Earthly Powers and Affective Environments: An Ontological Politics of Flood Risk

Introduction

In his book Alien Chic, Neil Badmington (2004) demonstrates some of the promise and challenge of engaging the many intellectual and cultural cross-currents mustering in the name of posthumanism. From the off, this gathering articulates a generative tension between two imperatives. The first is fuelled by the promiscuous inventiveness of the life sciences and its implications for repopulating the body politic in mundane and monstrous ways (e.g. Haraway, 1997). The second is the latest in a line of contrapuntal intellectual energies associated with the prefix ‘post’ that ostensibly work against the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment, but which surpass and sustain in the same breath whatever went ‘before’ (e.g. Simon, 2003). In this article I set out to explore the political promise of posthumanism, as a project that insists on the co-evolutionary embodiment and embeddedness of the human animal with the world (Wolfe, 2009: xv), even as I question whether that promise is imperilled by a name that is becoming more adhesive as it travels. More specifically, I want to examine how environmental disturbances, like flooding or earthquakes, might ‘force thought’ among the people affected by them and, thereby, occasion new political associations and opportunities. Drawing insights from recent conversations between political theory and science and technology studies, particularly the work of the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, I argue that posthumanist thinking requires a more experimental tack capable of articulating the affective force of such environmental disturbances if it is to make what Paulson (2001) calls the ‘crucial’ step in articulating how new types of encounter with nonhumans emergent in the practice of the sciences might give rise to new political practices.

In a preliminary mapping of the political implications of these posthumanist imperatives, the geographer Bruce Braun traces them to a series of essays by Jacques Derrida (2002) and Giorgio Agamben (2004) that query the ‘human’ by exploring how humanism produces this figure through that of another: the animal. Without this distinction humanism has no foundation, an insight that for Braun is captured most succinctly in Derrida’s neologism – animot. The word phonetically singularizes the plural for animal (animaux) and combines it with the word for ‘word’ (mot), thereby calling attention to the habit of rolling all animal species into one, producing an undifferentiated ‘other’ against which the ‘human’ can be juxtaposed and defined (Braun, 2004). Derrida goes on to explain that this ‘fundamental anthropology’ deconstructs itself, as the differentiation of the human from the animal always requires a supplement to fix the difference (language, reasoning, tool-making, etc.), yet each and every supplement is inadequate to the task. It is an argument closely paralleled by Agamben’s (2004) ‘anthropological machine’. Braun characterizes the political implications of this current in posthumanism in terms of its ‘deconstructive responsibility’, keeping vigil over the figure of the human as it is continuously deployed and defined in cultural, political, and philosophical practices.

The second current which Braun identifies is associated with ‘certain ontological stances’ that emphasize the ‘open-ended becoming’ of the world and provide a sort of ‘groundless ground’ from which the ‘fixing’ of the human comes into view as a problem (Braun, 2004: 1353). Using Donna Haraway’s (1997) ‘ontological choreography’ as his exemplar, he argues that rather than focus on how the figure of the human is established as an identity differentiated from other classes of being, those writing in this vein have taken the making of human being, and its corporeal constitution in particular, as their central concern. This focus on the bios of the posthuman brings a science fiction familiar, and now celebrated theoretical touchstone – the cyborg – into play as a necessarily ambivalent creature combining human, animal and machinic qualities, and disturbing the exclusively and self-evidently human terms in which the political subject has been framed (see Haraway, 1991). Like Braun, I find this cyborg ontology provocative, but also problematic in its tendency to temporalize posthuman/ism as an era or condition ushered in by unprecedented techno-scientific capabilities, in which the human and nonhuman are being ‘stitched together’ in new ways. ¹ Implicit in such terminology is a particular kind of historicity that holds on to the idea that things have not always been this way; that in times past the human was more self-evidently and reliably itself. This raises the question of whether posthuman/ism(s) have themselves become ‘anthropological machines’, unintentionally transfixed by the ‘human itself’ even as they herald its passing.

