Disentangling Waterworlds: The role of ‘agential cuts’ and ‘method assemblages’ in ontological politics – an example from Loweswater,the English Lake District

Introduction

In 2020, the UK's Environment Agency announced that all English rivers had failed to achieve ‘good chemical status’ as defined under the European Union Water Framework Directive and were heavily polluted (Laville, 2020). Held responsible for this state of affairs were profit-seeking privatized water and sewerage companies, who in 2021 alone, had discharged raw sewage into watercourses in England over 372,000 times (Laville, 2022). Failures in regulatory arrangements for monitoring, governance and law enforcement were identified as contributing factors to why they got away with it (HoC Environmental Audit Committee, 2022). Globally, water quality is declining at an alarming rate despite the ever-increasing number of procedures, regulations, scientific standards, laws, policies and prescribed practices put into place to safeguard this life-sustaining element (Damania et al., 2019).

To better understand why this is the case and grasp the multidimensionality of ‘waterworlds’ (Hastrup and Hastrup, 2017), different approaches have been developed in recent years under what are collectively referred to as ‘critical water studies’ (Mallinga, 2019). ‘Sociohydrology’ is one such approach. It considers human–water relations holistically and inclusively and foregrounds socio-cultural and socio-political dimensions that technocratic approaches tend to ignore. Sociohydrology looks at ‘both short-term and long-term consequences of shifts in water governance’, like those mentioned above in relation to the privatization of water in England (Di Baldassarre et al., 2019: 6330). Power relations, cultural beliefs, cognitive biases and trust are all key concerns here. Some socio-hydrology scholars have also become interested in the nonhuman dimensions of waterworlds and in how to account for water as ‘not wholly passive, inert or defined by utility but an agent in a network of agents’ (Smith, 2017: 100). Inspirational here has been Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Callon, 1984, Latour, 1988, 1993, 2004, 2005; Law, 1991; Mol, 1999), which conceives of nonhuman agents as ‘actants’ that modify ‘other actors through a series of actions’ (Latour, 2004: 75). Also inspired by ANT but bringing in insights from process philosophy, dialectics and political ecology has been work carried out under the ‘waterscape’ perspective, among others (Karpouzoglou and Vij, 2017). An early example here was Swyngedouw's (1999) study of the urbanization of water in Ecuador, where he characterized water as a ‘restless hybrid’ that circulates through a ‘cyborg world’ where nature and society jointly co-produce ‘socionatures’.

In recent years, the primacy of matter in human–water relations has moved even further into the spotlight with the advent of ‘new materialism’ (Barad, 2007, 2010; Bennett, 2009; de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; de Landa, 1997, 2002; Harman, 2009). In spite of differences in philosophy and approach, ANT and new materialism both share a commitment to going beyond understanding matter as a uniform, inert substance or a socially constructed fact, instead affirming its agentic force, processual nature, formative impetus and self-organizing capacity. In this article, written for the Special Issue (SI) on ‘Water Matters’, I would like to introduce an approach to tackling water pollution developed in Loweswater, the English Lake District, between 2007 and 2010 that was informed by both ANT and new materialism. It was pioneered by a participatory action group called the Loweswater Care Project (hereafter LCP), of which I was a member, to grapple with potentially toxic blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) and came to be referred to as ‘intra-active collective politics’ (Tsouvalis and Waterton, 2012; Waterton and Tsouvalis, 2015). Using the LCP as a case study, this paper will provide an empirically grounded response to two of the questions asked by the editors of this SI in their call for contributions: ‘how could we acknowledge the agency of water in our political ecologies?’ and ‘how could such an approach foster the composition of a better world of more balanced human interactions with the environment?’ (Smith, 2017: 102). Before responding to these questions, however, a few words about the LCP and how it came to embrace the philosophical ideas that informed its approach to water pollution are essential.

The LCP was formed in 2007 to investigate why cyanobacteria had become such a powerful player in Loweswater, a small lake situated near a hamlet of the same name, and what could be done to change this (relevant information about the events leading up to the formation of the LCP are provided in the ‘Context and Background’ section below). The LCP was the key element of a research project funded by the United Kingdom's Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU), led by researchers based at Lancaster University. In the grant proposal for the project, the LCP had been envisaged as a ‘new collective’ as defined by Latour (2004): an association of humans and nonhumans that comes together in the name of a matter of concern (in this case, blue-green algae) to grapple with it in order to compose a better common world, a world where that matter no longer causes such concern and controversy. A ‘common world’ can therefore be described as an assemblage ‘of contradictory entities that have to be composed together’ (Latour, 2011: 7) to achieve their harmonious co-existence.

