Beyond the Future to the
Past: Notes Toward a Radical Agrarianism
By Charles J. Sentell
Agrarianism is the study of
the practices and peoples who cultivate the land as their primary mode of
subsistence. As a set of traditions expressing the concepts and values of
farms, farmers, and farming, it aims to account for how food and its production,
distribution, and consumption bear on other areas of life, human and not.
In this way, agrarianism is a form of inquiry based on a set of questions into
the relationships between cultivating the soil for the foods and fibers
necessary for human lives, and the cultures emerging from their various
intersections. It is the study of the social, ethical, political,
spiritual, and ecological aspects of agriculture and agricultural ways of
living.
Within
this formulation, however, lies the germ of a larger question. Here
agriculture is what one nineteenth century observer called that “indispensable
preliminary to civilization,” whose origins are now located in the global wave
of Neolithic revolutions beginning between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago.[1]
For many, these near simultaneous transitions of human subsistence patterns
from hunting and gathering to settled agricultural cultivation mark the literal
beginnings of human civilizations. And though the details of these
transitions continue to change, the point is that the advent of farming marks
the temporal and technical boundaries of civilizations. By emphasizing
the evolution of certain techniques and practices that manipulate
the environment to produce more than it otherwise would, such developmental
narratives inevitably turn on a certain set of questions concerning technology
and historical progress that are correlated to a given stage of civilization.
At work within such narratives, moreover, is an ever present (but often tacit)
philosophical anthropology that places the various modes of food acquisition
and production – and the individuals with whom they are associated – within a categorical
hierarchy that functions to demarcate humanity proper from the primitive,
savage, and animal others that haunt the edges of civilization.
In this
sense, agrarianism is not merely a standard “ism.” This suffix
incorrectly suggests that agrarianism is simply or primarily a theory open
for adoption, an ideology to be taken up that in turn makes people
“agrarians”. Rather, if agrarianism concerns the complex networks of
relations between a people and their practices of soil cultivation, then it is
not so much a choice of theory – adopted as a belief among other beliefs, or an
ideology expounded as a systematic body of ideas – as it is a set of questions occasioned
by a concrete set of practices.[2]
And precisely because practices express values without speaking, showing
instead how beliefs are more precisely the habits of actions imbued with
meaning and justification over time, agrarian practices form the soil in which
agrarian concepts and values are rooted. As a particular set of habits
transmitted across generations, such practices form an inheritance in which the
act of eating invokes, and literally transmits, the domestication of generations
of plants, animals, and the humans that depend upon them for survival.
This transmission forms the material basis of agrarianism, a by now
species-wide institution that is also the primary mode of production for the
means of human subsistence.
So to
claim that agrarianism is a set of questions occasioned by a set of practices
is not to say that these questions lack normative roots and comprise some type
of objective or value-free inquiry. Wholly on the contrary: every
question and every practice is situated with respect to some specific content
and some particular purpose. The formulation of any agrarian question
immediately establishes a frame or field whose limits form the scope of
possible conclusions. In this sense, agrarianism may be understood as a praxis wherein
the ideals and principles directing agricultural modes of life are taken to
arise from, and become reintegrated into, the concrete practices of
agricultural production. These processes and products run deep and wide
within our bodies and our bodies’ politic; they concern the necessary
conditions for life, and therefore comprise a bio-politics where food, sex,
work, and death operate within various – but always particular – economies of
life. The broad scope of this praxis stems from the
contingent necessity of food for human life.
The frame
of agrarianism, then, is not simply or even primarily conceptual, but bound by
a collection of practices having determinate consequences for actual
communities. Whether it is through land reform or urban agriculture,
whether it is by analyzing the spread of industrial agriculture or evaluating
the consequences of international patent rights in seed, agrarianism attempts
to account for the sustaining connections of peoples to places, and to highlight
how these connections are at once deeply personal and profoundly
political. And so to reduce agrarianism to a conceptual topography is to
efface its actual geography. If agrarianism is a set of questions
inquiring into the actual production and distribution of food, if it is to
think about farms and farmers in their concrete contexts, then it is not an
area of inquiry that can simply be written off as relevant to only a few.
After all, at least for now, human beings continue to derive sustenance from real
food whose roots are fixed within real soil.
Thus if
agrarianism thus first appears to be irrelevant to contemporary problems, out
of touch with the realities of twenty-first century life, this is because these
very issues are undergoing a necessary occlusion with the continuing spread of
capitalist forms of agriculture. As Marx pointed out in Capital,
the spread of capitalist modes of agricultural production tends to convert “one
part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying
the other part, which remains a re-eminently industrial field.”[3]
And indeed, within the last century, the circulatory system of capital, whose
blood is a lifeless power pulsing relentlessly toward valorization and
accumulation, has rearranged the locations of food production beyond the
borders of the developed world, to places whose fertility represents a resource
yet to be consumed, a market yet to be opened, and a people yet to be
subjugated. For those sustained by this occlusion, our mandibles no
longer hang together, our mastication incomplete and uneasy.
