal their full complexity. Work in the vein of revealing hybridity involved tracing the ways in which values and representations of animals mould personal and collective identities (Howell, 2015) or the ways in which animals materially shape, contest and leave traces on space and place (Philo and Wilbert, 2000). Additionally, investigating hybridity has shown the double movement of how, on the one hand, nonhumans have been subjected to a range of social and political practices of inclusion and exclusion from human society, while, on the other, animals’ lifeworlds and geographies continue to assert themselves against any such orderings (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2020). Revelatory gestures were especially useful in showing how colonial projects were morethan-human ventures which nonhuman actors assisted, subverted and changed, and how moral and ethical relations towards animals were framed by colonisers in a way that relegated practices of the other as subservient (DeLanda, 1997; Ginn, 2008). Boundary work – tracing the nature-culture borderlands and various practices of purification – r­emains popular, particularly in post-colonial contexts where the construction and subversion of ‘natural’ categories has always seemed more overt. Ongoing work in Australia for example has focused on nature/culture and of right nature/wrong nature, and the necessary but fragile work of purification required (Atchison and Head, 2013; Franklin, 2011). This long-standing gesture gets its ethical heat from unveiling hidden hybridity, revealing the ideological and practical work required for the illusory separation of nature and culture. The problems of such an approach are well-rehearsed: it tends to the descriptive, rather than the critical; specific differences, particularly among humans, are dissolved too easily; power is flattened and power relations distributed in ways that obscure accountability. Furthermore, the gesture assumes that ethics (and politics) will flow from the newly revealed ontological understanding. Put bluntly, the claim that the world does not comprise separate domains of nature and culture had some radical bite in the 1990s and early 2000s, but no longer has any teeth. It has clearly been overtaken by events, not least the diagnosis of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Plantationocene/Chthulucene. These diagnoses make it impossible to deny the geo-political role of nonhuman life and earth processes, and seriously up the stakes. In many ways, of course, more-than-human studies helped establish the understanding of life that enabled such diagnoses to emerge.

Ethics of Encounter: Contaminating Difference In this gesture, ethics reside in the encounter, sparked by the contaminating difference involved in encountering other beings. This means that rather than ethics being an abstract code or something attached to a being, it is relational and emerges from encounter between beings (Smith, 2011) and companions (Haraway, 2008). Ethics is therefore performed amid specific acts of living, worlding-with and reaching accommodation among beings; being enchanted by nonhuman agency and intelligence is the ethical force. In a nutshell, this is the wager of new materialism: that by encountering difference, we can be changed and prompted to care. Key theorists include Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway. For Bennett, the vibrancy of matter can prompt an affective reaction which might make us care about the more-thanhuman; crucially, for her, we can cultivate our capacities for receptivity (2010). Haraway’s much more creaturely work broadens this. Yes, we are implored to be curious, ‘which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning’ (Haraway, 2008: 36). Yes, 422

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we are implored to live fully in our knots of relating. But, for Haraway, ethics here doesn’t flow entirely smoothly from encounters. Hence her emphasis on aspects of encounter such as ‘killing well’, since we all live within ‘mortal ecologies’ of beings ‘who live in and through the use of one another’s bodies’ we don’t get a pass on killing, but must face it fully (Haraway, 2008: 79). Haraway implores us to develop ways of sharing suffering. Difficulties therefore mount up when we consider the biopolitical orders in which human and animal life intertwine. Encounters are never innocent, and can be violent, estranged and awkward (Ginn et al., 2014). Hugh Raffles (2011) layers of wonder, theory and tales in Insectopedia tell us of multiple kinds of humans and insects interacting – obsessively, furtively, aggressively, lovingly. John Law (2011) argued that Raffles offers a corrective to Haraway’s companion species motif, in that insects may be significant others sometimes, but are always other, always remain partly inscrutable. Raffles signals here that there is something more than relation in encounter. Bennett (2010) is wise to this: she pitches her book, Vibrant Matter, as an attempt to hold on to a sense in which vitality emerges from relations, but also exceeds the event of that emergence. She accounts for this more-thanrelational character of vibrant matter by describing ‘open wholes’ whose members ‘never melt into a collective body, but instead maintain an energy potentially at odds’ with that assemblage (Bennett, 2010: 35). This sense of both relation and more-than-relation matters because it makes ethics ‘contagious’. That is, new ethical sensibilities can emerge from any encounter because of difference, although the results are never fully knowable in advance. The wider hope, then, is that the contagious ethics of encounter begin to re-distribute our sense of the possible and the good; politics becoming a matter of interfering in the emergence of those patterned contingencies for more convivial outcomes.

Ethics of Commoning and Flourishing Contaminating difference as a prompt to ethics has had to face the critique that, in the end, microscale bodily encounters may well alter flows of becoming, but they do little to address wider patterns of socio-ecological injustice; they may indeed wilfully bracket such questions. Notwithstanding critiques that her initial formulation of the plantationocene overlooked the sedimented and historical violence of actual plantations, Anna Tsing’s (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World exemplifies the move beyond revealing and encountering gestures to the promise that a wider ethics can emerge. Tsing (2015) and her collaborators have put forward an argument for seeing a ‘patchy’ Anthropocene. We might, they suggest, understand the Anthropocene as a deeply historical patchwork of landscapes of ruin and salvage, formed as capital appropriates free or cheap natures, dis-embeds humans and nonhuman creatures from their lifeworlds and renders them inter-changeable, fungible, tradeable, scaleable commodities (Tsing, 2015). This process is what Tsing (2015) calls the logic of the plantation: a process of violent abstraction that lurches from place to place, alienating human and nonhuman from land and from each other. Against the logic of the plantation, Tsing invites us to experience the world through arts of noticing that look around at multispecies relations not governed by the logic of the plantation but by the promise of a life in common. She wants us to see not self-contained units of life moving over the land, but historically interwoven rhythms, in which symbiosis is the rule not the exception and where ‘stuff happens through contaminated diversity’ (Tsing, 2015: 34). Tsing’s figure here is the peasant forest, and particularly the matsutake mushroom forest. Matsutake, an expensive delicacy, more or less resists commercial cultivation 423

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and thrives only in disturbed forests, as she explores in Japan, Yunnan, the Pacific northwest, and Finland. Tsing shows how indeterminate encounters between mushroom pickers and fungus, networked into a global commodity trade network, work to recuperate the land, ‘bringing life to damaged landscapes’ through arts of disturbance and arts of noticing (Tsing, 2015: 181). In other words, the ethics of encounter are mobilised in a wider promise of flourishing in common. Mushroom forests are one form of what Tsing (2015) calls latent commons, a place which offers fugitive moments of recuperative entanglement. They are, she says, ubiquitous; they are also underdeveloped, full of possibilities (Tsing, 2015). Tsing takes inspiration from JK Gibson-Graham’s feminist post-capitalist utopics – the commons not as an idea that one defends, but a gathering of lifeways that become more than sum of their parts (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013). More liveable commons require nurturing forms of multispecies sociality; they are not just human enclaves. The question of how creatures influence each other – if at all – is never settled; patterns of unintentional coordination can develop through the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways that gather (Baynes, 2013). Commoning requires hard graft amid situated histories. Unlike the plantation, they cannot easily be scaled reproduced or abstracted; they ‘move in law’s interstices … catalysed by infraction, infection, inattention – and poaching’ (Tsing, 2015: 255). One recurring motif in this ethical gesture is the desire to foster flourishing, and to draw attention to patterns of relation which restrict or harm flourishing. Thom van Dooren’s (2019) writing on the entangled flightways of birds, The Wake of Crows, takes a diverse set of human-corvid lifeworlds, and examines how creatures craft common flourishing out of ‘different histories, different imagined futures, differ ecologies’ (10). ‘How’, van Dooren asks, do ‘specific entanglements give rise to possibilities for life and death, and for whom?’ (2019: 10). Though many corvids are synanthropic, some species do not thrive around humans: unwelcome and culled house crows in Rotterdam; humane disruption using lasers of crow communities in Mojave; helping birds recover from typhoons in the Mariana Islands. One of the lessons is that accountabilities to other species overlap, and that practical work to foster flourishing requires reckoning with the ‘processes of wreckage’ shaping much of the contemporary world (van Dooren, 2019: 219). Flourishing, then, always involves care and violence – organisms do not act in harmony but create divergent ecologies. Flourishing does not imply an anything goes free-for-all but requires that some collectives prosper at the expense of others – that we favour one set of relations over another. This perspective, in turn, requires us to see nonhumans not always as victims, nor groups of human as perpetrators. Rather, flourishing involves many species knotted together, often imbricated in ethically conflicted ways in human landscapes or economy, working with and against other multispecies assemblies.

Confronting Capitalism Calls from more-than-human scholarship for ethical encounters, flourishing and common worlds have not always been well received by other fields of human-nature and environmental study. Criticisms generally take two lines of attack. First, scholars in critical environmental studies, political ecology and eco-Marxism take issue with the small scale of more-than-human studies. Marxist geographer David Harvey (2006) moaned that British human geography had narrowed in scope and become politically passive, often preferring to discuss abstract ideas rather than addressing the structural problems of capitalism. In a 424

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trenchant but highly caricatured critique of new materialism, eco-Marxist scholar Andres Malm (2020) has little positive to say about integrated study of human and nonhuman (or the ‘more-than-human’ phrase at all). Malm’s quip that the Anthropocene is a useful term for polar bears, amphibians or birds seeking to assign blame but not at all useful for humans, at once put capitalist relations rather than the Anthropos as the driver of planetary change, while also inferring that studying frogs (or bats, or dogs, crows, or any other critters) was a silly distraction (Malm and Hornborg, 2014: 67). Indeed, rather than dissolve the analytical poles of nature and society, Malm (2020) would like to maintain them since, in his analysis, we need them to analyse accurately the forces of capital. Second, then, scholars critical of more-than-human studies dislike its politics and ethics: too contextual, too vague, too blind to structural forces. The absence of ultimate secular authority (to refrain Latour’s observation from the introduction of this chapter), far from a weakness, is seen as poststructuralist folly. Even a more sympathetic figure, such as Jason Moore (2015), would eschew bodily scale more-than-human studies in his wider world historical-materialist project to understand the dialectics of planetary capitalist natures. While often made in dogmatic and confrontational ways, such critiques have not always been totally wide of the mark. Some work ploughing the furrow of Jane Bennett’s (2001) enchantment and vital materialism (2010), for instance, can legitimately be critiqued for sidestepping questions of capital and power. There are lingering suspicions that the new materialist wager is a naïve form of posthumanist fancy, insufficiently attentive to actual, ongoing posthumanist struggles (Braidotti, 2019). Yet, there has always been a sense in which more-than-human studies has engaged questions of capital – not in a transcendent sense, but in a contingent sense – to explore the making of specific bodies and meaning (think of the classic work of Donna Haraway (1997) on technoscience, in which capital and biology entwines to produce material-semiotic kin such as OncoMouseTM). If the thread of capital has always been latent in more-than-human studies, then the field has recently given it much more over attention. Geographer Maan Barua (2019) has theorised the ways in which nonhumans co-constitute the economic realm in a fundamental way, as well as providing affective or encounter value for capitalist systems. Other work has shown that animals and other nonhumans can, through the exercise of the specific capacities, be enrolled into systems of production and consumption in ways necessary to capital – for example, through the metabolic labour of the broiler chicken or factory pig (Beldo, 2017) or the exotic pet (Collard, 2020) (see also key edited volumes Besky and Blanchette, 2019; Ernwein et al., 2021). Political theorist Alyssa Battistoni (2017: 6) suggests that we recognise nonhumans as co-labourers, partaking in hybrid labour that shapes political economies; hybrid labour ‘understands the “work of nature” as a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world’. Labour is not exclusively human; although it might be done in ways only humans are capable, labour can take multiple formats. Several ethical implications follow from Battistoni’s naming of hybrid labour. First, new materialisms’ emphasis on intercorporeal ethics is collectivised and scaled up. Second, it ecologises mainstream theories of economic production and consumption, putting nonhuman forces into a political realm of production not as tools or objects, but as agentic beings. Third, the different forms of worklabour that nature does come to the fore: generative socio-natural reproduction; specific lives in agricultural and livestock industries; infrastructural or maintenance work. Nature is here not a static stock of ‘capital’, but a ‘subject’ we partner with and with which we can entertain relations of solidarity (Battistoni, 2017: 16). The provocation here is that nonhuman 425

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life is not only shaped by capitalism but plays a necessary part in shaping capitalist ecologies. Ethical engagements with nonhumans are therefore increasingly acknowledging their constitutive role as labourers in capitalist production.

Confronting Coloniality Some time ago, Ruth Panelli (2010) noted that more-than-human studies were not doing a great job of tackling the more-than-social, that is, tackling its unspoken whiteness and otherwise under-differentiated human subjects. To some extent, these shortcomings were a logical emergence from the history of nature. ‘Nature’ was a colonial creation: a neutral field of resources and processes to be made known, and either used or saved (exploitation and conservation being on the same side of the master-slave coin). Indeed, the ‘animal question’, that ongoing biopolitical apparatus of separating human from nonhuman, always contained intra-human difference, sorting more and less acceptable bodies into racial hierarchy (Agamben, 2004). More-than-human studies were perhaps slow to realise that if the ethical gestures of revealing hybridity, mobilising encounter and looking to flourishing were creating forms of post-nature, then they must necessarily be anti-colonial project too. Simply, it was not enough to focus on more-than-human ethics without confronting colonial legacies from which they emerged. Much has changed since 2010. Indeed, Panelli’s review suggested the picture looked very different if work from post-colonial settings was moved to the centre of analysis (for example, work on animality and the environmental humanities emerging from Australia). The work of Deborah Bird Rose (2012) on multispecies knots of ethical time, for instance, showed clearly how creatures (in one example, flying foxes in Australia), were implicated in two axes of temporality: sequential time, encompassing past lifeways, landscapes and changing colonial ecologies; and synchronous time, or debts and engagements shared in the ongoing present. In her work with animals and Indigenous thinkers, Bird Rose thus demonstrated how coloniality was not just an exogenous process but one internal to animal becoming. More than ever, more-than-human ethical engagement needs to reckon with these temporalities. There is also a far-reaching recuperative sense in which confronting coloniality seeks to redress ontological violence. As well as damaging lives and ecosystems, colonial extractive capital was predicated upon ontological violence; overwriting diverse knowledge systems and ways of being that never cleaved to the nature-culture dualism. The most concerted effort to address the colonial legacies and ongoing colonial and ontological violence associated with animals has come from anthropology. A growing number of voices from Latin America and Indigenous thinkers conclude that there is not ‘one world’ comprising an external nature and diverse social interpretations of that nature: rather, there is a pluriverse, a ‘world of many worlds’ (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018: 1). By this, de la Cadena and Blaser (2018) mean that the project of imposing a uniform one Nature on to the whole Earth was never wholly successful, and that myriad Indigenous ways of life are worlds-in-themselves (in other words, many natures/many cultures). For thinkers like Escobar (2020) and Mignolo (2000), alternative thought resists the ways in which modern philosophies alienated humans from nature and the animal. They suggest that Indigenous nature-cultures are not a supplement but a challenge. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2013) pushes this logic further, insisting that anthropology (and by implication more-than-human studies) take these philosophies and worlds seriously in their own terms, without resorting to Western theoretical scaffolding. 426

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What are the specific implications for more-than-human ethics? First, the cast of morethan-human studies radically gets opened up: spirits, deities, ghosts, ways of seeing creatures beyond biological sciences and giving greater credence to embedded modes of life and multiple ways of knowing nature beyond ‘one nature’ approaches. Second, the ethics of bodily scale human-animal interactions must be placed in their wider historical and political context. It makes little sense to grapple with specific instances of, say, human-animal conflict in conservation, without confronting colonial legacies; in other words, to interrogate modernity’s economies of flesh (Yusoff, 2018). There are however pitfalls to be navigated. It would be quite easy to take Indigenous perspectives and ontological multiplication as a course correction that left the structural inequities and masterful authority of the Western academic project unaddressed. There should be no multiplying ontology without also engaging ontological struggles (for example, over whether rocks are resources or ancestors (Povinelli, 2016), or specific creaturely legacies of inhuman colonialism (Zahara and Hird, 2016)). This does not mean the intellectual inheritances of more-than-human studies are effaced, but it does mean they must be further provincialised and interrogated – a challenge I take up in the final section of this chapter.

