Mark Hansen
English Department
Princeton University
mbhansen@princeton.edu
As several recent critical studies have conclusively demonstrated, biological research and theory form a central reference point in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.1 From his early major work culminating in Difference and Repetition of 1968, through his collaboration with Félix Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia (especially, A Thousand Plateaus of 1980), to his final work on Leibniz and geophilosophy (The Fold, and with Guattari again, What is Philosophy?), Deleuze has framed his account of individuation and agency through an evolving critical engagement with evolutionary thinking. Rooted in his early rehabilitation of Henri Bergson’s 1907 Creative Evolution, Deleuze’s heretical “evolutionism” draws widely and irreverently on the advances of recent biology; and yet, for all its gesturing toward biological theory, it remains distinctly philosophical in flavor. Not only was Deleuze’s very interest in biology overdetermined from the beginning by his desire to redress the almost total neglect of Bergson as a philosopher, but (more importantly for my purposes) his ongoing engagement with biological theory (and with Bergsonism itself) has been marshaled to support a metaphysics of the virtual that is, for all its resonances with recent developments in biology, at odds with the distinct priority biological theory (and the Bergson of Creative Evolution) places on processes of actualization.
Laying bare this différend between science and philosophy motivates the first strand of my argument in this paper: an attempt to unpack and clarify the genealogy of Deleuze’s changing, though lifelong, engagement with Bergson. Essentially, after starting off from a point of seemingly perfect convergence between philosophy and biology–Bergson’s notion of the élan vital–Deleuze drives an ever-widening wedge between the biological notions he appropriates from neo-evolutionism and what he increasingly comes to view as a model of creative evolution too fundamentally bound up with both humanism and a residual representationalism. As I shall argue, what compels Deleuze to distance himself from creative evolution and from a certain Bergson is his (paradoxically very Bergsonian) philosophical aim of furnishing a metaphysics for contemporary science, that is, a metaphysics of the virtual.2 Against such a metaphysics, I shall insist, against such metaphysics and with the support of contemporary biologists, that a certain priority be granted processes of actualization.
Still, despite Deleuze’s distancing from creative evolution, something substantial persists across his changing relation to both Bergson and biology: namely, his commitment to a notion of internal difference, or difference in itself. This commitment motivates Deleuze’s initial adherence to Bergson’s creative evolutionism no less than his later “break” with Bergson over the status of intensity as well as the correlated model of creative involution he develops together with Guattari. The initial impetus driving Deleuze’s effort to rehabilitate the fraught notion of the élan vital and with it, the very career of Bergson as philosopher, was nothing other than the notion of internal difference. As he reconstructs it in his 1956 essay, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” and then again in his 1966 Bergsonism, the élan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (internal difference) that is capable of accounting for the positive power of time as a source of creative invention. With the progress of his own philosophical career, Deleuze soon found reason to temper his initial adherence to Bergsonism–and specifically, to Bergson’s derivation of internal difference from qualitative difference–without in any way abandoning his own commitment to internal difference. As early as Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze traces qualitative difference or difference in kind (together with quantitative difference or difference in degree) to a fluid continuum of intensity, thereby eschewing Bergson’s argument that qualitative difference is itself one of two tendencies being differentiated and thus, a tendency internal to difference that, as Deleuze puts it, “show[s] the way in which a thing varies qualitatively in time” (Bergsonism 32).
By attending to what is at stake in this shift concerning the source of internal difference, I shall correlate Deleuze’s break with Bergson over the role of intensity with the generalized philosophical Aufhebung of biology that underwrites his introduction (in Difference and Repetition) of a “transcendental sensibility,” a “being of the sensible” that evades empirical determination. Drawing on what one commentator has called the “emerging consensus” in contemporary biology–that development involves dynamical processes 3–I contrast Deleuze’s own radicalized Bergsonism (one that eschews the very core of creative evolution) with complexity theory, a branch of contemporary biology which has, in effect, turned something very like creative evolution into a proper research program. What is crucial in this différend between science and philosophy is the relative importance accorded differentiation as a process of actualization: while Deleuze, in turning away from Bergson, eschews the necessity for discrete levels of differentiation in favor of a single plane of immanence (which paradoxically, he derives from the Bergson of Matter and Memory4), complexity theorists link differentiation to actualization and to processes of morphogenesis that are inseparable from the emergence of “natural kinds” in nature. Thus, while both Deleuze (or Deleuze + Guattari) and complexity theorists like Brian Goodwin and Stuart Kauffman recognize that transversal communication occurs across morphogenetic fields, only the latter insist on the irreducibility of the emerging organism (“natural kind”) as one “agent” among others active in morphogenetic processes of emergence. This difference furnishes the basis for a critical corrective to certain excesses in D+G’s biophilosophy that, I think, tend to compromise the value of their impressive conceptual apparatus for rethinking subjectivity and bodily agency in light of current developments in the biological, cognitive, and neurological sciences.
Without presuming to adjudicate between conflicting positions within the emerging consensus in biology (a task better left to practicing biologists), I shall thus invoke contemporary work in complexity theory in support of a second, more tendentious strand of my argument–a biologically-rooted critique that challenges D+G’s biophilosophy (redubbed, in A Thousand Plateaus, “creative involution”) on three main topics: 1) their investment in a molecular Darwinism; 2) their dismissal of the organism as a molar form that negatively limits life; and 3) their dubious use of macro-cosmic processes in molecular biology (all of which highlight the nonselectional dimension of “evolution”) as the basis for a posthuman (or at least nonhuman) ethics (the model of becoming presented in Plateau 10). While the analysis surrounding all three points introduces plausible and extremely important considerations into biological theory (considerations that are to a great extent, as I suggested above, shared by contemporary complexity theorists), the sheer radicality of D+G’s line of argumentation in each case not only sets them into conflict with their scientific sources, but ultimately undermines the value of their cross-disciplinary explorations of agency, subjectivity, and life.
Why then, the reader may be wondering, my interest–indeed investment–in D+G’s biophilosophy? The short answer concerns the sustained and often surprising resonances between their enterprise and the ground-breaking work that has been transforming the cognitive and biological sciences in the last few decades. No other cultural theorist pays anywhere near as much heed to work in science (the relation between philosophy and science is one of the central topics of D+G’s final collaboration, What is Philosophy?), which, concretely speaking, means that no other theorist is able to follow and to capitalize upon the sustained break with representationalism that forms a core principle of recent work in cognitive science and neurobiology. D+G’s interest in ethology–and indeed in what Keith Ansell-Pearson aptly calls an “ethology of assemblages”–anticipates the recent consensus in cognitive science (including AI) that behavior can only be understood when viewed systemically, i.e., as a component in a larger system or assemblage. Thus D+G’s theoretical corpus helps us unpack the cultural significance of the “adaptive responder” model (Clark 1997) in which body, brain, and world form a complex, holistic, evolutionarily-based system of intelligent behavior. With its insistence on a radically ecological model of agency, D+G’s work resonates with research in biology (Maturana and Varela, Bateson) and cognitive science (Edwin Hutchins, Andy Clark, Rodney Brooks) that understands adaptive behavior as a coproduction of intrinsic dynamics and response to environmental conditions. Such research highlights the role of human agents as “distributed cognitive engines” and situates “the flow of reason” across brain and world (with resonances, once again, to the Bergson of Matter and Memory); consequently, the new picture of living systems to which it gives rise deterritorializes the locus for evaluating adaptive success, attributing it to “brain-body coalitions in ecologically realistic environments” (rather than to the individual brain or organism) (Clark 69). Not only do D+G embrace a similar ecological picture of systems (or machinic assemblages), but, in their function as cultural theorists (and not biologists), they concentrate on extrapolating its implications for the pragmatics of human existence (what they call becoming). By situating the operation of selection within specific ecological contexts and by emphasizing the role of “side-communication” as a source for novelty, D+G foreground the possibilities for novel becomings that arise independently of selective pressures in ways that can potentially alter their impact.
At a moment when developments in the cognitive and biological sciences have revolutionized our view of the brain, behavior, and evolution, and when hitherto unimagined convergences between humans and machines are transforming the very meaning of life, it is imperative that cultural theory follow suit. In the light of these developments, notions of subjectivity, agency, and selfhood can no longer remain anchored in an obsolete representationalism, but must be rethought from the ground up. What D+G’s work accomplishes, despite whatever criticisms we may launch against their more radical tendencies, is precisely such a rethinking: eschewing all representationalist models of agency (including theories of performativity which, despite their promises, comprise nothing less than the last bastion of a moribund representationalism), D+G model agency as an emergent process rooted in biology and inseparable from a larger ecological context. In so doing, they make possible an affirmation of the rich, multi-leveled embodiment that characterizes our existence as human beings.
I say “make possible,” and not “accomplish,” because, as my argument will bear out, D+G’s dismissal or marginalization of the organism as nothing but a limited, molar, and thus epiphenomenal entity compromises their success in doing justice to the significant agency–indeed, multiple forms of agency–that we acquire by dint of our multi-leveled embodiment (Varela’s “Organism” enumerates five distinct levels of selfhood ranging from the most basic form of biological existence to the richness characteristic of social life). As I see it, D+G’s tendency to privilege the flexibility of the plane of immanence over any constraint imposed by organization–and, correlatively, to emphasize ecological context at the expense of emergent organism or system–risks indulging a familiar posthuman fantasy: to wit, the fantasy that the body can be programmed, that embodied life is simply the consequence of an operation of coding. While D+G’s model of becoming is far more nuanced than the flat-footed notions of performativity that have dominated recent discussions of cyberculture, their willingness to view the embodied organism as a component of a “haecceity” rather than an evolving system risks dissolving the body into the vast sea of life that is the plane of immanence.
To counter this risk and to salvage the immense promise of D+G’s fertile cross-disciplinary undertaking, we must therefore read their biophilosophy against their tendency toward radicalism. Accordingly, I offer my critical arguments not as a repudiation of D+G’s work, but rather as an effort toward a broader synthesis of Deleuzean philosophy of difference with contemporary science. By reintroducing a certain notion of organismic autonomy (borrowed from the systems theory of Maturana and Varela), I seek to reinject a particular “Bergsonism” into D+G’s ethology of assemblages–the Bergsonism that stresses the necessity for matter (and the organism) to serve as obstacles to the flow of life. Revamped in light of recent complexity theory, such a Bergsonism yields a model of human agency that eschews much of what D+G find intolerable about organic theories of the human 5 and also, incidentally, much of what contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience has shown to be implausible in the representationalist model of the mind (e.g., the idea of a central processing unit, the priority of representation, etc.6). Thus in the end, while D+G’s account of becoming will be shown to involve an illegitimate appeal to nonselectional factors that are active only at the level of macro-cosmic “evolution,” their work remains of the utmost importance for the lead they take in modeling agency as an ecological system. Purged of its “anti-organicism” and developed into a form of what Maturana and Varela call “structural coupling” (which, importantly, is necessarily local and concrete), the notion of a machinic assemblage furnishes the very basis for a model of embodied agency that can do justice to the two facets of ethology: the capacity to affect and to be affected.
From Creative Evolution to Creative Involution
The original impetus behind Deleuze’s interest in Bergson, as Ansell-Pearson and others have noted, stems from Bergson’s qualified rejection of natural selection, the core principle of Darwinism, which explains evolution in terms of an external principle of differentiation.7 With his notion of creative evolution, by contrast, Bergson furnishes an alternate understanding of differentiation: for him, evolution follows an internal principle that explains genetic change not as the result of selection from purely contingent variations but rather of a “continuity of genetic energy” (27). By appropriating this internalist perspective, Deleuze commits himself to a philosophical position that will guide his work from this point forward, initially through an alliance with Bergson that focuses on the nature of difference and later, following his break with Bergson over the role of intensity, in his effort to develop a “transcendental empiricism.” Given Bergson’s importance for Deleuze (and also his resonance with contemporary biology), it thus behooves us to explore his account of “creative evolution” and to unpack its relationship with biological theory.
Though expressly modeled on August Weismann’s theory of the “germ-plasm” (itself a precursor to modern theories of the selfish gene), Bergson’s concept of creative evolution rejects the idea that the germ-plasm is continuous in favor of a less extreme, though more metaphysical, notion of continuity: “though the germ-plasm is not continuous, there is at least continuity of genetic energy, this energy being expended only at certain instants, for just enough time to give the requisite impulsion to the embryonic life, and being recouped as soon as possible in new sexual elements, in which, again, it bides its time” (27). On the basis of this substitution, Bergson introduces his vitalism as a sort of qualified finalism (one shorn of its specificity and predeterminism) according to which life “is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism” (27). “It is,” he continues, “as if the organism itself were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former germ endeavoring to continue itself in a new germ. The essential thing is the continuous progress indefinitely pursued, an invisible progress, on which each visible organism rides during the short interval of time given it to live” (27).