Latour's call for the need for new collectives is rooted in his his long-standing critique of ‘Science’, where the capital ‘S’ implies the dominant, taken-for-granted and official view of scientific knowledge as an objective, value-free and neutral form of knowledge. Still today, Science is widely regarded as delivering incontrovertible ‘facts’ ready for use by politics or policy. As the beacon of the Enlightenment, Science evolved based on dichotomous ways of ordering the world, separating Nature from Society, Subject from Object, Reason from Emotion, and Human from Nonhuman. According to Swyngedouw (1999: 14), the problem with binarization was that once it became hegemonic, it was no longer just a dominant epistemology but turned into a dominant ontology, the view that the world actually was ontologically divided into ‘things natural and things social’. Consequently, Nature came to be understood as a unity existing outside of and separate from Society, accessible only through Science, through which it could be fully known and represented. Due to Science downplaying and side-lining other ways of knowing and relating to the world, it has had far-reaching depoliticizing effects (Tsouvalis, 2016, 2019).

Since the 1970s, ANT scholars have worked hard to debunk the ideology of Science (Callon, 1984; Latour and Woolgar, 1979). Their studies have shown that ‘the world’ is not ‘a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms’ (Latour, 2007: 245). What Latour means here is that scientific ‘facts’ are fabricated; that they are skillfully crafted in laboratories, at conferences, through peer review- and other processes. During these ‘trials of force’, as Latour calls them, and as a result of the forging of alliances between humans and nonhumans (actants), ‘facts’ gain weight or reality, allowing them to become ‘reliable witnesses’ in politics and policy (Latour, 2004: 75). Science obscures this, leaving us only with the ‘facts’, facts that we commonly mistake for reality per se, a reality separate and distinct from Society. In that way, Science alienates us from the multiple, dispersed agencies involved in the making of the world and in the making of matters of concern. This makes tackling matters like climate change, species extinctions, biodiversity loss, water pollution and the like difficult. In what is by now a classic STS text, We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour both illustrated and contested how nonhumans have historically been conceptualized, institutionalized and represented through the constitutional form and associated juridical system characteristic of Modernity (Latour, 1993). Concerning human–water relations, for example, Science underpins what Linton (2014) has referred to as ‘Modern water’ – a hegemonic way of knowing and relating to water embodied in particular forms of hydrological expertise that conceive of water chiefly as a ‘resource’ that needs to be ‘managed’. A decade later, Latour elaborated on what needs to be done to change this in The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004). He suggested that the Modern constitution that gave rise to Science is too exclusive as it is open only to humans with specific qualifications and forms of expertise. Nonhumans are excluded from this constitution and its political- and decision-making arenas, which they can only enter as incontestable ‘facts’: representations of Nature provided by Science (Latour, 2004). To change this, Latour proposed that we replace the Modern constitution with an ‘object-orientated democracy’, a democracy where objects have equal rights of expression and representation; where they play an active part in ‘a democratic republic of heterogeneous associations’ (Latour, 2005: 4). ‘New collectives’ are essential to bringing such a republic about. It is through these collectives that matter can be brought back into politics, resulting in what Latour refers to as Dingpolitik or ‘thing politics’ (Latour, 2004: 4). Dingpolitik does not rely on better, more accurate representations of the world ‘out there’ to tackle the problems faced by Society. Rather, it is concerned with changing how the world is configured. In other words, Dingpolitik is an ontological struggle (Hinchliffe et al., 2007), a struggle referred to by Stengers (2001; 2010) as ‘Cosmopolitics’ and by Waterton and Tsouvalis (2015) as ‘intra-active collective politics’. The latter notion brings me to the concept of ‘intra-action’, which comes from another theory that informed the LCP's approach to blue-green algae in Loweswater: Karen Barad's agential realism (Barad, 2007, 2014).

