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Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work, War in
the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical
synthesis of historical developments during the last one thousand years. A
Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialistic
history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix
Guattari, while engaging -- in an unprecedented manner -- the critical new understanding
of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing
attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies,
and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter
and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an
entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile,
semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages. De
Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies. In every
case -- economics, biology, and linguistics -- he discloses the self-directed
processes of matter and energy interfacing with the whim and will of human history
itself to form a panoramic vision of the West, free of rigid teleology and naïve
notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministic source
for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete
forms in the West's history rather, are shown to derive from internal morphogenetic
capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself. |