Two elements of this conception are worth special attention. First, by rejecting Weismann’s localization of the vital element in the highly specific form of the germ-plasm, Bergson leaves room for the creativity he ascribes to time; accordingly, what is transmitted is not just the physico-chemical germ-line, but the vital energy of a life force which expresses itself through repeated though flexible and open-ended processes of ontogenesis (embryogenesis and morphogenesis). Second, Bergson conceives of this life force as a counterpoint to the entropic decline of the physical universe in a manner that underscores the importance of its stabilization in material forms.8 It is, Bergson contends, the attachment of the vital force to organisms that conditions the emergence and propagation of life:
The life that evolves on the surface of our planet is indeed attached to matter. If it were pure consciousness, a fortiori if it were supraconsciousness, it would be pure creative activity. In fact, it is riveted to an organism that subjects it to the general laws of inert matter…. Incapable of stopping the course of material changes downwards, [life] succeeds in retarding it. The evolution of life really continues, as we have shown, an initial impulsion: this impulsion, which has determined the development of the chlorophyllian function in the plant and of the sensori-motor system in the animal, brings life to more and more efficient acts by the fabrication and use of more and more powerful explosives. (245-46)
While these two elements (consciousness and matter) tend in opposite directions (the former toward differentiation; the latter toward stabilization), it is important to note that they are held together through Bergson’s sustained biological realism and his correlated commitment to a biological notion of differentiation. If the creativity internal to life expresses itself, ideally, as a drive toward freedom from matter, in actual fact it utilizes the constrained freedom provided by flexible and open-ended processes of ontogenesis to express itself in stabilized forms that store solar energy and retard entropic dissipation. In short, stabilization of life in the organism is fundamental to Bergson’s vitalism. As we will see, the priority on actualization that this implies is central to the notion of differentiation as it takes shape in contemporary biological theory.
It is precisely this realism and the biological basis of differentiation that Deleuze eschews in his effort to arrive at a (philosophical) principle of difference in itself. The roots of such a principle–a principle that will underwrite both Deleuze’s philosophical Aufhebung of biology in Difference and Repetition and D+G’s marginalization of the organism in A Thousand Plateaus–can be found in Deleuze’s interpretation of vital difference as internal difference in Bergsonism. Introduced in the context of an effort to distinguish Bergsonian creative evolution from Darwinism, this interpretation foregrounds Bergson’s stress on the indeterminacy of vital difference in order to present the élan vital as the ultimate and purely internal cause of differentiation above and beyond any resistance matter offers to life, and indeed in place of such resistance. Before expressing itself as material differentiation, that is, the élan vital differs from itself: it is difference in itself. What this means is that vital difference is virtual and that expressed difference is the actualization of virtual life.
It is on this point that Deleuze contrasts Bergsonism with the “misconceptions” of both preformism and evolutionism: whereas in Bergson’s scheme “evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals,” preformism interprets it in terms of “the ‘possible’ that is realized” and evolutionism in terms of “pure actuality” (Bergsonism 98). In the former case, evolution is modeled “in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes” with the consequence that difference is reduced to resemblance; in the latter case, vital variations are conceived “as so many actual determinations that should then combine on a single line,” and not as differences in themselves (differences that differ from themselves) (99). In order to avoid these two misconceptions, Deleuze informs us, “a philosophy of life” must meet three requirements: 1) vital difference must be thought of as internal difference in which the “tendency to change” is not accidental; 2) the variations produced must enter into “relationships of dissociation or division” and not just “relationships of association and addition”; 3) these variations must involve a “virtuality that is actualized according to the lines of divergence,” such that evolution proceeds not from one to another actual term in a unilinear homogeneous series, but from a virtual term to heterogeneous terms that actualize it along a ramified series (99-100). These requirements, Deleuze continues, introduce the question of how “the Simple or the One, ‘the original identity,’” has the power to be differentiated in the first place, and the answer he provides, not surprisingly, involves the status of the virtual, a sort of “gigantic Memory” or “universal cone in which everything coexists with itself, except for the differences of level” (100).
The introduction of the virtual–or rather, the differentiation of a philosophical notion of the virtual from a biological one–allows Deleuze to determine vital difference as a properly philosophical concept. As Deleuze sees it, biological notions of “organic virtuality or potentiality” tend to maintain that “potentiality is actualized by simple limitation of its global capacity” and thus to confuse the virtual and the possible (Bergsonism 97). What is crucial to a true (or philosophical) notion of the virtual is the repudiation of any form of elimination or limitation: “to be actualized,” Deleuze argues, “the virtual… must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts” (97). Unlike the real, the actual “does not resemble the virtual that it embodies,” which means that difference is “primary in the process of actualization” (97). “In short,” Deleuze notes, “the characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is actualized by being differentiated and is forced to differentiate itself, to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized” (97). As we will see, Deleuze’s shift to a model of difference as intensity (rather than as one tendency within difference, the tendency to differ in kind) marks the advent of such a philosophical conception of difference in his work: since the unity of creative evolution is a unity of the virtual, it constitutes what Deleuze will later call a transcendental principle of difference (or intensity) that is itself responsible for the lines of differentiation which express creative evolution in the various different organisms constitutive of material life on earth. In this open-ended monadology, “what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that cannot be summed up, each one requiring the whole, except from a certain perspective, from a certain point of view” (101). It is on the basis of their emergence from the virtual unity that these lines of differentiation realize their creative potential: “They only actualize by inventing, they create in these conditions the physical, vital or psychical representative of the ontological level that they embody” (101). In Bergsonism, Deleuze attributes such a philosophical (or virtual) conception of internal difference to Bergson, arguing that Bergson’s stress on matter as an obstacle to élan vital does not recur to the conception of the negative he had previously condemned. Rather, since “evolution is actualization” and “actualization is creation,” the stabilization of life in the material form of organisms must be understood as differentiations that express the virtuality actualized in them, not as negative limits placed on that virtuality.9 Here, without spelling it out, Deleuze implies the existence of a domain of intensity that embodies this virtuality, thus effectively repudiating the primacy Bergson (and contemporary complexity theory) accord actualization as differentiation. As Deleuze states in a passage just cited, the differentiation of a properly philosophical concept of difference (or the virtual) attains its urgency from the poverty of biological notions of the virtual; things might be quite otherwise, as we shall see, should contemporary biology prove able to furnish a non-limitative organic or biological notion of the virtual.
Only in Difference and Repetition does Deleuze fully articulate the transcendental principle of difference central to his important work of the late 60s. As I have suggested, this articulation involves a certain break with Bergson and also, it must be stressed, with the biological realism with which Bergson theorizes the élan vital. Intended as a means of reaching a properly philosophical realm of analysis and directed against Bergson’s determination of the life force as a counterpoint to entropy (which Deleuze perceives to involve a potentially crippling reliance on a thermodynamic model), this break involves a key revision in Deleuze’s previous understanding of vital difference. Rather than deriving vital difference from Bergson’s two forms of difference, as he had in Bergsonism,10 Deleuze now finds it necessary to posit a fundamentally separate and primordial form of difference (intensity) from which both of Bergson’s forms are derived.11
In the analysis he offers in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze accordingly rejects Bergson’s critique of intensity together with the correlated analysis of vital difference as the tendency of difference in kind to differ from itself. Taking up the thread of his earlier insight into the ambiguity flavoring Bergson’s critique of intensity in Time and Free Will,12 Deleuze now goes on to oppose his own mature concept of difference to Bergson’s. In order to develop the radical potential of intensity against Bergson’s own reduction of it, Deleuze repudiates his earlier reading of internal difference on the basis of difference of kind, contending instead that vital difference concerns a more primordial domain of difference–differences of intensity which constitute “the entire nature of difference,” that is, both differences in degree and differences in kind (Difference 239). Vital difference (or difference in itself) can be neither qualitative nor extensive, since even qualities (following Deleuze’s critique of Bergson on intensive magnitudes) involve resemblance. In the wake of this transformation, it will be necessary to distinguish two orders of difference,
two orders of implication or degradation: a secondary implication which designates the state in which intensities are enveloped by the qualities and extensity which explicate them; and a primary implication designating the state in which intensity is implicated in itself, at once both enveloping and enveloped. In other words, a secondary degradation in which difference in intensity is cancelled, the highest rejoining the lowest; and a primary power of degradation in which the highest affirms the lowest. (240)
These two orders of difference belong to scientific and philosophical orders respectively; only a transcendental inquiry, Deleuze stresses, can fathom the illusion generated by empirical apprehension of intensity. Cutting through the scattered image reflected by the surface, such an inquiry affirms the “subterranean life” of difference: it discovers “that intensity remains implicated in itself and continues to envelop difference at the very moment when it is reflected in the extensity and the quality that it creates, which implicate it only secondarily” (240).
Not surprisingly, in light of its centrality for Deleuze’s mature philosophical project, this distinction allows us to fathom the fundamental correlation between the philosophy of difference and the critique of modern science: just as difference is covered over by the operation of negation central to philosophies of identity, intensity is obscured by the transcendental illusions of modern science. With this shift in his understanding of difference, Deleuze abandons the analysis of duration as qualitative difference (difference of kind) in favor of a continuum of intensity. From this point on, the philosophical principle of difference will set the terms for Deleuze’s encounter with science (modern biology) and will do so irrespective (and, I shall argue, to the detriment) of the increasingly concrete and serious nature of this encounter.
More fundamentally still, the shift to a model of difference as intensity introduces an ontological doubleness into Deleuze’s conceptual apparatus which generates the important notion of the “plane of immanence” so central to both Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Deleuze’s Cinema books. This ontological doubling allows Deleuze to differentiate an order of emergence from an order of constituted functioning without placing the two orders into opposition. Most readers of D+G will readily recognize this doubling in the differentiation of the molecular from the molar, an example which serves perfectly to illustrate what is crucial here: emergent actuals do not limit the virtual by means of an operation of negation, but rather express a concrete differentiation that remains in contact with the domain of intensity (or the virtuality) from which it emerges. Far from there being an opposition or contradiction between the levels, there is a profound complementarity: immanence and organization refer to distinct conceptual frameworks; they furnish variant accounts of phenomena, from the standpoint of process and product, respectively. Deleuze’s turn to a metaphysics of intensity, in other words, allows for a division between two separate orders at which the real can be grasped: on the one hand, there is the familiar domain of quality and quantity where things are given external determination; and on the other, the “subterranean” domain of intensity where relationality reigns supreme. Much of the difficulty in understanding D+G’s criticisms and transformations of Darwinism stem, as we will see, from the way one interprets the inseparability of these two domains: can and how can what emerges on the plane of organization (e.g., the organism) be traced to the plane of immanence, the domain of intensity?
Becoming as Creative Involution
Initially introduced to combat the thermodynamic model, the transcendental principle of difference (intensity or the “being of the sensible”) informs a crucial shift in Deleuze’s view of matter, a shift that stands behind the picture of the organism as a molar arrest of energy so central to the ethical project of A Thousand Plateaus. Reconceptualized as the transcendental ground of difference, intensity constitutes both differences of degree (extensity) and differences of kind (quality). Accordingly, it can no longer be the case, as it was for Bergson (and for the Deleuze of Bergsonism), that life expresses itself as the play of a virtual creative evolution involving divergent lines of actualization. The passage from one quality to another is not discrete, as the Bergsonian emphasis on qualitative difference (difference in kind) must contend; rather “even where there is a maximum of resemblance or continuity [between qualities], there are phenomena of delay and plateau, shocks of difference, distances, a whole play of conjunctions and disjunctions, a whole depth which forms a graduated scale rather than a properly qualitative duration” (238). These “phenomena” comprise intensity and their presence within qualitative difference insure the integrity of intensive quantities against or in spite of Bergson’s (attempted) reduction. Thus, rather than a varied production of material forms (organisms) which retard its movement, life qua virtual difference describes a continuum of intensity cutting across differences of kind (i.e., phyletic lineages or species) in a “dance of the most disparate things.”