Agential realism affirms the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies. It holds that phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction but emerge through intra-action, meaning that everything is part of a ‘mutual constitution of always already entangled agencies’ (Barad, 2007: 33; emphasis added). It is, therefore, impossible for humans to act as neutral, detached, objective observers as Science would have it, looking in on ‘the world’ from the outside. Intra-action and the dynamism of matter are generative ‘not merely in the sense of bringing new things into the world but in the sense of bringing forth new worlds’; they drive the ‘ongoing reconfiguring of the world’ (Barad, 2007: 170).

The LCP provides the first example where a conscious decision was taken to put these complex philosophical ideas into practice as far as I am aware. To reach this decision considerable preparatory work was needed as researchers had to familiarize potential LCP participants with these complex ideas. The LCP was a heterogeneous, transdisciplinary group made up of local residents with diverse backgrounds and professions, farmers, business owners, ecologists, limnologists, sociologists, geographers, agronomists, Government- and NGO representatives and others. It was open to everyone. All local participants were concerned about what they commonly called ‘the algae problem’. They wanted to be part of the LCP because they were worried about the impacts of the algae on the ecology, on social relations, and on the survival of the local community, which was heavily dependent on tourism income; as one resident explained, ‘who would want to come to see a dead lake?’ Most future participants initially expected that the researchers from Lancaster University were here to ‘solve’ ‘the algae problem’ through Modern Science. After several initial meetings (some of them held in a local pub before the LCP was established), where the researchers explained that ‘the algae problem’ could not be solved in this way and that a different approach was needed to tackle it, there was sufficient support for this ontological experiment to go ahead. One of the first things the LCP did as a collective was to jointly agree on some key principles of Latour's work (2004) that they wanted to adopt, including that:

understandings of nature are not self-evident;

Another decision LCP participants took early on was that the aims of the group would be to:

work collectively to identify and address catchment-level problems inclusively and openly;

The number of ‘things’ LCP participants wanted to explore in connection with ‘the algae problem’ increased over time as the complex intra-actions of these ‘things’ with other ‘things’ became apparent. For example, concerning maintenance issues, questions initially directed at leaf litter ending up in river channels and blocking them because they were no longer dredged (see below) soon led to questions about other ‘things’ finding their way into the lake, such as phosphorus (P) from leaking septic tanks (contained in, for example, faeces, dishwasher tablets and detergents). The feeling that fish numbers in the lake had declined because of the algae – backed up by stories of how plentiful fish had been in Loweswater in the past – led to research that established several new and unexpected connections. Firstly, apart from the algae, an unusually large number of phantom midge (Chaoborus) had made Loweswater their home, and it was likely that they were competing with the fish for food, thereby reducing their numbers. Secondly, the lake had been aggressively stocked with certain types of fish by the Victorians and, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by the National Trust. This raised questions about how ‘natural’ the number of fish present in Loweswater that local people still remembered had been, and whether ‘the algae problem’ could indeed be held responsible for their decline (Tsouvalis et al., 2012).

Many papers have been written about the LCP and its findings and achievements (e.g. Norton et al., 2012; Tsouvalis and Waterton, 2012; Tsouvalis et al., 2012; Watson et al., 2009; Waterton and Tsouvalis, 2015, 2016; Waterton et al., 2015) and it is not my intention to repeat them here. In this article, I want to probe more deeply into a question that has not been previously explored but is highly relevant to this SI on ‘Water Matters’. This question is how did the LCP put ontological politics into practice? More specifically, how did it unravel algae ontologically and how did it find actants that were intra-acting with cyanobacteria? In response to the first question, the short answer is that it performed what Barad (2007) calls ‘agential cuts’. In response to the second, it mobilized what Law (2004) calls a ‘method assemblage’. Both of these notions are explained in detail in the next section. After that, some essential background information is provided about Loweswater, followed by two sections analysing how specific elements of the LCP's method assemblage figured in its intra-active collective politics with algae (scientific modelling and a hydro-geomorphology survey), and finally, the Conclusions. Here, I elaborate on the issue of ‘care’ and discuss a number of ethical issues raised by ontological politics. These need yet to be fully answered. This article aims to significantly contribute to the fields of new materialism and Science and Technology Studies (STS) by providing insights into what doing ontological politics entails based on concrete empirical examples. As already mentioned, it responds to two key questions this SI addresses: ‘how to account for the materiality of water’, and ‘how to grasp the multiple and dispersed human and nonhuman agencies that co-constitute waterworlds’.

