27.10.11

Thousand Machines - Gerald Raunig (Semiotext(e), 2010)



A Thousand Machines

A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement


Gerald Raunig



In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community.

"It is to Gerald Raunig's great credit that his essay reintroduces the concept of the machine as defined by Deleuze and Guattari; he examines it against the background of Marxist tradition, which has been articulated most innovatively in post-operaism. His work shows the possible intersections and continuities, but also points to discontinuities between these two theories which have evolved at markedly different periods." --Maurizio Lazzarato


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