The centuries have acted rather as a warehouse for the idea we harbour about the Renaissance: the age of initiative, the age, above all others, of motivated decision-making provoked by strong images, the age when decisions were taken with ardour and carried through with confidence. If this intuition is not an unreal one, then historians should both stake their claim in it and account for it.

The fine quality of self-confidence which we attribute to the great figures of the Renaissance supposes the necessary and certain knowledge that one can “change the order of things.” And one can have a fairly clear idea from the example of the French how this certain knowledge is formulated and how it operates.

Art-historians of our time have concerned themselves mainly with research into the literary and philosophic sources of Renaissance works; this leads to a detailed philological commentary on its broader themes. However, it may be noted that neither iconology nor semiotics have yet observed the existence of various types of figuration in the plastic arts of that period.

A vast subject, as you see. Rather than enumerate doctrines or problems, it would be better to devote ourselves to one point, only one, but the one that, right or wrong, we hold to be central. This is the relation between history and sociology. It is not precisely a new point; but what if, before beginning to compare, we undertook to ask ourselves if one of the terms of the comparison even exists? If there is such a thing as Sociology? Suppose that sociology is nothing but a word, a homonymous word, under which one traditionally classes various anomalous activities which are, at bottom, history that is not recognized as such? Suppose that sociology is no more a human science than is history, that it is not a science? But first, what is a science?

In upholding the sensory principle of the classification of art, La Fontaine, consciously or not, took account of a tradition beginning in antiquity. The “philosophical century” was to have introduced a conceptual criterion, that of time and space. James Harris and Lessing are among the most ardent proponents of the division of art into the spatial and temporal. This criterion has played an important role in aesthetics. Among the countless systems of art classification developed in the course of the last two centuries, it has held a place of prominence to this day. Even those theorists who seek to soften the opposition between music and literature on the one hand, and the plastic arts on the other (Oskar Walzel), and who stress the union of space and time in the perception of the aesthetic object (Mikel Dufrenne), do not abandon the fundamental distinction between temporal and spatial art.

The concept of acculturation is at the centre of the social changes which are taking place, not without some disorganization, in the developing countries. The increasing interest which they continue to arouse therefore necessitates, among other things, the utilization of exact and operational concepts in the study of a social reality undergoing profound changes and suddenly confronted with civilizations totally different from their own.

We are now slowly re-discovering the conclusion reached by Alfred Grotjahn in his remarkably prescient Soziale Pathologie, namely that “zwischen dem Menschen und der Natur die Kultur steht.“ [1]. In some measure this maxim affects every branch of modern medicine but to none is it more relevant than psychiatry, which is so closely embedded in the social matrix in which the subject is practiced. A comprehensive study of this matrix would have to touch on a number of disciplines, including history, economics, social anthropology and sociology, but for our immediate purpose these multiple influences can be canalized by reference to the available systems of medical care which exist to deliver the two broad types of service offered by contemporary medicine: on the one hand, the specific products of biomedical research—a surgical operation, say, or a new drug—which are impersonal, often expensive and ideally directed at the cure of disease; on the other hand, the “non-specific” psychosocial contribution of medicine, intensely personal and more often directed towards alleviation or support. These two categories do no more than reflect the derivation of modern medicine from its twin sources of science and magic whose respective attributes were etched so sharply by Malinowski: “Science, even as represented by the primitive knowledge of savage man, is based on the normal universal experience of everyday life, experience won in man's struggle with nature for his subsistence and safety, founded on observation, fixed by reason. Magic is based on specific experience of emotional states in which man observes not nature but himself, in which the truth is revealed not by reason but by the play of emotions upon the human organism. Science is founded on the conviction that experience, effort and reason are valid; magic on the belief that hope cannot fail nor desire deceive. The theories of knowledge are dictated by logic, those of magic by the association of ideas under the influence of desire”. [2]

For the last two or three years my students have been asking me to explain the concept of historical law. I know for a fact that they have discussed this topic among themselves. This curiosity does not necessarily emanate from the Marxist group, where it would find a fairly natural place. And I am wondering whether I am witnesssing—from afar—a phenomenon of ideological maturation such as we experienced as a result of the second world war. At that time, with my studies ended, I had left a university at which the conception of the objective of history was (for the students) strictly orthodox (history as a study of fact in its unique aspect). In 1945 I came across a university in which the vast majority of the students were impregnated with the spirit of “Annales.” I never really knew how this had come about. It certainly was not due to the teachers—they were, and had remained, the same. At that time there was no such thing as an “assistant.” But it must be admitted that the students were, to some extent, inhaling the mood of the moment. Today, in this mood of the moment, we are faced with a host of questions about the concepts of recurrence and historical law.

