Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. 15: Stephen Muecke. Rhizomes » Issue 15 (Winter 2007) » Stephen Muecke Stephen Muecke [1] Imagine Nature divided from Culture by an official barrier, like a State border.
This is a metaphor, certainly, but the division between the two concepts is nevertheless real enough, and with real political effects. Zero News Datapool, MANUEL DE LANDA, THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS. The distinction between institutions which emerge from centralized and decentralized decision-making by its human components has come to occupy center-stage in several different contemporary philosophies.
Economist and Artificial Intelligence guru Herbert Simon, for example, views bureaucracies and markets as the human institutions which best embody these two conceptions of control. {1} Hierarchical institutions are the easiest ones to analyze, since much of what happens within a bureaucracy in planned by someone of higher rank, and the hierarchy as a whole has goals and behaves in ways that are more or less consistent with those goals.
Markets, on the other hand, are tricky. Indeed, the term "market" needs to be used with care because it has been greatly abused over the last century by theorists on the left and the right. Herbert Simonis distinction between command hierarchies and decentralized markets may turn out to be a special case of a more general dichotomy.