No-till tapped into the plants’ differential ability to absorb nutrients: those with deeper and more extensive roots were able to profit better from dispersed nutrients. This became a capacity that the system was nurturing in the cotton plant by gradually undoing the compaction layer so that its roots would have more room to grow. The length of cotton roots was a chief parameter of visual comparison when pits were opened in the no-till essay. Plants that had strong root capacity – cover crops such as brachiaria and crotalaria – were recruited into the system to perform a service of revolving the soil and bringing nutrients up. Crotalaria and other leguminous plants were further tapped for their capacity to bring nutrients down: that is, to capture nitrogen from atmospheric air and transfer it to the soil as their biomass degraded during fallow. These transactions were monitored and encouraged not just in space but also in time, especially with regards to intergenerational relations between the same and/or different crops. Plants in a same generation – that is,hydroponic gutter coexisting in the same cropping season – may compete or cooperate: maximizing the latter and minimizing the former was one of the ends towards which the no-till dispositif was oriented. Central to it was the legacy that one generation left to the next: the main crops – cotton or cereals – were to be the privileged heirs of nutrients recycled from all other crops grown in the previous season.
Successive generations of the same plant variety were also observed and compared across time, to ascertain the stability of the results concerning yields and other measurements. Scaling down the parameter of productivity entailed, finally, making sure not only that the cotton plant would thrive more than other actants in the parcel, but that certain parts of it would do so more than others. As with soil, researchers saw the cotton plant as a segmented entity; the above mentioned relationship between the plant’s roots and its aerial part was an important segmentation for the researchers. Within the latter, the flowers and bolls were their ultimate point of attention – several measurements in the dispositif tracked whether vitalities were being appropriately channeled into their multiplication, maturation, and quality: date of first budding flowers, first capsules opened, when bolls were ready to be harvested; number of branches and fruit sites; quantity and quality of fiber in the bolls. In this hierarchical redistribution of vitalities, however, the plants had their own priorities, which were not always aligned with the experiments’ productivity-centered frame. Much of breeding, in fact, is about reprogramming them to better respond to external demands, so that they will for instance yield faster, more abundantly and homogeneously.
In the project’s dispositif, plant agency often took the form of “natural” forces that its arrangement was designed to countervail. Researchers frequently talked about it by means of analogies with human organisms: the cotton plant “feels thirsty”, “looks happy” or “becomes sick, just like we do”. “Do you see all these dead flowers on the ground?”, a Burkinabe entomologist once explained, as he showed me the effects of different cotton pests in one of the tests. “These are not pest related. If there is hydric stress [i.e., lack of rain], the plant will sacrifice its flowers in order to maintain the capsules that have already budded. It is as if a mother, in a moment of scarcity, would prefer to abort a baby in order to save her children who have already been born.” Or, as a Brazilian agronomist explained in another occasion, if hydric stress is severe the plant may “abort the capsules before they are ready, sacrifice them in order for the plant itself to stay alive. It’s more important for the plant to survive.” This was because while cotton evolved to be a perennial plant, in commercial agriculture it is harvested as a whole and sowed anew each season; the plant becomes just a means to its offspring, the cotton bolls. Agriculture at large, not just the agronomic sciences, is fundamentally about understanding and controlling the behavior of these non-human agencies, about avoiding the dispersion of their vitalities by channeling them to certain ends that are extraneous to “nature itself” – productivity being the paramount end in mainstream scientific agricultural systems. The incredible rise in yields brought about by the Green Revolution was however predicated on other, broader changes: the more technology advanced, the more controls on the plant’s natural and social contexts it came to demand. This appeared at the micro scale of experimentation in the three project components, all of which ultimately revolved around how to make improved seeds express their full productive potential as it was envisaged by breeding.
