The sorrows of Structuralism- part 1

Structuralism arose because 'catch up growth' was 'low hanging fruit'. Direct intervention in the Economy could have dramatic, self-sustaining, results. Thus, for intellectuals, the temptation was to look only at the Supply side of the equation and do a bit of handwaving parsable as a claim that some 'Structure' existed which would internally achieve incentive compatiblilty. Kantorovich's work is an extreme example of this. His getting the Nobel Prize emboldened Soviet mathematical Economists, like Aganbegyan to such an extent that they persuaded Gorby to crash Communism itself.

Capitalism, because it treats Supply and Demand as co-evolved and thus the price mechanism as essentially ergodic- i.e. it features no 'non commutative' operators such as must perforce give great scandal to Control Theory- Capitalism is, nevertheless, precisely for that reason, enormously hospitable to Structuralist shite. Why? It's coz charlatans do 'market discovery'. Thus Medicine was a mischievous scam, till the market grew big enough to sustain barriers to entry of a self-perpetuating kind.

Satan, in Marie Corelli's novel, had his sorrows- all of an essentially chrematistic type- at the birth of my natal Century. Structuralism, it seems to me, was our Satan. Thus, its sorrows are worthy of remark.

Anyroad, to start from where starting should- i.e. Wikipedia- grok this you gawper unable to turn your eyes away from this train-wreck of a blog post-

The origins of structuralism connect with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics, along with the linguistics of the Prague and Moscow schools. In brief, Saussure's structural linguistics propounded three related concepts.^[1]

1. Saussure argued for a distinction between langue (an idealized abstraction of language) and parole (language as actually used in daily life). He argued that the "sign" was composed of both a signified, an abstract concept or idea, and a "signifier", the perceived sound/visual image.

So, this is like the distinction between i-language and e-language. At one time we thought someone like Chomsky would, one day, be able to program a computer with all the different 'intensional' languages and then the computer would not just be able to talk to us in a natural manner but also translate for us into any language.

We no longer believe that this can be done. Google Translate works by massively crunching 'extentional language' data- i.e.  only parole matters, 'langue' does not.

Even if there were some tractable way of specifying an i-language, it would be foolish to do so because our communications could be spoofed by a parasite or predator.

Indeed, in so far as 'langue' exists at all, it already has been spoofed by various rent or interessement seeking shitheads of the sort that we will always have too much with us because as Pascal says there are more more Monks than Reason.

2.Because different languages have different words to describe the same objects or concepts, there is no intrinsic reason why a specific sign is used to express a given signifier. It is thus "arbitrary".

No it isn't. There is a buck stopped mechanism here so a more or less rigid Kripke type designator exists. No doubt that mechanism itself arises out of focal solutions to coordination or discoordination problems- but then human beings themselves exist on an uncertain fitness landscape and so nothing social can be wholly ideal or Divine.
What I mean is if you start to use words in a Humpty Dumpty like way, people will think you are a nutter. If you do it in a Court of Law, you will lose your case. We may not be able to say, with any great precision, where 'the buck stops' when it comes to deciding whether a particular word can have a specific significance. But then it is best for a Society not to let any one discover this aspect of its existence for fear of being rendered vulnerable to parasites or predators.

3.Signs thus gain their meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs. As he wrote, "in language, there are only differences 'without positive terms.'"^[5]

Fuck off! Signs gain fixed meanings by a buck stopping, protocol bound, discourse specific, mechanism.
Consider the following statement- 'in language, £$%$@ are only diff))(*e3s without xdffs terms'
It means shit. What Soossoo (which is the correct way to pronounce Saussure) said isn't the same sort of shit. Why? Because it is obviously false.

Shit is a positive term. So is 'false'. There is a difference, contra Soossoo, between his shite and my taking the piss out of his shite. My statement is neither true nor false. It isn't buckstopped. Soossoo's statement is buckstopped as false because we know a lot more about what is and isn't computable.

Wikipedia says-

Proponents of structuralism would argue that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure—modelled on language—that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and those of ideas or the imagination—the "third order".^[6]

Deleuze, who wasn't genuinely stupid, writing in '67 makes a forgivable mistake- one Chomsky also made, as did Arthur C Clarke in thinking a computer, like HAL in 2001, could use 'i-language' or what Soossoo called 'langue'.

This is a quote from Delueze's article- 'How do we recognise Structuralism'- which Wikipedia links to.
'In fact, language is the only thing that can properly be said to have structure, be it an esoteric or even non-verbal language. '
What elementary mistake is Delouse making here?
The answer is obvious. Language has no structure. Using it efficiently- for some wholly non-linguistic purpose- however, does involve structure of a sort describable by decision trees and heuristic rules which tantalise by the prospect of some more general algorithm.

In other words, just as there is no structure inherent in 'stuff in the fridge you better eat or throw out'- there is a lot of structure in the tasty little snack your g.f can concoct from it. Can but doesn't. I swear, the only reason she comes round is coz I'm hooked on Uber eats.

Delouse, deluded about Language, makes the same point about something my students were expert in- viz. being unconscious while I lectured.

There is a structure of the unconscious only to the extent that the unconscious speaks and is language. 
Nonsense! The Unconscious isn't a spandrel. It is useful. So it has a capacitance diversity type structure which may, at the margin, be linguistic, but is otherwise wholly concerned with improving inclusive fitness on an uncertain landscape.
There is a structure of bodies only to the extent that bodies are supposed to speak with a language which is one of the symptoms. 
If Neurosis were a real illness- this might be true. But we now know Nuerosis is no such thing. The whole thing was just a money making fraud.
Even things possess a structure only in so far as they maintain a silent discourse, which is the language of signs. 
Very true! The ice cube in my bacardi & coke is only maintaining its structure because of its silent discourse with Slotedijk's conception of the Zorn und Ziet syzgy as foundational to any future Prolegemenon to saying Trump is very very bad. Fuck you Trump!
So the question What is structuralism? is further transformed—it is better to ask: What do we recognize in those that we call structuralists? And what do they themselves recognize?— since one does not recognize people, in a visible manner, except by the invisible and imperceptible things they themselves recognize in their own way. 
Quite right! We don't recognise people using visual cues at all. That is why I put my dick upon the Papa John pizza box. My g.f likes surprises of that sort. True she is 84 and looks nothing like the two young Mormons whom I had invited in. Still, there must have been some 'invisible and imperceptible things' about the pair which should have allowed them to recognise, in their own way, that they were actually my very elderly and quite toothless g.f.  Yet they signally failed to do the needful! Why? It is because Trump is very bad. Fuck you Trump! Fuck you very much indeed!

