Texts and images are both vulnerable to attack. Precisely which objects  are  available  from  the  past,  whose  written  and  visual  sources are saved, is astoundingly arbitrary. Only a confirmed believer can be sanguine about their providential arrangement.”

For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears,

Divides one thing entire to many objects; Like perspectives, which rightly gaz'd upon

Show nothing but confusion; ey'd awry

Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty,

Looking awry upon your lord's departure,

Find shapes of grief more than himself to wail;

Which look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows

of what it is not.

The exclusion from public debate of artists, writers and scholars is the result of the conjoined impact of several factor: some grow out of the internal evolution of cultural production - like the increasingly narrow specialization which leads researchers to give up the wider ambitions of the intellectual in earlier days - whereas others are the result of increasingly strong grip of a technocracy which, with the often unconscious complicity of journalists (themselves caught in the game of competition), puts citizens on extended intellectual vacation by favouring 'organized irresponsibility', in the words of Ulrich Beck, and which finds an immediate ally in a technocracy of communication - more and more present, via the media, in the universe of cultural production. One would have to develop, for example, the analysis of the production and reproduction of technocratic power or, better, epistemocratic power, in order to understand the almost unconditional delegation, founded on the social authority of educational institutions, which the great majority of citizens grant, on the most vital issues, to the 'state nobility' (the best example being the almost unlimited confidence which those who have been called 'nucleocrats' enjoy, notably in France).

"I am to build a house of ice

Because it is more liquid."

A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee through the construction of its wax cells puts many a human architect to shame. But what above all distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that he has already built  the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of the labor process a result comes about which was already present ideally in the representation of the labourer at its beginning. He not only works a change in form on something natural; he at the same time actualises in something natural his own purpose, and he knows this purpose as determining the kind and mode of his action, and as something to which he must subject his will.

Karl, Marx, Das Kapital, (Mew 23/193)