Continental Connections Thursday #5: "The World is an Egg"

I have been unable to put together a post the past few weeks due to a busy travel schedule to, among other places, the Deleuze Studies Conference in Copenhagen. As one of the instructors at this year's Deleuze Camp (or workshop as I'd prefer to call it to avoid thoughts of boy scouts, letters home to mom, etc.), I was given ample time to develop some thoughts associated with what is certainly one of the central projects of Deleuze's thought - if not the central project - which is to account for the emergence of identifiable beings without presupposing a predetermining identity. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was much overlap between my lectures and those of the other Deleuze scholars who participated in this year's camp - Dan Smith, Ronald Bogue, and Ian Buchanan.

The basic premise of my account is that Deleuze accepts the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). This places Deleuze, by my reading, in sharp contrast to Quentin Meillassoux who rejects PSR and argues for the necessity of contingency in a radically Humean sense (a topic to be explored in a future post). Deleuze will dedicate an entire chapter to a discussion of PSR in his book on Leibniz, but it is discussed even more clearly in Deleuze's "Method of Dramatization" talk, where he lists the order of reasons whereby a differentiated content comes to be, through differenciation (with a "c"), a determinate something. The problem for Deleuze's philosophy, the problem that motivates his thought, is to understand how this differentiated content is not already a determinate identity that gives rise to, and is the sufficient reason for, another determinate identity. If Deleuze makes this move, he would have failed in his effort to think difference in itself, a difference that is irreducible to a difference between determinate, identifiable things.

In his "Method of Dramatization" presentation Deleuze draws upon the example of an egg to clarify the "order of reasons," as he puts it, in a way that makes difference in itself the PSR. The first of four stages of the order of reasons Deleuze lists is differentiation. In the case of the egg, Deleuze argues that its nucleus, cytoplasm, and its numerous proteins constitute the 'virtual matter to be organized,' or they constitute the differentiated content of the egg. What is important to note here, however, is that it is not the determinate identities of this differentiated content that is important for Deleuze, but rather the intensive field that marks the second order of reasons - individuation (and here Deleuze draws heavily upon the work of Gilbert Simondon, whose work is largely overlooked [it is just now being translated]). In the egg, for example, individuation occurs when the concentration of certain proteins attain certain gradient-thresholds, what Deleuze will also call singular points (in contrast to regular and ordinary points). When this gradient-threshold is crossed, it signals a target gene to initiate or discontinue with its processing. In the case of the widely studied fruitfly, for example, the protein Bicoid is more highly concentrated toward one end of the embryo, which signals specific genes to produce the head and thorax of the fruitfly (see here for an interesting study of the fruitfly). In experiments where the threshold-gradient was extended the result was a much larger head and thorax relative to the rest of the body, and in mutations where there is no Bicoid gradient the embryo will not develop a head or thorax at all. What is important here is not the particular protein - that is, not the determinate, identifiable protein per se - but instead it is the field of intensive, individuating differences that, when combined with other gradients, provide the triggers for genetic processes which account for much of the developmental processes of complex organisms.

The third stage in the order of reasons is dramatization. Deleuze refers to this as the step where the intensive field, such as the threshold-gradients of Bicoid in the case of the fruitfly, become 'incarnated in spatio-temporal dynamisms', meaning that the intensive field becomes the extensive spatio-temporal processes whereby a fruitfly embryo develops a head and a thorax. Or to state this in Platonic terms, which Deleuze embraces (albeit in a qualified sense), with the third stage we cross the divided line from the intensive to the extensive, from an intensive field of individuating differences to an extensive field of spatio-temporal processes of development. And the final stage of the order of reasons is differenciation (again, with a "c") which Deleuze argues is 'always simultaneously differenciation of species and parts, of qualities and extensities.'  In contrast to an Aristotelian account of genesis, therefore, where a determinate essence of a species guides the processes of development, Deleuze argues for the importance of intensive fields of differences to show how species and parts are the results of processes rather than the overseers of processes.

Nearly twenty years after his 1967 "Method of Dramatization" talk, Deleuze and Guattari will begin their "How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs" chapter with a picture of the Dogon egg (which heads this post), for it is precisely the Dogon myth that "the world is an egg" that Deleuze and Guattari generalize along Spinozist lines in providing the PSR for the emergence of determinate identities, and by way of processes that do not presuppose the identity that comes to be. This is the problem of Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and often some rather odd statements such as "the world is an egg," "God is a lobster," among others, provide helpful clues to how Deleuze thought his way through this problem.