Chief among these is our bodily placement in the figurate window of scale, where as functional organisms we have an overriding concern for our bodily and social security and are compelled into architective strategies to preserve them, while connective matters appear to be of much lesser urgency.

Our social institutions display no connective behaviour at all. Connectivity is evident in the relations between individual humans but the relations between offices or ranks of our institutions are purely architective. The serial meaning they contribute to our lives is purely architective and the sociality they promote is purely architective. They may sometimes promote connective sociality but only as a means of maintaining their architectures. Governments do not provide grand theatrical events with the intention of pleasuring their citizens - they do so in order to unify the citizenry, perhaps promote the values of the society, convey a message or promote the election prospects of a candidate. A political party will always put its own survival above any principles it espouses. Societies actively promote themselves to themselves in order to maintain their identities. In doing so, they elevate the preservation of identity to be the highest good among their citizenry at every level.

Connectively, we can communicate amongst ourselves with music, dance and colour, and physically and emotionally caress or agitate each other, but our repertoire for connective expression is limited when compared to our repertoire for architective manipulation. This is not only due to environmental and social reinforcement, for by their very nature, architective techniques can be precisely codified and stored, faithfully passed from generation to generation, built on and accumulated; while connective skills are not easily codified or handed down. Our societies and traditions reflect eons of accumulated architective knowledge (much of it faulty!) while a personal lifetime of connective nous is usually buried with the individual.

The architective domination of our social and cultural environment means that our personal connective interactions receive significantly less of our conscious attention than do our architective interactions. Even in the realm of love, we often align our personal satisfaction with our performance according to social norms rather than in the transitory and vague caprice of romance. Our connective relations tend to melt into a subconscious background while our conscious attention is used overwhelmingly for the cultivation of our social identities.

An architective mode of consciousness tends to enforce its own exclusiveness while a connective mode of consciousness is inclusive. It is much harder for one to switch to a connective mode of consciousness from an architective mode than the other way round.

The dominance of our consciousness by architectivity means that we rarely recognize connective sentience or consciousness in others - or in ourselves.

The architective dominion of our lives leads us to see the world with architective eyes only. Rather than participate directly in our connective experiences, we attempt to grasp them architectively and are then confounded by the impossibility of capturing them with architective means. We clothe our connective experiences in architective texts, icons and rituals, as, for example, we ritualize love in marriage. Doing so makes them more amenable to our control but frustrates their connective meaning.

Nowhere is the frustration of connective meaning more evident than in our social attitudes to sex. Sex is rarely socially exalted or promoted for its own sake, yet as individuals we are obsessed with it. One would have thought that if it played such an important role in our individual lives it would have been explored in depth and developed into a sophisticated social interaction, yet it is hidden in shame by almost every society. On the one hand it is the fundamental existential process by which we as architective objects reproduce, but on the other sexual orgasm is our most intense connective experience. We are socially unable to cope with its connective enormity. In desperation we confine it to an architective straitjacket until there is nothing left but a soulless rite of species propagation and a lure for selling motorcars.

This preoccupation with architectivity is not a failing of the human character. It is the natural result of our placement in the figurate window. Our architective discomforts do not arise from a moral laxity on our part but from the necessity of coping with enormous architective pressures. Our individual lives are so pressured by the constant effort to maintain our bodily and social identities that we have little time and little motivation to appreciate what each other's lives are like, and our capacities for empathy and compassion are severely - but naturally - constrained.

Our lives may be dominated by architectivity but they are not totally controlled by it. Even within social constraints there is always some room for freedom of expression. Architectivity does not fix behaviour absolutely, it only constrains it to a range, however small that range may be. So while the behaviour of offices in our institutions may be tightly constrained, there is always some room, however small, for individual expression by the person holding the office, allowing that person's time in office to display a character different to say their predecessor's time in the same office.

We may also rebel against our social constraints, though this usually occurs in the context of replacing one architective hierarchy with another.

