Итог

2

Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits

Perhaps from force of occupational habit, perhaps by virtue of the calm that is acquired by every important man who is consulted for his advice and who, knowing that he will keep control over the situation, sits back and lets his interlocutor flap and fluster, perhaps also in order to show to advantage the character of his head (which he believed to be Grecian, in spite of his whiskers), while something was being explained to him, M. de Norpois maintained an immobility of expression as absolute as if you had been speaking in front of some classical -and deaf - bust in a museum.

Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu

Linguistic exchange - a relation of communication between a sender and a receiver, based on enciphering and deciphering, and therefore on the implementation of a code or a generative competence - is also an economic exchange which is established within a particular symbolic relation of power between a producer, endowed with a certain linguistic capital, and a consumer (or a market), and which is capable of procuring a certain material or symbolic profit. In other words, utterances are not only (save in exceptional circumstances) signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. Quite apart from the literary (and especially poetic) uses of language, it is rare in everyday life for language to function as a pure instrument of communication. The pursuit of maximum informative efficiency is only exceptionally the

exclusive goal of linguistic production and the distinctly instrumental use of language which it implies generally clashes with the often unconscious pursuit of symbolic profit. For in addition to the information expressly declared, linguistic practice inevitably communicates information about the (differential) manner of communicating, i.e. about the expressive style, which, being perceived and appreciated with reference to the universe of theoretically or practically competing styles, takes on a social value and a symbolic efficacy.

Capital, Market and Price

Utterances receive their value (and their sense) only in their relation to a market, characterized by a particular law of price formation. The value of the utterance depends on the relation of power that is concretely established between the speakers’ linguistic competences, understood both as their capacity for production and as their capacity for appropriation and appreciation; it depends, in other words, on the capacity of the various agents involved in the exchange to impose the criteria of appreciation most favourable to their own products. This capacity is not determined in linguistic terms alone. It is certain that the relation between linguistic competences - which, as socially classified productive capacities, characterize socially classified linguistic units of production and, as capacities of appropriation and appreciation, define markets that are themselves socially classified - helps to determine the law of price formation that obtains in a particular exchange. But the linguistic relation of power is not completely determined by the prevailing linguistic forces alone: by virtue of the languages spoken, the speakers who use them and the groups defined by possession of the corresponding competence, the whole social structure is present in each interaction (and thereby in the discourse uttered). That is what is ignored by the interactionist perspective, which treats interaction as a closed world, forgetting that what happens between two persons - between an employer and an employee or, in a colonial situation, between a French speaker and an Arabic speaker or, in the post-colonial situation, between two members of the formerly colonized nation, one Arabicspeaking, one French-speaking - derives its particular form from the objective relation between the corresponding languages or usages, that is, between the groups who speak those languages.

The concern to return to the things themselves and to get a firmer

grip on ‘reality', a concern which often inspires the projects of ‘micro-sociology’, can lead one purely and simply to miss a reality' that does not yield to immediate intuition because it lies in structures transcending the interaction which they inform. There is no better example of this than that provided by strategies of condescension. Thus a French-language newspaper published in Bearn (a province of south-west France) wrote of the mayor of Pau who. in the course of a ceremony in honour of a Bearnais poet, had addressed the assembled company in Bearnais: ’The audience was greatly moved by this thoughtful gesture'.¹ In order for an audience of people whose mother tongue is Bearnais to perceive as a 'thoughtful gesture’ the fact that a Bearnais mayor should speak to them in Bearnais, they must tacitly recognize the unwritten law which prescribes French as the only acceptable language for formal speeches in formal situations. The strategy of condescension consists in deriving profit from the objective relation of power between the languages that confront one another in practice (even and especially when French is absent) in the very act of symbolically negating that relation, namely, the hierarchy of the languages and of those who speak them. Such a strategy is possible whenever the objective disparity between the persons present (that is. between their social properties) is sufficiently known and recognized by everyone (particularly those involved in the interaction, as agents or spectators) so that the symbolic negation of the hierarchy (by using the ’common touch’, for instance) enables the speaker to combine the profits linked to the undiminished hierarchy with those derived from the distinctly symbolic negation of the hierarchy - not the least of which is the strengthening of the hierarchy implied by the recognition accorded to the way of using the hierarchical relation. In reality, the Bearnais mayor can create this condescension effect only because, as mayor of a large town, attesting to his urbanity, he also possesses all the titles (he is a qualified professor) which guarantee his rightful participation in the ‘superiority’ of the ‘superior’ language (no one, and especially not a provincial journalist, would think of praising the mayor s French in the same way as his Bearnais, since he is a qualified, licensed speaker who speaks ‘good quality' French by definition, ex officio). What is praised as ‘good quality Bearnais', coming from the mouth of the legitimate speaker of the legitimate language, would be totally devoid of value — and furthermore would be sociologically impossible in a formal situation - coming from the mouth of a peasant, such as the man who, in order to explain why he did not dream of becoming mayor of his village even though he had

obtained the biggest share of the vole, said (in French) that he •didn’t know how to speak’ (meaning French), implying a definition of linguistic competence that is entirely sociological. One can see in passing that strategies for the subversion of objective hierarchies in ihe sphere of language, as in the sphere of culture, are also likely to be strategies of condescension, reserved for those who are sufficiently confident of their position in the objective hierarchies lo be able to deny them without appearing to be ignorant or incapable of satisfying their demands, if Bearnais (or. elsewhere. Creole) is one day spoken on formal occasions, this will be by virtue of its takeover by speakers of the dominant language, who have enough claims to linguistic legitimacy (al least in the eyes of their interlocutors) to avoid being suspected of resorting to the stigmatized language faute de mieux.

The relations of power that obtain in the linguistic market, and whose variations determine the variations in the price that the same discourse may receive on different markets, are manifested and realized in the fact that certain agents are incapable of applying to the linguistic products offered, either by themselves or others, the criteria that arc most favourable to their own products. This effect of the imposition of legitimacy is greater - and the laws of the market are more favourable to the products offered by the holders of the greatest linguistic competence - when the use of the legitimate language is more imperative, that is, when the situation is more formal (and when it is more favourable, therefore, to those who are more or less formally delegated to speak), and when consumers grant more complete recognition to the legitimate language and legitimate competence (but a recognition which is relatively independent of their knowledge of that language). In other words, the more formal the market is, the more practically congruent with the norms of the legitimate language, the more it is dominated by the dominant, i.e. by the holders of Ihe legitimate competence, authorized to speak with authority. Linguistic competence is not a simple technical capacity but a statutory capacity with which the technical capacity is generally paired, if only because it imposes (he acquisition of the latter through the effect of statutory attribution (noblesse oblige), as opposed to the commonly held belie! that regards technical capacity as the basis for statutory capacity. Legitimate competence is the stalutorily recognized capacity of an authorized person - an ‘authority’ - to use, on formal occasions, the legitimate (i.e. formal) language, the authorized, authoritative language, speech that is accredited, worthy of being believed, or. in a word.

performative, claiming (with the greatest chances of success) to be effective. Given that legitimate competence, thus defined, implies the effectiveness of the performative, one can understand how certain experiments in social psychology have been able to establish that the efficacy of an utterance, the power of conviction which is granted to it, depends on the pronunciation (and secondarily the vocabulary) of the person who utters it; that is, through this particularly reliable measure of statutory competence, it depends on the authority of the speaker. The practical evaluation of the symbolic relation of power that determines the criteria of evaluation prevailing in the market concerned takes into account the specifically linguistic properties of discourse only in so far as they express the social authority and social competence of those who utter them. They do so in the same way as other non-linguistic properties such as the character of the voice (nasalization or pharynxization), a durable disposition of the vocal apparatus that is one of the most powerful of social markers, and all of the more overtly social qualities such as aristocratic and academic titles: clothing, especially uniforms and formal dress; institutional attributes like the priest’s pulpit, the professor’s platform, the orator’s rostrum and microphone, all of which place the legitimate speaker in a pre-eminent position and structure the interaction through the spatial structure which they impose on it; and, finally, the very composition of the group in which the exchange occurs.

