mattermorphosis

"The idea of mapping historical processes using these three types of lines can lead to novel philosophical insights. For example, once we understand that the possibilities open to an actual assemblage have a certain virtual structure, we do not have to think about primitive societies and their urban counterparts as representing successive stages of development of humanity. Some forms of social organization may indeed have appeared earlier than others – hunter-gatherers certainly existed before any central state apparatus – but that succession occurred only in actual time. In virtual time the latter was a possibility already prefigured in the former, and it is “precisely because these processes are variables of coexistence that [they can be] the object of a social topology …” In particular, primitive societies and their molecular segmentarity already contained in their associated possibility space a line of flight prefiguring a state apparatus, a line of flight that simultaneously offered an opportunity to become something else, a change of identity, as well as the risk of becoming rigidly segmented by the emergence of centralized authority. Hence, Deleuze and Guattari characterize primitive societies by the mechanisms of prevention and anticipation with which they guard off this possibility: burning all surplus food in ceremonial rituals, for example, to prevent it from becoming a reservoir of energy (a gradient) that a centralized authority can use to promote a division of labor, forcing primitives to cross the town-threshold and the statethreshold."

Manuel DeLanda, 2010