Manuel De Landa. Deleuze and The New Materialism. 2009. 1/11 (Video)

 Manuel de Landa speaking about the importance of Gilles Deleuze in the 21st century and the fundamentals of materialism in a seminar entitled Gilles Deleuze and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Questioning the role of structuralism and the post-modern position in philosophy, de Landa argues for a view of a materialist world autonomously removed from the concepts of our own mind. His challenge, he says, is to remove a transcendental plane from material objects, that is to remove the concept of essence from the world, without giving rise to a metaphysical position. Towards this, de Landa used the analogy of the battlefield as an example of the social material space to illustrate a plane of existence of extreme materiality. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland.

Manuel de Landa is, among other roles, a philosopher, media theorist, film maker, and artist.  As these, he has inhabited and lived between the intersections of thinking and creativity, uncovering the interstices which link historically separate autonomous fields to each other. Beginning in the late 1970s in New York where he produced a number of underground 8 and 16 mm films, de Landa has been at the forefront of creative thinking, working at the outer edges of media theory and incorporating the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari into his ideas. Manuel de Landa holds the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy at the European Graduate School as well as teaching at Columbia University, the University of Philadelphia and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

de Landas close reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and more importantly his continuation or extension of their ideas, sees the creative potential of philosophy in a new materialism. In his writing he seeks to expand on the notion of a total unity, through assemblage, of multiple singularities.  His work focuses on the idea that our rational view of the world in stable, solid structures is at best limited; instead he seeks clarification through the concept of liquidity, in which the liquid structures, constantly on the verge of chaos, have the greatest potential for creation.  de Landa rejects viewing the world through a solely anthropocentric persepcive and instead gains insight through an insistence on viewing nature from a non-anthropocentrically heirarchized environment. In this liquidity, de Landa see the power to self-organize and further, the ability to form an ethics of sorts, one untouched by human static control, and which allows an existence at the edge of creative, flowing chaos.

This unique vision comes to the fore in de Landas A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, in which he analyses history as a confluence of infinite variation, a flow of dynamic processes without rational, or traditional, order. de Landa sees in his history instead a revived form of materialism, liberated from the dogmas of the past. The history then presented is one of flowing articulations rather than one conducted along a linear, static construction.  Moving beyond a concept of binary oppositions, de Landa instead sees a past of infinite bifurcations, a flowing, liquid unfolding which exposes a collective identity from a myriad of points and perspectives.

Manuel de Landa has written and published extensively since the early 1990s. His published work includes War In the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (2000),  Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2005), and most recently A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006).