Comment on rhizome imagery

Something screwy happened to my blog in that I cannot post comments to my own posts! I have Google working on that. In the meantime in response to the comments to that post:

As Andy seems to indicate, such meshworks are a combination of the horizontal and the vertical. After all, "complexity" in involved. It's just much more "distributed" than would appear from a strictly unbalanced hierarchical view. So yes, of course I see progressive political views as much more "evolved," especially in light of how they take into account exactly what I'm talking about, this distributed nature of complexity rather than a simple formal hierarchy. More complex connections are vertical and horizontal, and not in the hierarchy/heterachy dichotomy Wilber proposes.

For example, DeLanda says this: ""The dichotomy between hierarchies and...meshworks, should be understood in purely relative terms. In the first place, in reality it is hard to find pure cases of these two structures....hierarchies give rise to meshworks and meshworks to hierarchies" (source). I'm currently reading his book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Continuum, 2002),* where he explores Deleuze's rhizomatic complexity from a scientific perspective. A brief excerpt with more to follow:


"Delueze is...a realist philosoper....[but] not a realist about essences or any other transcendent entity...something else is needed to give objects their identity and what preserves this identity through time. Briefly, this something else is dynamical processes" (2-3).

* Link to free Scribd version.