Boasian Reification?

"Intellectual truth is a moral sentiment followed by an emotional outburst enforced by a huff and a puff and a blow yer house away."

– Mental Balance

"The object of science is to rediscover the natural articulations of a universe we have carved artificially."

– Henri Bergson

Viewing the world from within the machinist paradigm, there are two basic lenses: the descriptive or structuralist (eg.., anatomy), and the functionalist (eg., physiology) which presents hypotheses of motivation (in both movement and purpose), answering the questions "what is it?" or "what are its parts or connections?" in the first case and "how does it work?" or "what is it for?" ("why") in the second. Confined to this viewing apparatus, the thingness is the thing. Once identified and plotted for future reference, viewers can move on to the next bit of dismemberment for an ultimate reconstruction more real than reality, if only because it is manufactured, no question about it beyond pride of workmanship.

But when everything is nominalised, it has merely been given a name. The anonymous context always precedes its articulation: before speech comes gibberish, just for the hell of it. This is why a hinge like an elbow has the same name as an enunciation – "arthritis of the tongue" should by now be as meaningful an utterance as disjointed thinking. The article is the real deal because it precedes a noun and then qualifies it by definition. Certainty is always an article of faith, which is why poetry, like a wide-angle lens, is identified by the embrace of ambiguity when it opens up the previously occluded context or rejoins what was formerly amputated, but only by implication – the principle of indeterminacy demands it only for the fallen of faith, those who realise an answer must be another question or turning point in that direction.

Predication is just the (or the just) application of syntax ("when?" and "in what order?"). Systems theory focuses on the connections or articulations alone (zones of connection or dissection) as if they are communication events and calls this functionalism, but because we are still within the machine paradigm, answers are confined to some form of pragmatism. "What is it good for?" just begs the questions "what is good?" and "how much?" Most ideas of functionalism still concern teleology, which is both 1) the reason or justification of a device and 2) its direction. In social systems, we have the questions "where are they going?" and "why?" Whether social or material, the answers break down to 1) structural improvement, creation and destruction and 2) "for itself" or "for the other". Pragmatic teleology is always concerned with profit. "No reason" or "It's fun" is considered childish and in need of improvement. Adultish parents are very concerned with progress and development.

Many who choose the organic over the mechanic metaphor have made no choice at all since the organism is still viewed as a machine. They've merely switched majors from engineering to biology within the same institution. Politics and argument (which are two ways of saying "antagonism" to gain a foothold) errupt largely over nothing because no one has actually left the box or switched viewing apparatus. Antagonism is relieved with a negotiated contract or balanced transaction. The refusal to pay results in civil war.

The box is just a large category. The category, Rousseau would tell us, is literally the result of a past contract devised in some ancient forum among its elect or select membership – an "authentic" communication event representing agreement but more often the power of persuasion, arms or do-nothing, blind faith. To be "on the same page" is the notion of agreement or democracy, the foundation of altruism as the morality of goodness, not interest in alterity – the unknown other. This is why democrats and republicans fight over nothing or fail to see that they are the same. Whenever sides are created, war is the end result and in the process, team-mates are continually exchanged. After the great battles, the teams are actually indistinguishable, yet because the names of the sides are retained, like north and south, matriarchy and patriarchy, communist and capitalist, there can be no actual end to the war. Despite the internal flux, the box is ever more rigid. Because of the flux, the viewing apparatus must be continually improved, just like the progressive evolution of surveillance in cities.

The Hunts and Rockefellers went to war over the sequential order of oil, metal (gold and silver) and paper (the first two as a means to the third, which is mightier than the sword), only to be be outdone by the current syntax of oil, plastic and digital ones and zeros in a computer data-base. The supersession required the improvement of the economic telescope. The digital-analog argument is still being waged by adherents of progressive and old-time religion:

Albeit both 'lectric's insertion by plastic,
Vinyl's still better than any cd,
not meaning certificate of any deposit,
the book's still better than what's on tv.

Today we have the text illuminated on a telescreen – we still read from tabulated squares and not on line at all. Wireless is radio and not a telephone. If this isn't turning back the clocks of time in a faux-forward direction, I don't know what it is than the action of forward-backwardness on backward-forwardness in a Fortean hyphenated existence as the most common experience. Time as the centerpiece of talk is itself the fetish, space-time doubly so, resulting in a total lack of movement and nothing travels everywhere – like nothing is free and all stuck-in-the-muds are justified by reverse sophistry: as religious fetish goes, nothing is as scary as time.

Fetish is just another name for religious or emotional attachment, often (even when it is merely a life-long habit), resulting in refusal to explore outside the box or invent a different viewing apparatus (or "god forbid" rely on what is given in the way of original equipment). The words for such would-be adventurers are heretic, fool or madman. There are pills one can take to prevent or cure a wandering mind (or a search for the difference of novelty as opposed to its creation via dissection). Mind-expanding drugs like certain kinds of poetic discourse (or word play as the experimentation with novel metaphors) threaten the integrity of the collective structure. This is why dropping out is always easier than reform or revolution and may have the most dire consequences upon recapture. Psychological survival then depends on nostalgia: "we'll always have Paris". There's also booze.

Reform merely increases the complexity of the structure (by denying the main axiom of thermodynamics, that no container is too big to burst, given enough hot air). Revolution, a more conservative approach, seeks to replace one with a like-structure by reversing its spin.

Who ever really entered a thought
we'd run out of tree or ore before
we'd see a shortage of slickum, but more,
there'd be any lackage to slippery talk?

Communists who would merely re-route the synaptic pathways of material flow confuse revolution and reform based entirely on religious preference – the adherence to archaic or platonic forms despite present circumstances. Such is how republicans are generally depicted from within the democratic factions, and the republicans call democrats communist. Go figure! The only real third way is out, a notion impossibilists cannot tolerate. As the ambiguous terrorist threat (a replacement for barbarians at the gate) is falling out of colloquial favour, we've come full-circle back to the christian, islamic, judaic friction as if "there is no god but our god" – the hypocrisy being that the three deities were extracted from the same body of just-so stories, making the still-ongoing crusades a mere matter of conflicting literary interpretation masquarading as a "racial", er, national debate – pagan refers to an entirely different myth-time. But fitting with Roman imperial tolerance, the embrace of all gods so long as their own are not excluded, the new-age "goddess" is just an aspiring new contender in an old dress trying to join the fracas out to preserve colloquial categories reified during the crusades. The box must not crumble, not at any cost: we must be civilised! It's a fight club, after all!

You might notice, I've not here left the rope-wrung ring of structural-functionalism, a three-dimensional hang-up. This is merely an attempt at ethnography from the lunatic fringe. It was gods, after all, who invented the wall, and it's diffusion has made archaeology the discovery of redundancy by digging up the dirt.

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