Manuel DeLanda. Materialism, Experience and Philosophy. 2008 5/12

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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[coreolis7]

@coreolis7 Don't you agree that science too will evolve? Do you consider Gould and Lewontin no improvement over Darwin? Evolutionary biology has a lot to explain, a lot to learn. BTW whats anti-intellectual about "play?" If it often turns out to be the most practical and efficient approach to problem- solving, that would explain why Nature favors it so often as a "strategy."

[christopheclugston]

@coreolis7 So you are proposing against intellectual faculties. That seems to be the stance of those that don't have an academic foundation in the relevant fields. Spouting that anti intellectual stance has dis-validated what I said (based on research) exactly how?

[coreolis7]

@christopheclugston

Why is it that Scientism always thinks itself the measure of all things? There was meaning before Darwin., and there will be after. Someday we will outgrow our insecure fetishes for materialism. Perhaps variety exists because life is whimsical. Only playfulness explains the million varieties of beetles.

[christopheclugston]

thus variety allows self survival which leads to a stronger gnetic traits pool that will give sounder off spring that will in turn carry forward the variety gene which in some cases wlil mutaqte. Any cerebral meta talk about the under lying reality of why has to be grounded in evolutionary science to obtain the Gestalt

[christopheclugston]

Variety exists in nature because of its evolutionary power. If you have moe variety you have more chance of survival--remember that all things are tied to the reality that the menaing of life is self survival first and species popagation second--

[anujdasgupta]

And in context (as stated above) of the Development thru the Fostering-Of-Variety, is there any way we can place Heidegger's Letting-Be (more preceisely, 'Releasement' or the German "GelassenHeit") in it?

What about Letting-Be not as against, but in relation to, or even making way for the Variety to be? Would it then be a 'constant' development OR a puncuated development? (Ref: look at nature, at Fractal patterns.. aint their dev. punctuated?)

[anujdasgupta]

Would you agree that - this constant strive fro 'development' sounds so much like a modernist project, except ofcourse now the parameter for change being the Fostering-Of-Variety?

[AAGMach]

For whom/for what purpose. Utilitarian? Anthropocentric?

In truth I haven't worked out for myself why variety is preferred... and so cannot adequately articulate it here. This is what I am tackling in my graduate studies. At this point I can really only say that I Feel it is right.

How is variety maintained without adding to it? Does not variety maintained become the same?

Without development there is stagnation, which chaos theory shows leads to death, and so in the end a loss of variety.

[anujdasgupta]

But then again, for any qs. of 'good' to make any sense in the world, that 'good' has to be qualified for whom or for what purpose! So the qs. of the 'development' being god or bad is of no significance, atleast not of prime significance, but then as u put it, might I as, y is Variety so desired/preferred here? Shouldn't the qs. at times be abt Maintaining that variety rather than always Adding to it?

[AAGMach]

The significance I refer to is that difference catalyzes development. For something to be significant, for me/DeLanda as I understand him, it must add to the heterogeneous mixture of reality, and so add to it's richness, and development. Then you may ask, are all produced differences and the development they catalyze 'good'? Yes, some directly insofar as they increase abilities to act/express/recognize, and those that are bad insofar as they then catalyze good to respond to/counteract them.