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Manuel DeLanda
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Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy (Continuum Impacts) Paperback – August 14, 2005

by Manuel DeLanda (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 27 ratings
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Deleuze is now regarded as the most radical andinfluential of contemporary philosophers. HereManuel DeLanda makes sense of Deleuze for bothanalytic and continental thought, for both scienceand philosophy.
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  1. Part of series
    Bloomsbury Revelations
  2. Print length
    240 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Bloomsbury Academic
  5. Publication date
    August 14, 2005
  6. Dimensions
    5.25 x 1 x 8 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0826479324
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0826479327
  9. See all details
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About the Author

Manuel DeLanda is a distinguished writer, artist and philosopher. He began his career in experimental film, later becoming a computer artist and programmer. He is now Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic; New edition (August 14, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0826479324
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0826479327
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 27 ratings

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Manuel DeLanda

Manuel DeLanda

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4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
27 global ratings

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5.0 out of 5 stars Received timely
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2018
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I believe that this book will be thoroughly enjoyed by the recipient.
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Walter J. Christensen Jr.
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2017
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DeLanda sees beyond Deleuze he writes about, which is no small contemplational feat
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Acquisitions, UNLV Libraries
4.0 out of 5 stars No Problem!!!
Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2014
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Wayne
3.0 out of 5 stars Deleuze Lite
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2017
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Deleuze Lite:
Delanda is very good at explaining Deleuze's philosophy when it comes to science, as in his first three chapters, except for Chapter 2 where he says "These would be in a nutshell, the three ontological dimensions which constitute the Deluzian world: the virtual, the intensive and the actual." (p. 55) As no Deleuzian would ever make such a claim, we can clearly see here Delanda's imposed metaphysics. And when it comes to philosophy, Delanda rejects Deleuze's philosophical project, as becomes evident in his last chapter:

Chapter 4, Virtuality and the Laws of Physics
Delanda reconstructs Deleuze for a scientific audience, but then bifurcates virtual science from virtual philosophy according to his proclaimed “flat ontology of individuals” (well defined as non-hierachical by Delanda), but which ontologically flattens a fully Deleuzian intensive philosophy of multiplicity which includes socio-linguistic aspects of reality. After taking us through three masterful chapters of Deleuzian philosophy applied to science, Delanda declares at the beginning of Chapter Four: “There is no room for reified totalities . . . no room for entities like ‘society’ or ‘culture.’ " (Delanda 2002: 147) In so doing he decapitates Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G) sociological critique of the historically reified totalities of both Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxian economics. He also denies the alloplastic richness of Anti-Oedipus (AO) and A Thousand Plateaus (ATP).

How does Delanda’s cogent expositon of Deleuze’s multiplicity in the scientific world so completely reject the multiplicity of Deluze’s philosophical project? We have a clue where Delanda states: (1) “Unlike spatio-temporal dynamisms, the terms “passive self” and “larval subject” received very little elaboration in my reconstruction, mostly because I wanted to keep the description of Deleuze’s ontology free from anthropocentrism as possible.“ (p. 202) Delanda here is reacting to the potentially anthropocentic philosophy in Difference and Repetition (D&R) and completely rejects the more comprehensive philosophy of multiplicity of ATP.

Delanda is understandably concerned about the anthropological emphasis in Deleuze’s three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, which also has a parallel in the three syntheses of space. The Deleuzian cogito requires that the “I that thinks” be placed in time as the passive “I.” Deleuze rejects the Kantian cogito which grounds determinability not only in time but in thinking, which is secondary and illusory. “Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self; and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental or the element of the [true] Copernican revolution. “ (Deleuze 1980: 86) Deleluze exposes the ‘I’ that is fractured based on the passive receptivity of the self, rather than covering it up as does Kant with the synthetic apriori activity of the transcendental unity of apperception (TUA).

Deleuze now searches for the condition of this wider existence—what makes the undetermined ground (the fractured I, the passive self) of a well-determined given (time) determinable. There is a dialectic (interplay) between the condition (of a passive self with sensations and concepts) and the given (objects in time) which Kant tries to cut off by appeal to the pure apriori given, which are thereby separated from concepts and sensations. Deleuze includes sensations and concepts in his cogito for which he must find the necessary conditions for particular sensations or concepts which is the basis for his third synthesis of time where the ‘I’ dissolves in the virtual (failure of the third synthesis).

