A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (Volume 5) (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series (5))

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. Review "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 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 Web journal Transversal and of Kulturrisse, the Austrian journal for radical democratic cultural politics. He is the author of Art and Revolution and A Thousand Machines, both published by Semiotext(e) Die Maschine als soziale Bewegung des heutigen "Prekariats" - derjenigen, deren Arbeit und Leben prekär sind.Gerald Raunig liefert in dieser "Präzisionsphilosophie der Maschine" einen historischen und kritischen Hintergrund für ein Konzept, das vor vierzig Jahren von den französischen Philosophen Félix Guattari und Gilles Deleuze vorgeschlagen wurde: die Maschine nicht als technisches Gerät und Apparat, sondern als Gesellschaft Zusammensetzung und Verkettung. Diese Konzeption der Maschine als Anordnung technischer, körperlicher, geistiger und sozialer Komponenten unterwandert den Gegensatz zwischen Mensch und Maschine, Organismus und Mechanismus, Individuum und Gemeinschaft Bicycles -- Machine Fragments -- Theater Machines -- War Machines -- Mayday Machines -- Abstract Machines. Gerald Raunig ; Translated By Aileen Derieg. Translation Of: Tausend Maschinen : Eine Kleine Philosophie Der Maschine Als Sozialer Bewegung. Includes Bibliographical References. **The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious.**__The Bicycle Thieves__