Artrite 4 k.way 2008

Manuel de Landa. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997, pp 57-70.

Manuel de Landa is a writer and philosopher. His work is broad-based and includes science, economics, and the theories of Gilles Deleuze, nonlinear dynamics and social organization. In an interview with Konrad Becker and Miss M. at Virtual Futures, he said “So as a philosopher, I am interested in all kinds of phenomena of self-organization, from the wind patterns that have regulated human life for a long time, like the monsoon or trade winds which are self-organized winds, to the self-organizing patterns inside our bodies, to the self-organizing processes in the economy, to the self-organizing process that created the Internet”. 1
Sand stone and Granite is chapter in his book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, within which he investigates common physical processes behind the formation of meshworks and hierarchies using the natural transformational geological process whereby mountain boulders are carried to the sea by rivers and sorted, relocated and sedimented in homogenous groupings, as a way of raising philosophical questions.
He describes how firstly there is the sorting process and then there is the sticking the different sorted groups together process consolidating the stones in their new spatial relationships described as an “architectonic” structure.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the two processes of cementing and consolidating as the two operations constituting an engineering diagram.2 ( de Landa P.60) that suggests that the same abstract process of stratification can be found in the human world as well.
Finding different possibilities for human societies to interrelate and interconnect is also a concern of Jared Diamond, who has studied the histories of societies that have ‘collapsed’ and investigated the complex and multitudinal facets and interconnections that have contributed to each collapse. He then made an in-depth contemporary study of problems to do with populations and environmental and resource crisis, along with examples of more successful societal models.
Whilst both de Landa and Diamond communicate a sense of profound urgency in their discourse, de Landa optimistically assumes that humanity may one day agree on a shared beneficial set of values. He writes that “The combinatorial possibilities-the number of possible hybrids of meshworks and hierarchies-are immense…and experimental and empirical attitude would seem to be called for…in our search for viable hybrids we must look for inspiration in as many domains as
possible 3.
This seeking for inspiration and multiple combinatorial possibilities both authors proritise highlight the immanent problems the world is struggling with. Diamond’s hope is that ” By relating output variables to input variables, I aim to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses 4.
He adds, “ My remaining cause for hope is another consequence of the globalized modern world’s interconnectedness. Past societies lacked archeologists and television. …Thus we have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past peoples.” 5

1 An interview with Manuel de Landa with Konrad Becker and Miss M. at Virtual Futures, Warwick 96 http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/intdelanda.htm
2 de Landa, Manuel. “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History”. New York: Zone Books, 1997. P.60
3 Ibid. P.69-70.
4 Diamond, Jared. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, New York: Penguin Books, 2006. P.18
5 Ibid. P.525