Performing agential cuts through a method assemblage: Crafting ‘realities’ for ontological politics

As noted above, agential realism holds that everything is entangled with everything else and that matter is inherently inseparable. This poses a conundrum for ontological politics, which is aimed at composing a better common world. In order to compose, reconstitute or rearrange a matter for the better requires understanding the kind of intra-actions and trials of force that have made ‘it’ a matter of concern in the first place. This can only be done by disentangling ‘it’ from other matters, but how? Barad (2007: 348) offers us a solution: by making ‘agential cuts’ in reality. She defines agential cuts as the result of any act of observation that separates, objectifies and imposes boundaries, thereby providing ‘a contingent resolution of the ontological inseparability within the phenomenon …’ (Barad, 2007: 348). Considering what Latour and other STS scholars have taught us about the fabrication of 'facts', I suggest that this can only be done by mobilizing what Law (2004) calls a ‘method assemblage’. A ‘method assemblage’ is ‘the enactment or crafting of ramifying relations that generates presence, manifest absence and Otherness, where it is the crafting of presence that distinguishes it as a method assemblage’ (Law, 2004: 42).

The idea that presence is crafted through a method assemblage serves as a reminder that Reality is not ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered and represented through Science. Rather, realities are made ‘in-here’, as Law puts it, within specific disciplines, through specific, tried and tested methods, through the use of previously crafted reality statements that have survived trials of force. The ‘in-here’ or ‘hinterland’ as Law also calls it, influences how we approach the world and the questions we ask about it. In the process of crafting and re-crafting realities, a method assemblage

creates new versions of the world. It makes new signals and new resonances, new manifestations and new concealments, and it does so continuously. Enactments and the realities that they [method assemblages] produce […] are made and remade. This means that they can, at least in principle, be remade in other ways. (Law, 2004: 143)

This is how method assemblages and the agential cuts they perform open-up possibilities for intra-active collective politics. They present us – by making present – with the inter-agentivity and vibrancy of matter (Bennett, 2009), giving us opportunities to intra-act in other ways. However, while method assemblages define ‘an overall geography – a topography of reality-possibilities’ (Law, 2004: 34) by rendering certain classes of realities and reality-statements as thinkable and real, they also render others as ‘less thinkable and less real [or] completely unthinkable and completely unreal’ (ibid: 33). Therefore, as certain realities are made present, other, related ones, are ‘simultaneously being made absent, pushed from view’; indeed, for Law, ‘presence is impossible without absence’ (ibid: 149). Before providing the reader with examples to illustrate these ideas and to show how the LCP's method assemblage figured in its ontological politics with algae, a few words about Loweswater and the history of the LCP follow.

Context and background

In this section, I briefly introduce Loweswater and the matter of concern of blue-green algae that led to the formation of the LCP. In 2007, around 45 permanent residents lived in Loweswater and there were eight farms with land in the catchment (compared to 22 in 1941; Bennion and Winchester, 2010). All farms had high-quality fertilized, intensively used grassland, and kept some livestock (sheep, ewes, cattle and horses). For tourists, there was a camping barn, a B&B, a hotel and a holiday cottage. Loweswater is a rather small and shallow lake, measuring only 0.6 km² in area. It is 16 m deep at its deepest point. The area of land bounded by watersheds draining into the lake – the ‘catchment’ – measures roughly 7.6 km². Many streams, locally known as ‘becks’, feed into Loweswater, passing on their way to the lake through mixed lowland and upland (partially wooded) land with steep-sided valleys to the north-east and south-west and gently sloping or level fields at either end of the lake. Loweswater is the only Lake District lake that does not drain towards the sea but into another lake, Crummock Water. It has a slow turnover time, retaining water for around 150–200 days (Grasmere, which is of a similar size, retains water for only 30 days). This tempo creates favourable conditions for the algae that live in Loweswater and flourish in its nutrient- and mineral-enriched water – Loweswater has been classified as ‘eutrophic’ (Maberly et al., 2006).

Algae are tiny organisms of extraordinary species variety, with estimates ranging from 30,000 to over one million different species worldwide. Loweswater's algae are cyanobacteria, a form of bacteria, as their name implies. From the late 1990s onwards, algal ‘blooms’ began to frequently occur in Loweswater, the result of millions of these tiny organisms rapidly reproducing and rising to the surface, literally turning the water into a pea-green soup (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Algal bloom in Loweswater, February 2008. Picture taken by the author.

