A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

Author: Manuel De Landa
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
More than a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics.Following in the wake of his groundbreaking War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical development over the last one thousand years. More than a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history as an arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministic source of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source of all concrete forms in the West's history are shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

Author: Manuel De Landa
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0942299922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging — in an entirely unprecedented manner — the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter—energy itself. A Swerve Edition.

Deleuze

Author: Manuel Delanda
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780982706718
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
This collection of essays, most published here for the first time, focuses on Gilles Deleuze's ideas about history and science. The focus is on ontological or metaphysical questions, including what are the legitimate inhabitants of the material world--natural and artificial--and what role should science play in determining their legitimacy?

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

Author: Manuel DeLanda
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780937997
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
First published 10 years ago, Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy rapidly established itself as a landmark text in contemporary continental thought. DeLanda here draws on the realist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to the domain of philosophy of science. As well as contemporary philosophical insights, the book also tackles new developments in geometry, complexity theory and chaos theory to bring new insights to our understanding of a scientific knowledge liberated from traditional ideas of essence.

Philosophy and Simulation

Author: Manuel DeLanda
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441170286
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
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Assemblage Theory

Author: Manuel DeLanda
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147441365X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Clarifies and systematises the concepts and presuppositions behind the influential new field of assemblage theoryRead and download the preface, by series editor Graham Harman, and the Introduction to Assemblage Theory for free nowManuel DeLanda provides the first detailed overview of the assemblage theory found in germ in Deleuze and Guattari's writings. Through a series of case studies DeLanda shows how the concept can be applied to economic, linguistic and military history as well as to metaphysics, science and mathematics.DeLanda then presents the real power of assemblage theory by advancing it beyond its original formulation allowing for the integration of communities, institutional organisations, cities and urban regions. And he challenges Marxist orthodoxy with a Leftist politics of assemblages.Key FeaturesCritically connects DeLanda with more recent theoretical turns in speculative realismMakes sense of the fragmentary discussions of assemblage theory in the work of Deleuze and GuattariOpens up assemblage theory to sociology, linguistics, military organisations and science so that future researchers can rigorously deploy the concept in their own fields"e;

War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Author: Manuel De Landa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
The author aims to show how the emergence of intelligent and autonomous bombs and missiles equipped with artificial perception and decision-making capabilities represents a profound historical shift in the relation of human beings both to machines and to information.

Time and History in Deleuze and Serres

Author: Bernd Herzogenrath
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441185704
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
For Gilles Deleuze, time is 'out of joint'. For Michel Serres, it is 'a crumpled handkerchief'. In both of these concepts, explicit references are made to the non-linear dynamics of Chaos and Complexity theory, as well as the New Sciences. The groundbreaking work of these key thinkers has the potential to instigate a radical break from traditional existentialist theories of time and history, affording us the opportunity to view history and historical events as a complex, non-linear system of feedback-loops, couplings and interfaces. In this collection, the first to address the comparative historiographies of Deleuze and Serres, twelve leading experts - including William Connolly, Eugene Holland, Claire Colebrook and Elizabeth Grosz - examine these alternative concepts of time and history, exposing critical arguments in this important and emerging field of research.

Architectures of Time

Author: Sanford Kwinter
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262611817
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
An exploration of twentieth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form. In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation. Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian duree, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.

The Rise of Realism

Author: Manuel DeLanda
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509519068
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
Until quite recently, almost no philosophers trained in the continental tradition saw anything of value in realism. The situation in analytic philosophy was always different, but in continental philosophy realism was usually treated as a pseudo-problem. That is no longer the case. In this provocative new book, two leading philosophers examine the remarkable rise of realism in the continental tradition. While exploring the similarities and differences in their own positions, they also consider the work of others and assess rival trends in contemporary philosophy. They begin by discussing the relation between realism and materialism, which DeLanda links closely but which Harman tries to separate. Part Two covers the many different meanings of realism, with the two authors working together to develop an expanded definition of the term. Part Three features a spirited exchange on the respective virtues and drawbacks of DeLanda's realism of attractors and singularities and Harman's object-oriented theory. Part Four shifts to the question of the knowability of the real, as the authors discuss whether scientific knowledge does full justice to reality. In Part Five, they shift the focus to space, time, and science more generally, and here Harman offers a defence of actor-network theory despite its obvious anti-realist elements. Lively, accessible and engaging, this book is the best attempt so far to clarify the different paths for realism in continental philosophy. It will be of great value to students and scholars of continental philosophy and to anyone interested in the cutting-edge debates in philosophy and critical theory today.