As Ansell-Pearson notes, this defense of intensity against qualitative reduction forms the basis for D+G’s later “etho-logic of living systems,” furnishing the metaphysics underlying the model of becoming introduced in Plateau 10 and the more general account of creative involution on which it is based. This philosophical basis serves to differentiate D+G’s becoming from theories of agency–ranging from existentialist humanism to recent accounts of identity as performance–to which it otherwise appears similar. What is central on D+G’s account is neither the authenticity of intentional action, nor the performative effects of ritualized action, but rather the possibilities for tranversal or rhizomatic connections across boundaries of all kinds. The kind of identity generated through becoming is thus molecular and fleeting: a conjunction of a set of singularities, of speeds and affects, that defines a concrete mode of individuation or “haecceity.”
Accordingly, while D+G’s examples of becoming–little Hans’s becoming-horse, French performance artist Lolito’s becoming-animal, Robert De Niro’s becoming-crab, Hofmannsthal’s becoming-rat, Vladimir Slepian’s becoming-dog, and so forth–seem to suggest a necessary anchoring in a human-focused existential situation, the particular kind of becoming they illustrate is just one instance of a broader, encompassing category. Human becomings, D+G make clear, are no different in kind from the most inhuman becoming imaginable: “all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects, or forms that we know from the outside…. We must say the same of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, that do not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar entities” (Thousand Plateaus 275). Nor is there any humanist privilege involved in interspecies becomings, since these latter occur beneath the (molar) thresholds that determine species form: “You become animal only molecularly,” D+G continue. “You do not become a barking molecular dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog. Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles” (275). Regardless of their point of origin or their local effects, becomings occur beneath and beyond any form of molar organization and involve the transversal communication of molecular forces. What this means is that human beings engage in processes of becoming that are, in all important respects, exactly similar to the processes of becoming that snap up the wasp and the orchid (or, for that matter, microbial genetic systems and animal or plant cells) into symbiotic complexes.13 In all cases, what is at stake are relations of speeds and affects that generate events or haecceities within the global plane of consistency that is Nature. Understood as movement at the molecular level, the becomings in which humans engage comprise a particular instance of a more general process of becoming that D+G term “involution.”
In contrast to evolution (including Bergson’s creative evolution), involution describes a creative process whose field of production does not depend on differentiation, but rather involves a dissolution of form that “free[s] times and speeds” and thus makes possible the “dance of disparate things” through transversal modes of becoming (267). Accordingly, creative involution privileges the “unnatural participation” or monstrous coupling which, by generating becoming without heredity, comprises the hidden principle of Nature itself: “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction…. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates–against itself” (241-2). Beneath the apparent divisions of natural history and the discrete products of natural selection there exists a rich field of heterogeneous molecular activity that, D+G argue, is responsible for the creation (as well as the creativity) of life, organic and nonorganic alike.
Though they stop short of jettisoning natural selection wholesale, D+G do significantly restrict its function, arguing (with Bergson) that selection forms a purely external principle of difference capable of operating only on constituted forms, that is, at the molar level. That such a principle cannot by itself account for the proliferation of life is well accepted by the majority of contemporary biologists and furnishes one common ground linking biological theory to D+G (and Bergson): in all these cases, some internal or vital principle of differentiation is required. D+G, however, distinguish themselves by their desire to furnish a rigorously molecular account of “evolution” (creative involution). As Ansell-Pearson has noted, the crux of Deleuze’s (and later D+G’s) transformative appropriation of Darwinism is the insistence (following Gilbert Simondon) that “differentiation presupposes individuation as a field of intensity” and that processes of individuation precede the constitution of individuals and thus “enjoy an independent evolution” (Germinal Life 92). While individuals (organisms) might be the carriers of individual differences, they do not comprise the locus of evolutionary mechanisms: “evolution” (and later, involution) operates directly through processes of individuation.
D+G transformatively appropriate two aspects of “neoevolutionism” in particular–the central role of population thinking and the importance of non-filiative, transversal modes of communication between living systems–in order to discount the shaping function of natural selection. As exemplified by various contemporary biologists ranging from traditionalists like Ernst Mayr to “mild” revisionists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, population thinking focuses on the plethora of individual variation within a species and between species in a manner that breaks definitively with any form of typological essentialism.14 Its importance, both for contemporary biology and for D+G, stems from the emphasis it places on variation over type, an emphasis which allows it to define species fluidly as sets of organisms held together not by predetermined and static form but rather through genetic as well as ecological bonds. Within contemporary biology, population thinking has largely broken down the rigid boundaries traditionally attributed to species, since the phenotypic variation between populations of individuals is no different from that within populations.15 This in turn has brought about a fundamental shift in the focus of evolutionary change, with biologists like Richard Dawkins and Lynn Margulis repudiating the traditional focus on the individual organism (which itself can no longer designate a static and wholly autonomous entity) in favor of sub-organismic exchanges of genetic material and symbioses that occur at the molecular level. Still, there is a decisive difference between this development and D+G’s transformative appropriation. While population thinking and transversal communication break down the fixation of biology on species and organisms, the revised picture of evolution they produce involves a cooperation between such molecular factors (which are themselves subject to selection) and the contribution they make as “components” of higher forms like organisms (also subject to selection). Indeed, on the model presented by complexity theory, these two levels freely interact with one another in the process of morphogenesis that yields organismic forms. For D+G, by contrast, the point of a molecular reading of Darwinism is to eliminate the need and possibility for such interaction: as Ansell-Pearson argues, population thinking and transversal communication furnish them a way out of the problem of the “irreducibility of the forms of folding”: since individuals are formed through fluid populations, there is no incompatibility between the novel becomings operative in creative becoming and the irreducibility of forms of life. Moreover, as Ansell-Pearson astutely observes, the resources of neo-evolutionism furnish D+G with the means, effectively, to reduce molar forms like species to molecular dynamics: D+G’s suggestion, he argues, “is that one can only understand a molar population, such as a species, in terms of a different kind of population, a molecular one, which is the subject of the effects of, and changes in, coding” (Germinal Life 159). Both the viability and the limitations of such a reduction will be investigated once we turn to a discussion of complexity theory.
For the moment, it behooves us to grasp the concrete transformations to which D+G submit neo-evolutionism. To support their turn from evolution to involution, they push the fluidity introduced by population thinking and sub-organismic communication to its extreme, contending on the one hand that molecular factors, both genetic and extra-genetic, determine higher levels of organization, and on the other that ecological relations (what, following modern ethology, they call “territorialization”) are capable of selecting variations that arise in “a free margin of the code” (Thousand Plateaus 322). In both cases, emphasis is placed on the extra-genetic mechanisms of variation that, following the so-called modern synthesis, necessarily accompany processes of genetic transmission:
A code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it…. There is no genetics without “genetic drift.” The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential margin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we call surplus value of code, or side-communication. (Thousand Plateaus 53)
This surplus value provides a “free margin of the code” that frees molecular particles from their restricted role within the process of genetic transmission. Moreover, surplus value of code empowers local environmental factors with the capacity to forge modifications of a code: such modifications, D+G contend, “have an aleatory cause in the milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the modifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection” (54).
Despite their aim to empower molecular processes as the active agents for modifications of code, D+G here invoke some minimal notion of organismic or systemic agency that, I would suggest, is crucial both for evaluating their molecular Darwinism and for adapting their ecological perspective for the purpose of developing a distributed model of embodied human agency. In the first place, D+G’s marginalization of the organism is clearly manifested in how they treat the topic of autonomy–a topic central to much recent work in the biological sciences. By stressing the determinative function of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, D+G subtly shift the agency for code modification from organism to environment. Accordingly, whatever autonomy they invoke must be predicated not of the organism, but exclusively of the larger ecological circuit in which it is involved. Despite a superficial resemblance to autopoietic theory, which defines living systems according to their autonomy (i.e., their capacity to reproduce themselves) and holds the organism to be “operationally-closed” (though “interactionally open”) to information from its environment, D+G’s conception of code modification remains vigorously heteronomous. Rather than merely being “triggered” by an environmental stimulus, it involves the environment in a far more active sense: through the process of territorialization, the environment itself plays the role of agent which, D+G contend, has the role of strictly determining the selection of code modifications. This displacement of autonomy from the organism to the ecological circuit is made manifest when D+G contrast mutation with differentiation and introduce territorialization as the mechanism that creates differentiation from the surplus value of code:
The essential thing is the disjunction noticeable between the code and the territory. The territory arises in a free margin of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differently. Each milieu has its own code, and there is perpetual transcoding between milieus; the territory, on the other hand, seems to form at the level of a certain decoding. Biologists have stressed the importance of these determined margins, which are not to be confused with mutations, in other words, changes internal to the code: here, it is a question of duplicated genes or extra chromosomes that are not inside the genetic code, are free of function, and offer a free matter for variation. But it is very unlikely that this kind of matter could create new species independently of mutations, unless it were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiplying the interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialization is precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a single species and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction between the territory and the code that the territory can indirectly induce new species. (Thousand Plateaus 322, last emphasis added)
In expanding the scope of the “organism” to embrace “an external milieu of materials, an internal milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions,” D+G wrest the function of territorialization from the individual organism itself and predicate it instead of a fluid immanent totality of “transcoding or transduction,” a fluctuating interconnection of milieus “in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it” (Thousand Plateaus 313).
The effect of this move is to resituate phenotypic change both “beneath” and “outside” the organism, in the fluctuations that reverberate throughout the entire plane of immanence:
There is a self-movement of expressive qualities. Expressiveness is not reducible to the immediate effects of an impulse triggering an action in a milieu… expressive qualities, the colors of the coral fish, for example, are auto-objective, in other words, find objectivity in the territory they draw…. expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another that ‘express’ the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances. To express is not to depend upon; there is an autonomy of expression.” (Thousand Plateaus 317)
By attributing autonomy to expression, D+G are able to propose the “refrain” as a form of territorialization distinct from organic territorialization. Defined as “any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory” and predicated of functional totalities that involve an organ’s structural correlation with an environment (refrains, D+G specify, can be “optical, gestural, motor, etc.”), the refrain forms the operative principle for phenotypic change qua fluctuation in the plane of immanence.
By attributing the function of territorialization to the plane of immanence, I suggest, D+G vastly overestimate the force of environmental factors, or what amounts to the same thing, significantly marginalize the role of organismic activity. In the place of their one-sided view of the correlation of organism and external milieu, what contemporary biology offers (from systems theory to complexity) is an ecological model whose contribution is precisely to balance intrinsic dynamics with response to the environment. Indeed, given Deleuze’s (and D+G’s) avowedly Spinozist notion of the body, just such a balance would appear to be called for even (or especially) on their account, since Spinoza’s conception of the organism involves what Hans Jonas calls a “seeming paradox,” in fact the very paradox addressed by contemporary biology: “spontaneity paired with receptivity,” “autonomy for itself,… openness for the world” (278). Jonas states:
This dialectic is precisely the nature of life in its basic organic sense. Its closure as a functional whole within the individual organism is, at the same time, correlative openness toward the world; its very separateness entails the faculty of communication; its segregation from the whole is the condition of its integration with the whole…. Only complex functional systems afford the inner autonomy that is required for greater power of self-determination, together with greater variety of inner states responding to the determinations which impinge on it from without…. Only by being sensitive can life be active, only by being exposed can it be autonomous. And this in direct ratio: the more individuality is focused in a self, the wider is its periphery of communication with other things; the more isolated, the more related it is. (278, 277, 278)
How does it happen that D+G’s ecological conception of the organism, in many respects so resonant with current work in biological systems, comes to diverge so markedly over the question of organismic autonomy? Once again, the answer concerns the crucial division between ontological levels that structures Deleuze’s work from Difference and Repetition onward: in line with Deleuze’s (and D+G’s) general tendency to give priority to the domain of intensity (the molecular), their invocation of various milieus as a means of expanding the scope of the organism has the effect of situating causal agency not simply outside the organism, but outside the plane of organization itself, i.e., the plane on which, following the theory of biological systems, an organism is causally and experientially correlated with an environment or milieu. What D+G seek is an understanding of the complex, relational causality that underlies the emergence of organismic effects from the molecular standpoint, that is, from a perspective or on an ontological level at which the organism has no causal autonomy. Such a perspective is, quite simply, alien to the conceptual terrain of current biology and complexity theory, where the tendency of morphogenesis to favor “natural kinds” (Goodwin, Kauffman) and the fractal multileveled nature of the “self” (Varela) necessitate interrelation between the plane of organization and the plane of immanence, between incipient order and transversal communication.
