A Thousand Machines.

A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement

Gerald Raunig
Translated by Aileen Derieg

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.

Intervention Series
Distributed for Semiotext(e)

About the Author

Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theorist who lives in Vienna, 
Austria. He is the author of Art and Revolution (Semiotext(e), 2007).

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12086
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