One can only situate and appreciate the importance of this situation with any accuracy by considering the recent evolution of historical thinking.

Everything that happens that we experience outwardly, or even inwardly, persists in being strictly and unavoidably “what it is”: a chair is a chair; perceptivity is perceptivity. This self-identification with itself of every phenomenon and every object is a major ontological miracle whose persistent recurrence causes it to pass un-noticed.

I hope we shall not invite reproach for singling out the comic actor from among the various types of actor, and for giving him our special attention. There is a philosophy of the tragic and there is a philosophy of laughter; there are thorough theories about the serious genre and the comic genre: for the purposes of this study, therefore, it would seem perfectly admissible to isolate the actor who makes one laugh. But we have not artificially detached the actor for the sake of analytical dissection: if we say that a comedian plays comic parts, we recognise his use of the comic.

The childhood of humanity, the human race in its infancy: while this expression was in common use, there was probably no ground for seeking out the implementation of real symbols on each occasion on which it was used. Its very success having made it commonplace, a metaphor becomes a convenient and communal way of speaking which does not necessarily correspond to a way of thinking. But as soon as the formula seems to be out of date, is ceases retrospectively by this fact, to be commonplace. Or to be more exact, a triteness to which the common run of thought no longer adheres, begins in itself to pose a question: if the end of a stereotype is not a loss for scholarship, it is a spur to reflection. What a modification must take place in our rational apprehension of ourselves, what an alteration of the status, content and function of the ideas of humanity and of childhood, in order that the metaphor “the childhood of humanity” should in future have no explanatory power, and that having ceased to enlighten or to prove, it should have ceased to appear natural, in order to become obsolete. Since the image of the childhood of humanity was commonplace, what concatenation of evidence was the basis for this commonplaceness? What does the recourse to images of childhood mean, as related to the definitive confines of humanity? And what is the conception of human “becoming” which is backed up by the temporal and qualitative buttresses of a childhood?

Logic is the science of pure time, just as geometry is the science of pure space.

In the past one would not have dared make such a statement. Just as geometry seemed to deal only with stable shapes and not with transformations and deformations, logic seemed to deal with the static modalities of thought and among its connections only with the syllogistic—and that as a matter of privilege. But geometry has become the science of moving spatial shapes; everywhere mathematics has brought in the fluxional element; on the whole, science considers rest as an extreme instance of motion. Logic too—even leaving aside mathematical logic— cannot keep its classical image. For thought cannot confine itself— and confines itself even less than mathematics does—to reflecting the static. While a circle can still be looked upon as a simple circle and not deformed by topological vision, a form of thought is always condensed time.

The problem of culture may rightly be regarded as one of the cardinal problems of the 20th century. Why is it that in this century sociologists, philosophers, historians, anthropologists, art critics and many others have been dealing, ever more intensively, with general questions of philosophy and culture? Why has “culturology” arisen as a science and is being ever more widely established?

Up to a point, but only up to a point, Utopia is the product of ancient nostalgia mixed with some examples drawn from the past. By “nostalgia” we mean the cast of mind which finds its way by mental channels to feelings and states of mind which are already familiar. The nostalgic aspect of Utopia which consists in the exorcism of reality by the evocation of a perfectly happy society, is only a repetition, rendered conscious and methodical, of the same range of insoluble questions and imaginary solutions which led to the creation of the myth of the Golden Age or of the Land of Cocaigne.

The task I have set myself in the following pages is the examination of certain problems concerning time in music from a phenomenological standpoint. Husserl's treatment of time carries on from that of Hume and Kant in the sense that, like them, he sees that our awareness is not merely successive. There is something in the very structure of consciousness which enables us to go beyond the moment, to stretch the span of the “now.” Without this capacity there would for us be no such thing as unity, identity and continuity of perceptual objects. It was with our awareness of ordinary sensible objects that Hume's and Kant's epistemology was mostly concerned. Moreover their analysis continued the stress on visual awareness characteristic of the western tradition. Kant's step forward as far as his analysis of time was concerned was to see time as the formal structure of all our experience. All that we can ever experience is seen through the lens of time. Kant, however, was equally concerned to show how our temporal consciousness entered into the constitution of the real world. He encounters difficulties on this score in so far as temporality is built into the structure not only of our experiences which claim to be objective but also into that of our merely subjective awareness. The problem of “reality” does not arise for Husserl in that the phenomenological method itself explicitly excludes this consideration. He is at one with Kant, however, in treating temporality in terms of the structure of our consciousness and, like Kant, insists on the importance of retention in perception. He goes on to specify that temporality is in common the form for not only perception but for phantasy, imagination, memory and recollection as well.

