Mapping the gap… —within
vowels space, flocks of birds, mapping plans, composing ourselves intently
We see our bones as our both innermost and outlasting remains, rarely do we think of them as the fossils of our movements except when they ache. We can feel our bones structure us like a building’s walls, but outside of that intent, we are more a gap within movements between…
The difference between a map and a plan is intent. Intent bewitches us, like all grammars, intention has glamour.
We often plan when maybe mapping is a better option.
One such intent is the use of structures to map and explore varieties of experience, as if bones tell us how to live. An intensification of a focus on structures often leads to various structuralisms. These views can often error in mistaking the skeleton for life itself. Or even being alive.
One such paragon of structuralism relates to language (see de Saussure), it is a type of grammarian bias, but developed in more useful ways, at least for a while.
There is a co-grounded set we use every day when we speak which distinguish themselves not by negative spaces like a folk definition and similar magical worlds:
An ass is not a horse but…
—until some greater set is interposed—
a donkey is a quadruped like a horse but…
a goat is a devil… horns—
….what’s useful…? what's polluting…?
the devil with it.Unlike these categories of intent, co-grounded sets co-evolve in use, or survival, much like a flock of birds in flight, they maintain their speed and their distance from their nearest neighbours and they thus wing as a group. They co-define themselves flocking across the sky.
Focus on the a bird without its neighbours and you may never see the flock.
In speech this emergent behaviour has been called/labelled/and/studied as a structuralism, but I feel, while it is understandable, this to be a misnomer. It arises from a folk notice of difference from within language speakers’ use and the language users thus formed concerns. (Various ontologies.)
This post seeks to re-negotiate that understandable understanding, and to outline some of its limits of usefulness in living/world-building.
The use of structure as a key metaphor is not so much a mistake as a ladder one must throw away after using it. Like any philosophy or similar activity engaged in i/enquiry rather than inquisition. Making usages dogmas to world-build is unwise.
Vowels are ground into difference by daily use by a population, we who are lucky enough to spend more time talking then we do eating. Both activities are required in/by the living poetry wherein we compose our bodies as we self the world.
Our mouths are a gap that continues right through us, with the odd sack here and there. We take in the substance of the terrain and compose our bodies (as we move), around the gap that continues right through us, this outside we carry within, the gap of the landscape around us that becomes a part of us deep in our gut… —as we become the world we produce in speech and other doings we track and trace, as new grounds on which we build “structures”. And these shelters work to explain how they stand not how they evolve, nor how they change day to day.
Structuralism puts the egg before the horse.
Structures are outcomes of usages, of being alive. Describing a structure does not build the structure, even if it tells you a possible and even likely how.
Sometimes we even call this informing power a voice, and call on authority to bulk up our defensive visions of the world, particularity when we feel the world is collapsing into a gap of nothingness, which is what the grammarian fears. They forget themselves of course.
The grammarian focuses on the stability that arises at the edge of chaos, and has little sympathy for inquiries into how stability arises out of chaos. The chaos that arises out of over-determined order is a mystery to them. As if they were never a baby.
The grammarian see the usage they are familiar with, comfortable with, and see that comfort as a shelter, a structure of good pronunciation and proper grammar, and with it they nurture the world. To talk wrong is felt to be attack on all that.
The grammarian sees the skeleton as the elan vital. Sees the fossil for the truth. The holy relic for love.
In mapping the gap we are engaged in delineating between various methods of definition, the grammarian is one perennial style. Like the poor, like empires, they are always with us.
Even as we use more carefully grounded delineations we will come across undefineable uses, and non-usages, un-useable and used-fors, used-anyways, a mass of messes of nothing… —and the anxious will worry about pollution. The outside passes within.
The anxious are always within us.
But use/agreement/survival grinds all usages into figures of fun, in torment, and laughter, there are so many gaps, the map is never complete, and never begun. It's not holy, there is no god in the gap, unless we throw one in for good measure, or out of laziness, as a bit of joke, as a distraction from our pursuit of power. As we should our lives into the world.
Mapping the gap involves itself in mapping mapping (definitions and decisions) about incompleteness and our limits, our knowing about our inability to do any of this, and judging it well, if not good. And proper.
The difference between a map and a plan is intention. Maps can emerge out of intentions, but that is rarely the plan.
As well, seeing that birds fly in a flock and each has an intention, does not mean the flock has a plan, and just because one can map the intentions, does not mean you have a plan. To call any of this a structure, these plans of parts, a shelter, is an act and outcome of world-building. It is of the “why we should”.
Any structure is a port in a storm.
The proclivity to see structure (de/constructing) when we should be mapping, is part of the moral urge to world-building. The proclivity is an outcome.
Those couple of sentences can be an acorn telling Henny Penny the sky is falling on your head, but only if you cannot see your own bias, that you cannot see your own bias is more than just a part of you, or a sin staining you, or a ill-fitting suit.
There is a calming effect in knowing your own soul. Then, perhaps… —any port in a storm is not required.
Now what I am referring to here as ‘bias’ is often thought of as ‘soul’ in other discourses/frameworks as it gives impetus to who you are. And ‘soul’ as a word let’s you plan intently, and build the world/shelter aware of your immortal soul, sometimes this is called individuation. (The thing about immortality for souls is unlikely though. That turns the soul into a bone.)(Or acorn.)
Structure arises out of usage and agreement, survival is a type of agreement in this framework; bias is a type of repeated survival. A soul is your incarnation of bias.
Structures thus are derivatives in a process and not the source.
Survival-in-process maps the world, in which, subsequently, intention plans a way across, to gather or hunt. Feeding-the-body is composed by bias/intent, and the intention ‘poses as an outcome.
The mapping remains in/of/through/over/under/by the terrain —a territory of opportunity unmapped never materialises into a terrain, until moved over/in/under/etc by a body of intentions as it composes itself, and once arisen, sees (its) movements as a always being there in landscape, nurturing country, since time began.
The landscape is also always there inside us, our intestines are an outside we carry around with/in us as we move across the landscape outside of us. Much like the air we breathe. And some call all this a belief in god, but they have coughed their own transcendence into the gap, a gap already everywhere. Belief does make reality, only the world as we should. Thus, we do not hold reality dear to us. We never belief in reality. There is no transcendence between plans.
Such a confusion of life.
But some call a map of all this a structure, or mistake the map for a plan, but it is still a part (of itself) and thus maps the part as describing the confusion of life, but these bones are not the intention. Reflexivity confuses, as the movement remains an intention held dear.
So remember, dear intention, the skeleton is a fossil of recursive movements.
A grammarian sees the remains and in death sees a structure worth preserving, for in the structure they see shelter, and in intent they seek shelter… — safety, survival, routine, rites, world-building.
Many structuralisms turn all that up to eleven, but the column is not a tree, the tree is not a bone.
Newer version at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com from July 2024.
Brilliant!