Manuscript from Presentation on DeLanda

Here is the manuscript from my talk on DeLanda from the PhD-seminars at Goldsmiths. It's basically an attempt to introduce and contextualize his work drawing upon his appearance in the 90's and current association with speculative realist thought. I did present another paper as well, which focused more on my own work, but I don't want to put it up here right now for various reasons. It should appear in some form sooner or later, though. In the meantime, here is the DeLanda-text (sometimes the formulations might be a bit off, since I wrote it for an oral presentation, so in that case apologies):

The Neo-Materialism of Manuel DeLanda

I will begin by talking about Manuel DeLanda’s work, and my approach will be philosophical, since my project is very much philosophically-oriented, and I consider myself first and foremost to be a theoretician rather than an artist. So rather than using theory as a way to better understand my practice, I’m using art as a way to enrich my theory. My approach is therefore very much a Deleuzian one, in that I’m not thinking of art as something “to do philosophy about”, but rather as a form of thinking in-itself. In other words, art is a form of practice which already is pregnant with thought, so the philosopher of art should not so much reflect on it, as much as extract the potency of thought that always-already belongs to it. It’s in this sense that my approach is a distinctly philosophical one, and why I will talk from a philosopher’s perspective. But this should not be misunderstood as an anti-practical approach, since I believe that theory not only is useful, but indeed inseparable from, practice. In other words, theory is less a representation of the world as much as the condition for practical interventions in it, and in this way an enabling condition for practice. Indeed, it seems to me that theoretical contradictions don’t just end up having negative effects within some kind of purely theoretical register, but also lead to similar contradictions at the level of practice, so this is where I see the importance of critical theory as such.

But before I go into the main theoretical discussion, I will just briefly introduce DeLanda and the theoretical context from which he emerged. One thing that is important to notice about him is that he doesn’t have a degree in philosophy – not even an undergraduate degree – since he started out as a filmmaker and then became a software designer, and somehow has managed to climb the academic ladder without having any actual academic credentials (he is a professor of philosophy today). He became known in the early nineties for his particular reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy – a reading which I think still is one of the most productive ones – and this was at a time before Deleuze and Guattari became big names in the academia. But his influence has not been very high in cultural studies and the arts, which probably has to do with the fact that his writings rather concentrate on those parts of Deleuze and Guattari’s work that concern themselves with science, metaphysics, and epistemology. Nevertheless, it seems to me that his take on D/G is incredibly useful even from an aesthetic perspective, and this is in many ways what my current project is about; although not so much in terms of introducing his work in cultural studies and the arts, but rather by extracting certain lines of thinking present in the neo-materialist corpus and elaborate on them from within the context of my own theoretical programme. In this regard, I also draw upon the collective work of the so-called Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru); which was a group of graduate students at Warwick University in the nineties, who got together around their shared interest in DeLanda, Deleuze, cyber-theory, rave culture, etc., and who now are teaching in various UK-universities (indeed, four of them are here at Goldsmiths, and two in this department – Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher – who are my PhD-supervisors). The main contribution of the Ccru, for me, is precisely their materialist approach to cultural studies – vis-à-vis, DeLanda, Deleuze, and their mentor Nick Land – which, like DeLanda’s work, not only offers some serious challenges to the tiresome prevalence of postmodern scepticism, but was also of key importance for current so-called “speculative realist thought”. So here the Ccru’s concerns intersect with DeLanda’s in the most explicit way, since it’s one of my basic arguments that his reading of Deleuze as a realist philosopher was a kind of forerunner of speculative realism, and that with the increased influence of these philosophical programs, we will gain a better understanding of the many benefits of this reading.

It should, however, be pointed out that far from everyone agrees with DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari as realists. Deleuzian thinker Ian Buchanan, for instance, proposes that one should read D/G as engineers of what he calls a “phenomenology of schizophrenia” – a claim which obviously discredits any form of philosophical realism, and Buchanan unsurprisingly dismisses DeLanda’s work for failing to take into account D/G’s internal reversal of psychoanalysis and the philosophy of desire. So for Buchanan, Capitalism and Schizophrenia is not so much the starting point for a renewed realist/materialist philosophy, but rather a radicalized account of the workings of the unconscious. One is of course free to agree or disagree with this claim, but whatever stance one may take here, one at least has to admit that this position unavoidably fails to escape out of what Quentin Meillassoux has named “the correlation of being and world”. So if one is of the opinion (as I obviously am) that this philosophical idealism is nothing but the first thing that must be abandoned if critical thinking is to be potent enough to move forward – indeed, the enabling condition for critical philosophy as such – then Buchanan’s position inevitably ends up doing little to push this through. So it’s consequently in this context that I would like to talk about DeLanda’s realism.