This tension between what I shall call D+G’s cosmic expressionism and current work in biology surfaces quite clearly in their effort to assimilate the body without organs (BwO) to the ecological notion of the milieu. When they claim, in ATP, that the body without organs is “adjacent to the organism” and “continually in the process of constructing itself,” they effectively present it as a variant of what Varela calls a “niche” or “milieu”–namely, the continually-shifting part of the environment which has existential meaning for an organism. In this determination, the BwO would form something like a background that, following the biological notion of structural coupling, is co-constitutive of the organism, or better, fundamentally inseparable from and in fluid interconnection with it. Difficulty arises, however, as soon as D+G shift registers to argue for the molecular fluidity among and between milieus that characterizes the plane of immanence, for in so doing, they dissolve the very principle–the organism–that accounts for the selection of a particular milieu (or milieus) from the larger environment. Simply put, their philosophical conception of a limitless molecular consistency between milieus is not compatible with ecological or biological notions that view the milieu as causally correlated with an organism. And this incompatibility cannot be explained away as an artifact of the division between planes of organization and immanence, since the crux of the notion of biological systems involves a local and causal correlation between organism and milieu that has no complement at the molecular level.16 Otherwise put, the concrete structural correlation between organism and milieu–a correlation that encompasses the organism’s powers to affect and to be affected, its autonomy and its receptivity–is fundamentally necessary to explain its emergence: the organism simply cannot be reduced to the epiphenomenon or existential effect of molecular forces.
One recent effort to dissolve this incompatibility deserves mention here, particularly since it helps pinpoint the potential contribution D+G’s conceptual apparatus can make toward a rethinking of embodied agency. In an effort to defend D+G against claims that they simply dismiss the organism through abstract negation, Ansell-Pearson unpacks the implications of their claim that the BwO is adjacent to the organism and continually in process, arguing that the BwO enjoys a certain double life. Since the BwO comes into play not only on the plane of consistency (where there are only molecular forces) but also in the strata where molar formations arise, it cannot be the case that it simply negates the organism; rather, there must in fact be two bodies without organs: one which opposes the molecular fluidity characteristic of the plane of consistency against the rigid organization that is constitutive of the organism and another that actually belongs to the stratum and constitutes “a body without organs of the organism” (Germinal Life 154). While the former BwO would comprise a synonym for the plane of immanence itself, the latter BwO would designate something akin to the biological notion of the milieu discussed above. Such a distinction, concludes Ansell-Pearson, saves D+G from accusations of reductionism, since it shows that their aim is not “to negate the organism but to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of it by situating it within the wider field of forces, intensities, and durations that give rise to it and which do not cease to involve a play between nonorganic and stratified life” (154).
Again, however, the crucial issue concerns the nature of the doubling of the BwO: can a biological notion of the BwO as the milieu(s) adjacent to the organism on the plane of organization (or on a particular, e.g., the organic, stratum) form a complement to a philosophical notion of the BwO as a continuum of molecular forces or intensity? In my opinion, the answer has to be no, since the former requires recognition of the particular autonomy that characterizes the organism and hence some degree of causal agency on the part of the organism (or the tendency in nature toward “natural kinds”). If recent work in biology and complexity theory is right to underscore the crucial role of the organism in morphogenesis, then a theory that would explain away this autonomy as an effect of molecular forces would be powerless to account for the emergence of biological systems, what Stuart Kauffman poetically glosses as “order for free.” At a more general level, Ansell-Pearson’s position here simply does not jibe with the cosmic expressionism through which D+G seek to dissolve all molar organization into a play of individuation through haecceity. Though it may be true that D+G only oppose a specific notion of the organism–the organism “construed as a given hierarchized and transcendent organization”–the clear priority they place on the molecular makes it hard to imagine what possible positive role it could be granted. Even if one eschews the reduction that yields such a notion–abstraction from its “molecular and rhizomatic conditions of possibility”–the organism must by definition remain a molar entity belonging to the plane of organization, and thus, in some sense or other, reductive of the molecular conditions whose epiphenomenal effect it is. How, indeed, can we overlook or discount Deleuze and Guattari’s repeated insistence on the radical difference between organisms and the organs from which they are made? Taking their work as a whole, the BwO seems intended to furnish not so much an alternative model of the organism as a radically divergent organization of organs that acquires its advantages expressly by shedding all traces of the rigidity and constraint structurally constitutive of organisms.
Nonetheless, Ansell-Pearson’s reading pinpoints a dimension of D+G’s work that, once divested from their cosmic expressionism, can furnish a crucial bridge between cultural theory and biology. When he urges us to take seriously D+G’s characterization of the body without organs as a “milieu of experimentation” and an “associated milieu” that a given organism always carries with it (Germinal Life 189), Ansell-Pearson succeeds in characterizing the BwO in a manner that is consistent with biology’s understanding of both evolutionary and somatic change, and that manages to overcome the problems involved in applying “insights gained from the evolution of biological populations, and from the becomings-animal implicated in ethological assemblages, to the field of ‘nonhuman’ becomings of the human”–to wit, the fact that these involve “inordinately lengthy geological timescales and highly complex evolutionary processes” (155). For if the body without organs forms the environment within which the organism emerges, it could bring the radical possibilities of transversal, molecular communication to bear on the organism itself, without requiring its molecular dissolution. Rather than negating the organism’s proper organization, the BwO would then have an indirect impact on the organism: it would furnish the material conditions for the organism to undergo (whether actively or passively) relative deterritorializations, deterritorializations whose significance would remain inseparable from the larger, abiding organismic whole and its correlation with its constitutive milieu(s). In this way, D+G’s work would make an important contribution to a model of embodied agency rooted in the contemporary biology of complex systems: not only would it open the organism to the domain of intensity, thereby explaining how molecular factors intervene in its development in ways that are not established in advance (and that thus draw positively, i.e., without recourse to limitation, on a biological or organic virtuality), it would also clarify the crucial role of embodied duration as a process through which environmental factors lead to structural change in an organism. Rather than being “strictly determine[d]” by deterritorializations and reterritorializations, modifications in code are mediated or processed by the body: they are the result of a self-modification of the organism in response to stimuli or, as Varela puts it, “perturbations” from the environment.
Before turning to a discussion of complexity theory, let me briefly recap my criticism of D+G. By dissolving the role of the organism through molecular reduction and radical ecologism, D+G effectively recast evolution as an expressive process whose primary vehicle is a mode of individuation alien, as Ansell-Pearson puts it, to that of persons, subjects, or substances. The autonomy of expression D+G attribute to ecological systems allows them to account for biological change in terms of haecceities or individuations which are capable of combining molecular factors in the most varied and transversal manner imaginable. Creative involution is thus ultimately synonymous with a sort of cosmic expressionism through which Nature ceaselessly generates differentiation by cutting across any and all boundaries. At this plane of composition (or consistency), there are only molecular aggregates or haecceities; forms and subjects, species and genera have no proper place here: “It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life” (262). With this cosmic expressionism, D+G definitively depart from Deleuze’s earlier allegiance to Bergson (and, as we will see, from a consensus shared by virtually all contemporary biologists): far from needing organisms to capture its force in static, material form, life or creative involution possesses an autonomy at the molecular level: as the product of differentiation in itself (transversal communication), individuation is already in itself thoroughly material.
Creative Involution and Contemporary Biology
Despite its philosophical roots, D+G’s cosmic expressionism resonates strongly with much current work in biology and complexity theory. From differing perspectives, the research of central figures like Richard Dawkins, Lynn Margulis, Stephen Jay Gould, Brian Goodwin, and Stuart Kauffman highlights the importance of molecular processes and ecological factors alongside (and sometimes to the detriment of) the role of individual organisms. Nonetheless, D+G’s position can be distinguished from most of this work by virtue of its radicality on two points: 1) its adherence to a thoroughgoing molecular reductionism; and 2) its vocation to limit natural selection to the operation of a purely external difference. While most contemporary biologists have found it necessary to temper the lesson of the molecular revolution by reasserting the importance of higher-level organization (e.g., the organism), D+G consistently portray such organization as an exclusively negative limitation of life, one that does not express so much as restrict its expression. And while no contemporary scientist would think of rejecting natural selection per se (though several question its presumptive priority and its capacity to account for the origin of life), D+G differentiate creative involution from natural selection along the molecular-molar axis, contending that (immanent) distribution across transversal lines is alone sufficient to explain variation and the transmission of novel traits.
In both cases, D+G’s position derives less from a biological rationale than from a prior and overriding philosophical commitment. Thus the staunch adherence to molecular reductionism, though certainly flavored by Deleuze’s early reading of Jacques Monod and François Jacob, French pioneers of the molecular revolution, finds its true necessity in the philosophical break with Bergson over the status of intensity and the role of matter in evolution. For once the Bergsonian model of actualization along variant lines is abandoned in favor of a more radical model of transversal communication across boundaries of all levels, the molecular domain sheds its dependence on form and structure and acquires a wholesale functional autonomy. Likewise, D+G’s repudiation of natural selection as a derivative external mechanism owes far more to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference than to biological theory.17 The strict priority Deleuze lends distribution over selection, as an immanent over against a merely external mechanism of variation, can find its justification only on a philosophical model of expressionism, not in an ecology of biological systems. Despite its resonance with contemporary accounts of self-organization, D+G’s account thus institutes a rigid separation between natural selection and involution, one that is effectively deconstructed (as we shall see below) by complexity theory’s marriage of self-organization with selection (Kauffman 168).
Despite sometimes significant discrepancies, contemporary biological research programs converge on a certain consensus concerning the irreducibility of higher-level organization in evolution. In practically all cases, whether for reasons that remain within the parameters of the neo-Darwinian framework or not, morphology at the cellular and the organismic level comprises a quasi-autonomous locus for evolutionary change. Like D+G’s understanding of emergence in terms of individuation by haecceity, complexity theory’s notion of morphological emergence from a “generative field” (to introduce just one example) shifts the focus away from the static physical essence of an organism to the dynamical context (the molecular field of forces) out of which organization emerges. In contrast to D+G’s approach, though, emergence on such an account is not purely punctual and singular, but processual in a manner that imposes structure and constraint on the emergent organism. Moreover, the process of emergence interrelates the domain of molecular flux with the plane of organization in a fundamentally different way than do D+G: far from constructing the molar register as a mere epiphenomenon of the play of molecular forces, complexity theory presents a picture of bi-directional causality in which the emerging, if inchoate, proto-organismic form has a downward effect, as it were, during the process of morphogenesis. Accordingly, the morphogenetic field, while certainly not equivalent or reducible to the plane of organization, also differs significantly from the plane of consistency: it comprises a virtual field of forces, representing a subset of the molecular domain, that is oriented around (or selected in function of) a particular emergent form.
Given this fundamental difference as well as the areas of overlap with D+G’s work, the kind of biological research exemplified by complexity theory (but encompassing alternate models including Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiosis and Gould’s conception of morphospace) provides an excellent context in which to evaluate and criticize the two major planks of D+G’s creative involution: their categorical separation of involution from natural selection and their marginalization of the organism.18 While complexity theorists make common cause with D+G by challenging the privilege accorded natural selection in modern biology, the rationale in the respective cases could not be more different: rather than being compelled, for philosophical reasons, to reduce natural selection to a purely external factor, largely extraneous to the molecular factors informing creative involution, complexity theory rejects the modern doctrine that selection alone is capable of accounting for all evolutionary processes. In its stead, complexity theory proposes what Kauffman calls a “marriage of self-organization and selection,” an asymmetrical pairing in which the spontaneous emergence of order in nature holds a primacy not altogether unlike the one D+G accord vital creativity, with the following difference: selection, in its secondary role, does not operate primarily by acting on constituted forms (as it does in Darwinism), or on molecular factors (as it does for D+G and a contemporary biologist like Dawkins), but rather by forming a source of resistance that “natural kinds” must overcome in order to emerge successfully from morphogenesis. Otherwise put, selection does not so much work in conjunction with vital creativity as against it, forming a counter-pressure to the tendency toward order in nature. On the issue of its interpretation of natural selection, complexity theory is thus far more reminiscent of Bergson than of Deleuze: rather than stripping it of any role in the process of vital creativity, complexity theory resituates selection, dethroning it from its preeminent place as the sole mechanism of evolution, but retaining it in an important supporting role.19
Complexity theory also resonates with D+G’s biophilosophy in its attempt to go beyond the surface level of typological form. Once again, however, the scope and nature of the rejection of typology differs fundamentally in the two approaches: while D+G (and Deleuze too, following his break with Bergson over the role of intensity) unequivocally view higher level morphology (the organism) as a form of negative limitation on the potential of life, complexity theory in effect expands Bergson’s materialism by insisting on the crucial role played by cellular and morphological processes of self-organization in the perpetual differentiation that is life. Thus, complexity theory rejects surface typology primarily so that it might fathom the deeper laws of organization (differentiation) through which form emerges at levels higher than the molecular. On this account, the organism is neither a negative limitation on some entirely unconstrained (and we might add, fantasized) vitalism, nor a mere epiphenomenon of molecular (genetic and extra-genetic) processes, but is itself an irreducible and quasi-autonomous source of order–a power of nature–whose emergence coincides with and might be said to express local constraints imposed on variation and selection by more general processes of self-organization. “The critical point,” as Kauffman puts it, “is this: In sufficiently complex systems, selection cannot avoid the order exhibited by most members of the ensemble. Therefore, such order is present not because of selection but despite it” (16).
