tree of porphyry

(tree of porphyry apparently drawn by peter of spain, 1329)

kristina's epiphany for today made some things a lot clearer...

the porphyrian tree (created by Porphyry, a phoenician neoplatonic)

is a hierarchical ontology...says wikipedia: a construction in logic

consisting of three rows or columns of words; the middlemost whereof contains the series of genus and species, and bears some analogy to the trunk. the extremes, containing the differences, are analogous to the branches of a tree.

from reading parts of 1000 plateaus, i understand that this tree model is what deleuze & guattari are opposed to -- proposing the nonhierarchical rhizomatic model as an alternative.

but this model helps to explain the introductory chapter of difference & repetition, especially the section of the chapter that starts on the bottom of pg. 11. not feeling clear enough to write about it, but some points (which maybe someone else can elaborate on): the words in the model represent concepts, and the space between each horizontal subset represents differences. this is the model in which every concept has a thing -- "a concept may be in principle the concept of a particular existing thing, thus having an infinite comprehension. infinite comprehension is the correlate of an extension = 1". (apparently, while there is a slight distinction between "comprehension" and "intension," which deleuze sometimes recognizes, the two terms are generally interchangable). this is is this system where there can't be any repetition of the sort deleuze is discussing, where difference is only conceptual difference and the 3 natural blockages come from the outside to intervene.