Jacques Berque

THE RETURN OF THE IMAGE

The imaginary is rightly called a power of contestation and of

creation. Insofar as such a power wields images drawn from
practical processes and dry abstraction, it is assumed from the
first that we are able to evoke such images. This faculty, which
can be compromised by certain developments and types of culture,
must first of all be named. Let us call it, as Charles Fourier
might have done: image-evocative power. By postulating its exis-
tence, we are acknowledging the fact that we notice it, and
acknowledging the links that attach it to Nature. But we are also
noticing the things that threaten it in an era of technology which
tends towards analytical reduction and operational formalism.

THE THREAT

To demystify is indispensable. To de-form or to dis-colour would

be fatal.
The
demystification of our time can lead to disenchantment:
up that
to stage, there is nothing to fear. One needs no illusions
in order to desire, to want and to evoke. But-and this is more
dangerous-they can go so far as to disfigure life, to depersonalize
Translated by M. S.

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it. This is what would happen if individuals were to lose their
personas, that is to say their masks and their voices. Life would
lose its individuality in a world deprived of participants, or
actors, and of stage settings. For the same process threatens
subjects, objects and landscapes. Now where would we be
without our identity, on a stage which could no longer be called
by the profound term given it by Paul Klee, &dquo;the theatre of
nature&dquo;? What would we do if action did not cover the nudity
of our flesh and did not cause desire to put our schemes into
action? It is the flamboyance of a call that sets us moving, like
the red flag of the revolutionary or the matador, a call that rouses
our red blood and answers it. But for there to be an appeal,
there must be visual, auditory and tactile images; and the
configuration of things around us and within us must be not a
diagram but a face, not an environment but a landscape.
But what is to happen to images at this stage in the industrial
revolution, when all forces must be resolved into their ultimate
elements before they can be activated, when all corporeal elements
become abstractions, when reality, sinking lower and lower,
further and further from immediate apprehension, tends to
become a connection, an idea, a figure?

MUST HISTORY BE DEHUMANIZED?

If there is any field in which this change can be observed, it

is that of our ideas about history, that great thing, or great
word, which, in the mouths of 20 th-century men, almost up to
our own day, had become synonymous with Providence. History
and historical humanism disgust many of our contemporaries, who
are not invariably mistaken. Henceforward we will no more be
able to endure anthropomorphism in history than alexandrines
in poetry. Have we not travelled far from the history of our
youth, from De viris illustribus in which we construed the deeds
of ancient Rome? Far, alas, from Michelet, he who adapted
Plutarch to the sans-culotte taste? We must admit that that
sort of history depended largely on personification. Ghosts were
made to speak: kings, generals, Jacques Bonhomme, the Third
Estate, and other Fabricius figures. But what have they to say
to us, who must free ourselves of the fusty relict of ancient and

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modern, not to mention the future? The objection is justified
up this point, and, more or less, accepted.
to
Let us go further. Not only individual heroes, but collective
masks are incriminated. The situation must be depersonified, but
so too (why not?) must groups. In reality, like individuals,

nations, or classes, cultures sin in that they are articulate subjects,

they wear masks and have personalities. Why should not they
too be changed into ideas, relationships and figures? Some people
go even further. They actually proscribe any recourse, I will not
say to naivety, but to life, which they accuse of empiricism, of
&dquo; non-scientificity.&dquo;
Now I should like to show that this is going to unwarrantable
lengths. Even in our analytical era, when all objects, actions
and forces are resolved into abstractions, which are the only
suitable means for transforming them, when this reduction, which
must of course be a unitary one, unites the diversities of the earth
and of our own contingencies in a uniform reason, even now
we must mobilize life by resorting to warmth, colour, savour,
sound-in short, to images. This must be for us the compensation
of abstract developments, but it also provides the latter with
nourishment. The progress of the logical form is balanced and
upheld by that of the emotive form.