What is ultimately at stake in the confrontation between D+G and complexity theory is a contrast between two vastly different accounts of the molecular and rhizomatic conditions for creativity. Despite claims for its absolute immanence, D+G’s notion of individuation by haecceity yields a view from nowhere (a pure description) that remains entirely synchronic; by contrast, morphological emergence from a “generative field” describes, within a complex, diachronic frame, those processes that generate order spontaneously in nature. Accordingly, while order results, on both accounts, from a combination of internal energy and external stimuli, the respective nature of this combination could hardly be more different. For D+G, the external environment (the molecular field or plane of immanence) exerts an influence that is radically indeterminate (unconstrained by any emerging form) and thus exclusively affirmative and empowering. Emergent “individuations” or “haecceities” can literally take any form whatsoever: they are all logically equivalent and processurally unrelated groupings of molecular singularities which express the impetus of life in particular concrete situations. Given this radical indeterminacy accorded the molecular field, we can better understand why D+G consistently view the organism as a negative limitation: organic form of any sort cannot but restrict the pure open-ended potentiality of the undifferentiated molecular field.
Not surprisingly, an embrace of just such restriction forms a central tenet of complexity theory’s account of emergence. As both Goodwin and Kauffman affirm, external stimuli–what Goodwin terms the generative or morphogenetic field–both facilitate and constrain concrete possibilities for morphological emergence. Introduced to explain the initial emergence of morphological forms in nature (and, in Kauffman’s work, the origin of life itself), the generative field comprises an “organized context within which inherited particulars act, and without which they can have no effect” (Goodwin 41). In other words, the generative field specifies factors–including timing and spatial order–favorable to the genesis of stable form. In this way, as Goodwin’s discussion of chemical self-organization makes clear, morphogenesis explains the emergence of form with absolutely no recourse to genetic principles:
What counts in the production of spatial patterns is not the nature of the molecules and other components involved, such as cells, but the way these interact with one another in time (their kinetics) and in space (their relational order–how the state of one region depends on the state of neighboring regions). These two properties together define a field, the behavior of a dynamic system that is extended in space–which describes most real systems. This is why fields are so fundamental in physics. But a new dimension to fields is emerging from the study of chemical systems such as the Beloussov-Zhabotinsky reaction and the similarity of its spatial patterns to those of living systems. This is the emphasis on self-organization, the capacity of these fields to generate patterns spontaneously without any specific instructions telling them what to do, as in a genetic program. These systems produce something out of nothing. (51)
This capacity to produce something from nothing–what Kauffman succinctly dubs “order for free”–goes hand in hand with a view of nature starkly divergent from that painted by Darwin. Rather than the result of a purely external force (natural selection) acting on entirely random variations, the frequency of different organic forms may simply reflect the probabilities of their respective morphogenetic trajectories. In other words, the preponderance of certain organic forms in nature may reflect internal laws and/or the existence of generic forms, and not simply nor primarily selection of random variations. Natural selection is thereby put into its proper context: at most, it may play a role in testing the stability of particular organismic forms that have been produced independently through processes of dynamic morphogenesis. Likewise, genes find their proper role as mechanisms in the service of generic forms: while they can influence many secondary properties of these forms, they cannot override the generic properties produced by dynamical processes of self-organization. In the end, complexity theory presents a forceful reaffirmation of the importance of the organism as an integral and irreducible factor in morphogenesis: neither the result of external processes of random selection nor a mere epiphenomenon of molecular genetics, the organism attains its proper status as “the fundamental unit of life,” a “natural kind” rather than an historical accident (41). To summarize then, while D+G plumb biological theory in search of support for their marginalization of the organism and natural selection, the most radical work in contemporary biology challenges orthodoxy on both these points only to reassert, with newfound insight, the importance of selection as a secondary regulatory mechanism and the centrality of the organism as the principle agent of evolution.
We can gauge the consequences of this difference by attending to the treatment of both genetic and extra-genetic processes in the respective accounts. From the perspective of complexity theory, D+G’s embrace of the phenomenon of genetic drift–what they call the “surplus value of code”–rings hollow since it assumes a purely undifferentiated context and hence a literally limitless possibility for variation. By interpreting genetic drift as a mechanism for purely unconstrained change, D+G minimize or ignore entirely the significant constraints placed on evolution by cellular processes and morphogenesis. While random genetic drift, and more generally, random variation, certainly do play some role in complexity theory’s account of evolution, they do so only within certain, albeit extremely flexible bounds set by processes of self-organization intrinsic to morphological emergence. More specifically, what D+G ignore in their overvaluation of population thinking and random drift is the role played by “local constraints” and the centrality of “functional wholes” in evolution (Kauffman 21-22). These two factors serve to constrain the possibilities for development along a severely restricted set of pathways. Each cell type, Kauffman argues, is a “highly constrained pattern of gene expression” that is “poised between only two or a few alternatives” and that, “at each stage in ontogeny,… has only a few accessible neighboring cell types” (409). These alternatives and neighbors are determined not through any overriding genetic program, but through the confrontation of contingency with the “underlying general properties of morphogenesis.” Thus, morphogenesis “is not just the genome’s ‘doing’; rather, it is the consequence in time and space of the structural and catalytic properties of proteins encoded in time and space by the genome, acting in concert with nonprotein materials and with physical and chemical forces to yield reliable forms” (410). While the underlying general properties of morphogenesis do not dictate the specific forms taken in any instance, they do specify a range within which possible emergences can occur. Consequently, development occurs in conjunction with organismic form, or, to cite Kauffman’s rather reserved summary, “some developmental mechanisms lie to hand in the evolution of morphogenesis” (410).
Viewed in this context, we discover that D+G’s position actually involves them in an unintentional solidarity with core adherents of the very neo-Darwinism they seek to transform: they too find themselves committed to what Kauffman describes as a simplification too useful to give up: “the initial idealization that variation [and also drift] can occur in any direction” (11). Certainly in their enthusiastic endorsement of random drift, but also with their more general embrace of population thinking as an unconstrained principle for change, D+G would seem guilty of precisely such a simplification: the very plausibility of their notion of transversal communication depends on the broader scope of variation within populations to trump morphological constraints acting on individual organisms. On Kauffman’s account, by contrast, both variation and drift must meet the test of selection, which means, in turn, that they must conform to the constraints morphogenesis imposes on selection. Selection, he contends, “is unlikely to be able to avoid those forms or morphologies which correspond to large volumes of the parameter space of the developmental mechanisms” (410). Like random variation, random genetic drift can only successfully take root when it contributes to the expression of those generic forms favored by nature.
Local constraint exercises a similar regulatory function on non-genetic factors like symbiosis and heterochrony, both of which form central mechanisms in creative involution. Once again, we find that D+G appropriate these factors without taking on the very significant role played by context or, more precisely, by proximity. In the case of heterochrony (change in organism due to changes in developmental timing), this selective appropriation allows D+G to exaggerate the extent of possible change and the power of heterochrony itself. Far from the purely unrestricted and free-floating mechanism D+G assume it is, heterochrony on Kauffman’s account functions within a severely constrained spatial matrix. There is, in any concrete situation, “local constraint on transitions between neighboring forms” (Kauffman 14). What this means is that heterochrony does not form a mechanism for any-possible-change-whatever, as it appears to on D+G’s reading, but rather for selectively “deforming one organism to a closely neighboring organism” (14). There are, Kauffman concludes, significant limitations on heterochrony which follow from the very feature D+G ignore: its concrete contextedness. Far from the freely acting mechanism they take it to be, heterochrony is constrained by “restrictions in generating neighboring forms or organisms, given that the process is starting at a specific point–in a given species or in a specific member of the species” (14). Insofar as these restrictions, like those placed on genetic variation and drift, follow from generic form, they testify to the irreducible role played by the organism in evolutionary processes. Once again, D+G’s hostility to the organism as such leads them to carry out what, from the standpoint of contemporary biology, can at best appear to be a mistaken appropriation.
In the case of symbiosis, a similar decontextualization permits D+G to divorce symbiotic couplings from an evolutionary framework, transforming them in the process into unrestricted mechanisms for becomings of all sorts. For biologist Lynn Margulis and her colleagues, by contrast, symbiosis functions within the parameters set by natural selection. Despite its radical assault on the anthropocentric view of evolution (Margulis’s work lays bare the microbial basis for the emergence of all post-molecular life in a way that questions the principle of morphological division as such), symbiosis can only succeed in generating new forms by passing the test of selection and it can only pass this test by yielding viable forms. Though it challenges the centrality of gradual selection, the “striking scenario” presented by symbiosis remains consistent with, even dependent on, the broadly Darwinian picture of evolution, as Margulis herself stresses:
The descendents of the bacteria that swam in primeval seas breathing oxygen three billion years ago exist now in our bodies as mitochondria. At one time, the ancient bacteria had combined with other microorganisms. They took up residence inside, providing waste disposal and oxygen-derived energy in return for food and shelter. The merged organisms went on to evolve into more complex oxygen-breathing forms of life. Here, then, was an evolutionary mechanism more sudden than mutation: a symbiotic alliance that becomes permanent. By creating organisms that are not simply the sum of their symbiotic parts–but something more like the sum of all the possible combinations of their parts–such alliances push developing beings into uncharted realms. Symbiosis, the merging of organisms into new collectives, proves to be a major power of change on Earth. (Margulis and Sagan 31-32)
While symbiosis allows a far greater adaptive creativity (since “all the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanism of the entire bacterial kingdom” [30]), it does not license the literally limitless creative power D+G claim on its behalf. Because it remains bound by the broad constraints of selection, symbiotic mechanisms simply cannot ignore the larger constraints governing macroevolutionary processes.
Not only do such concrete misappropriations of contemporary biological theory render questionable the specific mechanisms of creative involution, they also inform the highly singular alliances D+G forge with two marginalized figures from the history of evolutionary biology: Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and August Weismann. Considered in the light of recent biological thought, these alliances illustrate, even more forcefully than the specific misappropriations just discussed, the limitations of D+G’s synchronic account of creative becoming and, more generally, the reductive consequences of their primarily philosophical engagement with biological theory.
D+G’s cosmic expressionism hinges on a wholesale transformation of the animal kingdom into an immense body without organs defined molecularly by movement and timing. To effect such a transformation, D+G draw on the work of the eighteenth-century rational morphologists, and specifically, that of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.20 By playing Geoffroy’s topological conception of Nature as Fold against Cuvier’s conception of Nature as divisible space, D+G are able to introduce an expressive model of species differentiation. Whereas Cuvier invokes a transcendent (molar) principle of analogy to break Nature into (four) distinct branches, Geoffroy privileges the immanent molecular forces underlying such division, going “beyond organs and functions to abstract elements he terms ‘anatomical,’ even to particles, pure materials that enter into various combinations, forming a given organ and assuming a given function depending on their degree of speed or slowness” (254). By deterritorializing the molar analogies of proportionality between species, Geoffroy shifts focus from typology to the fluid plane of immanence in a way that reconceptualizes specification as an epiphenomenon of movement and timing:
Speed and slowness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the forms of structure but also the types of development. This approach later reappears in an evolutionist framework, with Perrier’s tachygenesis and differential rates of growth in allometry: species as kinematic entities that are either precocious or retarded. (Even the question of fertility is less one of form and function than speed; do the paternal chromosomes arrive early enough to be incorporated into the nuclei?) In any case, there is a pure plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distinguished from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or that individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their relations of movement. A fixed plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows down or accelerates. (255)
Consonant with new developments in fertility research, D+G propose timing as a molecular principle that yields species as “kinematic entities” prior to their (molar) emergence as relatively discrete forms and functions. In the wake of this transformation of timing into a philosophical principle of molecular expression, D+G are able to cite Geoffroy as an important precedent for their cosmic expressionism: Geoffroy’s understanding of animal taxonomy as the result of a continuous process of folding allows them to articulate their key notion of the plane of immanence: “The proof that there is isomorphism [of forms, but no correspondence] is that you can always get from one form on the organic stratum to another, however different they may be, by means of ‘folding.’ To go from the Vertebrate to the Cephalopod, bring the two sides of the Vertebrate’s backbone together, bend its head down to its feet and its pelvis up to the nape of its neck”(46). At the limit, folding assembles all of Nature into one great Animal totality that, like Spinozist Being, actualizes itself through the manifold of different folds available to it: it is, D+G decree, “still the same abstract Animal that is realized through the stratum, only to varying degrees, in varying modes” (46). Through this radical rehabilitation of 18th century rational morphology, D+G transform a biological theory of typological continuity into the philosophical basis of their molecular monism.