First of all, one must notice that the move from idealism, or correlationism, to realism doesn’t necessarily have to involve such an extensive theoretical move as Meillassoux does in After Finitude. Because, as Graham Harman has pointed out: Meillassoux is in fact a peculiar realist, in that he actually considers the basic correlationist argument – that if you try and think something beyond thought you are immediately bringing it into thought – as a very powerful argument which simply can’t be dismissed as invalid, whereas the other three “original” speculative realists (and DeLanda as well) think that it is a bad argument to begin with. But we do need to credit Meillassoux position in that it brings to attention the dogmatism that philosophical realism so often has been associated with in continental philosophy. Because until very recently, if you were a realist you were basically someone who didn’t understand Kant’s Copernican revolution, and thus fell victim to a kind of naive, or uncritical, acceptance of the world as such. This is a valid point, but this is also where the “speculative” part of speculative realism comes in, as an indication of the fact that this is not simply some form of revival of dogmatic, or naive, realism, but a realism according to which the world is far from simple and common sense, and thus undermines one of the main arguments against philosophical realism.

But if this is the case, then how should we explain the workings of a complex and mind-independent reality? In other words, the first question which any speculative realist thinker has to pose is: what is it that gives reality structure once we have removed the human/world-correlate, and dogmatism, from the centre stage? It’s here that DeLanda introduces his neo-materialism, which, as the name implies, is different from Marxist materialism, in that it ditches the dialectic simply as a transcendental illusion, and also argues that matter not only exists independently of our minds, but also has the capacity to express itself independently of our minds. So this is how he manages to circumvent the deadlock between idealism and naive realism, that is, by understanding matter as morphogenetically charged, or synthetically potent, with autonomous self-differentiating capacities. He thus criticises essentialism and idealism for subordinating matter to a transcendental set of entities, whether in the form of eternal ideas or social conventions. This is indeed inadequate, as he points out, since it unavoidably depotentiates the functional potencies that belong to matter as such, and the latter must therefore be understood solely on the basis of immanent production. This is consequently where he turns to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, since what he finds in their co-written texts, and in Deleuze’s solo-work, is precisely the philosophical resources for this renewed form of materialism. Here it should be noted that DeLanda, unlike most readers of D/G’s work, does not simply isolate his writings on the level of so-called “DeleuzoGuattarian jargon”, but on the contrary makes a serious effort to unpack their somewhat obscure arguments vis-á-vis the many breakthroughs of modern science. This is a crucial move, I would argue, since it seems to me that the major problem with the many contemporary readings of D/G is that they tend to merely repeat the jargon, without coming to terms with what these concepts actually refer to. So “deterritorialization”, “rhizome”, and “multiplicity” become nothing more than fashionable postmodern slogans, after “deconstruction” and “simulacrum”, which is unfortunate since it gives a very poor understanding of what D/G’s work really has to offer, and thus merely groups them up within the consensus of postmodern theory.

But if one subscribes to realism, this is a particularly crude mistake, since it reduces the richness of D/G’s work to semantics, and thus fails to move beyond the level of language, metaphor, and signification. DeLanda’s turn to science is therefore a crucial one, and indeed something which already is present in D/G’s work, as he illustrates by the numerous quotes that refer to figures such as Gauss, Riehmann, Darwin, and Thom. So therefore, it’s the rigorous explicitation of the scientific resources embedded in D/G’s work which is the philosophical contribution that we first and foremost need to credit DeLanda with, since a productive realism/materialism indeed has to, as he points out, come to terms with science if it is to have any saying about the nature of reality as such. And the many examples discussed in his work – from the topological invariants operating across the virtual, to the crucial roles of intensive differences (of temperature, pressure, etc.) in processes of morphogenetic individuation – are indeed nothing but the foundation for this form of realism.

