172 Participatory Processes
I am part of the expert system, in a somewhat contradictory way. Pleasure,
curiosity and passion connect me to this larger whole. Yet at the same time I often
experience disbelief, rage and disturbance at its shortcomings. In any event, I feel
no false obligation to be loyally silent. It is rather my right and my duty (in that
respect, I take my job in an old-fashioned way) to criticize when necessary, espe-
cially when others are hardly, or not at all, able to do so.
However, let there be no misunderstanding. For – even if I am aware of the con-
ventional classification systems on the shop floor, which divide the components of
the expert systems into categories such as ‘twits’, ‘eccentrics’, ‘dimwits’, ‘barons’ and
‘simpletons’ (a complex world!) – I argue strongly that we generally deal with very
capable and driven people. The failure of the expert system does not concern the
qualities of the people involved. What is fundamentally wrong is the way in which
we organize and apply knowledge. That is all this book is about. Nothing else.
Storylines
The theme has been clearly defined by now. Five distinctively different storylines
can be identified within the described framework. The storylines interweave and
interconnect in places. In other places I attempt to develop first this, then another,
storyline independently.
The first storyline concerns agriculture as a complex practice – as a carefully
coordinated unit comprising (i) the mobilization of resources, (ii) the conversion
of resources into end products and (iii) the sale of these end products.
The mobilization of resources is discussed in Chapter 2 in particular. There I
point out how, via a lengthy and complex emancipation process, the mobilization
of resources (land, capital, labour, knowledge, water, tools etc.) is actively with-
drawn from the influence of markets. This distantiation from markets at the input
side of the farm provided the basis for the success of Dutch agriculture. Creating a
certain distance between farm and markets is one of the hidden ingredients explain-
ing the success of Dutch agriculture. It is also one of the ingredients that is system-
atically ignored in the currently predominant description of the virtual farmer.
Farmers act as Homo economicus within the image produced by the contemporary
agricultural knowledge network, as entrepreneurs integrating their farm fully into
markets and therefore following and implementing the logic of the market: as pup-
pets on a string.
Dutch farmers are, I will argue in this book, not so much the entrepreneurs
they should be according to the agricultural expert system, but peasants: producers
who, for the sake of their own survival, actively withdraw the processes of farm
management and farm development from the logic of markets that seem to ignore
their survival.
‘We have never been modern’, according to Latour in a well-known essay
(1994). In its footsteps one could claim: ‘Dutch farmers have never been entrepre-