Manuel Delanda en “Intensive science & virtual philosophy”

“For the purpose of discussing the constraints guiding Deleuze’sconstructive project, one historical example of typological thinking isparticularly useful. This is the classificatory practices which werecommon in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, suchas those that led to the botanical taxonomies of Linnaeus. Simplifyingsomewhat, we may say that these classifications took as a point ofdeparture perceived resemblances among fully formed individuals, fol-lowed by precise comparisons aimed at an exhaustive listing of whatdiffered and what stayed the same among those individuals. Thisamounted to a translation of their visible features into a linguisticrepresentation, a tabulation of differences and identities which allowedthe assignment of individuals to an exact place in an ordered table.Judgments of analogy between the classes included in the table wereused to generate higher-order classes, and relations of opposition wereestablished between those classes to yield dichotomies or more elabor-ate hierarchies of types. The resulting biological taxonomies weresupposed to reconstruct a natural order which was fixed and continuous,regardless of the fact that historical accidents may have broken thatcontinuity. In other words, given the fixity of the biological types, timeitself did not play a constructive role in the generation of types, as itwould later on in Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species. 59

Deleuze takes the four elements which inform these classificatorypractices, resemblance, identity, analogy and opposition (or contradiction)as the four categories to be avoided in thinking about the virtual.Deleuze, of course, would not deny that there are objects in the worldwhich resemble one another, or that there are entities which manageto maintain their identity through time. It is just that resemblances andidentities must be treated as mere results of deeper physical processes,and not as fundamental categories on which to base an ontology. 60Similarly, Deleuze would not deny the validity of making judgments ofanalogy or of establishing relations of opposition, but he demands thatwe give an account of that which allows making such judgments orestablishing those relations. And this account is not to be a story aboutus, about categories inherent in our minds or conventions inherent inour societies, but a story about the world, that is, about the objectiveindividuation processes which yield analogous groupings and opposedproperties. Let me illustrate this important point.

I said before that a plant or animal species may be viewed as definednot by an essence but by the process which produced it. I characterizethe process of speciation in more detail in the next chapter where I alsodiscuss in what sense a species may be said to be an individual, differingfrom organisms only in spatio-temporal scale. The individuation ofspecies consists basically of two separate operations: a sorting operationperformed by natural selection, and a consolidation operation per-formed by reproductive isolation, that is, by the closing of the genepool of a species to external genetic influences. If selection pressureshappen to be uniform in space and constant in time, we will tend to

find more resemblance among the members of a population than ifthose selection forces are weak or changing. Similarly, the degree towhich a species possesses a clear-cut identity will depend on the degreeto which a particular reproductive community is effectively isolated.Many plant species, for example, retain their capacity to hybridizethroughout their lives (they can exchange genetic materials with otherplant species) and hence possess a less clear-cut genetic identity thanperfectly reproductively isolated animals. In short, the degree ofresemblance and identity depends on contingent historical details ofthe process of individuation, and is therefore not to be taken forgranted. For the same reason, resemblance and identity should not beused as fundamental concepts in an ontology, but only as derivativenotions.”