Knowledge, Culture and Society. Peter Burke
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a notion presented in France, originally, by Émile Durkheim in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1898 and, later, in a 1901-1902 text, written with his nephew, Marcel Mauss, in L’Année sociologique.61
Diverse groups of representations, even within the same society, imply diverse ways to make sense of the experience of the world and to appropriate it. And this includes, of course, the world of writing, and it’s what gives importance to the analysis of appropriation and the forms of circulation of texts, of discourses, symbolic practices, ideas and theories - scientific or not -, because, in every act of appropriation there is an act of change, of transformation, of contribution, of loss and of recreation, that stamps the seal of the “hermeneutical horizon” (Gadamer, Koselleck) or the “epistemological profile” (Bachelard) characteristic of the human group in which it circulates. Works travel around the social world (Chartier). This also requires us to think that “reception,” as such, doesn’t exist, because instead of being a passive act, it is a transformative one, even if academic theories don’t allow us to elucidate it at first sight. The most obvious examples are the practice of law, and judicial and juris-prudential theories, their circulation and appropriation all around the world.
Regarding this matter, Chartier pointed out that, for “the diverse meanings conferred to a text, or to a group of texts”, it wasn’t only required to analyse the “repertoire with its motifs”,62 but also the principles “of classification, organization, verification”, “that govern their production, as well as revealing the structures of written objects (or oral techniques) that ensure their transmission”.63 Experience is irreducible to speech64, even if its traces reach us, investigators, “through texts that want to organize, subdue or represent it”, so we can’t reduce or identify the “‘practical logic’ that governs behaviour”, “the identities and social relations” with the “hermeneutic, literate, logocentric, scriptural logic” that wishes to “fixate sense and articulate the correct interpretation that should constrain the act of reading (or looking)”,65 so it will be necessary to analyse the appropriation reaching the collective, what doesn’t remain in the personal sphere, or even among minorities, since, finally, intellectual lived history, the one that we all live as actors of its interweaving, takes paths - sometimes uncertain- in which we receive thoughts and are nourished in unexpected ways and learn, from someone, something that was thought by someone else in a distant place. I think about Hartog, about his historicity regimes, his notion of time, of omnipresent present, partly based in Paul Ricœur’s work but that through him show a strong influence of Koselleck (and therefore of Gadamer) and of the Sattelzeit notions - strata of time -, expectation of future, historic-hermeneutical horizon.66
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To conclude, I will say something daring: each knowledge system is a fiction, a cognitive apparatus that mediates and builds our experience. As François Hartog points out, quoting Braudel, we are, more or less, prisoners of “the inertia of disciplines, the routines of schools and the weight of institutions”: “it frequently happens that, under the influence of rich and strong traditions, an entire generation traverses, without participating, the time of an intellectual revolution”.67 Although we, historians, are aware that history is a narrative, a text and a representation of the past (even Von Ranke, Droysen and other 19th century historians said so in their time), it is also clear that the texts we produce refer to actions, concrete events, experiences lived by people; to their pain, their joy, their “real world”. Hence the importance of an analysis of appropriation and circulation, also in the wide social world, of the objects of knowledge, let’s call them that, and of the perceptions about people who produce them, the authors, since it is to the extent that they are able to impose themselves to the social group, that they are recognized and accomplish the performative purposes of all rationalist discourse (Weber, Elias, Bourdieu), by imposing certain ways to classify and organize experience (Durkheim, Cassirer, Sperber, Eliade68).
As Bourdieu already said, “realities” are constituted by the revelation and construction power that discourses exert. And I would add: and symbolic practices and, therefore, representations and the constant fighting game in which they inhabit the social world, with their creative strength, that in other fields has been called, by this and other authors, the symbolic power, the symbolic efficiency or the formative and performative capability of symbolic structures (Marx, Cassirer, Turner, Geertz, Schneider, Eliade, Durand, Starovinski, Baczko, Delacampagne…).
Let’s simplify this reflection to the limit: on one hand, A) the communities, in their social world have PRACTICAL FUNCTIONS, with which they create PRACTICAL CLASSIFICATIONS that generate SOCIAL EFFECTS; on the other hand, B) in this social (or cultural, if you prefer that term) and dialectic game between practices and representations, PRACTICAL REPRESENTATIONS are generated, and it is in this interaction where the PRODUCTION OF THE OBJECTIVE REALITY takes place. It means that in the production of discourses and texts, in the classification of experience, we have, on one hand, SOCIAL PRACTICES lived by means of MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS (with language and the symbolic flow as centres), that are acts of knowledge and recognition, of perception and appropriation of the world69, with which we build OBJECTUAL REPRESENTATIONS or SYMBOLIC OBJECTS (THINGS, emblems, flags, dialects, strategies of symbolic manipulation –powers, stigmas, prejudices, signs, codes…-) and we fabricate certain ideas about ourselves and about others, that is to say, we create representations (about ourselves an about the others) and differentiation processes.
Although it’s not my purpose, we could also take a little ex-cursus through the contemporary academic world, through the knowledge that the West considers THE KNOWLEDGE, in order to realize that the field is governed by parameters alien to the production of knowledge itself, with which epistemology was so deeply concerned, and history and philosophy of science in the second half of the 20th century,70 and we have entered the logic of global capitalism in its production, with measurement indexes, bibliometrics, etc.
To conclude, all knowledge is ultimately local knowledge, and to think about the way it was conceived is also to think about culture and its production circuit, since not all cultural systems are produced within the same logic or with the same rationality principles. A situation that leaves us but one working method: to perform an understanding of understanding, to comprehend how we comprehend, in order to encompass the diverse systems of interpretation, which is the HERMENEUTICAL TASK (Gadamer, Ricœur, Koselleck): describe (thick description), evaluate/interpret, translate/understand (Steiner), practice criticism, show the internal logic.
As previously stated, thought is organized by the symbolic structures in which it is immersed, and it’s only later that it gets particularised or made individual; adding to that the fact that symbolic contents are of a socially differentiated nature and, partly, of an ambiguous quality, so that cultural analysis continues to depend, partially, on the field in which it is practiced, the circuit of culture production and the rationality that constitutes certain human group; the set of rules that governs them (institutions), and the ways in which they are produced, circulate and are appropriated: practices, representations, knowledge and discourses, discourses that materialize in texts, oral and written, in works, behaviours, laws…
This also leads us to a reflection by Chartier, useful for the young, who can re-think the way they work and analyse. We, the older ones, have the paths open by our own practice through the years:
Works… don’t have a stable, universal, fixed sense. […] Produced in a specific sphere, the artistic and