Another Technoscience is Possible

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Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities

edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota

The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives

When Foucault introduced the concept of biopolitics he referred to a historically specific power agenda involving a particular approach to life. This approach was at the root of the modern sciences of biology and political economy, both of which set out to describe, explain and manage their objects of study as abstract processes of production and reproduction. Agricultural science must be situated in relation to the biopolitical agenda of 'applying' the modern scientific approach to the management of social life. The scientification of agriculture took place in the United States towards the end of the 19th century through a process that entailed both a delegitimation of farmer-generated knowledges and the production of new, modern subjectivities. As farmers became entrepreneurs in need of scientific education and advice, newly trained agronomists devoted themselves to designing fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds with the goal of maximizing yields. Public institutions were created which coordinated agricultural production with both science and trade policy. Agricultural science was thus inseparable from the process which transformed much of US agriculture into transnational agribusiness, and local farming networks all over the world into consumer endpoints of a globalized food industry.

More than 20 years ago Jack Kloppenburg, a rural sociologist and long-standing advocate of farmer-generated local knowledges, wrote that 'agricultural science as currently constituted provides neither a complete, nor an adequate, nor even a best possible account of the sphere of agricultural production' (2009: 248). Agriculture has been reduced by agriscience to the exploitation of land through intensive monoculture farming. Oriented towards the conquest of foreign markets, agricultural production has been made to depend on mechanization, agrochemicals, and the constant replacement of improved crop varieties. A cultivar with improved disease or insect resistance performs well for a few years (typically 5-9), after which yields begin to drop, productivity is threatened by weeds or pests that have become resistant to agrochemicals, and a more promising cultivar comes to replace the previous one (Altieri 2001). In recent years, the efficiency of commercial 'inputs' has decreased and the yields of key crops have in some places been leveling off. Mainstream agroscientists believe that this is happening because the maximum yield potential of current varieties is being approached, and therefore genetic engineering must be applied to the task of redesigning crops. Critics of agriscience, however, argue that such a solution would would only make things wors, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri 2001). It is well-known today that chemical-intensive monoculture farming has everywhere led to soil erosion, water pollution and numerous other serious damages such as the loss of plant and animal species, the destruction of natural pest control mechanisms, the consequent proliferation of new pests and 'super weeds', and global warming. While contemporary biotechnolgy is being promoted by some as the only rational solution to both food security and environmental disaster, many point out that in a form of capitalism dominated by intellectual property rights it will most likely elevate input costs for small and medium-scale farmers to such an extent that the amount of energy they invest will constantly threaten to surpass the energy they harvest. Such a situation will in turn favor further concentration of agribusiness in the hands of a few transnational corporations.

Since the 1960s, activists and academics have increasingly denounced the link between hegemonic forms of science and the social and environmental destruction caused by industrial capitalism. As Kloppenburg states, 'the agricultural sector provides a uniquely appropriate concrete terrain for the testing of a whole range of theoretical propositions' and for 'the necessary work of developing and elaborating the here-and-now prefigurative norms of what might one day be a transformed science' (2009: 261). Feminists, social researchers of science and technology, poststructuralist anthropologists, and increasing numbers of life scientists have shown, in a number of ways, how modern agriscience has involved a neglect of physical, biological, political and social contexts, and an alienation of subjects from the intimacy of their labor processes (Kloppenburg, 2009: 254). Of particular interest here is the critical work which has explicitly positioned the biopolitical paradigm of industrial agriculture not first and foremost as an economic kind of imperialism, but more profoundly as an epistemic and culturally specific kind of imperialism. In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist Arturo Escobar emphasizes the role of unjustified assumptions regarding Western science, progress and the economy, particularly as they were mobilized during the Green Revolution by 'a father/savior talking with selfless condescension to a child/native' (1995: 159). He refers to Norman Borlaug, the American crop scientist that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, who proudly asserted that agricultural science had been able to displace 'an attitude of despair and apathy that permeated the entire social fabric of these countries only a few years ago' (158). In Escobar's analysis, Bourlaug's patronizing judgement reflects the complex social fact that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, have been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.

In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist Gustavo Esteva characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming 'peasants' into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', and most profoundly an a ethical failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism.

After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in orther to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it is very clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). In this regard, he warns us that the contest has only started over the meaning of an  alternative agriculture, which is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (2009: 250), and this brings us once again to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism.

The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to the life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).

Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper 2008: 19).  Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself.

The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries.

The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades.  As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture.  

Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them. Where farmers cannot not be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately describing their attitude and behavior so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by improving their knowledge.