Thus the more formal a situation is, the more likely it is that the dominant linguistic competence will function in a particular market as linguistic capital capable of imposing the law of price formation which is the most favourable to its products and of procuring the corresponding symbolic profit. For the more formal the situation is, the more it is able to impose by itself alone the recognition of the legitimacy of the dominant mode of expression, converting the optional variants (at least on the level of pronunciation) which characterize it into imperative rules, ‘de rigueur' (like black ties at formal dinners), making the recipients of these linguistic products more inclined to know and recognize the legitimacy of this mode of expression, even outside the constraints of the formal situation. In other words, the more these different conditions converge and the higher the degree to which this occurs on a market, the narrower the gap between the values accorded in practice to the linguistic products which confront each other on that market and the theoretical value which would be attributed to them, in a hypothetical unified market, in relation to their position in a complete system of linguistic styles.

Conversely, as the degree of formality in an exchange situation and the degree to which the exchange is dominated by highly authorized speakers diminish, so the law of price formation tends to become less unfavourable to the products of dominated linguistic habitus.

It is true that the definition of the symbolic relation of power which is constitutive of the market can be the subject of negotiation and that the market can be manipulated, within certain limits, by a metadiscourse concerning the conditions of use of discourse. This includes, for example, the expressions which are used to introduce or excuse speech which is too free or shocking ('with your permission’, ‘if I may say so', ‘if you’ll pardon the expression’, 'with all due respect’, etc.) or those which reinforce, through explicit articulation, the candour enjoyed on a particular market (‘off the record’, ‘strictly between ourselves’, etc.). But it goes without saying that the capacity to manipulate is greater the more capital one possesses, as is shown by the strategies of condescension. It is also true that the unification of the market is never so complete as to prevent dominated individuals from finding, in the space provided by private life, among friends, markets where the laws of price formation which apply to more formal markets are suspended.² In these private exchanges between homogeneous partners, the ‘illegitimate’ linguistic products are judged according to criteria which, since they are adjusted to their principles of production, free them from the necessarily comparative logic of distinction and of value. Despite this, the formal law, which is thus provisionally suspended rather than truly transgressed.³ remains valid, and it re-imposes itself on dominated individuals once they leave the unregulated areas where they can be outspoken (and where they can spend all their lives), as is shown by the fact that it governs the production of their spokespersons as soon as they are placed in a formal situation. It would be quite mistaken, therefore, to see a ‘true’ popular language in the use of language which obtains in this oasis of freedom, where one has licence (a typical ‘dictionary word’) because one is among friends and not forced to ‘watch oneself. It is also true that popular competence, when confronted with a formal market, like the one constituted by a linguistic survey or investigation (unless specific precautions are taken), is, as it were, annihilated. The reality of linguistic legitimacy consists precisely in the fact that dominated individuals are always under the potential jurisdiction of formal law, even when they spend all their lives, like the thief described by Weber, beyond its reach, so that when placed in a formal situation they are doomed to silence or to the broken discourse which

linguistic investigation also often records.

This means that the productions of the same linguistic habitus vary according to the market and that any linguistic observation records a discourse which is the product of the relationship between a linguistic competence and the particular market constituted by the linguistic investigation. This market has a high degree of tension since the laws of price formation which govern it are related to those of the academic market. All attempts to pin down the variables that could explain the variations thus recorded run the risk of overlooking the effect of the investigative situation itself, a hidden variable which is doubtless the source of the differential weight of different variables. Those who. wishing to break with linguistic abstractions, try to establish statistically the social factors of linguistic competence (measured by this or that phonological, lexical or syntactic index) are only going half-way: they are in fact forgetting that the different factors measured in a particular market situation - that created by the inquiry - could, in a different situation, have very different relative weights, and that what is important therefore is to determine how the explanatory weights of the different factors which determine competence vary according to the market situation (which would require the development of a proper experimental project).

Symbolic Caph^-al: A Recognized Power

Hie question of performative utterances becomes clearer if one sees it as a particular case of the effects of symbolic domination, which occurs in all linguistic exchanges. The linguistic relation of power is never defined solely by the relation between the linguistic competences present. And the weight of different agents depends on their symbolic capital, i.e. on the recognition, institutionalized or not. that they receive from a group. Symbolic imposition - that kind of magical efficacy which not only the command and the password, but also ritual discourse or a simple injunction, or even threats or insults, purport to exercise - can function only if there is a convergence of social conditions which are altogether distinct from the strictly linguistic logic of discourse. For the philosopher’s language to be granted the importance it claims, there has to be a convergence of the social conditions which enable it to secure from others a recognition of the importance which it attributes to itself? Equally, the setting up of a ritual exchange, such as a mass, presupposes, among other things, that all the social conditions are in place to

ensure (he production of appropriate senders and receivers, who are therefore agreed among themselves. It is certainly the case that the symbolic efficacy of religious language is threatened when the set of mechanisms capable of ensuring the reproduction of the relationship of recognition, which is the basis of its authority, ceases to function. This is also true of any relation of symbolic imposition, even of the one implied by the use of the legitimate language which, as such, involves the claim to be heard, believed and obeyed, and which can exercise its specific efficacy only as long as it can count on the effectiveness of all the mechanisms, analysed above, which secure the reproduction of the dominant language and the recognition of its legitimacy. One may note, in passing, that the source of the profit of distinction, procured by any use of the legitimate language, derives from the totality of the social universe and the relations of domination that give structure to it. although one of the most important constituents of this profit lies in the fact that it appears to be based on the qualities of the person alone.

Austin's account of performative utterances cannot be restricted to the sphere of linguistics. The magical efficacy of these acts of institution is inseparable from the existence of an institution defining the conditions (regarding the agent, the time or place, etc.) which have to be fulfilled for the magic of words to operate. As is indicated in the examples analysed by Austin, these ‘conditions of felicity’ are sociaJ conditions, and the person who wishes to proceed felicitously with the christening of a ship or of a person must be entitled to do so, in the same way that, to be able to give an order, one must have a recognized authority over the recipient of that order. It is true that linguists have often rushed to find, in Austin’s inconsistent definition ol the performative, an excuse for dismissing the problem which Austin had set them, in order to return to a narrowly linguistic definition that ignores the market effect. They did this by distinguishing between explicit performatives, which are necessarily selfverifying since they represent in themselves the accomplishment of the act, and performatives conceived more broadly to mean statements that are used to accomplish an act other than the simple fact of saying something, or. to pul it more simply, the difference between a properly linguistic act (e.g. declaring the meeting open) and the extra-linguistic act (opening the meeting by the fact of declaring it open). In this way, they justified to themselves the rejection of any analysis of the social conditions in which performative utterances function. The conditions of felicity discussed by Austin concern only the extra-linguistic act; only to open the meeting effectively does one

need to be entitled to do so, as anyone can declare it open, even if his declaration remains totally ineffective.⁵

Was it necessary to employ so much ingenuity to discover that when my doing consists in my saying, what I do is necessarily what I say? But by pushing to the limit the consequences of the distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic, on which it purports to base its autonomy (notably with regard to sociology), pragmatics demonstrates by reductio ad absurdum that illocutionary acts as described by Austin are acts of institution that cannot be sanctioned unless they have, in some way, the whole social order behind them. ‘Whereas one clearly must be “entitled” to open the meeting, it is not necessary to be in a position of superiority to give an order; a soldier can give an order to his commanding officer, even though his order has little chance of being obeyed’.⁶ Or, again: ‘To claim legitimately to open the meeting, one needs to be authorized by the institution and not everyone is; but everyone has the authority to accomplish a speech act like an order, so that everyone can claim to accomplish such an act’.⁷ The construction of these ‘pure’ performatives, represented by explicit performatives, has the virtue of bringing out a contrario the presuppositions of ordinary performatives, which imply a reference to the social conditions for their success. From a strictly linguistic point of view, anyone can say anything and the private can order his captain to ‘clean the latrines’; but from a sociological point of view (the one adopted in fact by Austin when he reflects on the conditions of felicity), it is clear that not anyone can assert anything, or else does so at his peril, as with an insult. ‘Anybody can shout in the public square, “I decree a general mobilization,” and as it cannot be an act because the requisite authority is lacking, such an utterance is no more than words, it reduces itself to futile clamour, childishness, or lunacy.’⁸ The logical exercise of separating the act of speech from its conditions of execution shows, through the absurdities that this abstraction engenders, that the performative utterance, as an act of institution, cannot socio-logically exist independently of the institution which gives it its raison d'etre, and if it were to be produced in spite of everything, it would be socially deprived of sense.⁹ Since an order, or even a password, can work only if it is backed up by the order of things and its accomplishment depends on all the relations of order which define the social order, one would have to be crazy, as they say, to dream up and give an order for which the conditions of felicity are not fulfilled. The anticipated conditions of felicity help to determine the utterance by allowing it to be thought of and experienced as

reasonable and realistic. Only a hopeless soldier (or a ‘pure’ linguist) could imagine that it was possible to give his captain an order. The performative utterance implies ‘an overt claim to possess such or such power’,¹⁰ a claim that is more or less recognized and therefore more or less sanctioned socially. This claim to act on the social world through words, i.e. magically, is more or less crazy or reasonable depending on whether it is more or less based on the objectivity of the social world.¹¹ Thus we can counterpose two acts of magical naming that are. socially, very unequally guaranteed: the insult (‘you're only a professor’) which, lacking authorization, risks rebounding against its author, and the official naming or ‘nomination’ (‘J appoint you professor'), powerfully invested with all the authority of the group and capable of instituting a legitimate, that is, universally recognized, identity.

