A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

-Brian Massumi, Translator’s Foreword to A Thousand Plateaus

This is a quick note based on an idea that I had earlier today.

One of the phrases that’s sometimes gets used amongst the safety scientists and practitioners with whom I interact is the phrase “words create worlds.” What does this mean?

I take it to mean that language has pragmatic effects in the world. How does it do that, and what would be an example?

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on linguistics from A Thousand Pleateaus, I propose that it does this by creating concepts which effect “incorporeal transformations.” Those transformations create the conditions for new affects to be discovered.

What the hell does that mean?

Basically, a concept is a way of describing something. How we describe things, how we conceptualize them, matters because how something is described affects what we think it can do.

Here’s a trite example: Assume we have a cup. A cup can be used to drink, or to toast, or to do any number of other things. Now what if I say: “A cup is an elongated bowl.” How does that change what we think a cup can do? If this is the case, can I serve soup in it? Can it still be used in a toast? Do I need to buy distinct objects, designed in different ways, for drink and food? Will I confuse and disturb guests at a dinner party if I take their wine glasses at the end of the meal and serve ice cream for dessert in them?

Now for a less-trite example: Assume we have an organization and it’s got two types of roles for engineers, Dev and Ops. A dev can perform some activities and an ops person can perform others. Now what if I say: “Here’s a new way of organizing work practices and technologies such that dev and ops are continuous; we call it ‘devops’.” How does that change how the organization operates? Are the gestures people performs still the same? How are the things they find significant and thus worthy of paying attention to changed? Does this affect what the work processes output? Can the business say with a straight face that it “does devops” and that affects from whom it can get resources? As we can see, whole host of social relations and the technological artifacts that mediate them are affected when an “incorporeal transformation” occurs.

Now we start getting into questions about activity, how it’s conceived, and how that concords (or not) with ‘actual’ behavior. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole now, so check out Steven Shorrock’s blog for somewhere else to go with these ideas if you’re interested in pursuing this thinking in regards to activity at work.

But let me conclude by saying that I think that conceiving of things in new ways, of making sense of something in a new way, that is the condition for what we call “creativity.” Or as Deleuze put it in Difference & Repetition:

To think is to create – there is no other creation – but to create is first of all to engender ‘thinking’ in thought.