They present themselves not as world-making acts of construal, but as transparent lenses onto a pre-given world. These systems do not say “this is how we see it”—they say “this is how it is.”
This is the rhetoric of the pre-symbolic.
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It reframes symbolic construal as neutral description.
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It masks institutional or cultural alignments as objectivity.
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It treats historically situated architectures as timeless givens.
Once this move is accepted, alternative construals appear irrational, biased, or deviant—not because they are false, but because they fail to conceal their symbolic basis.
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Natural science often presents models as direct representations of reality rather than symbolic selections within a field of possibility.
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Formal logic erases the constitutive role of language, offering deduction as an unmarked tool.
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Bureaucratic rationality adopts the tone of procedural inevitability, burying symbolic choices beneath layers of administrative abstraction.
These systems exercise power by declining to appear as power at all.
But construal is inescapable. Every form of representation involves:
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cutting a world from potential,
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framing meaning through selection,
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and orienting perception via alignment.
Even the claim to neutrality is itself a symbolic move—often the most coercive of all.
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tracing their architectural assumptions,
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rendering visible their conditions of alignment,
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and reinserting them into the ecology of meaning.
Only then can symbolic power be held accountable to life.
In the next post, we’ll explore how symbolic infrastructures encode their own reproduction—not only shaping what can be meant, but training bodies and minds to reproduce those meanings unthinkingly.
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