How do the structuralists go about recognizing a language in something, the language proper to a domain? What do they discover in this domain? We thus propose only to discern certain formal criteria of recognition, the simplest ones, by invoking in each case the example of cited authors, whatever the diversity of their works and projects.
One can think of the Bourbaki as Structuralist- indeed Piaget mentions them paradigmatic in his short introduction to the subject- but Pure Mathematics is a wholly nomothetic discipline. What drives its language is Grothendieckian Yoga- i.e. the unification of idiographic discoursess on the basis of greater generality. Short run, this means a trade off in terms of significance. But, new techniques, not structures, gain mobility by this project so what really happens is that a 'Reverse Mathematics project' becomes more and more feasible. In other words, paying attention to Bourbaki, 'New Maths' ( which Tom Lehrer made fun off) and other such Continental uncleanness, does not involve assimilation to the Borg.

In '67, however, when Delouse was writing this, the madness of Maoism was precisely the Borg du jour of deeply petit bourgeois pederasts and pedagogues.

I. First Criterion: The Symbolic We are used to, almost conditioned to a certain distinction or correlation between the real and the imaginary.

Coz u r a fucking pedagogue! Get over yourself! Back in '67 working class people probably thought Professors of worthless shite were smart. They were swiftly disabused of any such notion. Delouse and his ilk were industriously storing up treasure for, not Marx, but Monty Python.

All of our thought maintains a dialectical play between these two notions.

Under Uncertainty- which is the fitness landscape on which we have evolved- there is no efficient way of distinguishing the two. Thus there can be no 'dialectical play' between them.  Kant's quid juris/ quid facti distinction reappears in Physics without any fucking a priori buck stopper at all. Later, much later, the experiments of Michelson-Morley, or Madam Wu, would drive this point home to the hilt.
That's why 'dialectical reason' has disappeared. It was empirically proven to be shite.

Even when classical philosophy speaks of pure intelligence or understanding, it is still a matter of a faculty defined by its aptitude to grasp the depths of the real (le reel en son fond), the real "in truth," the real as such, in opposition to, but also in relation to the power of imagination.

Nonsense! Either there is 'participation' in Nous or Logos, or there is a 'constructive' mimetic. Faculties, for, not Classical, but Christian, philosophy, refer to an endowment of an ultimately occassionalist sort. Why? The Soul were otiose but for some such alien faculty constitutively judging it or otherwise instrumentalising it.

Let us cite some creative movements that are quite different: Romanticism, Symbolism, Surrealism...

All of which were as boring as shit save for some aleatory talent their exponents might have been unable to programmatically smother.

In doing so, we invoke at once the transcendent point where the real and the imaginary interpenetrate and unite, and their sharp border, like the cutting edge of their difference.

Does citing Shelley invoke anything save boredom? Or citing Mallarme anything save a desultory, adolescent, 'afternoon on the phone'? What about Surrealism? At best, it is decorative in a simpering manner. At worst a facile availability cascade for Trustafarians.

In any case, we get no farther than the opposition and complementarity of the imaginary and the real—at least in the traditional interpretation of Romanticism, Symbolism, etc.

Traditional interpretations? Why not just say worthless belles lettristic shite?

Even Freudianism is interpreted from the perspective of two principles: the reality principle with its power to disappoint, the pleasure principle with its hallucinatory power of satisfaction.

Not any more, Delouse. It is interpreted as fraud. You can't get your HMO to pay for treating your Oedipus Complex. You have to come clean and mention that Voices are telling you to shit higher than your arsehole.

With all the more reason, methods like those of Jung and Bachelard are wholly inscribed within the real and the imaginary, within the frame of their complex relations, transcendent unity and liminary tension, fusion and cutting edge. 

Yes, but so were the methods of the Maharishi and Charlie Manson and Felix the fucking drug dealing Cat.

There is nothing, wholly shite, of which it can't be claimed that its methods are completely inscribed in something not subject to any selection pressure- i.e. stuff outside the realm of scarcity and thus subject to no 'sufficient reason' type efficiency constraint.

By contrast, anything not utterly shite is not wholly transcribed anywhere and has no intractable complexity or but backwardly inductive 'transcendent' unity.  Man can levitate- but not by the Maharishi's methods. What is needful is a jet-pack whose engineering depends not at all upon any fucking 'dialectical relationship' between the 'real and the imaginary', but a protocol bound manufacturing and testing process.

The first criterion of structuralism, however, is the discovery and recognition of a third order, a third regime: that of the symbolic.

Did Bourbaki type Mathematics- which was (or may still may be, for all I know) a highly productive Structuralist Research Program- have a Frege type 'third realm'? Oddly, no. The thing may feature in Godel and Ackermann and so on, but Bourbaki's is genuinely a Yoga. It unites without any ontological state space expansion or, ex falso quodlibet, principle of explosion.

The refusal to confuse the symbolic with the imaginary, as much as with the real, constitutes the first dimension of structuralism.

A dimension only exists if it has an intrinsic metric. Otherwise it is empty. Structuralism's first dimension is empty- save for beings able to construct a metric for symbols used in modal, or more immodest yet, logics.

In this case again, everything began with linguistics: beyond the word in its reality and its resonant parts, beyond images and concepts associated with words, the structuralist linguist discovers an element of quite another nature, a structural object.

'beyond the world in its reality and its resonant parts' is good. Deleuze wasn't a stupid Credentialised Careerist- moreover, the year was '67.

But what metaphysics or soteriology does this notion correspond to?

The answer is, onomatodoxy- i.e granting equal status to the name as the named, for example by saying Lord Rama is served simply by saying 'Ram! Ram!'- as mediated by an aesthetic notion of dhvani as developed by Riti poets like Tulsi.

But what is discovered beyond the word in its shruti or dhvani, beyond such rupa or yojana or, indeed, chittavritti, as is associated with it, is that the univocity of Nirguna Brahma can have no structure because its Truth is a pathless land.

