D/A: intensification
Manual DeLanda’s book A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History is a rough outline of a neo-materialist philosophy in the tradition of Braudel, Deleuze and Guatari. Rejecting prevailing attitudes that sees history almost exclusively in terms of texts, discourses, ideologies and metaphors De Landa traces the concrete movements, proceses, and interplays of matter/energy that have shaped human populations in the last millenium. DeLanda’s main concern is not about re-writing the history of how these processes work out, rather creating a theoretical apporach that provides a scientific investgation of the collective human behavior in relation to its physical and biological enviornment.
DeLanda explores these processes through an explicit engagment with complexity theory and utlimately views all historical processes as manifestations of the interplay or inorganic energy/matter. According to him, we live in a world populated by a complex mixture of geological, biological and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history; itself driven by energy/matter.
The most architcturally relevant chapter comes in his ‘geological’ analysis. In this chapter he examines the origin of different types of cities, the building of states and the conduct of wars. He explores these as patterns of complex processes embedded in the flow of energy/matter. Fuels, such as raw materials and biological muscle power, and the optimisation of its deployment, as well as the utilisation of the landscape (wind, ocean, rivers) are all addressed. The organisations and architecture of cities are interpreted as systems which consume, use and redistribute energy, while in the meantime generating products, people, and waste. Importantly, the cultural, political and religious institutions and organisations are viewed as distinct from the intentions, desires and meanings that have traditionally been associated with them. Indeed, De Landa believes they come into existence much in the same way as minerals come into existence in a mountain.
Similar to previous authors in these Stormfront readings (Kwinter, Sloterdijk,) we again see themes hinting at totalitarian abuse. For DeLanda, he see the excessive accumulation of hierarchies at the expense of meshworks to be problematic in the continous flow of energy/matter. His bias is that meshworks are essential to keep the morphogenetic process going. Anti-markets, industries, medical and educational systems resort to linear routinization, standardization, and homogenization with predictable and controlable production which inevitably stunts the process in the long run. While various academic disciplines have come to realize the deadends of such linear modes of thinking, DeLanda believes the key lies in the restratification of such modes of thought.
When reading DeLanda’s history, inevitably assumptions made about the scope of time will come up in the criticism. Why 1000 years? Why not fruther back in time? Also, are we to assume that this system of flowing matter/energy procesess has been going on since the beginning of time? Perhaps this system has always been preexisting. Whiletemporal origins of matter/energy process are likely answered by findings from particle physicists, we still have to deal with DeLanda’s seemingly reductive conclusion of hiearchies being problematic to the meshwork flow of energy/matter. This dominance of hiearchies is a relatively new phenomeon ( only a few hundred years) and may pale in significance to the next 1000 years to come. Delanda’s apporach is best when analyzing long term changes in society, but faces difficulty when analyzing short-term cultural changes and analysiscontemporary human societies.
Also, as much as DeLanda rejects the ideological and subjecive framework that have plagued the social sciences, can a materialist approach really be objective? For one, his theory gives priority to the energy/matter over ideas. However, are those scientific conceptions of matter/energy and closed loop systems still working ideas as well? Perhaps materialist approaches can be just as suspect as was aesthetic modernism’s choice of prosthetics.
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