внятный абрис концепции "ПЛОСКОЙ ОНТОЛОГИИ" дЕ лАНДЫ СО ССЫЛКАМИ НА ЕГО КНИГИ 1997 (Тысячи лет нелинейной истории)2002 (Наука об интенсивном и виртуальная философия) И особенно 2006 - хит сезона у левых - (ОНИ все ЕСТЬ В СЕТИ)
Social Ontology. A Theory of Assemblages. I render this set of intersections and geographies visible and manageable by a particular design in terms of six basic concepts: Place, Capital, Nature, Development, Identity, and Networks. These concepts are both chapter titles and notions that articulate my argument throughout the book
... CHAPTER 6 ... NETWORKS b) Networks and Complexity
Self-organization, assemblage theory, autopoiesis constitute new forms of thinking about the organization of the living, including networks and social movements. They contrast sharply with long-standing models of theory and social life.
Manuel de Landa (1997, n.d., 2003) has introduced a useful distinction between two general network types: hierarchies and self-organizing meshworks. This is a key distinction that underlies two alternative philosophies of life. Hierarchies entail a degree of centralized control, ranks, overt planning, homogenization, and particular goals and rules of behavior; they operate under linear time and tree-like structures. The military, capitalist enterprises, and most bureaucratic organizations have largely operated on this basis. Meshworks, on the contrary, are based on decentralized decision making, self-organization, and heterogeneity and diversity.
Since they are non-hierarchical, they have no overt single goal. They develop through their encounter with their environments, although conserving their basic organization, as in the case of autopoietic entities. Other metaphors used to describe these phenomena are tree-like structures or "strata" (for hierarchies) and "rhizomes" or "self-consistent aggregates" for meshworks (from philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The metaphor of rhizomes suggests networks of heterogeneous elements that grow in unplanned directions, following the real-life situations they encounter. It should be made clear that these two principles are found mixed in most real-life examples. They could also give rise to one another (as when social movement meshworks develop hierarchies; or the internet, which can be said to be a hybrid of meshwork and hierarchy components, with a tendency for the elements of command and control to increase). The reverse could be said about the global economy, since today's corporations are seeking to evolve towards a networked form with flexible command structures.
What is important to highlight is that the model of self-organization constitutes an entirely different form for ascertaining the creation of biological, social, and economic life.
IV. The "ontological turn" in social theory and the questions of information, complexity, and modernity. a) Assemblages and "flat" alternatives
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze has inspired some of these developments, and I shall be concerned mostly with these there, and in particular with the reconstruction of Deleuze's ontology by the Mexican theorist Manuel de Landa (2002) and de Landa's resulting own social theory (2005). Deleuze, in de Landa's view and unlike many constructivists, is committed to a view of reality as autonomous (mind-independent); his starting point is that reality is the result of dynamical processes in the organization of matter and energy that leads to the production of life forms (morphogenesis), highlighting not sameness but difference; in other words, things come into being through dynamical processes of matter and energy driven by intensive differences. This amounts to "an ontology of processes and an epistemology of problems" (2002:6). Deleuze's morphogenetic account makes visible form-generating processes which are immanent to the material world.
A central aspect in de Landa's social ontology arises from Deleuze's concept of the virtual. 452
Based on a careful reconstruction of Deleuze's concepts, de Landa goes on to propose his own approach to "social ontology" as a way to rethink the main questions and problems of classical and contemporary sociology (including notions of structure and process, individuals and organizations, essences and totalities, the nation-state, scale, markets, and networks). His goal is to offer an alternative foundation for social theory (an alternative "ontological classification" for social scientists).
NOTES 6 de Landa explains at length Deleuzian non-essentialist realism in his recent book (2002). In Chapter 6 we will encounter de Landa's theory of meshworks, also derived from Deleuze and Guattari. For now, it is sufficient to place non-essentialist realism (or neo-realism, as I prefer to call it, which is also post-constructivist) on the map of the realism/constructivism spectrum. Tim Ingold (2000c), in his critique of the dominant genealogical model of descent, comes close to a Deleuzian model, actually appealing to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome. Finally, I will not discuss here another type of neo-realist view, actor-network theory; it will also make a brief appearance in Chapter 6.
