Civilized Tulips

This study has its roots in an internship I did at the Skagit Valley Bulb Company in 2006. I shortly realized that what I thought was training in the tulip industry was in fact participant observation and thus began my initial investigation into tulip agronomy, global tulip trade, particularly that between the Pacific Northeast of the United States and the Netherlands, and the tourism associated with tulips in both regions. Trade networks linking Washington State and the Netherlands, where tulips are popularly perceived as a commodity indexing national identity on the order of Anne Frank, marijuana and windmills, are extraordinarily precise and strange networks of various kinds of capital.

Standing in front of a field of 100,000 tulips, holding invoices in my hand and standing next to an older couple taking pictures of the field before returning to the local B&B, I knew what I was standing in front of an answer without a question. At the same time as I was myself entering into as it were the tulip field I had become impressed with new methods coming out of science studies, particularly those associated with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer and Annrmarie Mol. I set about tracking the tulips, trucks, container ships, airplanes, postcards, farmers, agronomy publications, tourism data, tourists and dollars that move along the Washington-Netherlands axis.

My aim was to investigate these networks and generate an account of the tulip that would be based entirely on local practices, on real agents, human and non-human rather than on the universal categories of commodity and circuit of capital that formed the basis for my social analysis to date. It seemed to me at the time that there was no capitalism (see "The Tulip Industry Does Not Exist." Ag(r)on 3.4 (2007) p. 352), but that there was the construction of something worthy of being called the tulip circuit, but which was at no point the mediation of certain economic or social universals but that was itself that which was capable of explaining the existence of the tulip industry. I felt it vital to the future of this precarious industry of hybrids to not only denaturalize it but desocialize it as well. The deployment of Actor-Network Theory in the Dutch Agronomy Studies was needless to say far ahead of those efforts made in Pacific Northeast research universities. However, as I hope to show in this book, the conclusions of the Dutch academy are in need of dramatic revision.

To my surprise, I discovered that in fact the tulip represents a stable essence across geography and varied though regular (and ultimately Newtonian) temporalities. The divers elements of the tulip trade under the microscope of Actor-Network Theory are revealed to be more or less simple assortments of particulars, albeit organized as a complex social system of managed resources and independent actors, that exist according to general social laws but which are not however explicable in terms of the construction of individual social orders and moralities. To put it bluntly, human beings construct (or "grow") not the other way around and an investigation of the relevant actants will reveal precisely how eliminable individual actors are. With tulips there is indeed no transportation without translation, however I quickly realized that there is such a thing here as a perfect translation absolutely faithful to the fully concrete and immediately mobilizable intentions of the author.

It was a genuine surprise to find that the tulip is Natural in the fullest sense of the word, admittedly one that is cultivated and refined by Men. I have judged as a consequence that with the social study of the sciences we have landed on a truly scientific method, one capable not merely of mirroring the prejudices of the scientist but of generating truly novel results and real discoveries that bear little trace of invention, except perhaps as a sort of frame for the real content (in this case, tulips). This happy conclusion I will inspire other historians, economists, agronomists and sociologists to adopt the latest methods in science studies so that they might produce unthought results of their own.