Summary of Disassembling and Assembling Discourses

Western culture has decoupled nature from culture in successive moments that has created a binary. Different modes of governmentality have mobilised this discourse, ranging from godly warrant to legislated town planning. In the industrial age, society has been purified by banishing nature to the periphery, outside the citadels of human achievement. Upon returning to the cities, nature in the form of food products could be enjoyed by consumers, cleansed from the association of its lowly origins as enabled through the spatial separation between slaughterhouse and

supermarket. The Movement is an assemblage that problematises this binary and reframes Animal Agriculture as unnatural by highlighting its overflows. These overflows are critically represented as being a threat to the continued survivability of nature, in which society is a part of, rather than apart from. The Movement itself can be seen as an unintended overflow of conventional Animal

Agriculture, but the cultural practices of producing Synthetic Foods are offered as being better for and closer to nature, therefore the dualist hierarchy of culture dominating nature is destabilised.

Re-represented in this thesis are three discursive arguments from The Movement that decouple Animal Agriculture from being natural. The first and some say the most important target that works to bind many of The Movement’s actors together is a shared concern for Animal Welfare. Non- human animals are black boxed into a network that feeds Humanity via the convenience of a supermarket and the network of practices within Animal Agriculture becomes simplified. The Movement’s actors share a disciplined language by naming the outcome of this process ‘slaughter’, they tell stories about the unnatural cruelty of this slaughtering and produce their own

simplifications in the form of photographs which are said to represent the inhuman reality of ‘Factory Farming’ for non-human animals.

80 Next has been shown the ways in which The Movement co-opts discourses produced in other media such as film and combines these with officiously qualified statistics that problematises Animal Agriculture’s impact on nature’s water, forests and climate. These devices for governing thought can produce a ‘promotional public’ which adheres itself to the Assemblage on The Movement’s terms and proliferates the discourses that problematise the farming of animals for food. The third discourse to disassemble Animal Agriculture’s claim to naturalness is that of impacts to human health. Images and statistics combine again to command a rethink of what Factory Farming really is when The Movement explains the links between zoonotic disease spread, antibiotic resistance, heart health and faecal contamination of animal derived food. The coordinated, disciplined and shared weaponry of The Movement, attacks the ways in which Animal Agriculture can be thought about. The way in which the cultural production of Animal Agriculture has provided it an identity as the simplified deliverer of natural products and therefore natural in itself, is disrupted by The Movement’s problematising discourses which highlight its unnatural practices and anti-nature outcomes.

Among the crumbling ramparts of Animal Agriculture, The Movement seeks then to construct a new edifice, to assemble new frames that contain new practices of producing natural animal foods and this then is making a market for Synthetic Foods. The Assemblage translates and adheres actants to it, which sees this new Leviathan grow and be seen to grow in a way suitable to The Movement. Synthetic Foods are normalised through the display of relations among its sexy, young, smart and cool actors, celebrity investors, names that normalise and imaginings of how ‘Cellular Agriculture’ can be the antidote for the evils begat by Animal Agriculture. The market for Synthetic Foods is performed in part through productively enacting scale and the progress embodied by the stories of

Perfect Day’s growth, Cultured Meat’s efficiency increases and New Harvest’s ballooning support. This assemblage portrays a swarm like becoming of Synthetic Foods that foreshadows an offer for an

inevitably disruptive technology. This black boxing of foods future, auto-enrols the non-human, as an actor that is stably translated for working on behalf of the Assemblage. However, the non-human has agency, nature can boomerang back and therefore the black boxes that are said to contain compliant non-humans are always precarious. Perhaps even a provisionally stable Assemblage may be enough to make a market for Synthetic Foods, a new frame created from the overflows of Animal Agriculture like a Phoenix that burns down its enemy’s house and triumphantly arises from the ashes.

81 The Movement is a social and cultural construct as demonstrated by the cooperative nature of actors’ relations in solving the problem of ‘Factory Farming’. Traditional economics may explain the becoming of this market differently through various theories on innovation, but to limit the analysis to economic drivers misses the bulk of the explanatory work. The Movement makes a spectacle of their own cultural drivers such as animal welfare, improving the natural environment and human health at the same time as exposing how unnatural cultural practices, are always and have always been, integral to the economic performance of Animal Agriculture. In a market such as this, when culture shifts, economies must come along too as they are imbricated and associated

heterogeneously.