DeLanda on Temporal Beings

Manuel De Landa on temporal flows and the "hardenings" of reality:

"In terms of the nonlinear dynamics of our planet, the thin rocky crust on which we live and which we call our land and home is perhaps the earth's least important component. The crust is, indeed, a mere hardening within the greater system of underground lava flows which, organizing themselves into large "conveyor belts"(convective cells), are the main factor in the genesis of the most salient and apparently durable structures of the crusty surface. Either directly, via volcanic activity, or indirectly, by forcing continental plates to collide, thereby creating the great folded mountain ranges, it is the self-organized activity of lava flows that is at the origin of many geological forms. If we consider that the oceanic crust on which the continents are embedded is constantly being created and destroyed (by solidification and remelting) and that even continental crust is under constant erosion so that its materials are recycled into the ocean, the rocks and mountains that define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would merely represent a local slowing down of this flowing reality. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined simply by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow: very slow for rocks, faster for lava. 

Similarly, our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes, and norms. Here, too, we might be defined both by the materials we are temporarily binding or chainging to our organic bodies and cultural minds and by the time scale of the binding operation. Over the millennia, it is the flow of biomass through foodwebs, as well as the flow of genes through generations, that matters, not the bodies and species that emerge from these flows. Our languages may also be seen overtime as momentary slowing downs or thickenings in a flow of norms that gives rise to a multitude of different structures. And a similar point applies to our institutions,which may also be considered transitory hardenings in the flows of money, routines,and prestige, and, if they have acquired a permanent building to house them, in the mineral flows from which the construction materials derive.  

This book has concerned itself with a historical survey of these flows of "stuff," as well as with the hardenings themselves, since once they emerge they react back on the flows to constrain them in a variety of ways."

[ From: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 1997, p. 257-259 - Swerve edition ]