It is here
that the question of the radical potential of agrarianism
finds fertile ground. Stemming from the Latin radix – to
relate to or form a root or network of roots – to be radical is to be basic,
necessary, or inherent to the processes of life; it is to be that inner
moisture, that vital humor that is the pulse common to all living things.
Thus to understand and interrogate the ways in which the life-giving economies
of food have been integrated into global capitalist markets – the logic of
which necessarily includes violence, domination, and exploitation – requires an
inquiry into how life happens by way of roots, how culture is sustained through
a mediation between the microbes in the soil and the creative powers of human
labor.
Strictly
speaking, then, to speak of “radical agrarianism” is to be redundant.
Agrarianism is already about roots: roots of the plants that sustain the stalk
that is the common physical and social bond of food. On the other hand,
however, through this adjective it is important to emphasize that there
is nothing necessarily politically progressive or radical about agrarianism,
and that the farm has not, historically or at present, been the happiest or
most libratory place on earth. To be radical in
this sense, agrarianism must account for the way the farm represents a (perhaps the)
principle site of transmission for a wide variety of violent practices, such as
masculine domination and slavery, and the physical control and exploitation of
nature.
If the
above characterization is correct, then central to agrarianism are questions of
gender, race, and class, and the technologies of domination and domestication
that occur by way of agrarian forms of life. There are, indeed, many
problems with which agrarianism today must come to terms if it is to be
sufficiently radical, including: the so-called “backwards” nature of rural
people, i.e., their lack of progressive, forward-looking social organization,
as well their lack of education; agriculture and its rapid historical
association with slavery and patriarchy; the development and application of
machines and other technologies that have destroyed, and continue to destroy,
peoples and the planet; the accumulation of capital that agricultural makes
possible, and the concentration of wealth and power whose necessary
constitutive correlate is poverty, exploitation, and subjugation; the dramatic
urbanization and mass migrations from the country to the city, and from the
South to the North; and the discourse of private property rights, and the consequences
of the various enclosures and tragedies of the commons.
Far from
comprehensive, this list is meant simply to highlight how agrarianism is
situated at the confluence of a set of nesting and overlapping relationships
between labor and life, time and technology, and slavery and freedom, and that
to be sufficiently radical, agrarianism must actively confront these difficult
historical inheritances so as to be able to work toward a more libratory future. To recover the radical potential of
agrarianism, it is crucial to understand how its disparate iterations are
joined at the root, how they both turn on a larger set of concerns related to
the production and reproduction of life. In this sense, radical
agrarianism begins with the hypothesis that various arrangements of
agricultural production are already expressions of power. Agriculture as
a primary form of biopolitics, then, points to the
way in which agrarianisms have always been contestable discursive spaces as
much about plants as power, as much about domestication as domination.
*
* *
With this preliminary
definition of radical agrarianism, I now turn to examine the way time and
technology function in two American agrarianisms of the twentieth century,
namely, those of the Southern Agrarians and Wendell Berry. Here two
questions guide my critical inquiry. First, in what ways are these
agrarianisms unrealistic, conservative, and backward looking in their frame of
reference? In what ways are they nostalgic or pejoratively utopian, desiring
to return to a past that never was or a future that can never be? Second,
in what ways are they reactionary with respect to technology? How
do they conceive of the appropriate and inappropriate uses of machines and
technologies, and on what grounds are these normative claims made? In
short, I address two critiques commonly leveled against these agrarianisms –
namely, that they are romantic or sentimental or nostalgic modes of analysis,
and that they are synonymous with a sort of neo-Luddism,
out of touch with the present state of technology – on the way to reassessing
their radical potential today.
As I have
intimated, the traditions of agrarianism are long and wide, and are by no means
limited to texts. That said, however, in the Anglo-American academic
context the term does indeed conjure certain ghosts – mostly, but by no means
solely, dead and white and male. In the United States in particular, the
term has since the 1930’s often invoked one particular work of a group of white
Southern intellectuals in and around Vanderbilt University, collectively known
as the Southern Agrarians. The immediate, rather narrow association of
this term with this one text is unfortunate, for not only does it represent a
mere sixth of their published work, but there are also several other important
strands of agrarianism being developed at roughly the same time.[4]
As Paul Conkin and others have shown, for example,
while it is true that the Agrarians were all white men, this apparent
homogeneity often obscures very real social, political, and intellectual
differences between them.[5]
Moreover, as Kimberly Smith shows, there was a vibrant contemporaneous
African-American tradition of agrarianism – found, for example, in the works of
Lewis Woodson, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver – that leveled
a critique similar to the Agrarians, but obviously different in its emphases
and conclusions.[6]
So while the common association of agrarianism with the Southern Agrarians is
well established in the scholarly literature, here, as always, there is more
complexity than commonly supposed, more diversity and plurality than its status
as a movement would otherwise suggest. In such instances, there is no
substitute for engaging the text.