A 'structural object' has symmetries corresponding to conservation laws or conserved forces. However these arise in non dissipative systems. Still, Linguists were able to make remarkable predictions- or what seemed remarkable predictions at the time- for example that an Indo-European language would be found in ancient Anatolia and it would have certain characteristics. However, the problem here is that Languages are dissipative systems. True, by treating them as non-dissipative, you can make some interesting predictions. But those predictions are highly misleading because  dissipative organic systems may not be wholly ergodic for regret minimizing reasons. In other words what looks like a structure is actually a hysteresis effect built into a co-evolutionary arms race. So Structuralism is 'fool's gold'-

And perhaps it is in this symbolic element that the novelists of Tel Quel wish to locate themselves, in order to renew the resonant realities as well as the associated narratives. Beyond the history of men, and the history of ideas, Michel Foucault discovers a deeper, subterranean ground that forms the object of what he calls the archaeology of thought. Behind real men and their real relations, behind ideologies and their imaginary relations, Louis Althusser discovers a deeper domain as object of science and of philosophy.

Foucault fucked up- he literally 'died of ignorance' as the tag line was back then. Althusser killed his wife and was revealed to have been off his head all along. Structuralism's fool gold arose because of the aleatory appearance of hysteresis effects which gave the appearance of 'timeless' truths- whereas they were simply artefacts of an arms race between co-evolving multiplicative update weighting algorithms. Structuralism thought that if gold had been found then, by digging deeper, platinum must surely be discovered. But there was nothing there but dirt. The mine had been salted from the start.

Returning to the Wikipedia article, this condign summary is given-

 In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of "the Symbolic" is distinguished both from "the Real" and "the Imaginary";

This would be cool iff Dr. Lacan had actually cured anybody. He didn't. A Voodoo practitioner who distinguishes a Symbolic Baron Samedi from the Real and the Imaginary Baron is still just a fucking Voodoo practitioner.

similarly, in Althusser's Marxist theory, the structural order of the capitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from the ideological forms in which those relations are understood.

So it can't be critiqued and can't be reformed but rather must, like Lovecraft's Elder Gods, reduce those who seek for them to gibbering idiocy.

Returning to Delouse's '67 essay, we find a misology not absent in analytical philosophy- viz.  the mystification represented by a 'third realm' whereas all that exists is the tertius gaudens of a careerist academic availability cascade which will gain tenure and talk shite till the entire Department is discredited and disintermediated for signalling purposes as more and more of its PhDs end up as barristas.

We can enumerate the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic: 1, 2, 3.

No we can't. This isn't enumeration. It is mere juxtaposition. Enumeration means listing all the elements of a set. The Real and the Imaginary and the Symbolic are not elements of any Set as Delouse quickly reveals

But perhaps these numerals have as much an ordinal as a cardinal value.

If so, the Real must be bigger than the Imaginary or Symbolic because the latter two are computationally constrained.

For the real in itself is not separable from a certain ideal of unification or of totalization: the real tends towards one, it is one in its "truth."

Unless we had a language which could 'carve up Reality along its joints' in which case we would have a metric for modal logic.

As soon as we see two in "one," as soon as we make doubles [de'doublons], the imaginary appears in person, even if it is in the real that its action is carried out.

Seeing double means you are drunk or have a concussion. Of course, this could be just a metaphor for suddenly grasping that a thing or concept fits into two different action schemata. However, to take this metaphor as a concrete reality and construct upon it another metaphor- viz. that the 'double' is like a spooky doppleganger- is merely a baroque type of poetry which will cash out as onomatodoxy- i.e saying 'Ram! Ram!' and grinning toothlessly.

For example, the real father is one, or wants to be according to his law; but the image of the father is always double in itself, cleaved according to a law of the dual or duel.

The real father, more often than not, has done a runner and doesn't want to pay child maintenance. The image of the father was only invoked by pedagogues teaching credentialised shite or charlatans who recognised that treating people who aren't sick pays better provided you can convince them you're like their Daddy or summat.

It is projected onto two persons at least, one assuming the role of the playfather, the father-buffoon, and the other, the role of the working and ideal father: like the Prince of Wales in Shakespeare, who passes from one father image to the other, from Falstaff to the Crown.

So, this 'dual or duel' is just some shite a pederast of a pedagogue says in Eng Lit 101 in the hope of getting it on with some smooth cheeked youngster.

The imaginary is defined by games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection, always in the mode of the double. 

That is the definition of how people are duped. It depends on our imagining these obviously worthless shitheads aren't obviously worthless shitheads. In other words, this is the definition of how destroying the Imagination is the first step to duping people or oneself.

This can be the solution to a Newcombe or Kavka toxin type problem but, as such, this points to the manner in which the Imaginary is subsumed by the Real- not the other way round.

But perhaps, in turn, the symbolic is three, and not merely the third beyond the real and the imaginary. There is always a third to be sought in the symbolic itself; structure is at least triadic, without which it would not "circulate"—a third at once unreal, and yet not imaginable.  

Right! Coz you've just run up against the incompossible. So you gibber wordlessly and point to a sinister type of Occassionalism. Congratulations! You have advanced from the Catholicism of Ernst Hello to the cult of Cthulu which speaks to you from the pages of Hello Magazine in your psychiatrist's waiting room.

 We will see why later; but already the first criterion consists of this: the positing of a symbolic order, irreducible to the orders of the real and the imaginary, and deeper than they are.

Deeper? How? Were symbols created by Lovecraft's elder gods? If so, why have any truck with them?
The truth is, symbols are solutions to coordination and discoordination games. Nothing less, nothing more. If the symbols are useful, they are 'buck stopped'. If not, they are dammed up as capacitance diversity in a regret minimizing manner.

We do not yet know what this symbolic element consists of.

You would have done if you'd read David Lewis on Thomas Schelling.

We can say at least that the corresponding structure has no relationship with a sensible form, nor with a figure of the imagination, nor with an intelligible essence.

