Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“To speak of discourse, religious, philosophical, or scientific, in terms of its content is to consider it as formal representation, that is, as language “transparent” to its meaning, signifiers designating their signified. But whereas the operations of formal representation can be addressed by examining the components of “natural” languages, all of which greatly resemble each other, and can in principle be translated into one another with only minor difficulties, the institutional realm, that of ritual and art, cannot be defined by such simple aims as “thinking” or “conveying information,” nor can its “grammar” be summed up in a compendious set of rules. Reproducing or repeating the originary event is very different from using a system of signs to communicate about the world, even about the human as part of the world. Let us recapitulate what is formal and what is institutional in the originary sign. Its “formality” is its transparency to its “meaning.” The gesture that was to be part of an act of appropriation is separated from its original goal and comes to designate the appropriable object. The formal relation is not one of desire, but of communication, of the exchange of “information,” which in this minimal case is the information that this object belongs to a new category, which we may call indifferently the significant or the sacred .”

— Eric Gans, Institutional Culture: The Esthetic I · Saturday, February 17th, 2018 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment