Works by
Manuel Delanda
(Aka Manuel De Landa)
(Artist, Philosopher, Writer)
[1952 ]

• War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991)
  In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and surveillance technology have become chillingly apparent. For Manuel DeLanda, however, this new weaponry has a significance that goes far beyond military applications; he shows how it represents a profound historical shift in the relation of human beings both to machines and to information. The recent emergence of intelligent and autonomous bombs and missiles equipped with artificial perception and decision-making capabilities is, for Delanda, part of a much larger transfer of cognitive structures from humans to machines in the late twentieth century.
  
  War in the Age of Intelligent Machines provides a rich panorama of these astonishing developments; it details the mutating history of information analysis and machinic organization from the mobile siege artillery of the Renaissance, the clockwork armies of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic campaigns, and the Nazi blitzkrieg up to present-day cybernetic battle-management systems and satellite reconnaissance networks. Much more than a history of warfare, DeLanda's account is an unprecedented philosophical and historical reflection on the changing forms through which human bodies and materials are combined, organized, deployed, and made effective.

• A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)
  Following in the wake of his groundbreaking War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical development over the last one thousand years. More than a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history as an arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium.
  
  De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministic source of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source of all concrete forms in the West's history are shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.

• Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy (2002)

• A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity

See also:

• A Deleuzian Century? (1999) by Ian Buchanan, ed. with Eugene Holland, Fredric Jameson, Jerry Aline Flieger, John Mullarky, and Manuel De Landa
  Michel Foucault’s suggestion that this century would become known as “Deleuzian” was considered by Gilles Deleuze himself to be a joke “meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.” Whether serious or not, Foucault’s prediction has had enough of an impact to raise concern about the potential “deification” of this enormously influential French philosopher. Seeking to counter such tendencies toward hagiography—not unknown, particularly since Deleuze’s death—Ian Buchanan has assembled a collection of essays that constitute a critical and focused engagement with Deleuze and his work.
  
  Originally published as a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1997), this volume includes essays from some of the most prominent American, Australian, British, and French scholars and translators of Deleuze’s writing. These essays, ranging from film, television, art, and literature to philosophy, psychoanalysis, geology, and cultural studies, reflect the broad interests of Deleuze himself. Providing both an introduction and critique of Deleuze, this volume will engage those readers interested in literary and cultural theory, philosophy, and the future of those areas of study in which Deleuze worked.
  
  Contributors. André Pierre Colombat, Charles J. Stivale, D. N. Rodowick, Eugene Holland, Fredric Jameson, Horst Ruthrof, Ian Buchanan, Jean-Clet Martin, Jerry Aline Flieger, John Mullarkey, Manuel De Landa, Ronald Bogue, Tessa Dwyer, and Tom Conley

• (dis)Locations (2002) by Jill Bennett, Manuel De Landa, and Susan Best
  Characterized by digital relocation and the resulting multiplicity of urban and sexual erosions, contemporary culture is strongly in need of innovative narrative forms. One permutation of this new narrativity, interactive film, is explored in (dis)locations, the latest issue of the ZKM digital arts edition, jointly edited by ZKM/Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe and the College for Interactive Cinema Research, University of New South Wales. Contributing artists, whose work is presented on DVD, the medium of the moment, include Dennis Del Favero, Agnes Hegedus, Ian Howard, Susan Norrie, Jeffrey Shaw, and Peter Weibel. 
  
  Essays by Anna Munster, James Donald, Jill Bennett, Peter Weibel, and Ursula Frohne

• Verb: Architecture Boogazine (2002) by Adilkno Bilwet, Alejandro Zaera, Jorge Wagensberg, Kunio Watanabe, and Manuel De Landa
  The shift from ''modern'' to digital systems of design and production opens up a material work to a much more profound interaction between author and audience. This change represents a new stage in the development of the relationship that a work--or, in another sense, a message--establishes between the author--or sender--and the reader--or receiver. From the classical work, with its "a priori," essentialist model of appreciation, to the modernist object, with its subjective model of aesthetics, to the emerging cybernetic model, the interface between author and ''user'' has become closer, more direct, and more open. The first issue of the new "boogazine" Verb looks closely at these questions regarding the present relationship between information and authorship in cultural practice, asking: how does the increasing complicity between author and audience affect architectural practice? And how can architecture be conceived more fluidly in terms of information? Handsomely designed and richly illustrated, this combination of book and magazine is the first installment in what is sure to be a groundbreaking journey through architecture and design.

• Information Is Alive: Art And Theory On Archiving And Retrieving Data (2003) by by Winy Maas, ed. with Antonio Damasio, Arjen Mulder, Arjun Appadurai, Boris Groys, Brian Massumi, George Dyson, Ingo Gunther, Joke Brouwer, Manuel De Landa, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Sadie Plant, Scott Lash, and Simon Conway Morris
  The archive has of late proven to be a powerful metaphor: history is viewed as an archive of facts from which one can draw at will; our bodies have become a genetic archive since being digitally opened up in the human genome project; our language is an archive of meanings that can be unlocked using philological tools; and the unconscious is an archive of the traumatic experiences that mold our identity. More and more artists and architects are developing software systems in which data is automatically organized into complex knowledge systems, a process in which the user is only one of the determining factors. Databases, software and archives increasingly form the inspiration for artistic interventions. Information Is Alive considers the artistic potential of these couplings via a selection of essays, interviews and projects by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, philosopher Brian Massumi, writer Sadie Plant, paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, artists Margarete Jahrmann, Lev Manovich, Michael Saup, Jeffrey Shaw, Stahl Stenslie and others. Published on the occasion of the third Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF03).

• Phylogenesis foa's ark: foreign office architects (2004) by Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Bernard Cache, Detlef Mertins, Manuel De Landa, Mark Wigley, Sandra Knapp, and Sanford Kwinter
  Phylogenesis--wait, we'll explain the title soon--is structured as a reflection on the work that Foreign Office Architects (FOA) has produced during its first 10 years of practice. With its genesis as a primarily speculative and academic endeavor, FOA has recently expended much energy in the development of a technical arsenal for implementing real projects. Such explorations have been undertaken through a series of competitions, speculative commissions, and lately some real projects, some of them already completed, others still under construction. The outcome of these years is seen not just as a series of experiments, defined by the specific conditions of a project, but as a consistent reservoir of architectural species to be proliferate, mutated, and evolved in the near future. With the spirit of a scientific classification, the genesis of the projects is here identified as the evolution of a series of "phylums," actualized--and simultaneously virtualized--in their application to the specific conditions where the projects take place. Phylogenesis also includes an FOA-curated compilation of previously published texts from several critics who analyze "external" topics that relate to different aspects of the firm's discourse.

• Lebbeus Woods: System Wien (2006) by Peter Noever, ed. with Anthony Vidler and Manuel DeLanda
  "System Wien is an experimental sketch of Vienna's first District, and shows how it might find a way to change, even radically..." New York architect Lebbeus Woods, founder of the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture (RIEA), is deeply involved in architectural theory and experimental work. Rather than approach individual building plans, he develops visionary projects that embrace science, philosophy, and art. His design process, a complex intellectual model also inspired by science-fiction icons, has influenced generations of architects. Woods sets his hypothetical projects in zones of crisis--he believes that the architect's task is to design spaces and urban structures that react to the full range of human living conditions. The transdisciplinary treatment documented here is a series of architectural interventions, on the urban structure of Vienna's first district. The accompanying essays provide a broader context for the project, and analyze the work and ideas of one of the most important architects of our time. Bound with exposed boards and an open spine, the book's stitches, glue and fragmented images draw a parallel between Woods's work and the architecture of the book.