NATIVITY/ARTIFICIALITY
We must not of the artificial naiveties I have
course resort to

already mentioned, all the suspect individual and collective ghosts

which people our art galleries, rather as that bronze of Barbedienne
ornaments the mantelpiece in Sartre’s hell. No, it is no longer
a question of beautiful &dquo;subjects,&dquo; as they were called, made
of plaster or biscuit-ware, placed on the mantelpieces of history.
We must be concerned with true personifications. Which? Those,
I repeat, which, stripped of the false naiveties of tradition, are
based on a true nativity. Where are we to go for such a nativity
if not to Nature, whose very name, in Latin as in Greek, implies
a vital deployment in the direction of form?
To use the words of Eluard, nature is an inexhaustible &dquo;gift
to the eyes.&dquo; But henceforward we must know that this process
of feasting the eyes involves many levels, which correspond to

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the growing complexitiesof technical progress. Whether we wish
it or no, almost never now firmly set foot upon new-
we can
born images. They elude us in our lands, where nature, in the
specific sense that the term now takes on, is said to be shut
in parks, as culture is shut into &dquo;houses.&dquo;
True, we have slumbering within us a precious legacy, ours
since paleolithic days, if not earlier, and always at our disposal
if we want to rediscover elementary powers. This wealth will
not leave us so soon! But it tends increasingly to hide behind
protective barriers: archetypes, subconscious, mythology, while
the levels which immediately surround us are increasingly
factitious. Thus Milton’s Paradise Lost is opposed by an artificial
paradise, more in the Hegelian than in the Baudelairean sense
of the term. The factitious must give rise to the greater part
of our nativities.
There are of course human faces, which spontaneously make
signs to us, group personalities too, and landscapes, for some
remain, and also &dquo;motifs,&dquo; as painters call them when they
designate an ensemble of meaningful features. When such
ensembles appear in language, they are of necessity more subtle
when they involve groups of ideas rather than visual features.
Nevertheless, they are connected with images because they push
before them images, impulses. Is not the image an idea which
has been made sensible to the heart? It is an abstraction, if
one likes, but recreated as a figure and taking on an appearance
compatible with man’s desire, caressing and, if one may say so,
caressable. These faces, landscapes and ensembles are regroupings
of distinctive features, which have themselves become a distinctive
feature. They are the scales of this universe which ceaselessly
changes around us and which we must ourselves change in order
to come to grips with it.
In the civilization to which we are coming today, with its
computers, its cybernetics, its calculations of ever-increasing
complexity, its deadlier and deadlier formalizations, we are
running the risk of dissolving these features, and even of making
our points of contact with the universe disappear. Artists are

already aware of this danger, as are painters and poets. Painters

now scarcely dare be figurative. True, they abandoned the
imitation of so-called reality the better to liberate the imaginary
element and the image-evocative power. It is in this respect that

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they are more advanced than poets-or at least some of them
are-for poets are on the horns of a so-called dilemma between
the elements of song in poetry and the elements that should be
disciplined.
But this is not really a dilemma, but simply an unevenness.

THE COMPENSATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY’S IMAGE-EVOCATIVE POWER

Although we are today entering a desiccated phase of technological

development, we have been through other phases, and every time
an inherent tendency to compensate, to balance out, due no doubt
to the affinities between people and things, has caused every
new development of the machine to correspond to a new burst of

images. The events surrounding the first industrial revolution are

proof enough of that. Naturally, we know more about the earlier
than about the present-day revolution. We can place the initial
upsurge of technical inventions in a specific setting, and date it
to within a few years: It happened at the beginning of the
last third of the 18 th century, and began in England. A generation
later,it moved to France, and elsewhere on the Continent. It is
singular that in or around 1770, when essential equipment for
the development of factories was being invented, the Voyages
of Captain Cook were being circulated amongst the cultured
public. At this time, too, a new descriptive language was evolving.
Within the space of a few years, Paul et Virginie and the
discovery of the lands of the South balanced the invention of
the mechanical shuttle.
And do we not find a similar tendency to balance at each phase
in man’s development, a tendency which, albeit painful and slow
to overcome discord, can yet be observed on an historical scale?
When George Friedmann published his work on piece-work, in
which he emphasized ideas that he had already developed in his
work on Taylorism, to show the growing dehumanization of the
worker in a factory chain, I pointed out to him that, chrono-
logically at least, it is the industrial revolution that provoked and
made it possible for contemporary man to resort to nature and
to his own nature, to capture them with increasing immediacy
in art, to postulate their importance with increasing violence,
spurred on by hope.
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 If this be true, there is a parallel between the rise of

