Raikes' concept of the "rheomode," which comes from a Greek word which means flux or flow and was associated with the philosophers who followed Heraclitus, borrows physicist David Bohm's word for a new language that communicates on a fundamentally different order of space and time. One well-known fragment of Heraclitus, "you can't step in the same river twice,"* has been held to suggest that the universe is constantly in flux and change. Bohm felt that traditional language did not capture the constant motion of the world or the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

Bohm argued that there was another plane of physical reality in which the separation between subject and object appears as the Cartesian oversimplification that it actually is. The rheomode was meant to be a dynamic and interconnected language that shattered Cartesian duality and opened the world to its chaos and its unity, without contradiction.* Bohm's "new order," like Burroughs' "outer space," is another plane of existence alongside the one with which we are familiar - it appears foreign only because we have grown accustomed to this oversimplified and inverted Cartesian reality. A new language appropriate to the new order must intervene to disturb the comfort of our simplistic illusions.

Such language could only appear as something from another world, making its appearance in ordinary language as an irruption, shattering, if only momentarily, the illusion of distance between subject and object and between signifier and signified. Such language would operate as a trickster or joker, polyvocal, not emanating from any particular subject but operating through the interactions between subjects. Mady Schutzman shows that jokes change the way we think by interrupting established patterns, breaking expected connections and forging new ones. The trickster, who violates taboos and crosses boundaries, intensifies our awareness of the vulnerability (and thus mutability) of the institutions we create.*