Abstract
Starting from a redescription of agriculture’s relationship to precariousness, understood as a complex feeling at the crossroads of experiences of ontological instability, epistemic uncertainty and social insecurity, the aim of this research is first to grasp the role of a certain modernizing rationality in the transformation process of French agriculture at the turn of the 1960s-1970s: what we call entrepreneurial vitalism. The term refers to a reform of the legitimization of market society, no longer based on its naturalization, as in the classical liberalism analyzed by Polanyi, but on an evolutionary vitalization of market and competition logics. A shift from the order of nature to the disorder of life, where vital intensity merges with economic risk, and which finds one of its philosophical foundations in France in Bergson’s moralist and modernizing evolutionism. In agriculture, this vitalism is a powerful lever for shifting legitimate precarity from relations with the living to commercial relations, undoing the peasant to institute the agri-entrepreneur. By examining the discreet yet structuring role of this entrepreneurial vitalism, influenced by neoliberal thinking, in French agricultural policies and their theoretical and political legitimations, we seek to show the growing importance of the dual figure of the ("agronomic") engineer and the ("agricultural") entrepreneur in this process. The former as an agent of agrotechnical over-control of living dynamics, the latter as the new norm for agricultural work, caught up in a constant relationship with the instabilities of market processes. In this way, we attempt to characterize agricultural modernization as a reversal of legitimate precarity, from the labile and variable relationship to the living that characterizes peasant practices, to the relationship to markets that structures and determines modernized agro-industry. This historical work then enables us to better understand, through field surveys, how radical contemporary agro-ecological practices seek to make room for the instabilities of the living, by imagining non-dualistic practices, techniques and relationships. However, by focusing more on technical systems without outlining a properly political approach to their generalization, we argue that these agro-ecological practices, while remaining structurally marginal, are unable to really free themselves from the precarity regime created by modernization and the dominant entrepreneurial framework, which continue to impose the logic of the market as a superior reality. The final challenge of this work is therefore to outline the social and political conditions for a shift in legitimate precarity from the vagaries of the market to the instabilities of the living, enabling the constitution of an agroecological front conceived and experienced as a genuine social movement. With this in mind, we conclude with a philosophical reflection contrasting two institutional logics - the ark and the fortress - in order to think more precisely about the articulation of an earthly condition and a political future that both destitutes and institutes. In particular, we need to consider the concrete multiplication of erosion devices, in Erik Ollin Wright’s sense, of modernizing agricultural capitalism, drawing our inspiration more specifically from self-management logics of social security, aiming both at the conquest of political sovereignty over the attribution of value, democratic deliberation over legitimate stasis, and the collective re- appropriation of the means of experimentation, to invent relational, emancipatory and sustainable agricultural practices with other-than-human beings.