It is not impossible, it is almost inevitable, to conjecture the existence of laws so general that their jurisdiction would be affected neither by the nature nor the scale nor the level of their object—so that they would apply equally to the relations of numbers or of inert or organic matter, to the progression of rigorous thought or the flights of an amused or charmed fancy. If such laws did not govern the whole extent of the real, possible or conceivable world, or if, although autonomous, they could not be inferred from one another by some system of relations or transfers, I fear that human reflection, in spite of its partial successes, might seem condemned to reveal itself vain, since gaps, or fundamental absences of relationship, could put its cogency into question in a decisive fashion.

What I would like to explore in this short paper is the possibility of a theoretical interpretation of a social dialectic of emergence. I shall not be concerned to criticize or defend the dialectical method in social theory as such, but rather to give one interesting interpretation of it. In so doing, I have chosen two applications which I shall use to show what is meant here by emergence. The first of these treats ideological development in American advanced capitalism, the second examines certain aspects of Soviet Russian development. Both applications are schematic and require further fleshing out. So I put my views forth here only in an exploratory way. Employing the categories used in this paper, I am now preparing a more detailed study of the ideological development of Zionism, to be published subsequently. This latter study may provide more concrete answers to some of the issues raised in the present paper.

It is with fear that one approaches anything closely or distantly related to the idea of death and the dissection of a body which has held life. To some, giving one's body or an organ is a “taboo” subject. And yet numerous transplants can only be conceived of by starting from a corpse from which one removes the liver, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, etc… It is thus, for example, that between 15th March 1963 and 15th March 1965, 196 kidney transplants were registered in the world, taken from corpses, with 35.7% of successes.

In the Soviet Union, structural research has had certain distinctive features. Structural research, not only in language, but in literature and art too, is deeply rooted in Russian science. Quite apart from such distant forerunners as the Kharkov philologist Potebnia, one cannot forget the great group of philologists of the twenties, who dealt with questions of poetics, and whom contemporary criticism to a greater or lesser extent identifies with “formalism.” Soviet literary criticism of the twenties is well-known throughout the world; it has many times been discussed, from various points of view, in the press, and there is no need to dwell on its characteristic features. We need only emphasize the variety of theoretical standpoints that marked the Soviet philologists of the twenties and the differences between their subjective views, and also the fact that there are differences of principle that divide the majority of these workers from the “structuralism” of the fifties. Let us bear in mind that in the twenties V. M. Zhirmunsky and V. V. Vinogradov (who are usually numbered among the “formalists”) were in fact in dispute with the real members of Opoyaz (and subsequently adopted a reserved attitude towards structuralism as well). M. M. Bakhtin, who in his brilliant works has given a complete analysis of the complex semantic structure of great literary works, does in fact make use of the concept of a world image, and has a fine understanding of the “play” of oppositions at different levels, etc. His influence on structuralist research in modern literary criticism is undeniable; but he can certainly not be numbered among the “formalists” of the twenties, whom he vigorously opposed. It is noteworthy that even today both the structuralists and certain of their direct adversaries invoke the authority of Bakhtin.

The discussion about the use of computers in the legal world began the year the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener was born. His fundamental work, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and in the Machine, was in fact first published in 1948. His suggestion there of legal problems as cybernetic problems probably influenced the article published the following year by Lee Loevinger, in which one found jurimetrics, i.e., the use of computers in the field of law, spoken of for the first time.

Let us begin by taking a look at the semantic background: the word criticism designated an action implying judgment and discrimination based on standardized poetics or on preferred taste. By virtue of implicit or explicit criteria, the principal task of criticism—of things either beautiful or otherwise—was to make a distinction, to disapprove or to praise. If one refers to French dictionaries (from the 17th century onwards), one can see that the first and stable meaning of the noun criticism is:

“The art of judging a work of the mind” (Academy, 1694). To this first acceptation of the meaning of the word was added, in 1740, the idea of enlightenment and explanation. It has now come to designate “literary science,” independently of any judgment of value. This new acceptation, although confirmed by use, did not appear sufficiently clear to the compilers of the 8th Dictionary of the Academy (1932). The definition proposed at this date hardly differs from that of 1694: