concepts.

a concept is simply a bridge between dissimilar things. it moves in the edges of their use. i'm thinking of things in their materiality, but still as things in movement, becoming. concrete but not static. sort of like merleau-ponty and the body-image i think. i tend to think of it as the degrees of freedom open to a moving thing, traced out in lived space as attractor points. conditioned and predicated upon materiality that allows certain movements (i cannot decide to suck in water through my trunk or stretch my neck out like a giraffe because i'm not those things, although i can engage in a becoming-animal with them that allows the transfer of different qualities, an embodied "communication" that runs deeper than normal ideas of discourse), but that is still fairly varied.

the uses and habitual movements of things are the points of their "identity" most open to novelty, new construction, or most colored by ambiguity. they are the points of real connection to the world, through a sort of infinite/indefinite causation unbeholden to time (causation relevant in direct ways, in marginal ways, in simple alterations of the structure of the world and paths of possible relationships, etc- think of the movie Babel, to pick a recent one, in which the myriad meanings of a bullet transfer across worlds to stitch together a small and temporary collectivity of people in brutal accidents and confusions).

we are used to considering and using things (and people and ecosystems and industrial products and knowledge and and and...) instrumentally, or directly. we are accustomed to seeking the essence of a thing, a being, and using it appropriately to some purpose.

[we may think philosophy has little bearing upon life, yet still we act in the world under the unknown and tacit assumption that things have their appropriate essences and must be utilized according to those essences. that to engage with a thing we must grasp it firmly, fix or transfix its meaning, and turn that fixity into a sort of potential energy to capture and utilize. we adopt a stance towards the world and understanding, and use this stance to orient in the day to day of structural living.

--ASIDE: capturing essence, instrumental thought itself as the ground of this economic mechanism of capturing a virtual field, repressing it and siphoning off energy from the repression. vampirism over human populations, ecological populations, and the use of things in general.-- ]

yet in capturing the "essence" of a thing (or more honestly pretending to capture it) we lose the ambiguity embedded in its structure, in its symbioses with an ecology (natural or artifical or social). a thing moves through its edges, its points of indeterminate possibility. this is the mystical flourish and shimmer to the world that we are hellbent as a civilization upon denying and masking. but that's neither here nor there.

the concept takes those traces, those edges of things and bridges them. once again, this means that the concept sets up overlaps in the affective spaces of things, overlaps in their fields of movement.

a concept is a party host in the world of beings. it allows new liaisons by opening beings to their becoming, and the open ragged edges of meaning they occupy because of it.

now, a good concept, a good "party host," is one that "maximizes" the possible connections between beings in the relevant set. maximization is a poor metaphor for this but it will have to suffice for the moment. put more clearly, a good concept traces out more spaces in the movement of a thing and makes more of them amenable to influence and engagement with the movement-spaces of other things.

this is the basis of theoretical work i think, in any context. it's valuable because it opens up habituated pathways to new possibilities.

a good concept will, once again, allow richer and thicker connections by opening up more spaces of ambiguity and freedom in the becoming-identity of a thing.

[the task of a former of concepts must be to arrange them such that the concept-former does not force bridges or demand them, only open up reciprocal spaces in things- the things themselves must make the leap of communication.]