RafaelFajardo

[W]e may observe that the social sciences assume a doubly subordinate position, both under the hierarchy which is tending more and more to predominate, that of the natural sciences, and under the old hierarchy, today threatened by the rise in natural sciences and scientific values on the cultural stock exchange. Which explains why these disciplines still function as a refuge for bourgeois children with fair-to-middling results. What one might call the scientific syndrome, typical of most semiological work and of all the more or less phantasmagorical combinations of the different lexicons of the social sciences, linguistics and psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis and economics, etc., which proliferated in the seventies, can be understood as an attempt by disciplines defined as doubly negative (neither arts nor science) to reverse the situation by inverting the signs, and to aggregate the prestige of profits of literary (or philosophical) avant-gardism with those of scientific avant-gardism, although thse had long been considered incompatible, through the miraculous conjunction of the appearance of scientific rigour with the appearance of literary elegance or philosophical profundity. We can understand how the circular structure of domination, which allows disciplines that are doubly subordinate according to traditional criteria simultaneously to dominate from another angle the disciplines that dominate them, only if we realize that it characterizes a critical moment of the historical process which tends to subordinate the citadel of literary culture to scientific culture, which used to be subordinate.