The final version of “Simulating Machines: Modelling, Metaphysics and the Mechanosphere” has now been published online in a special issue of Deleuze & Guattari Studies, celebrating the 40th anniversary of their book A Thousand Plateaus. You can download it here.

This article is closely related to my earlier article on “Modeling Metaphysics: The Rise of Simulation and the Reversal of Platonism” (available here), where I made a similar argument but from a different direction and for a different audience (computer scientists).

Here is the abstract: This article explores some of the ways in which the conceptual apparatus of A Thousand Plateaus, and especially its machinic metaphysics, can be connected to recent developments in computer modeling and social simulation, which provide new tools for thinking that are becoming increasingly popular among philosophers and social scientists. Conversely, the successful deployment of these tools provides warrant for the flat ontology articulated in A Thousand Plateaus and therefore contributes to the “reversal of Platonism” for which Deleuze had called in his earlier works, such as Logic of Sense. The first major section offers a brief exposition of some key concepts in A Thousand Plateaus in order to set the stage for the second and third major sections, which argue that the fabrication of a metaphysics of immanence can be accelerated by connecting its conceptual apparatus more explicitly to insights derived from philosophical analyses of computational modeling and simulation and the social scientific use of Manuel DeLanda’s “assemblage theory.” The article concludes with a summary of the argument and a brief consideration of some of the potential ethical and political implications of this interdisciplinary engagement.