Unmooring Ontology and Ethics: Less-than-Animal Life Each of more-than-human studies ethical gestures reviewed above tends to privilege presence, as in actual, ongoing or historical relations and beings. This is because more-thanhuman studies roots its ethics in an ontology of relation and vitality. But where does relationality leave creatures not present, or not yet present, or unseen (Bastian, 2020; Ginn, 2016; Giraud, 2019)? Where does it leave the immaterial and non-corporeal dimensions of life? Hinchliffe (2008), for instance, outlined a move from a metaphysics and ecology of presence to one of partial, possible or withheld connections, and for forms of conservation that do not rely on pre-existing forms of life, but is attentive to the coming into presence of animals, places and people. As Wolfe (2010) and Smith (2011) have argued, emphasising presence and encounter neglects any relational ethics encompassing animals with which we have not articulated an obviously shared form of life. Basing ethics on an ontology of relation leaves the constitutive outside of relations – the immaterial, non-corporeal and non-relational – beyond consideration (Ginn, 2018). Some scholars have tackled this in what we could call a fourth gesture: indeterminate ethics. Indeterminate ethics attempts to deal with what lies beyond – displaced or virtually immanent in either time or space – the encounter and hold open a zone of indiscernibility or unknowability. Indeterminacy is less a question of ontology, but of hauntology, of spectres and absences. For example, Timothy Morton (2012) suggests that when we encounter vibrant matter (or animals) we do not really meet. Rather we encounter strangeness behind that meeting – the sense that we can never fully know the thing we meet, that there is always something withdrawing. Drawing on biosemiotics, Morton (2012) argues that – in quite prosaic ways – camouflage, deception and disguise are the stock of life, so that misrecognition or invisibility are to be expected. Morton thus wants an ethical ecology that includes collision, friction, inertness, or passivity as well as rambunctious life. Morton (2012), in contrast to new materialists, wants more negativity; he invokes Spinoza’s sad powers to argue for more depression, melancholia and passivity. Morton would ‘rather be a zombie than a tree hugger’ (2009: 129). The zombie does not form careful attachments to nonhuman matterings; it is dully reactive, undead and without vitality. Recouping something 427

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ethical from the zombie’s way of being is one of Morton’s ideas. This dark ecology, as he styles it (Morton, 2012), allows us to pay attention to more than matter’s positive vitality and turn to what might be absent and to whatever might lurk beyond the sensible. The ‘plant turn’ over the last decade or so poses a similar challenge to the way morethan-human ethics are conceived (see Lawrence, 2022 for a review of the plant turn). Critical plant studies has emerged around questions of plant communication, cognition, agency and interactions with humans – inspired in no small part by far-reaching scientific reassessments of the complexity of plant life (Gagliano et al., 2019). The range of topics is large: from the role of plants in biosecurity (Atchison and Head, 2013), to viticultural time (Brice, 2021), to the lively poetic or horrific presence of plants in literature (Meeker and Szabari, 2020). Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2013: 42) celebrated Braiding Sweetgrass has drawn much attention to the interplay of Potawatomi ideas and Western science, posing plants as ‘teachers’ rather than objects, and as a ‘who’ rather than a ‘what’. This echoes wider concerns in more-than-human studies about nonhumans as participants rather than objects of study (Pitt, 2018). Part of the challenge of plant studies is that vegetal being is very different to animalistic being. In short, plants are largely sessile (non-mobile); they passively endure and await changing external conditions (seasons, weather, sun); they have no interiority and so are more withdrawn than interacting; they have no self but are multiple beings, capable of division and self-division (Marder, 2013); their bodily mapping of inside/outside is very different to those of animals (i.e. in the way they breathe and digest) (Houle, 2011). There are obviously continuities between plant being and animality as well as differences (after all, humans share 80% of their DNA with daffodils (Morton, 2012)). Like animals, plants are thoroughly relational beings, and most rely on multi-kingdom alliances (with fungi, insects, bacteria and so on). But the differences partly explain the lack of ethical value attached to plants compared to animals in the history of Western thought (and indeed the marginal place of plants in more-than-human studies) (Hall, 2011). Nealon’s analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of more-than-human studies is instructive here. Tracing the subtending role of the animal in the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari (all influential figures in more-than-human studies), Nealon (2015: x) concludes that the modern concept of ‘life’ is rooted in animal ‘desire’, or a self that desires connections with others: ‘Animality provides the subtending notion of subjective desire that gives rise to biopower in the first place’. This ‘organismic biopower’ is ‘smuggled’ into the unspoken heart of more-than-human studies (Nealon, 2015: 118). This is, Nealon concludes, a parochial basis for imagining contemporary biopower. Rather than just adding plants to a list of more-than-human actors, attention to the specific vegetal differences mandates a more thorough review and overhaul of more-thanhuman studies’ ethical assumptions. Karen Houle (2011: 112) argues that plant ethics would take account of life as showing what can be accomplished ‘not within a successfully managed organic encasement of what a thing is’ but ‘as that which can happen by virtue of a certain unfaithful power of connectivity’. At first reading, this may sound like a standard call for new materialist conception of relation life, but the key word here is ‘unfaithful’: it marks the difference, or better the indifference, of plant being. The unfaithful points to a lack of clearly bounded subject, a lack of clear translation or alignment of interest, and puts more-than-human ethics on to more uncertain terrain. Lawrence (2022: 639) maps out the current tendrils of a ‘multi-elemental’ ethic unmoored from animal being, but as yet the plant turn has not yet answered all the questions it has posed. What is clear is that after 25 428

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years the ethical questions and gestures of more-than-human studies are not settled, and that more work is required to imagine liveable worlds for the full panoply of terrestrial life.

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PART 4

Towards a Common World

28 WALKING INTO THE FUTURE WITH BRUNO LATOUR Adrian Franklin

Introduction In many ways, all the variants comprising more-than-human studies (including ANT, STS, posthumanism, Deleuzian philosophy, ‘Ingoldian’ anthropology, animal studies, new materialism, non-representational geographies) gesture to the future though it won’t be all ‘new’ and there may be a lot of lessons and recovery from the past. As Stephen Muecke et al. (this volume) suggest, we are very much at the beginning of a long road, that will potentially involve a major rewriting of history, an ontological reorientation of research and ethics, and because more-than-human studies involve a politics of becoming that seeks to reunite humanity and ‘nature’, a critical recognition and reorganisation of who we actually live ‘with’ and how we might live better together in the future (Latour and Schultz, 2022: 55–63). And while we can never be sure where such journeying will take us and by when, this handbook confirms that we have at least made some headway in developing useful vehicles to take us there. As Mike Michael (this volume) says, more-than-human approaches (from Whitehead to post-actor-network theory) are particularly apt for addressing ‘the not-as-yet’. Through post-humanist ontologies many, if not all, of the problem areas of humanism and its dualisms are starting to be addressed, through a variety of rapprochements with ‘nature’. Those that address climate change loom very large here, not least in the latter works of Bruno Latour (Latour, 2017, 2018, 2021; Latour and Schultz, 2022) who was sadly lost to us in 2022. Future orientations take a number of related directions and include: 1 Addressing the conceptualisation and exploitation of an externalised ‘nature’ as a resource base for human progress, unlimited economic growth, consumerism and mobilities resulting in, among other things, global warming, waste, pollution and travelfacilitated viral pandemics. It involves collaborative searching for alternatives where that externality and separation is replaced by commonality, co-design and intra-action, and where a production orientated modern world is replaced by a ‘quest for the conditions of habitability’ (Latour, 2021; Latour and Schultz, 2022: 14; Franklin, 2023; see also Hawkins and Pyyhtinen, this volume) and conviviality (Gertenbach et al., 2021).

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2 Developing closer regard, curiosity, and responsibility for the non-human world around us; considering ‘habitability’ as a lived issue for human individuals in tandem with cultivating habits of respect, response, collaboration and frugality (Urry, 2008; Haraway, 2008, 2016; Ingold, 2021; Muecke et al., this volume). This encompasses a wide range of activities from the routinised slowing down to watch, listen-to, observe and respond to non-humans in everyday life to the more purposive sensing, tracking, participatingwith and monitoring especially productive intervention activities (design, engineering, mobilities and technologies) in the space-times of peoples, cultures, nations, regions, landscapes, cityscapes, health systems and other areas of life on earth and beyond (Urry, 2008; Latour and Schultz, 2022; see also Bastian; Clark; Pickering; Franklin; O’Gorman and Gaynor; von Essen; Matthewman, Power, Ren, Searle and Turnbull, this volume). 3 Avoiding the depletion of natural and material diversity, the extermination of species, ecological imbalance, soil erosion, flooding, desertification and other forms of ‘disastrous entanglement’ (see Pickering; O’Gorman and Gaynor; Philips; Matthewman, this volume) and deploying science and technology in ways that proceed carefully and dialectically with the material/natural world (Pickering, this volume). 4 Recognising and learning from our ancient and modern kinship with micro-organisms and our most recent acquaintance with (ongoing) mass travel/livestock industry vectored viral pandemics (see Bennett; Greenhough; Hinchliffe; Searle and Turnbull this volume). 5 Ending the exclusion, control, mistreatment and incompossibility of selected outcast non-human animals, including the unnecessary control and killing of ‘ferals’, ‘pests’ and other ‘misfits’ and the scandals of the industrialised ‘livestock’ industries (Arcari et al., 2021; Metzger, this volume). 6 Conceptualising and establishing an ontological/posthumanist politics based on the intra-relationships between humans and non-humans as entities existing, ‘on the same level’ (Whitehead, 1929: 18), and in relation to what Latour and Schultz (2022: 78–79) call ‘the metamorphosis in the political situation which pivots from production towards maintenance of habitability’. Latour and Schultz propose an ecological class to define and become the vehicle for new political interests through experience, embodiment and emplacement. Only in this way, they argue, can fears of loss and disorientation be assuaged (to production/growth/consumption-based political cultures) by foregrounding the prior consideration of habitability as the very condition for production. How earth had always created and maintained those conditions until production and development got out of balance (Whitehead, 1929; Haraway, 2008, 2016; Ingold, 2021, 2022a; Latour and Schultz, 2022: 17–25; see also Barry; Hinchliffe; Muecke et al.,; Pickering and Tsing, this volume). 7 Contrasts between indigenous and Western peoples, colonisers and the colonised are clearly necessary for thinking about the future; for recovering, extending, inspiring and innovating new forms of consciousness and ways of living with each other and the material/natural world (Salter, 2022; see also Muecke et al., Bastian, Bennett, Matthewman, this volume) alongside the opportunities to do so with new technologies. I am also interested in the ways Western cultures before (and after) the Great Divide lived more localised lives, ways of life created in the very same places Westerners will surely have to be localised to in the future if climate change is to be powered down. As the chapters in this handbook confirm, the other-than-human world is itself always moving, from things in disjunction to things in conjunction and thence to novelty. It includes 434

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everything from tectonic plates to mundane objects like knives, and stories told around campfires, in lively, complex, powerful and creative spaces, constantly in play with humanity rather than merely at its beck and call – an omnipresent material force in our lives that modern scholars had hitherto managed, somewhat idiotically, to misconstrue as neutral and inert and categorically separate from humanity. Climate change shows graphically just how wrong this was and how urgently we need to realign with it. This world of entities, materials, technologies, human artefacts and animate species, human and otherwise were never very good at remaining apart from each other, especially not keeping to naïve modern typologies, concepts and pedagogies. Not only do they meet often, they are also rather sticky. In consequential meetings they connect promiscuously through inbuilt capacities to reach out, attach and combine, affecting each other for shorter or longer periods as they remain assembled, reacting to each other. It is the exact opposite of the linear and selective lines of causation that modern ‘box and line diagram’ insinuate. Through these continuous chains of affect new things are formed, from the shedding and joining together of heterogenous elements which then become new entities continually in circulation. The chapters in this volume have demonstrated should be: the abundance of these circulations all around us. For a considerable period therefore, more-than-human studies have experimented with ways to access and understand such processes, to experience them (once again) and document them – and especially how demodernising humanity might respond and engage with them more productively and equitably in the future. Typically, this involved following different kinds of forward-moving processes: flows and circulations (Law, 2009), exfoliations (Gil, 1998), foldings-in (Ingold, 2013: 17), dances of agency (Pickering, 2000), becomingswith (Haraway, 2008), temporal movements (Tsing and Ginn, this volume). But while many strands of more-than-human studies began with science and technology studies and must remain interested in how humanity will live with and be changed by new technologies, the irony is that in many ways more-than-human futures must also involve a return to our past, before the so-called Great Divide/Bifurcation/Separation in the early modern sixteenth century, when nature and humanity were conceptually and formally separated. The unfolding and impact of this event was described in the opening chapter. Reunifying nature and humanity cannot mean a return to eras of the past because none of us are sixteenth-century people anymore and we cannot un-know the huge stock of technology, knowledge and culture that is very much a part of who we became, and part of the problem (and solution) as we consider possible futures (Urry, 2015). However, the likely future will involve some kind of reconciliation between the before and after epistemes, or a recomposition of nature and humanity. As Latour (2010: 480) put it: Because of the slow demise of Nature, I now have the feeling, much like Stephen Toulmin, that we are actually closer to the sixteenth century than to the twentieth, precisely because the agreement that created the Bifurcation in the first place now lies in ruins and has to be entirely recomposed. This is why we seem to experience a sense of familiarity with the times before its invention and implementation. When rationalists deride the time before the “epistemological break,” to use Louis Althusser’s favorite (and fully modernist) expression, it is because this earlier “episteme” was making too many connections between what they called the micro- and the macrocosm. But is this not exactly what we now see emerging everywhere under the name of “postnatural”?..... Of course, what is entirely lost today is the notion of a harmony between the micro- and macrocosm. Yet, that there is, and that there should be, a connection 435