If it is a structure, it must have symmetries. What are they? Delouse doesn't know. So why mention the subject? No doubt, Super-Strings have a structure but the guy on 'Big Bang theory' who owns the Comic Book store does not mention them coz he doesn't have any inkling about what that structure might be and if he pretends otherwise- for example if he says 'Silver Surfer is cooler than Wolverine coz Super String theory says so'- he knows he'll be shot down by Sheldon.

Delouse's problem was that he was Comic Book guy hanging out with people stupider than himself. No wonder he has acolytes!

It has nothing to do with a form: for structure is not at all defined by an autonomy of the whole, by a preeminence [pregnance] of the whole over its parts, by a Gestalt which would operate in the real and in perception.

But this sort of structure could only arise in an Occassionalist, not an Evolutionary, theory.

Structure is defined, on the contrary, by the nature of certain atomic elements which claim to account both for the formation of wholes and for the variation of their parts.

Very true! That's why coal is as hard as diamonds and why diamonds burn so well.

It has nothing to do with figures of the imagination, although structuralism is riddled with reflections on rhetoric, metaphor and metonymy, for these figures themselves imply structural displacements which must account for both the literal and the figurative.

Schizophrenic word salads are riddled with such shite. Structuralist research programs in Maths are not.

Nor has it has anything to do with an essence: it is more a combinatory formula [une combinatoire] supporting formal elements which by themselves have neither form, nor signification, nor representation, nor content, nor given empirical reality, nor hypothetical functional model, nor intelligibility behind appearances.

So, Delouse is writing about a zairja type combinatoric method Ramon Lully, a Franciscan tertiary, discovered while trying to convert the Moors. Poor fellow, he didn't understand that the Islamic barzakh could serve a philosophical 'capacitance diversity' type function which the corrupt Catholic concept of Limbo could not.

No one has better determined the status of the structure as identical to the "Theory" itself than Louis Althusser

Thus guaranteeing it to be shite

—and the symbolic must be understood as the production of the original and specific theoretical object.

Production? But that is an economic process- it evolves under scarcity. If 'original and specific' theoretical objects evolved, then they did so in competition with non theoretical objects as well an un-original and non-specific theoretical objects. This means that their mutual coexistence must represent an Evolutionarily Stable configuration. But, if that is the case, there is no point understanding the genidentity of an 'original and specific' theoretical object in a manner different from anything else. Suppose a mad scientist studies a theoretical 'woofy-cat'- i.e a cat which says woof woof and does other doggy things. Suppose such a woofy cat is actually produced. How it fares in the world, however, depends on a common fitness landscape for domestic pets. To understand how woofycat genidentity has propagated we have to use the same methods we would use for any non-theoretical breed available in the relevant market.

Sometimes structuralism is aggressive, as when it denounces the general misunderstanding of this ultimate symbolic category, beyond the imaginary and the real.

Yes. Paranoid Schizophrenics can sometimes become aggressive.

Sometimes it is interpretative, as when it renews our interpretation of works in relation to this category, and claims to discover an original point at which language is constituted, in which works elaborate themselves, and where ideas and actions are bound together.

Quite true, pedagogues often turn into pederasts and try to bugger with the brains of their charges.

Romanticism and Symbolism, but also Freudianism and Marxism, thus become the objects of profound reinterpretations.

Profound? Are you kidding me? Which pedagogue ever said anything profound? All that matters is that they don't actually beat their students to death with their dicks or drown them in their vaginas. Or is that too much to ask?

Not to mention the mythical, poetic, philosophical, or practical works which themselves are subjected to structural interpretation. But this reinterpretation only has value to the extent that it animates new works which are those of today, as if the symbolic were the source, inseparably, of living interpretation and creation.

The Black Panther first appeared in Marvel Comics in 1966. Unlike Althusser's shite, or Lacon's shite or even Delouse's shite, the Black Panther, in 2018, has animated a global project of reinterpretation and creation.
Why did Stan Lee succeed where Delouse failed? The answer is that Marvel Comics paid attention to the fitness landscape, it did not navel gaze at theoretical origins. Had it done so, Chadwick Boseman would have been playing a character named 'Coal Tiger'. The thing would have bombed.

To conclude, Delouse thought the Symbolic order was higher than the creatures who use it to solve coordination problems under conditions of scarcity. The result was that he and his ilk wrote stupid shite. Stan Lee understood the symbolic order was about efficient competition on an uncertain fitness landscape. He stuck to his guns- though there was a brief period when T'Challa was renamed the Black Leopard! such was the madness of the Nixon era- and so we can now all say 'After Shakespeare, Stan has created most'. (vide Hamlet vs Spiderman 1972 in which The League of Shakespearean characters defeats both the Avengers and the Justice League who have been fooled by the Joker into trying to destroy the Cosmic Cube)

Returning to Delouse, let us see whether he can say something sillier yet

II. Second Criterion: Local or Positional 

What does the symbolic element of the structure consist of?

A structure's symmetries are expressed symbolically. If there are no symmetries there is no ordering, however weak, and, hence, there is no structure. That's it. That's the whole story.

We sense the need to go slowly, to state repeatedly, first of all, what it is not.

No we don't. Either a Structure has symmetries and thus a lower Kalmogorov complexity definition, or there's no point calling it a Structure.

Distinct from the real and the imaginary, the symbolic cannot be defined either by pre-existing realities to which it would refer and which it would designate, or by the imaginary or conceptual contents which it would implicate, and which would give it a signification.

If you define a symbol- and Delouse's 'the symbolic' is one such- then either the thing is buck-stopped or you have wasted your breath. Pi is buck-stopped. Delouse's 'symbolic' is not. This means one can go on asking the same question and getting an answer with the same homology as before and pretend one is engaging with an actual Research Program. Fine! But, sooner or later, the Ponzi scheme collapses.

The elements of a structure have neither extrinsic designation, nor intrinsic signification. Then what is left? As Levi-Strauss recalls  rigorously, they have nothing other than a sense [sens = meaning and direction]: a sense which is necessarily and uniquely "positional.'"' It is not a matter of a location in a real spatial expanse, nor of sites in imaginary extensions, but rather of places and sites in a properly structural space, that is, a topological space.

Aha! So Topology is the master narrative here. Good to know.

