Common ground to recent studies exploiting relations between dynamical
systems and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics is, so we argue, the standard
Gibbs formalism applied on the level of space-time histories. The assumptions
(chaoticity principle) underlying the Gallavotti-Cohen fluctuation theorem make
it possible, using symbolic dynamics, to employ the theory of one-dimensional
lattice spin systems. The Kurchan and Lebowitz-Spohn analysis of this
fluctuation theorem for stochastic dynamics can be restated on the level of the
space-time measure which is a Gibbs measure for an interaction determined by
the transition probabilities. In this note we understand the fluctuation
theorem as a Gibbs property as it follows from the very definition of Gibbs
state. We give a local version of the fluctuation theorem in the Gibbsian
context and we derive from this a version also for some class of spatially
extended stochastic dynamics
