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Just as language is a system of signs which have meaning only in relation to one another, and each of which has its own usage throughout the whole language, so each institution is a symbolic system that the subject takes over and incorporates as a style of functioning, as a global configuration, without having any need to conceive it at all. When equilibrium is destroyed, the reorganizations which take place comprise, like those of language, an internal logic even though it may not be clearly thought out by anyone. They are polarized by the fact that, as participants in a system of symbols,
we exist in the eyes of one another, with one another, in such a way that changes in language are
due to our will to speak and to be understood. The
system of symbols affects the molecular changes
which occur where a meaning develops, a meaning
which is neither a thing nor an idea, in spite of the
famous dichotomy, because it is a modulation of our
coexistence. It is in this way, as is also true of logics
of behavior, that the forms and processes of history,
the classes, the epochs, exist. We were asking ourselves where they are. They are in a social, cultural, or symbolic space which is no less real than
physical space and is, moreover, supported by it.
For meaning lies latent not only in language, in
political and religious institutions, but in modes of
kinship, in machines, in the landscape, in production, and, in general, in all the modes of human commerce. An interconnection among all these phenomena is possible, since they are all symbolisms, and perhaps even the translation of one symbolism into another is possible.
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