Abstract

In Difference and Repetition, Charles Darwin was the philosopher of individuals and the priority of individual differences. His theory of evolution inaugurated ‘the thought of individual difference’. (DR 248) For Darwin, the individual and its differences come first. Species-specific characteristics do not exist until natural selection does its work on individual differences over geological time. It is not the individual that is derivative in relation to the genus of the species, which was the conclusion of Aristotlean science. Rather, it is the species that ‘is an illusion—inevitable and well founded, it is true—in relation to the play of the individual and individuation. . . . It is the individual which is above the species and precedes the species in principle’. (DR 250) Twelve years later, in A Thousand Plateaus, a neo-Darwinist theme intrudes. Individuals are described as effects of populations. Species-identity (‘form’) depends on codes, and codes apply only to populations, not individuals. ‘Organic form depends on an autonomous code’, a neo-Darwinist mantra they repeat four times in less than ten pages. Individuals are coded because they emerge amid populations that are coded, and changes in code primarily affect populations by affecting the ability of the code to propagate, which requires the agency of individual organisms. No code is impervious to decoding, organically expressed as mutation, genetic drift, and the re-purposing of redundancy. Fragments of code transfer across forms symbiotically. All organic forms become machinic, interlocking partial objects in an ecological economy. Forms depend on populations, populations imply codes, codes undergo decoding and displacement, natural selection does its work, and the rest is history.