Manuel DeLanda (born 1952) is a
Mexican-
American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in
New York since 1975. He is a lecturer in architecture at the
Princeton University School of Architecture and the
University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he teaches courses on the philosophy of urban history and the dynamics of cities as historical actors with an emphasis on the importance of self-organization and
material culture
Material culture is culture manifested by the Artifact (archaeology), physical objects and architecture of a society. The term is primarily used in archaeology and anthropology, but is also of interest to sociology, geography and history. The fie ...
in the understanding of a city. DeLanda also teaches
architectural theory
Architectural theory is the act of thinking, discussing, and writing about architecture. Architectural theory is taught in all architecture schools and is practiced by the world's leading architects. Some forms that architecture theory takes are t ...
as an adjunct professor of architecture and urban design at the
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York. It has an additional campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The institute was founded in 18 ...
and serves as the
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes o ...
Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the
European Graduate School. He holds a
BFA from the
School of Visual Arts
The School of Visual Arts New York City (SVA NYC) is a private for-profit art school in New York City. It was founded in 1947 and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design.
History
This school was started by Silas ...
(1979) and a
PhD
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...
in media and communication from the European Graduate School (2010).
DeLanda was previously a visiting professor at the
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...
School of Architecture, where he taught an intensive two-week course in the spring 2012 term on
self-organization
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order and disorder, order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spont ...
and urbanity; adjunct associate professor at the
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation from 1995 to 2006; and adjunct professor at
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly known as Cooper Union, is a private college on Cooper Square in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-s ...
's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture.
Films
After moving to New York, DeLanda created several experimental films between 1975 and 1982, some as part of an undergraduate coursework at the School of Visual Arts. While at SVA, DeLanda studied under video artist
Joan Braderman; they were subsequently married in 1980 and collaborated on several works (including Braderman's ''Joan Does Dynasty''
986 DeLanda's ''Raw Nerves''
980
Year 980 ( CMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place Europe
* Peace is concluded between Emperor Otto II (the Red) and King Lothair III (or Lothair IV) at Margut, ending the Franco-Germa ...
and ''Ismism''
979 before divorcing at an indeterminate point.
Influenced by the
No Wave
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and r ...
movement, DeLanda's
Super 8 and 16mm films also served as methodical, theory-based approaches to the form.
Ed Halter
Ed Halter is a film programmer, writer, and founder of Light Industry, a microcinema in Brooklyn, New York. He currently teaches at Bard College, where he is Critic in Residence.
Criticism
His writing has been featured in '' Artforum'', '' Th ...
"Abstract Machines. Nonlinear dynamics and the films of Manuel DeLanda"
Museum of the Moving Image, March 4, 2011 He pulled them from circulation after the original negatives were lost; in 2011,
Anthology Film Archives
Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the film preservation, preservation, film studies, study, and film distribution, exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent film, independent, experimental film, ex ...
restored and reissued them.
Cited by filmmaker
Nick Zedd in his
Cinema of Transgression
__notoc__
The Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd in 1985 to describe a New York City–based underground film movement, consisting of a loose-knit group of artists using shock value and black humor in their films. Key players ...
Manifesto, DeLanda associated with many of the experimental filmmakers of this New York based-movement. In 2010, he appeared in Céline Danhier's retrospective documentary ''Blank City''.
Much of his oeuvre was inspired by his nascent interest in
continental philosophy
Continental philosophy is a group of philosophies prominent in 20th-century continental Europe that derive from a broadly Kantianism, Kantian tradition.Continental philosophers usually identify such conditions with the transcendental subject or ...
and
critical theory
Critical theory is a social, historical, and political school of thought and philosophical perspective which centers on analyzing and challenging systemic power relations in society, arguing that knowledge, truth, and social structures are ...
; one of his best known films is ''Raw Nerves: A
Lacanian Thriller'' (1980).
Having moved on to the nondeterministic synthesis of
Baudrillardian and
Deleuzian theory,
command and control techniques, and
materialist
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism according to which matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materia ...
ic concerns of
complex systems
A complex system is a system composed of many components that may interact with one another. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication s ...
and
artificial life
Artificial life (ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline ...
(including
cellular automata
A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...
) that would comprise "Policing the Spectrum" (1986) and ''
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines'' (1992), DeLanda had largely eschewed by the mid-1980s his interests in "post-
Freudian
Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in t ...
ideas of the unconscious... as well as any interest in
film theory
Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for und ...
."
Philosophical work
DeLanda's notable works include ''
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 philosophers
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes o ...
and
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari ( ; ; 30 March 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, Semiotics, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and created ecosophy ...
on one hand,
and modern
science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
, self-organizing matter,
artificial life
Artificial life (ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline ...
and
intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as t ...
,
economics
Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...
,
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...
,
chaos theory
Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of Scientific method, scientific study and branch of mathematics. It focuses on underlying patterns and Deterministic system, deterministic Scientific law, laws of dynamical systems that are highly sens ...
,
history of science
The history of science covers the development of science from ancient history, ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural science, natural, social science, social, and formal science, formal. Pr ...
,
nonlinear dynamics,
cellular automata
A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...
on the other. His 2015 book ''Philosophical Chemistry: Genealogy of a Scientific Field'' furthers his intervention in the
philosophy of science
Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, ...
and
science studies
Science studies is an interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze the production, representation an ...
.
Books
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See also
*
New materialism
*
Noosphere
The noosphere (alternate spelling noösphere) is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the new s ...
*
Metaphysical realism
Philosophical realismusually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject mattersis the view that a certain kind of thing (ranging widely from abstract objects like numbers to moral statements to the physical world i ...
*
Wargaming
A normal wargame is a strategy game in which two or more players command opposing armed forces in a simulation of an armed conflict. Wargaming may be played for recreation, to train military officers in the art of strategic thinking, or to st ...
*
Cinema of Transgression
__notoc__
The Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd in 1985 to describe a New York City–based underground film movement, consisting of a loose-knit group of artists using shock value and black humor in their films. Key players ...
Notes
External links
Manuel DeLanda Extensive Annotated Bibliography with links to articlesVarious textsManuel DeLanda Professor Biography at The European Graduate School / EGS.*
Other interviewby
Paul Miller (28 May 2000)
Interview1000 Years of War. ''
CTheory'' (1 May 2003)
"Markets and antimarkets in the world economy"by DeLanda (26 June 1998)
{{DEFAULTSORT:DeLanda, Manuel
1952 births
Living people
Columbia University faculty
Academic staff of European Graduate School
Cellular automatists
20th-century Mexican philosophers
21st-century Mexican philosophers
20th-century Mexican writers
20th-century American male writers
21st-century Mexican writers
20th-century American writers
21st-century American writers
Writers from Mexico City
Continental philosophers
Philosophers of technology