ABSTRACT
Were we to explain to some novice the difference between soccer and, say, baseball, the first likely concept to occur in our mind would be that of system - soccer and baseball as two different systems of play. Accordingly, our task would be simplified if we began, for example, by isolating and examining systematically three important pragmatics1 of each sport ; the ball, the field, and the game proper. There is hardly any absolute or conclusive justification for the choice of this structuralist method of approach, rather than another. Such justification, if it exists, must relate to the innate properties of the object under consideration, and therefore is immanent. As Boudon has weIl observed;
La perspective 'structuraliste' n'a en elle-meme aucune vertu. Le succes rencontre par son application depend en grande partie de l'objet auquel on l'applique. 2
[The 'structuralist' perspective has no virtue in itself. Its success depends to a great extent upon the object to wh ich it is applied.]
What Boudon really means is that the structuralist perspective or method of analysis is not totally divorceable from a certain element of subjective intentionality on the part of the analyst. Underlying every structuralist enterprise is a certain phenomenological attitude to the world of object-systems, sometimes best expressed in the form of the theories now
associated with the structural analysis. In this chapter I shall attempt to state more positively the
nature -- to some structuralists gratifying - - of this experience of encounter with objects conceived of as systems. The hypothesis underlying our argument can be stated positively too. The reductionist attitude which is discovered at the heart of every structuralist enterprise can be interpreted as evidence of the simplifying tendency of the human mind. The movement of the human intellect in a descriptive contemplation of an object seems to fluctuate from the complex to the simple, from the whole to its parts, from the natio:1 to the tribe and so on . In the introduction to his interesting study devoted to systems of objects, J ean Baudrillard pertinently asks:
[ls it possible to classify the immense vegetation of objects as flora or fauna, with its tropical and frigid zones, its sudden mutations, and its fast disappearing species? 1
Every classificatory reductionism has one objective: the attainment of an exhaustive description of the object. In the case of a technological object, a locomotive engine or a primitive method of cooking, what can be descriptively attained is the convergence of the functions of the various structural units affirming the state or existence of a system entirely coherent within itself. Whether or not such an exhaustive description of the object can lead also to an equally exhaustive knowledge or comprehension of the steam engine or a primitive cooking method is another matter. My strong inclination is that it cannot. Nor can Table 2.1 '5 attempt to reduce our soccer model conceptually to its structural essence be considered as exhaustive, despite its recourse to a rough and simple schema.