In Hybrid Geographies (Whatmore, 2002) I set out to explore the suspect coupling of the ‘after’ of posthuman/ism with/as a technological accomplishment of the life sciences, as unqualified by precedent or memory as all the other brave new worlds that have gone before, time out of mind. I sought to argue that it is what exceeds rather than what comes after the human, however configured in particular times and places, which is the more promising and pressing project. It is for this reason that I advocated then, and continue to work with, a different signature preferring the ‘more-than-human’ (Whatmore, 2002: 4) to the ‘posthuman’; a signature that conjures a different kind of historicity and, by implication, politics. Using various analytic and narrative devices to push hybridity back in time, I sought to demonstrate that whether one works through the long practised intimacies between human and plant communities or the skills configured between bodies and tools, one never arrives at a time/place when the human was not a work in progress. Then and now, it seems to me that what gives the ‘posthuman’ moment bite is that its purchase is evidenced as much in everyday negotiations and political events around, say, foodstuffs, environmental hazards or healthcare as in the deconstructive vigilance of the humanities or reconstructive potency of the life sciences. It is a moment, in other words, which testifies to a Deleuzian sense of philosophy as a ‘mechanics’ for living (see Murphy, 1998: 213), a means of going on rather than an intellectual pastime. Such negotiations and events bear witness to the force of all manner of earthly powers – bodies, codes, devices, models, documents and proteins among them – whose affective charge on those they touch barely registers in the heterogeneous assemblages emergent in and as the techno-scientific practices of flood risk management.

The dominant currents in the posthumanist project mapped out by Braun raise important questions about biopolitical ‘redistributions of difference’ (see Esposito, 2008) that complicate the composition and conduct of bodies politic, not least by highlighting the significance of corporeality to what/who counts as a political subject. However, where work in this vein explores the distinction between zoe and bios to good effect, too rarely does it take into account a third term – techne – without which the ‘becoming political’ of our biological existence can hardly be conceived. To this extent, posthuman/ism’s preoccupation with the ‘life’ of the life sciences, bedazzled by the hyperbolic inventiveness of bio-engineering and bio-informatics (Doyle, 2003), focuses its political charge too narrowly on the body–subject relation and removes ‘life’ from the situatedness, or ecologies, of living. As a geographer, I gravitate towards the rich conjunction of the bio (life) and the geo (earth) – or what the writer Jeanette Winterson (1997: 85) calls the ‘livingness’ of the world. Living/ness is a relational condition that reconnects the intimate fabric of corporeality, including that of human becoming, to the seemingly indifferent stuff of the world that makes living possible. In this, it conjures an ecological imagination that foregrounds the conditional openness or immanence of life such that ecology is less the interaction between prefigured life forms/material entities than their emergence and transformation in a ‘wider field of forces, intensities and durations that give rise to [them]’ (Ansell Pearson, 1999: 154). What it invites is a shift in focus from a biopolitics fascinated by the ‘new’ to an onto-politics in which, as the political theorist Jane Bennett (2004: 365) puts it, ‘humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky web of connections or an ecology’. These are the points of departure for that ‘experimental’ tack in working through the political implications of posthuman/ism for redistributing the affective force of environmental processes to which I referred earlier and turn next.

The Matter of Politics

The potency of technological objects and more-than-human agents in the fabric of political association and social conduct is more or less evident in different contexts, registering most forcibly in those moments of ontological disturbance in which the things on which people rely as unexamined parts of the material fabric of their everyday lives become molten. Among the most powerful of such disturbances are those environmental events in which the earth quite literally moves (see Clark, 2011), such as volcanic activity, earthquakes, hurricanes and, not least, my focus here – floods. Where such powers may once have been attributed to and treated as ‘acts of god’ or ‘forces of nature’, today they signal an ontological alliance between interests in the propensities, affordances and affectivities of more-than-human phenomena, and amplifications of the produced-ness and contingency of human embodiment.

As the matter of politics and the politics of matter have become more systematically entwined with the proliferation of techno-scientific practices and artefacts mediating social life, so such moments of ontological disturbance render this dense infrastructure of mediations a familiar subject of political (dis)ordering, governance and dissent (Barry, 2002; Latour and Weibel, 2005). This co-implication of techno-science and politics has spawned a growing body of work at the interface of science and technology studies (STS) and political theory under various flags, including Annemarie Mol’s (1999) ‘ontological politics’, Bruno Latour’s (2005) ‘dingpolitik’ and Isabelle Stengers’ (2003) ‘cosmopolitiques’. Leading scholars in these two fields are brought into conversation in Political Matter (Braun and Whatmore, 2010) to interrogate the nature of the relationship between politics and techno-science. Perhaps the most significant argument developed in the volume is that technicity – whether understood in terms of language, equipment or machine – is not merely a supplement to human life; rather, as Adrian Mackenzie puts it, it is ‘originary’ (Mackenzie, 2002). In these terms, it is a mistake to posit humanity (culture) as somehow existing apart from the world of things (nature); rather, the human comes into being with this world. ² Such a view necessarily challenges how we think about the ‘stuff’ that we consider technological and the bodies that such materials are thought to supplement. Drawing upon the work of Simondon and Merleau-Ponty, for example, Mark Hansen (2006) argues that the operational capacities of the embodied organism (what he calls body schemas) unavoidably involves the body’s coupling with an external environment, a coupling that has always been accomplished through technical operations.

