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In-Depth Information
1997:8). In other words, scientific representations were dismissed as inappropriate
because, unlike local lay knowledge, they failed to anticipate the consequences of
their solutions. Thus, while science was presented by many as being the only form
of representation of animals that should influence political action, the experience of
the Bateson Report proves that in practice scientific representations are open to as
much political debate and contestation as other means.
Conclusion
Animals have an enigmatic presence in the hunting debate. Their representations
are omnipresent, the arguments of both sides are built around representations of the
fox and the deer, and of their interests. Both pro- and anti-hunting lobbies claim to
'represent' the animals in a political sense. Yet the animals themselves are totally
absent from the political debate: only their ghostly representations, rendered as
immutable mobiles, haunt the parliamentary chambers, television studios and
newspaper columns where the human actors 'speak on their behalf'. It could be
argued that the animals have no agency to participate; nor, indeed, any agency to
challenge or question the way in which they are represented (in both senses of the
word). However, this understanding of 'agency' as a possession is itself challenged
by 'actor-network theory' (ANT) perspectives which wrestle with the 'agency' of
non-humans (Brown and Capdevila 1999; Hetherington 1997). Here, agency is
repositioned as an 'effect' which is realised or released through the configurations of
entities into actor-networks. Thus there emerges a peculiar agency without
intentionality,
characterised by an ability to generate strange topological effects or 'foldings'
upon the ordering of space. This happens when an artefact, by virtue of its
apparent 'blankness'—that is, its apparent lack of overt significations—
disrupts the space into which it is placed.
(Brown and Capdevila 1999:40)
It is the disruption of space which holds the key to the empowerment of animals in
the hunting debate. The political marginalisation of the fox and deer in our story
through the process of representation is intrinsically spatial. The displacement of the
representation is geographical as well as metaphorical. It is precisely because the
political debate does not occur on the hunting field—but rather in the chamber of
the House of Commons, or in television studios—that the animals need to be
translated into mobile forms of representation in order to be enrolled into
arguments on either side of the debate. As a consequence of this spatial
displacement, representations of animals can become signifiers for certain
geographical spaces. Thus the photograph of the innocent fox cub reproduced in the
national press, or the biological picture of the dissected fox translated through post-
mortem examination and quoted in debate in Parliament, represent not just the
animals concerned but also the British countryside in an urban space.
