This is a thought experiment on the consequences of technical rationality, the dominant epistemology of practice that tells us that “professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique” (Schön 2017, 22). My aim is not to demonize technical rationality at the outset. Instead, I attempt to lay out the stakes of such a project when scaled beyond the confines of the spaces where experts conceive them. What happens when an “epistemic thing”—an unstable, experimental object of scientific research—is taken out of the controlled confines of the lab or the pages collated from a scientific symposium and introduced into the real world (Rheinberger 1997)? To borrow Anna Tsing’s phrasing, what happens when you increase the scale of an experiment without altering its frame for the differences encountered in the real world (Tsing 2015, 38; 2019, 506)?
The Auction Floor
The experimental system I want to set up for you is the auction floor or open market, where prices are negotiated and transacted, and commodities are sold. The specific auction floor I speak of lies on the outskirts of Ongole, a small town and the capital of Prakasam district in Andhra Pradesh, India. Adjacent to this state-regulated auction space lie vast open farmscapes whose monotony is broken up here and there by a tree, a pond, or a dried-up irrigation channel. Farmers grow crops, such as lentils, coriander, ginger, chilies, and tobacco. The specific auction floor and farms I speak of are used to market and cultivate Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco. This was part of the setting for my ethnographic fieldwork between 2015 and 2023 on agricultural commodities and their markets.
On the auction floor. Photo by author.
The epistemic thing I refer to in this essay is a set of parameters that denote the “quality” of FCV or cigarette tobacco. FCV tobacco is a variety of Nicotiana tabacum, whose harvested leaves, cured using heat radiated from flue pipes in brick barns, are used to manufacture blended cigarettes. The parameters determining FCV tobacco’s quality are desirable morphological, chemical, and sensory qualities in cured leaves that make them a good “fit” for manufacturing blended cigarettes. Subsequently, a good fit makes for convenient and pleasurable consumption by long-term consumers of cigarettes, who expect a consistent smoking experience based on cultivated brand loyalties. On the auction floor, some leaves get graded higher and fetch better market prices based on positive quality traits. For example, leaves with bright yellow-orange color are more valuable. The color indicates the presence of aromatic organic compounds, higher sugar content, and lower levels of the alkaloid component, nicotine, that specific cigarette consumers crave. Of course, these same chemical traits, like high sugar, also make consuming cigarettes addictive and lethal. Similarly, a ripe full bloom with hairy outgrowth is a positive morphological trait, indicating that the cured leaf is optimal for manufacturing. For the same reasons, leaves with these qualitative traits are considered high quality. They receive a higher grade and command better prices at auction.
So, we have established that the quality of FCV tobacco is an epistemic thing, and the auction floor is part of an assemblage called experimental systems. What are “epistemic things” and “experimental systems”? In his influential work Toward a History of Epistemic Things (1997), the philosopher of science and historical epistemologist of practice Hans-Jörg Rheinberger introduced the concept of epistemic things. Epistemic things, he claimed, were fuzzy objects that emerge in and through scientific experimentation. They do not have definitive boundaries but are open-ended, generating more questions than answers. For instance, transfer RNA (tRNA) was a fuzzy trace that emerged in an experimental system meant to study how cancerous tissues synthesize proteins differently from normal tissues in Paul Zamecnik’s laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital (Rheinberger 1997; 2005). Here, the intermediary “X” factor that Zamecnik’s team observed when synthesizing protein eventually led to the discovery of tRNA. Using examples like these, Rheinberger shows how epistemic things are crucial to scientific innovation and progress but function as non-teleological objects in experimental systems.
Yet, epistemic things are not timeless, free-floating entities either. Their presence converts problematic situations into problems, giving them shape and direction. Scientific practitioners must do particular work to imbue meaning and direction to render problematic situations into problems (Schön 2017, 40). The meaning scientists imbue into an emerging epistemic object depends on existing, situated technical objects, knowledge infrastructures, and the skills at their disposal. Thus, epistemic things are historically and contextually specific—they arise within an assemblage, what Rheinberger (2023) calls an experimental system, and are surrounded by technical objects available at that historical moment. Ultimately, epistemic things become technical objects like scientific facts, theories, or devices, or are eschewed as failed experiments. For Rheinberger (2023), experiments are a dialectic between the open-ended exploration of epistemic things and the crystallization of that exploration into settled technical knowledge.
