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Manuel DeLanda
Biography | Lectures | Bibliography | Resources | Links
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Video Quotes Top |
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Professor Manuel DeLanda with students Christian Haenggi (Zurich), Linda Lewitt (New York), Sarah Nind (Toronto).
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As a philosopher I am interested in all kinds of phenomena of self-organization, from the wind patterns that have regulated human life for a long time to the self-organizing patterns within our bodies, to the self-organizing processes in the economy, to the self-organizing process that is the Internet.
Humans didn't really invent machines. A hurricane is a motor in the literal sense. When a hurricane is born, a lot of self-organizing processes are involved that bring the heat from the outside and concentrate it in a reservoir. It took centuries before humans discovered the motor, something that self-assembles spontaneously in nature. As soon as you let matter and energy in any form flow in a non-linear manner (that is, past a certain threshold of complexity) machines will tend to spontaneously self-assemble. The key word here is 'non-linear.'
Unlike social constructivism which achieves openness by making the world depend on human interpretation, Deleuze achieves it by making the world into a creative, complexifying and problematizing cauldron of becoming. Because of their anthropocentrism constructivist philosophies remain prisoners of what Foucault called 'the episteme of man,' while Deleuze plunges ahead into a post-humanist future: In which the world has been enriched by a multiplicity of non-human agencies. And in contrast to other materialistic or realistic philosophies of the past. The key non-human agency in Deleuzian philosophy has nothing to do with the negative, with oppositions or contradictions but with pure, productive, positive difference. It is ultimately this positive difference, and its affirmation in thought, that insures the openness of the world.
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; "Professor Manuel DeLanda with students Christian Haenggi (Zurich), Linda Lewitt (New York), Sarah Nind (Toronto).")
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