A multiplicity of opinions and texts crosscut, producing an orography assimilated in the discourses and practices, and thus becoming the rule for assessing the validity of statements and actions in general. In this manner, they become common place and shape common sense. Any apt member of a community of speakers has to address certain topics by recurring to those formulations to be understandable. It is their amalgamation, the accumulation and juxtaposition of diverse texts, – thinkers, pamphleteers, ideologists and reformers-, that configure, despite their divergence, a possible basis of understanding, by adhering to the conventions that are contained in language.
An ontology of power is based on a toponomy of knowledge. Every natural description of the basic constituents of nature, no matter how apparently evident, has to produce a realignment that maintains order, affording the persistence of a certain modus of power, of cogency. Science as a system of ideas producing and sustaining and orderly alignment of categories, is ingrained in the preservation of authority based a priori on individual reason instead of divine will and order, and thus introducing this very element in its basic ontology. Thus the recent interest in the rhetoric of since and abstract theories conveying political practices.(1) Power appears as an operation within a given configuration. Analyzing the given configuration can give us an insight into the operations that produce this system.
(1) “Theorizing is a politically significant practice.” S.Fuller and J.H. Collier, Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge. A new Beginning for Science and Technology Studies, New Jersey, 2004, xi.