technology in our civilizations, the resurrection of the planet as

such (this is what decolonization means for us), and the deepening
of our artistic sensibilities and expression. And this humanization
of Nature and naturalization of man, the end assigned by Marx
to socialism, comprise not only the reconstruction of social
relationships, seen from an economic angle, but also a defence
and illustration of images, and of their relationship with social
structures and techniques of production. Similarly, the deserts of
uniform well-being offered us by the consumer society are not
less deadly for our future as human beings than imposture,
oppression and inequality.
If the theme of the death of God, that Nietzschean theme of
1880, seems today to be extended and outdone by a theme which
is much closer to us, that of the death of man, or at least of
humanism, history presents us, de iure and de facto with
possibilities of resistance and of hope. Let us present our case
more boldly. At the present stage of technological development,
characterised by the all-importance of formal analysis and the
advance of automation, there correspond, de facto and de iure,
new methods for reinstating man. One of these is the resurrection
of the image, that is to say savour, colour, in short the vibration
of things within us, and of ourselves in the universe.

WORK, SEEN AS A &dquo;FACTOR&dquo; AND AS A HERO

Let us not be deceived. Although it dispossesses anthropomorphism,

such a moral conclusion can always be drawn from history. But
it will not reduce history to a progressive or violent readjustment
of production ratios. It even suggests that production postulates
broader definitions and a more open stating of the problems.
&dquo;There is a critical line between industrialization and the scientific
and technical revolution, beneath the surface of the continuous
toing and froing; this line reverses several of the norms and
proportions of the material and cultural development of society.&dquo;
Reverses: is this a reference to the notorious hierarchy of
structures and superstructures, which relegates all our imagery
among the latter? However that may be, we are going to pass
fearlessly over the critical line that Radovan Richta speaks of.
Let us examine one of the most stimulating personifications of

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history, which to this day has not ceased to feed the hopes
of millions of men, but these hopes must in the end be adapted
to the analytic era. There is no better illustration of what we
intend to show here than this reexamination and transposition.
Socialist humanism requires for the &dquo;work factor&dquo; the complete
restitution of its rights. In particular, the Marxist thesis shows
that in the formation of capital, work is of supreme importance.
A collective personality, the working class, is thus the creator
above all, although economically it has been dispossessed of most
of its fruits, and politically it has been deprived of the initiative
and the primacy it deserves.
But the &dquo;work factor,&dquo; if one looks at it more closely, rests
on a conception of causalities which is still a mechanistic one.
It relates to the clear determinism of the steam-engine: the push-
rod, the piston, the shining steel gadgets, fed by coal, whence
suddenly, by muscular effort, a dazzling flow of metal upsurges,
a sort of fulfilment that is immediately confiscated.
Now causality, in our technological world, is not what it was
in 1770. Today, the effect is produced by electronics, which set
in motion mechanisms that are scarcely visible, beyond the reach
of physical effort, insensitive to touch. It is the definitive result
of the correspondence between subtle signals within systems. If
we extract from this system (increasingly manipulable by the
intelligence), no longer relying on brute force but on abstract
deduction, its component parts: the motivating force, the raw
materials, and finally the molecular structure, we realize that
these elements are simply manipulated with a desired result in
mind by both human labour and technological invention, and also
by the consumer’s money, his selections, not to mention his needs
and wants.
These transformations are incredibly much more complex and
mediate than those of manual labour. The analysis cannot stop
at the simplistic configuration of production &dquo;factors.&dquo; For,
whatever their share in the proceeds, the workers administer,
transmit and stimulate forces emanating from within them, just
as engineers and capitalists do.
Within them? That is so indeed: deeper in than the depths
of the mine and the horizon of raw materials. From chemical
reactions, themselves drawn from molecular propagations. And
from the appropriation of earthly space, which reconstitutes the

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adventures of the explorer and the exoticism of landscapes in
terms of production. Can we assess the industrial energy and
the creativity of the workers in 19th-century England without
taking into account the geography of the world which nourished
them and on which they exerted their influence? But who had
organized that world? It would be an insult to reduce the history
of the period to a single factor. And what place must one assign
to invention at a period when material and above all muscular
labour was giving way more and more to other effective measures?
Besides, everyone knows that the value of a production system
closely depends on a number of aspects outside the scope of
production, connected with ideology and culture.
But although by analysis we can get beyond the bounds
prescribed by 19 th-century socialism, in accordance with liberal
thought on this chronological type of analysis, does this mean
that our epoch will destroy the workers? On the contrary, let
us admit that they remain, as do peasants. This is true despite

