A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

[Dave Monroe]

De Landa, Manuel.  A Thousand Years of Nonlinear
   History.  New York: Zone, 1997.

Following in the wake of his groundbreaking War in the
Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents
a radical synthesis of historical development over the
last one thousand years. More than a simple expository
history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist
philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand
Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while
also engaging the critical new understanding of
material processes derived from the sciences of
dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that
see history as an 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.

De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape
to human societies: economics, biology, and
linguistics. In every case, what one sees is the
self-directed processes of matter and energy
interacting with the whim and will of human history
itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of
rigid teleology and naive notions of progress, and
even more important, free of any deterministic source
of its urban, institutional, and technological forms.
Rather, the source of all concrete forms in the West's
history are shown to derive from internal
morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of
matter-energy itself.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=4052

--- bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> He had to work with an enormous amount of material
> (1500 - 2000 AD)  and it's all interconnected but 
> beautifully organized.   Not exactly a happy ending,
> though.   :-( 

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