The history of the human animal and, indeed, of ‘culture’ is thus necessarily a history too of the stuff that is, from the beginning, part and parcel of human becoming. It is this coupling of embodiment and technics in human and nonhuman becomings (technicity) and their co-evolution (technogenesis) that challenges our conception of ‘the political’ as a category, notwithstanding the humanist assumptions that prevail in political theory (see Bennett, 2009). The philosopher Michel Serres, for example, has sought to address the consequences of the ‘exclusively social contracts’ through which ‘we have abandoned the bonds that connect us to the world’ and to rework the contractual polity towards an understanding of ‘the things of the world’ in terms of the ‘forces, bonds and interactions’ in which they ‘speak’ to us (Serres, 1995: 39). This work returns us to the political potency of techno-science but one recharged not by a biopolitical focus on the inventiveness of the life sciences and its implications for ‘cyborg’ political subjects, but rather by an onto-political focus on the inventiveness of politics itself. Here, the political is refigured as an eventful technogenesis that amplifies the res of the res publica such that ‘the matters that come to matter in the res… create a public around them’ triggering ‘new political occasions and associations’ (Latour, 2005: 16). Such matters include the machinations of the life sciences (witness the GMO [genetically modified organism] controversies) but, crucially, they are not restricted to them and are as likely to be geo-physical forces (witness environmental controversies triggered by earthquakes, hurricanes or floods), or computer-mediated technologies (witness mobile phone mast controversies), in which livingness (human and otherwise) is in composition.

This onto-political tack puts the onus of a more-than-human political ecology on a political inventiveness which, in turn, demands experimentation in the research practices of the social sciences and humanities too in terms of their involvement in the staging and conduct of new knowledge polities, media and devices in and through which techno-scientific objects and the environments they assemble can be rendered politically affective and amenable. Some such experiments are under way, in the guise of collective efforts to develop techniques for what Bruno Latour (2004) calls ‘learning to be affected’ and Donna Haraway (2008) speaks of as ‘response-ability’, the kind of political and ethical thinking that is called forth by the capacity of all manner of things, human and nonhuman, organic and nonorganic, to move and be moved by others. To do so means understanding stuff of all sorts as forceful and to experiment with what it means to incorporate this forcefulness into ethico-political conduct. In the remainder of this article, I want to work these arguments through the demanding experimental ethos of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers (2005a), for whom scientific objectivity is a distributed (and by no means guaranteed) achievement that correlatively constitutes experimental phenomena as reliable witnesses (objects) to their experimental articulation and experimental scientists as their reliable (objective) spokespersons. Each of these facets of objectivity relies in turn upon a third, an experimental apparatus that mediates their relationship in a way that can be replicated. More radically, Stengers extends this ethos of experimentation to elaborate an understanding of, even a test for, an adequate political theory and practice (see also Disch, 2010). Here, the potential company of witnesses and spokespersons engaged in experimentation exceeds the confines of laboratory science to include those affected by the issue at stake, so multiplying the trials to which objective knowledge claims are subjected. I do so with reference to a recent attempt to put this ethos into research practice, in which I collaborated with social and natural scientists and people affected by flooding in the UK.

