Book Review: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa, published by The MIT Press, 2000. Paperback, 333 pages. (Amazon)
To present the last one thousand years of historical developments, De Landa separates his book into three overlapping categories: Economic, Biological and Linguistic. Each chapter is further broken down into three parts with a philosophical inquiry bookended by roughly chronological histories (1000-1700 and 1700-2000). The author focuses on the flow of "stuff" (i.e. matter, energy, money, information) and their respective emergence and effect upon the flows from whence they emerged. This abstract notion goes against the typical "cause-and-effect" histories and ways-of-thinking that predominates today. Indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Fernand Braudel, the book's conclusion uses the former's Body without Organs as a model for locating his own Western history. By seeing human history in the last one thousand years developing from natural processes (the sun, rocks and lava, wind, genes) and affecting these same processes, De Landa presents a novel way to think about ourselves and the world around us.
To present the last one thousand years of historical developments, De Landa separates his book into three overlapping categories: Economic, Biological and Linguistic. Each chapter is further broken down into three parts with a philosophical inquiry bookended by roughly chronological histories (1000-1700 and 1700-2000). The author focuses on the flow of "stuff" (i.e. matter, energy, money, information) and their respective emergence and effect upon the flows from whence they emerged. This abstract notion goes against the typical "cause-and-effect" histories and ways-of-thinking that predominates today. Indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Fernand Braudel, the book's conclusion uses the former's Body without Organs as a model for locating his own Western history. By seeing human history in the last one thousand years developing from natural processes (the sun, rocks and lava, wind, genes) and affecting these same processes, De Landa presents a novel way to think about ourselves and the world around us.
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