Peter M. Lang “Deleuze and biosemiotics”

Lang, Peter M. 2024. Deleuze and biosemiotics: Biological emergence, agency, and subjectivity in Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus. Biosemiotics, 25.04. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-024-09567-w

The active, ecological generation of both bodies and meaning is a biological as well as a philosophical position. Regarding the organism as a contingent, emergent occurrence of discrete material parts accords philosophically with Deleuze’s notion of double causality developed in his 1969 book The Logic of Sense (1990). On the one hand, at the atomic level there is the mixture of bodies, or “intra-molecular modifications.” At its most primary, this is the hard, physical causality in Nature based on the conjunction and disjunction of atoms (Deleuze, 1990a/1969: 268). On the other hand, he gives the quasi-cause or “ideational cause” which corresponds to “varieties of a surface tension.” Of the latter cause he explains, “this cause is nothing outside of its effect, and…maintains with the effect an immanent relation which turns the product, the moment that it is produced, into something productive” (Deleuze, 1990a/1969: 95). At the outset, two important distinctions must be made. First, dual causality does not occur in succession but in tandem. Product and cause are copresent. The relation between cause and effect is not sequential but immanent and inseparable (Deleuze, 1990a/1969: 60). Secondly, I believe that the designation “quasi” (Deleuze also uses the term “fictive”) is misleading. The ideational cause is not a fiction or a phantom, but rather a direct and immediate expression. In other words, it is a coemergent expressive activity that corresponds to a material and/or biophysical event. From a biological standpoint, the emergence of life is the result of a unitary phenomenon in which a boundary (membrane) and the network dynamics that support it are the result of a singular chemical process (Maturana & Varela, 1992: 46). The boundary simultaneously envelopes and takes part in the network of dynamic interactions that describe the system. There is no sequence, only the emergence of a single, expressed event.^Footnote

If one is keeping score, Deleuze’s principle of dual causality gives us: (1) a description of dynamic systems; (2) an autonomous process of self-organization (that one can safely, however marginally, call autopoeisis); and (3) a membrane that not only defines a bounded system, but is an active participant in the maintenance of the internal system, which in turn reciprocally works to maintain the boundary.