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On Non-CoherenceJohn Law

Centre for Science StudiesLancaster University

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Burnside Farm

• Discovered 19th February, 2001

• Spread through sheep into the market system

• 70 premises• National epidemic• 2030 infected premises

• £3bn cleanup costs

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FMD 31st March

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Introduction …

1. Messy: patchwork of practices

2. Difficult to narrate!

3. Political: stories perform realities/politics (innocence!?)

4. Question: what reality to make? … ontological politics

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Outline

1. Two smooth summary stories: – Globalisation– foot & mouth UK

2. Commentary on literary & political work being done here

3. Patch in other stories to disrupt smoothness (a pinboard)

4. Conclusion: about ontological politics, story-telling, mess!

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Story 1: Global Narrative

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FMD Clinical Symptoms

What is it?

Productivity

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‘The capacity of buffalo herds to work during rice planting is halved, and milk yields decrease by 80%. When endemic, infections often occur serially with some herds falling ill three times a year. The livelihoods of families that depend on animals for food and power can be severely affected.,

Bangladesh….

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FMD World Map 1996-2000

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FMD World Map 2003

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Why is this important?

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OIE Classification

1. disease free without (routine) vaccination;

2. disease free with vaccination3. disease endemic

• Potentially disastrous for exporting countries

• At the same time, it spreads

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Pan Asia O Serotype, 1990

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Pan Asia O Serotype, 1995

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Pan Asia O Serotype, 1998

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Pan Asia O Serotype, 2001

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Narratives & Performativity1. Stories order the world (not simply

descriptions)2. Our stories order the world

(performativity)3. Our stories aren’t politically innocent

(we are making a difference: no choice; strengthening/weakening realities)

4. What reality to help to make more real? (= ‘ontological politics’)

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Global FMD Narrative makes …

1. Geographical & geopolitical reality

2. Boundary between disease & disease-free countries

3. Boundary between productive/less productive agriculture

4. Powerful WTO rules

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My Global FMD Narrative makes smooth reality ….

1. Single global space

2. Single time

3. Single objects in time and space

4. Makes some events/actors important and others not

5. Describes a system of exclusions/ vulnerabilities within that time/spae

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Good, fine, true, but is this what we want to do?

Criticism? Does it re-perform the conditions that frame dominance?

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Story 2: UK National Narrative

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The strategy?

1. Stop the animal movements

2. Kill infected animals and kill them

3. Trace and kill animals in contact

4. Disinfect the premises

5. Take biosecurity measures close by

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FMD Disinfectant

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FMD Stonehenge

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F&M Pyre

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Headline

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FMD: the Army

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FMD Great Orton

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Opening theCountryside

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National FMD Narrative

1. Discovery and Initial Strategy

2. Mounting Crisis

3. Fight back

4. Endgame

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National FMD NarrativeAssumptions

1. Space-time box, linear & progressive time (UK state apparatus)

2. Events/actors in box

3. Importance of actors

4. Discretionary agency for the state

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National FMD Narrative

1. Specific

2. Makes strategic, state-centred struggle

3. Makes disease fit for policy makers

Alternative narratives?

Is this what we should be doing?

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Smooth stories

1. Single worlds?

2. Or non-coherent worlds?

Practically: lots of things didn’t fit anyway

Which (do we want to enact?

Performativity!

Ontological politics!

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Metaphors/techniques to break up grand narrative: to perform something different?

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Possibilities …

• Museum collections

• Art exhibitions

• Elements in a landscape

• The rooms in a house

• Images streaming across a screen

• Multiple computer windows

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Possibilities …• Blogs• Web-pages• Meetings• Poetry, performance

• Think imaginatively about mess!

• On this occasion: a messy pinboard!

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FMD Pinboard

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Looking for other narratives …

… important in other locations

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Story 3: A trading narrative?

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The buzzhad gone

‘The buzz had gone … snuffed out like a candle – the mart’s car parks (were) empty of farmers and their vehicles … the rings (were) empty of auctioneers and their vendors and buyers together with the livestock they were trading, the offices (were) empty of clerks and their customers …’

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Livestock Market, Abergavenny

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Trading

FMD is social isolation, loss of income

Space: network of contacts

Time: a weekly cycle

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Story 4: A farming narrative?

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Families tended to become confined

‘… families tended to become confined. Children were sent to stay away or kept off school. Diversified off farm businesses were closed or kept in operation by the ‘away posting’ of one member of the family. Visits to family, friends or social venues virtually came to a standstill.’

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Farming

FMD: social isolation, fear

Space: network of social contacts

Time: cyclic, daily, weekly, monthly

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Story 5: Killing?

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But don’t get mewrong…

‘But don’t get me wrongI have now seen plenty of this plagueAnd it is no common cold.The animals suffer horribly, as the skin of their tongues peels offAnd their feet fall apart.We must try to kill them quick and clean,As soon as it appears in a herd or a flock.’

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Killing

FMD: clinical attitude

Space/time: embodied skills, love, detachment, local care and killing

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Story 6: burning?

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Burning

‘The flames turned the night sky orange, the stench of burning flesh – no wonder the talk in the country is of apocalypse’‘It is, to be sure, a mediaeval image, those piles of animal corpses being put to the flame – the pictures in the papers looking more and more like tapestries than photographs.’ (Guardian)

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FMD Pyre

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FMD Pyre

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Burning

FMD: mediaeval sacrifice, pestilence

Space: collapses into the pyres at the end of the world

Time: ending, apocalypse, expression of fate, moment of judgement

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Story 7: farming silence?

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Mornings came and days went by

‘Mornings came and days went by without the need to think of animals being fed, or checked for lameness or looking poorly. We had a silence around us, a dog with no work. Hay silage and straw with nothing to feed or bed. ’

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Silence

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Silence

FMD: has killed the farm

Space/time: locally embodied, daily, inseparable from material context, mundane absences

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Story 8: A story of walking and spirituality

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Few … have looked

‘Few … (commentators) have looked at what I can only call the spiritual consequences. For hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, [walking] is an escape from regimentation. They have lost the right to roam. They are being told that the slaughter of … sheep will transform the open [hills] of the Lake District into a scrubland no one who has loved Wordsworth … will recognise …’

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Walking

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Walking

FMD: bodily and spiritual constraint

Space: openness, freedom,

Time: disappears, (timeless appreciation of nature, spiritual communion)

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Eight patches on the pinboard

• Globalisation• Government strategies and policies• The market• Isolation on the farm• Veterinary Care• Burning• Silence on the farm• Walking

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Eight kinds of space & time

Global international trading movements

State nation progressive

Market local networks cyclic

Farm social relations cyclic

Vet embodied momentary

Pyre end of space end of time

Walking no limits outside time

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Concluding… • Narratives tell differently

• Narratives also enact differently

• Do we want FMD singular? Or FMD multiple?

• FMD as a set of interferences between enactments

• FMD instability, fluidity, otherness (like ALD)

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….• Ontological politics (style and

choice of narrative): what kind of a world to make?

• Responsibility!

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Method?• Reality enacting as incredibly

difficult! (holding materials, audiences together, circulating, including)

• FMD smooth or FMD mess?

• Don’t we need a messy method to understand/enact mess?

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