ABSTRACT
The idea of participation is essential: working in the fields men observed a ritual by which they ‘participate’ in a symbolic order. The artisans, for their part, afterwards reproduced the dichotomy which, for the Greeks, affected the work of farmers: exalted when they thought they were conforming to or reproducing the order of nature dependent on the gods; they were diminished when they became purveyors of whatever satisfied the needs of the vegetative and sensitive souls. If the land ceased to play the role that it long had, the uttering of work, as producing wealth, nevertheless continued to be influenced by the concrete character which belonged to the land and its gifts, considered as the first source of wealth. On the plane of the imaginary the object, has a place of honour: as a concretisation of the act of production, its task being to ‘plug holes’, to reduce the anguish of lack while at the same time provoking a feeling of alienation.
