Favored animals

Deleuze/Guatarri (D/G) are clearly very interested in animals, to the extent that much of what they write seems to point toward a kind of warning for its readers to keep their minds as far out of the noosphere as possible. Having run across this word (noosphere) in chapter 3: the Geology of Morals (a play on Nietzsche), I looked it up on wikipedia to find its definition: it is the term designating a third phase in the development of the planet, after the geosphere and the biosphere, which incorporates human thought, a "collective consciousness" of human beings. To D/G there is a danger inherent in remaining in this particular sphere, in concentrating on humanness, as we lose contact with otherness, such as D/G's favored site of geology but also chemistry and biology. This privileging of the human risks construing expression as a human attribute alone, and by expression here I mean, in effect, a claim of identity--this point is most saliently made for me with the repeated example of the crystal, which expresses its identity-as-crystal through its three dimensional form. Whether the human is there to perceive the crystalline form or not does not detract from the chemical and physical properties of the crystal: "there is a real distinction between content and expression because the corresponding forms are effectively distinct in the 'thing' itself, and not only in the mind of the observer." (58)

However, there is a trickiness to what D/G term "organic expression." It is inherently different, as they write:

"But the organic stratum has a unique character that must account for the amplifications. In a preceding discussion, expression was dependent upon the expressed molecular content in all directions and in every dimension and had independence only to the extent that it appealed to a higher order of magnitude and to exterior forces: The real distinction was between forms, but forms belonging to the same aggregate, the same thing of subject. Now, however, expression becomes independent in its own right, in other words, autonomous. Before, the coding of a stratum was coextensive with that stratum; on the organic stratum, on the other hand, it takes place on an autonomous and independent line that detaches as much as possible from the second and third dimensions." (59; italics their own, bolding mine)

To exist upon one dimension is to exist linearly, and D/G's primary example is DNA. The code of DNA is Real in D/G's conception of realness, as its code exists outside of a human-given meaning: a codon (nucleotide triplet) has a one-to-one relation to a particular mRNA to a particular tRNA to a particulate amino acid, combinations of which construct all flora and fauna. DNA allows for an articulation of expression, or what they call "alignment of expression," so "guranteeing their reciprocal independence from content without having to account for orders of magnitude." (59) It is interesting to note that the complexity of three-dimensional forms has to be reduced to a unidimensional code before such degrees of greater complexity can form.

D/G write that this change as many consequences, including the organism's power to accelerate deterritorialization (as we must remember that the crystal also deterritorializes when it is forming, when a "seed" provides the nucleation point for the crystal to form in a supersaturated solution). This accelerated territoriality is principal among these consequences. In territorial organisms, the expression of identity capable in the crystal becomes a signature. This definition of signature exists outside of a linguistic context, or within a linguistic context that is notably not-only-human, and speaks to a power of action over language (indeed, much of the last third of the third chapter is a deconstruction of semiotics). D/G contest the primacy of language, comparing its temporal linearity to the spatial linearity of DNA. The temporal linearity of language is what allows translation, or allows it to "represent all the other strata and thus achieve a scientific conception of the world." (62)

However, D/G focus largely on the face and hand as sites of expression, sites that language relies largely upon, emphasizing the animal elements. It seems that these authors are resisting a trend in contemporary theory to give a primacy to language, when language has been around for such a relatively small span of time in relation to the signatures of the animal-becomings. This emphasis on the embodiment of expression is summed up by the line "all human movements, even the most violent, imply translations." (63) Who does man think he is? D/G think of man as the violent, abstract machine that stands to full height and assumes he is above the strata that formulated him. Language overcodes, thereby realligning (in human perception) the strata around the human linguists and redefining that universe with God's favored animal at the center, with their paradise orbiting about them.