The limiting case of the performative utterance is the legal act which, when it is pronounced, as it should be, by someone who has the right to do so,¹² i.e. by an agent acting on behalf of a whole group, can replace action with speech, which will, as they say, have an effect: the judge need say no more than i find you guilty’ because there is a set of agents and institutions which guarantee that the sentence will be executed. The inquiry into the specifically linguistic principle behind the ‘illocutionary power’ of discourse thus gives way to the distinctly sociological inquiry into the conditions in which an individual agent can find himself and his speech invested with such power. The real source of the magic of performative utterances lies in the mystery of ministry, i.e. the delegation by virtue of which an individual - king, priest or spokesperson - is mandated to speak and act on behalf of a group, thus constituted in him and by him.¹³ More precisely, it lies in the social conditions of the institution of the ministry, which constitutes the legitimate representative as an agent capable of acting on the social world through words, by instituting him as a medium between the group and the social world; and it does that, among other things, by equipping him with the signs and the insignia aimed at underlining the fact that he is not acting in his own name and under his own authority.

There is no symbolic power without the symbolism of power. Symbolic attributes - as is well illustrated in the paradigmatic case of the skeptron and the sanctions against the improper wearing of uniforms - are a public display and thereby an officialization of the contract of delegation: the ermine and the robe declare that Ihe judge or the doctor is recognized as having just cause (in the collective recognition) for declaring himself

judge or doctor, that his. imposture - in the sense of the pretension expressed by his appearance - is legitimate. The competence that is specifically linguistic - the Latin once spoken by doctors or the eloquence of the spokesperson - is also one of the manifestations of competence in the sense of the right to speech and to power through speech. There is a whole dimension of authorized language, its rhetoric, syntax, vocabulary and even pronunciation, which exists purely to underline the authority of its author and the trust he demands. In this respect, style is an element of the mechanism, in the Pascalian sense, through which language aims to produce and impose the representation of its own importance ami thereby help to ensure its own credibility.’⁴ The symbolic efficacy of the discourse of authority always depends, in part, on the linguistic competence of the person who utters it. This is more true, of course, when the authority of the speaker is less clearly institutionalized. Il follows that the exercise of symbolic power is accompanied by work on the form of discourse which, as is clearly demonstrated in the case of poets in archaic societies, has the purpose of demonstrating the orator's mastery and gaining him the recognition of the group. (This logic is also found in the popular rhetoric of insults which seeks, by flagrant overstatement and the regulated deformation of ritual formulas, to produce the expressive accomplishment which allows one to ‘get those laughing on one's side'.)

Thus, just as the relation to the market defines, in the case of constatives. the conditions of acceptability and thereby the very form of the discourse, so loo the relation to the possibilities offered by a particular market determines, in the case of performative utterances, the conditions of felicity. One must therefore assert, against all the forms of autonomization of a distinctly linguistic order, that all speech is produced for and through the market to which it owes its existence and its most specific properties.

The Anticipation of Profits

Since a discourse can only exist, in the form in which it exists, so long as it is not simply grammatically correct but also, and above all. socially acceptable, i.e. heard, believed, and therefore effective within a given state of relations of production and circulation, it follows that the scientific analysis of discourse must take into account the laws of price formation which characterize the market concerned or, in other words, the laws defining the social conditions of acceptability (which include the specifically linguistic laws of grammaticality). In reality, the conditions of reception envisaged are part of the conditions of production, and anticipation of the sanctions of

the market helps to determine the production of the discourse. This anticipation, which bears no resemblance to a conscious calculation, is an aspect of the linguistic habitus which, being the product of a prolonged and primordial relation to the laws of a certain market, tends to function as a practical sense of the acceptability and the probable value of one's own linguistic productions and those of others on different markets.¹⁵ It is this sense of acceptability, and not some form of rational calculation oriented towards the maximization of symbolic profits, w hich, by encouraging one to take account of the probable value of discourse during the process of production, determines corrections and all forms of self-censorship - the concessions one makes to a social world by accepting to make oneself acceptable in it.

Since linguistic signs are also goods destined to be given a price by powers capable of providing credit (varying according to the laws of the market on which they are placed), linguistic production is inevitably affected by the anticipation of market sanctions: all verbal expressions - whether words exchanged between friends, the bureaucratic discourse of an authorized spokesperson or the academic discourse of a scientific paper - are marked by their conditions of reception and owe some of their properties (even at a grammatical level) to the fact that, on the basis of a practical anticipation of the laws of the market concerned, their authors, most often unwittingly, and without expressly seeking to do so, try to maximize the symbolic profit they can obtain from practices which are, inseparably, oriented towards communication and exposed to evaluation.¹⁶ This means that the market fixes rhe price for a linguistic product, the nature, and therefore the objective value, of which the practical anticipation of this price helped to determine: and it means that the practical relation to the market (ease, timidity, tension, embarrassment, silence, etc.), which helps to establish the market sanction, thus provides an apparent justification for the sanction by which it is partly produced.

In the case of symbolic production, the constraint exercised by the market via the anticipation of possible profit naturally takes the form of an anticipated censorship, of a self-censorship which determines not only the manner of saying, that is. the choice of language - ‘code switching* in situations of bilingualism - or the ‘level* of language, but also what it will be possible or not possible to say.¹⁷

Everything happens as if. in each particular situation, the linguistic norm (the law of price formation) is imposed by the holder of the competence

which is closest to the legitimate competence, i.e. by the dominant speaker in the interaction, and in a way that is all the more rigorous when the exchange has a higher degree of formality (in public, in a formal setting, etc.). It is as if the effect of censorship which is exercised over the dominated speaker and the necessity for him to adopt the legitimate mode of expression (French in the case of a patois speaker), or to come close to it, is more powerfully experienced, all other things being equal, when the disparity between the different kinds of capital is greater -whereas this constraint disappears between holders of an equivalent symbolic and linguistic capital, for example between peasants. Situations of bilingualism enable one to observe quasi-experimentally how the language used varies according to the relation between the speakers (and their instruments of expression), analysed in terms of the structure of the distribution of specifically linguistic capital and of other kinds of capital. Thus, in a series of interactions observed in 1963 in a small Bearnais town, the same person (an elderly woman living in one of the neighbouring villages) first used a ‘patois-French' to a young woman shopkeeper in the town, who was originally from another, larger town in the Bearn (and who, being more of a ‘city-dweller’, might not understand Bearnais or could feign ignorance). The next moment, she spoke in Bearnais to a woman who lived in that town but who was originally from the villages and more or less of her own age; then she used a French that was strongly ‘corrected’ to a minor town official; and, finally, she spoke in Bearnais to a roadworker in the town, originally from the villages and about her age. It is clear that the interviewer, as an ‘educated’ city-dweller, will only encounter strongly corrected French or silence; and if he uses Bearnais himself, this may well ease the tension of the exchange, but, whatever his intentions, it cannot fail to function as a strategy of condescension likely to create a situation no less artificial than the initial relationship.

