CONTROL: the extractive ecology of corn monoculture

ABSTRACT

This article tells the history of the industrial and biotechnological development of large-scale corn agriculture, from a new materialist perspective. Addressing the large-scale economy of industrial food production as a form of more-than-human configuration, it demonstrates how corn has been made into a quintessential commodity and factor of production for a consumption-based economy. Set within discourses around the climate crisis, this account critically assesses the Anthropocene and its advocacy for human accountability in regards to the exploitation of nonhuman matters. I ask: who is the Anthropos? How does it/he/she meet with its domesticated subjects, or rather makes them into domesticable materials? Telling the history of corn monoculture from a new materialist standpoint exposes this industry’s distribution of agency, power and control across a diversity of human and nonhuman actors. This is at the centre of this article’s three sections: (1) an argument for inscribing extractivism within new materialist literature, (2) an account of the industrialization of corn monoculture, exposing the industry’s main mechanisms and economic endeavours, as well as its ramifications with a biopolitics of invasion and (3) the biotechnological development of the industry and its shifts from a biopolitics of vegetal matter to an informational extractivism and a necropolitics of killable life. Thus I argue that if the industry of corn monoculture belongs to a broader network of detrimental industries characteristic of the Anthropocene, the geological Anthropos is not to be understood as synonymous with the human species, but as a very restrictive ecology of humans and nonhumans, including corporate, industrial, technoscientific and extractive actors. As such, the article emphasizes the moral necessity of rupturing with the narrative of the Anthropocene, a discourse better suited for supporting existing mechanisms of domination and exploitation constitutive of the economy of climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Monoculture
• industrialization
• biotechnology
• extractivism
• new materialism
• Anthropocene

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his gratitude to his research supervisor, Dr Darin Barney, for his support in making this research possible. The author would also like to thank the Canada Research Chair in Technology and Citizenship, the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and the Media@McGill Research Center, from McGill University, Canada, where this research and the writing of this article was conducted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hubert Alain is a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and research assistant for the Canada Research Chair in Technology and Citizenship, at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His research is concerned with political conflicts around corn agriculture, between large-scale exploitation and small-scale community based practices. He is also an amateur gardener, cook, and DIYer activist, collaborating with diverse guerrilla gardening, urban agriculture and organic food organizations based in Montreal.

Notes

1. The article was discredited by Nature for motifs of flimsy methodologies, but real motifs behind this decision remain debated.