Delanda identifies his fundamental divide with Deleuze: “The term ‘intensive’ which in my presentation was used in relation to individuation processes, not the virtual continuum,” (p. 199) This philosophical divide for Delanda requires a reconstruction in order to eliminate the confusion between the intensive virtual and his falsely individuated actual which thereby ‘flattens’ his ontology in comparison to Deleuze. Therefore all references to the individual are flattened by this exclusion of the virtual, of intensities, and lacks a robust philosophy of multiplicity.

As we have seen above Delanda does well to identify the problematic of the anthropocentric concept of time. However, he goes on to say, “Unlike my reconstruction where the term ‘individual’ refers to the final product (organisms, species, etc.), in Deleuze’s work it refers to the larval subject themselves. It often has the meaning of a Leibnizian ‘monad.’ (Delanda 2002: 202) Delanda refers to Deleuze’s robust larval selves as a Leibnizian monad which Delanda calls an ‘intensive individual’ in contrast to the Delanda cogito of the ’individual.’ Delanda defines the ‘individual’ as “without qualification to refer to the extended and qualified actual entities which form my flat ontology of individuals.” (Delanda 2002: 203)

Then, under a section entitled “Extensities and qualities,” Delanda says “These are the two characteristics which define the realm of the actual, the fully constituted world of extended and qualified individuals.” Contradicting this focus on the actual he says, “In ATP these two characteristics are referred to as ‘substances’ and ‘forms’ respectively . . . Given that no actual substance is every purely extensional, these two characteristics are ‘not really distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.’ ” (Delanda 2002: 203; Deleuze 1980: 502)

Consequently, Delanda opens the final chapter as stated above with his strong claim of a “flat ontology of individuals” where he has “no room for reified totalities” but only for “concrete social individuals” with the same ontological status as human individuals, simply operating at larger spatio-temporal scales, “products of concrete historical processes” and operating as “parts to a whole (sic).” Where there are cases of homogeneity to suggest the existence of a single ‘culture’ or ‘society,’ one must not “postulate such totalities,” but must be “given a concrete historical explanation.” (Delanda 2002: 147)

Delanda thus becomes reductionistic of not only individuals, and society, but also of science by cutting off the second articulation of expression, of the virtual and of philosophy itself. In his attempt to avoid false totalization, he states that science is a ‘scientific field,’ “like any other individual” which “will depend on contingent historical facts such as its degree of internal homogeneity and its degree of isolation from other fields.” (Delanda 2002: 148). Delanda thus additionally reifies history while conflating under the category of ‘individual,’ the alloplastic of human individuals, social individuals, and culture. It was precisely Deleuze’s project to provide a more comprehensive integration of the physical, organic and social in ATP and to bridge this gap of Delanda’s flatened ontology.

Delanda goes on to state, “The ontology I have developed in this book is fully historical. Each of the individuals which populates this other world is a product of a definite historical process of individuation and, to the extent that an individual’s identity is defined by its emergent properties and that these properties depend on the continuing causal interactions among an individual’s parts, each individual is itself a historical causal process.” (Delanda 2002: 183-4) Delanda gets very Cartesian in his use of the historical, bifurcating the actual from the virtual.

Moreover, in the introduction (Delanda 2002: xv) Delanda tells us that in Chapter Four he is actually trying to “eliminate the erroneous assumption of a closed world . . . [and] devalue the very idea of truth.” But then he again confabulates his ‘problematic epistemology’ by capturing “an objective distribution of the important and the unimportant, or more mathematically, of the singular and the ordinary . . . an objectivity of physical knowledge, an objectivity now captured by distributions of the singular and the ordinary.” (Delanda 2002: xv) Delanda grants that “there is much more to Deleuze’s books than just an ontology of processes and an epistemology of problem,” and that “there is a certain violence which Deleuze’s texts must endure in order to be reconstructed for an audience they were not intended for.” “A different kind of violence is involved in wrenching his ideas from his collaboration with Felix Guattari,” stating that he intentionally goes back to Deleuze’s early texts such as D&R for his ontology.