Published
collectively by “Twelve Southerners,” I’ll Take My Stand (1930)
contains a vitriolic indictment of industrial capitalism as well as a social
and political manifesto on the values of tradition and place. Opposed to
the industrial model of social organization then sweeping the nation, these men
organized themselves around a loose alternative agrarian model holding “that
the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that
therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number
of workers.”[7]
To achieve these goals:
We consider the
rehabilitation of the farmer as of the first importance to the South, the basis
of all good remedial procedure; and we therefore favour
a definite policy of land conservation, land distribution, land
ownership. At risk of appearing socialistic to the ignorant, we favour legislation that will deprive the giant corporation
of its privilege of irresponsibility, and that will control or prevent the
socially harmful use of labour-saving (or labour-evicting) machinery.[8]
Given their social and
historical locations, their arguments were no doubt conservative. From
both a historical and a contemporary perspective, however, the important aspect
of this conservatism is the tension produced between their trenchant critique
of industrial capitalism and the reactionary orientation of their ameliorative
social proscriptions. While this tension between their radicalism and
their conservatism may be the source of the abiding yet politically disparate
interests in their work, the source of this tension itself is located in the
political economy of post-Reconstruction America, and particularly the South.[9]
Throughout
the lives of all these individuals – which spanned from the Fugitive period in
the 1920’s, the Agrarian period in the 1930’s, the New Critical period of the
1940’s and 1950’s, and into retirement and reunion in the 1980’s – they all
witnessed an ever encroaching industrialism, spreading from the North during
and after Reconstruction, that dramatically reorganized the economy of the
South. From 1870 to 1945, for example, the U.S. farm population declined
from 75 to 17 percent of the total population, and the number employed in
agriculture dropped from 53 to less then 15 percent
of the total working population.[10]
As the country shifted from predominantly rural to urban, the Agrarians sought
a more regional orientation, and attempted to situate their politics outside
the increasingly polarized national ideological debates as simultaneously
anti-communist and anti-capitalist. In fact, much to the
chagrin of some members of the group, several wanted to change the title to A
Tract Against Communism, but the
decision was answered by an already set publishing schedule and remained.[11]
Nevertheless
– and perhaps precisely because they were attempting to take a stand between
these ideologies – much of the criticism they received was mocking or simply
dismissive, and focused on them being unrealistic, nostalgic, and out of touch
with the realities of modern life.[12]
Donald Davidson recalls that critics
begged to remind us of ox-carts
and outdoor privies, and inquired whether we ever used porcelain
bathtubs. If we admired agrarianism, what were we doing in libraries, and
why were we not out gee-hawing? Had we ever tried to
‘make money’ on a farm? Did we want to ‘turn the clock back’ and
retreat into a ‘past that never was’?.[13]
While Davidson admits a
certain nostalgic impulse, he argues that this criticism amounts to a
simplistic dismissal of the substance of their critique and a basic
misunderstanding of the form of their solution. By misjudging the latter,
by dismissing their vision of an agrarian political economy that would
counteract industrialism and restore life as the predominant value of
economics, such critics evaded the full thrust of their social and economic
projects. Anxious about the rates of mechanization, commodification, and
fragmentation that were sweeping daily and social life, the Agrarians struggled
to formulate a coherent political and economic vision that would complement
their already developing aesthetic. One of their central targets was the
modern understanding of time equating progress with machine technology and industrial
development.