The practical cognition and recognition of the immanent laws of a market and the sanctions through which they are manifested determine the strategic modifications of discourse, whether they concern the effort to ‘correct’ a devalued pronunciation in the presence of representatives of the legitimate pronunciation and, more generally, all the corrections which tend to valorize the linguistic product by a more intense mobilization of the available resources, or, conversely, the tendency to resort to a less complex syntax, to the short phrases which social psychologists have observed in adults when they address children. Discourses are always to some extent euphemisms inspired by the concern to ‘speak well’, to ‘speak properly’, to produce the products that respond to the demands of a certain market; they are compromise formations resulting from a transaction between the expressive interest (what is to be said) and the censorship inherent in

particular relations of linguistic production (whether it is the structure of linguistic interaction or the structure of a specialized field), a censorship which is imposed on a speaker or writer endowed with a certain social competence, that is, a more or less significant symbolic power over these relations of symbolic power.¹⁸

Variations in the form of discourse, and more precisely the degree to which it is controlled, monitored and refined in form (formal), thus depend, on the one hand, on the objective tension of the market, that is, on the degree of formality of the situation and, in the case of an interaction, on the extent of the social distance (in the structure of the distribution of linguistic and other kinds of capital) between the sender and the receiver, or the respective groups to which they belong; and, on the other hand, on the ‘sensitivity' of the speaker to this tension and the censorship it implies, as well as the closely related aptitude to respond to a high degree of tension with an expression which is highly controlled, and therefore strongly euphemized. In other words, the form and the content of a discourse depend on the relation between a habitus (which is itself the product of sanctions on a market with a given level of tension), and a market defined by a level of tension which is more or less heightened, hence by the severity of the sanctions it inflicts on those who pay insufficient attention to ‘correctness’ and to ‘the imposition of form' which formal usage presupposes.

It is, therefore, not clear how one could understand, other than in terms of variations in the tension of the market, the stylistic variations of which Bally gives a good example.¹⁹ with a series of expressions (represented here by approximate English equivalents) which are seemingly interchangeable, since they are all oriented towards the same practical result: ‘Come!’, ‘Do come!’, ‘Wouldn’t you like to come?’, ‘You will come, won't you?’, ‘Do say you’ll come’, ‘Suppose you came?’. ‘You ought to come’, ‘Come here’, ‘Here!’ - to which could be added ‘Will you come?’. ‘You will come’, ‘Kindly come’. ‘Would you be so good as to come’, ‘Be a sport, do come’. ‘Come please!’, ‘Come, I beg you’, ‘I hope you will come’, ‘I’m counting on you , . .’ and so on ad infinitum. Although such expressions are theoretically equivalent, they are not so in practice. Each of them, when used appropriately, achieves the optimum form of the compromise between the expressive intention - in this case, insistence, which runs the risk of appearing as unreasonable intrusion or unacceptable pressure - and the censorship inherent in a more or less asymmetrical social relationship, by making maximum use of the available resources, whether they are already objectified

and codified, like expressions of politeness, or remain in a virtual state. This is as much insistence as one can ‘allow oneself* to exert, so long as the ‘forms’ are observed. Where ‘If you would do me the honour of coming' is appropriate, ‘You ought to come’ would be out of place, because too off-hand, and ‘Will you come?’ would be distinctly ‘crude’. In social formalism, as in magical formalism, there is only one formula in each case which ‘works’. And the whole labour of politeness strives to get as close as possible to the perfect formula that would be immediately self-evident if one had a perfect mastery of the market situation.

Form and the information it imparts condense and symbolize the entire structure of the social relation from which they derive their existence and their efficacy (the celebrated ‘illocutionary force'). What is called tact or adroitness consists in the art of taking account of the relative positions of the sender and the receiver in the hierarchy of different kinds of capital, and also of sex and age, and of the limits inscribed in this relation, ritually transgressing them, if need be, by means of euphcmization. The attenuation of the injunction, reduced to zero in ‘Here', ‘Come¹, or 'Come here’, is more marked in Tf you would be so good as to come this way’. The form used to neutralize ‘impoliteness* may be a simple interrogative (‘Will you come?’), or a doubly delicate negative question ('Won’t you come?’), which acknowledges the possibility of refusal. It may be a formula of insistence which pretends not to insist by declaring both the possibility of refusal and the value set on compliance, in which case it may take a colloquial form, appropriate between peers (‘Do me a favour and come’), a ‘stilted’ form (‘Would you be so kind as to come’), even an obsequious form (‘If you would do me the honour of coming'); or it may be a metalinguistic inquiry into the very legitimacy of the question (‘May I ask you to come?).

What our social sense detects in a form which is a kind of symbolic expression of all the sociologically pertinent features of the market situation is precisely that which oriented the production of the discourse, namely, the entire set of characteristics of the social relation obtaining between the interlocutors and the expressive capacities which the speaker was able to invest in the process of euphemization. The interdependence between linguistic forms and the structure of the social relation within and for which it is produced can be seen clearly, in French, in the oscillations between the forms of address, vous and fu, which sometimes occur when the objective structure of the relation between two speakers (e.g. disparity in age or social status) conflicts with the length and continuity of their

acquaintance, and therefore with the intimacy and familiarity of their interaction. It then seems as if they are feeling their way towards a readjustment of the mode of expression and of the social relation through spontaneous or calculated slips of the tongue and progressive lapses, which often culminate in a sort of linguistic contract designed to establish the new expressive order on an official basis: 'Let's use ru.’ But the subordination of the form of discourse to the form of the social relationship in which it is used is most strikingly apparent in situations of stylistic collision, when the speaker is confronted with a socially heterogeneous audience or simply with two interlocutors socially and culturally so far apart that the sociologically exclusive modes of expression called for, which are normally produced through more or less conscious adjustment in separate social spaces, cannot be produced simultaneously.

What guides linguistic production is not the degree of tension of the market or, more precisely, its degree of formality, defined in the abstract, for any speaker, but rather the relation between a degree of 'average' objective tension and a linguistic habitus itself characterized by a particular degree of sensitivity to the tension of the market; or, in other words, it is the anticipation of profits, which can scarcely be called a subjective anticipation since it is the product of the encounter between an objective circumstance, that is, the average probability of success, and an incorporated objectivity, that is, the disposition towards a more or less rigorous evaluation of that probability.²⁰ The practical anticipation of the potential rewards or penalties is a practical quasi-corporcal sense of the reality of the objective relation between a certain linguistic and social competence and a certain market, through which this relation is accomplished. It can range from the certainty of a positive sanction, which is the basis of certitudo sui, of self-assurance, to the certainty of a negative sanction, which induces surrender and silence, through all the intermediate forms of insecurity and timidity.

The Linguistic Habitus and Bodily Hexis

The definition of acceptability is found not in the situation but in the relationship between a market and a habitus, which itself is the product of the whole history of its relations with markets, The habitus is. indeed, linked to the market no less through its conditions of acquisition than through its conditions of use. We have not learned to speak simply by hearing a certain kind of speech spoken

but also by speaking, thus by offering a determinate form of speech on a determinate market. This occurs through exchanges within a family occupying a particular position in the social space and thus presenting the child’s imitative propensity with models and sanctions that diverge more or less from legitimate usage.²¹ And we have learned the value that the products offered on this primary market, together with the authority which it provides, receive on other markets (like that of the school). The system of successive reinforcements or refutations has thus constituted in each one of us a certain sense of the social value of linguistic usages and of the relation between the different usages and the different markets, which organizes all subsequent perceptions of linguistic products, tending to endow it with considerable stability. (We know, in general terms, that the effects that a new experience can have on the habitus depend on the relation of practical ‘compatibility’ between this experience and the experiences that have already been assimilated by the habitus, in the form of schemes of production and evaluation, and that, in the process of selective re-interpretation which results from this dialectic, the informative efficacy of all new experiences tends to diminish continuously.) This linguistic ‘sense of place’ governs the degree of constraint which a given field will bring to bear on the production of discourse, imposing silence or a hypercontrolled language on some people while allowing others the liberties of a language that is securely established. This means that competence, which is acquired in a social context and through practice, is inseparable from the practical mastery of a usage of language and the practical mastery of situations in which this usage of language is socially acceptable. The sense of the value of one’s own linguistic products is a fundamental dimension of the sense of knowing the place which one occupies in the social space. One’s original relation with different markets and the experience of the sanctions applied to one’s own productions, together with the experience of the price attributed to one’s own body, are doubtless some of the mediations which help to constitute that sense of one’s own social worth which governs the practical relation to different markets (shyness, confidence, etc.) and, more generally, one’s whole physical posture in the social world.

