War in the Age of Intelligent Machines by Manuel DeLanda

“An abstract motor, the mechanism dissociated from the physical contraption, consists of three separate components: a reservoir (of steam, for example), a form of exploitable difference (the heat/cold difference) and a diagram or program for the efficient exploitation of (thermal) differences. In the nineteenth century, even social theories began to come complete with their own reservoirs, their own mode of difference and their own circulation diagrams. Serres mentions Darwin, Marx and Freud as examples in the area of scientific discourse: reservoirs of populations, of capital or of unconscious desires, put to work by the use of differences of fitness, class or sex, each following a procedure directing the circulation of naturally selected species, or commodities and labor, or symptoms and fantasies. Serres also finds the abstract motor in such apparently unrelated areas as painting (Turner) and literature (Zola).”

-Manuel DeLanda, 1991