Morphogenesis
From Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Loosely translated, the process that gives rise to form.
A concept used extensively in complexity theory.
One of the pioneers in morphogenetic processes was Alan Turing. As John Gribbin writes in Deep Simplicity:
“In 1952, [Alan] Turing published a paper which described in principle how the symmetry of an initially uniform mixture of chemicals could be spontaneously broken by the diffusion of different chemicals through the mixture. The anticipated relevance of this to biology was clear from the title of the paper, ‘The chemical basis of morphogenesis’ […]
imagine a mixture of chemicals sitting quietly in a glass jar. […] The result will be that an initially uniform, featureless jar of liquid transforms itself spontaneously into a sea of green dotted with red spots that maintain their positions in the liquid (as long as the liquid is not stirred up or sloshed around). The pattern is stable, but in this particular case it is a dynamic process, with new [molecules of the red catalyst and green inhibitor] being produced as long as there is a source of the chemicals from which they are being manufactured, and as long as there is a ‘sink’ through which the end-products can be removed. [In complexity terminology, this implies] that we are dealing with an open, dissipative system which is being maintained in a non-equilibrium state.” (118-120)
In Deleuze, the notion of morphogenesis is used in relation to the concepts of "immanence", "the virtual", "abstract machine" and "Body without Organs":
"To explain [the] inherent morphogenetic potential [of matter] without sneaking transcendental essences through the back door, Deleuze and Guattari developed their theory of abstract machines, engineering diagrams defining the structure-generating processes that give rise to more or less permanent forms but are not unique to those forms; that is, they do not represent (as an essence does) that which defines the identity of those forms." (DeLanda, 1997: 263)