In our own personal development we may learn how and when to let the architective grip on our consciousness go.

A Matter of Perspective

Our cultures, history and traditions have been overwhelmingly shaped by the architective dominion. So much have we been conditioned by a past confined in a figurate window that we unquestioningly accept that stasis is the natural "rest state" of physical phenomena and that movement only arises when energy is imparted to an object that is otherwise naturally at rest.

This discussion has shown that a state of motion is at least equally entitled to being considered the natural state of things, one in which stasis only arises when constraints are imposed on objects that are naturally in motion. After all, architectivity arises when constraints are imposed on connectivity and a pure connectivity is restored when constraints have been removed.

Indeed, since connective phenomena are universal while architective phenomena are confined to a window of scale and inherently isolated, a state of motion (being the natural state of connective phenomena) could well be regarded as the primary state of things with stasis (being the natural state of architective phenomena) being a secondary state.

Were we to regard a state of motion as the primary state of things, we might also choose to distinguish between things based on the differences between their behaviour rather than differences in their position or composition.

We have come to regard stasis and constraint as the default condition of the world more generally. For example, we regard poverty, as a constraint on energy and resources, to be the natural state of human affairs, one that can only be overcome by conscientious hard labour. Many cultures believe suffering to be humankind's natural condition, only to be overcome by great effort or ingenuity or a benefice of the gods. If we were to see an unconstrained movement of resources as the primary state of affairs we might understand that our poverty and suffering arise out of our being cornered and constrained within the figurate window of scale, and be more compassionate towards each other, for ultimately we all suffer through no fault of our own.

That said, all connective phenomena, even those in the purely connective window, are dependent on the presence of (architective) objects. Connective phenomena, though unconstrained and uncontained, are interactions between objects. Connectivity is as dependent on architectivity as architectivity is dependent on connectivity. So even if we did consider connectivity as the primary state of things, architectivity remains an essential ingredient of the cosmos. Architectivity should not be regarded as an optional extra to the universe. It is intrinsic to the universe in the same way that connectivity and the fundamental forces are. Where and when the conditions are right for objects to bond, they will bond.

Confined to a window of scale and isolated in spatial localities, architectivity attains its cosmic significance as a contributor to the connectivity of the cosmos rather than through its marvels of figurate complexity. At every scale, connectivity plays with whatever objects architectivity provides.

Although they are dependent on each other, architectivity and connectivity are not reducible to each other. Each can't be explained only in terms of the other. The existence of objects can't be explained in terms of waves or vibration alone - boundaries are needed to anchor vibrations into objects, otherwise they would just be passing consonances. (Even pair production, the creation of matter from pure energy, requires the presence of an anchoring atomic nucleus.) Similarly, waves and vibrations can't be explained in terms of static objects alone.

Architectivity and connectivity are irreducible in another sense, in that each hosts a different conception of opposition. In architectivity the poles of an opposition have values such as 'off' vs 'on', and phenomena display either one pole or the other such that there is no meaningful in-between value. In connectivity the poles of opposition have values such as 'strong' vs 'weak' and 'positive' vs 'negative' where there is a sliding scale between the poles and phenomena can display meaningful values in-between. In both these concepts each pole of its opposition necessarily implies the possibility of the opposite pole. But an architective opposition does not imply any connective opposition nor can it be explained in terms of any connective oppositions, and vice-versa. Connective and architective oppositions are irreducible too. To say that every phenomenon necessarily holds the seed of its opposite, as is suggested by a traditional understanding of Yin and Yang for example, does not hold in the comparison of architective vs connective oppositions. Connective and architective modes of interaction are irreducible, connective and architective modes of serial meaning are irreducible, and connective and architective modes of opposition are also irreducible.

It is interesting to note that connective oppositions do not host contradictions, only a sliding scale of leaning to either pole and allowing a point of balance in the middle. An architective opposition, on the other hand, is always contradictory and incapable of balance.

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