Overthrowing the Periodic Table

At first, the following looks completely insane:

I have a buddy who is a communications professor. He speaks the Gramsci/Foucalt lit crit hegemony stuff all the time. Mostly, I haven't got the first goddammed idea what he's talking about, though I have given it enough of a try to encounter the Sokhal hoax and stuff like that. But once, he asked me what it would take to 'overthrow' the periodic table. I tried to make the point that, fundamentally, the periodic table is an organization of experimental observation, that has since been backed up with theory. He wondered why we 'privilege' this particular structure.

On a second thought, it should be quite simple to devise a strategy to overthrow the periodic table. First, we establish a beachhead at chlorine. After chlorine is secured, we can use it as a base to attack mercury, lead, gold, and possibly other elements.

On a third thought, it still looks completely insane …