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.

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 But as soon as the formula seems to be out of date, is ceases retrospectively by this fact, to be commonplace.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?

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.

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.

Our capacity to foresee the lengthy life and the prospective techniques which are available to us has not essentially altered in the last 25 years, at a time when the field of possibles has been considerably widened by the exponential growth of our material and intellectual out-puts. Furthermore, as scientific revolutions, in the sense in which T. Kuhn intends this term, are becoming increasingly frequent and are affecting very different areas, one has leave to count upon the continuation of this widening process in the field of possibles, despite the constraint imposed by the finite quantity of identified and identifiable resources, at least on the scale of our planet. In other words, we do not think that this accelerated destruction of the environment (which is the main feature of our industrial civilisation) is beyond control, and that one should consequently preach—as various Jeremiah prophets are doing—a planetary Neo-Malthusianism extending to all the resources and expressed by the thinly veiled rejection of the right to industrialise for those countries still waiting to join the ‘rich man's club.’ But suddenly our ascendancy over the ever more diversified future grows slighter and slighter, because the prospective is stamping its feet; and this is a paradoxical and troubling consequence of the acceleration of the history in which we have to live. The widening of the field of possibles implies, moreover, an increase of choices. These choices are being made constantly, sometimes explicitly, but mostly implicitly: large options are sliced up by decisions of a minor order, and this obscures but does not lessen their significance.