Deleuze and Biosemiotics
Peter Lang
The aim of this paper is to establish a clear link between biosemiotics and Deleuzean philosophy. This can be done by highlighting the affinity in Deleuze’s work to theories of autopoiesis and organic/biophysical sense-making. A compelling through-line can be drawn between Deleuze, theories of living systems, and biosemiotics in the way an organism, as emergent assemblage, territorializes its world. If expression is considered as a continual modification of a system of interactions with an external milieu, it is fundamentally interwoven with a notion of “effective action” or the cognitive activity inherent to living systems. From the perspective of biological systems theory, cognitive activity produces a surplus of signification, an Umwelt, or world of meaningful interactions for the system. Biosemiotics teaches that lower-level (but no less essential) processes not only ground higher order structures from which meaning emerges, but are themselves meaning-making. Contingent molecular interactions in turn enable the organism to engage with and make sense of a world. Sense-making, the result of a complex of recursive, embodied activity allows us to ultimately acknowledge concepts such as “mind” and “subject” as not only wholly embodied, but grounded in a single, creative biophysical process. Specifically, I will focus on the cell as an organic semiotic system and the processual relation between cognition and language. The living cell, as a result of its function as a bounded system, marks inside and outside, establishes a set of lived relations, enacts a repertoire of behaviors, and establishes the foundation for a self-other distinction.
In order to make my case, I will begin with an analysis of double causality in Deleuze’s early book Logic of Sense before linking it to a reading of double articulation in the third chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. The former presents a philosophical overview of internal dynamics that is later recast in an explicit discussion of living systems in the latter. Along the way, my readings will be mediated by insights from autopoietic theory, namely those of Maturana and Varela and the work of Evan Thompson. Securing both a philosophical and a biological understanding of dynamic systems in Deleuze foreshadows a reading of autopoiesis as a theory of biosemiotics which in turn substantiates biosemiotics as at once a scientific and an aesthetic theory of subjectivity. Biosemiotics as a discipline bridges science, theory, and the arts. A Deleuzean biosemiotics coheres and mobilizes these concerns and, in my estimation, remains the only approach that is consistently biophysically and aesthetically productive from the point of view of individual subjective emergence.