David is picking up pictures from Norwescon today, so expect I'll have up a report by the weekend, including a belated picture of the lovely Okal Rel Universe buttons created for me distribute there by Kathy Plett and Jordan Bacon.

Now for something entirely different, as they used to say on Monty Python.

Received an e-mail today from my eccentric friend Si -- I think Si would accept that description, although she usually renders it more colorfully along the lines of "feminist bitch creative activist" -- recommending I check out the e-journal Rhizomes, which I did, and discovered it views itself as a cultural studies expression of a "Deleuzian" nature. Not recognizing the word I did a search and came up with an essay by one Manuel DeLanda called Deleuzian Ontology where I found out there were three major classes of ontologies, or claims for describing reality, and the philosphy of Deleuze is of the sort called realist and--more particularly--asserts the universal-singularity and individual-singularity rather than class vs. instance. As I understand it, after brief acquaintance, this makes all kinds of sense in biology and computing where instances stubbornly refuse to stay within the lines of any classification proposed to encompass them. I always tell my students that classification type critical thinking is a tool not a truth of the absolute sort. That is, there is little to be gained by splitting hairs over whether File Explorer (instance of a program) is a component of the Windows XP (instance of Operating System) or an instance of the class of system software known as Utilities, or an instance of the class of application software File Managers. The exact classification of any annoyingly gray item or hybrid beast like the platypus is less important than the recognition that classes can be used in the abstract to vastly implify the problem of thinking about a huge number of very cluttery details, just as "species" can be a handy method of thinking about a huge clutter of individual animals...but nothing about reality precludes the emergence of a thoroughly confusing beast or program. Maybe more meaningfully, no amount of classification and abstraction that defines the group can adequately cover the uniqueness of the individual for some purposes. Which reminded me of Alison's talk on the future of medicine some time ago in Prince George, when she spoke of the need for treatments to become individually taylored. That is, for a focus to develop that takes into account the differences between individuals or the uniqueness of individual circumstances, more than existing practice is generally able to do. I have heard similiar rumblings in computing, where centrally controlled, vanilla solutions are starting to give way under the far more natural need for personal customization and control. Messy business all around. But it strikes a chord with the Deleuzian Ontology essay, for me, somehow. Not sure whether therein there lies a tune....

posted by Lynda at 16:03   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments