Abstract
A vital step to successfully orienting Deleuze with biosemiotics (and theories of biological complexity overall) is to discover a coherent scientific throughline in his work that also accounts for the aesthetic/creative dimension of his philosophy. This requires the heterodox move (from a Deleuzean point of view) of giving priority to the organism. I argue that Deleuze’s treatment of the organism does more than signal a superficial relation to biological complexity theory that, as a result of his nuanced take on the matter, undermines the value of the organic body to his system. Instead, we can recognize a working theory of autopoiesis in the early Deleuze that scaffolds as well as substantiates his later ethological and biosemiotic observations and reveals a definite, albeit minimal, notion of subjectivity in his work. Most importantly, reorienting his logic of sense as a logic of sense-making, or the context-dependent signification between system and environment (Thompson, 2007), allows us to begin the work of mining a scientific throughline in Deleuze’s work akin to biological complexity theory that is of value to both Deleuze studies and biosemiotics.
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Notes
Larval subjects are akin to minimal cognitive systems (for example, a bacterial cell). Deleuze writes: “There is a self wherever a furtive contemplation has been established, whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing a difference from repetition functions somewhere” (1994/1968, 78 − 9).
Jakob von Uexküll writes, “each and every living thing is a subject that live in its own world, of which it is the center” (Uexküll 2010/1934: 45). This is its particular Umwelt, or “dwelling place,” a world opened up as a result of the specific life processes of the organism.
Aesthetics is here considered in terms of aesthesis or sense perception, following Baumgarten as the “science of sensitive knowing” (Strathausen, 2017) as well as Bateson, who defines aesthetics as a “responsiveness to the pattern which connects” (Bateson, 1979: 9). As such, I agree wholeheartedly with Tim Ireland’s appraisal of Baumgarten: “in experiencing everyday life, we are all aestheticians” (Ireland, 2022: 51).
See Buchanan (2008) for an overview on Deleuze’s engagement with Uexküll. For a more direct philosophical appraisal of Uexküllean/ethological influences on Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) see Brentari (2019) and Cimatti (2020). Both authors clearly detail the centrality of Uexküll’s work in the development of Deleuze’s onto-ethology that (1) extends biological meaning to natural and artificial things; and (2) in so doing eschews a foundational notion of subjectivity.
A position that, I argue, offers a truncated version Deleuze’s project by not only limiting any notion of subject in his work, but also deemphasizing the importance of the organic body to his system.
The guiding question, “What can a body do?” effectively anchors Deleuze’s philosophy and is treated in full in his book Expressionism and Philosophy: Spinoza (1990/1968). The answer he provides and subsequently works through is deceptively simple: to affect and to be affected.
There is significant overlap among the terms “sense” (Deleuze, 1990a/1969), “meaning/meaning-making” (Thompson, 2007), and “surplus of signification” (Varela, 1997) used throughout this essay. Differences resulting from nuance, individual or disciplinary, are negligible in light of their considerable conceptual resonance. “Sense”, according to Deleuze, recursively envelopes a series of a-signifying elements to produce meaning for the system in a process similar to that of membrane generation in autopoietic systems. “Meaning-making” is directly associated to the autopoiesis of a living system as self-organization and self-maintenance directly condition its domain of possible interactions within an environment, an Umwelt, and is synonymous with cognition. Francisco Varela explains that the “surplus of signification” is carried by the organism’s situated behavior in a physical environment and “haunts the surface” as a direct result of the structural coupling between organism an environment (Varela, 1997: 79, 85). In short, all three terms indicate that the closure of a system from its environment opens it up to a domain of interaction and signification which is tailored or “selected” by the activity of that system.
Fr. agencement. Deleuze and Guattari define the term as an “increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 8). Derrida (1968) employs the same term to describe differance as a pre-conceptual “bringing together” or web. Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term is, by comparison, much more dynamic in its articulation of becoming as a perpetual movement of novel becomings. The “immanent plane of Nature” or, more commonly, “plane of immanence” or “plane of consistency”, is akin to Spinoza’s idea of substance. Deleuze regards it as a virtual field where things are “defined by the arrangements of motions and affects into which [they enter]” (Deleuze 1988/1970: 124).
Deely (1994) raises this point in terms of intersubjectivity and communication. Intersubjectivity opens to an analysis of “what [things] are as parts of a system…relative to other things.” Communication, as well, speaks to a “participation in a more general feature of reality” or experience as it exists in and between the physical and cultural. If we can consider a natural world that can persist without the human (or human cognition), then we can approach a definition of intersubjectivity “cognitively realizable within experience itself.”
Intensity is the term Deleuze uses to describe the dynamic processes that generate and condition emergent events. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes: “Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualized.” A few pages later: “Intensities presuppose and express only differential relations…Intensity or difference in itself thus expresses differential relations and their corresponding distinctive points” (Deleuze, 1994/1968: 247, 252).
