Note: I will add some of the relevant quotes below should the reader be interested; but for sake of people’s small windows of time on social media, I will make my point brief by summarizing the book I am referring to:
Steve Brewer, in Origins of the Soul, makes the point (in a dialogue form similar to that of Plato’s (that life basically began through a kind of spontaneous chemistry in which chemical compounds in the primordial muck (hiding in crevices, BTW (engage in a kind of experimentation in which they assimilate various other available chemicals, mix them into their own chemical composition, and look for what works. In this sense, they were engaging in a natural bricolage that eventually resulted in primitive life forms: single cell organisms.
This was an argument made by Max in the dialogue for the sake of his materialist understanding of consciousness as a kind of redundancy produced by the perfectly mechanical workings of the brain. And here we see something very similar to Deleuze’s materialism (via Bergson (that recognizes the inherent creativity of nature. In Deleuze’s case, even being an artist is a matter of letting one’s self be a node within an already creative system of exchange. Still, part of me wonders if Deleuze’s materialism wasn’t just a conceptual convenience, a way of creating a model that underlies (while not enslaving (the many ways in which humans engage with the world.
It just seems to me that Deleuze’s models (w/ and w/out Guatarri (makes room for the possibility of participation.
*
Relevant quotes:
“This pre-biotic stage of evolution is likely to occur in tiny niches amongst crystalline crevices in rocks where the chemical conditions are just right. Now another key component of cellular life, a cell membrane, also forms naturally just by shaking fats with water. It only takes the encapsulation of the contents of such a niche in a membrane and now you have a primitive cell. This can drift off to another suitable niche but now carrying its own self-replicating chemistry with it. A final step is to separate the functions of genetic information into RNA’s closely related chemical, DNA and the catalytic function into proteins. You now have everything needed for a living cell. It’s doubtful we can ever get firm evidence for what exactly happened, but with concepts such as the RNA world, science has explained how there can be a purely natural pathway leading from primitive chemistry to cellular life.”
“Freya: It’s still a bit of a mystery why such an insignificant chemical could organize this soup into the complex chemical systems found in life.”
“Max: It’s only a mystery if you don’t distinguish between the use of the word chemistry and chemicals. Chemistry is the process used to produce chemicals; chemicals are the inputs and new chemicals the outputs. The unique feature about any catalyst is if you change its structure it can carry out new chemistry. This could be just doing the existing chemistry faster or slower, but there’s also the possibility of a new type of chemistry able to produce entirely different sorts of chemicals. Presumably, such a leap in chemistry allowed RNA to combine amino acids into chains and make proteins. Once you have this, the door is open to produce the even more versatile and efficient enzyme catalysts.”
-Brewer, Stephen. The Origins of Self. Kindle Edition.