Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History: A Synopsis and Critique

Here's a small synopsis and critique of De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. A quick word, though, about what De Landa means to me. It's actually been something of a great pleasure to read him again, because I think I can say, without exaggeration, that my chance stumbling upon his other book, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, among a random library shelf at uni one day, changed my life. I was looking for a different book, and I couldn't tell you for the life of me what it was now. I checked out Intensive Science because it looked interesting and gosh, it was nothing less than an Event for me, something after which almost everything I read now is, in some distant way or another, related to Deleuze. To return to De Landa is to return to the primal scene! Him and Levi Bryant's work on Deleuze, I should mention.

With the distance of time - it's been years - I'm heartened by the fact that I can take an equal distance now, to De Landa's work. A long while ago, this book would have blown me away, just as Intensive Science did. It is, in many ways, just as brilliant, and just as jam-packed with insight and facts. To read De Landa is to be overwhelmed and dazzled by his synthesizing ability. But now, I think, having matured a little in my understanding of history and the world, I can pick out things that bother me, and I'm no longer quite so in thrall as I would have been, way back when. This is a sign, I hope, of my own (positive?) intellectual development! I also really love this photo, which is the book with a (unplanned) matching cupcake. Anyway, onto the good stuff.

 

§1: Synopsis 

What happens when history is treated as a matter of flows? Flows of rocks, of people, microbes, languages, food, and money? Flows that accelerate and decelerate, intensify and extensify, coagulate and stratify, catalyse and come to a halt? Well, Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is what happens. This is history, but not as you know it: not class struggle, not great men, not events, and still less even nation-states; De Landa instead tracks, as it were, inputs and outputs, all the ingredients that go into making the Grand Events of history, but ingredients that usually fall far below and above the thresholds of what captures our given attention. 

Hence its ‘nonlinearity’: De Landa’s history is equally a history of scales (how do you get from rocks to mountains? From cities to states?), as much ‘horizontal’ across time (‘what’ happened), as ‘vertical’ through time (‘how’ it happened). And it’s in the way that this ‘how’ is shared across time and scale, that constitutes the philosophical interest of this book. Indeed De Landa’s opening sentence runs: “this is not a book of history, but a book of philosophy”. And it is so to the extent that the history within - of which there is plenty, almost too much - testifies to the philosophy, exhibits it in a way rarely done, with a degree of erudition and learning that verges on the superhuman.

Just consider the scope of this thing: broken up into three sections, on economics, biology, and linguistics - De Landa reads as though fluent in all three, not only synthesising but also intervening among an ocean of literature, so as to carve out his own distinctive spot amongst it all. The ‘thousand years’ that he covers - from roughly 1000AD to 2000AD - is itself a story of what he calls ‘intensification’: with natural flows accelerating, expanding, and setting off new flows, which in turn, do the same. To take just one example of the innumerable many within, De Landa charts how the intensification of trade was itself relayed in the dynamics of colonialism and conquest, fed into the explosive era of the industrial revolution, and transduced into the enormous sloshy flows of fast finance that governs so much of the economy today.

And that’s just in the ‘economics’ third of the book! But if that’s the kind of story he tells ‘across’ time, then what about ‘through’ it? Well here does the philosophical accent really pick up, with De Landa leaning into the use of the tools from dynamic systems theory on the one hand, and the work of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the other, to specify the various mechanisms, shared across all three domains, that generate these movements of intensification. Dubbed ‘structure-generating processes’ or ‘engineering diagrams’, the stake of De Landa’s book is to show that these processes are, in fact, the same - identical even - among all the disparate scales and times that he looks at, showing them to be at work regardless of the domain examined.

Think about that for a moment: this means that geology, economics, life, and even culture are all governed by the same mechanisms which drive their long-term dynamics, and De Landa here is making the claim to have found - or at least, to be relaying the finding of - those mechanisms! This is real big picture stuff, and the intrigue of A Thousand Years is in the convincing and meticulous way in which De Landa works to substantiate his thesis. Is it successful? Within limits, I think yes. De Landa’s is a coldly mechanical look at history, and there’s no doubt that the mechanisms he outlines do the work he says they do. But what they are not, is exhaustive.