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between the fates of these two spheres seems obvious to all. Even the strange Renaissance notion of sympathy and antipathy between entities has taken an entirely new flavor now that animals, plants, soils, and chemicals are indeed acknowledged to have their friends and their enemies, their assemblies and their websites, their blogs and their demonstrators. How can these new sympathies and reconnections be extrapolated into more effective solutions to climate change (Latour and Schultz, 2022: 17)? What kind of politics will replace those bound tightly to ever-expanded production and consumption? Latour and Schultz (2022) argue that to understand the current climate change impasse we need to understand how the alternative proposition, for an ‘ecological class’, and a politics of ecology could come into being by grafting itself onto existing class cultures, structures and politics. While Left politics had historically championed struggles against the primacy of production and the intrusion of economisation into all areas of society (see, for example, how farm labourers and tenant farmers in the nineteenth century had opposed ‘enclosures’ and the ‘rationalisation of agriculture’ in Chapter 1), the Left’s strongest historic role was to secure vaguely index linked stakes in the fruits of production. Over time such links exceeded the original bread and butter materialism of Marxism and early twentieth-century socialism (i.e. that affording a dignified material life for workers assuring among other things adequate housing, food, health, education and life chances) to a material life that emulated, if not exactly, the luxurious materialism of the social elite (especially meat-and fish-rich diets; fast-changing fashions and bulging wardrobes; luxury cars and prestigious homes; jet-set, frequent global travel; modern conveniences; comprehensive services; wines and spirits; ever-higher energy consumption). These so-called rising living standards were less the essential and modest specifications of the mid-twentieth-century modern dream imagined by a socialist/humanist politics, than the artefact of a second political culture, Liberalism – which, like socialism, was also a long time in the making (Latour and Schultz, 2022). While socialism and liberalism were both entrenched in productivism, socialist politics remained materially modest through minimum consumption standards, e.g., social housing and pensions began and remained essentially frugal. There was an essential frugality about post-war Scandinavian social democracy that contrasted strongly with the ostentatiousness of material life in the USA where the politics of Liberalism was driven by a logic of profit seeking and competition without limit which inevitably built the need to the expand markets and production. While the early Protestant captains of industry in England had preached frugality and material restraint in their own lives and in society (Alford, 2013), later aggressive corporatist/neoliberal forms of capitalism arriving from the USA became globally ascendant especially after the 1980s (Harvey, 2005) and thus unbridled consumerism broke out everywhere. Marketing departments stimulated a culture of envy and emulation among the working and middle classes in order to encourage the consumption of luxury and positional goods, while at the same time setting the material entry qualifications required for membership of the social elite to ever higher levels. Consumerism spiralled absurdly and seemingly without limit since both sides of politics, socialism and liberalism were rusted onto the political logic of production and development; neither believed they could be elected without promising economic growth. Hence, while many on both sides of politics may have seen the absolute necessity and urgency of climate change action, nobody, including ecological activists, could realistically imagine the politics of its enactment. 436

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So, there is an enormous contradiction and gulf between the values and materialisms of existing political cultures and apparatuses and those required for a politics of ecology. Latour and Schultz (2022) suggest that an ecological class would have to be built from the ground up in the same way all classes are made through the lived experience of its members, and slowly over time (socialism and liberalism took several centuries to produce pro-development reflexes) in what they call ‘The Great Turnaround’. Except that, we just don’t have a lot of time. An ecology class cannot be effectively inserted simply because turning around makes perfect sense in the abstracted science of climate change. An ecological class becomes a potential vehicle for change, they argue, when it can stand for a ‘decisive change of tack’ that actual people can at least envisage themselves making, as activists and/or individuals (Schultz and Latour: 19). ‘Giving priority to [engendering] the habitability conditions of the planet and not developing production’ (ibid.: 19–20) is a clear and positive twist that identifies both the values and benefits of changing what such a class would do. However, the clinching argument is that this ‘reversal’ can only be powerful and demand our attention when it subsumes previous political certainties and clarity into its overarching vision through a concept they call envelopment. ‘All the issues of production are wrapped up in’ (ibid.: 20) and therefore dependent on practices of engendering the habitability of the planet. It does not endanger production for what we need, only that bloated raft of luxurious excesses that en dangers everything in sight. ‘Mindless’ consumerism did not guarantee our prosperity, but engendering habitability is entirely about continuing prosperity for everything. It’s not a matter of degrowing, but of finally prospering….no conditioned reflex, no instinct, no affect as yet translates such a shift to the point where it becomes the new common sense’ (Latour and Schultz (2022: 21). It has to relate to the actual lives of people who would become its members and identify ‘how the new class struggle positions itself. (ibid.: 22) For Latour and Schultz then, ecology promises a new form of emancipation from the narrow ideas of modern freedom offered by liberalism (mostly concerned with ‘overrunning barriers’ ibid.: 33) to exploring what the actual limits of our own existence are – what kinds of possible lives the earth affords us in the actual places we live. ‘On all subjects and at all scales, those of the nation state as well as those of human groups or living organisms, ecology directs its inventory and recovery efforts at the limits of the old notion of a limit’ (ibid.: 33). Such a quest would enable us to re-examine important values and redefine them in these ecological terms: ‘belonging, identity, solidarity, community life – notions often associated, due to prior class history with the soil, the people, the nation’ (ibid.: 33–34) with all the darkness and risk associated with it included. In this scheme that realigns modern affects ‘the more dependent we are the better’ – it’s a quest for the ties that liberate’ (ibid.: 34)! Unlike the narrative that modernity built for itself, of moving fast and forward through history leaving the past behind, the ecology movement will involve, to repeat Latour and Schultz (2022: 41), ‘a multiplication of ways of inhabiting and taking care of engendering practice’ indifferent to ‘what belongs in the past present and future’…. ‘a scattering in all directions that recapture and repair what the old sense of history sought to oversimplify’. 437

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While Latour and Schultz’s proposed ‘taking stock’ would take full account of what individuals live on (or take from the earth) it also fixes on issues of the potentialities of locality, belonging, identity, community and solidarity that are often, if not always, contiguous with residence and experience. Fixing on where people currently live is also significant because for those living in affluent areas of the West and elsewhere, where energy use, travel and consumption are very high and need powering down, a shift to ecological class consciousness and politics would imply a realignment of lifestyle around locality. How can we imagine ourselves doing that? What resources are to hand that we can draw on to start thinking about that? Is it the West’s responsibility as the creators of global travel to show how it can be rendered safe? Yes, it is.

Becoming Local? So, I want to look at how some of the world’s most affluent and mobile people might react to this seemingly unlikely, yet absolutely essential future proposition. What possible cultural, historical and technical potentials, precedents and prehensions would weigh into the feasibility of such a thing ever coming to pass? In this final section, I am not attempting to design policy but assemble, even if incompletely, some aspects of my world that contain potential for becoming more local. At first sight, one would have to be pessimistic about the prospects of clipping the wings of the West. In 1998, Bauman argued that: ‘Mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among the coveted values – and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern times’ (2). More recently, the loss of freedom of movement during COVID lockdowns clearly indicated the unpopularity of confinement, and especially the difficulties it posed for some groups. Young adults in Europe and Australia, for example, expressed elevated levels of loneliness and unhappiness during lockdown phases. Lockdowns disturbed the complex connections between what Vanessa May described as types of place affordance and agespecific ‘cultural scripts’ that normally give rise to a sense of belonging – and protect against loneliness (May, 2018; Ahrendt et al., 2020: Franklin and Tranter, 2022: 1): For [younger adults], such scripts demand their identification with future orientations and a sense of belonging tied to the more distant and wide-ranging places of career advance, meeting, play, and pleasure that lockdown inhibited. By contrast, older retired cohorts were more inclined to frame their sense of belonging in the past through the maintenance of community connections and closer place-bonds of their locality, cultural places of memory and return that they were more happily confined to during lockdowns. (Franklin and Tranter, 2022: 1) However, some localities, such as Växjö, a university town in southern Sweden, have already collectively decided to reduce their carbon footprint to a fossil fuel free existence and were half way towards their goal in 2010 (Urry, 2013). In 2019 that goal was finally reached: ‘Today, 72% of the city’s energy supply is renewable and comes from biomass. There is a lot of walking and cycling replacing fossil fuelled car driving there now. But Växjö is hardly typical; its affluent-educated demographic probably leans heavily to green politics and already is highly localised. 438

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To begin with let’s concentrate instead on those people in the world who most often leave their locality for pleasurable international travel, whether as tourists or excursionists. Europe and America completely dominate the carbon used for such purposes, followed by China (UNWTO, 2023). And Europe is higher than the USA (UNWTO, 2023). Within Europe, the UK dominates; in fact, in 2019, the UK was named the world’s most (unnecessarily) internationally travelled nation. On 31 July 2019 (the last pre-COVID-19 year), the British Independent newspaper carried the headline: ‘More British people flew abroad last year than any other nationality’ (Adams, 2019). Citing official 2018 data from the international trade body for aviation, 126.2 million British passengers made flights abroad as compared with 115 million from the USA and 97 million from China. The UK accounted for 8.6% of global flights that year. If you divide the total number of British overseas passengers by the population of Britain in 2018 you get a figure of almost two flights per person. But when you factor in age, social class and occupation there are clearly many British people making far more overseas flights per year. And it is not all essential travel. Only around 9 million of those passengers were flying for work related purposes, while 59% of British overseas flights were for holidays and a further 24% of flights were to visit friends and family – many of those I imagine were essential, but not all (Statista, 2023; see also UK Gov, 2021. The proportion of different age groups who make no tourism trips is also significant. Fifty-one per cent of the over-65s made no trips, ditto 36% of the 55–64s, 32% of the 45–54s and 26% of 25–34s. Financial reasons were by far the most important reason given for not travelling (Eurostats, 2019). In other words, it is the financially secure British who are travelling so much, and there are a lot of them. Prior to COVID-19, already high rates of British international travel increased by 70% between 2000 and 2019 (UNWTO, 2023) and were on a steep upward slope before the pandemic struck. In what remains of this chapter, I am going to consider whether and how this British proclivity for high-carbon vacationing might be reigned-in to levels the earth can afford. Learning lessons from the (unpredicted) success of rationing in Britain during the Second World War, Urry (2013) underlined the necessity for climate change solutions to be, or to become fashionable. The English love of gardening was used to drive the Dig for Britain campaign, a movement for the mass self-provisioning of food in relation to the sudden loss of vital imported supplies. Britain dug up its parks, playing fields and used every scrap of spare land to cultivate food in the localities where people lived. For most family’s needs, a very small patch of ground was sufficient to supply everything apart from protein. When meat fish, milk and cheese were rationed more or less equally, people went along with it, and they also created new dishes from pulses which were not rationed. It all worked and people felt hungry, but quite pleased with themselves. People took holidays at their local beaches and beauty spots. The fashion industry kicked in by designing and making an entirely new slimline fashion profile (away from the generously baggy, excessive fashions for men and women in the 1930s) – which looked good on the healthier, slimmer, rationreduced British body. The new fashions completely displaced the older fashions almost immediately. But could staying local in peacetime become fashionable? There are indications that lower carbon forms of mobility such as walking, and especially long-distance walking on cultural trails, are both currently popular and undergoing an astonishing revival in Europe and Asia. Significant here are the ancient pilgrim routes of Europe and Asia that seemingly beckon the attention of a very broad demographic (Franklin, 2016). Could walking become an architype activity around which fashions for slower, 439

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alternative models to Britain’s ‘binge travel’ norm, might form? Might they possibly become a focal point around which to fashion re-localised forms of living? Can the affects associated with slower, more attentive forms of walking be counted on the gain rather than the loss account of re-localisation? Historically pilgrimage walking was associated as much with the freedom, pleasure and camaraderie of the road as it was with its overt purposes (giving thanks, seeking help or redemption, or a cure), and it is mainly the former that have inspired the recent revivals (Santos, 2002). As more and more people developed a taste for walking holidays along established routes and other trails – ancient rights of way, trade routes, coastal and mountain paths, hiking trails have enriched the scope for building walking into a more frequent activity in everyday life. The extent to which the new-found pleasure for walking might be translated into an alternative to excessive carbon-based travel remains a moot question that will require consideration of its feasibility in specific local contexts. In Britain, such purposive walking along major routes has been translated into everyday activities though the social, technical, and communal reorganisation of its 140,000 miles of footpaths that reach, uniquely into almost every neighbourhood. In the next section, I will consider the kinds of issues that make this proposition feasible or not.

Walking with John Clare and William Barnes I want to start again with the two poets, John Clare (1793–1864) and William Barnes (1801–1886), who were introduced in Chapter 1. The poetry and life of both men, though different, show very clearly how it was possible to live very full and rich lives in the space of one locality in England. I am going to ask how such lives were lived, why they were considered rich and sufficient territories to live in; whether their lives were in any way typical and whether the landscapes and natures that made them possible are still available to contemporary people today. Both men were sons of farm labourers on barely subsistence incomes, from rural villages (respectively, the coastal fenland village of Helpston in Northamptonshire, and the chalk downs hamlet of Bagber Common in Blackmoor Vale, Dorset). I used their poetic expression to show how deeply they, their fellow villagers and the plants and animals who also had their homes there were entangled in the interlocking nature-cultures of their respective localities. Both poets had their own voice but they also gave voice to other creatures and places around them (Irvine and Gorji, 2013, 2017). Both opposed the rationalisation of agriculture, the loss of the commons to Enclosure Acts and the threats to the survival of small farmers and workers. Barnes first began writing in Dorset dialect as the spokesman for the Tolpudddle Martyrs: ‘He consistently emphasized the threat to communal security and identity posed by the Agricultural Revolution’ (Hertz, 1985: 112). Both men were unusual in that they pivoted from rudimentary to more advanced forms of literacy through chance opportunities, connections and interests, but they remained where they were born and they used their powers of expression to document and protect the fragile beauty, richness and seemingly infinite variations of their small localities. Almost all of William Barnes’ life was spent within 30 miles of where he was born in Bagber. So beautiful and sufficient was this area, in his eyes. That he rarely ever visited what is today considered one of the finest coastlines in Europe, even though he could have walked there very easily. After his death, his poems describing where he lived and walked 440

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Figure 28.1  St Mary’s Church, Patrixbourne which lies in four major pilgrimage routes: Via Francigena, The Royal Saxon Way, The North Downs Way and The Old Way. Photo: Adrian Franklin.

