Talking About Becoming

In this dissertation, the different modes of assembling governance in organic agriculture will be examined. In the following chapters, I will look at what organic looks like for the four different ways of governing assemblages, and how the different modes of governance impact the way organic is put into practice. I will explore the ideas of

intensification in agriculture, and of the various meanings attached to the word organic

in India. It allows us to consider diverse forms of organic that currently exist in India (T. Brown, 2017b; A. Mukherjee, Dutta, Goyal, et al., 2017) and avoid limiting research to certified forms of organic (Osswald & Menon, 2013; TechSci Research, 2016; Thottathil, 2014), doing justice to the richness of the concept. By avoiding reified generalisations of heterogeneous phenomena, it is possible to avoid inadvertent assumptions, both on part of the researcher and the reader. It creates room to focus on the struggles between the different conceptions to claim legitimacy, struggles which would otherwise be overlooked because we lack the ontologies to define the contours of the conflict. An example will help illustrate. The concept of tree (arborescent) and rhizome (rhizomatic) is one way in which Deleuze and Guattari try to outline two poles on the continuum of assemblages, between striated and smooth space. Striated space, as illustrated in Figure

1, refers to a bounded space of thought that is highly ordered and structured. Conversely, smooth space is associated with movement and instability, and is understood to give rise to new possibilities by opening up previously bounded relations. These characteristics are mapped onto the trees and the rhizomes on the plane of consistency. The tree is highly legible. Its parts are distinct, and it has a root system, a trunk which branches out, and leaves at the end of the branches. A rhizome, on the other hand, has no beginning or end. It has an amorphous shape, and grows haphazardly from all directions. The tree is preferred for its legibility, and a good example of this is certified organic. Seen from a distance, the organic label is highly legible. It encapsulates complex information about how something was produced in the form of a small image. The consumer can see it and decide to buy it based on this information alone. The rhizome, in contrast, is more like non-formal organic agriculture. The boundaries are not clear; it arises out of repeated experimentation and adoption of practices under the desiring power of wanting to produce organically. This distinction is useful to help understand why one is favoured over the other. The highly legible trees attract the interest of macro actors like the state and capitalist assemblages, while the rhizome is legible only on close inspection at the micro-level of the nomad assemblage. AT also suggests that by putting the emphasis on describing what exists instead of testing idealised theories, it is possible to suggest new ways forward that build on local initiatives. In other words, it is the first step towards theorising up (Rigg, 2007). There is a practical imperative to assemblages, beyond the descriptive function of compositions of relations it serves. This imperative is the selective principle.4 _{Rephrased in the context of the Anthropocene, it}

means understanding whether the approach one chooses enables one “in managing to register, to maintain, to cherish a maximum number of alternative ways of belonging to the world” (Latour, 2018, p. 15). It entails a selection of those assemblages which can provide for multispecies survivability, or entanglements (Tsing, 2017).

4 _{“As Deleuze puts it, there is no Good or Evil in Spinoza’s ethics, but there is good and bad. Good is when}

Buchanan posits that an assemblage is composed of two interrelated dimensions. As illustrated in Figure 1, one dimension is the material elements, the plane of content, that constitute the assemblage, the relations they entail and the new arrangements and relations they may facilitate. The other dimension is that of how this arrangement or assemblage is justified and legitimated, the plane of expression. In other words, what makes it seem right and proper? (Buchanan, 2017). An example will help illustrate. Certification in organic agriculture is trust in a form of expression. Third-party Organic Certification implies a bureaucratic procedure, a ticking off of pre-defined requisites. The requirements are determined by an agency in accordance with regulations, and a

trustworthy auditor (trustworthy by virtue of being a third-party) checks to make sure the producer conforms to these standards. The trust is transformed into a certificate, which then becomes the embodiment of trust. It can be commodified, traded as if it is the real thing, almost like currency flowing through the economic system. Despite the elegance of this system of transferring trust, serious doubts remain. Doubts not in the system of certificates and trust, but more at the evaluation stage. Seufert et al. (2017) point out that organic certification does not make many practices mandatory. Crop Figure 1: An illustration depicting some of the concepts discussed in Assemblage Theory. The assemblage is represented by the space between the Plane of Expression on top, and the Plane of Content at the bottom. The assemblage emerges as a way to yoke the two planes together, and may be highly striated and thus appear to be systematic and arborescent, or may tend towards smooth spaces, thereby appearing to be more rhizomatic. Over time, the boundaries of striations (represented here by the thick dotted circles) shift as they are de/reterritorialized and de/recoded, leading to a mismatch referred to as assemblage converters. Lines of flight emerge; as new connections are sought. (Own illustration).

rotations, soil mulching and other practices so essential to the organic production, are not checked for when giving out the certificate. This begs the question of what is actually the basis of the trust, what the content of the certificate is. This emphasis on linking the material dimension with the expressive dimension thus exposes the problems with approaches that purport to be One-Size-Fits-All (OSFA), approaches which often end up being little more than bureaucratic exercises in ticking boxes in the expressive sphere whilst ignoring the actual task at hand, that of creating enduring and meaningful forms of sustainable agriculture in the material sphere.

Through this brief foray into ideas and vocabulary used in Assemblage Theory and using them in AT, I have explained several aspects of AT as used in this research project:

1. A turn to ontology within Agri-Environmental Governance to better apprehend social processes by challenging established framings that try to simplify irreducible complexity by omitting aspects crucial to a better understanding.

2. A Problem-Solution relationship approach to governance to see responses to the realities of the inorganic and organic stratum, while also actively shaping them.

3. Understanding assembling as a process of ongoing Becoming rather than of a static Being, and thus a combination of tendencies towards stasis and towards change.

4. Assemblage as a yoke that brings together the two dimensions of content and expression.

5. A selective principle, an ethical duty within Agri-Environmental Governance, to choose multi-species livability as a guiding principle to negotiate between competing assemblages