1)Your book focuses alot on how the different non-human interventions in human affairs have always been a symbiotic dynamic. Pockets of other times refract on one another and create simulations of simultaniety - but there is no teleological certainty, i.e. there is no "purpose" to the dynamic: out of this whole mess, how can we define linear processes, can things be left as open as you would like, or do you think that human society needs the sense of existing in a "closed" system equilibrium?

The main point of my books is to destroy the idea that human history proceeds by "stages of development" or by "successive ages", you know, the agrarian, the industrial, the informational ages, leaving one another behind. This is not to deny, of course, that the steam motor changed many things or that computer networks will have similarly radical effects. The idea is rather to look at history as a field of coexistances: the moment the motor appeared on the planet as a new machinic species it did not displace the clockwork (the previously dominant technology) as an obsolete species. Rather it began to coexist and interact with it, creating a variety of hybrids (think of the transmission gears of an automobile). Similarly, information technology will not create a new age, it will simply add itself to an already complex mixture, interacting even with technologies that are thousands of years old (such as language). The question of "thermodynamics" is a related one: I replace the idea of "ages" or "stages" by that of intensifications in the amount of non-human energy which flows through society. It has been these intensifications which have accelerated historical processes and have given us the illusion of "progress" or of directed change. Moreover, in non-human nature spontaneous creative processes also ocurr only in these conditions, that is, an intense flow of energy pushing a system far from equilibrium is always needed totrigger processes of self-organization, whether in geology, biology or any other realm.

2) In your "1000 Years" you point out that "human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunites to follow different routes of development". Would you take the Sheldrake/Deleuzian approach of holism within the ecological system of planetary biology - i.e. is the species conditioned as much as conditioning, or are these mutualities merely historical lenses, or human error? Should we be saying instead of what is history, what was history?

One of the ideas that I attack in my books is precisely the primacy of "interpretations" and of "conceptual frameworks". Sure, ideas and beliefs are important, and do play a role in history, but academics of different brands have reduced all material and energetic processes, and all human practices that are not linguistic or interpretative (think of manual skills, of know-how etc) to a "framework". The 20th century has been obsessed with these ideas, every culture (given that it has its own framework of beliefs) is its own world, hence relativism (both moral and epistemological) now prevails. But once you break away from this outmoded view, once you accept all the non-linguisitic practices that really make up society, not to mention the non-human elements that also shape it (from viruses, bacteria, and weeds, to non-organic energy and material flows, such as winds, ocean currents etc), then language itself becomes just another material that flows through society. It becomes more of a catalyst, a trigger for energetic processes (think of the words "begin the battle" triggering an enormous and destructive process). The question of "missed opportunites" is important, since for most of the millenium China, India and Islam had in fact a better chance to conquer the world than did the West, so that the actual outcome, a world dominated by western colonialism, was quite contingent. Things could have happened in several other ways.

3) Historical consciousness: "Self-consistent aggregates," a "surplus of consistency" and what you call "non-linear critical thresholds (bifurcation states)" have become in this sense cultural reflections of the physical world and its interaction with the social and biological models you use to describe the last several centuries. We live in a time where everything is determined by distributed networks and feedback circuits of every kind. I'd like to hear your thoughts on digital art and its relationship to the different forms of communication that co-inhabit our dense and continuously changing world. What's your take on it?

Here again we have two different answers depending on whether you believe in "conceptual frameworks" or not. If you do, then you also believe that there's such a thing as "the burgeois ideology of the individual", a pervasive framework within which all artistic production of the last few centuries is inscribed. But if you do not believe there was ever such a thing, then history becomes much less homogenous, much less dominated by any one framework, and hence you begin to look at all the different ways in which art has escaped the conditions of its production (which admitedely, did include ruling classes as suppliers of resources). Put differently, once you admit that history has been much more complex and heterogenous than we have been told, then even the "enemy" (say, capitalism) looks less in control of historical processes than we thought. In a sense what I am trying to do is to cut the enemy down to size, to see all the potential escape routes that we have been overlooking by exagerating the importance of "frameworks" or "ideologies". Clearly, if the enemy was never as powerful as we thought (which is not to say that it did not have plenty of power) the question of the role of art (digital or otherwise) in changing social reality aquires new meanings and possibilities.