became the source of an enthusiasm for emulating his closely observed immersion in the nature and culture of Dorset (Franklin, 2023). Clare is also influential in attracting those who wished to walk his Fenland idyll. These two nineteenth-century poets are interesting in that while their entire lives were spent in such small areas, they seemingly never tired of them or become bored or confined. It was only ever written about in adoring and protective ways, though this was not an easy time for the labouring rural classes and tenant farmers. Most of Barnes’ life was spent roughly in the country between Dorchester and Shaftesbury, a distance of some 48 km (30 miles) (Dugdale, 1953; Ashley, 1970; Barnes, 2011). Despite the limitations suggested by such a distance, it was perceived as an unfathomable multitude. Given his prodigious capacity for walking and given the density of footpath networks in all directions from this home, and, assuming that 48 km was the diameter of a circle that encompassed his main range, he had around 1,810 square kilometres (707 square miles) to roam in. This is probably not the scale that would come to mind for most people when climate change thinkers extoll the virtues and the necessity of ‘re-localisation’, so practised are we to thinking of locality as the immediate walkable distances around our homes, with cars and other transport used for anything further afield. Nor was it the scale of extreme confinement we experienced during COVID-19 lockdowns and recreation radii. Which is why walking with Clare and Barnes is useful, because they show us how large and varied ‘walked localities’ may be. Modern cyclists could of course extend that even further. Even at the age of 80, in February 1881, 441

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Barnes who became ordained in later life, was still a prodigious walker: ‘he walked 15 miles and back, on snow-covered roads to take two services, a wedding, a funeral, and an office for the sick all on one day’ (William Barnes Society, 2023). Within that circle around Barnes there were around 50 other villages (and many other smaller hamlets) and three significant towns set in a dramatic landscape revealing at every point the palimpsest of their ancestor’s ancient lives and monuments. These include such earthwork features as the Neolithic open-burial site atop Hambledon hill, the Iron Age hillforts at Rawlsbury Camp and the Bronze Age Barrow at Badbury Rings, but many of the thatched cottages of Dorset were begun and extended from the fourteenth century and before. But almost every view, from all of its many hills, the lumps, lines and ditches of millennia of occupation by their ancestors are plain to see. Dorset people literally live and walk on them. It was for this reason that in 1846 Barnes ‘had been alarmed by the prospect of the coming of the railway to Dorchester, devastating ancient remains’ (Wrigley, 1988: 6). Such places are not unusual in England and besides their natural and historical richness, they engendered an extraordinary range of inclusive festive pleasures through what Roud (2008) calls ‘England ritual half-year’, an ancient pagan lived heritage. Most villages and towns created and performed their own place-specific carnival rituals, each one open to all-comers. In joyful moods, Barnes poetry takes us to Shroton Fair twice and at least once to Shaftesbury Fair, Maidon Newton, Melhill Feast, Bishop’s Caundle and includes the festivities of Christmas, Easter, Guy Fawkes night, Harvest Home, Whitsuntide and more in various places (Barnes, 1984). It is clear that the folk of Blackmore Vale not only attended their own village or town festivities but most of those in the district – scattered across half the year. This was no quiet backwater. The mounting excitement as May Day or Harvest home approached is clear also from Clare in his narrative poem ‘The Village Minstrel’: When each cot-threshold mounts its hailing bough, And ruddy milkmaids weave their garlands gay’ Upon the green to crown the earliest cow; When mirth and pleasure wear a joyful brow; And join the tumult with unbounded glee The humble tenants of the pail and plough (Clare 1821:11) So, what at first seems like a small and confining space amounts to a territory considerably more than half the size of the County of Dorset itself, with a considerable capacity for art, drama, comedy and expression. Occasionally individuals could venture much further for whatever reason. In Barnes’ lifetime, train lines with stations in nearby Shillingston, Blandform or Dorchester connected him to Bristol, Bournemouth and London and to a steadily shrinking world of public transport. Both counties had a stunning variety of topography and ecology, but added to that we must emphasise, as they did, the seasonal change and the changing nature of their communities across a lifetime among its many sources of variation and permutation. Barnes and Clare both began writing poetry in order to hold onto a world that changed rapidly after Waterloo (1815) and the agricultural depression that ushered

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in such profound change with the so-called Agricultural Revolution – its modernisation and its shedding of so much humanity living and working the land. Barnes’ poetry falls into two halves, the much returned to times of an Edenic childhood living among entire kindred of small farmers at Bagber, to the times when this was all lost and scattered, and especially when he then lost his wife after they had set up their own school in Dorchester. It is clear from both poets that despite the traumas of major social change, a significant part of the charm of knowing small areas well is not only their capacity to surprise with novelty and variation, but also to bring a sense of belonging. Through the intimacies of locality (familiarity, constant watching and regular reacquaintance with its particularities and transformations (growth, blossoming, ageing, seasons, etc.) of known things, a sense of belonging to place forms and deepens. Not a shire horse walking to greet you over a fence; but Old John, who you have known for twenty years. Not that Robin singing; the Robin who always sings and nests in the Hawthorne hedge by the old stone bridge crossing the (river) Stour. Not those bells ringing; the bells of St Nicholas, Child Okeford ringing out over Hambledon Hill, on Thursday evening, at bell ringing practice (beginning at 6:30 sharp). Clare and Barnes’ poetry brim with more-than-human-intimacies established and renewed though walking countrysides such as theirs. Clare’s mourning and memorialisation of the dying Langley Bush (an ancient tree and place with pagan origins) begins with: O Langley bush the shepherds sacred shade Thv hollow trunk oft gaind a look from me Full many a journey o’er the heath I’ve made For such like curious things I love to see And it ends with: My last looks linger on thy boughs wi pain To thy declining age I bid farwell Like old companions neer to meet again (Clare 1984:30) Ingold (2022b: 21–22) makes the point that such walking is not merely travelling slowly but involves a very different relationship to the way we engage with and perceive the world. It adds richness and knowledge to our experiences that cannot be obtained from the modern practices of tourism and travel. For Ingold, the modernisation of travel meant that people ‘could be “carried across” from a point of departure to a destination rather than making their own way along’ (Ingold (2022b: 21). It involves ‘a mechanical displacement of the body from one point to another’ from which ‘knowledge is assembled from observations taken from these points’(Ingold, 2022b: 21). By contrast, through most of history: ….Humans have…picked their way with bare, sandalled or moccasined feet. It is these dextrous movements along paths of life and travel I contend, and not in the

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processing of data collected from multiple sites of observation, that inhabitant’s knowledge is forged. Thus, locomotion and cognition are inseparable and accounts of the mind must be as concerned with the work of the feet as they are with that of the head and hands. (Ingold, 2022b: 22) The close association between walking and knowledge is also made in the Latin phrase solvitur ambulando (the problem is solved by walking).1 So, with Clare and Barnes as guides, I am heading towards a consideration of whether contemporary British people could feasibly and contentedly exchange their current highcarbon tourism for a more actively engaged experience with the country around them. We are not an especially urban society, concentrated in a small number of vast cities (such as the sprawling six capital cities of Australia). We are already largely spread out across the country. More or less the same villages, towns and cities of today were in existence during the lives of Clare and Barnes. Both might be surprised to know just how little their localities have changed. As I argued in Chapter 1, their legacy as poets alongside those of similar writers and artists, has made sure that much of rural (and urban) Britain continues to be loved, inspiring the British who already spend of lot of time there. A lot of work went into writing that affection into their flesh and mind. So much so, that unlike many places (again, e.g., Australia), rural Britain is considered among the most desirable places to live, to the point where many older village families have disappeared as local cottages became unaffordable for their children. Until recently, the countryside itself was protected from new building by ‘greenbelt’ bans. Woodlands and many other areas have been protected, though there have been losses too. However, walking in large British cities also has its own beauty, charms, heritage and nature and its own writer champions, such as Virginia Woolf, John Betjeman, Will Self and Patrick Wright, prodigious walkers all, sometimes nightwalkers. Patrick Wright was described as ‘a wandering, disestablished scholar whose method is to walk and talk’ (Ascherson, 1991: np). GM Harvey (1976: 10) called John Betjeman ‘the John Clare of the suburb’, and for good reason. John Clare wrote that footpaths ‘give me joy as I proceed’ (Macfarlane, 2013: 16). It remains possible to walk in the footsteps of Clare and Barnes across the length and breadth of England, where 140,000 miles of the same footpaths are public rights of way that traverse all lands, whether public or private. It’s not quite ‘the right to roam’ anywhere (Allmansrätten) that exists in Scandinavia, but it’s not far off. As Robert Macfarlane (2013: 16) reminds us: Footpaths are mundane in the best sense of that word: worldly, open to all. As rights of way determined and sustained by use, they constitute a labyrinth of liberty, a slender network of common land that still threads through our aggressively privatised world of barbed wire and gates, CCTV cameras and No Trespassing signs. It is one of the significant differences between land use in Britain and land use in America that this labyrinth should exist. Americans have long envied the system of footpaths and the freedom it offers…Ditto Australians who divided up the land they acquired free without rights of way within or even between them. It’s an entire island continent of privatised property. While Clare and Barnes clearly lived a full and rich life, living mostly in one locality, mostly getting about by walking, perhaps not everyone today would relate to the lives of the 444

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agricultural labouring classes of the nineteenth century, even those who became documentary poets and writers living in the countryside – as do so many of our contemporary writers. They might say, rightly, that they were poor peasant villagers who had little choice, which stopped them exercising the obvious and natural desire to travel and see other more exciting, faraway places, as normal people do today. Perhaps then, Clare and Barnes are not the best role models, or sufficiently good models to win most people over to re-localisation. It is a fair enough assumption, especially when we are considering the social, cultural and historical – and class – dimensions of feasibility. The wealthy middle classes will feel so cheated by the loss of their platinum frequent traveller entitlement. What might they think of re-localisation as a proposition if it transpired that historically almost all British people had lived perfectly contended and rich lives while rarely if ever leaving their locality? Or that they had mostly walked when they did? Perhaps, having no wish to travel widely, even when it was on offer? Perhaps even finding such an idea an unattractive prospect. I will explore these possibilities next.

The Cultural Heritage of Travel in Britain We therefore need to describe the cultural heritage of travelling more broadly, starting perhaps with middle class people of the nineteenth century. Our image of such people, from film and TV depictions, has them scurrying everywhere in a variety of horse-drawn contraptions. But how accurate was that? Take another two people, from different spheres of the middle classes, for example: Thomas de Quincy (1785–1959) who was the son of a wealthy merchant in Manchester. He had lived in a large country house before moving to Bath Spa, then at the height of fashion, where he attended a prominent public school. By contrast, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1835) was the son of a Devon vicar (and headmaster of a nearby school) who was educated at Christ’s Hospital, London and Jesus College, Cambridge. Surely these two would travel in horse-drawn contraptions, of various kinds? In 1807, some 25–35 years before railways carried passengers, Thomas first met Samuel in Bridgewater, Somerset. After a long day together, Thomas left Samuel at 10pm in order to walk back to Bristol in the cool of a moonlit night, a journey of 40 miles, taking 11 hours. According to his diary, he thought nothing of this and enjoyed the journey: I seemed to myself in solitary possession of the entire sleeping country: the summer night was divinely calm; and no sound except once or twice the cry of a child as I was passing the windows of cottages, ever broke upon the utter silence. (Johnson, 1991: 702) As Paul Johnson remarks, ‘That the poor walked everywhere…was taken for granted. But the amount of long-distance walking done by the literary middle classes, who have recorded it, is also impressive’ (ibid. 703), and it was done with equal gusto by many. With a friend or relative, the author, poet, and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth (1771– 1855) outwalked all the men mentioned so far. She ‘regularly walked from Penrith across the Pennines and moors to visit the Hutchinsons near Halifax’ a journey of some 87 miles taking some 28 hours (Johnson, 1991: 702). The Kentish writer, William Hazlitt frequently walked over 80 miles from his London house to his writing house in Winterslow, Wiltshire. His wife Sarah had walked over 200 miles around Edinburgh as she waited for her divorce to come through, thus enabling her to marry William (Johnson, 1991: 703). Today, 445

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these seem staggering distances, but these people clearly thought nothing of it; they looked forward to such journeys and enjoyed them. Equally, trained artists such as The Ancients (Thomas Richmond and Edward Calvert) regularly walked 20 miles from London to visit their friend Samuel Palmer. Critically, the motives given by many middle classes long-distance walkers did not come down to the absence of choice or the capacity to pay for, or possess the means of transport, which was widely available, but was expressed in other terms: of seeing nature, taking exercise and saving money (Johnson, 1991: 702–703). Johnson confirms also that walking was not confined to rural pleasures. The essayist Charles Lamb (1764–1847) recorded taking considerable walks within London of varying distances, from 5 to 30 miles long. ‘Countless numbers walked five or more miles to work and back; every morning, between seven and eight, you could see 90,000 people tramping across London Bridge to get to the City’ (Johnson, 1991: 703). In sum, walking significant distances was an embedded common-sense practice across a wide range of middle and working class backgrounds where it was considered a pleasurable and beneficial activity. Perhaps the middle class were more wide-ranging, owing to their occupations, and more scattered families and social networks, but it seems that all people walked because there were so many things worth walking to see and do in the densely packed naturecultures of Britain. So far so good. But this takes us only to the arrival of railways in the 1830s and 1840s. Now we should consider how they reacted to the arrival of opportunities to travel by other means, and beyond familiar worlds in walking range. Railways were actually widely used as devices to extend building into countrysides on the fringes of large cities, on the grounds that people preferred to live in rural settings. As commuter transport then, they also facilitated living in the country (see Chapter 1, this volume). Here, I am more interested in how significant they were in extending tourism and whether people had unmet desires to travel widely before the railways arrived. After all, the most important issue here is whether relocalisation is a feasible substitution for longer range tourist travel that we need to cut back. So, the crux of the question is: how attractive was travel per se, and to unfamiliar places? By far, the most important technical innovation here was the arrival of railways and the embryonic touristic infrastructures that smoothed the way for a new steam mechanised tourist class. In England, this was pioneered by Thomas Cook who as the author of a modern tourism industry, perceived the potential of pleasurable travel to places faraway – for everyone.

