ABSTRACT
Plato's image of the cave on whose wall are cast the shadows we mistake for real is a popular one today. There is a heady promise in various inteIlectual fields of escape from the conditions of knowledge. With this promise an impossible kind of freedom is being proposed, freedom from necessity of any kind. It is preached particularly in artistic and literary drcles. These are the people who have shouldered the clergy's old responsibility to care for the symbols of sodety. They should know that the cave is the body sodal mediated by the image of the other body. To emerge free from its constraints would be as feasible for the artist as for a linguistic philosopher to give up the constraints of language. Indeed the illusion of escape may weIl be a new kind of confinement. Bernstein's work shows us something of how our different cosmologies imprison uso The free exerdse of our faculties is limited by the media of expression. There are areas of experience which can be investigated in one speech code but not another. There are sodal relations possible for one but not another. The range of speech codes available is part of the sodal environment for an individual at any given time. Since the speech code is a quality inhering in the sodal structure, a strong oneway casual relation seems to be implied. If pressed on the matter, presumably Bernstein would be gloomy about the prospects of ever mastering the codes and being free of their restraints. On his view we can only hope for fortunate shifts in the sodal structure to introduce change:
The thesis to be developed here places the emphasis on changes in the sodal structure as major factors in shaping or changing a given culture through their effect on the consequences of speaking ... which speech codes are generated is a function of the system of sodal relations. The particular form of a sodal relation acts selectively on what is said, when it is said, and how it is said ... The experience
157 of the speakers may then be transformed by what is made significant or relevant by the different speech systems. This is a sodological argument, because the speech system is taken as a consequence of the sodal relation, or to put it more generally, is a quality of the sodal structure (Bernstein, 1965: 151).
