Manuel DeLanda. Materialism, Experience and Philosophy. 2008 2/12

http://www.egs.edu/ Manuel DeLanda speaking about materialism and experience, Gilles Deleuze, materialist philosophy, left and marxist movement, a world of experience, philosophy of nature, social constructivism, sociology, materialism, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Free public open video lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS, Film Media and Communication Studies department program, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2008. Manuel De Landa.

Manuel DeLanda, (born 1952 in Mexico City), is a writer, artist and distinguished philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York), a Professor for Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, a professor at the Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006). He has published many articles and essays and lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States. His work focuses on the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on one hand, and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear science, cellular automata on the other. De Landa became a principal figure in the "new materialism" based on his application of Deleuze's realist ontology. His universal research into "morphogenesis" - the production of the semi-stable structures out of material flows that are constitutive of the natural and social world - has been of interest to theorists across many academic and professional disciplines.

Alongside his intellectual work, DeLanda made several short Super 8 and 16mm films in the 1970s and early 1980s, all of which are now out of circulation. Cited by filmmaker Nick Zedd in his Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, DeLanda associated with many of the experimental and art filmmakers of this New York based movement. Much of DeLanda's film work is inspired by his interest in philosophy and critical theory; one of his best known films, Raw Nerves, has been described as a 'Lacanian thriller' by at least one critic.

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[GrandUltimateMe]

Once a word has been written or spoken, it has become a part of the experience of anybody who reads or hears it. It is subject to topological pressures, meaning that its meaning can mutate according to the surrounding state-space. Is this not just a matter of proposing two subjects: a linguistic subject, and an experiential subject? The one is an "Identity" - a supposed transcendental entity, or essence, the other more in line with what Deleuze describes Hume's idea of a subject is.

[ehmpeters]

@Edansmommy I believe that we can only perceive the "specifics" of language (classifications) until we FIRSTLY comprehend them. We can become detached from language unknowingly so much so that I find that once I have learnt a concept the reappearance of becomes ubiquitous in everyday life, especially in media. It is as if the concept never existed before and of course it did and it makes me wonder - what other realities am I unaware of?

[Edansmommy]

an error on delanda's part: the *origin* of the many words for snow isnt the issue. the issue is, ppl are born into a language *long after* the "29 words for snow" have been conceptualized & institutionalized. these ppl are more likely to identify the nuances of snow than those born into a language that doesn't make such distinctions. it doesn't mean the latter can't *learn* to recognize snow varietals, but it would require going beyond their native language... not so for the snow-dwellers...

[Entro01]

3:38 ...Swing a dead shretinger's cat. Works well with the snow example he gave. lol

[AAGMach]

As he explains at the end, he makes this dichotomy (not bifurcation) for effect, as he says: for pedagogical purposes; to try to break through to those who do see language as producing our material world. He is very aware of their correlation. But it remains that one is foundational, and that is the material world and our interventions in and by it as part of it.

There is no way he will be chasing the in-itself, he is a philosopher of fluidity, difference, development and change.

[touchingstoves]

Duck-rabbit.

[defdeezy]

the linguistic exists as a reaction of the mind to material experience, but you are right that they are both intricately connected.

[FuriousBataille]

I was thinking similar thing myself. I was just reading the Postulates of Linguistics chapter of A Thousand Plateaus and wonder what DeLanda has to say in terms of order-words and incorporeal transformations.

[0neironaut]

i enjoy his lecturing but i dont enjoy his simple bifurcation between linguistic practices and the material world... one doesnt simply produce the other, but both inform and nuance our conscious experience of the world. I hope he doesnt intend to chase down the "in-itself"... the search is naive.