Space is what is structural, but an unextended, preextensive space, pure spatium constituted bit by bit as an order of proximity, in which the notion of proximity first of all has precisely an ordinal sense and not a signification in extension.  Or take genetic biology: the genes are part of a structure to the extent that they are inseparable from "loci," sites capable of changing their relation within the chromosome. In short, places in a purely structural space are primary in relation to the things and real beings which come to occupy them, primary also in relation to the always somewhat imaginary roles and events which necessarily appear when they are occupied. The scientific ambition of structuralism is not quantitative, but topological and relational, a principal that Levi-Strauss constantly reaffirms.

Cool! So if, fifty years after Delouse wrote these words, the top Topologists and Geneticists and so on were telling their students to study Delouse then we'd know he was onto something.

Nothing of the sort has occurred. A Sokal can spoof Deluezian shite better than Ajay Skaria or some other such Subaltern shithead.

And when Althusser speaks of economic structure, he specifies that the true "subjects" there are not those who come to occupy the places, i.e. concrete individuals or real human beings—no more than the true objects are the roles that they fulfill and the events that are produced. Rather, these "subjects" are above all the places in a topological and structural space defined by relations of production. 

In other words, Althusser was more Debreuivian than Debreu- but Debreu moved on. By the early Seventies, he was one of the co-discoverers of the 'Anything goes' theorem. Econ didn't get stuck in a logic loop. It developed an actual critique of capital markets- and thus Capitalism- as well as of incomplete Contracts- and thus every type of Left-Liberal Utopia.

When Foucault defines determinations such as death, desire, work, or play, he does not consider them as dimensions of empirical human existence, but above all as the qualifications of places and positions which will render those who come to occupy them mortal and dying, or desiring, or workman-like, or playful.

So the guy set up as a manufacturer of Procrustean beds for every occasion. What happened next? A bunch of brain dead Careerists cobbled together illiterate PhD theses and put their students to sleep while pretending to be fighting the system as the intellectual vanguard of some surd and subaltern identity class.

These, however, only come to occupy the places and positions secondarily, fulfilling their roles according to an order of proximity that is an order of the structure itself. That is why Foucault can propose a new distribution of the empirical and the transcendental, the latter finding itself defined by an order of places independently of those who occupy them empirically.

I can do the same thing on the basis of a prescriptive ontology featuring a maximal tropism to make cat like noises. People and things merely occupy a lattice of cat like noise making which alone can properly distinguish and distribute the empirical and the transcendental.

Structuralism cannot be separated from a new transcendental philosophy, in which the sites prevail over whatever occupies them.

That's not a good thing. It means whatever shite you are spouting is homologically equivalent to the theory that everybody and every thing should be making cat like noises.

Father, mother, etc., are first of all sites in a structure; and if we are mortal, it is by moving into the line, by coming to a particular site, marked in the structure following this topological order of proximities (even when we do so ahead of our turn).

Father should be making cat like noises. So should mummy. That is what is required by their sites in my structure. You may say 'why should I make cat like noises? Mummy and Daddy didn't and they lived happy and successful lives.' My reply is, 'Daddy and Mummy occupied sites of cat-like noise production. Empirically it may appear that they failed to make cat like noises- but, from the Transcendental point of view, silence too is a cat-like noise. Moreover, they were probably saying 'O Long Johnson'. Kindly click on the relevant video on You Tube.

"It is not only the subject," says Lacan, "but subjects grasped in their intersubjectivity, who line up... and who model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain which traverses them... The displacement of the signifier determines subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, in their blindnesses, in their conquests and in their fate, their innate gifts and social acquisition notwithstanding, without regard for character or sex..."  One could not say more clearly that empirical psychology is not only founded, but determined by a transcendental topology.

It is not only the potential cat like noise maker but also the potential cat like noise makers, grasped in their intersubjectivity, who line up... and who model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain which traverses them while itself potentially making cat like noises.

One could not say more clearly that empirical psychology is not only founded, but determined by a transcendental  topology of making cat like noises.

Several consequences follow from this local or positional criterion. First of all, if the symbolic elements have no extrinsic designation nor intrinsic signification, but only a positional sense, it follows necessarily and by rights that sense always results from the combination of elements which are not themselves signifying?

Cat like noises are elements which are not themselves signifying to vacuum cleaners. Yet, if Delouse aint talking shite, it must necessarily be the case that saying miaow to your Dyson will activate it even if it don't have no voice control module. Okay, I just tried miaow and nothing happened. Now I'm going to purr. Fuck me! It worked! The fact that I just pressed the switch is irrelevant coz like it was just a case of how the geodesic of my Space Time is warped.

As Levi-Strauss says in his discussion with Paul Ricoeur, sense is always a result, an effect: not merely an effect like a product, but an optical effect, a language effect, a positional effect.

This means my cat-like noise theory is not nonsense at all. Somebody please tell Macron. As Ricoeur's protege, he will immediately understand that he needs to make cat like noises to the French Railway Union till they call off their strike.

There is, profoundly, a nonsense of sense, from which sense itself results.

Oui! Monsewer Macron, pleeeze zay 'Miaow Miaow'! Zis Rail Strike is zo awfooool! Zut alors!  Aux grand maux les grand remèdes!”

Not that we return in this way to what was once called a philosophy of the absurd since, for such a philosophy, sense itself is lacking, essentially.

Absolutely! Macron must remember this if he finds himself accused of being the Sganarelle of the bildungsburgertum's theatre of the Absurd.
Fuck that. He should just stick to making cat like noises till Angela Merkel takes him in her lap and strokes and pets him and refinances Europe.

For structuralism, on the other hand, there is always too much sense, an overproduction, an over-determination of sense, always produced in excess by the combination of places in the structure. (Hence the importance, in Althusser's work for example, of the concept of over-determination^ Nonsense is not at all the absurd or the opposite of sense, but rather that which gives value to sense and produces it by circulating in the structure.

Miaow miaow miaow 

Structuralism owes nothing to Albert Camus, but much to Lewis Carroll.

Fuck off! Carroll was a proper Mathematician. 

" The second consequence is structuralism's inclination for certain games and a certain kind of theatre, for certain play and theatrical spaces. It is no accident that Levi-Strauss often refers to the theory of games, and accords such importance to playing cards.

But he remained ignorant of Game theory. 