Thomas Cook From the 1840s until his death in 1892, Thomas Cook ventured into what he thought was a highly beneficial, democratising project to extend travel and tourism beyond its beginnings as an aristocratic leisure (that he had seen first-hand in his first job) to a general mass market. Born in 1808 in Melbourne, Derbyshire to humble circumstances, he started his working life at 10 as an assistant to a market gardener on Lord Melbourne’s estate. His inspiration for developing a tourism company then did not come from personal experience but from emulation. It was based on the aesthetics and popularity of the Grand Tour for the English aristocracy, and the influential association that the English philosopher John Locke had consolidated between travel, education and the expansion of mind. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2014) Locke asserted (against Ingold’s more recent contention noted above) that knowledge derived from external sensual stimulation, and that therefore it was possible to exhaust what might be gleaned from any one environment. 446

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Extolling the virtues of travel, he argued that changes of scene were necessary in order to build an understanding of the world – with the corollary that to stay put risked arrested mental development (Franklin, 2018). Such views were not new, they had been propagated by other expansionist, colonising civilisations from ancient Egypt in Africa (where there is much evidence of tourism graffiti inside the Pyramids), through ancient Greek and Roman civilisations in Europe and the Middle East. In ancient Greece, educational tourism was systematically organised between sister cities where several classes of tourist were hosted by temples (for lower ranked people) and social elites (for higher ranked travellers). It is always important to remember that England was part of the Roman Empire for over five centuries; they never forgot its benefits and much energy was spent trying to restore something like it again (Monty Pythons weren’t joking). From at least the fifteenth century, the aristocratic travelling class of England revived ‘the Grand Tour’ in more formal terms after the manner in which Roman civilisation had travelled to pay homage to ancient Greek civilisation and as ancient Greek civilisation had themselves travelled to ancient Egypt and elsewhere to revere and learn from civilisations before theirs (Lomine, 2005; O’Gorman, 2010). The motives to travel in all three cases were largely expressed as educational and aspirational, to appreciate great feats of engineering and construction, to admire great virtuosity in the arts, decoration, and design and to emulate the building of great cities and civilised ways of life. In the 1840s when Thomas Cook began to develop tourism, the European Grand Tour was dominated by the English aristocracy and upper middle classes, including many of its artists (Franklin, 2018). It was then so notoriously English that in France, tourism came to be considered an English foible. To the French the concept of tourism was incomprehensible: In Europe, the specificity of the tourist was not recognised until the end of the eighteenth century. No earlier trace can be found anywhere. It is worth recalling Gustave Flaubert’s anecdote about the tourist trip he took to Brittany with his friend Maxime Ducamp in 1847). On arriving in one village, they found it impossible to convince the inhabitants that they were travelling simply for pleasure. It was an absurd, incomprehensible notion. They were taken for spies, surveyors, cartographers, government road inspectors or controllers checking on the work of lighthouse-keepers. Anything other than pleasure seekers. In the end, they had to invent an official purpose for their visit, a function, a utility, to cease being incomprehensible, and therefore suspicious, in the eyes of the villagers. (Doquet and Evrard, 2008: 37) According to the French Dictionary Larousse, for example, ‘touriste’ had become an acceptable synonym for ‘English’ from around 1890 onwards (Doquet and Evrard, 2008). But it was a tiny fraction of the English the French saw as horse-drawn tourists. What did others think when travel was on offer to them? Not much. In trying to scale-up/massify tourism through railway technologies, to include all classes of traveller in Britain, Cook came up against an unexpected limitation: despite some wellknown itinerant trades and the global scale of English naval trade itself, the great majority of English people, like the hedgerow poets Clare and Barnes, rarely moved out of the relatively small localities they lived in and were not keen on the idea of travel – at all. Cook wrote that most of his time throughout his very long career as a travel/tourism pioneer/promoter was taken up with persuasion: coaxing people reluctant to travel out of familiar worlds to unfamiliar places, as well as potential destinations very reluctant to receive them. The 447

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idea of hordes of strangers flowing into and constantly at large in their communities was ­abhorrent – a most alarming concept (Brendon, 1991; Withey, 1998; Franklin, 2012: 93). It is a notion that is coming back into fashion as ‘anti-tourism’ in many places (Hughes, 2018). Cook might have thought twice about this project had he read diarist John Byng’s Rides Round Britain (Byng, 1996). Byng was among a few eighteenth-century eccentric aristocrats who began to ask, seventy years before Cook, whether there were equally important things to learn and beautiful things to see by touring Britain, and by implication whether it was necessary to travel quite so far to Italy and Greece for a Grand Tour. Hoping to uncover an itinerary and route for a British Grand Tour, John Byng’s rides involved extensive tours across the country from 1782 to 1793. His travel journals always began in London and observed not just what could be seen but how that information could be gleaned ahead of time. London, the headquarters of the travelling elite was a mine of information about places and sites, maps, paintings, texts, and books on travel. Outside the capital he was confronted by a dearth: in the regions and bridleways, he found not only a non-travelling culture but one that could not comprehend the idea of a world of things worth travelling significant distances to see. His editor, Adamson, wrote that ‘the people Byng described on these journeys led lives cut off from those of their neighbours only twenty miles away’ (Byng, 1996: xii). Even very close to London, Byng encountered baffled responses to his questions. In 1782 at the Red Lion, Bagshot, for example, he Had much discourse with the landlord and ostler about my road, of which they were equally ignorant; and in regard to places worth seeing, enquiry is only to be made in London – more devoid of information two people could not be. (ibid.: 4) As a seasoned aristocratic traveller Byng was baffled by such ignorance, but as I have showed above, their lack of interest about what lay outside their familiar territorial ranges did not mean their lives were limited and dull or that their miniature territories were devoid of interest or intensity. The words of John Clare, William Barnes and others were far more successful at inspiring urbanised people from all over England to spend more time walking slowly and carefully around such places, often following exact walks captured in poetry. Up until the advent of mass car ownership in the 1960s and then package holidays abroad in the 1970s, such localised leisures were normative and highly valued. The point here was that it took Cook a lifetime of intense persuasion, advertising and travel writing to create a broad popular market for wide-ranging travel. The desire for tourism did not precede its provision and it was exceedingly slow to become a norm. It is not so much a reflection on the joys or otherwise of going to new places, as how well small localities provided a full and varied life for their inhabitants across a lifetime; how wrapped up and absorbed they were with them. It suggests that we really have nothing to fear from re-localising, or there is no apparent reason we would not also grow to love such spaces as they did. My suspicion is that many people already do. The relatively shorter rail holiday journeys to local coasts, all well known before they became ‘seaside resorts’, were about as far as the railways took most people for the best part of a century. If we re-localised we could walk, or use bikes and electric cars to get to our local beaches without breaking, say, government restricted personal carbon budgets. Nor did the arrival of railway travel displace the intense local knowledge of local places, fauna and flora or the emerging pleasures of natural history as a pastime. 448

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Walking featured prominently in Jane Austen’s life as well as the younger women in her novels: For Austen and for her characters, walking is a habitual part of daily life. In letters written in 1805 and in 1806, Austen says, “we do nothing but walk about” and “we walk a good deal” (196). She characterizes herself as a “desperate” walker, and this disposition is shared by her heroines. …most of the main characters demonstrate prodigious stamina, by today’s standards, in the amount of ground they daily cover for health and exercise. Secondary Austen characters walk regularly, too. Confronted with a walk in the rain to see her sister Jane at Netherfield, Elizabeth Bennet points out that “‘The distance is nothing, . . . only three miles’” (32); Persuasion’s Mary Musgrove protests that she is “‘very fond of a long walk’” (83); and the Dashwood sisters of Sense and Sensibility discover interesting sights a mile and a half from their cottage. Walks routinely take about half the morning or afternoon, and provide a pleasant and healthful way of passing the time. (Palmer, 2001: 155) From the 1820s, the natures that Clare and Barnes and others knew well through their perambulating pathways to study it daily were translated into a mass movement for walking the old footpaths – notably as the ‘tendrilled prose’ of walking enthusiast George Borrow ‘proved wildly influential’ (Borrow, 1851, 1977; Macfarlane, 2013: 20). Borrow’s cult of ‘leisured vagabondage’ (Macfarlane, 2013: 21) was propagated through the widespread establishment of walking clubs, and through them a national interest in natural history thrived. Natural history habits rooted though families, local natural historical associations, churches, walking/rambling clubs, print media and thence into radio, television, natural history guidebook publishing and schools (Franklin, 2023). Although a new and modern passion, it was a viable pleasurable residue from the past that resisted The Great Divide and maintained England’s walking culture. It passed on the sense of a connected world that modernising people could relate to and participate in.

Transforming the Landscape of English Walking In a recent article (Franklin, 2023), I illustrated how England’s natural history enthusiasms and the face-to-face, embodied attachments it had fostered with specific local natures, were (inadvertently) lost from around the 1980s onwards. The more abstracted, detached and disembodied narratives of ‘environment’ eclipsed them, especially in the spheres of early learning, schools, the teaching of biology, children’s books, television and the internet. The intimate, micro natures of natural history that included humanity were replaced by nature conceived as a systemic externality, where humanity was often omitted, excluded or not even seen as belonging to specific ecosystems – or as mostly endangering them. Nonetheless, reviving walking in more localised forms of living would offer opportunities to revive the reinforcing pleasures of natural history and that too could spawn a new industry and fashion for media, adult and children’s guidebooks, apps and online connections (see also Searle and Turnball, this volume). The physical infrastructure of walking tracks in England and Wales, many of them ancient ways that have been historically kept up and maintained by the localities they pass through, is impressive and affords an enormous untapped capacity to absorb more users 449

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transitioning out of high-carbon travel habits. ‘Paths are habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own’. Without ‘common care and common practice they disappear….they need walking’ (Macfarlane, 2013: 17). In nineteenth-century Suffolk, small cutting hooks were left on stiles and posts at the beginning of well-used paths so that walkers could cut back the overhanging vegetation of high summer. They would leave the hook at the end of the path for returning walkers to do likewise. Capacity building additions to Britain’s walking tracks has been under way in recent decades and a groundswell of common activity is now directed at upgrading and extending these into several national networks and thence into connections with everyday life. The base infrastructure is the 140,000 miles (225,308 km) of ancient rights of way (footpaths, bridleways, towpaths, green lanes, white roads) and cycle tracks that crisscross public and private lands across England and Wales and circumnavigate its coastlines (The Ramblers Association, 2023). There are potentially another 10,000 miles (16,093 km) of ancient footpaths that are currently lost from maps (mostly from landowners who have illegally ploughed them or fence them off) but their legal status remains, and an army of volunteers are working hard to reclaim them (The Guardian, 2018). These were originally well-kept paths that connected all landholdings and settlements, giving access to residents, workers, trade and visitation. Many of them were subsequently widened into roads and motorways but they still thread their way through the entire landscape such that few contemporary neighbourhoods are far from a connection into the national network of footpaths. Where I was born, we had access to five footpaths within a 10-minute walk. In addition to the rights of way, sixteen long-distance trails, many of them ancient major tracks or trade (or pilgrimage) routes were upgraded and adopted into the National Trails network with a combined length of 2,500 miles (4,000 km) long. It commenced in 1965 with the Pennine Bridle way and culminated with the England Coast Path around England and Coast to Coast in England, both in 2022. Being wider many are also suitable for cycling and horse riding. Cleveland Way in England 1969 Coast to Coast in England 2022 Cotswold Way in England 1973 England Coast Path around England 2022 Glyndŵr’s Way in Wales 2000 Hadrian’s Wall Path in England 2003 North Downs Way in England 1978 Offa’s Dyke Path in Wales and England 1971 Peddar’s Way and Norfolk Coast Path in England (treated as a single National Trail) undated Pembrokeshire Coast Path in Wales 2012 Pennine Bridleway in England (bridleway) 1965 Pennine Way mainly in England with a short distance in Scotland 1969 The Ridgeway in England (mostly bridleway/restricted byway/byway) 1972 South Downs Way in England (bridleway) 1972 South West Coast Path (South West Way) in England—the UK’s longest 1978 Thames Path in England 1996 Yorkshire Wolds Way in England 1982. (National Trails, n.d.) 450

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Figure 28.2  Hambledon Hill, Iron Age Hill Fort, Child Okeford, Dorset. Photo: Adrian Franklin.

There are also currently 163 pilgrimage routes listed by The British Pilgrimage Trust (BPT) established in 2014. They aim to Help build routes, infrastructure and support for pilgrimage all around Britain, create a community to support the work of the BPT and other organisations… communicate to create understanding, awareness and involvement… and thereby make pilgrimage popular, with strong participation across Britain. (The British Pilgrimage Trust, 2023) Finally, there are several organisations such as Slow Ways that encourage an interactive organisational network among walkers themselves – to create and share new paths and routes of all kinds. Initiated in 2020 as a not-for-profit community interest company, Slow Ways is currently a walking app-based initiative to create a national network of walking routes connecting all towns and cities as well as thousands of villages: Using existing paths, ways, trails and roads, people can use Slow Ways routes to walk or wheel between neighbouring settlements, and combine them to create longer distance trips. It’s designed to make it easier for people to imagine, plan and go on walking journeys. There are currently over 8,000 Slow Ways stretching for over 120,000 km. This network of routes was created by 700 volunteers during the Spring 2020

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lockdown, creating a unique Slow Ways map in the process. While there are thousands of miles of paths linking places across Great Britain, there isn’t a comprehensive and trusted network designed to help people walk off-road between towns and cities. That’s what the Slow Ways initiative, with its distinctive geometric connections, is creating. (National Trails, 2023) Maturing during the confining days of COVID-19 lockdowns and government imposed ‘recreation radii’, Slow Ways illustrates how people of all ages responded to the affordances of English walking naturecultures and infrastructure in enthusiastic and creative ways: ‘walking trips of over a mile increased to 87 trips per person in 2020, an increase of 34% compared to 2019 (65 trips per person) (UK Gov, 2021). Because the enhanced walking potential was already networked through ancient footpath into the places where English people lived, it was a natural extension of everyday life; an already loved part of life rather than a completely unknown substitute. It didn’t need new policy initiatives or ‘development’ to create a potentially significant climate change impact. Walkers are also able to participate in the creation and sharing of new routes though the recent arrival of numerous apps (OS Maps; Footpath; Alltrails; Mapout). These help walkers to navigate and remain safely on unclear footpaths and save successful new routes to share with others. A wide range of notes about access, terrain, degree of difficulty, hazards and views as well as natural historical and cultural heritage notes and observations can be uploaded by walkers that build into enriching archives for other walkers. It is only to be expected that reviews of such apps appear in the Guardian’s Travel pages (The Guardian, 2018), but it is an unexpected about-turn to see the Daily Mail enthuse about them with equal energy (Heptinstall, 2020). Such apps enable walkers to go beyond known and trusted routes and daily habits, to experiment and explore as well as plan much longer day- and holiday-routes. In time, perhaps walkers will also take with them a walker’s knife made to Mike Michael’s Chthulucene specifications? [see his chapter in this volume].