27 Deleuze deploys a difficult mathematical language that de Landa explains, particularly the concepts of multiplicity -as a form of organization "which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system" (2002: 13); manifolds, as the space of possible states of a system, regulated by the system's degrees of freedom; dynamical processes, in terms of trajectories in a space, recurrent behavior, and processes of differentiation; singularities that act as attractors around which a number of trajectories converge within the same sphere of influence (basin of attraction), possibly leading to a steady state (structural stability); and so forth. De Landa summons complexity concepts to explain the Deleuzian world. Multiplicities are concrete universals, they are divergent, and cannot be thought about in terms of 3-dimensional metric Euclidean space but of n-th dimensional (non-metric) topological spaces, although the former is produced through differentiations in latter. This happens through concrete physical processes of differentiation of an undifferentiated continuous intensive space into extensive structures (i.e., discontinuous, divisible structures with metric properties) through processes that include phase transitions, symmetry-breaking, etc. Multiplicities are thus immanent to material processes (see also the useful Primer on Complexity at the end of the volume by Haila and Dykes, eds. 2006).
How does the actualization of the real happen? Deleuze makes an ontological distinction between actual trajectories and vector fields (inherent tendencies to behave in certain ways). Actual trajectories converge around a basin of attraction with a certain structural stability. This is to say, concrete realizations of a multiplicity are more accurately actualizations of a vector field -actualizations of a larger field of virtuality. This is not opposed to the real but to the actual -that is, it is another structural part of reality. The status of multiplicities is virtuality. This approach requires understanding the individuation of possible histories. This is complicated because the actualization of vector fields is rarely a linear process, on the contrary it is shaped by non-linear dynamics; trajectories may emerge out of an attractor even by accident or external shocks; they are always the result of a contingent history. Alternatives that are pursued at a given point (especially at bifurcation) may depend on chance fluctuations in the environment (a point underscored by complexity theorists, e.g., Prigogine and Nicolis 1989; Sol? and Goodwin 2000), in a conjunction of chance and necessity. What matters in the investigation is to remain
29 aspects of assemblage theory. First, assemblage theory emphasizes the exteriority of relations; second, it postulates two dimensions of analysis: a) the role played by the components, from the purely material to the purely expressive; b) processes of territorialization and deterritorialization that either stabilize or destabilize the identity and (internal consistency and sharpness of boundaries) of an assemblage. Third, it introduces several other mechanisms, particular those of coding and decoding (by genes and language). Assemblage theory also seeks to account for the multi-scaled character of social reality, and provides adjustments to this end. First, it recognizes the need to explain the historical production of the assemblage, but without placing emphasis only in the moment of birth (e.g., as in the origin of the collectivity "PCN") or original emergence of its identity at the expense of processes that maintain this identity through time. Second, assemblages are produced by recurrent processes; given a population of assemblages at one scale, these processes can generate larger-scale assemblages using members of existing population as components. Assemblages (e.g., organizations), in other words, come into being in a world already populated by other assemblages. Third, there are complex entities that cannot be treated as individuals. Here de Landa introduces other (non-metric, topological) concepts from Deleuze, particularly those of possibility spaces or phase spaces (from physical-chemistry), and attractors (universal singularities or topological invariants) that might be shared by many systems; and the concept of diagram as that which structures the space of possibilities of a particular assemblage.
Finally, there is the question of how assemblages operate at larger time scales -they often endure longer than their components and change at slower rate. Does it take longer to effect change in organizations than in people, for example? At this level, it is important to identify a) collective unintended consequences --slow cumulative processes-- that result from repeated interactions; b) products of deliberate planning. The first item is more common in long-term historical change. In the second case, enduring change happens as a result of mobilization of internal resources (from material resources to, say, solidarity). In general, the larger the social entity targeted for change the larger the amount of resources that must be mobilized. This implies that spatial scale does have temporal consequences since the necessary means may have to be accumulated over time. Said differently, the larger the spatial scale of the change desired the more extensive the alliances among those involved need to be, and the more enduring their commitment to change.
там же пересечения с когнитивистами (Матурана-Варела)