evolutionary factors which restrict their statistical weight in the

nation. Although the workers have less influence as conventional
factors, they remain as images of the Promethean power of
man, a silhouette standing between the elements he draws from
nature and the products he draws from it. This is not a question
of archetypes, but of projects.
This is so true that our attitude towards this contestable
factor, but true hero, varies according to the very images we
use to bring him to life. When Engels described the working
class in Manchester, he contrasted the factory worker, miserable
immigrant from the villages of Ireland, with the happy craftsman
of yesteryear, the apple-cheeked peasant of Merrie England. But
at that time it was still a question of physical labour. Nowadays
we think more and more of other types of work, involving white-
collar workers, technicians and intellectuals. The characteristic
type is no longer the unskilled labourer of 1850, nor is he the
man in the assembly-line, characteristic of the 20s. He has already
become an operator. Because he stands half-way between manual
and more abstract images, he appears as the incarnation of the
type. It seems as though our sensitivity to the collective personage
of the worker stabilises itself at different levels, and obeys
different motivations according to the period, in view of the

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relationship between real processes and the images that production
evokes.
There is a limit to this evolution. One day, when complete
industrialization and automation have reduced the manual role
to an asymptote, will we not have a completely different
conception of the Promethean gesture? Might we not, perhaps,
derive it from the astronaut? I think not. The gesture of man,
striving against nature, pushing his project before him, will
always be singled out. True, this image changes from epoch to
epoch; but it remains true to the basic human silhouette. If
this be true, the manual worker is no longer a mechanical and
mechanistic mass of causality, as he was in the 19 th century.
But there still remains a constant element in the symbolism and
imagery, the most directly-felt link between the natural bases of
man and his aims.

FACES OF THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD

This also applies to men in underdeveloped countries. If the

effort of the factory and field worker evokes in us imprescriptible
images, what can one say when this man carries on his shoulders
the weight, not only of the destiny of human and personal
manufacture, but also of diversity?
The Afro-Asian militant has introduced into world history
colours, images, landscapes which were previously unknown to
or suppressed by most people. Hence, as we can see this very
day, the privilege attached to silhouettes whose existence the
previous generation never suspected: the autochthonous pioneer
of steppe or forest, the partisan setting in motion the logistics
of nature against the aggressor, the coloured intellectual revoking
intolerable hierarchies in the name of true world reason. The
world system which underlies these gestures has much more value
and is much more effective than the one built up by Western
civilizations. The images, too, have more variety and point. In
the era of analytical dissolution, a new rationality, both provoked
by the rigorous analyses to which we are constrained, and
existing in spite of them, restores man’s hope by giving it a
new colour.

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Another idea which appeared about ten years ago, and which
supports the theories adduced earlier, is that of the importance
to be attributed to the interplay of social images, and particularly
to those by which society acts itself out. Jean Duvignaud has
emphasized what he for his part calls theatricality-a word one
may object to. Life echoes itself in masques, actions and stage
decors. To be purified, as Aristotle with his catharsis claimed?
Rather let us say to revel in itself and to increase itself by
reduplication. This is why the theatre, which the whole of western
tradition had confined within a box, the stage setting in the
Italian style, which was itself enclosed within another box, or
theatre, is now prompted by a new anxiety to emerge into the
street.
As corollary to this, the sociologist of today is constantly
a
aware of spectacular effects. The economist analyses what he calls
the demonstration effect. He must take into account some manifes-
tations that moralists disapprove of, as do social apostles, but
whose part it is dangerous to minimize. The overlord of an
indigent population may, as it were by proxy, possess himself
of all the riches and beauty that the community could hope to
enjoy: from the point of view of justice, he is fulfilling a
regrettable function, taking shocking advantage, and his privileges
should be suppressed. However, his function does exist. It can
and must be transposed. Woe to the society which seeks to
dispense with spectacle and demonstration!
True, scandalous elements of inequality remain between
individual members of prosperous societies, and greater ones still
between different world societies. But here and there one can
glimpse the satisfaction of a need as such. Who knows if one is
not approaching another regime, that of desire, no less strong
as a motivating factor than necessity?
The subject of desire plainly abuts on that of the image. They
both profit from the contemporary expansion of well-being, which
restricts the influence of the morals of poverty, and of the
failure of the reductions which, purely in the sphere of production,
set out to keep a hold over man. Man increasingly appears in
the world as acting and acted upon, not only by means of
production, but also by eroticism, merriment, aesthetics, in short,
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by a group of categories whose insertion into nature and whose
elaboration by society is not exclusively the result of technology,
but also that of semiology.

