index
Identities
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The loss of monopolar strong identities . . .
Non-hierarchal connections and identities
The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra. Man did not survive God, nor did the identity of the subject survive that of substance. All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical 'effect' by the more profound game of difference and repetition. Deleuze 1994, xix
The story of "modern" thought (or politics, or places) is not a simple tale of the dissolution of fixed traditional identities and social grammars. It is a story about hierarchal traditional unities (in cities, in the self, in nature) being first replaced by an emphasis on atomized disunity (Hobbes, Newton, Locke, the isolated artistic "genius," modern monofunctional zones and plans), and then about the rediscovery of connection in new non-hierarchal modes in places, in selves, in ethics, political theory, art, and the theory of meaning.