Our experimental environment—the auction floors on which the prices of FCV tobacco are discovered—also comprises numerous technical objects such as weights, grades, statistics, and government-issued bale tags. Several of these technical objects, including grades, are based on existing conceptions of what parameters make up “good” quality. But, wait a minute! How can quality be both an epistemic thing and a source of technical objects? That is a temporal question. Here, I borrow from Latour’s description of scientific facts. Like scientific facts, quality is a Janus-faced concept (Latour 1987). It acts like the black box of scientific fact—fixed and stable—on which experts build other technical objects and perform qualifications on the auction floor. But now and then, the black box unravels, and quality is exposed as an emergent epistemic thing.
Women workers sorting out tobacco leaves. Photo by author.
State experts—the scientists and regulators of the Indian state who support Prakasam’s FCV tobacco farmers in developing and auctioning their crops—treat quality as a fixed scientific fact in their research and development activities. In their view, technical objects such as grades (based on quality parameters) are essential tools to communicate the market’s preferences, articulated in a legible hierarchy that suggests corresponding prices to local tobacco farmers. Farmers, in turn, rely on such signals to plan their activities ahead of harvest. Understandably then, farmers expect grades that denote the hierarchy of quality to translate into established tiers of prices at the end of the auction process.
Making Things Scalable
“Making projects scalable takes a lot of work.” (Tsing 2012, 507)
Enacting quality is a constant process of taming chance. Farmers and experts who provide agri-extension services to farmers seek to control large-scale cultivation through precision harvesting, curing, and grading to produce high-quality cured FCV tobacco leaves. On farms and grading halls, quality parameters can fluctuate depending on factors like seed variety, soil type, amount of irrigation water used, and curing temperatures (see Besky 2020). Any of these elements can negatively impact a leaf’s morphological, chemical, and sensory properties, making it less desirable. For instance, too much irrigation can cause rot, while too little can cause wilt. If the water is saline, it increases chloride levels, making the smoke harsh. If curing temperatures are too high, it adversely impacts the conversion of glucose to sugars, caramelizing the leaf. Farmers rely on experts to provide scalable technology (like disease-resistant, high-yielding seed varieties) to optimize their production in highly variable landscapes.
Brick barns used to cure tobacco. Photo by author.
In this instance, the Indian state experts have successfully used scale to their advantage. Since FCV tobacco is a relatively minor crop in the country, grown by only 100,000 farmers and only in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, experts can more easily coax farmers into adopting cultivating and curing practices to optimize quality. Experts in the sector have the financial support to act on this scale dimension. A research institute dedicated to tobacco research and a commodity board dedicated to marketing FCV tobacco have worked together across decades of face-to-face interactions. Over many training sessions, via state-regulated agri-extension services and through agrarian seminars, experts have convinced farmers to invest in producing a “high” quality tobacco crop. As a result, many FCV tobacco farmers have invested in building barns and today pay relatively high wages to specially trained curers. However, disciplining, coaxing, and negotiating only works if farmers get adequate prices for their capital investment and efforts.
This is where things get complicated for farmers and experts. Although experts treat quality as a fact on which they build technical objects, quality often acts like an epistemic thing in practice. Quality’s unstable nature stems from its relationship with another element core to its experimental system—its correlation to fluctuating market demand. Quality’s relationship to market demand means that, in some years, harsh tobacco containing too much nitrogen and too little sugar, usually considered low in quality, might suddenly become more coveted or desirable. Under such circumstances, a lower-grade leaf may fetch a higher price than a high-grade one. Or crop losses in competing tobacco-growing nations like Brazil or Zimbabwe might lead to a shortfall in the availability of specific grades of tobacco in the market that year, raising prices through the roof in India (Samdani 2024; Wright 2024). Conversely, adverse market conditions can mean that neither low nor high grades of FCV tobacco earn enough to compensate farmers’ costs of production. Under such circumstances, expectations based on the relationship between grade and price that experts set up through the qualification process are disturbed.
Structural Shifts
Other major impacts come from long-term structural shifts in what’s considered good quality. Such shifts can have dramatic effects. In the not-so-distant past, events like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union have ended up rendering quality volatile for a time. These events shifted the consumer profile for Indian FCV tobacco. In the post-independence decades after 1947, aiming to boost the newly independent state’s economy, the Indian government entered a series of bilateral trade deals with the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. According to my expert interlocutors, the immature style tobacco with high nicotine drove quality targets at the time because the smokers in these regions preferred its harsher smoke. Crucially, since these styles of tobacco grow better under specific environmental conditions, FCV tobacco grown in rainfed black soil regions was coveted in this period.
By the 60s and 70s, sustained anti-tobacco activism around the globe had given tobacco corporations a new idea: to convince consumers in Europe and the US that filter-tipped cigarettes and light cigarettes were healthier. Of course, they didn’t tell the consumers that the light cigarettes contained more sugars and were more acidic, which made them more readily absorbable by the lungs and led to diseases such as cancer (Proctor 2011). These factors changed what kind of cured leaf was regarded as good quality. These shifts in discourse changed what was now a higher grade, bringing higher returns for ripe tobacco leaves with low nicotine and high sugars. FCV tobacco’s dependence on soil, seed, and water variability in producing a quality crop meant that this ripe-style, low-nicotine tobacco grew in irrigated, sandy, and loamy soils was now considered “good” quality.
Consequently, sandy and loamy soils now became the ideal regions for growing FCV tobacco. As a result, FCV tobacco, a vital, lucrative rainfed crop in drought-prone areas until recently, is no longer grown in those regions. Instead, it is grown in irrigated areas which rely less crucially on this drought-resistant crop. Ultimately, historical events like the breakdown of the Soviet Union or the whims of a handful of buyers make quality an unstable, epistemic thing. However, in a scalable project, long-term structural shifts in what constitutes good quality have a far greater impact on the natural world than just a failure in a lab. While it is expensive to shelve a laboratory experiment, it is even more expensive when it relies on state-of-the-art instruments. Imagine what changing notions of “good” quality might mean for experts’ and farmers’ investments and expectations across large cultivating regions.
Conclusion
For people who study markets, this isn’t new information. Callon, Meadel and Rabeharisoa (2005) argue that experts working on qualification must be reflexive because of the nature of markets. Markets constantly evolve, diversify, and morph. The expert’s job is to continually buffer for these changes and prepare farmers to meet them. By continuing to treat quality as a technical object, innovating technologies based on a static conception of quality, and imposing high quality as an ideal for farmers, experts set themselves and the farmers they serve up for failure with significant material and financial costs. When quality acts like an unstable epistemic thing at this scale, farmers, their farms and barns, experts, and public investments—including state auction platforms, labs, and knowledge infrastructures—are all rendered redundant. In a capital-starved agrarian economy, a laboratory failure becomes a failure of several people’s labor, investments, and fortunes.
References
Besky, Sarah. Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea. University of California Press, 2020.
Callon, Michel, Cecile Meadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. “The Economy of Qualities.” In The Technological Economy, edited by Don Slater and Andrew Barry. 28-50. Routledge, 2005.
Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Proctor, Robert. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. University of California Press, 2011.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford University Press, 1997.
—. Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation. University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Samdani, MN. “Tobacco Crop Failure in Indonesia, Brazil Triggers Andhra Price Surge.” Times of India, May 2, 2024.
Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Routledge, 2017.
Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University, 2015.
—. “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” Common Knowledges 25 (1–3): 143–62. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7299210.
Wright. 2024. “‘Toughest Season’: El Niño Leaves Tobacco Farmers in Zimbabwe with Less Crops and Lower Prices.” Euronews, March 13, 2024.