This immediately poses another question, however, which concerns the relationship between science and philosophy. Because continental philosophy has, as is well known, long been oblivious to the progression of modern science; indeed, one of the central foundations of contemporary continental philosophy – obviously in the spirit of correlationism – was a reaction against the so-called “threat” of the natural sciences. This is of course Husserl’s phenomenology, which in many ways was constructed as sort of a response towards the claims that philosophy would soon become superfluous because of the advances of the natural sciences (particularly experimental psychology), so Husserl therefore created phenomenology, as a philosophical account of the immediate access of human experience beyond the domains of science, but in the process he became an idealist precisely because of his fear for the natural sciences. This anecdote of course just reinforces the argument that contemporary realist thinking has to come to terms with science – but in what way? And DeLanda’s work has unsurprisingly been criticised for its endorsement of modern science, such as when James Williams (another thinker famous for his writings on D/G) argues that DeLanda is making philosophy too dependent on the truth and falsity of scientific statements. But the problem with this critique (besides from the fact that Williams never explicitly mentions if he is arguing from an idealist standpoint) is, as DeLanda has pointed out himself, that it assumes that scientific theories just replace each other arbitrarily when they are falsified, which of course is wrong. Einstein’s theory of relativity did, for instance, not replace Newtonian physics, but simply showed that the latter is only partly true. Or, to use another example, just because we do believe in the mind-independent existence of an entity such as oxygen (based on the numerous empirical evidences from modern science) this does not mean that we know all that there is to know about oxygen. In other words, even if it is true that scientific theories can never give us a complete account of the real that doesn’t mean that they are completely wrong, or inadequate to draw ontological consequences from, as the speculative realist philosopher Ray Brassier has pointed out in response to similar criticisms: “The fact that our best current science will probably turn out be only partly true does not license the conclusion that it is all wrong and that it has no authority whatsoever”. Rather, what it does mean is that we always need to be cautious about the metaphysics we ascribe to science, as both DeLanda and Brassier also have pointed out, so that we don’t end up following science blindly, or believing that current science gives us the ultimate structure of reality (i.e. that all that is real must be comprehensible within the explanations of current scientific paradigms), but that does not invalidate the compatibility between scientific explanation and philosophical speculation as such. It just means that we need to distinguish between different forms of scientific explanations and their histories within their various fields.

I will conclude this talk with isolating what it is in DeLanda’s writings that have been most important in terms of my own project, which is the concept of “machinism”, which of course already is present in D/G, but which he takes up and elaborates on in his own writings. First of all, the idea of machinism should not be misunderstood as having to do exclusively with technological machines, because even if it certainly encompasses technology as well, it refers to something which goes beyond the mere technological and becomes synonymous with the self-differentiating potency of matter itself. So for DeLanda, as for Deleuze and Guattari, there is a fully real machinism which governs the production of the real as such: indeed, our entire four-dimensional space-time. To take a simple example to illustrate this: “When we say (as Marxists used to say) that “class struggle is the motor of history” we are using the word “motor” in a purely metaphorical sense. However, when we say that “a hurricane is a steam motor” we are not simply making a linguistic analogy: rather we are saying that hurricanes embody the same diagram used by engineers to build steam motors, that is, that it contains a reservoir of heat, that it operates via thermal differences and that it circulates energy and materials through a (so-called) Carnot cycle. Deleuze and Guattari use the term “abstract machine” to refer to this diagram shared by very different physical assemblages. Thus, there would be an “abstract motor” with different physical instantiations in technological objects and natural atmospheric processes”. In other words, whereas we tend to think of a hurricane and a stem-engine as two completely different entities, they in fact share the same abstract motor, or abstract machine, and may thus be grouped together with respect to their objective isomorphism (i.e., the fact there is a mechanism-independent process which drives both of these entities). Of course, this is just one example of an abstract machine, and the topological points, periodic attractors, and meshwork/hierarchy-diagrams that DeLanda discusses – and which governs the structure of the many entities which populate the planet, from salt crystals and granites, to biological organisms and radio-transmitters – are all examples of other abstract machines which operate according to given intensities of matter and energy and produce the material world as such. So according to this position, the biosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and so on, are all governed by the morphogenetic potency of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “mechanosphere”, or “machinic phylum”, which is their name for the combined production of all the abstract machines that populate the domain of the virtual. This virtuality, is, as DeLanda points out, not the virtual reality of computer simulations, but a “real virtuality” which, like the extended notion of machinism, clearly goes beyond art and media, but nevertheless will have consequences not just in philosophy, but in those areas as well. And it’s subsequently in this context that my own work should be situated.