ABSTRACT
This chapter considers high-spirited moaning sessions among tenant farmers in Duthchas Hills – what is locally known as the 'crack' – as a poetic and potentially transformative medium for carving out alternative and often counterfactual trajectories across a legal landscape whose topological features are shaped by a singular revolutionary event. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork among tenant farmers in Scotland's Duthchas Hills, the chapter charts the contours of an agricultural revolution that is being articulated not through the making of change but through its obliteration. To the tenant farmers in Duthchas Hills, absolute right to buy (ARTB) currently constitutes the only viable path towards establishing a vibrant agricultural community. By generating pataphysical distortions 'from within', the 'crack' draws ARTB towards itself and thereby effaces any distinction that might have existed in their distinctive 'lineaments'. By examining the 'crack' as a form of 'pataphysical' distortion, the chapter allows the analytical account to emerge from within the ethnographic phenomenon.