While every speaker is both a producer and a consumer of his own linguistic productions, not all speakers, as we have seen, are able to apply to their own products the schemes according to which they were produced. The unhappy relation which the petits bourgeois have to their own productions (and especially with regard to their

pronunciation, which, as Labov shows, they judge with particular severity); their especially keen sensitivity to the tension of the market and, by the same token, to linguistic correction in themselves and in others,²² which pushes them to hyper-correction; their insecurity, which reaches a state of paroxysm on formal occasions, creating 'incorrectness' through hyper-correction or the embarrassingly rash utterances prompted by an artificial confidence - are all things that result from a divorce between the schemes of production and the schemes of evaluation. Divided against themselves, so to speak, the petits bourgeois are those who are both the most ‘conscious’ of the objective truth of their products (the one defined in the academic hypothesis of the perfectly unified market) and the most determined to reject it, deny it, and contradict it by their efforts. As is very evident in this case, what expresses itself through the linguistic habitus is the whole class habitus of which it is one dimension, which means in fact, the position that is occupied, synchronically and diachronically, in the social structure.

As we have seen, hyper-correction is inscribed in the logic of pretension which leads the petits bourgeois to attempt to appropriate prematurely, at the cost of constant tension, the properties of those who are dominant. The particular intensity of the insecurity and anxiety felt by women of the petite bourgeoisie with regard to language (and equally with regard to cosmetics or personal appearance) can be understood in the framework of the same logic: destined, by the division of labour between the sexes, to seek social mobility through their capacity for symbolic production and consumption. they are even more inclined to invest in the acquisition of legitimate competences. The linguistic practices of the petite bourgeoisie could not fail to strike those who, like Labov, observed them on the particularly tense markets created by linguistic investigation. Situated at the maximum point of subjective tension through their particular sensitivity to objective tension (which is the effect of an especially marked disparity between recognition and cognition), the petits bourgeois are distinct from members of the lower classes who, lacking the means to exercise the liberties of plain speaking, which they reserve for private usage, have no choice but to opt for the broken forms of a borrowed and clumsy language or to escape into abstention and silence. But the petits bourgeois are no less distinct from the members of the dominant class, whose linguistic habitus (especially if they were born in that class) is the realization of the norm and who can express all the self-confidence that is associated with a situation where the principles of evaluation and the

principles of production coincide perfectly.²³

In this case, as, at the other extreme, in the case of popular outspokenness on the popular market, the demands of the market and the dispositions of the habitus are perfectly attuned; the law of the market does not need to be imposed by means of constraint or external censorship since it is accomplished through the relation to the market which is its incorporated form. When the objective structures which it confronts coincide with those which have produced it, the habitus anticipates the objective demands of the field. Such is the basis of the most frequent and best concealed form of censorship, the kind which is applied by placing, in positions which imply the right to speak, those agents who are endowed with expressive dispositions that are ‘censored’ in advance, since they coincide with the exigencies inscribed in those positions. As the principle underlying all the distinctive features of the dominant mode of expression, relaxation in tension is the expression of a relation to the market which can only be acquired through prolonged and precocious familiarity with markets that are characterized, even under ordinary circumstances, by a high level of control and by that constantly sustained attention to forms and formalities which defines the ‘stylization of life’.

It is certainly true that, as one rises in the social order, the degree of censorship and the correlative prominence given to the imposition of form and euphemization increase steadily, not only on public or official occasions (as is the case among the lower classes and especially among the petite bourgeoisie, who establish a marked opposition between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary), but also in the routines of everyday life. This can be seen in styles of dressing or eating, but also in styles of speaking, which tend to exclude the casualness, the laxness or the licence which we allow ourselves in other circumstances, when we are ‘among our own kind’. That is what Lakoff notes indirectly when he observes that the kind of behaviour among friends, where someone asks openly about the price of an object (‘Hey, that’s a nice rug. What did it cost?’), which would be acceptable among the lower classes (where it might even seem like a compliment), would be ‘misplaced’ in the bourgeoisie, where it would have to be given an attenuated form (‘May I ask you what the rug cost?’).²⁴

Linked to this higher degree of censorship, which demands a consistently higher degree of euphemization and a more systematic effort to observe formalities, is the fact that the practical mastery of the instruments of euphemization which are objectively demanded

on the markets with the greatest tension, like the academic market or the high-society market, increases as one rises in the social order, i.e. with the increased frequency of the social occasions (from childhood on) when one finds oneself subject to these demands, and therefore able to acquire practically the means to satisfy them. Thus bourgeois usage is characterized, according to Lakoff, by the use of what he calls hedges, e.g. ‘sort of, ‘pretty much’, ‘rather’, ‘strictly speaking’, ‘loosely speaking’, ‘technically’, ‘regular’, 'par excellence', etc., and, according to Labov, by intensive use of what he calls filler phrases, e.g. ‘such a thing as’, ‘some things like that’, ‘particularly’.²⁵ It is not enough to say, as Labov does (with a view to rehabilitating popular speech, which leads him simply to invert the system of values), that these expressions are responsible for the verbosity and verbal inflation of bourgeois speech. Though superfluous in terms of a strict economy of communication, they fulfil an important function in determining the value of a way of communicating. Not only does their very redundancy bear witness to the extent of the available resources and the disinterested relation to those resources which is therefore possible, but they are also elements of a practical metalanguage and, as such, they function as marks of the neutralizing distance which is one of the characteristics of the bourgeois relation to language and to the social world. Having the effect, as Lakoff puts it, of ‘heightening intermediate values and toning down extreme values’, or, as Labov says, of ‘avoiding all error and exaggeration’, these expressions are an affirmation of the speaker’s capacity to keep his distance from his own utterances, and therefore his own interests - and, by the same token, from those who cannot keep such a distance but let themselves be carried away by their own words, surrendering without restraint or censorship to their expressive impulse. Such a mode of expression, which is produced by and for markets requiring ‘axiological neutrality’ (and not only in language use), is also adjusted in advance to markets which require that other form of neutralization and distancing of reality (and distancing of the other classes which are immersed in it) which compromises the stylization of life: that forming of practices which gives priority in all things to manner, style and form, to the detriment of function. It is also suited to all formal markets and to social rituals where the need to impose form and to observe formalities, which defines the appropriate form of language - i.e. formal language - is absolutely imperative and prevails to the detriment of the communicative function, which can disappear as long as the performative logic of symbolic domination operates.

It is no coincidence that bourgeois distinction invests the same intention in its relation to language as it invests in its relation to the body. The sense of acceptability which orients linguistic practices is inscribed in the most deep-rooted of bodily dispositions: it is the whole body which responds by its posture, but also by its inner reactions or, more specifically, the articulatory ones, to the tension of the market. Language is a body technique, and specifically linguistic, especially phonetic, competence is a dimension of bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s whole socially informed relation to the world, are expressed. There is every reason to think that, through the mediation of what Pierre Guiraud calls ‘articulatory style’, the bodily hexis characteristic of a social class determines the system of phonological features which characterizes a class pronunciation. The most frequent articulatory position is an element in an overall way of using the mouth (in talking but also in eating, drinking, laughing, etc.) and therefore a component of the bodily hexis, which implies a systematic informing of the whole phonological aspect of speech. This ‘articulatory style’, a life-style ‘made flesh’, like the whole bodily hexis, welds phonological features - which are often studied in isolation, each one (the phoneme ‘r’, for example) being compared with its equivalent in other class pronunciations - into an indivisible totality which must be treated as such.

Thus, in the case of the lower classes, articulatory style is quite clearly part of a relation to the body that is dominated by the refusal of ‘airs and graces’ (i.e., the refusal of stylization and the imposition of form) and by the valorization of virility - one aspect of a more general disposition to appreciate what is ‘natural’. Labov is no doubt right when he ascribes the resistance of male speakers in New York to the imposition of the legitimate language to the fact that they associate the idea of virility with their way of speaking or, more precisely, their way of using the mouth and throat when speaking. In France, it is surely no accident that popular usage condenses the opposition between the bourgeois relation and the popular relation to language in the sexually over-determined opposition between two words for the mouth: la bouche, which is more closed, pinched, i.e. tense and censored, and therefore feminine, and la gueule, unashamedly wide open, as in ‘split’ (fendue, sefendre la gueule, ‘split oneself laughing’), i.e. relaxed and free, and therefore masculine.²⁶ Bourgeois dispositions, as they are envisaged in the popular mind, and in their most caricatured, petit-bourgeois form, convey in their physical postures of tension and exertion (bouche fine, pincee, livres