Solvitur Ambulando? In this chapter, I have been interested in how the watchful, caring engagement of local walking cultures (orientated to habitability), contrast with the fleeting (Urry, 1990), dispassionate/uninvested (Bauman in Franklin, 2003) and superficial (MacCannell, 1992) gaze of international tourists (with their orientation to the production and consumption of luxury). How it seems that modern societies like Britain took a wrong turn somewhere, emulating the model of the restless, acquisitive social elites rather than those contentedly anchored to nature, place and proportionate needs and pleasures. And how the latter might yet come to replace the former as a useful and feasible climate change response. Perhaps even contributing to the making of a new ecological class. Might the seemingly intractable problem of realigning Western consumer society with the carrying capacity of Earth be achieved, in part, by simply walking together into the future? Solvitur ambulando literally means solving a problem by walking, a long and widely known truth that walking is good for thinking, solving problems and understanding. As Ingold (2022b) suggests, it is also how humans have always forged knowledge about, and valued connections with their world. Walking is a foundational more-than-human concept 452

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and very likely one of the reasons people feel so much at home while walking and gain so much pleasure from it. In 2013, John Urry remarked that the societies of the rich North seem to have reached or are even passing the point of ‘peak travel …and that a ‘combination of high oil prices, stagnating economic growth, an ageing population and a renaissance of walking and cycling would indicate some slowing down of travel within the rich North of the world’ (my emphasis) (6). He was wrong about peak travel in 2013, but he may have been onto something with walking and cycling. Yet, as the dangers of climate change become palpably global in the 2020s there was little sign of any bearing down on carbon use at a global level, prior to COVID-19. Political leadership and narratives focussed on economies locked into the flows of income that travel and tourism generated just as city economies were locked into car driving. Neoliberal politicians around the world quick to open up economies after the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020–2021 placed great emphasis on reopening national and international borders to travel and tourism – despite the predicted risk of increased mortality from infection spikes that such policies involved. With affected anguish, Gladys Berejiklian, the Liberal Premier of New South Wales, Australia didn’t mince her words: ‘Death is horrible, but we also need to put things into perspective, because at the moment there are 8 million citizens [in New South Wales] who don’t have choice in how they spend their free time’ (The Guardian 2 Sept 2021). These are only shocking words because Berejiklian voiced them. We can be sure that most other neoliberal politicians were thinking it, certainly in Britain. Freedom of choice was another concept developed by John Locke (the intellectual ancestor of Liberalism), from his writings on Natural Rights; but as we saw above, the value of travel also came down to liberal thinking via his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding. However, Locke subordinated the (second) natural right to liberty – our freedom to do whatever we want – to the first natural law, the right to life. That is, one may do whatever one wishes providing it does not conflict with others’ right to live. Travel-dispersed viral pandemics and climate change threaten life on such a scale, that this barely warrants a second thought. Yet, contemporary neoliberal governments are evidently not even good at upholding liberal values, or perhaps not when it involves people other than themselves, elsewhere. It is hard to find anything in contemporary neoliberal motivations beyond their one-dimensional obsessive, lockstep with economic growth and short-term policies that track only re-election prospects. To squander a planet for such a puny cause would be unthinkable to Locke, and yet it is thought with great conviction by his progeny. The only choices that contemporary neoliberal politicians insist on being freely available are commodified, high-carbon, long-distance travel/consumption packages that descend from the very persistent and persuasive Mr Cook. But with some considerable confidence, it is possible for British people to identify with the low-carbon, local alternatives of walking, with its long track records of appeal and popularity with intrepid, lively walking people from all backgrounds: John Clare, William Barnes, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sarah Hazlitt and Charles Lamb before the railways, and many more afterwards. Their confidence would surely only grow when they also consider how their forebears resisted becoming a ready market for Mr Cook’s excursions – had not been tempted by travel even when it was made possible by the railways. If there was a feasible, liveable and desirable local alternative to tourism for the Brits therefore, it has to be walking with a quickened step in Britain. That walking has the capacity to slow down the pace of travel and tourism and contribute substantially to re-localisation aims would seem to be on track in Britain. The potential 453

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to compound the influence of its history and heritage as a walking people with the viability of living rich local lives-with non-humans was always a promising proposition. But, combined with the recent upgrading, extension and connectivity of walking tracks using new technologies that make walks longer, more accessible and deeper experiences for more people, is eminently feasible. And it is perhaps fashionable enough to cut through the neoliberal offer. Localities and users, rather than offshored multinationals and destinations overseas would be the beneficiaries of walking-assisted localism. Many such areas have lost important services and essential infrastructure that could be regained. Walking foregrounds habitability on a number of levels and flattens class differences in an economy of mutual gains at a time when carbon restraint is urgent. It can’t be the only component in the making of Latour’s ecology class, but it clearly has a role to play.

Note 1 OED Online. Solvitur Ambulando, Phr. Available at: www.oed.com/view/Entry/184399 (accessed 18 February 2023).

References Adams C (2019) More British People Flew Abroad Last Year than any Other Nationality. Independent, 31 July. Ahrendt D, Mascherini M, Nivakoski S and Sandor E (2020) Living, Working and COVID-19. Report, Eurofound, Brussels, September. Alford BWE (2013) WD & HO Wills and the Development of the UK Tobacco Industry: 1786-1965. London: Routledge. Arcari P, Probyn-Rapsey F and Singer H (2021) Where Species Don’t Meet: Invisibilized Animals, Urban Nature and City Limits. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4(3): 940–965. Ascherson N (1991) ‘Down Dalston Way’ Review of Patrick White’s A Journey Through the Ruins: The Last Days of London. London Review of Books 13(12), 14–16. https://www.lrb.co.uk/thepaper/v13/n12/neal-ascherson/down-dalston-lane. Sourced 3 March 2023. Ashley HW (1970) In the Steps of William Barnes. Bournemouth: Southern Newspapers Ltd Bournemouth. Barnes W (1984) The Dorset Poet. A Comprehensive Selection of Poetry and Prose. Introduced and Selected by Chris Wrigley. Wimbourne: Dovecote Press. Barnes W (2011) Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. London: British Library, Historical Print Editions. Bauman Z (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Borrow GH (1851) Lavengro: The Scholar--the Gypsy--the Priest. London: J. Murray. Borrow GH (1977) [1862] Wild Wales. London: Fontana. Brendon P (1991) Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism. London: Secker and Warburg. Byng J (1996) Rides Round Britain by John Byng. London: The Folio Society. Clare J (1821) The Village Minstrel. London: Taylor and Hessey. Clare J (1984) John Clare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doquet A and Evrard O (2008) An Interview with Jean-Didier Urbain. Tourist Studies 8(2): 175–192. Dugdale G (1953) William Barnes of Dorset. London: Cassell. Eurostats (2019) Population By Age Group. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/ view/tps00010/default/table?lang=en (accessed 15 February 2023). Franklin AS (2003) ‘The Tourist Syndrome’: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman. Tourist Studies 3(2): 205–217. Franklin AS (2012) The Choreography of a Mobile World: Tourism Orderings. In: René van der Duim, Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson and Carina Ren (eds) Actor Network Theory and Tourism. Ontologies, Methodologies and Performances. London: Routledge, pp. 43–58.

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INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abrahamsson, S. 295 Abram, D. 107, 108, 110; The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World 107 actor-network theory (ANT) 22, 130, 258, 283, 289, 309, 363, 376, 377, 395, 421, 433 Adam, B. 326 Adey, P. 289 ‘aesthetic of behavior’ 342 affect 207, 210, 323, 351; economies of study events 399–400; homemaking practices 286; human-centred perspectives 23; knowledge of E 398; of others 24; Spinozist notion 396 ‘affective materialities’ 393 Affluence and Freedom (Charbonnier) 371 After Lockdown (Latour) 367 Agamben, G. 179 agency 3, 372, 428; airport 216; animal 246, 247, 248, 250, 253, 285–287, 291; to change and create 24; civic-public and biopolitical assemblages 147–152; dance of 22, 34–36, 38, 190, 197, 200, 275, 335, 435; distributed 144, 147–148; forms of 141, 144, 145–148, 221; historical 129–130; of housing 287–288, 291; human and nonhuman 38–39, 111, 134, 147, 191, 208–209, 217, 258, 263, 265, 270, 284, 285, 305, 370, 371, 391, 393, 396, 422; indigenous 143–144, 148, 152; institutional 208; language of 92; and legality 371; material 36, 288, 291; microbial 222; more-than-human

216; of packaging 303; political 297; and power 131, 133, 192; time and reshuffling of things 152–153; and voice 313, 417; Western model of personal 93 Agricultural Revolution 443 airports: affective infrastructuring 214–215; caring for 207–208; geosociality 213–214; infrastructure 208–209; tinkering with 215–217 Alder, K. 175 Alemani, C. 335 Alldred, P. 392 alter-globalization 42 Althusser, Louis 362, 435 American Plastic (Meikle) 295 Anderson, B. 325 animacy 92, 98 animal agency 246, 247, 248, 250, 253, 285–287, 291 animate 86 animism 3, 6; definition of 97; English 6, 9, 15; legal suppression of 6; and naturalism 96–99; of peoples 97 anthropause: Chornobyl dogs 236–237; conceptualisation of 233–234; COVID-19 233–240; description 232; more-than-human reading 232, 234; resurgence 233; Self-Isolating Bird Club 237–238; Sheffield Peregrines 235–236 Anthropocene 130, 234, 337, 344, 345, 372, 381–382, 423; apocalyptic tones of 341; debate 113; exhibition 336; geological 336; hypothesis 105, 107, 111

457

Index anthropomorphism 3, 81, 97–98, 315 Appadurai, A. 174 Archambault, Julie. 117 Aristotle 6, 86 artworks 365–366 Asdal, K. 311, 313 assemblage 396; affective capacities within 396; of ‘affective materialities’ 393; of animate and inanimate entities 395; civic-public and biopolitical 147–152; of constraints and opportunities 197; cultural-material 8; of dwelling 288; event 398–400; food 303; heterogeneous 216; human-animal 222; humanmicrobial 226; hybrid 398; more-thanhuman 129, 236, 314; of multispecies 238, 251; posthumanist 36, 40; research 390–393, 395, 397–401; ritual 11; satoyama 124; social-material 134; thinking 283 Athfield, I. 278 Atran, S. 87 Attenborough, David 246 Augé, M. 205; Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity 205 Auger, J. 383 Austen, Jane 449 Austrin, T. 272, 274 autopoiesis 61 autre-mondialization 42 Axelos, Kostas 106 Bacon, Francis 141 Bakhtin, M. 8, 12, 368 Barad, K. 51, 259, 351, 394, 395, 409, 420 Barnes, W. 7, 8, 13, 15–17, 19–21, 23, 440–445, 447–449, 453 Bartha, P. 409, 410 Barthes, R. 362 Barth, Fredrik 210 Barua, M. 351, 354, 425 Bastian, M. 407 Bataille, G. 106, 108 Bateson, G. 54, 57, 349 Battistoni, A. 425 Baxter, R. 289 becoming 189–190; awareness of 38; capacities for 393; conscious 351; of entities 23–24; Holobiont 222–225; knowledgeable 137; of landscapes 122; and life 24; multispecies 381; nonhierarchical 58; open-ended 38; politics of 5, 38–40, 423, 433; of posthuman assemblage 40; productive 38, 353; propositional 377; relational 129; of social 35; in time 35, 38 becoming animal 57–63, 73n39, 286, 394

becoming-intense 59 becoming-known 15 becoming local 438–440 becoming-major 395, 401 becoming-minor 395, 401 becoming-with 15, 21, 22, 51, 52, 55, 70n20, 216, 420; becoming worldly 42, 63; of companion species in naturecultures 61, 64; dance of 57; narratives of 270 becoming-woman 59, 74n40, 394 Beer, G. 167 Beer, Stafford 39 Beisel, U. 222 Bekoff, Marc 54 Bennet, Elizabeth 449 Bennett, J. 24, 210, 214, 393, 422, 423, 425; Vibrant Matter 423 Benson, E. 248, 313 Bentham, Jeremy 54 Berejiklian, Gladys 453 Bergold, J. 410–413, 415, 416 Bergson, Henri 261 von Bertalanffy, L. 98 Betjeman, John 20, 21, 444 The Bifurcation 1–3, 5, 7, 435 biodiversity 19 bioinsecurities 220–222 biopolitics 130, 221; description 302; of food 298, 303, 305 Black, M. B. 87 Blaser, M. 426 Blok, A. 348 Bloomfield, S.F. 225 Blue, G. 249 Blunt, A. 283 Borrow, G.H. 449 Bourdieu, Pierre 364 Boyle, Robert 7 Braidotti, R. 4, 361, 365, 366, 368, 377, 396 Braun, B. 302, 305 Bresnihan, P. 13 Brice, J. 223, 224, 328 The British Pilgrimage Trust (BPT) 451 Broca, Paul 148 Brooke, J. 104, 105, 107, 108 Brown, A. 339 Brown, N. 225 Buller, H. 404, 414 Burston, R. 143, 144 Burtynsky, E. 336, 344 Byng, J. 448; Rides Round Britain 448 de la Cadena, M. 120, 426 Cage, John 334, 335, 337 Caletrío, Javier: Low Carbon Birding 240 Callon, M. 142, 165, 168, 169, 179

458

Index Calvert, Edward 446 Cameron, Fiona 366 Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) 273 Carbon Democracy (Mitchell) 370 Carbonell, Isabelle 124 Carluccio, A. 380 Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela 117 Carnivalesque 10, 12, 22 Carroll, J. 391, 392 Cartesian 33, 69n13, 262 de Carvalho Cabral, D. 117, 311, 313 Castells, M. 175, 176 Catts, O. 340 causality 112 census subjects 152 Chakrabarty, D. 113, 367 Charbonnier, P. 371; Affluence and Freedom 371 Chevrier, Joelle 124 Chia, Robert 352, 353 Choi, Insook 38 Chornobyl dogs 236–237 Chthulucene 130, 376, 381–386, 422, 452 cities 4, 20–22, 24; agency of humanity 189–192; Australian 200, 444; British 444; burning 191; California 44; deindustrialisation and wilding of cities 196–197; ecology of human waste 195–196; garden 21, 192, 276; of Middle Ages 34; modern 197, 277; more-than-human 191, 192–195; New Orleans 34; of nineteenth century 192–193; pre-colonial Mesoamerican 343; Singapore street cats 198–200; urban ethology 197–198; Whose City? 190–191 Clare, J. 7, 8, 13–21, 23, 440–445, 447–449, 453 Clarke, A. 379 Clark, N. 8, 21, 191, 192, 200 Cleaver, F. 414 Clifford, J. 143 Clifford, Jim 44 climate change 2–3, 214, 365, 368–369, 404, 433, 436, 437; anthropogenic 194; dangers of 453; effects of 282; and environmental pollution 219; extreme weather and environmental crises 290; glacial melt 103; heatwaves 103; monsoon rains 103; necessity for 439; planet-wide 104; processes of weathering and decay 285 Cochoy, F. 303 Cohen, Randy 37, 39 Colebrook, C. 108, 112 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 445, 453 Coles, Richard 407

Collingwood, R.G. 308 companion species 21, 45, 48, 50–53, 56–57, 60, 309, 423; ‘becoming with’ of 61; goals of 66; invited and uninvited 282; knots of entangled 63–64; microbes as 220; for technohumanism 46 compositionist manifesto 22 concrescence 24, 45, 377 Connolly, W.E. 393 contact zone 143–144 The Control of Nature (McPhee) 33 Cooke, B. 413, 414 Cook, J. 315 Cook, Thomas 446–449, 453 Coole, D. 258 Cortés Zulueta, C. 250 cosmopolitics 67, 189, 348–349; of botanic garden bats 194; defined 348; going upstream 353–355; synchronic 120; of urban multispecies 349 Covid 19 232, 271, 439; anthropause 233–241; crisis 356; lockdowns 441, 452–453; more-than-human microbial socialities 220; recreation radii 452 Cox, R. 289 Cracknell, Martyn 411 Craddock, S. 221 creativity 6, 25, 126, 200, 379 Cresson, E. 158, 159 Cromwell, Thomas 11 Crow, G. 189 culture 83 Cussins, Adrian 37 dance of agency 22, 34–36, 38, 190, 197, 200, 275, 335, 435 Darwin, C. 60, 99, 147; The Descent of Man 99 Davis, L. 199 Davis, M. 103, 104, 190, 191; Late Victorian Holocausts 103 decolonisation 72n30, 135, 277 DeLanda, M. 108, 394, 395, 401 Deleuze, G. 4, 21, 23, 57–61, 65, 106, 108, 110, 170, 192, 261, 351, 373, 377, 390, 391, 393–398, 400, 401, 428 Deleuzian 15, 396, 400, 433; ‘becominganimal’ 57; in case of companion species 21; concept of incompossibility 351; concept of ‘nonorganic life’ 108; ‘ethological’ ontology 391, 393, 396, 400; between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ scientific traditions 390, 393–395, 401; the ‘major,’ ‘State’ or ‘Royal’ mainstreams 394; more-than-human perspective 106, 377, 428; notion of ‘material vitalism’ 261; notion

