De Landa, M. (2000). A thousand years of non linear history

De Landa, M. (2000). A thousand years of non linear history (1a ed.). New York: Swerve Editions.

(De Landa, 2000)

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Introduction

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(…) Many historians have abandoned their Eurocentrism and now question the very rise of the West (…) and some have even left behind their anthropocentrism and include a host of nonhuman histories in their accounts.

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Philosophy is not, however, the only discipline that has been influenced by a new awareness of the role of historical processes. Science, too, has acquired a historical consciousness. It is not an exaggeration to say that in the last two or three decades, history has infiltrated physiscs, chemistry, and biology (…)

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(…) both classical thermodynamics and Darwinism admitted only one possible historical outcome, the reaching of thermal equilibrium or of the fittest design. In both cases, once this point was reached, historical processes ceased to count. In a sense, optimal design or optimal distribution of energy represented an end of history for these theories (…)

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(…) the move away from energetic equilibrium and linear causality has reinjected the natural sciences with historical concerns. This book is an exploration of the possibilities that might be opened to philosophical reflection by a similar move in the social sciences in general and history in particular. These pages explore the possibilities of a nonlinear and nonequilibrium history by tracing the development of the West in three historical narratives (…)

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(…) However oversimplified this picture may be, it contains a significant clue as to the nature of nonlinear history: if the different “stages” of human history were indeed brought about by phase transitions, then they are not “stages” at all -that is, progressive developmental steps, each better than the previous one, and indeed leaving the previous one behind.

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(…) even the humblest forms of matter and energy have the potential for self-organization (…) When put together, all these forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined. And this insight into matter’s inherent creativity needs to be fully incorporated into our new materialist philosophies.

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(…) however, what matters is not the planned results of decision making, but the unintended collective consequences of human decisions.

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In a real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated “stuff” simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes (…) a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy in its different forms and of the multiple coexistences and interactions.

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Conclusions and speculations

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We repeatedly saw that hierarchies and meshworks occur mostly in mixtures, so it is convenient to have a label to refer these changing combinations. If the hierarchical components of the mix dominate over the meshwork components, we may speak of a highly stratified structure, while the opposite combination will be referred to as having a low degree of stratification (…) we may speak of a given mixture as undergoing processes of destratification as well as restratification, as its proportions of homogeneous and heterogeneous components change. Finally, since what truly defines the real world (…) are the unformed and unstructured flows form which these two derive (…) to this flowing reality animated from within by self-organizing processes constituting a veritable nonorganic life: the Body without Organs (BwO) (…)

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I have attempted here to describe Western history in the last one thousand years as a series of processes occurring in th BwO: pidginizations, creolizations, and standardizations in the flow of the norms; isolations, contacts and institutionalizations in the flow of memes; domestications, feralizations, and hybridizations in the flow of genes; and intensifications, accelerations, and decelerations in the flows of energy and materials. Cities and their mineral exoskeletons, their shortened food chains, and their dominant dialects are among the structures we saw emerge form these nonlinear flows. Once in place, they reacted back on the flows, either to inhibit them or to further stimulate them.

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To view human history as unfolding immersed in this cauldron of nonorganic life is one way to eliminate notions of progress or unilineal development. Indeed, the three narratives I used to approach the geological, biological, and linguistic histories of the West were framed not in terms of “man” and his manifest destiny, but in terms of stuff undergoing different kinds of intensification.