Manuel de Landa, in his 1996 interview with Konrad Becker and Miss M., speaks his thoughts about the economy, the internet, and neo-materialism. Implicit in his words is a harsh critique of contemporary human analysis, a critique of how we order the metaphors by which we understand the world around us. He points at historical ways of thinking which are still actively present in contemporary times. He touches on the Aristotelian mode which we still employ in disseminating understanding of causes. Parallels can be drawn from his words to critiques of Cartesian dualism. He explicitly critiques Derrida and Beaudrillard for their confusion of the ordering of properties of the world. At the axis of his critique is the point that the “humble” materiality of which we are aware is often taken for granted, as “it is not the exciting part.” “The exciting part,” he says, is virtuality.
This virtuality, he notes, is an emergent property of the material, in the economy and in the online realm, as well as in natural processes. The distinct division of the material from the virtual which is commonplace in scholarly work at present, very closely resembles the body – mind distinction Descartes drew in the 17th century, which has been criticized thoroughly and successfully since then. Descares separated the body and the mind as distinct substances altogether, implying an immortality and thus a superiority of human existence despite the fact of material ephemerality. The current economic system, revolving around virtual flow of finances and commodities without use value is seen by many people to transcend the material and self-organizing forces out of which it has emerged, as though it is as separate and distinct as the mind in Cartesian thought.
His reflections on “capitalism” comprise a critique of the scope of the term. Notions of capitalism fail to recognize the mechanistic differences between what de Landa calls the market and anti market forces, which are both implicit in the term. The anti-market forces which command valuation within the system, and allow for the power to essentially reside in a set managerial group at the top of a hierarchical structure, are similar to the virtual. The “layers of virtuality,” he says, “are running on top of a material basis that ultimately informs the source of power and the basis of society.”
I get a real sense that de Landa, in a lot of what he says, is critiquing general human arrogance. He mentions that Aristotle stared a tradition in Western thinking which made it perfectly alright to assume that “matter was seen as an inert receptacle for forms and humans came up with these forms that they imposed on this inert receptacle.” De Landa criticizes quite heavily the Derridian estimation of the power of language in shaping reality, the notion that there is nothing outside of the text, in stating that, by this conception, “even the weather doesn’t exist” outside of what we make of it. The economy is often seen as something which humans have created—as a form which we have imposed on the material world to make it what it is. De Landa’s neo-materialism observes that this is only seems to be the case when emergent properties, like the mind, intelligence, and the human capacity to lay commands as anti-market forces, are taken to be the causes of motion. This is the arrogant assumption which de Landa points out and refutes through most of what he says in the interview.
The ‘falseness’ or artificiality of the spaceless world online is another realm which is often treated as an entity separate from the ‘real’ material world by the same logic which Descartes used to separate mind from body irreconcilably. The same critiques which responded to Descartes’ can be applied to thinking that the internet is entirely separate from the real, and that the economic power relations will take a different form. De Landa aptly points out that the internet will always rely heavily on the hardware out of which it emerges and becomes available to us. Whoever controls the hardware can certainly control the symmetry of the bandwidth and other aspects which characterize the medium.
I have to cheer for de Landa for having pointed this out, though implicitly in the interview, and I feel as though it would be incredibly interesting to apply critiques of Cartesian dualism to common contemporary intellectual conceptions of the internet, especially those which attempt futilely to reconcile the timeless spaceless internet with material reality as two separate and distinct creatures of human beings (here, Castellles comes to my mind immediately).
Primary source text: An Interview with Manuel de Landa, http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/intdelanda.htm
Also useful:
Manuel de Landa’s essay, Markets and Antimarkets in the World Economy, http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/a-market.htm
Hooked Into Machine 
Posted on May 3, 2011
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