4) Connection and destratification, confluence and conjugation: in both your work and Deleuze and Guattari's, there's a sense of continuous, vertiginuous change - a tacit admission that history is continuity, a differential process patterened by multiplex rhythms and tempos. History with a capital "H" in philosophy has always been the provence of some sort of belief that the world is moving towards some prepackaged goal (City of God, the workers paradise, etc etc), and it's seen as some sort of inexorable unfurling of a banner of universal human essence - you break this down to "material history," and use this critique to attack preveious models of philosophy. Could you sum up your relationship with other philosophers of history like Locke, Plato (different systems/periods "golden ages etc etc, unilinear, "progress" deteministic stuctures of thought), and what about non-Western historical viewpoints?

There are two main differences between my philosophical ideas about history and those of previous philosophers. The first one is a rejection of essences as sources of form, you know, the idea that the form of this mountain here or of that zebra over there emanates from an essence of "mountainhood" or of "zebrahood" existing in some Platonic haven or in the mind of the God that created these creatures. Instead, for each such entity (not only geological and biological entities, but also social and economic ones) I force myself to come up with a process capable of creating or producing such an entity. Sometimes these processes are already figured out by scientists (in those disciplines linked to questions of morphogenesis, like chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics) and so I just borrow their model, other times I need to create new models using philosophical resources (here's where Deleuze and Guattari come in.) The second difference with most sociological tradition, one that touched deeply into the nature of human history, is my rejection of the existance of totalities, that is, entities like Western Society or the Capitalist System. The morphogenetic point of view does allow for the emergence of wholes that are more than the sum of their parts, but only if specific historical processes, specific interactions between lower scale entities, can be shown to have produced such whole. Thus, in my book , from the interactions of individuals, institutional organizations (bureaucracies, banks, stock markets) emerge and aquire a life of their own. From the interactions between these institutions, cities emerge, and from the interactions between cities, nation states emerge. Yet, in these bottom-up approaches, all the heterogeneity of real nation states, with their pockets of minorities, dialect differences etc, can be captured, unlike when one models history with totalites (concepts like "society" or "culture" or "the system") in which a lot of homogeneity is artificially injected into the model.

5) One thing everyone seems to agree on is that there are so many different frameworks of interpretation today for human activity to be viewed through, that we have lost track of the world we inhabit: the "natural" has been displlaced by the human phenomenology of teche and logos - we as a species have altered the atmosphere of the planet, changed the composition of the oceans, and even created seismic disruptions (America vibrates on a 110 volt system in the key of A, Europe because it's on 220 volts vibrates in the key of B flat or something like that), there's the sense of anthropocentric agency, and cognitive "instrumentalization:" What new framework can displace our interpretative processes, if at all?

I agree that the domination of this century by linguistics and semiotics (which is what allows us to reduce everything to talk of "frameworks of interpretation") not to mention the post-colonial guilt of most white intellectuals which forces them to give equal weight to any other culture's belief system, has had a very damaging effect, even on art. Today I see art students trained by guilt-driven semioticians or postmodern theorists, afraid of confronting the materiality of their medium, whether painting, music, poetry or virtual reality. To them this materiality is an illusion, as is reality (since, given the framework dogma, every culture creates its own reality). The key to break away from this is to cut language down to size, to give it the importance it deserves as a communication medium, but to stop worshiping it as the ultimate reality. Equally important is to adopt a hacker attitude towards all forms of knowledge: not only to learn Unix or Windows NT to hack this or that computer system, but to learn economics, sociology, physics, biology etc. to hack reality itself. It is precisely the "can do" mentality of the hacker, naive as it may sometimes be, that we need to nurture everywhere. Hence the importance of cutting the enemy down to size so as to see its vulnerabilities and the potential escape routes from its power structures. I tried to do that with the military in the first book and with capitalism in the second, but there's a lot of work yet to be done.