pincees, serrees, du bout des livres, bouche en cul-de-poule - to be fastidious, supercilious, ‘tight-lipped’) the bodily indices of quite general dispositions towards the world and other people (and particularly, in the case of the mouth, towards food), such as haughtiness and disdain (faire la fine bouche, la petite bouche - to be fussy about food, difficult to please), and the conspicuous distance from the things of the body and those who are unable to mark that distance. La gueule, by contrast, is associated with the manly dispositions which, according to the popular ideal, are rooted in the calm certainty of strength which rules out censorships - prudence and deviousness as well as ‘airs and graces’ - and which make it possible to be ‘natural’ (la gueule is on the side of nature), to be ‘open’ and ‘outspoken’ (jouer franc-jeu, avoir son franc-parler) or simply to sulk (faire la gueule). It designates a capacity for verbal violence, identified with the sheer strength of the voice (fort en gueule, coup de gueule, grande gueule, engueuler, s'engueuler, gueul-er, aller gueuler - ‘loud-mouthed’, a ‘dressing-down’, ‘bawl’, ‘have a slanging match’, ‘mouth-off’). It also designates a capacity for the physical violence to which it alludes, especially in insults (casser la gueule, mon poing sur la gueule, ferme ta gueule - ‘smash your face in’, ‘a punch in the mouth’, ‘shut your face’), which, through the gueule, regarded both as the ‘seat’ of personal identity (bonne gueule, sale gueule - ‘nice guy’, ‘ugly mug’) and as its main means of expression (consider the meaning of ouvrir sa gueule, or I’ouvrir, as opposed to la fermer, la boucler, taire sa gueule, s’ecraser-* say one’s piece’, as opposed to ‘shut it’, ‘belt up’, ‘shut your mouth’, ‘pipe down’), aims at the very essence of the interlocutor’s social identity and self-image. Applying the same ‘intention’ to the site of food intake and the site of speech output, the popular vision, which has a clear grasp of the unity of habitus and bodily hexis, also associates la gueule with the frank acceptance (s’en foutre plein la gueule, se rincer la gueule - stuffing oneself with food and drink) and frank manifestation (sefendre la gueule) of elementary pleasure.²⁷

On the one hand, domesticated language, censorship made natural, which proscribes ‘gross’ remarks, ‘coarse’ jokes and ‘thick’ accents, goes hand in hand with the domestication of the body which excludes all excessive manifestations of appetites or feelings (exclamations as much as tears or sweeping gestures), and which subjects the body to all kinds of discipline and censorship aimed at denaturalizing it. On the other hand, the ‘relaxation of articulatory tension’, which leads, as Bernard Laks has pointed out, to the dropping of the final ‘r’ and ‘1’ (and which is probably not so much an

effect of laisser-aller^ as the expression of a refusal to ‘overdo it', to conform too strictly on the points most strictly demanded by the dominant code, even if the effort is made in other areas), is associated with rejection of the censorship which propriety imposes, particularly on the tabooed body, and with the outspokenness whose daring is less innocent than it seems since, in reducing humanity to its common nature - belly, bum. bollocks, grub, guts and shit - it tends to turn the social world upside down, arse over head. Popular festivity as described by Bakhtin and especially revolutionary crisis highlight, through the verbal explosion which they facilitate, the pressure and repression which the everyday order imposes, particularly on the dominated class, through the seemingly insignificant constraints and controls of politeness which, by means of the stylistic variations in ways of talking (the formulae of politeness) or of bodily deportment in relation to the degree of objective tension of the market, exacts recognition of the hierarchical differences between the classes, the sexes and the generations.

It is not surprising that, from the standpoint of the dominated classes, the adoption of the dominant style is seen as a denial of social and sexual identity, a repudiation of the virile values which constitute class membership. That is why women can identify with the dominant culture without cutting themselves off from their class as radically as men. 'Opening one’s big mouth" (ouvrir sa grande gueule) means refusing to submit, refusing to ‘shut it’ {la fermer} and to manifest the signs of docility that are the precondition of mobility. To adopt the dominant style, especially a feature as marked as the legitimate pronunciation, is in a sense doubly to negate one's virility because the very fact of acquiring it requires docility, a disposition imposed on women by the traditional sexual division of labour (and the traditional division of sexual labour), and because this docility leads one towards dispositions that arc themselves perceived as effeminate.

In drawing attention to the articulatory features which. like the degree of ‘aperture’, sonority or rhythm, best express, in their own logic, the deep-rooted dispositions of the habitus and, more precisely, of the bodily hexis, spontaneous sociolinguistics demonstrates that a differential phonology should never fail to select and interpret the articulatory features characteristic of a class or class fraction in relation not only to the other systems with reference to which they take on their distinctive value, and therefore their social value, but also in relation to the synthetic unity of the bodily hexis from which they spring, and by virtue of which they represent the ethical or

aesthetic expression of the necessity inscribed in a social condition.

The linguist, who has developed an abnormally acute perception (particularly at the phonological level), may notice differences where ordinary speakers hear none. Moreover, because he has to concentrate on discrete criteria (such as the dropping of the final ‘r’ or i’) for the purposes of statistical measurement, he is inclined towards an analytical perception very different in its logic from the ordinary perception which underlies the classificatory judgements and the delimitation of homogeneous groups in everyday life. Not only are linguistic features never clearly separated from the speaker’s whole set of social properties (bodily hexis, physiognomy, cosmetics, clothing), but phonological (or lexical, or any other) features are never clearly separated from other levels of language; and the judgement which classifies a speech form as ‘popular’ or a person as ‘vulgar’ is based, like all practical predication, on sets of indices which never impinge on consciousness in that form, even if those which are designated by stereotypes (such as the ‘peasant’ ‘r’ or the southern ceusse) have greater weight.

The close correspondence between the uses of the body, of language and no doubt also of time is due to the fact that it is essentially through bodily and linguistic disciplines and censorships, which often imply a temporal rule, that groups inculcate the virtues which are the transfigured form of their necessity, and to the fact that the ‘choices’ constitutive of a relationship with the economic and social world are incorporated in the form of durable frames that are partly beyond the grasp of consciousness and will.²⁹

Did You Say ‘Popular?

Sayings containing the magical epithet 'popular' are shielded from scrutiny by the fact that any critical analysis of a notion which bears closely or remotely on 'the people’ is apt to be identified immediately as a symbolic aggression against the reality designated - and thus immediately castigated by all those who feel duty bound to defend 'the people', thereby enjoying the profits that the defence of ‘good causes' can bring.¹ Equally, the notion of ‘popular speech’, like all the sayings from the same family (‘popular culture', ‘popular art', ‘popular religion', etc.), is defined only in relational terms, as the set of things which are excluded from the legitimate language by, among other things, the durable effect of inculcation and imposition together with the sanctions implemented by the educational system.

As the dictionaries of slang and ‘unconventional language' clearly show, what is called ‘popular’ or 'colloquial' vocabulary is nothing other than the set of words which are excluded from dictionaries of the legitimate language or which only appear in them with negative ‘labels of use': fam., familiar, ‘i.e. common in ordinary spoken language and in rather free written language’, pop., popular, 'i.e. common in urban working-class areas, but disapproved of or avoided by the cultivated bourgeoisie as a whole'.² To define thoroughly this ‘unconventional’ or ‘popular’ language - which would be more fruitfully described as pop., to remind us of its social conditions of production - one would have to specify what comes under the heading 'working-class areas’ (milieux populaires) and what one understands by ‘common’ usage.