MEANING OF THE AUDIO-VISUAL ELEMENT

In his Civilisation de l’image, Dr. Fulchignoni has recently given

a striking description of the ever-faster, ever-intenser exchange
between man, his technical milieu and images. Wireless, which
restores the spoken word, the cinema, which reacts typologically
to so many types of behaviour, audio-visual education methods,
these new teaching techniques or techniques of evocation which
bounce back to us off artificial satellites, literally bathe us in a
flood of formative images. The man of tomorrow, technological
man, once baptized &dquo;man of the eye&dquo; because during the Re-
naissance he had invented perspective, will perhaps be &dquo;man of
information-theory or cybernetics,&dquo; or, and this is even more
likely, &dquo;man of the multiplication of life&dquo; by sound, shape and
rhythm.
This modernimagery acts like the avant-garde theatre. It wants
not merely to be perceived, but to be lived through. It is no
longer derived from performance, but from participation. It enters
inside us, it modifies us. Mass communications should refer
not only to communications on a massive scale. It should also
mean mass impregnation, collective creation, a new mythology.
At one time the spread of the written word, through printing,
had a colossal effect on the development of minds and on the
dynamics of social relationships. How can one assess the more
pressing requests, the more global involvement poured forth,
transmitted or received at all hours of the day and almost of
the night, by all the radios, all the aerials, all the screens in the
world...

FROM BODILY FORMS TO THOSE OF ART

The human body itself is involved. Nowadays it adds its own

most direct language to the ever more piquant suggestions of
clothes and fashion. While the cosmonaut in his space suit races
forward, nudity, the other side of the medal from that thickly-
wadded garment, is becoming widespread. Instead of being

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confined within four walls, or between the pages of specialized
magazines, this nudity comes into the open, becomes a form of
social aesthetics, suggests a type of morality, sets itself up in
opposition to collective dishonesty, as a challenge flung at artifice
and at the consumer society. -

At a period when industrial progress was still regarded with

conviction, Marcel Mauss wrote his Techniques du corps in which
sexuality was merely the subject of a chaste allusion. For
sexuality alone is not the source of so many manifestations: far
from it. Dancing, which has become a social phenomenon, the
ritual of undressing in the summer, the profane or revolutionary
liberation of these bodies (it would be wonderful if some day
a study as penetrating as Mauss’s could be devoted to this

subject: and this study, like the earlier one, would be of

contemporary relevance), these are the manifestations in question.
Artists had always sought after this carnal element to counter-
balance the overwhelming element of factitiousness. We repeat
that they had done so during the first industrial revolution. They
are still doing so, and their methods become increasingly exacting,
elaborate and hunted.
True, painters have in general stopped reproducing bodies and
landscapes. But they have taken their research and creativity
much further than their predecessors. And this is just what
society wants of them. For despite certain appearances, the
industrial civilization attributes to art an increasingly important
role. Aesthetics are far from being a survival from ancient times;
nowadays they seem to have taken on a sociological importance
proportional to the thing that menaces us. This magnification is
not, of course, altogether satisfying. The fact that painting, for
example, is becoming an economic symbol, a stock, rather than
a vehicle for beauty, is distressing. But this prosperity in the

painting market, as one says, this proliferation of the painter

who is above all an image-builder, seems to me to provide a
new confirmation of the ideas expressed above. Just as the
modern painter does not need to be figurative to be a figurator,
he does not need to be talented and upright in order that he
and his work as a whole, and its function, should represent a
world in the process of creation.
The things that are true about painting are true about the
others arts too, and in particular of the poem. &dquo;Figuration is a

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term used to designate the ensemble of elements that figure,&dquo;
proclaims Michel Deguy. &dquo;In poems, things rise up. Apparition,
according to an appropriate logic, in this setting in which every-
thing figures,&dquo; because it is endlessly drawn from the &dquo;burgeoning
of nature.&dquo; There will be no more happiness if the ability to
receive the earthly, in its figures which change in themselves
through the changes that they allow, is destroyed.&dquo;
Long ago Hegel had analysed in depth the role of the artistic
message. &dquo; Just as in talking of the exterior of the human body,
we have said that all its surface, as opposed to that of the
animal world, reveals the presence and the beating of the heart&dquo;
[it becomes a signifier ] , &dquo; speaking of art, we say that its tasks
is to make the phenomenal and the evident become the eye,
seat of the soul, making itself visible to the mind, at all points
on its surface.&dquo; Thus a painting is not simply my eye looking
at it; it is also itself an eye looking at me. In Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon, the chorus describes the distress of the betrayed
husband, suddenly blind in his palace. Eumorphôn de Koloss6n...
etc. &dquo;For him the fair-formed statues have lost their grace.
When eyes are lacking, Aphrodite fades away altogether.&dquo;...