Delanda also completely eliminates Deleuze’s use of content and expression, which combined with form and substance to define the full ontology of double articulation in ATP, rather than Delanda’s articulation which he also flatly carries into “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.” Deleuzes’s ontology in ATP is that each movement of a strata of reality consists of the first articulation (movement), of both physical conjunction and symbolization (coding), of both substance and form, both parts (segmentarity) and multiplicity, the first more quantal intensity and merely ordered, the second more rigid, atomic and organised. Unfortunately Delanda comes nowhere near this capacity for the philosophy, although he does for science as multiplicity what he refused to do for philosophy

Delanda says “Every stratum needs a double articulation, a double play of substances and forms, of extensities and qualities, one at the level of molecular populations and another at the level of molar aggregates:” (Delanda 2002: 206)

D&G say: “The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures (forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which structures are simultaneously actualised (substances).” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 40-1)

Content is formed matter consisting of 1) substance as chosen matter and 2) form as matter chosen in a certain order: a) substance itself and b) form of content of matter. Expression is about how structures function as 1) organization of their own specific form and 2) substances as they form compounds: 1) form as organization and 2) content of expression of compounds. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 43)
There is an alloplastic grouping of strata (rather than autoplastic that only makes changes within) which make modifications in the external world through a new distribution of content and expression. Alloplastic layers work with linguistic rather than genetic forms of expression, including symbols that are comprehensible, transmittable and modifiable from outside. This is the layer of a new distribution of properties, the human: technology and language, tool and symbol, ‘gesture and speech.’(Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 60)

The organization of content and expression consists of both technological content and semiotic (symbolic) expression. Content and expression both contain existing aspects of hand/tools and face/language as well as preexistant formations. Content is not simply hand and tools, but a technical social process preexisting them as “states of force or formations of power.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 63) Language Expression is not merely a face or a language, but a “semiotic collective process that preexsts them and constitutes regimes of signs.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 63). Therefore a formation of power is much greater than a tool, and a regime of signs is much more than a language—they are determining and selective agents—as much in the constitution of languages and tools as in their usages or diffusions.

Unfortunately Delanda could not stay philosophically consistent with his own observation: “The Deluzian ontology . . . [is] a universe of becoming without being . . . where individual beings do exist but only as the outcome of becomings. “ (Delanda 2002: 99) Double articulation is therefore not merely an integration/individuation of the virtual and the actual, but also of substance and form, expression and content.
15 people found this helpful
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Ricardo Baez
2.0 out of 5 stars Frustrated
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2018
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I tried honestly to find value in this book. I could not find it. It seems to me that there are two DeLandas, the bright professor I see in many videos online and the author of this book. This book was recommended when I attended an online a course about Deleuze’s book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.It was very attractive to me as a retired Mathematician to know that there was a very brilliant explanation of Deleuze's obscure and convoluted style in terms of the mathematics worked professionally. But as I was reading the text all I could find where very general and confusing pseudo explanations in terms of science jargon.

I am aware that the book is not a technical book, but the crucial ideas of science used are very poorly explained even at the level of the layman.Trying to talk about Galois Theory, a subject that is hard enough to expend at least one semester to understand, and just mentioned in brief lines here is somewhat close to an intellectual abuse. On the other hand very crucial terms, for example “quasi-causal operator" are not defined in the book. I had the kindle version and use the search facility to find it but with no success.

I am reading now "Assemblage Theory” by the same author, whata difference, he is clear and brilliant explanations of many difficult terms of Deleuze contrast with this book. I suspect that science is not his business, is it?
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Brian C.
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant reconstruction of Deleuze's ontology
Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2011
This book is a reconstruction of the ontology of the Continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze, but it is one of those rare commentaries that goes beyond being a mere commentary and achieves the status of an original work of philosophy in its own right. DeLanda's reconstruction of Deleuze's ontology is, interestingly enough, approached from the standpoint of analytic philosophy. DeLanda admits that he is taking a risk in attempting to reconstruct the ontology of a Continental philosopher in terms of analytic philosophy. He runs the risk of being 'too Continental' for analytic philosophers, and 'too analytic' for Continental philosophers. Personally, I tend to think that most philosophy students these days are a bit fed up with the Continental/analytic divide and are more then willing to make accommodations for those working in differing traditions. At any rate, the brilliance of DeLanda's reconstruction should be enough to silence any complaints.