Experimenting Political Practice

If we take seriously those nonhumans that are best characterised as forcing thought … what we need to think about and address is not the empty generality of humans as thinking beings, but something we usually reserve for expertise, the correlate of the classical definition of political agency: humans as spokespersons claiming that it is not their free opinions that matter, but what causes them to think and to object. Humans who affirm that their freedom lies in their refusal to break this attachment. (Stengers, 2010: 5)

The association between knowledge controversies and the emergence of new publics has been elaborated in the work of STS (science, technology and society) scholars. Michel Callon’s ‘hot situations’ (1998), Bruno Latour’s (2005) ‘matters of concern’ and Isabelle Stengers’ (2005a) ‘things that force thought’, for example, all provide vocabularies for addressing those moments of ontological disturbance in which the things on which we rely as unexamined parts of the material fabric of our everyday lives become molten. Such situations, matters or forces render expert knowledge claims, and the technologies through which these become hardwired into the working practices of commerce and government, the subject of intense political interrogation. In this, controversies act as force-fields in which expertise becomes enmeshed with, and redistributed through, ‘an ever-growing, ever-more-varied cast of characters’ (Callon, 1998: 260) sufficiently affected by what is at issue to want to participate in collectively mapping it into knowledge and, thereby, in its social ordering. For Callon, Latour and Stengers such knowledge controversies are generative events in their potential to foster the dis-ordering conditions in which expert reasoning is forced to ‘slow down’, creating opportunities to arouse ‘a different awareness of the problems and situations that mobilize us’ (Stengers, 2005a: 994).

Their account of the political potency of knowledge controversies relies on two departures from the conventions of democratic political theory. The first is to avoid equating democratic politics with the institutions of representative government and the machinery of policy making, and to be more attentive to the multiple and emergent constitution of publics and their political capabilities. Here, one can point to a variety of efforts to articulate an associative politics concerned with the capacity of citizens to band together and act in concert but in the manner of a ‘swarm’, rather than in consequence of some prefigured category of political interest (e.g. stakeholders) or class. ³ For Stengers, these new kinds of publics are allied to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘minoritarian’ politics, in which they can produce ‘not as their aim but in the very process of their emergence, the power to object and to intervene in matters which they discover concern them’ (Stengers, 2005b: 161). The second departure is to redress the endemic humanism of political theory by recognizing that such emergent publics are not exclusively human achievements. Jane Bennett, for example, draws an instructive contrast between the demos (polity) of contemporary political theorists like Rancière and that of Latour to argue that democratic political theory has to grasp that politics exercises more than the disruptive power of people to disagree while remaining indifferent to what is at stake in the disagreement (Bennett, 2004). Thus, for Stengers, emergent publics are induced by generative events like knowledge controversies, in which the phenomena or problems that ‘slow down reasoning’ make a difference or, as Latour (2005) might put it, matter to the assemblage of political attachments and capabilities.

The energetic business of ‘arousing’, ‘triggering’, ‘sparking’ connections between knowledge controversies and emergent publics is sometimes glossed over by their being treated as always already implicated. In a recent paper (Whatmore and Landström, 2011), their connection is examined in-the-making through a research intervention in the science and politics of flooding in Pickering, a market town in Yorkshire in the north of England. This project sought to put Stengers’ experimental, ⁴ or inventive, ethos into research practice by exercising the conditions and possibilities of subjecting scientific propositions and artefacts to public trial. Stengers’ approach calls for experiments in which the knowledge claims and practices of those researching knowledge controversies are somehow put at risk/stake in the controversy alongside those of people affected by it with whom they collaborate. Thus, our first working principle was to ‘treat all kinds of knowledge and skill that we study consistently, in terms of the effects that they produce’, ⁵ including our own into the bargain. This is important in the context of flooding, in which controversies often centre on discrepancies between the first-hand experience of flood events and the vernacular knowledge accumulated in affected localities, and the flood science that informs ‘evidence-based’ flood risk management.

A second feature of Stengers’ experimental ethos that we sought to put to work was her emphasis on articulating those ‘things which force thought’ in/as minoritarian political practices. Where the dominant logic of public participation methodologies is the claimed empowerment of local people, the logic here is what Annemarie Mol (1999) would call ‘ontological’. For Stengers (2010) this means empowering ‘the situation’ to ‘force thought’ in those affected by it and, thereby, intensify public scrutiny sufficiently to ‘slow down’ the reasoning of established experts and open up the possibility of reasoning differently. The primary knowledge practice on which the technical arrangements and institutional procedures of flood risk management rely is mathematical modelling, a computer-mediated exercise in predicting future (unknown) events from projections of observed (known) events and estimating the return period of a flood event of a specified magnitude. As modellers would be the first to acknowledge, the knowledge claims advanced through predictive modelling are necessarily provisional and uncertain. However, such scientific circumspection commonly becomes dulled in the translation of these models into the ‘evidence-base’ on which the government agencies responsible for flood risk management rely, thereby rendering them immune to public interrogation.

