| Introduction: (11-22)
I. Historicized philosophy: emphasis on morphogenesis: all
structures are products of processes
A. Materialist historians:
Braudel and McNeill
B. Historicized science
1. Classical modern science: reversible time, universal laws
2. 19th C: introduction of historical processes, but with only one outcome:
a. Thermodynamics: time’s arrow: equilibrium
b. Evolution: organisms as constructions: fittest design
3. 20th C: revolutions
a. Thermodynamics: Prigogine: attractors and bifurcators
b. Biology: nonlinear dynamics of ecosystems: changing fitness landscapes
II. ATY tries to propose nonlinear
social sciences
A. Arthur Iberall’s early
attempt:
1. 3 parameters: settlement; energy consumption; interactions
2. Gas, liquid, and crystal forms of society
a. DeLanda’s presentation here indicates one of my principal complaints
about his
work:
he ignores DG’s notion of anti-production (drawn from Bataille’s notion
of
glorious expenditure). Thus he says that surpluses are only available
at State
form.
This ignores DG’s readings of Clastres and political anthropology: the
potlatch
is a positive mechanism to prevent the State by requiring chief to waste
surpluses.
3. No progress/stages, but exploration of a virtual space of social forms
B. DL wants to remove
metaphor by showing that all matter-energy flows have self-
organizing potentials
1. Solitons or waves
2. Attractors
3. Nonlinear combinatorics: creation of novel virtual structures
C. Description of human
behavior: irreducible reference to beliefs and desires
1. Constrained decisions by place in hierarchy
2. Unintended collective consequences by virtue of meshworks (markets)
III. New methodology:
A. Limits of analysis:
necessity of taking account of emergent effects (arising from
interaction of parts [often nonlinear --
e..g., positive or negative feedback loops], so that
analysis into parts and then addition will
miss them)
B. Bottom-up approach:
E.g., cellular automata simulations to demonstrate emergence
1. Do not postulate systematicity until you can show a system-generating
process
2. Treat entities as populations of entities at lower level
a. DL rejects use of “capitalism” as society-wide or systematic designation,
preferring
Braudel’s restriction of capitalism to anti-market institutions at top
level,
above markets and material life
b. This is a huge question, relating to DG as well as Marx: they would
I think
claim
that the tendency of real subsumption (intensification and spread of
commodity
relations into previous market or subsistence areas) is precisely the
tendency
to the subjection of all social interactions to a single rule of profit,
or
in
DG terms, axiomatic of decoded flows, and is thus the rendering-systematic
of
all life as capitalist. That this is a limit, perhaps never to be reached,
doesn’t
prevent
systematic effects once past a certain threshold? Thus the heuristic
benefits
of looking for capitalist relations in previously non-commodified areas,
by
letting you see beginning trends and predict probable outcomes, outweighs
DL’s
methodological scruples (or so it could be argued?).
c. By analogy, would we also have to reject “racism” and “patriarchy”
as system-
level
descriptions? There as well we would have to weigh political utility of
such
descriptions over against methodological scruples.
C. Rejection of orthodox
economics and orthodox sociology
1. Economics posits individual (atomized) decision maker and thus misses
emergent
effects and constraints
of institutions: its methodological individualism is okay, but
not its ontological individualism
2. Sociology is top-down, positing a whole (“society”) that is rather
to be explained,
and seeing individuals
as mere rule-followers (“methodological holism”)
3. Neo-institutional economics (North, Vanberg, Williamson)
a. Splits the methodological difference: methodological individualism
(of
economic
individuals) and ontological holism (of ecology of institutions): once
alive
they react back on the flows that gave birth to them by serving as
catalysts,
regulators, inhibitors, etc
(1) here again, DL misses a key DG point from AO: that (adult)
“individuals”
are formed by social processes (“desiring-production”), so economics
cannot assume a pre-formed individual, even with bounded rationality and
subject to institutional constraints
b. Transaction costs as key
4. ATY attempts to combine neo-institutional economics with complexity
theory
IV. Preview of book:
A. Chapter One: “geological”
dynamics of European towns (energy intensifications
[agriculture, coal, oil], arms races, institutional
developments, relation with States, etc)
explain eventual Western domination of
millennium
1. As we will see, I think he slights the Williams/Blackburn thesis about
body political
effects of slave trade
[money as economic catalyst and sugar/coffee/tea/nicotine as
somatic speed]: although
DL’s methodology is not at fault here, just a matter of
emphasis on the inputs
to the auto-catalytic loop of the Industrial Revolution
B. Chapter Two: eco-systematic
approach: germs, plants, animals, and humans: flows of
organic materials: cities as parasites:
flows of genes
C. Chapter Three: linguistic
materials: dialects and standard languages; pidgins and creoles,
media effects
V. DL’s ontological monism
A. Geological, biological,
linguistic are not stages of perfection: there is some stratification,
but there is also interweaving
B. Each layer is animated
by the same self-organizing processes (DG: abstract machines)
C. There is a single
matter-energy flow undergoing phase transitions; each new layer
enriches reservoir of nonlinear dynamics
and combinatorics available for generating new
structures AND processes
|
|