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Ontologies, Order, Emergence and Agency
Modernity was in love with taxonomies. Postmodernity is equally in love with ontologies. Taxonomies have to do with naming, listing, cataloguing. Ontologies are about Being and beings. Naming something, like 'carrot' enables one to point it out in a supermarket. Classifying it as a vegetable, locates it and distinguishes it from other vegetables and from other kinds of things: animals, rocks, water.... However,one cannot eat a name, no matter how well defined. The being of a name is not of the kind that nourishes physically. The name has a virtual existence. It is empty of substance. That is to say, the word 'carrot' refers to any carrot whether it is there in sight of the speaker or not. It does not name just one particular carrot and no others. It is the being of language to be empty in the sense of having no one-to-one relationship with anything. That is the power of language that de Saussure recognised.
Through language as a system that represents things in general whether or not a particular instance is present means that people are freed from specific circumstances. I don't have to wait until a tree is in range of seeing in order to be able to talk about the nature of trees. I can list all the ways that a tree is different from other plants, and the ways that plants are different from animals, and the ways that both plants and animals are different from stones and other non-living entities. Essentially, the word 'tree' takes on significance because it is different from all other words in the language system. If a particular category such as 'house' does not refer to any particular house, but can be equally used for all houses, then the word 'house' has no particular significance other than referring to a category that is different from all other categories. Language is a system of such differences: house is different from barn, is different from hut, is different from cottage, is different from.... These differences allow us to negotiate meanings, make nuances as between a house that is detached, semi-detached, or a terrace. It acts as a co-ordinating system. I can say, 'no, not that one, look a liitle further and you'll see it, it's the red one'. Or, I can say 'meet me at 1pm, next thursday in the pub.' Or more sophisticatedly, we can explore the meanings of life, whether there's a god, or whether there's life on some world in outer space. And we can argue and try to co-ordinate our uses of words to attain what we might come to believe is a 'shared meaning'. However, whether that shared meaning points to something 'real' is another matter. In some circumstances the reality or not of something talked about can be 'tested', in others, it cannot.
how thinking takes place. conscious, unconscious, intentional, machinic
For Deleuze and Guatari (...) there is the arborescent form of thinking and the rhizomatic way of being. What does this mean?
is it a matter of either or? or both?