As does Lacan to his game metaphors which are more than metaphors: not only the moving object [lefuret, literally the ferret; or, moving token in the jeu de furet, the game of hunt-the-slipper] which darts around the structure, but also the dummy-hand [la place du mort] that circulates in bridge. The noblest games such as chess are those that organize a combinatory system of places in a pure spatium infinitely deeper than the real extension of the chessboard and the imaginary extension of each piece.

Math can tame state space explosion- but it takes actual cognitive effort to do so. Talking shite don't cut it.  

Consider the new computer program which is beating human players of Go. It does this by turning aside by broadening its nueral network and using simpler decision rules- which however are self-learning. Its approach is eminently idiographic.

The new AlphaGo Zero works more simply. First, it combines the move-picking network and the game-predicting network, making the program more efficient and flexible. Second, the combined neural network uses a new architecture that allows for many more layers of tunable artificial neurons than those in the first AlphaGo. Third, during training, the network and search tree work more closely to improve each other. With these changes, the program could skip the step of learning from human games. It also skipped rollout, which had relied on hand-crafted tactical guidelines.

The hypertrophied nomothetic approach of French shitheads, half a century ago, was bound to validate nothing but theories homologically equivalent to my cat-like noise teleology. That is why it was commodified for Identittyarian (Breast is One, Nips are many) gesture politics.

Or when Althusser interrupts his commentary on Marx to talk about theatre, but a theatre that is neither of reality nor of ideas, a pure theatre of places and positions, the principle of which he sees in Brecht, and that would today perhaps find its most extreme expression in Armand Gatti's work.

Gatti was one tough dude. Why compare him to, the poltroon, Brecht, or mention his name in connection with, the wife-killer, Althusser?
Okay, it was '67. Delouse couldn't have known how things would go down. But the reason he couldn't have known was because his own theory was shit. If it hadn't been, he couldn't have written this sentence.

In short, the very manifesto of structuralism must be sought in the famous formula, eminently poetic and theatrical: to think is to cast a throw of the dice [penser, c'est e'mettre un coup de des].]i

But Game Theory is topological. Throwing dice involves Probability, and hence is fully covered by Measure Theory, not Knightian Uncertainty of 'Quantum' entanglement or 'negative probabilities' or Hannan Consistency or anything we know now to be useful.

Deciding may be compared to throwing dice. Thinking is penumbral, it's topos is the 'in-between'- methexu, barzakh, bardo, antarabhava... it occurs at the limit which unites as much as divides quantity and quality, Representation and Recurrence, the one and the many because to deny, as Oedipus does, that one man is many, is to stand self-blinded as the pillar of a Temple whose roof has always already fallen in.

The third consequence is that structuralism is inseparable from a new materialism, a new atheism, a new anti-humanism.

No it isn't. It is inseparable from any theory homologous to my teleology featuring cat-like noises.

For if the place is primary in relation to whatever occupies it, it certainly will not do to replace God with man in order to change the structure. And if this place is the dummy-hand [la place du mort, i.e. the dead man's place], the death of God surely means the death of man as well, in favor, we hope, of something yet to come, but which could only come within the structure and through its mutation. This is how we understand the imaginary character of man for Foucault or the ideological character of humanism for Althusser

or my insistence that everything makes cat like noises which does not depend on Goddess Bastet or Shashti but arises out of a critique of the notion of 'Man' or 'Humanism' under conditions of late Print Capitalism.

III. Third Criterion: The Differential and the Singular What then do these symbolic elements or units of position finally consist of?

Delouse is saying 'what does some X's 'hash table' finally consist of?" This presupposes there is an index (which Delouse will later discuss under the rubric of the 'serial') for a complete 'associative array' such that each 'key' figures uniquely.
Obviously, if Uncertainty prevails and God is not Occassionalist, the hash table consists of nothing but notional, defeasible, elements.

Let us return to the linguistic model. What is distinct both from the voiced elements, and the associated concepts and images, is called a phoneme, the smallest linguistic unit capable of differentiating two words of diverse meanings: for example, "Millard" [billiard] and "/>illard" [pillager].

Either the phoneme is buck-stopped by some conventional juristic process or it isn't. If it isn't Wittgenstein's private language argument applies. Not only is there no certainty, it must be the case that no error correction is occurring. The thing is bound to turn to shit, not retain any semblance of structure.

It is clear that the phoneme is embodied in letters, syllables and sounds, but that it is not reducible to them.

It is reducible to reception. You may say 'eggs', I hear 'yeggz' and say 'Sari! No yeggz here Saaar! These iz Brahman Ho Tull, yai zay!'

Moreover, letters, syllables and sounds give it an independence, whereas in itself, the phoneme is inseparable from the phonemic relation which unites it to other phonemes: b / p. Phonemes do not exist independently of the relations into which they enter and through which they reciprocally determine each other.

If this were true, people would say I sound like Stephen Fry and people would ask which Public School I attended. As things are,  the young Asian Immigration Officers at Heathrow gaze at me in dismay because though I clearly have lived in this country for forty years, I still sound as if I'd just been discovered stowed-away on a Cross-Channel ferry. Amartya Sen says the same thing happens to him. It doesn't at all. The fucker talks posh. What invites incredulity is his claim to be the Dungeon Master of Trinity or some other such notorious S&M hangout.

We can distinguish three types of relation. A first type is established between elements which enjoy independence or autonomy: for example, 3 + 2, or even 2 / 3. The elements are real, and these relations must themselves be said to be real.

Gorillas and hand grenades enjoy independence and autonomy but you can't add them together. Two gorillas may well be divided by three hand grenades in to lots of different pieces but those pieces won't all be either gorillas or hand grenades or some aggregate of both.

A second type of relationship, for example, x2 + y2 - R2 = 0, is established between terms for which the value is not specified, but which in each case, however, must have a determined value.

Nonsense! R may be impredicative.

Such relations can be called imaginary. But the third type is established  between elements which have no determined value themselves, and which nevertheless determine each other reciprocally in the relation: thus ydy + xdx = 0, or dy-/ dx = - x/y. Such relationships are symbolic, and the corresponding elements are held in a differential relationship. Dy is totally undetermined in relation to y, and dx is totally undetermined in relation to x: each one has neither existence, nor value, nor signification. And yet the relation dy/dx is totally determined, the two elements determining each other reciprocally in the relation. 

