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In (he Essay on the Introduction of the Concept of Negative Grandeur in Philosophy, Kant imagines a man who is miserly by ten degrees and who strives towards brotherly love by twelve degrees, in contrast with another man who is miserly by three degrees and capable of a generous intention by seven degrees, and who produces an act marked by four degrees of generosity. He concludes that the first man is morally superior to the second man even though if one measures their actions - two degrees against four - he is unarguably inferior. We should perhaps use a similar arithmetical assessment of merit to judge scientific works ... The social sciences are evidently in the camp of the ten-degree miser, and we would undoubtedly attain a more accurate assessment of their merits if we knew how to take into account, in a Kantian manner, the social forces they must overcome. This could not be more true when what is at issue is the specific object of the discipline whose influence extends to all social sciences - namely language, one and indivisible, constituted, in the work of Saussure, by the exclusion of all inherent social variation, or. as with Chomsky, by the privilege granted to the formal properties of grammar to the detriment of functional constraints.

Having undertaken, before it became fashionable, an academic study (fortunately never published) which rested on a methodical ’reading’ of the Course in General Linguistics in order to establish a 'general theory of culture', I was perhaps more sensitive than others to the most visible effects of the domination exercised by the sovereign discipline, whether it concerned literal transcriptions of theoretical writings or the mechanical transfer of concepts taken at face value, and of all the thoughtless borrowing which, by dissociating the opus operatum from the modus operand!. leads to unex-

pected and sometimes preposterous re-interpretations. But resistance to fashionable tastes is in no respect a rejection destined to authorize ignorance: initially the work of Saussure, and then, at the point when I became aware of the inadequacy of the model of speech (and practice) as execution, the work of Chomsky, which recognized the importance of generative dispositions, seemed to me to present sociology with some fundamental questions.

It remains the case that these questions cannot have their full impact unless one transcends the limits which are inscribed in the very intention of structural linguistics as pure theory. The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure’s inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects. Transferring the phonological model outside the linguistic field has the effect of generalizing, to the set of symbolic products, taxonomies of kinship, mythical systems or works of art, the inaugural process which makes linguistics the most natural of the social sciences by separating the linguistic instrument from its social conditions of production and utilization.

It goes without saying that the different social sciences were unequally predisposed to accommodate this Trojan horse. The particular relationship which binds the anthropologist to his subject, and the neutrality of the ‘impartial spectator’ conferred by the status of the external observer, made anthropology the prime victim. Together, of course, with the tradition of the history of art or literature: in this case, importing a method of analysis which assumes the neutralization of functions could only consecrate the mode of perceiving the work of art which was always demanded of the connoisseur, namely, a ‘pure’ and purely ‘internal’ disposition, which excludes any ‘reductive’ reference to ‘external’ elements. Thus, rather like the prayer wheel of another domain, literary semiology has taken the cult of the work of art to a higher degree of