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February 15, 2007
Back to Deleuze, multiplicity and the virtual that I was previously exploring through reading the opening chapter of Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy and a chapter in Liz Grosz's Time Travels: Feminism, nature, power the issue was separating out the possible/real couple from the virtual /actual one.
DeLanda says that:
Deleuze avoids taking as given fully formed individuals, or what amounts to the same thing, to always account for the genesis of individuals via a specific individuation process, such as the development process which turns an embryo into an organism. (p.37)
Well, that is both Aristotle and Plato placed to one side. And so we move away from essentialist thinking and all topological thinking in the construction of a Deleuzian ontology.
So what does individuation mean?
DeLanda says that a plant or animal species is defined by the process which produced it:
In short, the degree of resemblance and identity depends on contingent historical details of the process of individuation ...For the same reason resemblance and identity should not be used as fundamental concepts in an ontology, but only as derivative notions.
What is rejected, says DeLanda, are static categories in favour of historically constituted individuals. Darwin gave us the means to think in terms of species as historical entities. The next step is to think in terms of virtuality (differential elements and relations or structure of an object) and multiplicity.
What Delanda is doing , as far as I can make out, is to argue that the world does not consist of static entities as the world is changing; it is becoming and this process cannot be reduced to anything static, such as numbers, words, entities or matter. If we go from the static to the moving--as we need to then, then we generate a cinematographic view of the world in which static frames follow each others. Our own language inhibits us from understanding the becoming of the world. The virtual is continuous, but the words we use to describe this are not, they are just representations.
Okay, so far so good.
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Gary;
I confess I find something askew here regards how DeLanda is speaking of "individuation".
Are we speaking of individuation psychoanalytically or biologically? Delueze was speaking of the individual/individuation lacking a specific identity, or essence, because the historical moment/historical forces, had dissolved the unconscious of Freud. (this is shorthand, mind). An embryo into an organism is about the biological process -- the DNA codes and so forth, no? The psyche was not even posited that way by Freud. The psyche is shaped by the material conditions of history, and by the specific influences of that individual. What is the "individual"? Thats what takes up a couple thousand pages of Delueze.
What is meant in the last sentence by the word "process"?