DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy Not School Group

[Editor's Note: Thanks to Wayne for this plug for a new Not School group for November that's it's not too late for YOU to go join. Sign up for Not School and get in it.]

Manuel De Landa is one of the most prominent and clear interpreters of Giles Deleuze, and we're exploring DeLanda's book Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy.

Deleuze, according to DeLanda, provides us with a genuinely post-Einstenian approach to physics. He goes beyond giving a solution in the form of an axiomatic approach to physics and looks instead for a new formulation of the problem. The problematic approach "rejects the idea that fundamental laws express general truths and views them instead as posing correct problems" (IS, p. 169). DeLanda translates Deleuze's ideas into contemporary scientific and mathematical theory, showing how relevant Deleuze's thought is regarding chaos and complexity theory, emergence, non-linear science, etc.

Linear causality renders a system unproblematic, whearas "nonlinear and statistical causality re-problematize material systems, showing them capable of self-organization and self-assembly, with many things left unexplained in the effect after the mere citation of an external cause." (IS, p.174)

"We have learned from GR [General Relativity] that spacetime is a dynamical field among others, obeying dynamical equations, and having independent degrees of freedom... We have learned from QM [Quantum Mechanics] that every dynamical object has quantum properties, which can be captured by appropriately formulating its dynamical theory withing the general scheme of QM. Therefore, spacetime itself must exhibit quantum properties." (Rovelli, Quantum Spacetime, p. 109) As DeLanda points out, Deleuze's theory of multiplicites makes up a flat ontology that does not rely on the background of a metrical space-time.

Basically, being is energy transformation/conversion, fundamentally differential or becoming rather than static entity according to Deleuze/DeLanda. We learn how non-equilibrium thermodynamics treats energy flows across a gradient, and the reduction that gradient produces entropy--and in so doing produces order.

This group is being led by the very competent biochem specialist, Andy; come check it out.

-Wayne Schroeder

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