Scan barcode
tombomp's review against another edition
5.0
As a different perspective on history, it's fascinating and well worth reading. It doesn't always successfully avoid a teleological perspective and sometimes it feels like "description of history. this happened because nonlinear stuff" without a real connection but it does a pretty good job considering. It works pretty great as a history in itself, too. The conclusion doesn't really explain itself too great, which is the one real annoyance I have. I have a few problems with the theory from a Marxist perspective but as a well argued and relatively unusual perspective that challenges preconceptions and redefines them it's excellent and I recommend it.
[I should note the two things that stood out to me, both minor asides unrelated to the rest of the book but both annoying. He says that a labour theory of value believes a broken thing can be just as valuable as a thing that works as though he's just destroyed it, ignoring ideas of utility. He says that terms like patriarchy aren't useful because they imply society wide deliberate structure (something like that) when it's hard to see patriarchy as anything else - descriptive terms are still useful even if the exact mechanism by which they work isn't completely defined]
[I should note the two things that stood out to me, both minor asides unrelated to the rest of the book but both annoying. He says that a labour theory of value believes a broken thing can be just as valuable as a thing that works as though he's just destroyed it, ignoring ideas of utility. He says that terms like patriarchy aren't useful because they imply society wide deliberate structure (something like that) when it's hard to see patriarchy as anything else - descriptive terms are still useful even if the exact mechanism by which they work isn't completely defined]
jensaperstein's review against another edition
5.0
Was never totally sure what was happening. Had a great time, though.
"In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated "stuff" simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes. Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality, or, in other words, they all represent the different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself. Thus, what follows will not be a chronicle of "man" and "his" historical achievements, but a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy in its different forms and of the multiple coexistences and interactions of these 21 forms. Geological, organic, and linguistic materials will all be allowed to "have their say" in the form that this book takes, and the resulting chorus of material voices will, I hope, give us a fresh perspective on the events and processes that have shaped the history of this millennium."
"But if a set of rules is not the source of the combinatorial productivity of language, then what is?" I worry about these things as well. This book was cool.
"In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated "stuff" simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes. Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality, or, in other words, they all represent the different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself. Thus, what follows will not be a chronicle of "man" and "his" historical achievements, but a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy in its different forms and of the multiple coexistences and interactions of these 21 forms. Geological, organic, and linguistic materials will all be allowed to "have their say" in the form that this book takes, and the resulting chorus of material voices will, I hope, give us a fresh perspective on the events and processes that have shaped the history of this millennium."
"But if a set of rules is not the source of the combinatorial productivity of language, then what is?" I worry about these things as well. This book was cool.
ungezieferwerden's review against another edition
2.0
de landa definitely bit off more than he could chew here. while his framings are interesting they fail to convince with his selection of sources (perilously eurocentric in matters of history, scientistic rather than scientific for biology) and too often to compensate he resorts to an ad hoc aesthetic selection of elements with poorly justified (if at all) agential capacity. it also doesn’t help that he uses a conception of marxism that at the time of writing (and long after the brenner debate) had been rejected in, and supplanted by the works of many anglo-american marxists.
alisham's review against another edition
4.0
if you wanna get stoned and think about materialism it's a fun time! more building blocks of a way of thinking about the world/systems, than necessarily a correct or complete philosophy of historical processes (if that is even a reasonable way to conceive of history, but materialists gonna materialist.) the linguistics section felt hopelessly out of date, but it didn't take away from the original ideas, just complicated them. i expect i'll think on this one.
More...