Manuel DeLanda (b. 1952), Mexican-American philosopher and leading figure in the ‘new materialism’ developing in the wake of Deleuze and Guattari. DeLanda’s work combines research into history, biology, technology, architecture and economics to investigate a wide variety of topics at the intersection of philosophy and the scientific researches known as non-linear dynamics or complexity theory. DeLanda’s basic concern is ‘morphogenesis’: the production of stable structures out of material flows; such production is not the result of a form being imposed on a chaotic matter (‘hylomorphism’), but occurs when a (biological or social) system reaches a threshold that triggers immanent processes of material self-organization.

DeLanda’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) is nominally an examination of the role of information technology in military history, but is really an examination of social-military morphogenesis, as with, for example, Napoleon’s military mobilization of the citizenry created by the French Revolution. DeLanda is careful to note, however, that his application of nonlinear dynamics findings in physics and biology to social systems remains analogical, and not yet scientific, as mathematical models of sufficient complexity to analyze social systems have yet to be developed.

In A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1999), DeLanda widens his field of vision to examine economics, biology, and linguistics. DeLanda appeals to nonlinear dynamics researches and Deleuzoguattarian terminology to move from the geological to the social, investigating the interplay of ‘the flows of lava, biomass, genes, memes, norms, money,’ out of which come the
stable and semi-stable structures of the natural and social world. Relying on the historians Ferdnand Braudel and William McNeill, the biologists Stuart Kaufmann and Brian Goodwin, and the linguists William Labov and Zelig Harris, DeLanda distinguishes ‘hierarchies’ and ‘meshworks’ (interactive networks, or what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘rhizomes’) as two basic
structural forms found in many natural and social registers (although never purely, but always in mixed form).

In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), DeLanda continues with the topic of morphogenesis, but this time in the guise of a 'reconstruction' of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition that explains the mathematical background of Deleuze’s ontology and epistemology. DeLanda explains Deleuze’s ontology as anti-essentialist, that is, as insisting on tracing the
genesis of actual forms from intensive material processes (those that change their nature when pushed beyond critical thresholds); the virtual realm is made up of the repeatable structures of such processes. The Deleuzean ‘ontological difference’ is produced by the purification of mathematical concepts, which eliminates any reference to identity to produce a pure differential virtual field. For DeLanda, Deleuzean epistemology asks us to treat physics problematically rather than axiomatically. In this approach, the achievements of theoretical physics are seen not as linguistically interpreted general laws, but as correctly posed problems, that is, as the posing of the distribution of what is singular and ordinary (i.e., what is important and not). DeLanda’s reconstruction thus stresses that Deleuzean ontology discloses not a closed world capturable by sentences, but an open world to be explored.

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