[[EPZ Thousand Plateaus - Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari]] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 224 > The only universal history is the history of contingency. Let us return to this eminently contingent question that modern historians know how to ask: why Europe, why not China? Apropos of ocean navigation, Fernand Braudel asks: why not Chinese, Japanese, or even Moslem ships? Why not Sinbad the Sailor? It is not the technique, the technical machine, that is lacking. Isn't it rather that desire remains caught in the nets of the despotic State, entirely invested in the despot's machine? "Perhaps then the merit of the West, confined as it was on its narrow 'Cape of Asia,' was to have needed the world, to have needed to venture outside its own front door." The schizophrenic voyage is the only kind there is. (Later this will be the American meaning of frontiers: something to go beyond, limits to cross over, flows to set in motion, noncoded spaces to enter.) Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 387 > The situation is much more complicated than we have let on. The sea is perhaps principal among smooth spaces, the hydraulic model par excellence. But the sea is also, of all smooth spaces, the first one attempts were made to striate, to transform into a dependency of the land, with its fixed routes, constant directions, relative movements, a whole counterhydraulic of channels and conduits. One of the reasons for the hegemony of the West was the power of its State apparatuses to striate the sea by combining the technologies of the North and the Mediterranean and by annexing the Atlantic. But this undertaking had the most unexpected result: the multiplication of relative movements, the intensification of relative speeds in striated space, ended up reconstituting a smooth space or absolute movement. As Virilio emphasizes, the sea became the place of the fleet in being, where one no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion. great divergence - really casual random factors Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 384-385 >When historians inquire into the reasons for the victory of the West over the Orient, they primarily mention the following characteristics, which put the Orient in general at a disadvantage: deforestation rather than clearing for planting, making it extremely difficult to extract or even to find wood; cultivation of the type "rice paddy and garden" rather than arborescence and field; animal raising for the most part outside the control of the sedentaries, with the result that they lacked animal power and meat foods; the low communication content of the town-country relation, making commerce far less flexible.