Given the broad resonances between D+G’s biophilosophy and complexity theory, it comes as no surprise to discover that Geoffroy has also been invoked (most emphatically by Goodwin) as a precursor for the notion of morphogenesis. Once again, however, what is at stake in the respective cases could not be more divergent: whereas D+G invoke Geoffroy’s “Principle of Connections” (the notion that diverse forms are all transformations of a single basic ground plan of structural elements) as support for a rigorously molecular theory of becoming–and thus for the wholesale dissolution of form as such–Goodwin cites it as an early insight into the existence of generic forms in nature. On Goodwin’s account, the Principle of Connections “stated that certain patterns of relationship between structural elements in organisms remain unchanged even if the elements themselves undergo alteration” (144). Since these are, for Goodwin, precisely the patterns favored by nature (generic forms), Geoffroy’s Principle of Connections, once placed into the proper dynamic context, would be capable of explaining morphological emergence in a non-reductive manner. In this sense, Geoffroy’s Principle would describe nothing other than the morphogenetic field itself: the (molecular) factors of movement and timing that, as D+G stress, operate within the constraints laid down by structural invariance and are responsible for generating diverse realizations of “a single basic ground plan of structural elements” (144). In short, it simply does not follow from the isomorphism of forms that form itself is dispensable, a mere epiphenomenon of governing molecular processes. Rather, form acquires a role that is not merely historical (and thus susceptible to molecular reduction)–as it is on all superficial accounts of typology–but rather generative in the structural sense: it is both the product and the vehicle of those self-organizing processes which express the underlying structural or generic patterns favored by nature.
By construing Geoffroy’s Principle of Connections as a principle of molecular folding, D+G construct a Geoffroy antithetical to that invoked by his more well-disposed contemporaries. Unlike the morphologist Richard Owen, for example, who understood the Principle as describing a static set of relationships defining an ideal tetrapod limb (following the example used by Geoffroy) from which all variants are derived by transformation, D+G interpret it as the basis for an expressionist theory of emergence that dispenses entirely with form as anything more than a trivial byproduct, a mere epiphenomenon, of underlying molecular processes. Despite this crucial difference, however, D+G’s position presents a picture of emergence that is, at least when contrasted with complexity theory, hardly less static than that of Owen: by making form either transcendental (Owen) or purely fortuitous (D+G), both positions trivialize its relation to the molecular forces from which it emerges. In D+G’s case, this trivialization undermines the explanatory value of their philosophy of emergence, since without form as its product and vehicle, molecular processes lack any sense of direction or motivation. Far from there being favored natural forms or anything that could explain the emergence of one rather than another form, all becomings are effectively equivalent: they all express the same Substance or underlying totality, though in different ways or from variant perspectives. As so many (logically equivalent) sets of molecular singularities or haecceities, becomings thus lack any intrinsic relation to one another and to their generative conditions–any relation, that is, which would implicate them in some or other specific dynamical context. Despite D+G’s insistence on the dynamical status of becoming, their model thus lacks the kind of dynamism that characterizes biological notions of emergence: a dynamism inseparable from the morphological constraint imposed during the process of actualization. The priority they lend the virtual leads them into conflict with the biological perspective, since, in order to preserve the possibility of dissolving any actualization back into the virtuality from which it emerges, they are led to inject a form of reversibility that simply contradicts the primacy biology places on processes of actualization. So long as D+G refuse to recognize the constraint built into self-organization in the biological domain, their conception of differentiation remains formal and empty (at least in terms of that domain) and the notion of emergence it supports simply cannot do justice to the dynamic nature of biological processes. At best, their cosmic expressionism can mimic the dynamics of physical processes, where a thoroughgoing externalism obviates the necessity for any account of internal agency and form.21 Moreover, the oft-mentioned resonances between their work and non-linear dynamics 22 is belied by their refusal to embrace the specific irreversibility that characterizes biological systems.23
A second and far more muted historical alliance–with August Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm continuity–reveals more clearly still the radicality of D+G’s appropriation of biological theory.24 As we noted above in reference to Bergson, Weismann was that late 19th century neo-Darwinian whose conception of the “germ-plasm” addressed the lacuna in Darwinism–its lack of a mechanism to explain heredity–and thus anticipated the genetics revolution that began with the rediscovery of Mendel’s work around 1900. Following on the heels of Bergson (who, remember, rejected the continuity of the germ-plasm in favor of a continuity of genetic energy), D+G rework Weismann’s conception into a notion that Ansell-Pearson dubs “germinal life”: a more general “intense germen” that is effectively synonymous with the body without organs. In the course of this reworking, the germ-plasm is modified practically beyond all recognition: far from regulating the process of genetic inheritance in a diachronic context, as it does for Weismann, the intense germen produces a synchronic convergence of all developmental moments (a body without organs) that facilitates unlimited transversal communication across all possible boundaries. In effect, what D+G accomplish through this transformative appropriation is a deterritorialization of the germen from its location within the nucleus of the cell (hence the name, germ-plasm) to the broadest imaginable environment, the entire set of singularities comprising the plane of immanence at any particular moment. Following this deterritorialization, germinal life loses all dependence not only on genetic material (DNA) but also on organisms per se, understood either as the bearers of such material (following the modern genetics paradigm) or as generic products of self-organizing processes (following complexity theory). D+G, in other words, submit life to a generalization that removes it from the biological domain (and strips away any privilege that biology might enjoy); by situating the intense germen exclusively at the molecular level and predicating it of all processes, organic and nonorganic alike, D+G thus redefine life as a thoroughly machinic process, one that expresses itself in heterogeneous conjunctions of singularities which are themselves heedless of biological constraints.
Once again, this alliance resonates, to a degree, with an historical commitment on the part of complexity theory. Like D+G, complexity theorists attack Weismann and his legacy (i.e., modern genetics) on the issue of context or environment, arguing that the “Weismann barrier” prohibiting communication from the germ-plasm to the soma rests on an untenable dualism. In this case, however, the deconstruction of Weismann’s dualism is advanced to support the centrality of the organism as the fundamental unit of life. “As a general biological principle,” Goodwin argues,
Weismann’s dualism… is incorrect. All unicellular organisms, all plants, and many animal species, including mammals, have no separation of germ plasm from somatoplasm. The capacity to reproduce is a property of the whole organism, not a special replicating part that is distinct from the rest of the reproducing body. And in the case of sexual reproduction, to which Weismann’s concept can be applied, it is the egg cell that carries the organization required for accurate replication of the DNA in the next generation, not hereditary essence. (36)
While they stop short of endorsing a revitalized Lamarckianism (though not without noting that recent studies have suggested the possibility for unicellular organisms like bacteria and yeast to modify their DNA for adaptive purposes), Goodwin and his colleagues argue that the contextedness of genetic transmission has the effect of overturning the strict separation of germ cells and the soma. From their perspective, the unchanging organization of organisms simply cannot be accounted for on the hypothesis of a genetic continuity, since all the molecular components of the cell–including DNA, RNA, and the proteins they code for–undergo “molecular turnover” (37). What does explain this organization is the persistence of the generic form of various organisms: the continuity of “certain aspects of the organization of [molecular] materials–their dynamic relationships, the way they are arranged in space, and the patterns of change they undergo in time” (37-8).25
While Weismann and the modern genetics tradition get things wrong by attributing too much to germ cells (genes), D+G go astray by dissolving all ties between germinal continuity and organic life. The error, in both cases, stems from neglect of the organism. From the standpoint of complexity theory, by contrast, what is crucial is precisely the active role played by the organism as a mediator between the molecular domain and the macro-environment: the organism, Goodwin contends, is “an active agent with its own organizational principles, imposed between the genes and the environment. Organisms both select and alter their environments, and their intrinsic dynamic organization limits the hereditary changes that are possible, so that the variety available for evolution is restricted” (104). There can, in other words, be no continuity of germinal life–whether at the level of the germ-line or the plane of immanence–without the active mediation of the organism. The biological can no more be reduced to molecular processes than it can be dissolved through a broader conception of nonorganic life.
Germinal Life as the Basis for Becoming?: Toward a Critique of D+G’s Ethology
At the same time as they witness the limitations of D+G’s synchronic approach to evolution, these eccentric historical alliances raise questions concerning their effort to develop a model of human practice on the basis of creative involution. In the first place, the flexibility postulated by Geoffroy’s “Principle of Connections” and by the types of symbioses Margulis discusses (e.g., between cells and mitochondria) only arises over large-scale macroevolutionary timescales, not in cases of individual somatic change of the sort that forms the object of D+G’s ethology of becoming. Thus, when they champion a philosophical “Geoffroyism” and embrace nonselectional mechanisms like genetic drift and symbiosis, D+G are in effect illegitimately applying to change at the level of the individual a timeframe that properly characterizes macroevolutionary processes. Consequently, the dissolution of higher level form that D+G derive from Geoffroy’s Principle and from symbiotic processes rests on an illegitimate foundation insofar as it depends on this same application. Far from characterizing the somatic life of individual entities, this dissolution only arises in reference to vast stretches of evolutionary time. While Margulis may be right that we are, from the standpoint of macroevolution, mere hosts for microbial life, in the narrower frame we remain organized units which are, in some sense or other, the objects of nature’s selectional processes. Likewise, while Geoffroy’s principle may establish the ultimate unity of life in the macroevolutionary perspective, it does not have any immediate bearing on more local–and more concrete–processes of morphogenesis. It is one thing for D+G to draw on contemporary biology and on neglected historical pathways to underwrite creative involution as an alternative model of macroevolution and quite another thing to apply this model to the behavior of individuals or use it as the basis for a molecular dissolution of the organism. While the former may wreak havoc with biological orthodoxy, the latter involves an egregious category mistake: a conflation of a developmental (human) timeframe with a macro-evolutionary one.
Insofar as the virtually limitless power of self-modification they grant individual bodies is directly derived from their account of creative involution, it is hardly surprising that D+G’s model of becoming depends on this very same category mistake. Becoming acquires its role as the operator of D+G’s radicalized, Spinozist ethology–a model of practice centered on experimenting with what a body can do–because of its likeness to, or indeed identity with, the mechanisms of creative involution. Becoming, D+G unequivocally claim, “is involution”; it draws its force from phenomena of “side-communication” and “contagion”–precisely those extra-genetic mechanisms which characterize contemporary neo-evolutionism:
Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. There is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever descend. There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus. There is a block of becoming which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves (rhizosphere). (238)
When they go on to assert that such phenomena of side-communication are “essential to all becomings-animal,” D+G leave little doubt concerning their ethological significance: the mechanisms characterizing creative involution form the very basis of their model of ethical practice.
Despite the central importance of this enabling homology between involution and becoming, however, D+G offer scant argument to support it, tending, for the most part, simply to assume its legitimacy as an entailment of their monist cosmic expressionism. What substantiation they do offer, moreover, tends to confound biological common sense. Witness, for example, their effort to coordinate their deterritorializing appropriation of Weismann with von Baer’s groundbreaking work on embryology. By employing the intense germen (the result of their deterritorialization of the germ-plasm) as a context within which to invert the process of embryonic development described by von Baer, D+G transform von Baer’s work in a manner that exceeds the bounds of biological plausibility. Whereas von Baer stresses the developmental irreversibility leading from the embryo to the organism, D+G seize upon the allegedly limitless flexibility of the embryo, as contrasted with the relatively fixed adult organism, wresting it from its concrete and constrained status within biological theory and retooling it into the operative basis of their model of practice. When they align the egg with the BwO, they are clearly seeking more than just biological legitimacy for their account of the BwO’s adjacency to the organism; in what amounts to a far more radical move, they effectively posit a deterritorialized embryology, one that can mobilize the flexibility of the egg well beyond the parameters not only of embryonic growth but of biological development as such.
