Micro/Macro

It is a striking paradox about Western historical ideas and thinking that they have been most often presented as if there were of necessity dualistic polarities, namely right and wrong, good and bad, inside and outside, part and whole and so on. And, we might be tempted to think so today with the topic of micro/macro, the little as against the large, the local and global, or big and small of things. But it seems far more plausible in the hybrid-synchronic world of today, to speak of micro-macro as if they are necessarily and mutually interconnected as mere boundary-less extensions that flow into each other (like communicating vessels of consciousness), or alternatively presented as created positions of a shared singularity that are being seen from different view points. The late French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze conceived of our contemporary world and its ideas as being like a rhizome, that is to say a decentred (or pluralized) reality that was in certain respects analogous to the internet. This is particularly fitting since it is the very medium that makes the ideas behind the TEDx project communicable to the wider world. Each one of us and our ideas are therefore a singularity  (a microcosm), and in the sharing and discussion that will take place in the conference we become a sort of shared and/or collective set of intentions (a macrocosm); that is to say micro/macrois not merely the topic we undertake, but the actual reality of what we are about to experience and enact while sharing our ideas. Beyond that and in the wider communication outside of the present space (physical or video linked), and which may be generated as a result, we are of course transformed into a collective microcosm as against the greater macrocosm of that larger attendant world. Thus we are as it were the fundamental basis for the very nature of how to initiate, inspire and innovate, always remembering, like the insightful artist, that value is not attached to size of a picture, but to the quality or depth of the contents that are expressed by it. What we communicate to each other today is our beginning, the final outcome of which we cannot know, and, perhaps, is ultimately the excitement that drives independent ideas and free thought.