Translating these two features of Stengers’ experimental ethos into research practice, we trialled an experimental research apparatus – the Competency Group (CG) ⁶ – as part of a research project interrogating the knowledge controversies associated with flood risk science and management in the UK funded by the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme. ⁷ It involved the natural and social scientists in the RELU project team collaborating with residents affected by flooding in two localities in which flood risk management was already a matter of concern and public contestation. In the Pickering case, group membership comprised two hydraulic modellers and three social scientists (‘university’ members, of which I was one), and eight volunteer residents (‘local’ members) from the town and upstream catchment, supported by a dedicated facilitator and a camcorder operator from the project team.

Our collaboration centred on bi-monthly meetings, supplemented by a variety of other activities that emerged in the course of the group’s work, including field visits, archival research and video recording. These activities were further supported by a password-restricted website hosting a resource depository for materials generated by group members (e.g. maps, transcripts, photos, newspaper cuttings, policy documents, etc.) and a group blog. The working practice of CGs centres on ‘slowing down’ reasoning. In the case of the CG in Pickering, this slowing down applied to each others’ reasoning among members of the group as well as to that of the local Environment Agency (EA) in order to collectively interrogate explanations for, and solutions to, flooding in the locality that were circulating in the controversy and/or brought to the table. One of the primary means of achieving this slowing down of reasoning was to work with various materials and artefacts that served to mediate or objectify the knowledge claims and practices of different members of the group and those informing local flood management – from photos and video footage to computer models and policy documents brought and/or produced by group members. This emphasis on the objectification of knowledge claims and practices served two other purposes also. First, it was a means of ‘putting at risk’, in Stengers’ terms, the knowledge practices of university as well as local members of the group, perhaps most obviously those of the hydrological modellers. Second, it was a means of enabling the collective knowledge claims and practices of the CG to travel beyond the time and place of group activity, notably in visualization devices such as maps and computer models of local flooding.

As one of the five university members of the group I experienced first-hand working with various objectifications of knowledge about flooding, artefacts which mediated the collaborative interrogation of expert knowledge and experimentation with alternatives that became pivotal to the emergent practices and identity of the CG. Most striking from the off was its effect on reconfiguring flooding expertise amongst group members. Working with brought objects (such as maps, photos, satellite images and even a remnant piece of mouldy carpet) served to situate each member’s attachments to the event of flooding. A common thread in these attachments among local members was their visceral character, such that the affective qualities of flooding stayed with them, whether in terms of the alarming noise ‘of the roaring waters’ (MP), the lingering smell ‘when you go in someone’s house after it has gone’ (BG) or the frightening impression of floodwaters at night ‘just moving … moving really quietly, but threateningly’ (BG, 11/09/2007). This activity also helped to dissociate the university members from the normal networks constitutive of their authority and highlighted the ways in which all knowledge claims rely on the witness of objects. What became evident through this ‘brought object’ exercise was an appreciation of living in a landscape in which flooding has long been a familiar feature. As one of the oldest local members of the group, recalling her girlhood in the town, observed: ‘I remember flooding, or the threat of flooding, being an annual occurrence in winter times. It was expected and you just lived with it’ (BG, 11/09/2007).

One such object was a photograph of the 1932 floods in Pickering. It sparked a conversation among ‘local’ group members about the dilemmas of living with the inevitability of flooding in a town built at the bottom of a valley with the ‘beck’ (river) flowing through it. The question with which local residents wrestled, then, was ‘that [if] it has always happened [….] why do we have so much problem with it, when we know it is going to happen?’ (MP, 11/09/2007). What became equally clear during the course of this first CG meeting was that both this landscape and the town’s susceptibility to flooding were apprehended as co-fabrications of weather, geology and human land use time out of mind. On the one hand:

water is so pervasive. It gets in everywhere, it flows in, and you sort of treat it as something that does flow, that sometimes people don’t appreciate that that flow can have such force [except] when you see one of the major floods […] when it literally tears down a bridge. (MP, 11/09/2007)

