Desiring agency: Limiting metaphors and enabling constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari

Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene and Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Pl ateaus share a common interest in de-throning consciousness as the seat of identity. At the same time, they seek to displace agency into non-conscious actors or dispel it altogether. In this sense they are part of a larger mo vement within cognitive science and evolutionary biology to define cognitio n in terms that partially deconstruct the distinction between organisms and environment. Yet their projects differ from this larger movement in that t hey both rely on performative language to enact dissolutions or displacemen ts that could not take place in empirical reality. To evaluate their projec ts, this essay develops a theoretical framework that envisions metaphorical language working together with enabling constraints to produce reliable kn owledge. Within this framework, the problematic move that Dawkins and Deleu ze/Guattari make extensive use of metaphoric language without the counterba lance of constraints. Instead of the non-human unconstrained agency that th ese theorists enact through their performative language, this essay propose s a model of distributed agency that works through rather than against cons traints.