Monday, October 27, 2008

Ideas for a New Vocabulary

By Lynn Hoffman





Chris Kinman and I are exploring a postmodern vocabulary that fits with the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who have given us the pair: Rhizome (decentralized) vs. Tree (hierarchical. The Internet is a rhizome too, billions of bits floating in an electronic colloid. Here are some more pairs:
  • Rhizome vs. System

  • Assemblage vs. Narrative

  • Webwork vs. Network

  • Sharevision vs. Supervision
    (see The Sharevision Group, Northampton)

  • Cloud-linked vs. Theory-linked
    (see “Cloud Computing” on the Web)

  • Starfish-structure vs. Spider-structure
    (see Ori Brafman and Aaron Beckstrom’s “The Starfish and the Spider”)

  • Aliveness vs. Health or Stability
    (see Kinman’s “Territory of the Alive”)
  • Gift-oriented vs. Problem-oriented
    (see Kinman’s “Confluences”)

  • A few ideas based on my correspondence with Clarke Millar:

  • “Collecting what Gathers Momentum" vs. Creating a Collection

  • "Floating Summer Midges"
    (Clarke Millar used this image to talk about ideas as if they were airborne swarms and schools. Again, a cloud-form)

    Example: “Family Therapy” just put out a "Genogram" of the family therapy pioneers, and I am in it. Rather a nice page with a picture and a biography, and I am in the midst of all the other First Midges, in the floating Midge Cloud.” (email from Lynn Hoffman to Clarke Millar)

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