DeLanda believes that Deleuze's ontology is fundamentally based on replacing the philosophical concept of 'essence' with that of 'multiplicity' (pg9). DeLanda writes, "In a Deleuzian ontology...a species (or any other natural kind) is not defined by its essential traits but rather by the morphogenetic process that gave rise to it...while an essentialist account may rely on factors that transcend the realm of matter and energy (eternal archetypes, for instance) a morphogenetic account gets rid of all transcendent factors using exclusively form-generating resources which are immanent to the material world" (pg.9-10). DeLanda's book is an attempt to explain in detail how this process works. DeLanda attempts to define multiplicities by using the resources of chaos and complexity theories (symmetry breaking bifurcations, vector spaces, attractors, etc.). DeLanda has recourse to a new modal status (the virtual) when determining the ontological status of multiplicities and he attempts to explain the differences between the virtual and the traditional categories of modal logic (possibility, necessity, and actuality). This is one way in which DeLanda attempts to provide an ontological account of a basic Deleuzian concept (the virtual) in terms that are more familiar to analytic philosophers (modal logic). DeLanda also gives detailed accounts of how virtual multiplicities and their singularities along with intensive properties and differences drive the processes of morphogenesis and individuation. For example, DeLanda gives a very interesting description of embryogenesis which is based on the work of Gerald Edelman and Stuart Kaufmann in which intensive properties (the rates of synthesis and degradation of different adhesion molecules, and the birth and death rates of cells) as well as attractors existing within nearby state space drive the structural and qualitative differentiation of cells which ultimately produces a fully formed organism from a single cell (pg62-65). This example illustrates the "three ontological dimensions which constitute the Deleuzian world: the virtual, the intensive, and the actual" (pg61). The virtual are the attractors which are nearby in state space and which guide the qualitative differentiation of the cell (these attractors are real but not actual, hence the term virtual), the intensive in this case are the rates of synthesis and degradation of different adhesion molecules and the birth and death rates of cells (DeLanda explains in detail and great clarity the difference between intensive and extensive magnitudes), and the actual is the actual structure of the organism which possesses both extensive and qualitative properties which then come to hide the intensive processes and the virtual multiplicities which produced it in the first place.

This is definitely a difficult book. DeLanda delves fairly deeply into a number of subjects which are going to be outside the scope of the average philosophy student (the history of mathematics, topology, chaos and complexity theory, embryogenesis, thermodynamics, etc.). A great deal of this book is still over my head. DeLanda's great saving grace is that he is an extremely clear and lucid writer a quality that differentiates him from many Continental philosophers including Deleuze. DeLanda also gives many concrete examples illustrating his abstract concepts which greatly aid the reader in understanding. Even with this help from DeLanda this book is still going to be a challenge for anyone who does not have DeLanda's grasp of all the relevant scholarship (and very few readers, if any, will). But unlike many philosophers DeLanda's difficulty does not simply frustrate but rather inspires. DeLanda inspires the reader to want to learn more about the subjects he is discussing in order to better understand what he is saying (if the reader is like me he or she may even wind up developing an entire research project centered around mastering the material referenced in this book). Unfortunately Deleuze, in my opinion, can often be more frustrating then inspiring. So even though I may take some heat for this I would actually recommend reading this book before attempting to read Deleuze himself. At the very least DeLanda should convince the skeptics that Deleuze does have something very interesting to say and he is worth the frustration which will inevitably accompany any attempt to read Deleuze's works first-hand.
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Marlie
3.0 out of 5 stars I would order from this seller again it came in just like it was suppose too
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2015
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brought it as a gift. I would order from this seller again
it came in just like it was suppose too.
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FG
5.0 out of 5 stars A crucial piece of work.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 20, 2018
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A crucial piece of work.
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curieux insatiable
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnifique
Reviewed in France on February 18, 2016
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Un des plus beaux livres sur la pensée deleuzienne. Clair avec des exemples concrets qui rendent la philosophie de Deleuze accessible et matérielle sans lui enlever de sa profondeur.
Livre comme on en fait rarement, il bouleversera votre manière de penser...
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B. Wilson
4.0 out of 5 stars A difficult but brave and exciting book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 16, 2022
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This is a book that I would recommend to scientists because it could pull them out of a restrictive and self limiting mindset. I would recommend to philosophers: to those that wish to embrace the Deleuzian way of thinking and to understand its origins, and Bergsonians who want to look at extensions of his ideas. The one thing I did think would improve the book would be to add graphs and diagrams. The book pursues an unremitting verbal approach, which may appeal to Deleuzians (because that is what Deleuze did) but it would render a good portion of the text usefully redundant at the cost of a few drawings. It still, in my opinion, succeeds in its didactic intentions, in bridging a gulf between disciplines, but perhaps points to a reduction more in scientific terms than philosophical, something that Deleuze's verbal approach was perhaps designed to avoid.
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