§2: Commentary

Politics, for instance, is given short shift here, and one is more likely to find De Landa talking about the 'crossing of thresholds between stable-state attractors', rather than say, struggle and achievement. In the one mention of the French Revolution that is found here, De Landa is concerned with… the language of the time. But more than just a quibble about pathos, this leads to curious oversights - as with De Landa’s buying into (the very 90s-00s) trope that states are ever more on the wane, and that globalisation would see a decline in their capacities for the exercise of power. This, in turn, follows from De Landa’s overly schematic way of assessing organization - as either a matter of ‘meshworks’ or ‘hierarchies’ and the sliding scale between the two. Roughly: a matter of less or more formalised organization and homogenisation, with De Landa exhibiting a marked but qualified preference for the former and its heterogeneity.

This kind of ‘left-libertarian’ impulse - which is, to be fair, far more implied than made explicit - feeds into De Landa’s quibble with Marxist accounts of history: ‘capitalism’ for De Landa is far too ’totalizing’ a lens to examine history, and, following the work of historian Fernand Braudel (whose writing on the longue durée of history is unsurprisingly central to A Thousand Years), De Landa prefers instead to see capitalism as merely one more mode of social organization working alongside others. To which one wants to add: it sure is, but as any account of capitalism shows, part of its perniciousness is the way in which is parasitises upon those other modes of organization all the better to entrench itself (think here of housework and carework, notorious for their status as unacknowledged support beams of capitalist reproduction). Totalization and differentiation can't simply be treated as poles to measure organization by.

But confined, as it were, to the two parametric measures of ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘homogeneity’ (parameters which are naturally lent by the effort to view history by means of systems theory), these kinds of dynamics simply ‘slip through’ the otherwise rich conceptual apparatus that governs A Thousand Years. And if, in dealing with the State and with capitalism - arguably among the two most pressing topics of concern for today - A Thousand Years cannot find firm footing, then one can’t but help be suspicious of the utility of this approach to history. To continue a little bit, De Landa's allergy to speaking about capitalism extends right down to his vocabulary. At some point in the book, he simply stops calling it capitalism and - again following Braudel - refers to it instead as a matter of 'anti-markets', in that capitalism for him is a matter of consolidation and monopolizing, such that the heterogeneity of market players are suppressed for the sake of just a few.

But to anyone who has borne witness to the hopping-mad proliferation of market-logics into every possible sphere of life, under the auspices of a capitalism in its flowering, neoliberal mode, to speak of capitalism as 'anti-markets' is its own brand of madness. In this, De Landa basically falls on the side of contemporary apologists who, blaming capitalism's ills on a pathologized 'crony capitalism' gone off the rails, hope instead for a capitalism kept a little better in check, accorded its own its own plot in the wider garden of socio-economic organization. But, as Deleuze and Guattari themselves understood - following Marx - the only limit to capitalism is capitalism itself, which otherwise corrodes every effort to circumscribe it here and there. De Landa's effort to ward this off by claiming to 'correct' D&G in the conclusion to A Thousand Years (where he says that the pair would have been more consistent with their own methodology if they didn't totalize capitalism) speaks less to the limits of D&G, than it does to De Landa.

Nonetheless! Despite all of this, A Thousand Years is still an absolute corker of a book, with a ton to learn from. In particular, De Landa's reconstruction of the mechanism of 'double articulation', so central to the D&G's "Geology of Morals" chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, is still among the best and most useful in all of the voluminous secondary literature written on the topic. That De Landa has been able to take that model and 'apply' it to, quite literally, a thousand years of history, and provide example after example, is no mean feat. Most people can't even supply a single one, let alone a book-length treatment of it. So, shortcomings or no, this still remains a model for how philosophy might intersect with history, across an astonishing variety of scales. If one keeps in mind its limits, this is still very much worth the read.