Algal blooms can be dangerous, for occasionally when the algae die, they release toxins fatal to mammals (Codd, 2000). Algae can also be deadly to other organisms when alive as they consume oxygen, and when present in great numbers, can suffocate other aquatic lifeforms such as fish (Tsouvalis et al., 2012). Hence the fear of local people to end up with a ‘dead lake’. Gradually, the abundance of algae and their regular and frequent blooms became a matter of concern for the community and regulatory agencies. Latour notes that a matter of concern brings ‘people together because it divides them’ (Latour, 2005: 13), and this is exactly what happened in Lowswater when people began to ask: who is to blame for this state of affairs?

In early 2000, there was an uncontested understanding at play in Loweswater that phosphorus (P) was the main nutrient controlling phytoplankton production and that any P entering the lake was rapidly incorporated into algal biomass (Maberly et al., 2006; Norton et al., 2011). Evidence from a lake sediment core taken in 2000 was taken to indicate that raised P levels in the lake had resulted from anthropogenic sources with an emphasis on farming practices: nutrient applications to fields (fertilisers, manures etc.), pesticide usage and the inappropriate storage of animal feed or waste (Bennion et al., 2000; Haygarth, 2005; Heathwaite and Johnes, 1996). In 2001, on the initiative of a local farmer, farmers in the catchment established the Loweswater Improvement Project (LIP) to address ‘the algae problem’. They worried about the lake and the tensions the algae had caused, and they feared the repercussions from agencies with responsibilities for pollution in the area. Despite the lake's relatively small size, its governance arrangements are complex. Although farmers make the key decisions regarding land use, they do so in the context of national and international policies, regulatory frameworks and incentives of several large public and charitable organizations (including the Lake District National Park Authority (LDNPA), the Environment Agency (EA), Natural England (NE) and the National Trust (NT)) (who owns the lakebed of Loweswater and a proportion of the surrounding land (Watson et al., 2009)).

The LIPs history and its activities have been discussed by Waterton et al. (2006). Noteworthy here is that the LIP teamed up with ecologists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) at Lancaster and, between 2001 and 2004, tested soil nutrient levels, created buffer zones of semi-natural vegetation, re-routed waste waters through farmyards, and installed new septic tanks and wastewater systems on some properties adjacent to the lake. In 2004, Lancaster University with funding from RELU explored and confirmed the benefits of expanding the LIP to include local residents, institutional stakeholders and others concerned about the lake (Waterton et al., 2006). A larger grant from RELU in 2007 enabled the LCP to form.

Below, I critically examine the role of the LCP's method assemblage in its ontological politics, starting with scientific modelling. Scientific modelling was undertaken to grasp intra-actions of land use and algal growth. This example highlights the complexity of this method and the considerable hinterland it relies on to perform agential cuts. It also explores the ‘made’ nature of models, their relationship to the ‘real world’; and their role in the crafting of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ through a qualitative interview conducted by the author with one of the scientists involved in the modelling process, a limnologist.

Land use change and algal blooms: Performing agential cuts through scientific modelling

The purpose of scientific modelling is to understand, define, visualise or simulate real-world processes and events. Scientific models can be defined as inscription devices that enable the transformation of material substances and processes into visual displays like figures and diagrams (Latour and Woolgar, 1979). Accordingly, models have material-discursive dimensions. They produce determinate meanings and material beings while simultaneously excluding the production of others (Barad, 2007). Models also have histories. They are the product of complex trials of force, processes of making and remaking, and rich hinterlands of realities (Law, 2004). In order for them to work, they require the input of previously crafted data that is relevant to the questions at hand, in this case: ‘how are land use and algal growth in Loweswater connected?’ ‘How much phosphorus ends up in the lake from the land?’

