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gathering and those who gather around an issue (see Latour 2005, p. 23). Yet even though

there are traces of this original meaning (e.g. Icelandic deputies are called the equivalent of

“thingmen”) a “realpolitik” dominates contemporarily, claiming a matter of fact politics and

form of resolution (Latour 2005). That is, it claims that facts are value-free. For Latour, a

dingpolitik intervenes into this problematic realpolitik by repositioning matters of fact as

always motivated by matters of concern, and by paying attention to the process of

representing issues. As Latour has argued ‘[m]atters of fact are only very partial…very

polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern’ (2004, p. 232). The point of

drawing attention to matters of fact is not to undermine facts by critiquing their fabrication,

rather the point is to ‘add reality’, a relational reality, where concerns and values are part of

the reality of facts (Latour 2004, p. 323). For Latour, a dingpolitik offers a chance to reignite

the relationships between facts and concerns. The objects of science and technology have the

quality of the old sense of the word thing (Latour 2004, p. 233). That is, they are divisive

matters around which people gather with concerns. As Latour suggests ‘[w]e might be more

connected to each other by our worries, our matters of concern, the issues we care for…’

(Latour 2005, p. 4). People do not assemble because they agree or are socially compatible but

because ‘they are brought together by divisive matters of concern...’ (Latour 2005, p. 13).

Sustainability discourses make claims to a realpolitik by drawing attention towards

fish facts - stock sizes, biomass indications – and away from values and divisive matters of

concern. Haraway helps us to think this through. She suggests that analytically we may want

to move the political to the background and focus on the technical (think sustainability

discourses that focus on stock, fishing gear etc.). However, foreground and background are

relational rather than ‘binary dualisms or ontological categories’ (1997, p. 68). She continues:

The messy political does not go away because we think we are cleanly in the zone
of technical, or vice versa. Stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable
distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places.
(Haraway 1997, p. 68).

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