In his
contribution to the volume “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress,” for
example, Lyle Lanier argues that agriculture is “the pursuit which lies at the
base of every social organization,”[14] and
that its industrialization will inevitably lead to “personal isolation, and a
fractionation of life functions into an ever-expanding and differentiating
system of formalized institutions.”[15]
Connecting the questions of time and technology:
By ‘industrialism’ is meant
not the machine and industrial technology as such, but the domination of the
economic, political, and social order by the notion that the greater part of a
nation’s energies should be directed toward an endless process of increasing
the production and consumption of goods. There is nothing inherently evil
about a machine, although the operation of one on a lifetime scale would
necessarily be pretty monotonous….It is not the machine, however, but the
theory of the use of the machine to which I object, and if this theory, which
we may call industrialism, is a valid hypothesis of the course of Western
civilization, all discussion of ‘progress’ would do well to cease. The
only intelligible meaning of progress implies social institutions for producing
psychological effects just the reverse of those so outstanding in our Machine
Age.[16]
Arguing that the conception
of progress at the heart of industrialism actually produces subjects opposite
of its stated aims, Lanier then suggests that the psychological effects of
industrialism are as potentially odious as its material ones. Central to
this analysis are two separate but related theses: one the one hand, an aesthetics of time wherein history unfolds linearly and
progressively toward a future taken as natural and inevitable, and on the other
hand, a politics of technology where the machine and its increasing application
to life is the embodiment of social progress.
Within
the narrative Lanier is working against, then, experience is oriented toward
the future, where humans will be liberated from toil and work, from poverty and
starvation, by means of the machine and its deployment in the form of
industrial agriculture. Freedom from want and need is
promised through the centralized, mechanized, and commoditized production and
distribution of food and agricultural commodities, among much else. The
form of this development, then, figures the inexorable march of industrial,
i.e., capitalist, modes of production as an unalloyed social good. In
this context, nostalgia recalls a time prior to the mechanization – and
therefore industrialization – of agriculture. Crucially,
then, nostalgia for the Southern Agrarians concerns an actual past that was
then literally disappearing from the landscape.
From the
Greek nostos – a returning home –
and algos – pain – nostalgia is the
longing for home and all its familiar surroundings, a homesickness, a longing
for a period in the past, a painful memory evoking a former era. And so
it is important to note how the meaning commonly added to the concept – to wit,
that the past in question was never, in fact, a real past, that the past of
nostalgia is merely fictional or imaginative, or that it is a naively
sentimentalized or romanticized past – is inaccurate and misleading. And
so the past for which the Agrarians pined was an actual past; its effects were
palpable and real for the millions of Americans then undergoing the painful
transition from a primarily rural, agrarian mode of life to one dominated by
urban, industrial modes of organization.
This
point is important not only with respect to the Southern Agrarians, however,
for the home of nostalgia functions in a similar way in the recent work of
Wendell Berry. Beginning with The Unsettling of America (1976),
Berry developments an agrarian critique of life under capitalism that relies at
times on a certain nostalgic mood about past forms of social and economic organization.
While Berry acknowledges some indebtedness to the Agrarians, he explicitly
rejects their nostalgia for the Old South – with all its attendant wounds of
racism, sexism, and colonialism – and focuses instead on life at the very local
level.[17]
According to Berry, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the Africans they
brought along with them in chains, and the indigenous peoples they destroyed in
the process, inaugurates a modern condition of being homeless. For Berry,
this homelessness is both literal and existential: it is the founding of a new
order, decisively breaking with the past and opening up the frontiers for a
brave new future. Resident aliens from birth, natality
in the Americas is inescapably marked by an inheritance of violence, genocide,
and domination, all circulating uneasily yet inevitably around eating, working,
living, and dying in this strange new land.
Importantly,
Berry argues the advent of this world was possible only by developing the very
technologies that allowed the movement, enslavement, and extermination of
entire cultures in the first place. And while he recognizes the logically
contingent but historically necessary connections between colonialism and
capitalism, he only barely addresses upon the specific relationship between
agriculture and slavery in the context of Americas.[18]
Nevertheless, he attempts to construct a vision better able to resist and
transform what he takes to be the extension of these forms of domination,
namely, the industrialization and corporatization of agriculture on a global
scale and the new visages of enslavement following in its wake. In such a
world, he says,
[p]eople
will be allowed to be free to do certain things
in certain places prescribed by other people.
They will be free to work in the places set aside for work, free to play or
relax in places set aside for recreation, free to live (what that may mean) in
places set aside for living…They will not live where they work or work where
they live. They will not work where they play. And they will not,
above all, play where they work. There will be no singing in those
fields. There will be no crews of workers or neighbors laughing and
joking, telling stories, or competing at tests of speed or strength or
skill….The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat.
They will be detached and remote from the sources of their life, joined to them
only by corporate tolerance. They will have become consumers purely –
consumptive machines – which is to say, the slaves of producers. What
these model farms very powerfully suggest, then, is that the concept of total
control may be impossible to confine within the boundaries of the specialist
enterprise – that it is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing
consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without
making machines also of people.[19]
While this is no doubt but
a part of a his critique of life under capitalism, its force seems blunted by
the nostalgic mode Berry slips into by suggesting that before the
industrialization of agriculture people laughed while they worked, and competed
with their neighbors in innocent contests of strength. After the
displacement and destruction of such communities by corporate agriculture,
however, such people, and the people who depend upon them for sustenance, are
reduced to the status of “consumptive machines,” slaves to those now in control
of the sphere between the soil and the seed; and few indeed live beyond this
sphere.