Phosphorus (P) has long been known to play a key role in algal growth and eutrophication. P is a chemical element found on Earth in numerous compound forms and locations, for example, as phosphate ion (PO₄³⁻) it is present in water, soil and sediments. P is the second most abundant and essential element in the body of mammals after calcium, primarily found in their bones and teeth. It is also present in their excrement, and leaves their bodies after they die, finding its way back into the earth. P in soil is often in short supply and because it is essential to plant growth, many farmers apply P fertiliser on their land to increase yields. Surplus P can find its way into rivers, lakes and oceans from land, where it can be incorporated into the sediment, stored internally and recycled. This is the case in Loweswater (Reynolds and Davies, 2001), meaning that even if external sources of P are controlled here, P pollution in the lake will continue. To better understand the complex intra-actions of land use and water quality in Loweswater, the LCP asked a professional aquatic ecology team to monitor and model them. Making their models work required many different types of data, including

data on land cover and associated land uses;

How did scientists describe the making of agential cuts through scientific modelling? What did they see as the purpose of modelling? I explored these questions with a limnologist from the aquatic monitoring team, first asking him what he thought about the relationship of models to the real world. He explained that a model

is not meant to represent the real world, it's meant to be a simplification of the real world, but the simplification is meant to be such that it's cutting out the stuff that we don’t have to know about. (L/2009; emphasis added)

It is interesting to note here that the limnologist uses the same term to describe how models simplify the real world that Barad uses to explain the purpose of ‘observation’ – to ‘cut out’ stuff (or make ‘agential cuts’). By ‘cutting out stuff,’ ‘realities’ are crafted and severed from the seamless fabric of the Universe. However, how do scientists know what ‘stuff’ they ‘don’t have to know about’, as the limnologist put it? They rely on their hinterland, on realities previously made through trials of force and associations forged between humans and nonhumans. This hinterland provides them with information about which ‘things’ carry weight in their discipline, and which ones do not. An example that illustrates this hinterland was provided when the limnologist described the development of one of the three models, the PROTEC model, which, according to him, ‘kind of encapsulated the brain and understanding of [name of the inventor of the model] on how algae grow in lakes’ (L/2009).

The role models play in the crafting of realities became even more apparent when I probed more deeply into their purpose during the interview. The limnologist explained that while they could help

uncover things that we don’t understand as well as we thought we did, they also highlight gaps which then feed back into your knowledge […]; things that you hadn’t thought about before because they hadn’t surfaced. (L/2009; emphasis added).

Here, again, we are reminded that ‘scientific reality’ must not be mistaken for reality per se; that there is no ‘unity’ that we have access to as Science makes us believe (Latour, 2004). Stengers defines scientific reality as the ‘selective grasping of those aspects of reality that seem relevant to the issue at hand’ (Stengers, 2002: 261). This is why ‘searching’ is such an important element of scientific activity, and even the failure to find what one is looking for – or to find the wrong ‘thing’ – can be inspirational. This is why ‘being wrong’ about some ‘thing’ is highly valued by scientists. For the limnologist interviewed, ‘being wrong is the biggest breakthrough’,

the best thing about being a scientist because that gives you a new perspective. If you’re […] wrong during an experiment […] that is telling you something […] If [being wrong] gave you an unexpected answer, the unexpected answer is the gold dust that you are looking for. It can give you a new perspective on how things work. (L/2009; emphasis added)

Finding ‘gold dust’ and gaining a ‘new perspective on how things work’ is the pinnacle of scientific activity. It produces ‘a new and reliable link with the world [and] the creation of such a link is always an event, something they [scientists] hope for but cannot master or decide’ (Stengers, 2002: 261). In the next section, I explore what happened when LCP participants were confronted with unexpected new links, and how these links or realities figured in their intra-active collective politics with algae. This section brings us into contact with deep-time and Loweswater's ancient fabric, which matter in Loweswater to this day. The hydro-geomorphology survey of the catchment was the element of the method assemblage used to establish these new links and craft these new realities.

Deep-time and the mighty force of High Nook

‘Catchments’ or ‘watersheds’, as their name suggests, collect and drain rainwater. Water is co-constitutive of many modes of coexistence and figures in innumerable processes. Water can take on gaseous, liquid and solid forms and is essential to the survival of all living organisms. In catchments, water sustains life and co-produces landscapes by contributing to rock weathering, soil erosion and landslides. Sometimes, there is too much of it, resulting in waterlogged soil and flooding. Sometimes, there is too little, resulting in a draught. Many questions were asked by LCP participants about these different dimensions of water and how water ‘management’ figured in ‘the algae problem’.