459

Index of ‘Nonorganic Life’ 261; plane of immanence 393; ‘posthumanist’ ontologies 192; rhizomatic anomalies 60 Demuth, B. 312 Denes, Agnes 344 Derme, T. 339 Derrida, J. 47, 52–58, 428 Descartes, Rene 7 The Descent of Man (Darwin) 99 Descola, P. 96–98 description 37, 191, 363, 405 Despret, V. 63, 209 deterritorializing 106, 261 Dewey, J. 264 Diehl, H. 12 district energy scheme (DES) 272 Dixon, Robyn 63 document authorship 311 Domanaska, Ewa 311 Donovan, Tara 366 Dooren, T.Van 351, 424; The Wake of Crows 424 Douglas, M. 259, 260 Dowling, R. 209, 283, 288 dreaming and metamorphosis 90–92 dualism 32–33, 433; constructionist/realist 391; of industrial vs. natural, commercial vs. amateur 328; nature-culture 282, 284, 396, 426; property 133, 135; social theory 392; society/nature 107; surface/ depth 393 Du Gay, P. 303 Dunne, A. 383 Durant, Will 270 Durkheim, É. 148, 257, 272 ecological class 434, 436–438, 452 ecology 24; of animal 253; of bad ideas 356; behavioral 62; of being 365; class 437, 454; cosmopolitan 235; dark 428; deep 47; digital 234–238, 240, 241; and environment 200; ethical 427; of human waste 195–196; level improvements to habitat 19; liveable 238; microbial 223; of modern life 238; more-than-human 208; mortal 423; and nature 192; political 189, 191, 350, 354, 371, 424, 436–437; of practices 384–385; of production 137; restoration 66; of the senses 107; of social life 136; wetland 18 Edensor, T. 323 Edwards, Duncan 408 Edwards, P. 337 Einstein, Albert 211 Eliot, George 368

emergent (emergence) 191; aesthetic effects 33; of bacteriology 220; climate 290–291; of controversies 301; dance of agency 35–36, 38; disease 137, 220; of futures and designs 383; geosociality 214; history of nature 426; of humanity 99; of mass production and mass consumption 263; of more-than-human studies 2, 282, 390; ontological politics and temporal 40, 120, 270, 274–275; planetary thinking 105–107; politics 270; properties 137; Puritanism 6; reality 306; of scientific inquiry 391; of series of scientific and moral concerns 170; tracheotomies 378; and withering airport materialities 206, 210 engendering practice 437 English animism 6, 9, 15 English walking 449–452 entanglement: of care and control 249; current and historical 134; digital 237; disastrous 434; human-microbe 220, 223, 224, 226; human-nonhumanmicrobial 223; and interconnectivity 113; of more-than-humans 216, 376, 412; mortal world-making 53; multinatural 318; multispecies 312; of nature and culture 309; of past, present and future 385; of people and atmospheres 134; problematise emancipation 366–368; of society and nature 103; subject-forming 72n30; visual 54 envelopment 437 environmental humanities 189, 246, 308–310, 314, 319, 335–336, 420, 426 Eriksen, C. 290 Ernst, Max 38 Escobar, A. 426 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 453 ethics 36–37, 194; of civility 194; committees 397; of commoning and flourishing 423–424; of community-based research 411; contagious 423; of encounter, contaminating difference 422–423, 424; human 191; indeterminate 427; less-than-animal life 427–429; microbial 225; more-thanhuman research methods 5, 421, 426–427, 428; participatory 406; and politics 310, 312–313; and relational ontologies 309; of revealing hybridity 421–422 etioliation 340 Eubanks, Y. 415 Eurocentric humanities 368 European ‘regulatory state’ 175 exfoliation 23, 435

460

Index Falke, C. 18 Farias, I. 348 Farnsworth, J. 272, 274 fictocritical 361, 362 ‘fieldwork agencement’ 143 Finer, Jem 334, 335, 337 Flakelar, D.C. 316, 317 ‘flat’ ontology 393 Flaubert, Gustave 447 Fleming, Alexander 136 Floyd, Pink 39 Foucault, M. 149, 161, 170, 178, 362, 373, 428 Fox, N.J. 392, 397 Fox, T. 197 Franklin, A.S. 286, 287 Franklin, G. 191 Frazer, James 148 Freccero, Carla. 117 Frederiksen, Jens B. 213 Freud, Sigmund 47, 48, 58, 59 Frost, S. 258 frugal connectivity, concept of 208 Fujimura, J. 379 Fuller, J. L. 48 Furuhata, Y. 342 Gabrys, J. 248 Gaia 3, 61, 107–110, 336 game changer 206–207 Gan, E. 122, 123 Garcier, R. 195 Garnett, E. 221 Gates, Bill 37 Gaver, Bill 383 Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) 338 Geosmin 339 Gibbs, L. 283, 289 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 424 Gieryn, T.F. 276 Gilbert, S.F. 61 Gillen, F. 146–148, 151, 153 Gillon, C. 283, 289 Ginn, F. 313, 351, 416 Ginsburg, Faye 48 Goines, David 58 Goodall, Jane 54 Gorji, M. 15 Gorman, R. 220 Gray, G. 146 Great Divide 1, 3, 4, 46–50, 54, 57, 200, 435, 449; anti-animism in England 6–7; anti-carnival 8–9, 10, 11–13; Carnival in England 8; disaster scholarship 269; making of 5–19; problematic 270; record keeping and writing 7; social issues 13–19; as social scientists 269

Greenland 205–206, 210–213, 212 Grosz, E. 110, 111 Grylls, Bear 381 Guattari, F. 23, 57, 58, 60, 61, 65, 106, 108, 110, 261, 373, 390, 393–396, 398, 400, 401, 428 habitability 433, 434, 437, 452, 454 Hache, É. 350 Haff, P.K. 336 Hallam, E. 109 Hallowell, A. I. 80, 82, 84–97, 335 Halsey, M. 15 Hambledon Hill, Iron Age Hill Fort, Child Okeford, Dorset 451 Haraway, D.J. 15, 21, 25, 108, 109, 117, 118, 134, 165, 216, 223, 226, 246, 309, 313, 364, 366, 367, 376, 377, 381–383, 386, 409, 422, 423, 425; Staying with the Trouble 381; When Species Meet 42–67 Hardy, Thomas 22 Harris, Sydney 45, 46 Harvey, D. 424 Harvey, G.M. 20, 444 Hauser, J. 337, 339 Hawkins, R. 248 Hayles, N.K. 32 Hazlitt, William 445 Head, L. 1, 6 Healey, P. 348, 351 Hegel, G.W.F. 262 Heidegger, Martin 428 Heizer, Michael 343, 344 Helmreich, S. 224, 310 Hénaff, M. 262, 263 Hendriksen, K. 206 Hendrix, Jimi 39 Hennion, A. 363, 364; The Love of Art 363 Herrera, C.E.G. 220, 227 Hertz, A. 17 Highways and Byways of Dorset (Treves) 21 Hillier, J. 349, 352, 353, 355 Hinchliffe, S. 189, 197, 220–223, 252, 349, 353, 354, 427 Hird, M.J. 225 Hixson, Lucas 236 Hobbes, Thomas 7 Höckert, E. 209 Hodgetts, T. 404 Hoffenberg, P. 145 Holloway, J. 323 home 4, 288; animal agency and homemaking 285–287; carnival’s emotional 12; conceptualising 283–284; and connection with ‘nature’ 284–285; domestic 286; house-as-home 287–288,

461

Index 290, 291; lively house 287–289; making practices 282; materialised 283; as morethan-human 282, 290–291, 318; and nature 282; nesting box (‘nestbox’) 235; planet 104, 109; Santa Cruz greenbelt 44; smart 378; to wildlife 194 honeybees: death and ‘saving the bees’ 324–326; in Gardens 322–323; learning and coordinating with colony 328–330; more-than-human accounts 323; productivism 326–328; spending time 323; temporalities and timescales 323–324, 330–331 Houle, K. 428 Howard, Ebenezer 192 human-animal studies 246, 282, 285–286 humanism 23–24, 33, 36–37; academic 37; animals as persons 80–82; anthropological 148; colonial 150–151; critique 420; European post-enlightenment 369; everyday concerns 190; liberal 362, 370; modernist versions of 46; narratives 270; other-than-human grandfathers 82–85; posthumanism 416; Renaissance 45; social inquiry 391–393; uncritical 73n38; universalism 151 Hutchinson, Lonnie 277 Huyghe, P. 338, 339 Hybrid Geographies (Whatmore) 422 hybrids: approaches 309; assemblage 398; of city and country 21; ecological-technical 337; English carnival 9; ethics of revealing 421–422; labour 425; material/ social/conceptual ontologies 36; between metal and silicon 334; mixed organic– technological 47; monster 134; morethan-human 376–377; multifaceted accounts 309; notion of ‘Garden Cities,’ London 192; politico-technical institutions 163, 180n23; problem 134; thinking 132; wolf–dog 63–64 Iafeta, I. 277 Ikegami, Takashi 341, 342 Imanishi Kinji 116 immanence 393, 420 incompossibility 348, 350–356, 434 In conversation with animals workshop 407–409, 412, 415 In conversation with insects workshop 407, 410–411, 413, 415 In conversation with plants workshop 407 In conversation with the elements workshop 407, 412, 416, 417n8 Indigenous peoples 3, 190, 272, 309, 312, 369, 417n5

industrial waste 195 Ingels, Bjarke 212 Inglehart, R. 192 Ingold, T. 3, 15, 25, 109, 190, 258, 259, 323, 443, 452 Insectopedia 423 Irvine, R.D.G. 15 Ishiguro, Hiroshi 341 Jacobs, J.M. 283, 288, 289 Jervis, J. 11 Jóhannesson, G.T. 208 Johnson, P. 445, 446 Johnston, C. 315 Jolly, Allison 65 Jones, O. 407 Jones, P. 144 Jones, Phil 407 Judas 252–253 ‘Judas’ animal individuals 253 Jullien, F. 352, 353 Kaika, M. 284, 285 Kashefi, Kazem 339 Kays, R. 252 Keats, John 14, 15, 18 Kelly, A.H. 222 Kimmerer, R.W. 428 Kirksey, S.E. 310 Kitzinger, C. 392 knives: on grasping 377–378; hunting knives 380–381; on More-Than-Human 376–377; mushroom knives 379–380; re-de-signing the knife 384–386; Swiss Army Knife 376, 378–379 knowledge of E 398 Kohn, E. 117, 121, 345 de Kooning, Willem 33–38, 40 Kosut, M. 330 Kothari, U. 413, 414 Kraftl, P. 289 Krzywoszynska, A. 226 Kuklik, Henrika 147 Lagerspetz, O. 259 Lamb, Charles 446, 453 Landecker, H. 135–137 Larkin, Philip 21 Late Victorian Holocausts (Davis) 103 Latour, B. 1, 3, 4, 7, 22–25, 37, 40, 46, 109–111, 133, 134, 137, 141, 142, 150, 151, 165, 179, 189, 190, 192, 196, 201, 257, 269, 270, 272, 309, 335, 350, 352, 353, 363, 367, 371, 373, 376, 377, 379, 393, 420, 425, 433–438, 454; After Lockdown 367; Reassembling the Social

462

Index 363; We Have Never Been Modern 22, 269 Lauridsen, Jens 206 Lavau, S. 252 Law, J. 22, 67, 131, 192, 221, 384, 423 Lawrence, A. 59, 428 Lees, L. 289 Lefebvre, H. 105, 106 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. von 351 Lemke, T. 302, 305 LePique, Jacque 84 Lévinas, Emmanuel 54 Lezaun, J. 222 liberal arts 31 Lien, M.E. 210, 215 life, concept of 428 lines of causality 370 Lingis, A. 8 livestock-guardian-dog (LGDs) 65 living things 79, 85–88, 92 Locke, John 7, 446, 453; 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding 453; Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2014) 446 Lorimer, J. 223, 224, 233, 310 Lövbrand, Eva 104 Lovelock, James 107 The Love of Art (Hennion) 363 Low Carbon Birding (Caletrío) 240 Low, T. 194 Lund, K.A. 208 Lyons, Antony 407 Macfarlane, R. 444 macro times 343–345 Majone, G. 175 Malm, A. 132–135, 137, 425 Mancini, C. 405, 407, 412–414 The Mangle of Practice (Pickering) 38, 189 Marcus, G. 173 Margulis, L. 50, 60, 61, 107, 222 de Maria, Walter 344 Marvin, S. 191 Marx, K. 52, 195, 257 Massey, D. 130, 136–138, 207, 208 materialism 2–3; historical 132–133; home 283, 287; MTH ontology 392; new materialism 22, 258, 270, 335, 390, 392–393, 420, 422, 425, 433; ontological 118, 397; political crisis 175, 190, 192, 200; relational 22, 200; renewed 392; vital 392, 425 material semiotics 22, 43, 57, 60, 122, 314, 425 material vitalism 261 Matthews, P. 275 Mauss, Marcel 149–151

May, V. 438 Mbembe, A. 113 McCain, Helen 408 McCarthy, C. 145, 146 McCubbin, S.G. 237, 247 McCulloch, A. 237 McKittrick, K. 365 McLean, J. 240 McPhee, John 33, 34, 40; The Control of Nature 33 Medd, W. 191 Meikle, J. 295–297; American Plastic 295 Mellick Lopes, A. 291 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 107 meso time 340–343 metamorphic zone 110 Metzger, J. 208, 349–353, 355 Michael, M. 259, 433, 452; Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature 259 microbes: becoming holobiont 222–225; bioinsecurities 220–222; conversations with 225–228; micro-bio-geography 219–220; microbiomania 219; pathogenic microbes 219, 222; socialites 220, 224 micropolitical perspective: major and minor science 393–395; and MTH 390–391, 395–397, 400–402; research assemblage 397–400; social inquiry beyond humanism 391–393 microtime 338–340 Mignolo, W. 426 Miller, D. 288 Miller, Warren 48 Mill, John Stuart 147 Mitchell, T. 368, 370; Carbon Democracy 370 Mitman, G. 309 Mitterberger, D. 339 Mol, A. 67, 118–122, 131, 207, 209, 216, 302 Mondrian, Piet 33–35, 37, 38, 40 Moore, J. 425 Moore, L. 330 Moore, N. 410 more-than-human (MTH) 1; agency 216; anthropause 232, 234; approaches 22; assemblage 129, 236, 314; city (see cities); conceptual toolkit 395–397; Covid 19 220; cultivation 238–239; Deleuzian 106, 377, 428; ecology 208; elements 297, 303–304; emergent (emergence) 2, 282, 390; entanglement 216, 376, 412; ethical ideas (see ethics); ethics 5, 421, 426–427, 428; histories 308, 311–319; home as 282, 290–291, 318; hybrids 376–377; incompossibilities 351–353; making of 2; microbial socialities