But these
two claims must be disambiguated, for the latter is not necessarily dependent
upon the former. Berry’s critique of life under capital, that is, does
not turn on whether life was really an idyll bucolic dream –
for surely it was anything but. Rather it turns on the specific ways life
has been reorganized in the present, for entirely different purposes and
therefore with entirely different consequences. By situating the problems
of contemporary life in terms of the scale and control of political economies,
Berry attempts to redraw our attention to the social and ecological importance
of local economies. Based within and organized for actual people in
actual communities, such economies function as the primary means by which the
fragmented lives, meanings, and values that have emerged over the last century
can be rehabilitated, and thus work toward a new ethics of care for peoples and
places.
Thus,
perhaps some aspect of the nostalgia charge sticks. In a world where
economies and societies are increasingly interconnected on a global scale,
where capital roams freely across borders while people are restrained by hands
invisible and armed, a return to local communities and small-scale economies
might indeed be motivated by a longing to return to a time before such
complexity was actual or perceptible. A telling example is seen in
various colloquial expressions that the underdeveloped two-thirds of the world
are “trapped back there in the present.”[20]
Within this framework, the future can only be reached by industrial progress
and economic growth, by the expansion of free markets whose rising tide of
wealth will raise all boats into the future. Berry argues that this
concept of the future is “the most prolific source of justification for
exploitative behavior” because it contains an internal contradiction that
endorses “using up future necessities in order to make a more abundant future.”[21]
And now that this future has colonized most of the agriculture in the so-called
developed world, it is now marching across the underdeveloped world in
increasingly conspicuous, if ambivalent, ways.
In their
ethnographic study Broccoli and Desire, Peter Benson and Edward
Fischer trace such consequences for an indigenous agrarian community in Tecpán, Guatemala. By analyzing the double commodity
nature of foodstuffs in a globalized capitalist economy – i.e., how such
commodities hide the origins and conditions of their production while
contributing to a neoliberal ideology about how their purchase and consumption
benefits those who labored in their production – they trace how a certain Mayan
community view the reduction of its subsistence agriculture so as to increase
the production of broccoli for export to the U.S.[22] Developing
a phrase the Maya use– algo más, or, something more, something better –Benson
and Fischer frame the paradoxical situation of cultivating a crop they do not
eat, broccoli, which involves substantial financial and personal risk, while at
the same time struggling to survive. “The sense of ‘something better’ that
farmers put forward to justify their engagement in the global broccoli trade,”
they found, “reveals not a banal idea of the future opposed to the present but
a vision of the future as an ongoing struggle between the past and the
present. Here the future is always deferred, even as it enlivens risky
practices.”[23]
Within this frame of temporality, then, the actual future – as opposed to the
ideal future – is forever being negotiated between the past and the present,
and not between the present and some unknown yet desirable future.
In such
an environment, nostalgia for agrarian modes of life finds little fertile soil
on which to fall, appearing only at the edges for how little explanation it
seems to occasion for those in the midst of experiencing a dramatic, sometimes
violent, collision of worlds and the revaluation of values that follows.
In place of nostalgia, I offer rue as an alternative temporal mood for
agrarianism. As the interior echo of an imperfect past, rue is a sense of
mournfulness over a real past remaining in the present. Remembering what
remains, rue is a mood full of sorrow and compassion; it laments what is
doleful and dismal about the past and how that past bears upon the
present. Full of cries and utterances of remorse for the injustices of
the past, the rueful is full of looks and actions seeking the sources of
distress to engage in a regretful repentance and redress. While nostalgia
lacks real critical potential with regard to the past, rue critically engages
it, and along with it the violence and domination characteristic of so much of
agricultural life, past and present, and situates the rueful to work toward the
amelioration of such injustices. A verb, an adjective and a plant, rue is
a perennial evergreen shrub that has bitter, strong-scented leaves used
medicinally to treat blindness and internal spasms. Both a remedy and a
poison, rue is a supplement in the true sense of the word. Just as the
mad Ophelia says distributing her flowers, “O you must wear your rue with a
difference,”[24] its
application always already entails a difference.[25]
So
whereas nostalgia is a desire to return to the past, however real or ideal, rue
is the desire to recognize the past as constitutive of the present, thus
enabling it to serve as a point of departure for determining what ways that
present can itself be transformed in the present. Rather
than a linear temporality, rue invokes the way cultivation – the regeneration
of the means of life – operates in a revolving temporality. As Berry
notes,
cultivation is at the root of the
sense both of culture and of cult…And these words
all come from an Indo-European root meaning both ‘to revolve’ and ‘to
dwell.’ To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to
worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle.[26]
Rue as a temporal mood for
agrarianism works to reconstruct linear models of life and economy. By
accounting for the multiplicity of relations at work within the cycles of life
in particular places at particular times, a rueful temporality moves around and
through the processes of birth and death, of life and decay, in time with the
spinning of the earth.
