To explain the ontology of continuity mentioned previously, I briefly refer to the immanent ethics of Baruch Spinoza as understood by Deleuze. An ontology of immanence eschews the concept of transcendence. Transcendence is an understanding attributed to Abrahamic theologies, which achieve conceptual stability by applying a dualism to the world we live in. In a reality as created by a transcendent being (God), there are two substances, the creator-substance (God) which is ideal and perfect, and the created-substance, which is a shadow, an imperfect copy. The former is considered to be transcendent, and superior to the latter, which is considered inferior. Further, the existence of the world is predicated on the existence of a transcendent being, but not the other way around (Ames, 2016). There is thus a constant reliance on the transcendent to provide morality through a set of constraining rules, that “consists in judging actions and intentions by relating them to transcendent or universal values”(D. W. Smith, 2011, p. 124). Morality is supported and constructed by universal and a priori categories like Good and Evil, discrete categories with no overlap, against which actions and entities are to be judged. These categories, according to Deleuze, are discontinuous, predicated on two distinct orders of being (the incommensurable categories of Platonic Ideas and their corresponding analogues on earth), and can be understood through seeking the universal essences of things, things that do not shift and change (Adkins, 2015). While the issue may seem arcane and far-removed from us, this mode of thinking still persists. Whether it be through positing pure free-market models and then
identifying constraining imperfections in existing markets (Ackerman & Beggs, 2013), or through calculating yield gaps between the maximum attainable yield and the actual yield and then working to reduce the gap by removing the obstacle in existing agriculture production systems (Sumberg, 2012), the focus is on realigning reality so that it moves closer to the Ideal. Perhaps the clearest conflict is illustrated by Bruno Latour, where he identifies a conflict between the Local and the Global as understood by those enamoured with the grand project of Modernization (Latour, 2018). Seen through the lens of this grand project, the Local represents all that is “archaic, backward, thinking only of their own little parcels of land” in a reactive and risk-averse manner (Latour, 2018, p. 13), while the Global stands for everything that is forward-looking, profit-seeking and cosmopolitan made possible by techno-scientific advances. Seen in such a way, the Local was an entity that had to be abandoned and even actively vanquished in order to reach this transcendent state of utopian Globalization.
In contrast, the idea of the continuous asserts that there are no discrete categories, only temporary results of a continuous process acting upon one substance — God, or Nature. In an immanent world, God/Nature is everywhere, giving rise to what is known as substance monism, which asserts that there is only one substance. This, then is the source of ontological univocity in Deleuze and Guattari’s system (Adkins, 2015). In Spinoza’s ethics, there is good and bad (describing degrees of capacity to act along a continuum) instead of Good or Evil. Anything that increases our capacity to act is considered to be good, while anything that diminishes this capacity is considered to be bad; the key is that this capacity can always change (Buchanan, 2019). The focus on immanence and continuity is also reflected in and inspired by the rise of complexity theory and systems thinking, which deal with the “study of the self-organizing capacities of ‘open’ systems (those through which matter and energy flow” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p.17). Complexity theory has been increasingly applied in evolutionary economic geography, posing a direct challenge to the idea of a transcendent ideal market system and instead re-embedding regional economies through concepts like selection, lock-ins and path dependency (Martin & Sunley, 2007; Pike et al., 2016). Within agriculture, attempts to capitalize on insights from complexity theory to improve agricultural systems have resulted in a challenge to the idea of monocultures with the sole aim of
reducing yield gaps, with increasing focus on redesigning agriculture based on the science of ecology accounting for concepts like critical transitions and abrupt shifts in agroecosystems (Pretty & Bharucha, 2018; Vandermeer & Perfecto, 2017). Latour uses a similar approach to break down the previously mentioned poles of the Global and Local into more nuanced groups, ultimately identifying a common ground between the two warring factions, the idea of a Terrestrial which will have to reorganize politics in order to ensure the flourishing of life on earth (Latour, 2018). Another important dimension is that of time. A linear conception of time is discarded, and instead a non- linear conception is adopted. Borrowing heavily from the work of Henri Bergson, the past is conceptualized as an a-temporal bloc of events in the past, where “each and every past event co-exists with all the others” (Holland, 2013, l. 392). This bloc is known as the virtual, and serves as the repository of a multiplicity of potentials, of which only one is actualized in the present. The actualization is not final, and will change with time in the future, with the actualized present interacting with relevant pasts, effectively rendering time irreversible (Holland, 2013). A direct outcome of this insistence on continuity is that it provides an alternative to the logic of unities (Nail, 2017). A unity is an organic whole, like a human body, whose various organs work together, and would stop working if this organic whole is broken up. The organs and the body are bound by these intrinsic relations, where any disruption would be fatal. Thus, any rearrangement or changes in relations would not be possible. In contrast, what Deleuze and Guattari suggest is that assemblages are characterized by extrinsic relations, where component parts subsist independently and yet are drawn into relations with each other in multiplicities.