Past, Present and Future 169The next issue is the relationships between things. What is fascinating, but also
confusing, about the world of agriculture is that there are no separations between
periods and phases. Even though there are noticeable shifts in emphasis, overlap
and mutual influence predominate rather than clear boundaries. In the traditional
phase or constellation (see Figure 8.1a) agriculture was already modernizing rap-
idly. And during the decades in which the process of modernizing had become
dominant (as represented in Figure 8.1b) a megaproject, confusingly named ‘mod-
ernization project’ was developed and implemented. This was in fact an expression
of the ‘postmodern’ operation of expert systems avant la lettre (see Figure 8.1c).
More accurately, the moment when the past finally seemed to lose its straitjacket,
two new, unequal but interconnected, developments emerged.
On the one hand, modernity, which had already been hidden in the bowels of
traditionalism, made its entry. Building upon experiences, practices and resources,
which had all been handed down through history, multiple developments were
initiated resulting in a variegated morphology, in a wide range of farming styles,
each one equipped with a particular future project, an attempt to develop its own
practice (that is, its own farm and set of relations into which it is woven) corre-
sponding most closely to its own wishes, insights, interests, capabilities and limi-
tations. Even though the term would be used only much later in the social sciences,
one could say that agency increasingly flourished from this moment onwards.
More or less at the same time, a countermovement was defined, for an expert sys-
tem was created through which farm development was represented as a uniform
process.
It follows clearly from the previous explanation that the phases I described
above cannot be regarded as consecutive, let alone as well-defined periods. They
are ordering principles, ways of relating past, present and future in and through
social practices. Analytically, one can attempt to define certain basic patterns vis-à-
vis each other; empirically, however, one will always encounter different and mutu-
ally conflicting principles, sometimes dominated by the one, sometimes by the
other.
Recent agrarian history is usually narrated in terms of necessity and inevitabil-
ity. The development of agriculture is, to coin a phrase, structurally determined.
Agricultural development has taken place in a particular way; it could not have
happened differently. The development that took place over the past decades
informs us about underlying forces. These forces will also, and probably more than
ever before, determine the panorama of the agriculture of the future.
The structuring moment is located in various ‘bodies’: in the coercive forces
recognizable in the market sphere; in the ongoing technological development; in
the complete modernization of our societies, which leaves neither the agricultural
sector nor the countryside unaffected; and/or in the sphere of politics. The latter
body is usually understood in terms of reflex, in terms of an intermediary between
the underlying economic, technological and cultural changes.
In this narrative style, the future of agriculture emerges as a story that ‘can be
told in advance’, as a story that is, as it were, the inevitable outcome of a script