Revolving
into regeneration rather than into revolution, agrarian temporality is not a
revolutionary time that seeks to sweep away the dead wood of history to
re-found life on a new foundation. Rather, it is a form of radical
time wherein the present is understood to reach back through the past,
to be constitutive of the past. The present, in other words, is emergent
from the past and is not merely a waypoint to the future; it is situated at the
confluence of its many pasts, synthesizing new presents out of its many winding
and overlapping roots in the soil of its own place. In this sense there
can be little doubt that agrarianism involves a looking backward, a turn toward
that which sustained communities and lives in the past. For people and
their forms of social organization, maturation involves a movement away from a
past that is as unrecoverable as it is inalienable. Indeed, you can never
go home again. Home is thus something always made away from home.
So at least in the context of the agrarians discussed above, the charge of
nostalgia is ultimately symptomatic of a certain failure of imagination, a
particular historical denial that fails to understand the present as
inextricably connected to the past.
In this
way, the failure nostalgia represents – and the strength of it as a criticism of agrarianism
– is coherent only within a specific understanding of time wherein history
unfolds inexorably into the future, erasing the past as it overcomes the
present to reach a future that remains forever just beyond the horizon.
Within this temporality, the machine and its products are the central means by
which this future – one wherein life will be without toil or material want – is
achieved. In this way, the charge of nostalgia, as a
criticism of agrarianism, depends upon the very conception of time and
technology that these agrarians are working against. Within this
aesthetic of time, nostalgia is the naïve, futile, and indeed impossible desire
to return to a past time. Within an agrarian temporality, then, nostalgia
is groundless. It has no roots. And that is precisely its
problem.
By
invoking an irrecoverable past, a past that must be left behind in the blind
deaf and dumb rush into the future, nostalgic criticism attempts to accomplish
what on its own terms is impossible, namely, to return home. For the
nostalgic, progress is impossible, and this is certainly neither
what the Agrarians or Berry are claiming. Rue, on the other hand,
operates within a different temporality, one that does not give up or reject
the idea of progress precisely through its insistence on the ineliminable continuity of the present with its various and
sundry pasts. Progress is not the movement to a given end, but
is always a progress from a particular place, always already a
determinate stage of development. For the rueful, progress is
possible. Because rueful criticism lives in the movement between the
present and its various pasts, progress is intelligible only by means of these
pasts, which serve as waypoints redirecting economies, energies, and human lives
toward ever better, more socially and ecologically sound ends. Rue
connects individuals in the present to their sundry imperfect pasts, thus
forming the condition without which intelligent, transformative action is
impossible. Only from some actual location are the potential movements
forward comprehensible at all.
In this
way, it is clear that for both the Agrarians and Berry there is are important
connections between various conceptions of temporality and the politics of
technology they occasion. For each, the modern developmental model
that associates social progress with economic industrialization is neither
necessary nor desirable. And so while the Agrarians reject the notion
that the uncritical proliferation of machines to every area of human life is a
synonym for social progress, they do not propose an equally uncritical
rejection of the machine tout court. Their comportment to
technology, rather, is critical; it seeks to understand how certain machines
make machines of people, how they embody power concentrated in a certain form,
not progress. Like them, Berry’s comportment to technology does not
involve a wholesale dismissal of its application to agriculture (or any other
area of production), nor is it some type a neo-Luddite reaction against the machine
in general, though at times it can certainly seem that way.[27]
Thus both are critical, circumspect comportments that, to be sure, call for a
“restraint on the proliferation of machines,” but this restraint is guided by the actual social and ecological consequences
of machines used in particular ways.[28]
And so just as I have suggested rue as an alternative to
nostalgia, I also suggest that rather than an aesthetic dominated by a
reactionary attitude toward technology in general, a more appropriate agrarian
comportment is one guided by an ecological aesthetics. Such an aesthetic
turns, above all, on the way technology itself is natural, on a naturalized
technology that situates techne as
an aspect of phusis rather
than its opposite.[29]
Contrary to the traditional philosophical anthropologies holding technology in
some general sense sui genre of human affairs,
this stands to substantially broaden the common conceptions of biotechnology
that are too often limited to the commoditized bio-manipulation of plants,
animals, and (parts of) humans – to the biopolitical
techniques deployed to control the fabric of life, the genetic code of living
organisms. By challenging this dualism at its roots, where the question
of human intervention with the environment gives way to a
question of relationships in an environment, an aesthetic of
ecology would cultivate technologies whose function serves a more robust
symbiosis between humans and their environments. There is no better
example of, or model for, such technologies as the living topsoil itself, what
Berry identifies as “the basic element in the technology of farming.” He
says:
The soil is the great
connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer
and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes
into health, age into youth, death into life.
Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper
care for it we can have no life…. Because the soil is alive, various,
intricate, and because its processes yield more readily to imitation than to
analysis, more readily to care than to coercion, agriculture can never be an
exact science. There is an inescapable kinship between farming and art,
for farming depends as much on character, devotion, imagination, and the sense
of structure, as on knowledge. It is a practical art.[30]
Rather than an industrial
technics of domination, an agrarian technics enlists already existing
components of the environment to cultivate consequential, mutually beneficial,
and multivalent relationships that harness the habits of dynamism and
reciprocity. As the study of the art of cultivating life, agrarian
inquiry seeks what Murray Bookchin calls “a
life-giving technics,” that is, one whose technologies model and cooperate with
the means and ends of life’s natural processes, enhancing life rather than
dominating it.[31] An
agrarian comportment to technology, then, is not essentialist about the
machine, but pragmatic and ecological, looking at the interaction between
humans, their tools, and their environments for ways to duplicate, imitate, and
integrate the functions already operative within the natural world. In
short, such an agrarian aesthetic aims to reconstruct the modern ontological
dualisms of nature and culture, on the one hand, and the natural and the
technological, on the other, toward a more robust social ecology.
*
* *
As a contingent necessity
for human life, food stands at a unique junction between the social and natural
worlds. As a multifaceted inquiry into its production, distribution, and
consumption, agrarianism stands as a necessary set of questions into that which
sustains life between the body and the body politic. Agrarianism, in
other words, is an inquiry into the configurations of land and people whose
labor produces the food that is the condition without which life could not be
sustained. The basis of agrarian inquiry, therefore, is already at work
whether recognized or not. The living nature of such
questions lies precisely in their necessity for the continuation of life.
Agrarianism thus turns not on the extent these questions are raised and brought
to a wider consciousness, but in accounting for how these
questions are always operative in conditioning the human social world. In
this sense, agrarianism has always been a form of radical inquiry;
it has always inquired after the roots of the lives that make culture
possible.
From this
perspective, central to agrarianism are questions concerning the powers of
certain practices to condition the transmission of certain habits across
generations. As a reconstructed form of past inquiries, then,
agrarianisms in the present must begin by seeking the roots of those forms of
domination that find fertile ground in those social formations whose primary
means of subsistence turns on the cultivation of the soil. Aware of the ineliminable historical conditioning of the present, these
agrarianisms cannot seek some crude elimination of machines, but must continue
to press the question as to the uses of machines under given forms of
life. Emphasizing the powers necessarily but contingently embodied in
specific technologies, agrarianism can assist in the critical project of
uncovering the consequences of those powers, as they are and might be
distributed, for human communities living in wider nonhuman ecologies.
In this
way, agrarianism is not a set of arguments about the need for society to go
back to the way things were in some near or distant past, as if there were a
stable enough thing to serve as an adequate means for such a
transformation. Neither is it about everyone becoming farmers, nor about
everyone going “back to the land” and abandoning the luxuries and lifestyles
that, among other things, the globalization of agriculture has made
possible. Indeed, such universal prescriptions are decidedly out of step
with the agrarianism I have outlined here. As a mode of radical inquiry,
agrarianism can pursue the roots of social reproduction by raising again the
necessary questions occasioned between the production of life and the
consumption of food, between the freedom of production and the slavery of
consumption.
But this
is not to say that aspects of the solutions to our current ecological and economical crises do not involve elements of past
practices. They do involve such elements, more than likely, for there
were and are ways of raising food before the invention of fossil fuels and
patent rights. To do this, perhaps there is a need for a greater number
of people living and working the land, providing local food for local mouths
whose exchange benefits local pockets. But this is not saying that much.
In the United States today there are more prisoners than farmers.[32]
If economies are to be brought under the control of those they affect, if communities
are to be revitalized by closing the temporal and spatial distance between
their means of subsistence and their ends of flourishing, then we certainly
will need more people to become involved in the sustainable production of food
for the future. To this end, there ought to be public policy initiatives,
including the granting of usufruct to land not in use, to encourage people who
are interested and inclined (certainly a growing number) to move back to
smaller communities and participate in local and regional economies.
