...that has to be my favorite line of Marx, ever. It sums up my feelings about a farmer with whom I was talking in New Zealand. For miles around his house you could see fields mowed pristine by the nibbling mouths of sheep. And machines like an irrigation machine on wheels. You dialed a certain amount of rain and hit Enter, and presto.
The farmer was wondering why his daughter was the only person in her school who worked on a farm. The simple answer, which propriety forbade me from giving, went something like this: “Well, man, you fired the workers and replaced them with automation, to improve your bottom line.” This dude was telling us about the efficiencies gained therefrom, for Pete's sake, in the same conversation in which he lamented the sorry state of his daughter's school fellows.
Imagine what groups of humans and nonhumans who weren't farmers and sheep could do with the “vast open space” of agriculture. The original Mark Fisher hauntology, of which lawns, parking lots and ambient music are but pale translations, is the field.
Imagine, in other words, a time without agriculture.
We've had four vast modes of human enjoyment: capitalism, communism, feudalism, slave owning societies. These have all taken place basically in an agricultural world. Every single one of them has had fields and sheep, as it were.
Ecology without agriculture? I think my Ph.D. student Eric O'Brien has a serious point.
