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did for folktales. Once the material has been collected, one can treat either the content,
divided by labels or semantic units (actions, themes, agents), whose relationships are
analyzable in terms of structures and whose aggregates indicate the mental geography
peculiar to a given group;l0 or one can study the modes of production, for example the way in
which proverbs (generally distichs: "Out of sight, out of mind," "When the cat's away, the
mice will play," "Red sky in morn-ing, sailor take warning," etc.) reinforce the impact of the
meaning by diminishing differences in sound (through rhyme, alliteration, etc.)." On the one
hand, one is concerned with systems of signification, on the other, with systems of
fabrication. Through a twofold control of the corpus they circumscribe and of the operations
they carry out on it, these methods succeed in defining their object themselves (what is a
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proverb?), in rationalizing its collection, in classifying the types and transforming the "given"
into something reproducible (for example, if one knows the rules of the production of
proverbs, one can fabricate series of them). These techniques thus provide, by explaining
them, the ability to construct social phenomena, just as biology synthesizes insulin.
Because the analysis of myths has been further developed than that of proverbs, such analysis,
from Aarne to Levi-Strauss, has shown how a science of these discourses, by isolating and
sifting them, by refining and formalizing the minimum units it treats,12 can classify a
literature that is supposed to be heterogenous, can reveal a "savage mind" (pensee sauvage)
and a logic in bodies of material constituted as "foreign," and, in this way, can renew the
interpretation and production of our own discourse.
The drawback of this method, which is at the same time the condition of its success, is that it
extracts the documents from their historical context and eliminates the operations of speakers
in particular situations of time, place, and competition. Everyday linguistic practices (as well
as the space of their tactics) have to be ignored in order for the scientific practices to be able
to operate in their own field. The innumerable tricks of bringing in a proverb at just the right
moment and with a particular interlocutor are thus not taken into account. This art and its
practitioners are excluded from the laboratory, not only because the scientific method requires
a delimitation and simplification of its objects, but also because there corresponds to the
constitution of a scientific space, as the precondition of any analysis, the necessity of being
able to transfer the objects of study into it. Only what can be transported can be treated. What
cannot be uprooted remains by definition outside the field of research. Hence the privilege
that these studies accord to discourses, the data that can most easily be grasped, recorded,
transported, and examined in secure places; in contrast, the speech act cannot be parted from
its circumstances. Of the practices themselves, science will retain only movable elements
(tools and products to be put in display cases) or descriptive schemas (quantifiable behaviors,
stereotypes of the staging of social intercourse, ritual structures), leaving aside the aspects of a
society that cannot be so uprooted and transferred to another space: ways of using things or
words according to circumstances. Something essential is at work in this everyday historicity,
which cannot be dissociated from the existence of the subjects who are the agents and authors
of conjunctural operations. Indeed, like Schreber's God, who "communicates only with
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cadavers," 13 our knowledge seems to consider and tolerate in a social body only inert
objects.
Was it fate? I remember the marvelous Shelburne Museum in Vermont where, in thirty-five
houses of a reconstructed village, all the signs, tools, and products of nineteenth-century
everyday life teem; everything, from cooking utensils and pharmaceutical goods to weaving
instruments, toilet articles, and children's toys can be found in profusion. The display includes
innumerable familiar objects, polished, deformed, or made more beautiful by long use;
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