A common hypothesis of local residents was that because the Environment Agency (EA) no longer dredged the outlet of the lake, Dub Beck, it had become clogged up with sediment, leaves and debris, making it difficult for water to exit the lake. In an interview conducted in 2008, the EA confirmed that Dub Beck was no longer dredged ‘on financial grounds’, and that this had become ‘a bone of contention with the farming community’ (EA/2008). At a meeting in 2008, the LCP decided to find out more about this issue. A small research project was commissioned by the LCP, which was paid for by the RELU grant and carried out by a hydro-geomorphology consultant, Nick Haycock, and the owners of the lakebed, the National Trust.

Hydro-geomorphology is an ‘interdisciplinary science that focuses on the interaction and linkage of hydrologic processes with landforms or earth materials and the interaction of geomorphic processes with surface and subsurface water in temporal and spatial dimensions’ (Sidle and Onda, 2004: 597). Haycock's remit was to investigate how the geology of Loweswater was connected to the flow and maintenance issues of the lake. He presented his findings to the LCP in 2010. Below, I use the transcript produced from Haycock's presentation (recorded with his permission; Haycock, 2010) to show what he discovered while walking

madly around the catchment to try and get my eye on things to do with water, things to do with the landscape, and how we think the uses of the landscape have been changed in the way that water is used and what the implications are for the lake. (Haycock, 2010)

Prominent in Haycock's method assemblage, therefore, was his ‘skilled vision’ (Grasseni, 2007) and hinterland, which he used to perform agential cuts. Let us join him on his walk around the waterworld of Loweswater.

Conclusions

In this article, I have tried to answer two questions asked by the editors of this SI on ‘Water Matters’: ‘how could we acknowledge the agency of water in our political ecologies?’ and ‘how could such an approach foster the composition of a better world of more balanced human interactions with the environment?’ (Smith, 2017: 102). To do so, I have provided two empirical examples from the LCP, a new collective that formed in Loweswater, the English Lake District, in 2007 in response to the matter of concern of blue-green algae. Through these examples, I have tried to show how ontological politics was put into practice here, and below, I outline some steps that were taken as a result of this slow form of politics to compose a better common world, one where algae are less dominant.

The approach developed by the LCP was informed by Latour's critique of Science and key principles from his work, and Barad's theory of agential realism. The latter, as explained, affirms the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies and holds that phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction but emerge through intra-action. In other words, agencies are always already entangled. I have argued that to disentangle them and put intra-active collective politics into practice requires the making of ‘agential cuts’ (Barad, 2007), and this, as I have shown, can be achieved through a ‘method assemblage’ (Law, 2004). The LCP's method assemblage enabled it ‘to enact and depict the shape-shifting implied in the interactions and interferences between different realities’ (Barad, 2007: 122) and obtain ‘a contingent resolution of the ontological inseparability within the phenomenon’ (Barad, 2007: 348) it was grappling with, namely blue-green algae. The specific elements of the LCPs method assemblage that I focused on in this article were the scientific modelling of land-use-water intra-actions and the hydro-geomorphology survey of the catchment.

Through the agential cuts performed and the realities crafted, LCP participants were able to intra-act with ever more actants that co-constituted ‘the algae problem’: rivers and river channels; sediment; rocks; soil; rain; sheep; excrement; phantom midges; past and present policies, regulations and water management practices; septic tanks; detergents; and more. Ontological politics as I have emphasised needs to be a slow form of politics. This tempo enabled LCP participants to get a feel for the algae and grasp its many different dimensions, multiple associations and the countless actants they intra-acted with. As a result, LCP participants realized that power and agency overflow the category of deliberating human subjects; that they course through collectives that include other entities, and through heterogeneous networks that extend beyond the present and into deep time (Clark and Yusoff, 2017).

