Итог полностью

If the ‘immigration of ideas’, as Marx puts it, rarely happens without these ideas incurring some damage in the process, this is because such immigration separates cultural productions from the system of theoretical reference points in relation to which they are consciously or unconsciously defined, in other words, from the field of production, sign-posted by proper names or concepts ending in ‘-ism’, a field which always defines them far more than they contribute to defining it. That is why ‘immigration’ situations make it particularly necessary to bring to light the horizon of reference which, in ordinary situations, may remain implicit. But it is self-evident that the fact of repatriating this exported produce involves great dangers of naivety and simplification - and also great risks, since it provides us with an instrument of objectification.

None the less, in a state of the field in which power is visible everywhere, while in previous ages people refused to recognize it even where it was staring them in the face, it is perhaps useful to remember that, without turning power into a ‘circle whose centre is everywhere and nowhere’, which could be to dissolve it in yet another way, we have to be able to discover it in places where it is least visible, where it is most completely misrecognized - and thus, in

fact, recognized. For symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.

‘Symbolic Systems' (Art, Religion, Language) as Structuring Structures

The neo-Kantian tradition (Humboldt-Cassirer or, in its American variant. Sapir—Whorl, as far as language is concerned) treats the different symbolic universes (myth, language, art and science) as instruments for knowing and constructing the world of objects, as ‘symbolic forms', thus recognizing, as Marx notes in his Theses on Feuerbach, the ‘active aspect’ of cognition. In the same tradition, but with a more properly historical intent, Panofsky treats perspective as a historical form, without however going so far as to reconstruct systematically its social conditions of production.

Durkheim explicitly includes himself in the Kantian tradition. None the less, by virtue of the fact that he endeavours to give a “positive' and ‘empirical' answer to the problem of knowledge by avoiding the alternative of apriorism and empiricism, he lays the foundations of a sociology of symbolic forms (Cassirer was to say expressly that he uses the concept of “symbolic form' as an equivalent of form of classification)? With Durkheim, the forms of classification cease to be universal (transcendental) forms and become (as is implicitly the case in Panofsky) social forms, that is, forms that are arbitrary (relative to a particular group) and socially determined.*

In this idealist tradition, the objectivity of the meaning or sense of the world is defined by the consent or agreement of the structuring subjectivities (sensus = consensus).

'Symbolic Systems' as Structured Structures (Susceptible to Structural Analysis)

Structural analysis constitutes the methodological instrument which enables the neo-Kantian ambition of grasping the specific logic of each of the “symbolic forms' to be realized. Proceeding, in accordance with Schelling's wish, to a properly tautegorical (in opposition to allegorical) reading which refers the myth to nothing outside itself, structural analysis aims at laying bare the structure immanent in each symbolic production. But, unlike the neo-Kantian tradition.

Figure 1

Division of the labour of domination

which emphasized the modus operandi or productive activity of consciousness, the structuralist tradition emphasizes the opus oper-atum or structured structures. This is evident in the way Saussure, the founder of this tradition, views language: as a structured system, language (langue) is fundamentally treated as the condition of intelligibility of speech (parole), as the structured medium which has to be reconstructed in order to account for the constant relation between sound and meaning. (In the opposition he establishes between iconology and iconography, and which is the exact equivalent of the opposition between phonology and phonetics. Panofsky-and that entire aspect of his work which aims at laying bare the deep structures of works of art - is part of this tradition.)

First synthesis