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)