IMAGE AND NATURE SECOND

If the work of art has ceased to have meaning because Helen

has gone, les us also fear that a social system, even an effective
one, even a &dquo;just&dquo; one, will be meaningless as long as it does
not make the world within it as well as the world around it
into a look exchanged with us.
The increasingly important role of images cannot be dissociated
from the most historical aspects of praxis. It invades praxis as
much as it is invaded by it. It is not one of the least surprising
features of our time that the all-powerful industrialization seeks
a new development of images. The present generation finds that
these images are more expansive and more real than the things
to which &dquo;reality,&dquo; the &dquo;concrete,&dquo; &dquo;basis&dquo; or &dquo;structure&dquo; were
reduced only thirty years ago. The very fact that this latter word
owes such a reputation to formalism is noteworthy. It does not
matter that the interpretation given by formalism to form sins
through abstraction and reduction. It is instructive to note that
&dquo;structure&dquo; is used nowadays most frequently for mathematical

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or other forms, whereas even recently the term was most often
used of the economic framework of society. This semantic
evolution does not merely indicate a change in knowledge, but,
we feel, a change in historical reality itself.
The latter’s abstract armatures, accessible to new methods of
action, and also its expressive surfaces (if one can use the term)
seem at least as important as the material determinisms stressed
by several generations of scholars and militants.
These expressive surface are increasingly important both from
a scientific and a practical point of view. In their capacity as
sensitive soundings of the deepest of movements, as messages
loaded with plenary information-for him who is able not only to
feel but to decipher them-they present us with the same
problems of qualification and practical decision that were once
provoked by a different order of ambiguity. The struggle of our
age is no longer between true and false, which so deeply torments
mankind, no longer between the effective and the ineffective,
which a positivist generation, and the West in general, claimed
as their universal criterion. To such struggles there is now added
another. In the flood of images which assail us, we must
distinguish between the meaningful and the insignificant or
fallacious.
Can we not see the words of H61derlin: &dquo;Man lives poetically
on earth&dquo; not as the expression of romantic nostalgia but as
that of the utopia of the analytic age? However that may be,
it is certain that in rejecting outdated anthropomorphisms, we
must not lose sight of these correspondences between man and
nature which the advance of knowledge as of action can only
make more intimate and even more rigorous. True, rigour can be
misused, as a denaturing and dehumanizing element.
The expansion of the image helps us to fight this danger. But
we must admit that this fight can no longer be naive. For the

settings in which we act out our lives, those groups of perceptions

vigorously stressed and standing out themselves as vociferous
identities, all this is profoundly disorganized and re-manipulated
by technology. Spontaneous groupings, straightforward landscape
views of ourselves and our history, are becoming rarer and rarer,
and direct impressions or empirical approaches usually fail to
grasp their meaning.
The true landscapes of our time arise from secondary bodies,

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which analysis rebuilds, having destroyed the first. It rebuilds
them from our modernity, and roots them once more in a nature
which likes to hide, as Heraclitus said, but which also likes
to be revealed. The images that have formed the subject of this
study are thus in many respects an extrapolation from nature
and from our own natures through history and according to
our factitiousness. They are also simulacra, instruments of a

passage from genre to genre, of a metaphorism between categories

of existing things, without which all social dynamisms would
disappear.
CONCLUSION

Some of the ideas argued in this study can be schematically

summarized as follows:
1) The form, commonly understood as an abstract structure
of reality, can also be defined as a face breaking into the depths.
2) This face, or rather these faces, of a diversity inherent
in the world and in ourselves, must today be constructed rather
than welcomed, for we are busied with, and busy ourselves with,
increasingly mediate elaborations of the world and of ourselves.
3) The dialectic of form and content, or of analysis and
experience, which is essential to our epoch, is not only a question
of being seen or of truth, or of functioning, but one of meaning,
of sensuality, of play.
4) It is not only through work than man humanizes nature,
but he humanizes it and re-natures himself in one, chiefly by
exercising his image-building faculty.

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