Capítulo IX “Variación de Pasivos Financieros”
4.- PRESUPUESTO DE GASTOS
A/agrarianism as Modernism
As in chapter one, it's important to consider the meanings and manifestations of the various strains of anti-‐development modernism that emerge throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. More specifically, we might further connect Gaonkar's attention to the unexpectedly plural modernity of settler colonies—"not one but many . . . not new but old and familiar" (23)—along the (post)colonial margins with Patricia Chu's interest in the "'anti-‐colonialist' regionalist rhetoric" of the Agrarians, which resulted in a "masculine, agrarian, and 'high' or New Critical modernism" (117).
So while critics often recognize the city as the locus of high modernism, making processes of modernization synonymous with urbanization, the Nearings and the Agrarians each find the most viable future in the provinces. And like other rural subjects, their
response to the overwhelming presence of modern development through industrial capitalism constitutes a particularly modern mode of protest. Still, the relative absence, in both I'll Take My Stand and Living the Good Life, of qualities typically associated with aesthetic modernism encourages the question: How should we understand their function by conventions of landowning. The term also represents people and culture directly
engaged in agriculture: "Of or relating to cultivated land or the cultivation of land; based on or engaged in the cultivation of land; (esp. of a society, community, etc.) agricultural,
farming." And, as early as the late eighteenth century, it additionally signifies resistance to abusive practices of landowning: "A person who advocates a redistribution of landed property. Often in pl., denoting any of various groups or parties engaged in this." In this sense, the label applies with as much force to the STFU as it does the Twelve Southerners.
as modernist texts? Seth Moglen's configuration of "two modernisms" provides a useful model. According to Moglen, the most readily canonized of the modernists "produced literary works that are structured by the presumption that collective resistance to the damaging forces of modernization is impossible." Conversely, the other major strand of modernists held that the "most corrosive forces at work in American life might be altered and ameliorated, and that the human capacities that seemed most constrained might somehow be enabled to flourish in the future" (7-‐8). The split thus arises between those who believe that the experience of modernity is irredeemable and those who hold to the possibility of redemption. And, as I consider both the limits and the potential of collectivity in this chapter, it's also important to consider how this split follows a rift dividing those who subscribe to classical liberal models of selfhood, that emphasize individual modes of agency and subjectivity, and those who stress collective forms of identity, personality, and action. Although his analysis is primarily interested in the cultural work done by narrative fiction, Moglen's belief that certain American modernists might be able to "bring into being a social order in which the human potentialities imperiled by modernization might be revived or made anew" matches the stated aims of both our bodies of agrarians (25). While fiction writers and poets, guided by Ezra Pound's famous exhortation to "make it new," experimented with literary forms, the Agrarians theorized alternative modes of living and economies, while the Nearings performed them as a lived reality.
Calling for the return of a disappeared—or disappearing—agriculturally driven South, I'll Take My Stand is a proudly conservative attempt to refute the spread of modernity by articulating the nation's future in crudely binary terms: North or South, industrialism or agriculture, progress or tradition. Despite this reductive framework, I'll
Take My Stand is a tangled text with multiple authors and an irregular sense of its own message—it's an anthology that openly performs modernity's unevenness. And in terms of forwarding a consistent political philosophy, the text's multiplicity brings the Agrarians up short. But its internal disagreements might also register as a kind of modernist
multivocality, resulting in a text that presents a skein of unresolved fragments appealing beneath and beyond rationality, towards the kind of mythopoeic pastoral of T. S. Eliot and James Frazer. To this end, its more doctrinaire contributors, Donald Davidson in particular, were often unnerved by the divergence of the text's messages. They recognized in part what is fully clear to contemporary readers: as a coherent manifesto, I'll Take My Stand is fundamentally flawed. Its flaws, however, highlight the diversity of responses forced by the onset of modernity. Even within a narrowly selected group of participants—it's hard to imagine a more evenly peopled group: all white, southern men of a shared ideological bent and, for the most part, a shared class background and professional orientation—we see that it's virtually impossible to apprehend the full meanings of modernity without having one's vision refracted by its epistemological diffusions.