463

Index 220–222, 225; ontology 13, 390, 392; planetary thought (see planetary); politics 130–138; and problem of ‘well-being for all’ 350–351; responsive and creative 11; scholarship 104, 227, 233, 240–241; social thought 105, 107, 108, 111, 258–259, 266; speculative fabrication 376–377; temporality 323–324; theory and practice 104, 110; thinking 3, 103, 282; walking 435 more-than-human participatory research (MtH-PR) 405, 409, 411, 413, 415–416 more-than-human research (MtHR) 405 Morin, E. 105, 106, 108 Morton, T. 109, 427, 428 Muecke, S. 433 multispecies ethnography 116–117, 314, 420 multitudes 13, 86, 96, 441; of devices and instruments 171; earthly 111–113; of human and nonhuman others 131; of new technical and cultural arrangements 303; of other material and immaterial entities 298 museums 152, 172, 193; art 33, 38; collections 152, 178, 314; colonial 146; democratic education 149; ethnographic 141; evolutionary 147; exhibitions 147, 149–150; and field, relations between 141–142, 144, 146, 154n9; indigenous cultures 152–153; natural history 141–142; ‘political anatomy’ of visitor 178; public 145; and universities 144, 154n9 The Mushroom at the End of the World (Tsing) 423 Mutero, C. 355 Myers, N. 341

New Ontologies 120, 189 Neyland, D. 300, 302 Nimmo, R. 327 Nixon, R. 327 Noble, David 175 non-humans 263; agencies 192, 258, 274, 277, 368, 370–371; animals 80, 92, 95, 246, 361, 371, 434; co-resident 21; device or instrument 163; elements 192, 200; existence of 258; and humans 6, 13, 24, 79, 192, 259, 264–265, 309, 319, 335, 353, 365–367, 393, 395, 397; intruders or pests 355; knowing with 209–210; materialities 390, 392, 397; or not-quitehuman others 258; others 269, 371; social theory 262 nonorganic life 108 Nonorganic Life, notion of 261 Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (Augé) 205 Nowotny, H. 337 NTROs (Non-Traditional Research Outputs) 368

Nakaya, F. 342, 344 Nash, R. 308 naturalism 96–99 naturecultures 13, 15, 17, 65, 107, 190, 372; affect of Clare and Barnes 19–24; ‘becoming with’ of companion species 61; of Britain 446; Chthulucenic 376; future 376; human and nonhuman fauna and flora 385; memory 22; or natural environment 381; prospective 381–382; situated 56; spatio-temporalisation of 385; variety of 378 Nealon, J.T. 428 need theory 363–364 nesting box (‘nestbox’) 235 networks 165–171 new materialism 22, 258, 270, 298–302, 335, 390, 392–393, 420, 422, 425, 433

Ojibwa ontology 80, 94, 98–99 ontological politics 131 ontological turn: cosmopolitan ontologies 120; ‘Golden Snail Opera’ 124–126, 125; ‘How Things Hold’ 122–124, 123; human informants 121, 123; infrastructures 121–122; landscapes 122; multispecies 116–126; non-textual media 121; non-Western ontologies 116; practice-based ontological frames 120; scholars 117–119; temporalities 121, 122–124 ontology 4, 35, 80, 87, 119; anthropocentric 392, 395–396; Deleuzian 396; to empiricism 7; and ethics 421, 427–429; ethological 393, 396; ‘flat’ 393; humanist 395; and materiality, relation between 121; Mongolian 119–120; more-than-human 13, 390, 392; naturalist 97; of non-Western people 99; and objects, connections between 300; Ojibwa 80, 98–99; politics of 38–40; posthumanist 35; relational 309; of social inquiry 13, 391; Spinozist 395 Pacha, concept of 345 Paci, P. 250 Packham, Chris 237 Pahl, R. E. 189, 192, 195, 198, 200 Palmer, S. 446 Pálsson, G. 210, 214, 215 Panelli, R. 426 Parliament of Things 40, 189, 201

464

Index Parsons, R. 304 participatory research (PR): critics of 413, 417; defined 410; handbook or toolkit 406; human participants in 410; methodological approach 410; morethan-human (MtH-PR) 405, 409, 411, 413, 415–416; and MtHR 405, 408, 409–410; perspective of 412 Pask, Gordon 38 pathogenic microbes 219 Patter, L.E.Van 247, 249 Paxson, H. 223–226, 310 Pedersen, Morten Axel. 119, 120 Peirce, C.S. 263 Penny, S. 342 Petric, S. 340, 341 philosophy of organism 2, 24 Pickering, A. 1, 5, 189, 191, 192, 265, 266, 274, 275, 364; The Mangle of Practice 38, 189 Pickering, Andy 24 Pickles, K. 278 Pinchot, Gifford 191 Piraro, Dan 46 planetary 109; consciousness 105, 113; differentiating 112–114; earthing 107–109; effects 8; and human scales 109–112, 114, 337, 343–344; life 421; multiplicity 106, 111–112, 114; non-gradualist 112; perspectives 107; seasonality 8; self-differentiation 105, 111; self-organisation 107–108; thinking 105–107 plant-human intercognition 340 plant studies 428 plastic packaging 302–305 Plato 86 du Plessis, Pierre 314 Pogue, D. 236 political materials 297–298, 305–306 political thinking 162–164 politics and government 176–179 politics of becoming 5, 31–41, 423, 433 polyrhythmia 323 posthuman 32, 51, 362, 392; articulation of 377; assemblage 40; convergence 365; debates around 335; normativity 40; scholarship 394 posthumanism 22, 33, 35–36, 51, 362, 367–369; assemblage 36, 40; humanist 46, 416; Marxist critics of 370; ontologies 35, 192 post-Pasteurian approach 225 Povinelli E.A. 148, 153 Power, E.R. 287 practical ‘troubles’ 364–365

precautionary principle 40 prehension 23, 45, 377, 384, 438 productivism 326 Pschera, A. 247, 248, 252 Puig de La Bellacasa, M.P. 208 Puritanism 6, 11–12 Raby, F. 383 Raffles, H. 423 Reason, P. 404; Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea 404 Reassembling the Social (Latour) 363 Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature (Michael) 259 relational materialism 22, 200 Ren, C. 209, 213 Reriti-Crofts, Aroha 277 research assemblage 397–398; elements in 399; major and minor science 393–395; micropolitics of 398–400, 401; MTH conceptual toolkit 395–397; MTH social inquiry methodology 391–393 resurgence 232–233, 235, 238–239 Reynolds, R. 271 rhizome 394 Richmond, Thomas 446 Rides Round Britain (Byng) 448 Rivet, Paul 148–150, 152 Rivière, Georges Henri 150 Rose, D.B. 426 Roud, S. 8, 442 Rowell, Thelma 61–63, 65 Rowse, T. 152 Roy, A. 233 Ruppert, E. 142, 143, 152 Sagan, D. 60, 61, 222 Salter, C. 340 Saraceno, T. 344, 345 Satsuka, S. 120 Savage, M. 132 Schaffer, S. 175 Schultz, N. 434, 436–438 science and technology studies (STS) 2, 32, 36–38, 48, 165, 189, 246, 259, 270, 283, 297, 335, 368, 395, 435; description 278n2; disaster studies 272–274; ontological politics and temporal emergence 274–277; politically 273; and political theorists 297; practically 272–273; scholars in 309, 341; standard social science 270–272; temporally 275–277; theoretically 272 Scott, J. P. 48 Searle, A. 245, 246, 248, 252, 253 Self-Isolating Bird Club 237–238

465

Index The Separation: actual entities 24–25; Carnivalesque woman, medieval Canterbury 10; Great Divide 5–19; Green Man, Canterbury Cathedral Cloisters 9; Mermaid, Canterbury Cathedral Cloisters 10; natureculture affect of Clare and Barnes 19–24; River Lydden at Bagber 16 Serres, M. 105, 106, 108, 192, 377 Shakespeare, William 12, 79, 84, 85 Sheehan, P. 247 Sheffield Peregrines 235–236 Shibuya, Keiichiro 341 Silver, J. 248 Simard, S.W. 385 Simmel, G. 257, 261, 262 Simonsen, M.A. 208 situated knowledges 309, 367 Skolimowski, Henryk 404 smart home 378 Smith, Adam 372 Smith, D. M. 95 Smith, J.A. 286 Smith, M. 427 Smith, S.J. 288, 290 Smithson, Robert 344 Smuts, Barbara 54–57 Snow, C.P. 1, 2, 31, 32, 36, 39 Social Laws (Tarde) 262 sounds of speech 92–96 space-times 51, 130, 135–138, 227, 434 spatial planning 348 species 135; abstraction 24; animals 52–57, 83, 197, 287; becoming-animal 57–63; companion (see companion species); domesticated 286; endangered 193–194, 252; and habitats 20; humankind as 80, 352; Jim’s dog 43, 44–46; keystone 223; Leonardo’s dog 44–46, 45; livestockguardian-dog (LGDs) 65; multispecies 116–126, 311, 339–340; Turkish Akbash dogs 65; undomesticated 285; wild 196, 284; wolf–dog hybrids 49, 63–67 speculative fabrication 376; ‘design-with’ and ‘design-for’ 383–384; Haraway’s Chthulucene 381–382; hunting knives 380–381; more-than-human 376–377; mushroom knives 379–380; re-designing knife 384–386; Swiss Army Knife 378–379 The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Abram) 107 Spencer, B. 143, 146–148, 151–153 spiking neural networks (SNNs) 342

Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea (Reason) 404 Spivak, G.C. 112 Staying with the Trouble (Haraway) 381 stay with the trouble 216, 364 Steinmetz, G. 147 Stengers, I. 4, 37, 63, 134, 137, 192, 348–350, 356, 364 Stiegler, B. 265 St Mary’s Church, Patrixbourne 441 Strathern, M. 116, 165, 172 Strecker, L. 337, 339 subjective desire 428 Sutter, P.S. 309 Swanson, H.A. 214, 310 symbiogenesis 50 Takeda, N. 189 Tarde, G. 262, 272; Social Laws 262 Tarkovsky, A. 343 Taylor, John 15 technology: as deterministic 248–249; individualisation of animals and countermapping 249–250; society 158–162; wild animal expectations of privacy 250–252; zones 174–176 temporality: of beekeeping 329, 331; of companion species 56; coordinating 122–124; ecological 330; of failure 278; of home 283; of human-wildlife relations 251; of Industrial capitalism 344; intrinsic 33; of life on earth 60; as morethan-human 323; nonhuman practices 121; opaque 328; of plants 340–341; sequential time 426; spatio 376, 378, 381; synchronous time 426; and time 324; viticulture 328 Tester, K. 194 Theunissen, M. 262 Thévenot, L. 297, 301 Third World Development 40 Thomas, K. 6, 7, 411, 412 Thomas, S. 410–413, 415, 416 Thompson, M. 193, 259 Thrift, N. 8, 395 Topinard, Paul 148 Toulmin, Stephen 435 tourism, concept of 447 toxic waste 168–169 ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge’ (TEK) 369 Treves, F. 21, 22; Highways and Byways of Dorset 21 Tsai, Yen-ling 124 Tsing, A.L. 25, 52, 233, 238, 310, 314, 323, 326, 380, 385, 423, 424; The Mushroom at the End of the World 423

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Index Turkish Akbash dogs 65 Turnbull, J. 245, 246, 248, 252, 253 Tylor, Edward Burnett 147 von Uexkull, J. 338, 410 Urry, J. 197, 439, 453 US Army Corps of Engineers 34 value, concept of 372 Verma, A. 249 Vernadsky, Vladimir 106 de Vet, E. 290 Vibrant Matter (Bennett) 423 Vidler, A. 285 da Vinci, Leonardo: Vitruvian Man 45–46 Vital, A.V. 314 vital materialism 392, 425 Vitruvian Man (da Vinci) 45–46 Viveiros de Castro, E. 84, 117, 120, 426 Wakefield-Rann, R. 227 The Wake of Crows (Dooren) 424 Wald, P. 220 walking: bearwalking 91; becoming local 438–440; with Clare and Barnes 440–445; Cook 446–449; cultural heritage of travel in Britain 445–446; with dogs 45, 65; ecological class 436–438; English 449–452; externalised nature 433; habitability 434; indigenous and Western peoples 434; industrialised ‘livestock’ industries 434; material/ natural world 434; more-than-human studies 435; ontological/posthumanist politics 434; pilgrimage 440; pleasures 44; Protestant captains of industry 436; rising living standards 436; with rocks 216; Solvitur ambulando 452–454; values and materialisms 437; viral pandemics 434 Wanderer, E. 253 waste 190, 257, 263; ‘aneconomic’ side of 261; bacterial 339; circulation of 200; disposal 44, 197; domestic (human) 195–196, 197, 221, 287; exclusion of 263–264; hazardous 260; industrial 195; mater 258–261; materiality of 259–260;

municipal 263, 266n6; nuclear 260; or excretions 257; organic 260; problem 194; of space and time 215; toxic 168–169 water pollution 195 Webb, Mary 12, 13 Weber, M. 166 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour) 269 Whatmore, S. 189, 197, 209, 305, 310, 353, 422; Hybrid Geographies 422 When Species Meet (Haraway) 42–67 Whitehead, A.N. 1, 3, 4, 23–25, 45, 377 Whybrow, N. 191 Wilder, G. 150, 151 Williamson, S. 274 Williams, R. 173 Winner, L. 276 Wise, M. N. 175 Wolfe, C. 416 Wolfe, Virginia 190 Wonga, Simon 145 Woolgar, S. 300, 302, 350, 356 Wordsworth, Dorothy 445, 453 worlding 52–53, 57, 65, 216, 296, 308, 422; children and birds (case study) 314–316; co-constitution 311; environmental history 308–309; environmental humanities 309–310; more-than-human and multispecies studies 310; multiple species, multiple voices 311–312; new sources 313–314; situated ethics and politics 312–313; Wayilwan women’s weaving, plants and wetlands (case study) 316–318 Wright, Alexis 190 Wright, Patrick 444 Xenakis, I. 343, 344 Young, Neil 39 Yusoff, K. 113 Zagala, Stephen 369 Zalasiewicz, J. 106, 336 Zizek, S. 178 Zola, Émile 368 Zurr, I. 340

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