Manufacturing Space

Embryology, morphology more generally, is the process by which the body defines a space for itself.  The metaphor makes it easier to see that the space doesn't pre-exist the things that come to fill it, but is built and extended piecemeal by those things as one thing transforms into another.  As the arm grows into the hand, the space that each new articulation will fill is laid out by unfinished developments in the previous articulation.  The embryo cannot avail itself of any global space or absolute positioning system outside itself.

In a lot of other places Deleuze contrasts two types of spaces.  Sedentary versus nomadic.  Striated versus smooth.  Extensive versus intensive.  Open versus closed.  Here in pp. 20-22 of the introduction to D&R, he draws a contrast between two the types of repetition (roughly speaking, object versus process) as they constitute geometric space, a temporal space, and a linguistic space.  In the case of each space we see the same distinction -- a homogenous pre-defined space that acts like an inert container for the things in it, versus a fragmented heterogenous space that defines itself through the things in it.  

To fill a space, to be distributed within it, is very different from distributing the space

As the examples he gives here demonstrate, it's not that it's impossible to define a space by some sort of identical repeating element like a square or a hexagon or the tick of a metronome.  It's simply that there had to have been some process that led to the production of this element and its tiling to infinity.  This process has to be repeated each time a new unit is generated, a fact that's hidden by the way all the units look the same and are thought to have fallen from some all purpose a priori sky.  For some reason this reminds me of cymatics.

This connection between the space and the units we use to divide it gets developed a little in the part of the first chapter devoted to "univocity" ("a single voice which raises the clamour of Being").  

There is a hierarchy which measures beings according to their limits, and according to their degree of proximity or distance from a principle. But there is also a hierarchy which considers things and beings from the point of view of power: it is not a question of considering absolute degrees of power, but only of knowing whether a being eventually 'leaps over' or transcends its limits in going to the limit of what it can do, whatever its degree. 'To the limit', it will be argued, still presupposes a limit. Here, limit [peras] no longer refers to what maintains the thing under a law, nor to what delimits or separates it from other things. On the contrary, it refers to that on the basis of which it is deployed and deploys all its power; hubris ceases to be simply condemnable and the smallest becomes equivalent to the largest once it is not separated from what it can do.  

Defining something by its power is a theme that often appears with Deleuze.  I believe that it's an idea he borrowed from Spinoza, who defines a body by everything it can do. It's also an idea that fits well with the anti-essentialism of pragmatist philosophy -- a thing is nothing more than the sum total of all the effects it has and all the things that can affect it.  And don't forget the echo of Nietzsche's "will to power" in here as well.  "Power" is somehow defined as the intensive measure of "ability to do".  Maybe a bit like temperature is defined/measured by the ability to heat other things up, though to be honest I've never been completely clear how this definition works.  

This starts to make a little better sense in the context of the egg.  Consider how an arm develops.  At first nothing more than a incipient bud at some point defined by a certain concentration of chemicals that serves as a sign, it later begins to grow and become a space of its own, until it reaches some point where it again differentiates into upper arm and forearm and later wrist, hand, and fingers.  Each of the limits that defined these articulations is really a sort of phase transition in a complex chemical soup.  At each step, the next organ or articulation begins as an intensity arising on the space laid out by the prior differentiation, but it then develops into a space in its own right.  The dynamics of the new space run as far as they can before that space in turn breaks apart into others.  Since there's no picture of the arm made available to the egg in advance, the process of defining the space and the process by which the parts grow to fill it and transform into one another are really the same process.

This seems like a small step towards an insight into what Deleuze means by power.  A heterogenous and open space that can't be defined in advance also can't be filled or covered with identical pre-formed units.  In fact, the absolute distinction between a neutral space container and the things that fill it is going to be lost.  Defining things by their power -- that is, by how far they can go before they become something else -- seems to be the necessary correlate of dealing with an open space.