For their part, the Nearings' protests arrive from a distinctly different political angle. Scott Nearing, an original leader of the People's Council for Peace and Democracy, was called before a grand jury in 1917 for obstructing the peace with the publication of his book The Great Madness, which "analyz[ed] the basic causes and aims of the war as commercial, not idealistic" (Loving and Leaving 21). For the Nearings, an agricultural existence was a principled break from a world that "had rejected in practice and in principle our pacifism, our vegetarianism, and our collectivism" (Living 3). Within Living the Good Life's careful enumeration of the couple's beliefs, we read that they sought to "share in salvaging what
was still usable from the wreckage of the decaying social order . . . [and] to have a part in formulating principles and practices of an alternative social system" (4).
As a written artifact, Living the Good Life functions as a combination of farmer's almanac and personal history, centered specifically on the Nearings' Vermont project. It is also a text that consciously performs its own literariness. For example, each chapter places itself within a historical continuum by offering up thick sediments of quotations from a variety of sources. In addition to predictable entries from Thoreau and Jefferson, the text also offers citations from a range of more obscure texts and a range of periods, from
Gervase Markham's The Countrey Farme (1616) to Rider Haggard's A Farmer's Year (1899) to Julian Huxley's Essays of a Biologist (1923). Much as The Good Life understands itself to be intervening in a specifically modern set of problems—Great Depression, World War, the inequities of an industrial economy—the text is always mindful of its precedents, offering a genealogy of ecologically minded appreciators of the soil made accessible through writing. In contrast to the Agrarians' southernness, the Nearings' ambition to enact a wide-‐scale pastoral community takes them to rural Vermont, and rather than drawing inspiration from an imagined past, they step directly into the stream of history, creating a rural alternative to the excesses of industrialism and urbanism.
Susan Stanford Friedman's incisive deconstruction of the terms "modern" and "modernism" concedes that whatever else modernism might represent, it is undoubtedly concerned with the turbulence of cultural rupture. Yet, as responses to this turbulence are translated into manifestos, they project their own kind of authority, against which future innovators must rebel: "The impulse to order is the product of chaos" (510), she explains of modernism's uncanny ability to extinguish and reinvent itself through modernity's
capitalism-‐fueled cycles of creative destruction. Living the Good Life thus stands as a series of persistent attempts to create a unique logic, to make the authors' own lifestyle accessible to others with all the patience and scrupulousness of a how-‐to manual. As it narrates the process of turning of flinty Vermont soil into fruitful loam, the Nearings' text seeks to organize the "chaos" of a life lived against the grain of American capitalism, in resistance to what Warren Susman identifies as a unique product of the 1930s—the "American Way of Life" (202). Similarly, the Nearings' attempt to fashion a wholesale alternative lifestyle is itself an effort to create an adjacent "culture" at a time when, according to Susan Hegeman, that concept had an especially poignant meaning. According to Hegeman's model, then, the Nearings' invention of new kind of agrarian culture might serve to "answe[r] a particular descriptive need in the modernist moment, when older conceptions of history and
temporality had begun to seem, for various reasons, no longer adequate to explaining the specific experiences of alienation and difference Americans felt from others in their communities, their nation, the world" (4).
By recognizing these divergent strands of agrarianism as clearly intentioned
alternatives to American capitalism, we might recognize them as expressions of what Scott Herring theorized as the regional modernist drive towards the "subnational" (4), a
classification describing the self-‐conscious reassertion of a group's sovereignty via its establishment of an autonomous economic, cultural, and even political, identity. Thus, while it's not uncommon to configure the Nashville Agrarians within the context of literary modernism, we should notice the wide range of meanings derived from the agrarian
instinct, and what this range indicates about the complex politics of rural American modernism across different regions.