While the more technological a seed is, the more controls are required for its potential to be actualized, in less capital- and technology-intensive types of agriculture, the less technological – or as agronomists say, rustic – the seed is, the less external controls it demands. As a result, its vitality is more dispersed and does not concentrate on the quantity and quality of cotton capsules to the same degree as in improved seeds: in one word, productivity is necessarily much lower. Its resilience, on the other hand, is much greater. One can therefore see the milieu paysan’s predicament as stemming from a lag between technology and context: peasant farmers deployed improved seeds without the attachments required for them to express their full normative potential. The project’s experimental dispositif largely followed the pattern of technology-intensive agriculture: more than in peasant farms, it successfully organized and controlled agencies and vitalities that would be otherwise free floating, dispersed in and around the space and time of the parcel, acting according to their own designs. The outcome was, as described above, a beautiful and vigorous parcel. The dispositif’s capacity for directing non-human agencies was limited by its very design: by prescribing a range of controls to be imposed on the actants within the parcel, it simultaneously limited its range of action to them; outside of prescribed controls, actants were pretty much out of its reach. There were however many other agencies that laid beyond the reach of the dispositif and the researchers. Experimental controls deployed in the project parcel were made to act by other controls – I am referring here to the capacity of researchers, technicians, and other front liners to implement the dispositif itself. Somewhat like peasant farmers, though in a lesser degree, project front liners did not, or could not,u planting gutter always follow the technical protocols with the rigor ideally required for a statistical design. One would be tempted to refer to these as “social” controls exercised on people, to differentiate them from “technical” controls exercised on things. But what I propose here, following actor-network theory’s basic prescription of symmetry between humans and non-humans, is an exercise in looking at them as being ultimately of the same kind. The chief effect of this exercise, as I saw it, was to bring to the fore how experimental controls were ultimately predicated on broader controls, that oriented those inscribed in the dispositif’s design but, paradoxically, also prevented their deployment as such. This “gap” in controls found in the C-4 Project – and probably in all others, since, as was discussed above, technology transfer is itself predicated on a preexisting asymmetry between departure and arrival points – brings to light agencies situated at scales beyond the ethnographic present and location, which are not always included in more “immanent” accounts of social-technical assemblages and their actants: agencies that make them act, but upon which they cannot act back – at least, not with the same force. There is, here, a fundamental asymmetry in the distribution of agency that is not normally recognized in actor-network theory’s basically “flat” networks : an asymmetry that elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities has gone by the name of systems, structures, the postcolonial condition, and many others.
The following section will illustrate this asymmetry through one of its most common manifestations in the field, related to how scientific enterprises operate through homogenization and standardization, and explore its consequences for technology transfer to farmers in the C-4 Project.To reach such levels of technification was never the aim of the C-4 Project, which was working, rather, to strike some kind of balance between the new technologies and local production systems. Nonetheless, standardization was a concern at certain key points. Crop management procedures should be the same across the entire field so that, upon harvest, the final product is as homogeneous as possible: cotton fibers of similar length, color, free of contaminants, and so forth. This was a strong demand coming from another, much higher scale, shared by cotton producers in Brazil and elsewhere: the world market. Lack of homogeneity was an issue recurrently noted by researchers for the milieu paysan; even a layperson such as myself could clearly perceive the contrast between the homogeneity of the project and peasant fields, where cotton plants would often have variable sizes, colors and amount of flowers or capsules. Since the seed was supposed to be the same, heterogeneity would come from factors such as variable soil inclination , or the uneven application of organic and chemical fertilizers. Most of these ultimately stemmed from a contextual element not found in cerrado agriculture: prevalence of human labor. Human labor necessarily entails greater diversity , discontinuity , and fewer mediation by artifacts . But even at the institutes, when workers were outsourced from the local communities to perform less skilled tasks such as harvest or counting damaged plant parts, homogeneity could be lost, for instance through lack of continuity. “We try, we train them, but then one day comes a woman, two days later comes her sister, and then she does it differently or loses track of the previous counting”, one of the African researchers told me. Sometimes, technicians themselves would be absent sick, too weak to work due to fasting during Hamadan, or would for some reason decide to harvest earlier than planned. Measurements and other standards would be found to vary between the Brazilian and the African institutes: one used volume, the other used weight; one soil classification was based on the U.S. system, the other on the French system. As one of the African front liners put it, even in the researchers’ joint work, “approximations” were often necessary. In other words, between Brazil and Africa, Embrapa and the C-4 institutes, experimental stations and milieu paysan, something almost always became lost in translation. But were they lost in Latourian translation? In Reassembling the Social, this notion was recruited by Latour to perform nothing less than the task of replacing the “social” itself. Translation indicates a relation that, rather than carrying causality between “intermediaries”, associates “mediators” that make each other “do things” : “a connection that transfers … transformations” . The network is the ethnographic inscription of such concatenated translations: “what is traced by those connections in the scholars’ accounts” . In this sense, there is nothing to be “lost”; each translation is immanent, in the sense that it configures its own reference, with no determination beyond itself. In this view, actor-networks are as if in a process of perpetual emergence: “in each instance, we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was associated together because the previous definition has been made somewhat irrelevant” . Yet, there was among my interlocutors a pervading sense of inappropriateness – that the “real” thing laid elsewhere – that I could not just theorize away. African researchers had often been trained abroad, were fairly up to date in what was going on in their scientific fields, and participated in a global techno-science that had, quite literally, much of its reference elsewhere – usually, still, in centers of excellence in the global North. They knew how a dispositif should be correctly implemented, and how a good laboratory of soil analysis or biotechnology should look like. More often than not, however, this was not what they had in their own institutes. But on the other hand, what they had in their institutes was the real thing, their daily work environment. As with the “not-so-captured” African peasantry discussed previously, their regular condition was to be in-between – as Boaventura de Sousa Santos put it in an apt, and candid, formulation on the paradoxical nature of the postcolonial condition, they “live in the margins without living a marginal life”.