ABSTRACT

In 2010, twenty-eight bovines on a Pennsylvania beef farm were exposed to a hydraulic fracturing wastewater leak on their grazing pasture. Over the following year, eleven out of seventeen calves born to the exposed animals died. The farmers framed the deaths as outside normal deathly production on the farm, while state institutions claimed the deaths resulted from the farmers’ negligence, framing them as ordinary. I draw on necropolitics to examine how death becomes a normalized mode of capital production in agri-food systems, investigating how the wastewater spill and calves’ deaths ruptured the everyday production of bovine death. The paper argues that death must occur in prescribed sites and at approved times to function as a site of value accumulation in capitalist agriculture. I examine how the spill and calf death events emerged through promiscuous entanglements between overlapping modes of capital extraction across and through the site of the farm. Using assemblages, I trace unruly, promiscuous encounters at this food-energy contact zone to consider how the calves’ deaths render visible the space-time boundaries used to manage more-than-human mortality as a metabolic process in livestock production, and highlight disparate power relations between diverse necropolitical actors and modes of governance.

摘要

2010年，宾夕法尼亚州牛肉农场的28头牛在放牧的牧场上遭受了水力压裂废水的泄漏。在接下来的一年中，暴露的动物所生的十七头小牛中有十一头死亡。农民将死亡定为农场正常生产以外的死亡，而国家机构声称这些死亡是由于农民的疏忽造成的，将其归为普通死亡。我利用死灵政治学来研究死亡如何成为农业食品系统中的一种标准化资本生产方式，研究废水的泄漏和犊牛的死亡如何破坏了牛死亡的日常生产。该论文认为，死亡必须发生在规定的地点和批准的时间，才能在资本主义农业中发挥价值积累的作用。我研究了跨农场场地和通过农场场地的资本提取重叠模式之间的混杂纠缠如何导致溢漏和小牛死亡事件的发生。通过组合，我在这个食物与能量接触的区域追踪了不羁的，混杂的遭遇，以考虑小牛的死亡如何使时空边界清晰可见，这些时空边界用于管理牲畜生产中的新陈代谢过程中超过人类的死亡，并突出显示了不同的情况。各种政治角色与治理模式之间的权力关系。