Stratification can best be understood in Deleuze and Guattari as the sedimentation of form: “Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist in giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy…organizing them into molar aggregates” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 4). It is important to note that while stratification in this sense inhibits movement, Deleuze and Guattari note that not all strata are bad. Assemblages have two sides: the molecular/dynamic and molar/determinate. It is at the second side where we can begin to identify signification and subjectivity. Contrary to Ansel-Pearson’s reading, rather than separating the two into distinct “bodies,” a biosemiotic perspective allows us to approach both sides of the assemblage as operating in a complex, mutually generative way.
Which is to say, “it moves.” Cf. Deleuze and Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus: “The body without organs is not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 30). As observed by Ansel-Pearson, the focus for Deleuze and Guattari is not on the form of the organism/body but its velocity: “It is a question of becoming an intense body and of finding potential movements of deterritorialization as an organism” (Ansell-Pearson 1999: 155; emphasis orig.).
See also Maturana & Varela, 1992: 89: “identity is specified by network of dynamic processes whose effects do not leave that network.”
Following his work with Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson describes enaction against a traditional phenomenological model: “autonomous systems do not operate on the basis of internal representations in the subjectivist/objectivist sense. Instead of internally representing an external world in some Cartesian sense, they enact an environment inseparable from their own structure and actions…they constitute and (disclose) a world that bears the stamp of their own structure” (Thompson, 2007: 59). The enacting of an Umwelt that is inseparable from the lived activity of an organism does not simply eschew formal representation, it steps back entirely from consciousness as such.
This is not to imply that cognition in any way stretches beyond the biological here and now. Protevi (2013) recognizes a “new Transcendental Aesthethic” that results from the metabolic activity of living systems. He writes: “metabolism is a new transcendental aesthetic, the a priori form of organic time and space. The essential temporal structure of any metabolism is the rhythmic production of a living present synthesizing retentions and protentions, conserved conditions and expected needs…every organism has a subjective position, quite literally a ‘here and now’ created by its metabolic founding of organic time and space” (Protevi, 2013: 155 − 56). Cf. Thompson (2007) for a “transcendental” reading of the Mind in Life position.
Cf. Hayles, Unthought: “[Nonconscious] cognition operates at a level of neuronal processing inaccessible to the modes of awareness but nevertheless performing functions essential to consciousness…The point of emphasizing nonconscious cognition is not to ignore the achievements of conscious thought…but rather to arrive at a more balanced and accurate view of human cognitive ecology that opens it to comparisons with other biological cognizers [and to] the cognitive capabilities of technical systems” (Hayles, 2017: 10–11).
Cf. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy: “The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior” (Deleuze 1988/1970: 125).
The network of recursive operations that defines an autopoietic system is useful in not simply disambiguating just what Deleuze is after in his description of dual causality, but in linking it to the notion of semiotic causality developed by Hoffmeyer (2008). Semiosis recursively acts up on directs the material (efficient) cause from which it emerges, functionally mediating the embodied dynamic interactions and processes that condition it: “Semiosis, sign action, is necessarily embedded in sensory material processes, and therefore has both a dynamic side, which allows a process of communication to take place, and a complementary logical, or mediating, side” (Hoffmeyer, 2008: 68).
In this sense, the Deleuzean perspective grants agency to non-human actors. While this takes us beyond a strict analysis of living systems, it does not discount it. Karen Barad articulates non-human agency in semiotic terms in her discussion of intra-action, the dynamic and differential activity of material forces in the world, writing: “[The] ongoing flow of agency through which part of the world makes itself differently intelligible to another part of the world and through which causal structures are stabilized and destabilized does not take place in space and time but happens in the making of spacetime itself. It is through specific agential intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency. That is, it is through specific intra-actions that phenomena come to matter – in both senses of the word” (Barad, 2007: 140). See also Beever and Cisney (2013) for an insightful overview of panpsychism in Deleuze and Peirce.
The Deleuzoguattarian designations “molecular” and “molar” can be understood autopoietically in terms of a local (molecular) network of recursive interactions giving way to a global (molar) unity/self. Cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 39–74.
The subtitle and leading question of the third chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987) reads, “Who does the earth think it is?” The chapter follows a lecture by the fictional Professor Challenger, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, detailing the earth as a dynamic system, fundamentally unformed and unstable, but ultimately self-organizing. The hint here is toward a fundamental connection between identity and cognition.
Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary is borrowed directly from André Martinet (double articulation) and Louis T. Hjelmslev (content/expression). However, they make clear: “this is not at all to say that the strata speak or are language based” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 40). Rather than regard the aforementioned linguistic principles as structures, Deleuze and Guattari treat them as functions in a broad, material sense.
This parallelism can also include sense and materiality as examined in the early Deleuze.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Carsten Strathausen for his valuable comments and suggestions while I was preparing this paper and for his invaluable friendship over the last seven years.
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Lang, P.M. Deleuze and Biosemiotics: Biological Emergence, Agency, and Subjectivity in Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus. Biosemiotics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-024-09567-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-024-09567-w