Like elastic concepts such as ‘the working classes’, ‘the people’ or ‘the workers', which owe their political virtues to the fact that one can extend the referent at will to include (during election lime, for

instance) peasants, managers and small businessmen, or, conversely, limit it to industrial workers only, or even just steelworkers (and their appointed representatives), the indeterminately extensive notion of ‘working-class areas’ owes its mystifying virtues, in the sphere of scholarly production, to the fact that, as in a psychological projection, everyone can unconsciously manipulate its extension in order to adjust it to their interests, prejudices or social fantasies. Thus, when it comes to designating the speakers of ‘popular speech’, there is a general tendency to think of the ‘underworld’, in keeping with the idea that ‘tough guys’ play a determinant role in the production and circulation of slang. Also certain to be included are the workers who live in the old urban centres, and who are brought almost automatically to mind by the word ‘popular’, while peasants are likely to be rejected without further consideration (no doubt because they are doomed to what the dictionaries classify as region., i.e. regional speech). But there is no question - and that is one of the most precious functions of these catch-all notions - of whether small shopkeepers should be excluded, and notably the bistrot owners, who are undoubtedly excluded by the populist imagination even though, in culture and in speech, they are unquestionably closer to manual workers than to salaried employees. And it is in any case certain that the fantasy, nourished more by the films of Carne than by careful observation, which generally turns the folk memories of nostalgic class fugitives towards the ‘purest’ and most ‘authentic’ representatives of the ‘people’, excludes without a second thought all immigrants, whether Spanish or Portuguese, Algerian or Moroccan, Malian or Senegalese, who we know occupy a larger place in the population of industrial workers than they do in the proletarian imagination.³

A parallel examination of the populations which are supposed to produce or consume what is called ‘popular culture’ would serve to highlight once again the confusion in the partial coherence which almost always underlies implicit definitions. In this case, the ‘underworld’, which was supposed to play a central role in shaping ‘popular speech’, would be excluded, as would the Lumpenproletariat, whereas the exclusion of peasants would not be automatic, although difficulties do arise when attempting to put peasants and workers in the same category. In the case of ‘popular art’ - as an examination of that other objectification of the ‘popular’, the ‘Museums of Art and Popular Culture’, would show - it seems that, until recently, ‘the people’ meant only peasants and rural craftsmen. And what is one to make of ‘popular medicine’ and ‘popular religion’? In such cases,

peasants are as indispensable as ‘tough guys’ are in the case of popular speech.

In their concern to treat it like a ‘language’ - i.e. with all the rigour that one reserves ordinarily for the legitimate language - all those who have tried to describe or write the pop., whether linguists or authors, have condemned themselves to producing artefacts which bear more or less no relation to the ordinary speech which speakers least familiar with the legitimate language employ in their internal exchanges.⁴ Thus, in order to conform to the dominant dictionary model which must only record words seen to have ‘a significant frequency and duration’, authors of dictionaries of unconventional language rely exclusively on texts⁵ and, making a selection within a selection, subject the speech forms concerned to an essential alteration, by meddling with the frequencies which make all the difference between speech forms and markets which are more or less tense.⁶ Among other things, these authors forget that to write a speech form which, like that of the working classes, excludes any literary intention (and not transcribe or record it), one must remove oneself from the situations and even the social condition in which it is spoken, and that the interest in these ‘discoveries’, or even the fact of selective recollection alone, excluding everything one comes across also in the standard language, totally undermines the structure of frequencies.

If, notwithstanding their incoherences and uncertainties (and partly due to them), notions belonging to the family of the ‘popular’ are frequently used, even in scholarly discourse, it is because they are deeply embedded in the network of confused and quasi-mythical representations which social subjects create to meet the needs of an everyday knowledge of the social world. The vision of the social world, and most especially the perception of others, of their bodily hexis, the shape and size of their bodies, particularly the face, and also the voice, pronunciation and vocabulary, is in fact organized according to interconnected and partially independent oppositions which one can begin to grasp by examining the expressive resources deposited and preserved in language, especially in the system of paired adjectives employed by the users of the legitimate language to classify others and to judge their quality, and in which the term designating the properties ascribed to the dominant always receives a positive value.⁷

If social science must give a privileged place to the science which examines the everyday knowledge of the social world, it is not only with a critical purpose and with a view to freeing the understanding of the social world of all the presuppositions it tends to absorb through ordinary

words and the objects they construct (‘popular language’, ‘slang’, patois, etc.). It is also because this practical knowledge, in opposition to which science must establish itself - and first by trying to objectify it - is an integral part of the very world which science is supposed to discover: it helps to create this world by helping to create the vision which agents may have of it and, in so doing, orienting their actions, particularly those aimed at preserving or transforming this world. Thus a rigorous science of the spontaneous sociolinguistics which agents employ to anticipate the reactions of others, and to impose the representation which they wish to give of themselves, would enable one to understand, among other things, a good part of what, in linguistic practice, is the object or the product of a conscious intervention, whether individual or collective, spontaneous or institutionalized. One example of this is all the corrections that speakers subject themselves to or are subjected to - in the family or at school - on the basis of a practical knowledge, partially recorded in the language itself (a ‘sharp accent’, a ‘suburban working-class accent’, etc.), and the correspondences between linguistic differences and social differences based on the more or less conscious observation of the linguistic features which are marked or remarked upon as imperfect or faulty (notably in all the books on form, on what should and should not be said), or, conversely, as valorizing and distinguished.⁸

The notion of ‘popular speech’ is one of the products of the application of dualistic taxonomies which structure the social world according to the categories of high and low (a ‘low’ form of speech), refined and coarse (coarse language) or rude (rude jokes), distinguished and vulgar, rare and common, well mannered and sloppy: in short, categories of culture and nature. (Do we not talk of langue verte, ‘slang’ or ‘fruity language’, and mots crus, language that is ‘raw’, as in ‘raw humour’?) These are the mythical categories which introduce a decisive break in the continuum of speech forms, ignoring, for example, all the overlapping that occurs between the relaxed speech of dominant speakers (the fam.) and the tense speech of dominated speakers (which observers like Bauche or Frei class with pop.), and above all the extreme diversity of speech forms which are universally relegated to the negative category of ‘popular speech’.⁹

But by a kind of paradoxical repetition, which is one of the standard effects of symbolic domination, the dominated speakers themselves, or at least certain groups among them, may apply to their own social universe principles of division (such as strong/weak, submissive; intelligent/sensitive, sensual; hard/soft, supple; straight, frank/bent, cunning, false, etc.) which reproduce within their order the fundamental structure of the system of dominant oppositions

pertaining to language.¹⁰ This representation of the social world retains the essence of the dominant vision by affirming the opposition between virility and docility, strength and weakness, real men, ‘tough guys’, ‘lads’, and others, like the females or effeminates who are doomed to submission and contempt.¹¹ Slang, which has been turned into the form par excellence of ‘popular speech’, is the product of the kind of repetition which leads to the application, to ‘popular speech' itself, of the principles of division which produce it. The vague feeling that linguistic conformity implies a form of recognition and submission which raises doubts about the virility of men who abide by it,¹² together with the active pursuit of the distinctive deviation which creates style, lead to a refusal to ‘try too hard’; and this in turn leads to a rejection of the most strongly marked aspects of the dominant speech form, and especially the most tense pronunciations or syntactic forms, as well as leading to the pursuit of expressiveness based on the transgression of dominant censorships - notably in matters of sexuality - and on the will to distinguish oneself vis-a-vis ordinary forms of expression.¹*¹ The transgression of official norms, linguistic or otherwise, is, at the very least, directed as much against the ‘ordinary’ dominated individuals who submit to them, as against dominant individuals or, a fortiori, against domination as such. Linguistic licence is part of the labour of representation and of theatrical production which ‘tough guys’, especially adolescents, must pursue in order to impose on others and assume for themselves the image of the ‘lad’ who can take anything and is ready for anything, and who refuses to give in to feelings and to sacrifice anything to feminine sensitivity. And even if it may suit the propensity of all dominated speakers to vulgarize distinction (i.e. specific difference) by reducing it to the universality of the biological sphere through irony, sarcasm or parody, nevertheless the systematic denigration of affective, moral or aesthetic values, in which analysts have identified the deep-seated ‘intention* of slang vocabulary, is above all the assertion of an aristocratic inclination.

Regarded, even by certain dominant speakers, as the distinguished form of ‘vulgar* language, slang Is the product of the pursuit of distinction, but is consequently dominated and condemned to produce paradoxical effects which cannot be understood if one tries to force them into the dichotomy of resistance or submission, which governs ordinary ways of thinking about ‘popular speech¹ (or culture). One can perceive the effects of counter-finality inherent in any dominated position by simply stepping outside the logic of the mythic vision. When the dominated pursuit of distinction leads

dominated speakers to assert what distinguishes them - that is, the very thing in the name of which they are dominated and constituted as vulgar - according to a logic analogous to the kind which leads stigmatized groups to claim the stigma as the basis for their identity, should one talk of resistance? And when, conversely, they strive to shed that which marks them as vulgar, and to appropriate what would allow them to become assimilated, should one talk of submission?