Sheer nonsense! Dy is wholly determined by what is happening to y. There exist a set of X's which satisfy the formula with respect to how y is changing. dy/dx is wholly indeterminate- any x or y could satisfy it at some times but not others.

This process of a reciprocal determination is at the heart of a relationship that allows one to define the symbolic nature. Sometimes the origins of structuralism are sought in the area of axiomatics, and it is true that Bourbaki, for example, uses the word "structure." But this use, it seems to me, is in a very different sense, that of relations between non-specified elements, not even qualitatively specified, whereas in structuralism, elements specify each other reciprocally in relations. In this sense, axiomatics would still be imaginary, not symbolic properly speaking. The mathematical origin of structuralism must be sought rather in the domain of differential calculus, specifically in the interpretation which Weierstrass and Russell gave to it, a static and ordinal interpretation, which definitively liberates calculus from all reference to the infinitely small, and integrates it into a pure logic of relations.

Oh dear! Delouse thinks he is smarter than Andrei Weil or Grothendieck! He thinks the 'mathematical origin of structuralism' is something fixed for all time in the rejection of 'space intuition' in favour of a similarly flawed Arithmeticization in thework of Weierstrass and the early Russel, whose halitosis was so bad he had to settle for calculus rather than coition. Thankfully, an American Dentist fixed him up and so he could move on from Logicism to getting laid.

Obviously, if we- irrationally- subscribe to a complete and consistent Logicism then we could liberate calculus from anything at all. However, this would also entail the ineluctable tropism of every Dedekind cut to make cat like noises. That's the way the Principle of Explosion works. It justifies you saying something stupid at the price of licensing every other sort of stupidity.

Corresponding to the determination of differential relations are singularities, distributions of singular points which characterize curves or figures (a triangle for example has three singular points). In this way, the determination of phonemic relations proper to a given language ascribes singularities in proximity to which the vocalizations and significations of the language are constituted.

If this were the case, not only would Strong A.I be feasible but it would also be mathematically certain that cats excrete some microbe or virus which causes Society to build pyramids and create hierarchies and so on. Thus my teleology re. making cat like noises is perfectly rational.

Delouse's project, however, is not because it is reciprocally determined by my making cat like noises without, however, determining the sort of noises Parisian cats used to make which, I need hardly mention, have an archeological relationship to such sounds as my neighbour's tabby emits and which, from time to time, out of simple exasperation, I too utter.

The reciprocal determination of symbolic elements continues henceforth into the complete determination of singular points that constitute a space corresponding to these elements. The crucial notion of singularity, taken literally, seems to belong to all the domains in which there is structure. The general formula, "to think is to cast a throw of the dice," itself refers to the singularities represented by the sharply outlined points on the dice. Every structure presents the following two aspects: a system of differential relations according to which the symbolic elements determine themselves reciprocally, and a system of singularities corresponding to these relations and tracing the space of the structure. Every structure is a multiplicity. The question, "Is there structure in any domain whatsoever?," must be specified in the following way: in a given domain, can one uncover symbolic elements, differential relations and singular points which are proper to it? Symbolic elements are incarnated in the real beings and objects of the domain considered; the differential relations are actualized in real relations between these beings; the singularities are so many places in the structure, which distributes the imaginary attitudes or roles of the beings or objects that come to occupy them. 

 If it is true that 'to think is to cast a throw of the dice' then it must be the case that the terminus ad quem of thought is making cat like noises- because silence too is a cat like noise. Furthermore, since any set of dice throws can be mapped onto a sequence of cat like noises, it follows that Delouse's thought is fully determined by, without itself at all determining, cat like noises.

It is not a matter of mathematical metaphors. In each domain, one must find elements, relationships and points.

Why must one do so? "Nicaraguan horcruxes of my neighbour's cat' is a domain. Why must one find elements, relationships and points in this domain? There can be only one canonical answer- viz. making cat like noises.

When Levi-Strauss undertakes the study of elementary kinship structures, he not only considers the real fathers in a society, nor only the father-images that run through the myths of that society. He claims to discover real kinship phonemes, that is, kin-emes [parentemes], positional units which do not exist independently of the differential relations into which they enter and that determine each other reciprocally. It is in this way that the four relations—brother / sister, husband / wife, father / son, maternal uncle / sister's son—form the simplest structure. And to this combinatory system of "kinship names" correspond in a complex way, but without resembling them, the "kinship attitudes" that realize the singularities determined in the system.

So, Delouse thinks there is a correspondence without resemblance even in elementary kinship structures.  Thus I was justified in making cat like noises rather than saying 'Namaste Auntyji!' as my Mother demanded. Indeed, she hereself corresponded to, without resembling, some sequence of cat like noises and thus I was fulfilling my filial duty to what she corresponded to by making similar cat like noises.
Anyway, I won that argument. Sadly, my Professors at the LSE were made of sterner stuff. But then they actually knew some Maths as opposed to 'mathematical metaphors'. Sad.

One could just as well proceed in the opposite manner: start from singularities in order to determine the differential relations between ultimate symbolic elements. Thus, taking the example of the Oedipus myth, Levi-Strauss starts from the singularities of the story (Oedipus marries his mother, kills his father, immolates the Sphinx, is named club-foot, etc.) in order to infer from them the differential relations between "mythemes" which are determined reciprocally (overestimation of kinship relations, underestimation of kinship relations, negation of aboriginality, persistence of aboriginality).

So, what if Levi-Strauss shat on Literature? Any Witzelsucht Witzel can and has accomplished as much. By contrast, if you gave Alan Moore a copy of Kirscher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus you'd get a comic book franchise so rich and strange it would redeem our trumpery Trumpian Age and, by the quill of Thoth, stay Yahweh's Day of Wrath.

The wrong answer to the Sphinx's riddle is 'me'. Saying 'we' would have spared its life and tamed it and one could then go on to have lots of nice adventures and Mummy would have made us sandwiches and we wouldn't end up sleeping with her but just fallen asleep holding her hand on the sofa as some Sun TV serial meandered melodramatically on and on.
 Similarly, saying 'one man can't be many' is fucked in the head. I recall sleeping my Granny in the Sixties at a time when I was a secret agent  and a cowboy and an Astronaut as well as Dev Anand in 'Jewel Thief' and unstarching Mary Poppins knickers.

