Differentiating Organics: Performing Multiple Objects to Organize Singular Markets for Organic Tea and Biscuits in the UK - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 60

a singular organic market, the practice of organic farming remains diverse. Thus,
these cases illustrate Mol's ( 2002 ) and Law's ( 2008 ) arguments that reality, in this
case organic farming, remains 'multiple', despite attempts to singularize practices
through standardization.

4.2 Conceptualizing the Performances of Organic

In recent years performativity analysis has gained traction in economic sociology,
critical management studies, science and technology studies (STS), and in rural
sociology (Mol 2002 ; Busch 2007 ; Callon 2007 ; MacKenzie et al. 2007 ;Law
2008 ; Loconto 2010 ). Historically, however, it has inspired two ontologically
disparate interpretations in the literature. The first notion of performativity suggests
a separation between observed action and the knowledge about that action (Goffman
1974 ; Hilgartner 2000 ; Mead [1934] 1962 ). Goffman ( 1974 ) claims that 'standard-
making routines' can be “performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not,
guile or good faith” (p. 75) but nonetheless they must be enacted to be realized. This
vision of performance “focuses attention not only on the rhetoric and narrative of the
performance itself but also on the way performance expresses - and is embedded
in - modes of information control” (Hilgartner 2000 , p. 11). In other words, the
observed enactments are representations of reality, rather than reality itself that is
perceived.
Other theorists argue that action cannot be separated from the knowledge about it.
In this second sense, the word performativity has been traced back to Austin's
( 2004 [1962]) notion of illocution, or 'performative utterance', where “the issuing
of the utterance is the performing of an action” (p. 163). The main point that
separates Austin's version of performance from Goffman's is that it insists that an
'inward' performance, or backstage, is not necessary for an 'outward' performance
to occur. Put differently, “the inside is merely a fold of the outside” (Deleuze 1988
cited in Bell 2007 , p. 14). It is this “interweaving of 'words' and 'actions' - of
representations and interventions - that the concept of 'performativity' is designed
to capture” (Muniesa 2007 , p. 5). In other words, real objects and subjects and the
representations of both are enacted simultaneously (Law 2008 ). Moreover, these
performances are constituted by both the performers and the audiences who evaluate
the performances (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991]). This interpretation of
performances, or practices, enables an analysis of how values are enacted through
both actions and discourse (cf. Callon 1998 ;Law 2004 ; MacKenzie et al. 2007 ;
Muniesa 2007 ).
Human - nature interactions have been illustrative of the variation and difference
that emerge when paying attention to performances (Szerszynski et al. 2003 ). Mol
( 2002 ) shows that “attending to enactment rather than knowledge has an important
effect: what we think of as a single object may appear to be more than one ( )

objects come into being - and disappear - with the practices in which they are
manipulated. Since the object of manipulation tends to differ from one practice to

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