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June 23, 2006
In his article on Deleuze and biophilosophy Mark Hanson links Deleuze's work to the cognitive and biological sciences. Hanson says:
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.
I do not know what representationalism means in relation to cognitive science. I presume that it refers to the classical computational view of cognition; one that relies on internal representations and computations.
Hanson says that 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. He adds:
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.
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