Land and Progress
In their own way, the authors of both I'll Take My Stand and Living the Good Life are each after what Marx, perhaps dismissively, calls the "idiocy of rural life" (65). While Edward Soja explains the adjective's use with reference to its Greek root, idios, meaning "one's own, private, separate, set apart" (206), it's clear that Marx sees rural life as encouraging
disengagement of all varieties, including political, and that he remains uneasy about its revolutionary potential. Yet this kind of disengagement from the culture at large is
precisely the point for both the Nearings and the Agrarians, and considering their theories about the soil and the concept of "progress" will help us to better understand their
distinct—but often complementary—ideas about the intersections of land, revolution, and the shape of an ideal future.
Agrarianism in the style of both the Agrarians and the Nearings offers an
engagement with the material world vis-‐à-‐vis literary representation of the soil as the most effective way to reconnect with a sense of self and community decentered by modern capital. Throughout I'll Take My Stand, however, this tendency is forcefully regionalized, as the various essayists extol the virtues of the soil, which frequently comes to serve as a metonym for the South at large. Within this regional frame, John Crowe Ransom marvels that "out of so simple a thing as respect for the physical earth and its teeming life comes a primary joy, which is an inexhaustible source of arts and religions and philosophies" (9), while Frank Owsley uses the dirt to invoke myths of autochthony that trace the contours of a triumphal southern history: "Each word, name, sound, had grown from the soil and had behind it sweet memory, sitting adventure, and ofttimes stark tragedy. Thoughts, words,
ideas, concepts, life itself, grew from the soil" (69). Elsewhere, Herman Nixon confidently remarks on a "critical sophistication that is native to Southern soil" (199).53
More circumspectly perhaps, the text's introduction proclaims that the "theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers" (xlvii), a particularly telling statement when you realize that the reference to "workers" is designed to occlude its authors. This reading rests more comfortably alongside what we encounter in Living the Good Life, where the dirt, especially the dirt experienced by the Nearings as workers in Vermont, is simultaneously a host to the noblest of professions and a problem to be overcome.
To harness the earth's potential and to provide sovereignty through work becomes one of Living the Good Life's most prominent motifs. Indeed, by their own account, one of the Nearings' major accomplishments on their Vermont homestead was achieved when a "piece of eroded and depleted mountain land was restored to fertility, and produced fine crops of high quality vegetables, fruits and flowers" (6). Nadivah Greenberg's history of "green conservatism" helps us locate a vital point of contact for both I'll Take My Stand and Living the Good Life: a respect for the more deliberate pace of rural life and its activities, as well as a reverence for the soil's material and metaphorical meanings. For Greenberg, the
53 Not surprisingly, W. J. Cash has a less enthusiastic reading of the influence of the southern landscape on its inhabitants. He describes the "wide fields and blue woods and flooding yellow sunlight" as creating a "world . . . in which not a single factor operated to break up the old pattern of outdoor activity laid down on the frontier," tying it to the region's perceived shortcomings in art and intellect: it is "a world in which horses, dogs, guns, not books, and ideas and art" prevailed (96).
Agrarians' stance is less an "outlying anomaly" than the reprise of an "earlier American conservatism" (90), one that urged a responsible marshalling of natural resources and moderation in consumption. Similarly, the Nearings recognize themselves as members of a "dying social order" seeking to "live frugally and decently" amidst the overwhelming onslaught of industrialism (4), a project that includes a calculated effort to absent
themselves from the money economy in favor of a use economy where everything produced is cycled back into the local (household) system.
Thus, while the latent power of the Agrarians' southern soil rises up to meet its inhabitants, the Nearings' Vermont dirt needs attention, labor, and reform. Theirs is not a narrative of restoration; it's about crafting a durable future from the materials of the present. To put a sharper point on this observation, it's worth considering how these texts conceptualize time and how such conceptualizations shape their proposals. In both cases, there exists a calculated resistance to what Martha Banta calls, in a nod to Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific approach to systems management, "Taylored time," wherein "time is both the greatest enemy of efficient work and the instrument with which to master effective production" (6). This industrialized approach to time management insures that time itself is met(er)ed out and measured as never before, by the addition of devices such as factory whistles and punch clocks. And yet it's precisely this sense of time over-‐
regulated that creates a situation in which it is constantly in danger of slipping out of place. In an increasingly standardized world with an increasingly standardized sense of temporal distance and pacing, subjects who find themselves at odds with time's flow feel their difference with new acuity. To return to Leigh Anne Duck again, modernity's uneven development has a temporal dimension.
