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September 14, 2005
A review of a book on Deleuze by Eric Alliez, entitled 'The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?', This text focuses on Deleuze and Guattari's text 'What is Philosophy? The reviewer says that in his second chapter, "The Aetiology of Science," Alliez stages :
'...Deleuze and Guattari's polemic against analytic philosophy, as scientization of philosophy. Now we have to read the analytics not as Hegelians, that is, as philosophers judging science from above, but as faithful to Deleuze and Guattari's notion that philosophy, science, and art are three different modes of thought. For Alliez, Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in the attempt "to sketch a programme of physical ontology up to the task of superseding the opposition between 'physicalism' and 'phenomenology' by integrating the physico-mathematical phenomenology of scientific thought into a superior materialism founded on a general dynamics" '
I too understand analytic philosophy in Australia to be a scientization of philosophy. Hence my turn to continental philosophy.
What I understand is that Deleuze constructs a "non-Hegelian" ontology that seeks to explain ontological change in terms of immanent difference. Rather than rely upon a change of unified beings imposing wills on each other, forming coherence by reaction (presumably, this is how Deleuze interprets Hegel dialectic of the master-slave relationship), Deleuze scours his philosophical predecessors for concepts that differentiate between external and internal causation and privilege internal causation.
I interpret this on terms of autopoiesis associated with the Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis is process whereby an organization produces itself. An autopoietic organization is an autonomous and self-maintaining unity which contains component-producing processes; it is self-production understood in terms of living machines. Maturana and Varela say:
"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Maturana, Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living, 1973, p. 78)
It is an attempt to think self movement in terms of a machine metaphysics .Hence an autopoietic system operates as a closed system.
Can Delueze's notion of becoming be conceptualized in terms of autopoiesis?
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