Manuel de Landa
Encyclopedia
Manuel De Landa, is a writer
, artist
and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is presently the Gilles Deleuze
Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School
in Saas-Fee
, Switzerland
; a lecturer at the Canisius College
in Buffalo, New York
; a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania
School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
; and an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute
School of Architecture in Brooklyn
, New York
. He was previously an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
at Columbia University
. De Landa has a BFA
from New York's School of Visual Arts
.
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 dynamics, 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, De Landa made several short Super 8
and 16mm films in the 1970s and early 1980s. He pulled them from circulation after the original negatives were lost. In 2011, Anthology Film Archives
restored and reissued them. Cited by filmmaker Nick Zedd
in his Cinema of Transgression
Manifesto, De Landa associated with many of the experimental and art filmmakers of this New York based movement. Much of De Landa'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 'Lacan
ian thriller' by at least one critic.
His latest book (as of March 2011) is Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, which explores simulations of emergence in systems of different scales, from the atomic to the social.
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is presently the Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School
European Graduate School
The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
in Saas-Fee
Saas-Fee
Saas-Fee is the main village in the Saastal, or the Saas Valley, and is a municipality in the district of Visp in the canton of Valais in Switzerland...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
; a lecturer at the Canisius College
Canisius College
Canisius College is a private Roman Catholic college in Buffalo, New York, United States. The college was founded in 1870 by members of the Society of Jesus from Germany and is named after St. Peter Canisius. The college is one of 28 institutions in the Association of Jesuit Colleges and...
in Buffalo, New York
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...
; a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
; and an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
School of Architecture in Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. He was previously an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York City, also known simply as GSAPP, is regarded as one of the most important and prestigious architecture schools in the world...
at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. De Landa has a BFA
Bachelor of Fine Arts
In the United States and Canada, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, usually abbreviated BFA, is the standard undergraduate degree for students seeking a professional education in the visual or performing arts. In some countries such a degree is called a Bachelor of Creative Arts or BCA...
from New York's School of Visual Arts
School of Visual Arts
The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...
.
He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines is a book by Manuel de Landa that traces the history of warfare and of technology. It is influenced in part by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish , and also reinterprets the concepts of war machines and the machinic phylum, introduced in Deleuze and...
(1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is a 1997 book by Manuel De Landa. The book forms part of DeLanda's ongoing project of applying dynamical systems theory and the like to such diverse fields as history, analytical science and realist philosophy, challenging prevailing paradigms in each instance...
(1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is a 2002 book by Manuel De Landa.In De Landa's words, the book seeks to present the process-based realist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to an audience of analytical philosophers of science and scientists with an interest in philosophical questions...
(2002) and
A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity
A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity
A New Philosophy of Society =ANPS is an attempt to loosely define a new ontology for use by social theorists - one that challenges the existing paradigm of meaningful social analyses being possible only on the level of either individuals or 'society as a whole'...
(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
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
on one hand, and modern science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
, self-organizing matter, artificial life
Artificial life
Artificial life is a field of study and an associated art form which examine systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American computer scientist, in 1986...
and intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
, economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
, architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
, chaos theory
Chaos theory
Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the...
, history of science
History of science
The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....
, nonlinear dynamics, cellular automata
Cellular automaton
A cellular automaton is a discrete model studied in computability theory, mathematics, physics, complexity science, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling. It consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states, such as "On" and "Off"...
on the other.
De Landa became a principal figure in the "new materialism" based on his application of Deleuze's realist ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
. His universal research into "morphogenesis
Morphogenesis
Morphogenesis , is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape...
" - 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, De Landa made several short Super 8
Super 8 mm film
Super 8 mm film is a motion picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement of the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format....
and 16mm films in the 1970s and early 1980s. He pulled them from circulation after the original negatives were lost. In 2011, Anthology Film Archives
Anthology Film Archives
__notoc__Anthology Film Archives is a film archive and theater located at 32 Second Avenue on the corner of East Second Street in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City devoted to the preservation and exhibition of experimental film. It is the only non-profit organization of its...
restored and reissued them. Cited by filmmaker Nick Zedd
Nick Zedd
Nick Zedd is an American filmmaker and author based in New York City. He coined the term Cinema of Transgression in 1985 to describe a loose-knit group of like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humor in their work...
in his Cinema of Transgression
Cinema of Transgression
The Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd in 1985 to describe a New York City, United States based underground film movement, consisting of a loose-knit group of like-minded artists using shock value and humor in their work...
Manifesto, De Landa associated with many of the experimental and art filmmakers of this New York based movement. Much of De Landa'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 'Lacan
Lacan
Lacan is surname of:* Jacques Lacan , French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist** The Seminars of Jacques Lacan** From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, a book on political philosophy by Saul Newman** Lacan at the Scene* Judith Miller, née Lacan...
ian thriller' by at least one critic.
His latest book (as of March 2011) is Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, which explores simulations of emergence in systems of different scales, from the atomic to the social.
Books
- War in the Age of Intelligent MachinesWar in the Age of Intelligent MachinesWar in the Age of Intelligent Machines is a book by Manuel de Landa that traces the history of warfare and of technology. It is influenced in part by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish , and also reinterprets the concepts of war machines and the machinic phylum, introduced in Deleuze and...
(1991) - A Thousand Years of Nonlinear HistoryA Thousand Years of Nonlinear HistoryA Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is a 1997 book by Manuel De Landa. The book forms part of DeLanda's ongoing project of applying dynamical systems theory and the like to such diverse fields as history, analytical science and realist philosophy, challenging prevailing paradigms in each instance...
(1997) - Intensive Science and Virtual PhilosophyIntensive Science and Virtual PhilosophyIntensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is a 2002 book by Manuel De Landa.In De Landa's words, the book seeks to present the process-based realist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to an audience of analytical philosophers of science and scientists with an interest in philosophical questions...
(2002) - A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social ComplexityA New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social ComplexityA New Philosophy of Society =ANPS is an attempt to loosely define a new ontology for use by social theorists - one that challenges the existing paradigm of meaningful social analyses being possible only on the level of either individuals or 'society as a whole'...
(2006) - Deleuze: History and Science (2010)
- Philosophy & Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (2011)
External links
- Manuel de Landa Faculty profile at European Graduate SchoolEuropean Graduate SchoolThe European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
EGS. Biography, bibliography, photos, quotes and video lectures. - Manuel DeLanda Annotated Bibliography with links to articles
- Various texts
- http://www.canisius.edu/topos/delanda.asp
- Interview
- Interview on CtheoryCtheoryCTheory is a peer-reviewed academic journal published since 1996. It focuses on technology, media theory, and culture, publishing articles, interviews, book reviews and "event-scenes." It is edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. The journal is published by the University of Victoria, BC, Canada....
- Other interview by Paul MillerDJ SpookyPaul D. Miller , known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author...
- "Markets and antimarkets in the world economy" by DeLanda