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 Felix 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...