A/SCIENCE VII/IIV

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                           C o m m e n t a r i e s  .7

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         It is insufficient to posit (hu)man as an empirical object.
  Social science to succeed in theoretical modes must resolve the mixed
  agencies of language.  Historicism is a futile endeavor without a theory
  of language to ground it.  In the absence of that theory, social science
  can only succeed by bringing society to the rational terms of a game.
  From this economics derives its authority.  The state depends upon this
  success.

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         For the game to persist, the reflexive aspect of language must be
  restrained.  This is accomplished in the state through the critiques by
  science of committed knowledge, and by the markets universal transmutation
  of commitment into statistical ordinalities, the net result of which is
  to purge the langauge of any competing codes of legitimacy, but at the
  expense of a debauching of the language.  The disciplines are well named
  and serve as the security forces of the state.  Synthesis and politics
  are hostile to their partitions, and are hence heretical.

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          Thus in its final rationalization, the power of the state is not
  physical.  War, in violating that expectation, is perceived as a process-
  ual taboo.

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           There is a scene in a wax museum at Tours in which a heretic
  is being horribly tortured in the presence of spiritual and secular
  representatives.  The internal context of the scence is one of presumed
  goodness.  It is hauntingly reminiscent of a modern surgery in context-
  ual organization, and manifestly revelatory of the terms in which power
  is rationalized, and expository of the social sciences.

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