Ambiguity and ambivalence

So this is the art of allegory: it is to hold two or more things together that do not necessarily cohere. Wynne, writing in a different idiom but making a related point, says that:

Through their rationalist discourses, modern expert institutions and their ‘natural’ cultural responses to risks in the idiom of scientific risk manage- ment, tacitly and furtively impose prescriptive models of the human and the social upon lay people, and these are implicitly found wanting in human terms.

(Wynne 1996, 57)

His argument is that lay people both fall into line with these models and that they don’t. We might add that they both enact those models and they don’t. This, then, is the possibility opened up. Low-status people need to live in and enact two versions of reality – the official and the local – at the same time. Such is Wynne’s argument.

Vicky Singleton has made similar arguments about ambivalence. In her work she has explored the way in which health-care programmes often, perhaps usually, represent their aims and their successes in ways that are clear, singular, definite, and are said to follow from explicit policy. At least in public those responsible for the programmes usually craft a representation and a reality that is singular and definite. They say, for instance, that the UK cervical screening programme has successfully reduced women’s deaths from cervical cancer. However, Singleton also shows that at the same time there are other stories that represent and enact the programme in ways that are less definite, less coherent, more dispersed, and have relatively little to do with the direct application of policy. In other words, her argument is that ambivalence runs through the cervical screening programme.

For instance, it turns out that general practitioners simultaneously entertain doubts about the programme, and believe that it is good for women to be screened. Here are the interview words of a GP:

We do persuade women to have smears and, but [pause]... the evidence that smears have done a lot of good is not great in this country [pause]

... I don’t have any difficulty encouraging women to have a smear but I wouldn’t, pressure is something I would not like to exert on a woman.

(Singleton and Michael 1993, 258)

This is an ambivalence in words. The GP is awkwardly hinting at – and recognising – two realities. On the one hand there is a programme that reduces rates of the disease, and on the other hand there is one that does not. But such ambiguities and multiple realities abound. For instance, laboratory cytology is also said to be reliable, while at the same time it is taken to be uncertain.87

Now this is where some people can fall down because with the more florid cancers you may not get a positive result. There are ones that are missed and they were staring you in the face, because the smear, which wasn’t reliable under this technical set of circumstances, was negative. So the naked eye appearance is important.

(Singleton and Michael 1993, 243–244)

And these are just two of the ambiguities. Writing with Mike Michael, she argues that the screening programme ‘is rendered durable by the way that actors at once occupy the margins and the core, are the most outspoken critics and the most ardent stalwarts, are simultaneously insiders and outsiders’ (Singleton and Michael 1993, 232).

The argument is not that these oscillations and ambivalences are signs of bad faith. Perhaps there is sometimes bad faith, but something much more important is going on. Rather, Singleton is telling us that programmes such as these always harbour and enact conflicting practices and views. And then she is making a stronger claim too. This is that it is such oscillatory ambiva- lence that makes them possible and more or less successful in the first place.88Consistency or coherence can only be achieved in theory and not in practice. Or consistency depends on non-coherence.

GPs, hill farmers, all of us are allegorists because we read between the lines and manifest realities that are not being spoken about in as many words. We play, that is, with the boundaries between that which is Othered and that which is manifest. We might thus think of allegory as a mode of discovery – so long as we understand that in a world of enactment, allegory is also crafting what it is discovering. That is the first point. The second is equally interesting. It is that as allegorists, a lot of the time we are crafting and manifesting realities that are non-coherent. That are difficult to fit together into a single smooth reality.

We have been here already, but in a different vocabulary, for this is a point about multiplicity. The different realities enacted in the different practices of the cervical screening programme are indeed different. They are like the lower-limb atheroscleroses discussed by Mol. And again, like the lower-limb atheroscleroses, there are various ways in which these can be – and are – patched together in practice. The possibilities enumerated by Mol apply again here. But having said this, Singleton’s allegorical concern is also slightly different. The interest is not simply that presences and absences are multiple. It is also on the representation of non-coherence or multiplicity. This is a touchy issue because, as we have seen, Euro-American assumptions about what is out-there make it difficult to think of this or talk of it as non-coherent or multiple. Within the technical limits available, and subject always to the need for correction, it prefers to represent manifest reality as singular. The consequence is that it tries to deny the possibilities for non-coherent depiction offered by allegory. It tries to draw a firm line between those absences that are permitted to manifest themselves and those that do not fit, those that are Othered.

No doubt there are many possible ways for enacting allegory, many possible ways in which it might mess with absence, recrafting the boundaries between realities made manifest and realities Othered. There are many possible ways in which it might stand for and enact non-coherence out-there. Sometimes it will use words – in my reading this is what is being attempted by Singleton and Wynne in the examples discussed above. Sometimes, however, it will take us outside words. And this, I suggest, is what is happening in the case of the run-down building occupied by the Waterside Alcohol Advice Centre. The building – and our apprehension of the building – are an exercise in allegory. In the absence of words I guess that there is less pressure to narrative consis- tency. There is less pressure to manifest an absence that is single and coherent. Perhaps, then, architectures and other non-linguistic verbal forms are rich

sources for allegory. Perhaps they are allegories which enact the non-coherent, allowing us to make it manifest. Perhaps it is simply that we are not very good at treating them as allegories – apprehending the ways in which they craft and relate sets of realities that cannot be located in a single narrative.89

Of course non-coherence is not a good in itself. As I have noted, Singleton and I were persuaded that a higher degree of organisational coherence would have been better all round for the treatment of those with alcohol-related problems in the Waterside area. Nevertheless, to try to shoehorn non-coherent realities into singularity by insisting on direct representation and Othering whatever does not fit is also to miss the point. It is to (try to) enact a particular version of ontological politics. And it is the strength of an allegorical attitude to method assemblage that it does not miss that point. That it carries an alternative politics. That it softens and plays with the boundaries between what is Othered and what is made manifest. That it discovers – and enacts – new and only partially connected realities.

I now extend this argument by exploring a further case, that of a calamitous railway accident.

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