A pragmatic, positive and integrated use of the ideas of nonlinear science and complex systems

Manuel De Landa closes his book, A thousand years of nonlinear history, with a reflection on the pragmatic use of the ideas borrowed from nonlinear science and the science of complex systems. The two main forces that De Landa has been recognized throughout his book are homogenization and heterogenization. The first force assures a pyramidal or stratified construction with a hierarchy and a strong commandment, the second a flat or destratified organization or meshwork with no central control.

De Landa recognizes that linear science, adapted to describe hierarchic and stratified systems, have dominated the western thought for the last three centuries and thus limited our view of the world. On the other hand, the actual homogenization of the world, in terms of economies or ecology and occuring over many scales, have rendered the world more linear:

"[A]s our industrial, medical and educational systems became routinized, as they grew and began to profit from economies of scale, linear equations accumulated in physical sciences and equilibrium theories flourished in the social sciences. In a sense, even though the world is inherently nonlinear and far from equilibrium , its homogenization meant that those areas that have been made uniform began behaving objectively as linear equilibrium structures, with predictable and controllable properties." Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

Still, the nonlinear contribution is important and indeed necessary to avoid the world and Earth to become a dead, predictable and uncreative body. So what should we do? First, De Landa cautions not to adopt the extremist view of destroying the homogeneous part of the system. As Deleuze and Guattari wrote:

"If you free [the system] with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged into catastrophe. Staying stratified -organized, signified, subjected-, is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever." Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus, pp 160-161, cited in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

What a balanced and moderate view from post-modernists such as Deleuze and Guattari that are supposed to be, according to what I heard about them, more nihilist that positivist! It reminds me of Camus who wrote in, L'homme rebel, that revolutions were not necessary. Revolutions are actually counter-productive. They may do more harm than good and only by changing the world small steps at a time, can we achieve the ideal dreamed. De Landa, Deleuze and Guattari expand that idea acknowledging the complexity and nonlinearity of the system:

"This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuum of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times." Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus, pp 160-161, cited in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

De Landa explains that

[a]ll these precautions are necessary in a world that does not possess a ladder of progress, or a drive toward increased perfection, or a promised land, or even a socialist pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Moreover, these warnings derive from a recognition that our world is governed not only by nonlinear dynamics, which makes detailed prediction and control impossible, but also by nonlinear combinatorics, which implies that the number of possible mixtures of meshwork and hierarchy, of command and market, of centralization and decentralization, are immense and that we simply cannot predict the emergent properties of these myriad combinations will be." in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

De Landa pursues:

"Thus the call for a more experimental attitude toward reality and for an increased awareness of the potential for self-organization inherent in even the humblest forms of matter-energy." in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.

He finishes by emphasizing that this approach does not necessarily mean a hopeless and boring view of life. Far from it:

"It is important, however, not to confuse the need for caution in our exploration of the nonlinear possibilities of (economic, linguistic, biological) reality, and the concomitant abandonment of utopian euphoria, with despair, resentment and nihilism. There is, indeed, a new kind of hope implicit in these new views. After all, many of the most beautiful and inspiring things on our planet may have been created through [partial] destratification. A good example of this may be the emergence of birdsongs: the mouth became destratified when it ceased to be a strictly alimentary organ, caught up in the day-to-day eating of flesh, and began to generate other flows (memes) and structures (songs) where the meshwork element dominated the hierarchical. The emergence of organic life itself, while not representing a more perfect stage of development than rocks, did involve a greater capacity to generate self-consistent aggregates, a surplus of consistency. The human hand may also have involved a destratification, a complete detachment from locomotive functions and a new coupling with the external environment, itself further destratified when the hand began converting pieces of it (rocks, bones, branches) into tools. Thus, despite all the cautionary tales about simplistic calls for anarchic liberation, there is in these theories a positive, even joyful conception of reality. And while these views do indeed invoke the «death of man», it is only the death of «man» of the old «manifest destinies», not the death of humanity and its potential for destratification." in A thousand years of nonlinear history, Conclusion and speculations.