Confusing the map with the territory

..."Structuralism has been valuable in drawing our attention to the importance of relations. However, the cardinal sin of structuralist thought– and these assumptions still remain pervasive today –lies in its tendency to, as Bateson would put it, confuse the map with the territory. That is, the structuralist makes a map of relations among nodes in a network, but then treats this map as if it were itself a real and abiding thing such that these relations are abiding and eternal. The entities inhabiting the network then get treated as epiphenomena of this map of relations, such that it is the structure that is real and the entities populating the network that are illusions. This is a specifically Platonic tendency within structuralist thought"...

Essay here,from Larval Subjects.