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In this "concise philosophy of the machine," Gerald Raunigprovides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago bythe French philosophers F?lix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as atechnical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. Thisconception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, andsocial components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism andmechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance--from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction toVittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's"Fragment on Machines" to the deus ex machina of Greek drama--Raunigarrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding itsmost apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 hasbecome a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precariousnature of labor and lives.