In other words, people and places out of pace with the contemporary world lapse out of time, which actually represents something like a goal for both the Nearings and the Agrarians. Bergson's conceptualization of time as an entity that exists beyond scientific measurements, in the consciousness of human subjects bears repeating here: both groups seek to make time work for them rather than working for time. Hence attempts by both the Nearings and the Agrarians to emphasize leisure over and above production stands as a rejection of the ethos of early-‐twentieth-‐century capitalism. "Things were moving fast— perhaps too fast" (29), the Nearings write, and their project explicitly tries to recast time, to loosen the grip of clock time, by highlighting the importance of free time. The Agrarian difference is subtle, but important: they are trying to step off the track of industrialized time by moving backwards—not, as the Nearings, sideways. At the risk of simplifying their relative positions, it's fair to suggest that the Nearings' project exists in "progressive" time: it seeks to enter the stream of history, engaging time as it unfolds in the present. The Agrarians, on the other hand, work to make the stream change its entire course, using tradition and the mythos of a disappeared past to imagine a premodern, preindustrial society.
In the eyes of the Agrarians, to be industrialized is to be stripped of a vital
connection to one's own place and, consequently, one's own sense of history; to become, in the words of Lyle Lanier, "unattached to that tremendous social anchor"(150). For Lanier, "progress," especially as exemplified by Dewey-‐style pragmatism, is a catalyst for
existential disconnection. This is not too far removed from the thinking of the Nearings except that Lanier's solution represents a more fully formed retreat into the past, and one that requires a good deal of obfuscation and deliberate forgetting. So, for instance, when
Lanier pines for the "restoration of the balance of economic forces" that existed in antebellum America, he neglects to recall that such a balance—if it ever really existed, a doubtful proposition given the instability of the global markets in which the planter class participated—was in large measure made possible by the availability of slave labor. "Progress is a comparatively modern idea," Lanier assures us, as if that fact alone were enough to discredit it, and we realize that the problem with using the sign of "modernity" as a straw man is that it's a portable battle line, continually accommodating and
reaccommodating itself to the needs of its philosophers. In his attempt to wrest "progress" out of a linear narrative, then, to replace one teleology with another, Lanier is himself participating in what we might recognize as a complexly modern trick of manufacturing myth and history.54
Thus, the two texts' different attitudes about the meanings of progress indicate a fundamental difference within their political orientation. For the Nearings, the attempts to create progress should be rerouted away from modern forms of "exploitation," which include "the plunder of the planet; the slavery of man and beast; the slaughter of men in war, and of animals for food" towards the creation of a sustainable future marked by "serenity, purpose, and at-‐one-‐ness" (5-‐6). And it can be achieved, the Nearings argue, by revitalizing the pockets of rural, land-‐based culture still uncompromised by modern development. For the Agrarians, the very specter of "progress" is inseparable from
54 Lanier may be correct to argue that "progress usually turns out to mean business" (123), but in the analysis of W.J. Cash, a southern modernist of a different ideological cast,
whatever else industrial development might have done, "Progress . . . was the father of the forces" that precipitated the decline of southern lynching (305-‐6).
industrialism, which the South, as Andrew Lytle declaims, "should dread . . . like a pizen snake" (234).
Although they arrive from different ends of the political spectrum, both the
Agrarians and the Nearings exhibit concerns about the effects of "industrial capitalism"—a phrase they share with one another, and with Marx. In point of fact, Marx's description of the effects of "industrial capitalism" is of a piece with what we find in both I'll Take My Stand and Living the Good Life:
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded