Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
still today, Cooperative Extension represented the most widespread and
pervasive arm of state-based expertise in the United States.
Cooperative Extension work is an ideal case for studying the interface
of social and material repair because advisors are supposed to intervene
directly in the ecology of place, practice, and power found in their local
communities. This aspect of Cooperative Extension work brings to mind
Michel Foucault's extensive work on the ties between power, knowledge,
and the modern state. In Foucault's conceptualization, the state maintains
power and social order through modern institutions of expert knowledge
and practice, such as medical clinics and prisons. In this respect, Foucault's
view of modern statecraft is defi ned not so much by an ideology or a his-
torical era but rather by institutionalized practices, a set of techniques that
consolidate power.
18
Despite Foucault's emphasis on the power of these
practices, however, their effi cacy seems quite variable. The techniques of
domination he describes in connection with the rise of penology have
had a profound effect on the way modern societies treat lawbreakers, but
new problems seem to inevitably arise from these systems of power-based
order.
This dichotomy between state intentions and outcomes is the subject of
James Scott's
Seeing Like a State
(1998), in which he describes several “high-
modernist” attempts by the state to control and direct the lives of its popu-
lace, including urban planning, agrarian reform, and rural resettlement
projects. In each of his examples, Scott writes, the state viewed this inter-
vention in a very linear and simplistic way, assuming that abstract princi-
ples of design imposed from above could easily improve and replace the
systems of practice already in place on the local level. In addition, state
planners believed this reordering of local practices could increase the
control and accountability that the state held over its people, “consolidat-
ing the power of central institutions and diminishing the autonomy of
[subjects] and their communities vis-à-vis those institutions” (286). Scott
describes how these grandiose projects turned out quite badly for the state
and especially for its people, and he argues that high-modernist projects
failed because they did not account for the importance of local knowledge.
Overall, the cases presented by Scott argue against the totalizing power
of the modern state and its ability, as emphasized in Foucault's work, to
intervene in local communities of practice (1998, 101).
The case of Cooperative Extension lies somewhere between these two
extremes, where expert-based power is portrayed as either totalizing or