Undertaking intra-active collective politics could be challenging for all LCP participants, but especially so for scientists, whose methods were critically examined and ‘facts’ questioned regularly. Collaborating with LCP participants who tried their hand at citizen science activities like water monitoring could also be demanding. However, such collaborations can be hugely beneficial for scientists and have been found to encourage them ‘not to judge away, as mere opinion, what is outside their boundaries’ (i.e. their hinterland; Stengers, 2002: 263). To find out whether this had been the case for scientists participating in the LCP, I asked the limnologist whom I interviewed how he had experienced working in the collaborative fashion of the LCP. He explained that the

RELU work is right at one end of what I do, it's right at the extreme. That's why I said to X once […] that I couldn’t cope with this because it's too difficult. (Stengers, 2002)

However, he felt that participating in the LCP had added something important to his work, although he was ‘not so sure how to get to grips with “it”’. When asked to elaborate on this, he described this ‘extra thing’ as ‘kind of unknown knowledge that so far science hasn’t really been able to know about or couldn’t make use of’. Law (2004) refers to this as ‘absent’ or ‘other’ knowledge. Like the LCP's limnologist, many local people too went out of their comfort zone as LCP participants. Some, as noted above, became ‘citizen scientists’. Others undertook interviews or conducted surveys to learn more about how local septic tanks were maintained or what detergents people used – both being key actants in Loweswater's waterworld. One study carried out by a local resident that shows just how broad the LCP's interests had become looked at the impact of tourism on the catchment and the local community (funding for six small research projects that LCP participants could apply for had been factored into the project's budget. For examples of work undertaken see the following reports: Bennion and Winchester, 2010; Davies and Clarke, 2010; Webb, 2010).

When feedback was collected from LCP participants in 2010 to find out more about what they thought the benefits of working in the ways the LCP had done had been, replies included that they had

revealed the complexity of problems of the lake, leading to the realisation that a solution for algal blooms may be difficult or even impossible (local resident, five meetings attended);

The word ‘care’ has appeared in all the names under which the participatory action group that started out as the LCP in 2007 has operated. Indeed, more care-ful human–water intra-actions have been its lasting legacy. According to Puig de la Bella Casa (2011: 87), ‘interests and other affectively animated forces – such as concern and care – are intimately entangled in the ongoing material remaking of the world’, and she suggests that we add the notion of ‘matters-of-care’ to our conceptual repertoire of ‘matter-of-concern’ and ‘matters-of-fact’ (the latter notion being used by Latour to describe the kind of ‘facts’ provided by Science). I agree with that. The formation of the LCP was motivated by ‘care’: care for the lake and the many lifeforms it supports; care for the people who live and make a living there; care for the broader environment of which this waterworld forms part, and care for many other ‘things’. This suggests that care is a key dimension of ontological politics directed at composing a better common world. This invites us to reflect on what this means for a point made earlier, namely that our knowledge and understanding of the world – of matter and how it matters in matters of concern – will always be incomplete. Vis-à-vis presence, there will always be absence and otherness, realities that have not yet been crafted and others that figure but can never be made present. In short, we will never fully grasp ‘the world’. We might try to ‘impose structures onto life and being’, but will inevitably find ‘that neither life, nor being, follow our designs’ (van de Port's, 2020: 28).

This raises some challenging ethical questions that scholars advocating ontological politics have yet to fully address. For example, for whom do we want to compose a better common world? Who does we stand for, and what does better mean in a given context? Ontological struggles inevitably produce winners and losers, and Loweswater is no exception here. If the measures taken by the LCP against algae are successful, algae numbers in Loweswater will decline, meaning that some of these organisms will die. As a result, other actants could gain force and increase in number, for example, fish. A large fish population could, in turn, adversely affect Loweswater's phantom midge population, and so on and so forth. Who the winners and who the losers are of ontological struggles is difficult to foresee, and because of that, notions like we, better and care need further critical attention. Perhaps the answers to these questions cannot be found solely through reasoning and logic but by following the intuition that better, for example, means forging associations and intra-actions that create a world where loss – and, therefore, suffering – is no longer the common denominator of matters of concern like biodiversity loss, species loss, habitat loss, loss of homes-, lives- and livelihoods. Surely, a better ‘common’ world is also one where not one group of actants dominates other actants to the detriment of all – whether they be humans, microbes, animals, plants or insects. Whitehead once observed that we live ‘in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures’ (Whitehead, 1978: 50). Ontological politics is about acknowledging this and making the world a better place together with them. It is about providing democratic spaces and processes where these fellow creatures can matter, where theirs as well as our voices can be heard. This demands humility on our part and a slow pace of proceeding, which will allow us to feel what is at stake and for whom, and to forge new connections that could have better outcomes for all.

Highlights

Authors’ note

Judith Tsouvalis is also affiliated at School of Computing and Communications, InfoLab21, South Dr, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4WA.