A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement

by Gerald Raunig, Aileen Derieg

Overview

The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious.

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.

Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781584350859
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	04/09/2010
Series:	Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series , #5
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theorist. He works at the Zürich University of the Arts, Zürich and the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), Vienna. He is coeditor of the multilingual publishing platform Transversal Texts and the Austrian journal Kamion. He is the author of Art and Revolution, A Thousand Machines, and Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, all published by Semiotext[e].

What People are Saying About This

Maurizio Lazzarato

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

Endorsement

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

—Maurizio Lazzarato

From the Publisher

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

—Maurizio Lazzarato