In order to institute the broad homology with “mythology” that underwrites their generalization of embryology, D+G perform a double deterritorialization of the latter, arguing first of all that the BwO (the cosmic egg) derives its flexibility through its essential likeness to the embryo (the biological egg):
The BwO is the egg…. The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension…. There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryology and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. (164)
From both biological and cosmic perspectives, the egg comprises a domain of virtual potential that is prior to any actualization, any production of developmentally-constrained forms of life. Just as the flexible potential of the embryo remains inherent in the developed individual, so too does the limitless virtual repertoire of the BwO lie dormant within any concrete organism that it spawns. In this sense, D+G suggest, the biological egg, no less than the cosmic egg, is coterminous with the plane of immanence or consistency. Rather than forming a flexible field of potential that is developmentally prior to morphogenesis and that loses its flexibility through developmental fixation (as it does for complexity theory), embryology in its deterritorialized form comprises what amounts to an atemporal condition of possibility which not only does not disappear or undergo constraining alterations following developmental fixation but remains in force as a virtual reservoir conditioning subsequent movements of becoming. Embryology thus plays a role in D+G’s philosophy analogous to that of Spinoza’s substance: it defines a cosmic field of virtual potential that gets expressed in the particular forms which are selected for actualization.
In a second and even more striking step in their deterritorialization of embryology, D+G model the recursivity between organism and BwO (i.e., precisely what renders them “adjacent” to one another) on the alleged germinal contemporaneity of embryo and organism. Despite their explicit attempt to garner legitimacy through an appeal to biological theory, this step requires D+G to inject psychological principles into the domain of biology in a manner that again exemplifies the limitations of their biophilosophy. As the fruit of a confrontation between Freud and Weismann that wrests the “germ plasm” out of the biological sphere as such, the germinal contemporaneity underwriting D+G’s notion of becoming is, in the end, the product of a certain (anti-Freudian) psychoanalyzing of biology:
The BwO is not “before” the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself. If it is tied to childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult regresses to the child and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the child, like the Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears from the organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter that on the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood block, a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child “before” the adult, or the mother “before” the child; it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud failed to understand about Weismann: the child as the germinal contemporary of its parents. (164)
In the wake of this psychoanalytic deterritorialization of biology, we can finally understand how becoming obtains its seemingly unlimited power: If the organism relates to the BwO as the adult relates to the childhood block and if the relation in each case recovers the germinal potential of embryogenesis, then becoming can always in principle draw on the virtual potential of the BwO or “intense germen” that accompanies it as its immanent cause. That is why becoming need not obey the evolutionary constraints that are imposed through developmental processes and also why it can draw irreverently on a wide array of genetic and extra-genetic mechanisms. It is also, we should add, why becoming always appears predestined to succeed. So long as the BwO remains adjacent to the organism, forming an expressive milieu around it, but without undergoing any limitation or actualization, the BwO serves to furnish a limitless source of alternate organizational pathways that form the basis for, and thus guarantee the logical possibility of, the deterritorialization of the organism.
Once again, however, D+G’s unflinching effort to liberate germinal life from biological constraint does not come without significant costs. In the first place, their reliance on a psychoanalytic framework radically disrupts biological theory. By making becoming dependent on a return to the potential of a developmentally prior state, D+G reject out-of-hand all biologically-rooted forms of constraint in a way that simply contravenes the biological consensus concerning the irreversibility of developmental processes within concrete individuals. While D+G could, at worst, be accused of total disingenuousness in their appropriation of biological principles, at best, they are guilty of the profound category mistake we diagnosed earlier: confusing the flexibility attributable to organisms on an evolutionary timescale with the far more narrow flexibility characteristic of developmental processes. In either case, their ethology of becoming is–from the biological standpoint–nothing short of impossible.
Even if we overlook this profound difficulty or discount its significance, D+G’s account founders on an internal inconsistency that witnesses the resilience of biological theory and points toward a possible reconciliation of becoming with biology. Centering on D+G’s account of the reciprocity between the BwO and the organism, this inconsistency revisits Ansell-Pearson’s above-discussed effort to distinguish a BwO of the organism from the BwO that coincides with the plane of consistency. While it is, quite clearly, the latter, destratified BwO that D+G liken to the embryo or biological egg (since it alone can justify the limitless possibility they attribute to becoming), only the former, more narrow and stratified BwO can meaningfully be qualified as “adjacent” to the organism, in the sense that it forms what biologists would call the organism’s “niche” or “world.”26 No matter what D+G say to the contrary, as soon as they introduce the “organism” and correlate it with the BwO, they cannot avoid certain biological constraints which necessarily delimit a specific environment in which the organism is situated and develops. As we noted above, it is precisely this point that informs D+G’s value for theorizing agency on an ecological, distributed model. It also bears on D+G’s distinction of absolute from relative deterritorialization, suggesting the impossibility of the former in the domain of biology: simply put, deterritorialization as a biological process can only take place relative to a concrete if flexible context and can only modify the ecology of the organism within certain structurally and situationally imposed bounds. In short, while the destratified BwO (the BwO proper) forms an inclusive context for becomings understood as conjunctions of singularities or haecceities, becomings that involve actual embodied organisms occur within a significantly more restricted context–the virtual field of possibility that corresponds to the specific environment with which the organism is structurally-coupled. Although this context (i.e., the stratified BwO) can certainly change in conjunction with the organism’s development, it must always in some way delimit the larger plane of immanence if its “adjacency” to the organism is to make any positive contribution toward the latter’s continual construction. Not only is Ansell-Pearson thus right to posit a BwO of the organism (even as he significantly overstates its role in D+G’s thought), but in so doing he exposes the internal contradiction between D+G’s incipient ecological understanding of organic systems and their philosophically-rooted cosmic expressionism. Any effort to render becoming consistent would accordingly have to modify D+G’s cosmic expressionism enough to recognize the ecological basis of the organism. Because it must be rooted in a concrete subsection of the plane of immanence–something like a “morphogenetic field”–that is delimited from the plane as such, becoming cannot possess the infinite (logical) flexibility of a “haecceity,” but must remain relative to emergent properties of the developing organism in a way that underscores the irreducible role biology plays in all processes of becoming, or at least in all of those involving organic entities.
As it stands, however, the power D+G ascribe to becoming only obtains in a synchronic framework that yet again betrays the philosophical basis of their project. Far from constituting a biologically plausible account of life, their cosmic expressionism yields a philosophical monism that strategically employs the malleability of cultural coding as a means of loosening the grip of biological constraint.27 We get a clear glimpse of this “strategy” in their effort to move from an ethology of behavior to an ethology of assemblages. Two claims are crucial here. In the first place, D+G underscore the necessity of localizing behavior in assemblages, not individuals; not only must the notion of behavior be expanded to embrace the most diverse components, from the biochemical to the social, but agency must be understood as an emergent, distributed process belonging not to a concrete individual, but to a system or assemblage. In the second place, D+G insist on the molecular dimension of becoming, updating ethology by suggesting that (as Ansell-Pearson puts it) “becomings-animal involve not only the selection of adaptive traits but also the play of physico-chemical intensities and zones of proximity that cut across phyletic lineages”–“a ‘musical becoming’ of life” (Germinal Life 174-5). Such a view allows D+G to deconstruct the binaries (e.g., “innate-acquired”) operative in the ethological tradition and to champion the notion of “consistency” over that of substantial unity or identity. In their “bio-behavioral machinics,” behavior results from “packets of relations… steered by molecules” (the molecular components of ethology’s “centers of activation”) and the problem of consistency, as Ansell-Pearson recognizes, becomes one of molecular engineering. What is thereby gained is the capacity to deterritorialize the innate and the acquired from their anchoring in the organism as a “center of activation”: D+G, continues Ansell-Pearson, “situate the problem of the ‘innate-acquired’ in the more dynamic context of a rhizome in which the natal gets decoded and the acquired is subject to territorialization” (175). By opening the innate and the acquired to molecular forces that circulate beneath the organism, effectively making them a function of the plane of immanence, D+G thus claim to circumvent the constraint they exercise within a standard ethological model of behavior.
Once again, however, D+G’s resonance with contemporary science (here, the cognitive science of distributed systems) is undermined by the radicality of their position. For in shifting from an ethology of behavior to an ethology of assemblages, D+G do not so much shift the locus of agency from isolated organism to larger cognitive and social system as dissolve the role of agency altogether. Unlike the work of Andy Clark or Edwin Hutchins on the social distribution of cognition, D+G’s ethology of assemblages does not aim to expand the framework in which cognitive agency must be situated, but instead to render the emergence of such agency an epiphenomenon of the play of molecular forces on the plane of consistency. It is for this reason and this reason alone that they can claim to dissolve all biological and social constraints limiting what a body (or assemblage) can do: on their model of cosmic expressionism, the coordinates defining a body (longitude and latitude) are not properties specific to a particular body or assemblage, but rather properties that accrue to the body (or assemblage) by dint of its relation to the plane of immanence. Otherwise stated, there is no positive concept of bodily agency in D+G’s work, only an expressive concept that emerges on the basis of an ontology of immanence.
As was the case with the biological notion of the milieu, D+G’s appropriation of cognitive science must be modified in a manner that recognizes both the contextedness and the agency of particular concrete assemblages. Just as the emerging organism furnishes an important source of constraint on its own emergence (since it specifies the range of environmental factors to which it is sensitive), so too does the assemblage introduce a source of constraint on its own development (since its own emergent behavior determines the range of environmental factors to which it can respond). Otherwise put, the assemblage (no less than the organism) plays an active role in selecting which molecular forces can affect it: far from being the expressive correlate of an autonomous play of molecular forces on the plane of immanence, the assemblage is what brings together specific components and a concrete “fringe” of virtuality (the range of factors to which it can respond). The assemblage simply cannot be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of the molecular forces it contains.
This necessary specificity of the assemblage gives rise to a dual critical imperative: to respect the particular cultural or social contexts out of which assemblages emerge and to demarcate the constraint exercised by such context from the constraint exercised by biological factors. In his criticism of D+G for disregarding the question of animal becoming (the fact that the “animality” of the animal is not simply given and that animal becoming is not automatically relative to the human), Ansell-Pearson draws attention to the first imperative: D+G, he contends, fail “sufficiently to acknowledge… the specific character of becomings-animal of the human, such as the cultural contexts in which they take place and which… make them intelligible… it is quite clear that their reading [in Kafka] of the figuration of such becomings is being carried out in the context of a politics of desire” (Germinal Life 188). What such a criticism foregrounds is the particular limitation that is placed on becomings by the social contexts in which they occur: the becomings-animal of Kafka’s fiction, for example, “operate in the context of a negotiation with values that are at once economic, judicial, bureaucratic, and technological” (188, emphasis added). Such limitation, it need hardly be said, impinges on the limitless potential D+G ascribe to becoming as a matter of an exclusively molecular creative involution.
D+G’s psychoanalytically-derived notion of germinal contemporaneity allows them to present an expressive model of the social that functions to dissolve these limitations. By effectively psychoanalyzing biology, D+G are able to place the social on the same plane with the biological 28 and to reduce the molar conception of the social as limitation to a deeper, molecular socius. The crucial element here is the notion of body (or assemblage) as haecceity: as a punctual expression of a singularity, a body brings together biological codings and cultural markings in a manner that is altogether indifferent to their variant status. Such a conception articulates becoming with a certain model of somatic change (antithetical to any biological notion) based on what we might call social selection. To develop such a conception, D+G dismiss biological constraints on organic development, championing instead a radically deterritorialized mechanism of somatic selection, one rooted not in the organic soma–that is, in the physical body–but in the body qua haecceity, a punctual construct of speeds and affects whose consistency at any given moment derives from its position within a particular synchronic determination of the (totalizing) plane of immanence or socius. In addition to its blatant disregard for biological thought, this move indulges in a particularly pernicious posthuman fantasy that has had a strong resonance in contemporary popular and aesthetic culture: the fantasy that somatic change can itself be programmed, that the body is, more or less, a malleable material which can be reconstituted through particular symbolic, inscriptional, or disciplinary interventions.29
Once again, this fantasy takes root in D+G’s philosophical model of monist expressionism–a model that strips away all intermediate boundaries, including those imposed by organic development. By holding D+G to the test of contemporary biology, we can see how their expressionist model of somatic change actually depends on a conflation of what they describe as an “uprooting of an organ from its specificity” with permanent change in the organ’s function. Only by effectively conflating behavioral with evolutionary change in this way can D+G coherently propose to replace the organic body with a deterritorialized “articulation” of the body according to a new configuration of speeds and affects. In short, this conflation of evolutionary and physiological timeframes comprises the basis for the privilege they accord ethology in their analysis of bodies. Just as traditional ethology privileges a body’s capacities–what it can do–over its static characteristics, D+G’s transindividual “ethology of assemblages” allows them to define a body by two coordinates that articulate it on the plane of immanence.30 Latitude determines “the affects of which [a body] is capable…within the limits of [a given degree of] power,” while longitude specifies “the particle aggregates belonging to [a] body in a given relation” (256). Because they furnish the molecular constituents of bodies, independently of any molar formation (e.g., the organism or assemblage), these two ethological coordinates are not a function of the agency possessed by a concrete assemblage, but rather the expression of the plane of immanence, in this or that particular mode. Though they serve to define a body (or assemblage), these two coordinates are not properties of a specific assemblage so much as they are properties of the plane of immanence itself.
