Non-Linear History

Mexican writer, artist, philosopher and science writer Manuel De Landa is one of the most interesting and creative thinkers of our day. Nonlinear History has an ambitious project: to tell a very important part of human history, intertwined with the history of energy flows, rocks and microorganisms. While carrying out this project, the author, who was inspired by new approaches in modern natural sciences - such as non-linear dynamics, self-organization theories, artificial life and artificial intelligence, chaos theory -, Deleuze's philosophy and Braudel's historiography, became the leading name of a "new materialism" approach with these efforts. .
This materialist history reads the history of the physical, biological and social/cultural worlds through the history of the solidification, acceleration and deceleration processes that matter-energy flows undergo. Therefore, he treats human history as a complex process that is affected by the material world in which it exists in different ways, but at the same time affects this material world in very different ways: This is a history that is non-linear and does not follow a purposeful "progress".
He organizes his book in three parts: geological history, biological history and linguistic history. It shows that similar processes were at work in all three histories, which are impossible to understand with straightforward determinism and functionalist approaches. Again, he develops a passionate polemic against the attitude that has become increasingly widespread lately, the "cultural relativist" attitude that tries to understand people solely through culture or language. ...



Number of Pages: 360

Year of Printing: 2013


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Metis Publishing

First Printing Year: 2006

Number of Pages: 360

Language Turkish