Partly based around agriculture, partly around the other necessary institutions
of social life, such communities need not be rural backwaters. With the
dramatic proliferation of communications technology, ideas, peoples, and
movements across the world are increasingly glocal –
simultaneously global and local– in present time.
Yet the
place where each dwells is always particular. And it is from this
particularity that agrarianism has always drawn its greatest strengths.
Rather than abstract principles and politics, the most radical agrarianisms
marking the history of the Americas have been those that aim, above all, at
good farming, which involves caring for the relations that make life possible –
and even pleasurable – in a given place. So whether it is understood as a
natural theology or a secular ethic, a practice of subsistence agriculture or a
utopian vision of the future, an economy of scale or a philosophy of
technology, agrarianism stands as a powerful set of critical questions that
seek to respond to the necessities of eating, loving, working, and dying within
the contemporary world. And when these questions are ruefully pursued to
their roots, when they mourn over a real past, however imperfect, they can
begin to comprehend the necessary possibilities for the future. In this
way, radical agrarianisms can begin again to serve those real
places where individuals gather in community to live, love, and resist in the
present, so that the hope for something more, for something better, may persist
into the future.
[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
H.C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop, eds. and trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 313. For
the latter point, see Colin Tudge, Neanderthals,
Bandits, & Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998), 30. While there is a vast literature on this
subject, see also David R. Harris, ed., The Origins and Spread of
Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia (London: UCL Press Limited,
1996) and C. Wesley Cowan and Patty Jo Watson, eds., The Origins of
Agriculture: An International Perspective (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992).
[2] See also Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace:
The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. (Emeryville:
Shoemaker and Hoard, 2002), 238.
[3] Karl Marx. Capital, Volume 1. Ernest
Mandel, trans. (New York:
Vintage Books, 1977), 580.
[4] Paul K. Conkin, The
Southern Agrarians (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001), 57.
[5] See also John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: The
Fugitives and the Agrarians (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1965), especially chapters 1-4;
[6] Kimberly Smith, African American Environmental
Thought: Foundations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 51.
[7] Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South
and the Agrarian Tradition. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
University Press, 1977), xlvii.
[8] Donald Davidson, “‘I’ll Take My Stand’: A History” in Agrarianism
in American Literature, M. Thomas Inge, ed.
(New York: The Odyssey Press, 1969), 198.
[9]Paul V. Murphy, The
Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 4. See also, Michael
O’Brien, The Idea of the South, 1920-1941(Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1979).
[10] A. Whitney Griswold, Farming and
Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 129.
[11] Donald Davidson, “‘I’ll Take My Stand’: A History,” 198.
[12] Alexander Karanikas, Tillers
of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as social and literary critics (Madison:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 4-18.
[13] Davidson, “‘I’ll Take My Stand’: A History,” 199.
[14] Lyle Lanier, “The Critique of the
Philosophy of Progress,” I’ll Take My Stand, 152.
[15] Ibid., 148.
[16] Ibid., 149.
[17] Morris Allen Grubbs, ed. Conversations with Wendell
Berry (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 40.
[18] Berry does in fact provide a fuller discussion of these and
related issues in The Hidden Wound (New York: North Point
Press, 1989).
[19] Wendell Berry, The
Unsetting of America: Culture and Agriculture. (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 75.
[20] Edward F. Fischer and Peter Benson, Broccoli and
Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 66.
[21] Berry, The
Unsettling of America, 58.
[22] Fischer and Benson, Broccoli and Desire, 33.
In 2000, for example, Guatemala exported roughly 60 million pounds of cut
broccoli to the U.S., which was up more than 900 percent over the previous
twenty years, and most of this was grown in the Tecpán
region.
[23] Ibid., 48.
[24] William Shakespeare, The
Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Scene IV, Act 5. G. B. Harrison
(ed.). (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and Company, 1948), 642.
[25] Jacques Derrida,
“Plato’s Pharmacy,”
in Dissemination. Barbara Johnson, trans.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
[26] Berry, The
Unsettling of America, 87.
[27] See, for example, Wendell Berry,
“Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” The Art of the Commonplace.
[28] Berry, The
Unsettling of America, 82.
[29] I am thinking here of a materialist reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Physics,
as well as an ecological reading of Marx’s Capital.
[30] Berry, The
Unsettling of America, 82.
[31] Murray Bookchin, Toward an
Ecological Society. (Minneapolis: Black Rose Books,
1996), 25.
[32] Bill McKibben, “Localize,” “Forum:
How to Save Capitalism,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2008, 45.