Elective Affinity

In an intriguing chapter on modern agriculture in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) , James C. Scott notes that the isolation of a few variables is “a key tenet of experimental science” and “both valuable and necessary to scientific work.”  It also, necessarily, means that scientists see things a certain way.  He quotes a chaos theorist: “There is a fundamental presumption in physics that the way you understand the world is that you keep isolating its ingredients until you understand the stuff you think is truly fundamental.  Then you presume that the other things you don’t understand are details.  The assumption is that there are a small number of principles that you can discern by looking at things in their pure state – this is the truly analytic notion – and somehow you put these together in some more complicated  ways when you want to solve more dirty problems.   If you can .”

With regard to agricultural research in particular, Scott argues that “scientific agricultural research has an elective affinity with the agricultural techniques that lie within reach of its powerful methods.”  These are primarily modernist agricultural techniques, measured by yields: “Maximizing the yields of pure-stand crops is one technique where its power can be used to best advantage . . . . The forms of agriculture that conformed to their modernist aesthetic and their politico-administrative interests also happened to fit securely within the perimeter of their professional scientific vocation.”

That is to say: What I don’t catch isn’t fish.