Sunday, September 25, 2011

Institutional Structure

In my last post, I made the conventional mistake of talking about "institutional structure". Properly speaking, there are no institutional structures, nor social structures either. Only the material world has structure, and it is by mistaking certain material arrangements (like prison cells and lecture theaters) for "social" orders that we can come to believe that the "social world" exists as a structured entity.

Social life (which is not in the world, but in history) has texture, not structure. It has a surface you can feel.

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