The philosophical machine: Vertov, deleuze and guattari on the interchanging movement from art to philosophy

What is Philosophy?, the third volume of the series of books that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote on “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, presents us with a rather unusual idea, but one that is essential to understanding contemporary philosophical thought: the notion that philosophy is a concept-creating machine that must be connected to other machines, such as the arts and the sciences. Philosophy, science, and art are three distinct forms of reliable thinking. Given the heterogeneity of thinking, in what sense can the three distinct forms of thinking answer the problem of creating concepts and using the machine as an allegory? This essay aims to analyse philosophy’s role in its relation to artistic and scientific practices by examining Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Moving Camera (1929). It will focus on three guiding principles: creation is not exclusive to art and the sensible; philosophy mediates the relation between art and the sciences; and this mediation aims to keep their discord alive, not to solve it.