Multilateral Emergence

A concept introduced by Décarie-Daigneault (2025) to describe the non-teleological character of emergence in organic systems as theorized by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Standard scientific accounts treat emergence as progressive complexification — from simple to complex, from parts to organized whole. Multilateral emergence holds that emergence "can go both ways": organization and disorganization are equally productive responses to problems. The human subject can be unmade back into its constitutive multiplicities just as readily as those multiplicities can be organized into a subject.

Key Points

  • Emergence is problematically determined — organisms develop in response to problems (finding food, solving a labyrinth), not according to a pre-established telos. "An organism is nothing if not the solution to a problem" (Deleuze, DR 211)
  • Because emergence responds to problems rather than a plan, and because problems can call for disorganization as readily as organization, the directionality of emergence is not fixed
  • Deleuze's third synthesis of time (the "eternal return") provides the temporal-ontological grounding: time "out of joint" (hors de ses gonds) frees the passive syntheses from the axes along which they were organized, allowing them to re-enter new configurations
  • The je fêlé (cracked I) — Deleuze's reading of the Kantian cogito — is the subjective discovery that the self was always already constituted by asubjective multiplicities that can resurface
  • The concept provides the "ontological grounding" for Deleuze & Guattari's later practical-political concept of becoming-animal

Details

The Problem of Teleology in Emergence

Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze describe how passive syntheses (organic, perceptual) are "redeployed" into active syntheses (thought, representation). This diachronic process — from the metabolic to the perceptual to the cognitive — resembles standard emergence: new structures arise with properties not contained in their components. Protevi defines emergence as "the (diachronic) construction of functional structures in complex systems that achieve a (synchronic) focus of systematic behaviour as they constrain the behaviour of individual components."

But this description risks teleology: are organic syntheses destined to overcome themselves into perceptual syntheses and eventually into thought? The paper argues no: the "chicken is not the entelechy of the egg" (Deleuze). Bergson's élan vital does not progress toward a final form. The emerging properties within organic systems are contingent on "hazardous encounters that generate problems," and each organism's crystallized past provides singular responses.

Disorganization as Production

The decisive move is that some problems call for unmaking rather than making. Cézanne's "squinting" destroys the organized visual field so that the constitutive multiplicity of perceptual impressions can resurface — the painter works from "a pre-world where there were still no men" (PhP 337/379). Kafka's Gregor Samsa traces "an intense line of flight" through becoming-beetle as a response to a bureaucratic problem. These are not failures of emergence but productive deployments of the constitutive multiplicities.

Toadvine describes this bilateral motion as a "kaleidoscopic exchange with our animality": "When a beam of light is refracted in a kaleidoscope, neither the unified beam, nor the multiplicity of refractions appears more real than the other."

Connection to the Three Syntheses

Décarie-Daigneault reads the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition as the temporal architecture of multilateral emergence:

  1. First synthesis (habit) — founds the living present through organic contraction; constitutes Chronos
  2. Second synthesis (memory) — grounds the present in an unlimited past (Aion); the sign contracts an entire past
  3. Third synthesis (eternal return) — "ungrounds" (effondement) the first two: time "out of joint" frees the syntheses from their organization, making them available for new deployments

The third synthesis is what makes emergence multilateral: "The solidity of the self that emerges throughout laborious asubjective syntheses is not the endpoint, nor the principle that guides its own making."

MP's Parallel: From Vertical to Lateral

MP's early works (Structure of Behavior) treat the animal-human relation as "vertical transcendence" — the human integrates the animal stratum into a higher organization. The later works (Nature Lectures) revise this to a "lateral" relation: "not a hierarchical relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship" (Nature 268). This laterality is the MP-side of multilateral emergence: the strata of constitution are not hierarchically ordered but dynamically intertwined, with the possibility of movement in any direction.

Positions

  • Décarie-Daigneault (2025) introduces the concept by reading Deleuze's third synthesis together with MP's laterality thesis and Toadvine's "kaleidoscopic exchange."
  • John Protevi (2006, 2012) provides the framing of emergence in Deleuze — both diachronic (creation of new patterns) and synchronic (constraining component behavior). Protevi reads Deleuze's passive syntheses as genetic/constitutive: "there is no perceiving subject prior to the series of perceptions."
  • Ted Toadvine (2024) develops the chiasmic reading: "such becoming has the structure of a chiasmus: a becoming-animal of the human that is a becoming-human of the animal."
  • Manuel De Landa (2012) thematizes how each stratum of organization contains systems that are not reducible to their role within the stratum; the relations are "explained by contingent coevolution," not necessary mutual constitution.

Connections

  • is the culminating argument of decarie-daigneault-2025-anonymous-temporality
  • extends generative-passivity — generative passivity names the emergence of sense from nonsense; multilateral emergence adds that this process is bidirectional, not only "upward"
  • resonates with interanimality — the lateral, non-hierarchical relation between animal strata that multilateral emergence presupposes
  • contrasts with teleological emergence — the standard scientific model where emergence is progressive complexification
  • is grounded in the third synthesis of time (Deleuze, DR ch. 2) — time "out of joint" frees the passive syntheses from their axes of organization
  • is practically deployed as becoming-animal (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980)
  • is one term of a three-tradition Bergson-MP-Deleuze convergence on continuous birth — see claims#bergson-mp-deleuze-naissance-continue (live claim) for the structural-parallel articulation across Bergson's durée, MP's naissance continue, and Deleuze's third synthesis of time

Open Questions

  • Is multilateral emergence a description of how organisms actually develop, or a normative philosophical concept about what becomes possible under certain conditions (artistic practice, political becoming)? The paper seems to want both.
  • How does this concept relate to MP's concept of dedifferentiation (sleep as the provisional collapse of the diacritical system)? Sleep seems like a case of multilateral emergence — disorganization that is productive of rest, dreams, and the body "holding the place" — but the paper does not make this connection.
  • Does the concept require Deleuze's third synthesis, or could it be derived from MP's resources alone (laterality, chiasm, wild being)?

Synthetic Claims

The synthetic interpretive layer (wiki/claims.md) articulates one claim for which this page is a Wiki home, at live status. Live claims are cited with provisional framing per CLAUDE.md §Claims Register Format.

  • live claim, see claims#anticipation-retroaction-as-temporal-signature-of-life — per Halák (M-C 2026 Ch 5 §4.1), the temporal structure "anticipations and retroactive integrations" is the distinctive temporal signature of organic life on MP's account, structurally parallel to MP's chiasm but operating in ontogenetic time. The page's Decarie-Daigneault-derived multilateral-emergence concept gains a cognate philosophical cross-anchor: where multilateral emergence names the organizational register of organic productive disorganization (with the organism as a multi-emerging whole rather than centrally-coordinated unity), anticipation-retroaction names the temporal register of the same productivity — the diachronic reversibility through which each anticipation is retroactively integrated into a totality that no anterior phase contained. Together with mp-teleology-non-naturalizable (live), the multilateral-emergence reading and the anticipation-retroaction reading provide complementary articulations of MP's non-naturalizable institutional teleology: organizational (multilateral emergence) and temporal (anticipation-retroaction).

Sources