We always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only be followed. The metal worker is an intenerate i. In this section of their essay on war machines and nomadology they are seeking to convey the difference between hylomorphic models of molding, of forcing passive matter into an intellectual mold that is captured by an abstraction and Idea. This is a materiality of ambulant processes, of coupling event-affect, which constitute the vague corporeal essence, that are distinct from their sedentary linkages to older Aristotelian notions.
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War in the Age of Intelligent Machines is a book by Manuel DeLanda , in which he traces the history of warfare and the history of technology. Deleuze and Guattari appreciated Foucault's definition of philosophy as a "tool box" that was to encourage thinking about new ideas. They prepared the field for a re-appropriation of their concepts, for use in another context of the "same" concept, which they called " actualization ". DeLanda drew on the concepts these authors put forth, to investigate the history of warfare and technology.
Skip to content. Skip to navigation. Essay by Manuel de Landa for "TechnoMorphica," TechnoMorphica A key issue in philosophical analyses of technology concerns the most appropriate way of conceptualizing innovation. One may ask, for instance, whether human beings can truly create something novel, or if humanity is simply realizing previously defined technological possibilities. Indeed, the question of the emergence of novelty is central not only when thinking about human-developed physical and conceptual machinery, but more generally, the machinery of living beings as developed through evolutionary processes. Can anything truly different emerge in the course of evolution or are evolutionary processes just the playing out of possible outcomes determined in advance? At the turn of the last century the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote a series of texts where he criticized the inability of the science of his time to think the new, the truly novel. The first obstacle was, of course, a mechanical and linear view of causality and the rigid determinism that it implied.
Describing the development of weapons such as the saber or the sword, Deleuze and Guattari relate how metallurgy follows variations in materials and their qualities spatio-temporal haecceities and transforms them into features traits of expression such as hardness, sharpness and finish. The assemblages cut the phylum up into distinct, differentiated lineages, at the same time as the machinic phylum cuts accross them all. This matter flow can only be followed. The artisan is one who is determined to follow a flow of matter as pure productivity. The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. His work is a legwork. To follow the flow of matter The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device. According to Manuel de Landa, for Deleuze the machinic phylum is the overall set of self-organizing processes