 Oedipus pronounces a curse on his Daddy's killer. But, tat tvam asi. Thou art That. So what? One is also everything else.
Killing Daddy is an imitatio dei- that's how Zeus and Jupiter got their start. Fucking your Mummy, or dreaming it happened, means you'll be welcomed back to your polis as a great hero. Oedipus is sitting pretty till he does what is ungodly and unkingly viz ask too many questions and thus become subject to his own isonomia- but that's okay, no biggie coz the old Indo-European Religion prescribed reciprocity between Deity and devotee- they live each others deaths and die each others lives.
This is a story with a happy ending. Though Oedipus, the big silly, didn't pal up the Sphinx to have a lot of nice adventures, like He-Man & Battle Cat, which he could have done just by saying 'we' not 'me' in answer to her riddle, still, at the end of the day, the Erinyes are tamed and transformed into the Euminides just in time for us to get the ancient Greek equivalent of corn-dogs and candy floss.

Kinship is about hugging and squeezing Daddy to death and giving little kisses to Mummy or Granny- Aunties can go hang, except for that sweet one who is getting married in December- and everybody eating corn-dogs and candy-floss and watching terrible melodramas on a CRT TV connected to a VCR that weighs more than you do.

Fuck was wrong with Levi-Strauss? He'd lived in Karachi. There must have been some kids who adopted him and made him give them piggyback rides and then fed him samosas or jalebi or whatever. Why could he not understand that kin are kind and continually exchange identities by 'paratman parivartana'? You feed a baby and it tries to feed you. You try to teach English to the little shits and they teach you not to say 'yeggz' rather than 'eggs'- either that or the other way round. I don't know anymore.

To belong to a kinship network- e.g. my own Tambram family- is- I am very sorry to say- to be immediately integrable into a wholly different one- e.g. that of Karachi Memons with whom I've got zero in common. Kids- and not just kids- young people from homes of that sort- they just fucking colonise everybody. Maybe, it wouldn't have happened to me if I spoke posh English or dressed better. I'm kidding myself. Kinship and kindness aint about 'me'. It's about 'we'.

I'm a 55 year old Tamil man. When I die, the only people who will remember me will be this Memon family where- back in '94- I accidentally ate 2.5 kgs of vegetable samosas which were supposed to be for all the guests. I thought the tray was just for me- I imagined that the womenfolk, discovering that their son's guest was Hindu, had sent this vegetarian dish so I could slake my hunger rather than be tempted by food forbidden by Religion.

Anyway, I was so stupefied by overeating that I sank supine on some sofa and thus became easy prey for some terroristic gang of tiny tots who, perversely, fled the attentions of the lovely lasses in the andaroon in order to try to get some useful work out of the horrible hulk that I represented.
Kids are like that. Cruel. Till they stop being kids. Sad. We are all that Sphinx which perishes as the four legged become two legged in so univocal a manner that 'me' supplants 'we' and one man can no longer be many.

Still, my memory is that I was once 'Battle Cat' to a He Man who is now probably an actuary or oncologist.

'Oedipus? Oedipus-Schmoedipus. He was a good boy who loved his Mother.'

I read out that joke from an American joke-book I'd borrowed from the USIS library.

Mum laughed.

I wasn't sure she'd gotten it. I hadn't. But, for once, she had and was able to repeat it at dinner parties.

What am I saying here?

Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith's precursor, defined Economics under the rubric of 'familial rights'.

Them Glasgow Uni geezers were great Greek scholars.

By contrast, India's 'Artha-shastra' (Economics) is backward because it is atomistic.

Yet, Yuddhishtra- the Just King- had to learn Game Theoretic Decision Theory just to overcome his 'Vishada' (abulia) at not knowing how to do justice to his own kin.

I'm now gonna try say something as foolish as Delooser.

Here goes-

 Oikos is related to Oikonomia as Artha is related to Akrebia.

Wikipedia says- the ancient Greek word oikos (ancient Greek: οἶκος, plural: οἶκοι; English prefix: eco- for ecology and economics) refers to three related but distinct concepts: the family, the family's property, and the house. Its meaning shifts even within texts, which can lead to confusion...In normal Attic usage the oikos, in the context of families, referred to a line of descent from father to son from generation to generation.

Oikos is related to Artha by a notion of 'true descent'- legally meaningful, for buck-stopped, kinship relationships. Artha, as meaning, also relates to the divine 'rta' or 'oikonomia', and is cognate with Avestan 'asha' as Truth. The Greek Church distinguishes between the plasticity of 'oikonomia' and the rigidity of 'Akrebia' as laws, vows and depressive conceptions of duty. But, and this is the fucking point of the Mahabharata, everybody is a true born son- if he wants to be- and none is if you didn't love him to pieces when you could coz he has become 'one man' and thus can't be 'many'.

Sod that as a game for soldiers!

Artha- hermeneutics- is a steaming pile of shite if Baby can't teach you langue.

Not everybody has a Baby.

Sad.

Think I'll go make cat like noises.

But which Baby will it delight?

Well, me writing this blog post is still a sort of cat-like noise making, right?

Jeez, I jus' fuckin' depressed myself.

Delooser took another course. And won- that fucking Froggie louse! Sterile Spinozas, spinning their unsticky webs, yet are redeemed and rendered Avuncular, Paternal, or even Vatsalya Avatar type toothlessly grinning Granny or Gandhi type figures, by the sticky hands of those who childishly turn over their pages with sticky hands.

Vasudhaiva Kutambakam is a real thing.

Just as Moliere died playing the title role in Le Malade imaginaire, coz he really was sick; and Sophocles, senile, cheated his Oikos by reason of the continued brilliance of his rhyme, so too does Deleuze- as did I after overeating samosas at a Memon Eid- become Evelyn Waugh's hellish vision of the Monsieur Prudhomme of the Thirties- viz. a man who seats his children on his lap and methodically feeds them all the good things on offer while prosing on in the manner of a Freemason.

Deleuze- by reason of his esoteric verging on Diabolism- now deservedly spoon feeds Subaltern Skarias.

Such irony is that theodicy which reconciles every conatus to being disrupted by cuddles.