Protevi on Deleuze and the Biological

Larval Subjects, Autonomous Systems and E. coli Chemotaxis

By John Protevi

Upon first reading, the beginning of Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, with its talk of “contemplative souls” and “larval subjects,” seems something of a bizarre biological panpsychism. Actually it does defend a sort of biological panpsychism, but by defining the kind of psyche Deleuze is talking about, I’ll show here how we can remove the bizarreness from that concept. First, I will sketch Deleuze’s treatment of “larval subjects,” then show how Deleuze’s discourse can be articulated with Evan Thompson’s biologically based intervention into cognitive science, the “mind in life” or “enaction” position. Then I will then show how each in turn fits with contemporary biological work on E. coli chemotaxis (movement in response to changes in environment).

The key concept shared by all these discourses is that cognition is fundamentally biological, that it is founded in organic life. In fact and in essence, cognition is founded in metabolism. Thus fully conceptual recollection and recognition, the active intellectual relation to past and future – what Deleuze will call the dominant “image of thought” – is itself founded in metabolism as an organic process. This founding of cognition in metabolism can be read in an empirical sense, for just as a matter of fact you will not find cognition without a living organism supporting itself metabolically. But it can also be read in a transcendental sense: for our thinkers, metabolism is a new transcendental aesthetic, the a priori form of organic time and space. The essential temporal structure of any metabolism is the rhythmic production of a living present synthesizing retentions and protentions, conserved conditions and expected needs. The essential spatiality of metabolism comes from the necessity of a membrane to found the relation of an organism to its environment; there is an essential foundation of an inside and outside by the membrane, just as there is an essential foundation of past and future by the living present.

We thus see the necessity of a notion of biological panpsychism: every organism has a subjective position, quite literally a “here and now” created by its metabolic founding of organic time and space; on the basis of this subjective position an evaluative sense is produced which orients the organism in relation to relevant aspects of its environment.

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