| | A
Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.
Manuel De Landa.
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.
. . or . . 
|
