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harmony and counterpoint or the rules of pictorial composition, and by providing
the verbal and conceptual material essential for naming differences previously
experienced in a purely intuitive way. The danger of academicism is obviously
inherent in any rationalized teaching which tends to mint, within one doctrinal
body, precepts, prescriptions and formulae, explicitly described and taught, more
often negative than positive, which a traditional education imparts in the form of
a habitus, directly apprehended uno intuitu, as a global style not susceptible to
analytical breakdown.
3.2.2. Familiarization by repeated perceptions is the privileged mode of
acquiring the means of appropriating works of art because the work of art always
appears as a concrete individuality which never allows itself to be deduced from
principles and rules defining a style. As is seen from the facts in the case of the
musical work, the most exact and best informed discursive translations cannot
take the place of the execution, as a hic et nunc realization of the individual form,
which is irreducible to any formula; the conscious or unconscious mastery of the
principles and rules of the production of this form enables its coherence and
necessity to be apprehended by a symmetrical reconstruction of the creator s
construction but, far from reducing the individual work to the general nature of a
type, it renders possible the perception and appreciation of the originality of each
actualization or, rather, of each execution, in relation to the principles and rules
according to which it was produced. Although the work of art always procures
the twofold feeling of the unparalleled and the inevitable, the most inventive,
most improvised and the most original solutions can always be understood, post
festum, in terms of the schemes of thought, perception and action (rules of
composition, theoretical problems, etc.) which have given rise to the technical or
aesthetic questions to which this work corresponds, at the same time as they
guide the creator in the search for a solution irreducible to schemes and, thereby,
unpredictable yet none the less in accordance, a posteriori, with the rules of a
grammar of forms. The ultimate truth of the style of a period, a school or an
author is not contained as a seed in an original inspiration, but is defined and
redefined continuously as a signification in a state of flux which constructs itself
in accordance with itself and in reaction against itself; it is in the continued
exchange between questions which exist only for and through a mind armed with
schemes of a specific type and more or less innovative solutions, obtained
through the application of the same schemes, but capable of transforming the
initial scheme, that this unity of style and of meaning emerges which, at least
after the event, may appear to have preceded the works heralding the final
outcome and which transforms, retrospectively, the different moments of the
temporal series into simple preparatory outlines. If the evolution of a style (of a
period, a school or an author) does not appear either as the autonomous
development of an essence which is unique and always identical with itself, or as
a continuous creation of unpredictable novelty, but as a progression which

18
least an elementary form of apprehension, however inadequate it may be.
19
Thus,
the first degree of strictly pictorial competence shows itself in the mastery of an
arsenal of words making it possible to name differences and to apprehend them
while naming them: these are the proper names of famous painters — da Vinci,
Picasso, Van Gogh — which function as generic categories, because one can say
about any painting or non-figurative object that suggests Picasso , or, about any
work recalling nearly or distantly the manner of the Florentine painter, that
looks like a da Vinci ; there are also broad categories, like the Impressionists (a
school commonly considered to include Gaugin, C zanne and Degas), the Dutch
School , the Renaissance . It is particularly significant that the proportion of
subjects who think in terms of schools very clearly grows as the level of
education rises and that, more generally, generic knowledge which is required for
the perception of differences and consequently for memorizing — proper names
and historical, technical or aesthetic concepts — becomes increasingly specific as
we go towards the more educated beholders, so that the most adequate perception
differs only from the least adequate in so far as the specificity, richness and
subtlety of the categories employed are concerned. By no means contradicting
these arguments is the fact that the less educated visitors to museums — who tend
to prefer the most famous paintings and those sanctioned by school teaching,
whereas modern painters who have the least chance of being mentioned in
schools are quoted only by those with the highest educational qualifications —
live in large cities. To be able to form discerning or so-called personal opinions
is again a result of the education received: the ability to go beyond school
constraints is the privilege of those who have sufficiently assimilated school
education to make their own the free attitude towards scholastic culture taught by
a school so deeply impregnated with the values of the ruling classes that it
accepts the fashionable depreciation of school instruction. The contrast between
accepted, stereotyped and, as Max Weber would say, routinized culture, and
genuine culture, freed from school discourse, has meaning only for an infinitely
small minority of educated people for whom culture is second nature, endowed
with all the appearances of talent, and the full assimilation of school culture is a
prerequisite for going beyond it towards this free culture — free, that is to say,

19
L. S. Vygotsky has established experimentally the validity of the general laws
governing the transfer of training in the field of educational aptitudes: The
psychological prerequisites for instruction in different school subjects are to a
large extent the same: instruction in a given subject influences the development
of the higher functions far beyond the confines of that particular subject; the
main psychic functions involved in studying various subjects are interdependent
— their common bases are consciousness and deliberate mastery, the principal
contribution of the school years (L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans.
E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962), p. 102).