The task of this paper is the construction of a theory of organismic spatiality. I take as a starting point Gilles Deleuze's reference in The Logic of Sense to Gilbert Simondon's concept of the membrane. The membrane is a dynamically topological limit between the organism's milieus of interiority and exteriority-the first moment of organismic spatiality. It is the foundation of the organism as an entity spatially distinct from its environment. The membrane is discriminatory and asymmetric-a concept, I claim, best understood by way of a discussion of affectivity. To understand how the membrane brings the organism's interior milieu into contact with the outside requires us to analyze its capacity to affect and be affected by its environment. To appreciate the compositional implications of this affectivity, I bring the concept into conversation with Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's work on autopoietic systems theory. Conceived autopoietically, the organism's activity as a living system constructs its own milieu of exteriority. Just as it pulses to its rhythm of temporality, so too does the organism live its own space: the here, as opposed to the now, of organismic subjectivity.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1926 essay, “Contemporary Vitalism,” includes Bergson alongside Driesch in a short list of “the most published representatives of vitalism in Western Europe,” and, indeed, Bakhtin’s critique of Driesch is intended to undermine what he calls the “conceptual framework” of “contemporary vitalism” as a whole (The crisis of modernism: Bergson and the vitalist controversy. Eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992, p 81). The conceptual framework that Driesch and Bergson are supposed to have shared in common consists at bottom, for Bakhtin, in the ontological commitment to the autonomy of life, “its independence, its disconnectedness from physical-chemical phenomena” (81). This has long been understood as the defining mark of vitalism, at least in the mind of its critics: the contention that matter and the mechanical models that track it are insufficient to the reality of biological forms, and that the explanation of life therefore requires the postulation of a non-mechanical, possibly immaterial, uniquely vital principle, force, substance, or property. Recent scholarship has made considerable headway in complicating these pictures by attending to earlier and subtler forms of materialism, and by distinguishing between different types of vitalism and drawing out the heuristic or scientific utility of some of them (Wolfe, Eidos 14: 212–235, 2011, Antropol Exp 17(13): 215–224, 2017; cf. Wolfe and Normandin, Vitalism and the scientific image in post-enlightenment life science, 1800–2010. Springer, Dordrecht, 2013). The focus of some of this work has been on the critical revaluation of Driesch himself (Bognon et al., Kairos J Philos Sci 20(1): 113–140, 2018). Yet the status of Bergson’s commitment to the existence of a vital principle remains underdeveloped. In the midst of what some are calling a “Bergson renaissance,” I think that it calls for the same kind of critical reappraisal (Ansell-Pearson, Bergson: thinking beyond the human condition. Bloomsbury, New York, 2018: 1; cf. Lundy, Deleuze’s Bergsonism. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, p 5, 2018). The aim of this paper is to attempt the outline of an answer to that call. I begin with a brief summary of Driesch’s vitalism, then I reconstruct Bergson’s underappreciated critique of internal finality, or what Kant called inner purposiveness, and locate in it a subterranean criticism of vital principles of the Drieschian variety as well. Two consequences follow: first, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, it cannot be in the Drieschian sense and we are therefore wrong to associate the two; and second, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, then his vitalism has to be understood—somewhat counterintuitively, and certainly contra Driesch—on the basis of a principle external to the ostensible individuality of biological forms.
The book opens with an introductory overview of Bergson’s philosophical trajectory, organized around the basic shape of the author’s reading of Bergson as a post-vitalistic philosopher of biology. By way of motivation for what is innovative and significant about the study at hand, the introduction situates Bergson along the following three axes: (1) the vitalism controversy that helped contribute to the initial decline of his reputation as well as the residual opposition still felt towards him by philosophers of science (among others); (2) the current resurgence of interest in Bergson to which this book will make a signal contribution; and (3) the contemporary life sciences, which are in the process of defining themselves along a number of new avenues of study, from deep homology, developmental constraint, and convergence, which all testify against traditional understandings of the contingency of adaptation to a kind of unity and directional pattern at the heart of evolutionary processes, to the widespread efficacy of symbiosis, which re-centers association and cooperation over competition and accords a new significance to transversal alliances and transindividuality over arborescent descent with modification and the programmatic development and behaviour of closed biological individuals.
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