In War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel DeLanda cuts through humanism and adopts the position of robot historian. Like a techno-Foucault, he traces the evolution of self-organizing machine consciousness under the selective pressures of human warfare. Even more interesting is that he combines three theoretical influences: non-linear dynamics, the nomad thought of French post-structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the psychedelic experience (DeLanda returns yearly to ritually trip with a shaman in Oaxaca). Crosslinking these already mutant forces, DeLanda has created an analytic machine that stops at nothing. Besides War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, he has an article on Nonorganic Life in the latest Zone, and hes engaged in a new book that will trace capitalism as a self-organizing system, involving geology, hydraulics and linguistics. Mexico City-born DeLanda is a scholar neither by trade nor temperament. Hes a misplaced polymath in the Age of Microspecialization. After moving to New York City seventeen years ago he studied art, made celebrated underground films, and wrote advanced 3D software. Abandoning art and film, he currently writes and makes a living by modeling on high-end 3D graphics programs. What follows is less an interview than snapshots of the very strange loops spinning in his mind. *** MANUEL DELANDA: If you read the essays by the first guy who saw spontaneously oscillating chemical reactions, you find out he was unable to publish his essays. This was in the 50s, not long ago. The idea that orderly behavior could arise spontaneously from matter was so counter-intuitive.. At that time, the only two ways they could see stable things arising in nature was through rational perfection -- the best possible outcome -- or heat-death. What nonlinear science brings about is a complete new range of structurally stable forms of behavior, which has absolutely nothing to do with rationality or the heat-death of entropy. Now attractors are appearing all over the place. Weve discovered a whole new reservoir of forms of stabilization. Its a paradigm warp... techgnosis/delandad.html
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:37:15 +0000
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