Skills for Heterogeneous Associations: The Whiteboys, Collective Experimentation, and Subaltern Political Ecologies

Abstract

Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature (2004, Harvard University Press) argues for a new ‘common sense’ for political ecology that disabuses it of any foundational grounding in nature. In this paper I interrogate Latour's project in relation to struggles that might be termed ‘subaltern political ecologies’. I argue that Latour's account of the political as bearing on the ‘progressive composition of the world’ offers insights for engaging with the inventiveness of subaltern political activity. I suggest that subaltern political ecologies offer both resources and challenges to the project of reworking the common sense of political ecology. To demonstrate this, I engage with the struggles against unequal social and material relations of the 18th-century Irish peasant movement, the Whiteboys. I follow the movement of their forms of political activity to London's dockside spaces. I suggest two skills that subaltern political ecologies ‘add’ to the politics of ‘heterogeneous associations’: the configuring of strategic arrangements of humans and nonhumans in antagonistic ways and the making of solidarities as ongoing interventions in the constitution of networks. This reworking of key political processes as active engagements in world-building activities seeks to foreground forms of political identity and agency which have often been marginalised, ignored, or dismissed.