why structure doesn't quite speak to me

When I say "I'm not a very structured person" I don't mean that I'm crazy, liberal, would prefer crazy rasta hobo hair and would like to do away with any sense of order whatsoever. It's just that I'm skeptical about compromising meaning to serve the boundaries set by structure. In this way, meaning is necessarily limited and artificially compartmentalized. Structure really is a manifestation of meaning. Structure necessarily follows meaning, and that is the logic of their complex dynamic.

Right now I'm speaking abstrusely in vague terms seemingly distant from reality. But I think the structure-meaning discourse is something that affects everyday life enough to be worth at least a passing inquiry.

Putting stuff in tables

Tables are a convenient way to categorize information, to access information and to compare across the catagories of information. It is an efficient method of organizing knowledge because it demarcates, defines and offers a means of comparison within the same space of inquiry. The only qualm I have with Putting Stuff In Tables is that boxing up information forces them into categories, and this negates the interrelatedness of the content you're working with. At best, they discourage inquiries into interconnectedness.

What do I mean? Imagine working with three factors to explain the rise of a certain nationalism in a certain region: 1) Economic frustration 2) Colonial policies 3) Regional influence. Normatively, the argument for the burgeoning of nationalism is spliced into three separate lines of reasoning. (Usually following the local-metropolitan/regional-international or a social-political-economic type of framework.) Yet there are several significant overlapping between the factors — economic frustration was the by-product of colonial administration, which was in constant dialogue with regional events, regional dissidence stemmed from economic upheaval etc. etc. So you see that there is an interesting interconnectedness across the factors, yet a table forces them to be expounded on as if they were totally discrete from each other.

My main quibble here is: if interrelation and convergences are observed in the external world, and if an appreciation of this complexity is to be valued in inquiry, then perhaps diagrammatic attempts to make sense of this world privileges convenience over truth, and is something we should be alert about.

Quantifying the abstract

I'll start with an example:

"On a scale of 1 to 10, what would you rate your enjoyment of this course?"

I think questions like these invite results that don't reveal how enjoyable the course was, but rather, tell us how people translate experience into a number and perceive the indices of this sliding scale.

Another common way the abstract is quantified is through the use and abuse of Key Performance Indicators in organizations. As a way to set benchmarks and gauge progress, KPIs are a useful tool that can benefit work productivity (or whatever managerial bullshit you can think of.) However, when the workings of the organization begin to serve KPIs as if they were concrete objectives to be met as if they were an end in themselves, the original thrust of the organization is undermined and overlooked. This is similar to the argument against examinations — that they fail to offer a holistic assessment of the student's progress. Examinations don't accurately reveal how much the student has learnt; they merely tell us how well a student can answer a predefined question in a predefined setting in a predefined length of time.

Justifying violence

Here I'm talking about larger structures: structures of power, structures that organize wealth and resources, structures that organize people. I am wary of structures, institutions, of power because they are traditionally self-serving and oppressive to varied extents depending on where you come from. I am questioning the foundations of statehood and its necessity in daily living, how it produces the social and ideas about the civil, how its subjects are born into its relentless conditioning not even knowing its pervasiveness in daily life. Pragmatically (and admittedly), a radical upheaval of statehood as the superstructure of global power is impossible due to real economic considerations, but having said that, we should be awakened to its flaws and among them, its systematic monopoly on "legitimate" violence. 

That the state is fundamentally paranoid about its own existence is the Achilles' Heel impeding the possibility of peace. The converse is true: existential paranoia on the level of the state produces the desire for defense, and consequently, for the use of force to deter. (No matter how one tries to deny it, the use of potential force as an active mode of deterrence is still a violent gesture.) A dominant theme emerges in the apologetics for statehood: the structure provides, the structure stabilizes. But the structure also attacks, forgetting that contained within other structures are people, vulnerable and fallible, all serving some structure one way or another.

In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. (Sontag, Against Interpretation)