At the second meeting we began by working with printouts of the EA’s indicative flood maps of the 2007 event as a means of translating individual experiences into composite knowledge of the pace and pattern of flooding. Such maps, as one of the ‘university’ members noted, ‘have been generated by the Environment Agency using models. They are not actual measurements of where the water actually goes. They are where they think the water goes, using models’ (SNL, 06/11/2007). Local members shared their recollections of flooding in the town back to the 1940s and set about modifying the official map of the most recent floods from their experiences and observations on the ground. The point of the exercise, as one of the local members put it afterwards, was to get a feel for the:

difference between … the character of this knowledge [the EA map] [which] is computer generated and is a kind of abstract amalgamation of things … [and] the documentary data that we have been pooling, that is kind of anecdotal and some of that is accurate … but, there is a different kind of error … that is human error as opposed to mathematical error …  So, maybe, if we are looking at trying to get truth or reality or something like that about flooding [we have to] acknowledge that there are going to be those sources of errors whichever system we use. (DQ, 06/11/2007)

On this imperfect basis, these amended mappings informed our collective efforts to interrogate the expert models that held sway, and the proposed flood wall which they had authorized, and to engage in modelling for ourselves as a means of trying out different forms of intervention suggested by individual group members. By the second meeting in Pickering the visceral experiences of local members of the recent flood event and frustrated dealings with flood risk experts had already charged our collective thinking with a urgent sense of wanting to ‘make a difference’ to the impasse on flood defences. The ensuing discussion gelled into a decision to give our research collaboration a public face – the Ryedale Flood Research Group (RFRG) that, from this point on, began to overtake the methodological principles that had guided its initiation. To produce something that would have an impact on the controversy in Pickering, the RFRG discussed the need for some means of making the collective knowledge claims of the group travel – an envoy that the EA (and other institutional actors) would have to take seriously or, at least, ‘could not dismiss easily’.

Over subsequent months our efforts became focused on producing a bespoke model of flooding in Pickering Beck which would enable others to follow our working practice of ‘trying out’ different flood mitigation ideas – dredging, removing in-stream vegetation and debris, reversing the 19th-century drainage ‘grips’ in the upper catchment, reclaiming the flood plain from farming, to name a few – and seeing what difference they made to the movement of water over the catchment landscape. This process of trial and error allied a form of vernacular physics with an experimental way of doing flood modelling informed by local knowledge (Odoni and Lane, 2010). Here, plumbing came to provide a practical vocabulary that enabled the group to build and test a bespoke model of flooding in Ryedale. As one local member put it, ‘you think about a gutter and how much can go through it and if it fills up it comes over the top. So if you have got half the size of gutter, it comes over the top more quickly … and if you put things in the way, and you make smaller bore pipes, it can’t flow’ (MP, 11/09/2007). The group’s collective modelling work led us to identify and propose an intervention not considered by the EA and dismissed by its consultants as ‘unviable’, namely upstream storage by means of a series of small obstructive structures or bunds. So it was that our envoy/proposition also acquired a shorthand name in the group – the ‘bund-model’.

Going public took the form of an exhibition in Pickering Civic Centre. The event was advertised in the local press and held on a Tuesday in October 2008, a few months after the group had ceased to meet regularly. Occupying a large ground floor space overlooking a flood-prone stretch of the river in question, the exhibition attracted some 200 visitors, including EA staff, local politicians and journalists. It was organized around a series of posters arranged to ‘walk’ visitors through the RFRG’s knowledge claims about the nature of flooding in Pickering, and culminating in our proposition of upstream storage by means of a series of small bunds. This was supplemented by a range of visual materials and visualization devices worked with and/or constructed by the RFRG to enable visitors to get some sense of the working practices that had produced the knowledge claims and propositions being presented, including the ‘bund-model’ running on a computer so that visitors could try it out for themselves (with the assistance of group members). The event garnered extensive local press and radio coverage, both of the proposition of ‘multiple small bunds upstream’ and the modelling work that had produced it, of the group’s ‘experimental’ redistribution of expertise (see Whatmore and Landström, 2011 for more details).

Conclusions

Environmental knowledge controversies refer to those events in which an environmental disturbance of some kind forces people to notice the unexamined stuff on which they rely as the material fabric of their everyday lives, and attend to its powers and effects. In such moments the ontological settlement that divides the social from the natural, and which expert environmental management practices assume and perpetuate, loses its grip. In these conditions, such expertise and its various socio-technical intermediaries come under intensified scrutiny by those sufficiently affected by the matter at issue to want to participate in mapping it into knowledge and, thus, in its social ordering. In places in which learning to ‘live with’ environmental disturbances like flooding is a force of habit informed by individual experiences and communal memories, neither explanation nor comfort is to be found in a purified nature when the ‘us’ is situated in a long settled landscape in which both the past and prospective legacy of more-than-human inhabitation is unavoidable.

