Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
In this way, the activities of foxes and deer have (unintended) agency-as-effect in
the disruption of space at two poles. At one end, the politicisation of hunting is
provoked by the actions of animals disrupting the discursive space of the
countryside: by the fox attacking a chicken-house and disrupting an agricultural
network of production; by the deer swimming a river vainly trying to escape
pursuing hounds, disrupting the image of the countryside as a space of nature. At the
other end, the arrival of representations of the animals and their actions, in the form
of immutable mobiles, in the House of Commons or other debating forums
disrupts political space and causes politicians to act in ways they would not
otherwise have done (by speaking, debating, voting on the issue).
Moreover, the increasing distanciation of the animal from its representation
creates a third means by which animals can achieve unintended agency-as-effect.
This is where the animals
in actu
continue to behave and act in ways contrary to
their representations, disrupting their own representational space, with the effect of
undermining the political legitimacy of those representations in the human realm.
In all these ways animals have the capacity to act in a manner which affects how
they are legislated for by humans. Animals thus become enrolled into political
participation in a manner which is not wholly fixed in human hands. Humans
control the rules of decision-making and the technologies of representation, such
that the representations of animals mobilised in support of human-derived political
positions are ones constructed by humans and tainted with human interests. Yet,
without the participation of animals in those representational networks, their
objectives cannot be achieved. Latour (1993:144) imagined a 'parliament of things'
in which the franchise of humans and non-humans to participate politically
becomes entwined, but for the extensive range of issues in which non-humans are
fundamentally implicated—animal welfare, conservation, agriculture, the
environment—the realisation of such an assembly may require only recognition of
the complex micro-processes of representation through which politics already
proceeds.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the editors for their helpful comments on earlier drafts
of this chapter.
References
Advertising Standards Authority (1998) 'Adjudication: Countryside Alliance', ASA Web-Site
<http://www.asa.org.uk/adj/adj_2482.htm> (accessed 10 June 1998).
Baines, R. (1997) 'Economic impact of foxes and fox hunting on farming in Wiltshire', Paper
presented to Annual Conference of the Rural Economy and Society Study Group,
Worcester, September.
Barron, B. (1997) 'Hunting hangs in the balance',
Somerset County Gazette,
11 April.
