"Machinic Phylum" as explanation and description

This text is pleasantly bewildering. I will attempt to pinpoint a peculiar confusion as it pertains to the concept of the machinic phylum; this concept seems of utmost importance for the mode of insight that this piece promises.

On the one hand, "machinic phylum" can be explanatory. Harkening back to scientists (along with their theoretical perspectives and vocabulary), this term explains phenomenon which occur... but I hesitate to say "naturally" since it is the logic of the non-organic. By "explaining" we could say that it provides an analysis of "causality;" Things happen because they happen for a simple, mathematically derivative reason. This, however, is also tricky since we would like to say causality (and the knowledge of what mathematics describes) is natural and unidirectional. The point of the causal analysis as regards the machinic phylum though, suggests that there is a bizarre emergent property, a "cooperative" formation arising arbitrarily to be a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Something could thus gain an intelligence, like a hive of bees or collection of amoebas or flock of birds nesting, and this intelligence can be "traced."

On the other hand, "machinic phylum" appears to be a concept which operates as an analogy (a term he conveniently uses on page 23 and elsewhere without considering too many of the ramifications of this view). In this respect, the phylum is not necessarily a reflection of what is actually happening but a way to see history "from the perspective of the robot." Hence, DeLanda seems to use this conceptual insight to describe much more complex interactive, human, social phenomena. We can see the mass "flow" of history like a fire or jet stream turbulence - the way in which order emerges out of chaos.

It would seem that these two aspects of the phylum would link up to the straightforward bifurcation of what Delanda gives us on page 20 - for he wishes to look at two notions, order of out chaos and the specific formations that result. In one of his examples, he looks at the singularity of forging iron at the non-organic, machinic level and the use of the iron at the social, phylum level. However, if there is an overlap as I see it, if DeLanda offers us a machinic description of history as non-organic to some extent - the machine of war - then he is attempting to elide the distinction of explaining machinic social formations with describing phylum "singularities." Two holistic problems arise which are greater than the parts of the argument that DeLanda can control: 1. Singularities are by definition that which we cannot explain or account for - the very idea of emergence as beyond the logic of the governing machine of mathematical rules of operation. 2. There is something odd about the "looping" back of intelligent interface going on here. I hope to have this formulated by the time we meet in class, but my suspicion is that intelligence is both inactively part of the assembly and greater than the sum of the war machine whole to reflexively interface with computers...

What I am having trouble understanding is the singularity of conceptual understanding itself once it arises out of the matrix of the machinic phylum of ordering - once intelligence gains the perspective to look back upon the conditions of its own formation. The very emergent property looking at itself now is more than that which produced it. It seems here we could go one of two ways - Hegelian consciouness and the concept of aufhebung or the materialistic soft determinism of mathematical and lower level operations. DeLanda seems to perform both of these positions somehow.