A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

Manuel DeLanda

introduction

“All structures that surround us and form our reality (mountains, animals and plants, human languages, social institutions) are the products of specific historical processes.” (p. 11)

“Both classical thermodynamics and Darwinism admitted only one possible historical outcome, the reaching of thermal equilibrium or of the fittest design. In both cases, once this point was reached, historical processes ceased to count.” (p. 13) However, recent advances have changed this: Prirogine showed “that the classical results were only valid for closed systems, where the overall quantities of energy are always conserved. If one allows an intense flow of energy in and out of a system … , the number and type of possible historical outcomes greatly increases … we now have multiple coexisting forms of varying complexity.” (p. 14)

Attach/link relevant notes on 3-body problem, non-linear causality.

“The industrial revolution can be viewed in terms of reciprocal stimulation between technologies and institutions, whereby the elements involved managed to form a closed loop, so that the entire assemblage became self-sustaining.” (p. 20)

Geological History 1000 – 1700 A.D.

“The history of urban economics since the Middle Ages,” incl. analysis of positive feedback (Von Foerster notes, link def.) … “each involving a different set of individuals and institutions and evolving in a different area of the European urban landscape.” (p. 20)

“We must avoid the error of comparing cities to organisms, especially when the metaphor is meant to imply (as it has in the past) that both exist in a state of … homeostasis. Rather, urban centers and living creatures must be seen as different dynamical systems operating far from equilibrium” (p. 28)
There are two processes of urban development: a spontaneous process in which the city gets its shape from following things like the landscape or the distribution of the smaller communities from which it grows (ex. Venice), and the deliberate, planned process that we associate with cities such as Washington, D.C. The important point is that the forms result from decision-making processes. Most cities are mixtures of these two processes. (p. 30)
“Markets and bureaucracies, as well as unplanned and planned cities, are concrete instances of a more general distinction: self-organized meshworks of diverse elements, versus hierarchies of uniform elements… meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another. For instance, as markets grow in size they tend to form commercial hierarchies.” (p. 32) Other examples?

To clarify, DeLanda also seems to mean market in the physical sense (i.e. flea market or trade fair). He’s not just using it in the sense of “Bull Market”, etc. Also (later) note the use of “Anti-Markets” after Braudel: neologism used “exclusively to refer to a certain segment of the population of commercial and industrial institutions,” in an attempt to avoid some of the confusion created by the different meanings of the word “capitalism.” (p. 48)
“McNeil’s hypothesis is that exposive, self-stimulating (“auto-catalytic”) urban dynamics cannot emerge when hierarchical components overwhelm meshwork components.” Braudel seems to agree. (p. 34)

Planned v. spontaneous money: “Whenever these two types of money came into contact, standardized money would inevitably win.” (p. 35) Save this for later re: thinking about remittances and alternative systems for their transfer (ex: via pre-paid phone cards), also scrip ex: Lewes pound, also Dead Medium: Metal Money. Precious Metal as a Network Protocol, Julian Dibbel, barter.

Potentially important for thinking about resilience and its relationship to energy inputs (i.e. fossil fuels) and transaction costs:

“This point might be clarified by applying certain ideas recently developed by the neoinstitutionalist economist Douglas North. As we noted above, not only resources change hands in the market place but also property rights; hence the market facilitates simple exchanges as well as potentially complex transactions. The latter involves a host of “hidden” costs ranging from the energy and skill needed to ascertain the quality of a product, to the drawing of sales and employment contracts, to the enforcement of those contracts. In small medieval markets these “transaction costs” were minimal, and so were their enforcement mechanisms: threats of mutual retaliation, ostracism, codes of conduct, and other informal constraints sufficed to allow for the more or less smooth functioning of a market. But as the volume and scale of trade intensified (or as its character changed, as in the case of foreign, long- distance trade), new institutional norms and organizations were needed to regulate the flow of resources, ranging from standardized weights and measures to the use of notarial records as evidence in merchant law courts or state courts. North’s main point is that, as medieval markets grew and complexified, their transaction costs increased accordingly; without a set of institutional norms and organizations to keep these costs down, the turbulent intensification of trade in the West would have come to a halt. Economies of scale in trade and low-cost enforceability of contracts were, according to North, mutually stimulating.”

Central Place theory vs. Hohenberg and Lees “network system” … “Generally, the flows of traded goods that circulated up and down these hierarchies consisted of basic, necessities, such as food … in contradistinction, the circulation of luxury items originated somewhere else. Long-distance trade, which has since Antiquity dealt with prestige goods, is the province of cities outside of the Central Place system, cities that act as gateways to faraway trading circuits, as well as nodes in a network not directly constrained by distance. For example, many European gateway cities were maritime ports.” … “Instead of a hierarchy of towns, long-distance trading centers formed a meshwork, an interlocking system of complementary economic functions.” (p. 39) So, how would we evaluate the relative connectivity of maritime ports and today’s “ports” or shipping hubs (air freight, just-in-time distribution, vertical integrated manufacturing, containerized shipping, etc). More importantly, are there historical instances of basic necessities originating somewhere else (I think this may come up in the second chapter regard Venice, though I haven’t re read that – it’s been a few years).

“One very important feature of Central Place and Network systems is the type of cultural structures they give rise to.” Hierarchies homogenize while meshworks interlock heterogeneous elements without imposing uniformity. (p. 40)

Nonlinear models of market dynamics. Galbraith re: “spontaneous economic activity (markets)” vs. “planned economic process (big business)” (p. 46)

Against Marxist “teleological conception of economic history in terms of a linear progression of modes of production.”

Sandstone and Granite

Engineering diagrams / abstract machines behind structure generating processes that yield specific meshworks and hierarchies. geophilosphy. hydraulic computers – rivers as sorting mechanisms. abstract machines and the generation of social classes. Discussion of role of positive (thermostat) and negative (explosion) feedback.

Geological History 1700 – 2000 A.D.

Intensifications from stored energy (fossil fuels), coal towns formed conurbations (Mumford?). Simmons argues that industrial take off didn’t occur until steam-engine (Newcomb) (p. 76) Meshworks of mutually supporting innovations (coal-iron-steam-cotton) before the 1800s these often led to resources depletion and diminishing returns (p. 77)

“Skills provided ‘catalytic information’ … capable of bringing together and amplifying flows of energy and materials. This is a good argument against labor theories of value, for which a a machine is nothing but the congealed muscular energy that went into its production.” (p. 79)

Railroads and the military: management, operations research. Military influence on the rationalization of labor. “The American System of Manufacturing,” interchangeable parts in small arms. (p. 84) increasing homogenization.

Economies of scale vs. economies of agglomeration. electrification. city killing (see urbicide and Jane Jacobs) via the mobility of large corporations after they have internalized economies of agglomeration (p. 93) Technologies such as electricity, automobile allowed cities to overcome internal limits to their growth, but were (are) dependent on cheap energy

Silicon Valley vs. Route 128 (Mass)

“As late as the 1960s, a routinized, rationalized production process that generated economies of scale was thought by many to be the perfect example of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. That so-called systems approach celebrated routinization as the crowning achievement of modern science. Today we know that planned loops of triggers and flows are only one of a number of systems that exhibit emergent properties, and that spontaneously generated loops may be more adaptive and resilient than rigidly planned ones.” (p. 97)