- Hardcover: 333 pages
- Publisher: Zone Books (January 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0942299310
- ISBN-13: 978-0942299311
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 567 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,031,607 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Forcefully challenges habituated understandings of'history., 'urban' and 'economics'." Christopher Hight, AA Files
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.Book Description
Following in the wake of "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines", Manuel De Landa presents a synthesis of historical development over the last one thousand years. The work sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix 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. The result is a study of human societies and their mobile, semistable forms: cities, economies, technologies, and languages. 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 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.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
More philosophy than history,
By nietzschebunyan "nietzschebunyan" (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Paperback)
If you're looking for a lot of philosophical work, then you may be a little disappointed with this book. It is, more than a reflection on and questioning of a nonlinear approach to social systems and human history, an application of such an approach. Thus, I was sometimes left wanting more of a meditation on what the implications of such an approach were, and more of a debate with opposing viewpoints (e.g. engaging with Charles Taylor whose critique of Foucault's approach to historical study has similar bearing on DeLanda's). Also missing is a justification or explanation of DeLanda's reductionism, as evidenced in his frequent statements like "bodies are nothing but...", "societies are just...", etc.Overall, though, a very interesting book. Some of it may seem obvious to those who combine a background in philosophy and biology/ecology, but DeLanda is a good synthesizer and everyone will learn something from this book--his work on cities and plagues is, I found, a particularly useful way of examinging social/political relations between entities (human, suprahuman, etc.). Many of the exclamations that make the book sound catchy (societies are governed by the same principles as geological formations) are never really substantiated to my satisfaction, despite being the ostensible theses of the book. However, while not as revolutionary as the rhetoric may make it sound, this book is a worthwhile contribution to history, historiography--and you even get a bit of Deleuze and Guattari scholarship thrown in.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Understand the BwO!,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Paperback)
The pot of gold at the end of this rainbow covered book is De Landa's explanation of Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs. Worth it for that alone.
0 of 6 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Gibberish,
By
This review is from: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Paperback)
The author is trying to communicate with us, butby using Klingon Battle Language he'd be more intelligible. The terms and concepts in the book appear not to have ordinary meaning, but follow a lexicon inspired by someone who had too much graduate level deconstructionism. I gave it an honest try, on recommendation of Terence McKenna and Mark Pesce. It would seem that the author is writing for an audience with IQs above 200, or I'm hopelessly out of touch.
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