Collin vs. Blog: The Network Fallacy?: "the argument, more than implicit in Taylor's pages and in the pages of many other theorists of our condition, makes what I would call the 'system' or 'network' mistake -- the mistake of thinking that because something is embedded in a network that sustains that thing and gives it both value and shape, it is incoherent to speak of its properties, or of the boundaries that separate and distinguish it from other nodal points in the network. Since identity is network-dependent, the reasoning goes, nothing can be spoken of and examined as if it were free standing and discrete.
The trouble with that reasoning is that it operates at a level of generality so high that you can't see the trees for the forest.
Well, yes and no. This is not a new 'mistake'--it's been around at least since the heyday of poststructuralism (and it would be easy to trace back through Burke and IA Richards as well). There, it was used as a reductio ad absurdum with which to point out the problem with deconstruction and the like--if it's all 'free play of signifiers,' then nothing means anything, and we might as well give up, blah, blah, blah. Basically, it involves ignoring one half of KB's 'paradox of substance.' "