The experimental research collaboration outlined here suggests that for techno-scientific controversies to be generative of new political and technical possibilities particular kinds of experimental practice capable of achieving a redistribution of expertise are required. In the case of the Pickering flood controversy it was the CG experiment which engendered a shift in the terms of the controversy, first through the knowledge practices of the group itself and, subsequently, through the public mediations of the bund-model in which its knowledge claims and practices became objectified. The process of ‘going public’ – which saw the CG metamorphose into the RFRG and exhibit its work in the Civic Centre – was a critical component in this re-articulation of the problem at issue, amplified by the local media. Only as a knowledge controversy did flooding become a generative event, in which expert reasoning was forced to ‘slow down’ and a space for reasoning differently opened up, involving those affected in new political opportunities and associations. Not until this point could something resembling a hybrid forum be said to emerge in Pickering, with the qualities of an ‘open space […] where groups can come together to discuss technical options involving the collective, hybrid because the groups involved and the spokespersons claiming to represent them are heterogeneous’ (Callon et al., 2011: 18). The bund-model has continued to travel long after the CG ceased to meet, exercising new knowledge polities through the RFRG’s proposition of ‘upstream storage’ (see Whatmore and Landström, 2011). The series of small bunds made out of vernacular materials that the RFRG proposed are even now being constructed in the upper catchment of Pickering Beck and Ryedale. How ironic, then, to find that as our proposition has gathered momentum and even national attention as an innovative approach to flood management, so too has it come to be characterized by the UK government department responsible for flood management policy – Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) – as a ‘natural approach to flood protection’. ⁸

I have argued here that working against the humanist grain in political theory returns us to the political potency of techno-science but one recharged and redistributed through an onto-political focus on the inventiveness of the political. Refigured as an eventful technogenesis, politics amplifies the matters that come to matter politically, and triggers new occasions and associations to band together and make a difference. Crucially, if originary technicity makes sense in these terms, it also makes sense to insist that nonhuman and technical objects are an irreducible part of all stories of the ‘becoming-being’ of the human, both individually and collectively, and that this could not be otherwise. I have tried to give some sense of the diversity of scholarship exploring this onto-political tack – in STS, political theory, anthropology and geography, among others. What they share in common is a commitment to an ontological or more-than-human conception of knowledge practices and knowledge polities; an interest in knowledge controversies as generative events in the socialization of scientific knowledge claims and technologies; and a demonstrable investment in research practices that redistribute expertise, including that of social scientists. In this, they put the onus of a more-than-human political ecology on inventive practices of conviviality, of living with or co-fabricating, in which all those (humans and nonhumans) enjoined in them can, and do, affect each other. ‘Learning to be affected’, or to ‘think response-ability’, pose important challenges for scholarly practice too, demanding experimentation in the research practices of the social sciences and humanities in terms of their involvement in the staging and conduct of new knowledge polities, media and devices in and through which techno-scientific objects can be rendered affective and amenable to effective interrogation.

While the proliferation and potency of nonhuman objects in social life today may indeed render questions concerning the ‘stuff’ of politics more intelligible than previously, it is also important to underline that asking these questions at the present juncture is not impelled solely by the kinds of techno-scientific or political inventiveness that I have described. Rather, it is also one that we might wish still to call ideological. The difficulties confronted in rising to this challenge should not be underestimated because humanism retains an extraordinarily powerful hold on the imaginative resources and analytical practices with which human life is/can be thought, which continue to trip up attempts to write against the grain. Most obvious, perhaps, is the stubborn attachment of scholarship – liberal and radical alike – to a humanism that finds ever new ways of positing the nonhuman as ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here’, at the very heart of human becoming, and to a liberalism that continues to posit intention and action as attributes of autonomous individuals, rather than locating individuals and their capacities in relation to political ecologies that condition the individuation of singular things. This reinforces the onus on inventiveness that I have associated with the onto-political charge of posthuman/ist styles of research and scholarship. Bruno Latour’s tough yardstick for such work is to evaluate the ‘contents of the world before and after the enquiry’ (Latour, 2004: 219).

The question we have to ask ourselves [he argues] is not whether we have accurately represented some pre-existing phenomena or entity but whether there is now a distance between the new repertoire of actions and the repertoire with which we started. (Latour, 2004: 219)