As a kind of “molecular recipe” for organic function, ethology thus facilitates a shift outward from a developmentally-specified, organic body to a synchronic, expressive body. Cutting beneath all molar typological categories, the expressive body is simply the conjunction of all the affects of which it is capable: “In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects. This kind of study is called ethology, and this is the sense in which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics. A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox” (257). On such a model, organic functions are the result not of organic form (nor, we should add, of morphogenetic processes that generate such form), but of deterritorialized speeds and affects that circulate on the plane of immanence. Rather than emerging within certain broad constraints set by physiology, ethological relations are thus given a radical freedom and are even, following D+G’s appropriation of von Uexküll’s work, held to condition the very emergence of physiological traits:
It will be said that the tick’s three affects assume generic and specific characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout. This is true from the standpoint of physiology, but not from the standpoint of Ethics. Quite the contrary, in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from longitude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees. We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects. (257)
Leaving aside the question of D+G’s fidelity to von Uexküll, it should be clear that this generalized ethology of assemblages comprises a philosophical, not a biological or even systems-theoretical, model of embodiment. Like the geometrical method Spinoza employs in The Ethics, the construction of a body through its affects generates what would be called, in philosophical terms, a “real definition” of that body, a “veritable generation of the object defined” (Deleuze, Difference 79). While it may serve the purposes of D+G’s expressionist monism, such a model can be reconciled neither with the current consensus in biological thought that organ function forms an integral part of organic development, nor with work in cognitive science on socially-distributed cognitive systems. From the biological perspective, organs are not free-floating and purely indeterminate singularities that acquire specificity only when incorporated into a particular assemblages of desire, but are, from the very beginning, constrained by the internal repertoire of functionalities which govern the morphogenetic processes responsible for specifying their functions. And from the cognitive science perspective, assemblages cannot simply be epiphenomenal expressions of the politics of desire, but possess an integrity and agency that also implies limitation and constraint. A model of agency informed by these two bodies of scientific research gives a picture at odds with D+G’s repudiation of the organism: on such a picture, organs form dynamic parts of larger organisms that develop in tandem with the concrete environmental niches to which they are structurally coupled and with the assemblages of which they form one component among others. Organs, the organism, and the assemblage simply cannot be reduced to the philosophical roles D+G reserve for them.
Notes
1. See Caygill, O’Toole, Welchman; most centrally, see Ansell-Pearson’s “Viroid Life” and especially his Germinal Life.
2. “For Bergson,” Deleuze contends, “science is never ‘reductionist’ but, on the contrary, demands a metaphysics–without which it would remain abstract, deprived of meaning or intuition. To continue Bergson’s project today, means for example to constitute a metaphysical image of thought corresponding to the new lines, openings, traces, leaps, dynamisms, discovered by a molecular biology of the brain: new linkings and re-linkings in thought” (Deleuze, Bergsonism 116-17).
3. This commentator is American microbiologist and developmental biologist, Franklin Harold. See Depew and Weber 419.
4. See Cinema I: “This infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane [plan] of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: not something hidden behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement…. The plane of immanence is the movement (the facet of movement) which is established between the parts of each system and between one system and another, which crosses them all, stirs them up together and subjects them all to the condition which prevents them from being absolutely closed…. The material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machinic assemblage of movement-images” (58-9). With its emphasis on the image, this definition of the plane of immanence differs in important respects from that developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
5. In The Fold, Deleuze appears to return to his earlier, more properly Bergsonian position regarding the organism. For a discussion of the role of biology in The Fold, see Badiou. For a more general discussion of The Fold as a break with reductive materialism and a recognition of the fractal integrity of biological systems, see Mullarkey.
6. See Minsky’s The Society of Mind and Varela, Rosch, and Thompson’s The Embodied Mind.
7. See Ansell-Pearson’s Germinal Life, 66.
8. On this point, incidentally, Bergson’s theory converges with recent efforts to apply nonlinear dynamics to biological systems. See Kauffman and below.
9. It is, nonetheless, difficult for us to avoid the illusion of such a negation, since we (like every other species) can only perceive life from our own differentiated perspective:
Life as movement alienates itself in the material form that it creates; by actualizing itself, by differentiating itself, it loses contact with the rest of ‘itself.’ Every species is thus an arrest of movement; it could be said that the living being turns on itself and closes itself. It cannot be otherwise, since the Whole is only virtual, dividing itself by being acted out. It cannot assemble its actual parts that remain external to each other: The Whole is never ‘given.’ And, in the actual, an irreducible pluralism reigns–as many worlds as living beings, all ‘closed’ on themselves. (Bergsonism 104)
It is, moreover, precisely because the Whole is not given that life, and the organisms in which it expresses itself, remain open-ended and creative, not reproductive. This is precisely what Bergson conceptualizes as the “positivity of time”–“an efficacity… that is identical to a ‘hesitation’ of things and, in this way, to creation in the world” (105).
10. In Bergsonism, Deleuze had rooted internal vital difference in a certain duplicity of difference in kind that Bergson introduces in Time and Free Will. In that text, Bergson analyzes abstract time and space as mixtures (of space and duration and or matter and duration, respectively) that divide into two tendencies (toward relaxation in the case of matter or toward contraction in the case of duration). On this account, difference of nature does not only reside between two tendencies, but is itself one of these tendencies: duration as difference that differs from itself.
11. My analysis here follows the lead of Ansell-Pearson in Germinal Life. On the topic of intensity in Difference and Repetition, see also Smith.
12. He had argued in Bergsonism that it raises the question whether it is intensity “that gives all the qualities with which we make experience” (92).
13. The notion that symbioses play a central role in evolution stems from the work of Lynn Margulis. See Margulis and Sagan.
14. For a canonical statement on population thinking, see Mayr. See also Sober and Gould.
15. See the discussion of population thinking in Depew and Weber, Chapter 12.
16. On this point, D+G’s position can be distinguished from that of Jacques Monod, one of the crucial biological mentors of Deleuze, as well as from that of neo-Darwinians like Stephen Jay Gould and Lynn Margulis and complexity theorists like Goodwin and Kauffman. Because of their radical desire to develop a rigorously molecular understanding of evolution (or, better, involution), they must explain the emergence of organisms from the plane of immanence without any recourse to higher order principles. Unlike Monod, who evokes natural selection to explain how the molecular intensities can be drawn out of the realm of chance and operate as the force determining organisms, and unlike contemporary biologists and complexity theorists who explain the emergence of organisms through recourse to nature’s tendency toward “natural kinds” or to the phenomenon of symbiosis, both of which function in conjunction with natural selection, D+G lack any mechanism with which to explain the emergence of organisms as anything other than pure contingency, i.e., the extraneous epiphenomena of molecular processes.
17. This argument is forcefully made by Howard Caygill, who criticizes Deleuze’s privileging of distribution over selection as retroactively humanist insofar as it “sentimentalizes selection.”
18. By using the biological theory most resonant with D+G’s program in order to illustrate the significant differences between the two, my intention is to demonstrate the heretical nature of D+G’s work and its implications for their account of becoming without having to make substantive pronouncements regarding biological theory. My critique, that is, does not hinge on the correctness of this particular theory, but only on the viability of the more general consensus that it exemplifies.
19. For discussions linking complexity theory to Bergson, see Kampis and Rosen.
20. See Depew and Weber 48-50 for a discussion of Geoffroy’s role in the history of biology.
21. On the difference between dynamic systems in the physical and the biological registers, see Goodwin 175.
22. See Massumi, De Landa, and Murphy.
23. On this point, consider the subtle shift to which Isabelle Stengers submits the Deleuzian conception of the virtual in suggesting the substitution of the term “possible” for Deleuze’s “virtual,” and of the term “probable” for Deleuze’s “possible” (Stengers 27n10). Without addressing the biological sciences in particular, this pair of substitutions is intended “to create a more explicit link with scientific practices” and it does so, we might add, by treating the plane of actualization as the crucial site on which these practices operate.
24. In Germinal Life, Ansell-Pearson views Weismann as the most important biological reference for D+G and develops the thesis that D+G’s notion of life generalizes Weismann’s concept of the germ-plasm beyond the boundaries of the organism. In my opinion, the role Ansell-Pearson accords Weismann is much exaggerated (there is, as he admits, only one reference to Weismann’s theory in D+G) and the function it serves (deterritorializing life from the organism) runs counter to my argument here. For a discussion of Weismann’s historical importance in biology, see Depew and Weber 187-91.
25. With this emphasis on the organization of the molecular material, complexity theory converges with the autopoietic theory developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and particularly with its central notion of “organizational closure,” according to which an organism is closed to informational exchange with its environment and functions to preserve its own organization in the face of constant perturbation from the outside. See Maturana and Varela.
26. For a discussion of the structural coupling between an organism and its world, see Varela’s “Organism.” Varela defines the difference between the environment in general and the “world” that exists for a specific organism as the “surplus of significance” that the correlation of organism and environment introduces.
27. My understanding of this strategy significantly revises my earlier treatment of D+G’s model of becoming in Embodying Technesis, Chapter 8. Despite this revision, however, I continue to stress the necessity of according a certain autonomy to molar formations.
28. This leveling of the differences between the biological and the social can be seen more generally in D+G’s psychoanalytically-rooted critique of the “body image.” Here they play off their appropriation of Melanie Klein’s part object (which furnishes the notion of a partial organ) against psychoanalytical and phenomenological notions of a whole body, which, they suggest, retain the privilege of the organism and the molar category of organization. Nonetheless, D+G’s work–despite my criticisms here–gives the means to broaden the analysis of constraint from the biological to the social in a way that complements the work of someone like Varela.
29. While popular practices like body building and tattooing furnish particularly tangible symptoms of such a fantasy, its complex underlying “logic” is perhaps nowhere better laid bare than in Paul Verhoeven’s 1989 science fiction film Total Recall. The film’s central premise involves a struggle of two “minds” to possess a single body. After the complex plot lines work themselves out, the two characters played by Arnold Schwartzenegger–two characters who might be said to share Arnold’s body–confront each other in a scene that brilliantly foregrounds what is at stake, in our negotiations concerning the posthuman, in the postmodern debate on the copy and the simulacrum. The film’s hero, Douglas Quaid, stands–in the flesh–face-to-face with a simulated version of his own face on a video monitor, claiming that, in fact, he (Quaid) is not who he thinks he is, that he is really a certain Hauser, betrayer of the resistance movement, who “would like his body back.” This scene’s enabling divorce of information and embodiment–and the privilege it seems to place on the former as the “essence” of human identity–gives rise to a series of mind-boggling questions: where, for example, has Hauser been “living” during the time he’s “lent” his body to Quaid?; and what, finally, is Quaid (or, for that matter, Hauser), if his being has no essential relation to the body he occupies? Beyond such local questions, however, the denouement of the film–in which Quaid resists the effort to erase him and appropriates the body that is not supposed to be his–foregrounds the specific fantasy that the body can be retrofitted to meet the needs of new informational programs, identities, or selves, or in other words, that somatic change can, as it were, be determined by will. In this way, Total Recall inverts the defensive humanism of Verhoeven’s earlier film, Robocop, and of the vast majority of recent cinematic science fiction: instead of depicting the gradual reassertion of an embodied self following an identity reprogramming, Total Recall invests the far more ambivalent fantasy that we (or those who program us) possess virtually unlimited power to remake our embodied selves in any way that we (or they) see fit.
30. For a comparison of an ethology of behavior and an ethology of assemblages, see Ansell-Pearson, 170ff.
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