To avoid the effect of the dualist mode of thought which leads to the opposition of a "standard* language, as measure of any language, and a "popular* language, one must return to the model of all linguistic production and rediscover in it the source of the extreme diversity of speech forms which result from the diversity of possible combinations between the different classes of linguistic habitus and markets. Among the factors which exercise a determining influence on the habitus and which appear relevant, on the one hand, in terms of the propensity to recognize and acknowledge the censorships which constitute dominant markets or to profit from the obligatory freedoms ottered by certain free markets, and. on the other hand, in terms of the ability to satisfy the demands of both kinds of market, one can therefore cite the following: sex. a source of very different relations to different possible markets, and particularly the dominant market; generation, i.e. the mode of generation, through the family and especially through the school, of linguistic competence; social position, characterized especially in terms of the social composition of the workplace, and the socially homogeneous exchanges (with dominated individuals) or heterogeneous ones (with dominant individuals, e,g. as in the case of service staff) that it favours; social origin, whether rural or urban, and in the latter case, whether old or recent; and finally, ethnic origin.

h is clearly among men, and especially among the youngest and those who are currently and above all potentially the least integrated in the economic and social order, such as adolescents from immigrant families, that one finds the most marked rejection of the submissiveness and docility implied by the adoption of legitimate ways of speaking. The ethic of brute force which is pursued in the cull of violence and quasi-suicidal games, of bikes, alcohol or hard drugs. in which those who can expect nothing from the future assert their relation to the future, is undoubtedly just one of the ways of making a virtue of necessity. The manifestation of an unreasoning commitment to realism and cynicism, the rejection of the feeling and sensitivity identified with feminine sentimentality and effeminacy.

the obligation to be tough with oneself and others which leads to the desperate daredevil acts born of the outcast's aristocrat ism, are a way of resigning oneself to a world with no way out, dominated by poverty and the law of the jungle, discrimination and violence, where morality and sensitivity bring no benefit whatsoever.¹⁴ The morality which converts transgression into duty imposes a manifest resistance to official norms, linguistic or otherwise, which can only be permanently sustained at the cost of extraordinary tension and, especially for adolescents, with the constant support of the group. Like popular realism, which presupposes and matches expectations to opportunities, it constitutes a defence and survival mechanism. Those who are forced to stand outside the law to obtain the satisfactions that others obtain within it know only too well the cost of revolt. As rightly observed by Paul Willis, the poses and postures of bravado (e.g. vis-a-vis authority and especially the police) can co-exist with a deep-seated conformism regarding everything concerning hierarchies, and not only between the sexes; and the ostentatious toughness which human self-respect imposes in no way excludes a nostalgic yearning for the solidarity, indeed the affection, which, simultaneously gratified and repressed by the highly censored exchanges of the gang, expresses or betrays itself in moments of unseif-conscious reflection/⁵ Slang (and this, together with the effect of symbolic imposition, is one of the reasons why it has spread well beyond the fringes of society) constitutes one of the exemplary, and one might say. ideal, expressions - with which more diplomatic expressions must reckon and even compromise - of the vision, developed essentially to combat feminine (or effeminate) ‘weakness’ and ‘submissiveness', through which the men most deprived of economic and cultural capital grasp their virile identity and perceive a social world conceived of purely in terms of toughness.¹⁶

One must be careful, however, not to overlook the profound transforma’ tions which borrowed words and sayings undergo, in their function and significance, when they enter into the ordinary speech of everyday exchanges: thus some of the most typical products of the aristocratic cynicism of 'tough guys’ can, in their common use. function as kinds of neutralized and neutralizing conventions which allow men to speak (within the limits of a strict sense of decency) of affection, love or friendship, or, quite simply, to name loved ones, parents, son, wife (the more or less ironic use of terms of reference like ‘the boss', ‘the queen mother', or 'her ladyship’, for example, provide a way of avoiding terms like ‘my wife' or simply a first name, which are felt to be too familiar).¹⁷

At the other extreme in the hierarchy of dispositions towards the legitimate language, one would doubtless find the youngest and the most educated women who, though linked professionally or through marriage to the world of agents poorly endowed with economic or cultural capital, are undoubtedly sensitive to the demands of the dominant market and have the ability to respond to it which gives them something in common with the petite bourgeoisie. The effect of generation is in essence confused with the effect of changes in the mode of generation, that is, with the effect of access to the educational system, which certainly represents the most imponant of the differentiating factors between age groups. However, it is not certain that schooling has the homogenizing effect on linguistic competences that it endeavours to have and that one might be tempted to ascribe to it: first, because the academic norms of expression, when they are accepted, may remain limited in their application to oral and especially written academic productions; second, because the school system tends to distribute pupils in classes that are as homogeneous as possible with regard to academic criteria, and. co {relatively, with regard to social criteria, so that the peer group tends to have an influence which, as one moves down the social hierarchy of institutions and sections and therefore of social origins, contradicts with increasing force the effects that may be produced by the educational process; and finally because, paradoxically. in creating durable and homogeneous groups of adolescents who have broken with the school system and. through it, with the social order, and who are placed in a situation of virtual inactivity and prolonged irresponsibility.^l* the sections to which the children from the most deprived classes are doomed - and notably the sons of immigrants, especially North African ones - have undoubtedly helped to provide the most favourable conditions for the elaboration of a kind of ‘delinquent culture' which, among other manifestations, expresses itself in a speech form which has broken with the norms of the legitimate language-

No one can completely ignore the linguistic or cultural law. Every time they enter into an exchange with the holders of the legitimate competence, and especially when they find themselves in a formal situation, dominated individuals are condemned to a practical, corporeal recognition of the laws of price formation which are the least favourable to their linguistic productions and which condemns them to a more or less desperate attempt to be correct, or to silence. One may classify the markets by which they are confronted accord-■ng to their degree of autonomy, from those most completely

subjected to the dominant norms (like those which obtain in dealings with the law. medicine or the school) to those most uninhibited by these laws (like those constituted in prisons or juvenile gangs). The assertion of linguistic counter-legitimacy, and. by the same token, the production of discourse based on a more or less deliberate disregard of the conventions and proprieties of dominant markets, are only possible within the limits of free markets, governed by their owm laws of price formation, that is. in spaces that belong to the dominated classes, haunts or refuges for excluded individuals from which dominant individuals are in fact excluded, at least symbolically, and for the accredited holders of the social and linguistic competence which is recognized on these markets. The slang of the ‘underworld’, as a real transgression of the fundamental principles of cultural legitimacy, constitutes an important assertion of social and cultural identity which is not only different from but opposed to it. and the vision of the world which it expresses represents the limit towards which (male) members of the dominated classes tend in linguistic exchanges within the class and, more particularly, in the most controlled and sustained of these exchanges, like those in cafes, which are completely dominated by the values of force and virility, comprising one of the rare principles of effective resistance, together with politics, against the dominant manners of speech and action.

Internal markets differ from each other according to the tension which characterizes them and. by the same token, according to the degree of censorship which they impose, and we may put forward the hypothesis that the frequency of the most affected or stylized forms (of slang) decreases in proportion to the decrease of tension in markets and the linguistic competence of speakers. This is minimal in private and familiar exchanges (first of all in exchanges within the family), where independence with regard to the norms of legitimate speech is marked above all by a more or less complete freedom to ignore the conventions and properties of the dominant speech form. And it no doubt reaches a maximum in the (more or less exclusively masculine) public exchanges w'hich call for a veritable stylistic quest, like the verbal sparring and ostentatious attempts to outdo one another that occur in some cafe conversations.

In spite of the enormous simplification which it presupposes, this model brings out the extreme diversity of discourses that are created practically in the relation between the different linguistic competences which correspond to the different combinations of characteristics belonging to producers and the different classes of markets. But furthermore, it allows one to draw up a programme of methodic-

al observation and io highlight the most significant cases which illustrate the whole range of linguistic productions of the speakers most deprived of linguistic capital: whether they are. first, the forms of discourse offered by the virtuosi on the free markets which are the most tense (i.e. public), and notably slang; second, the expressions produced for the dominant markets, i.e. for the private exchanges between dominant and dominated speakers, or for formal situations, and which can take either the form of speech which is embarrassed or broken through the effect of intimidation, or the form of silence, very often the only form of expression left to dominated speakers; and finally, the discourses produced for familiar and private exchanges. for example between women. These last two categories of discourse are always excluded by those who. in characterizing linguistic productions solely by the characteristics of the speakers, ought logically to include them tn ’popular speech'.

The censorship effect exercised by any relatively tense market is seen in the fact that the utterances that are exchanged in the public places reserved in practice (al least at certain times) for the adult males of the lower classes, like certain cafes, are highly ritualized and subject to strict rules: one does not go to the pub only to drink, but also to participate actively in a collective pastime capable of giving the participants a feeling of freedom from daily necessities, and of producing an atmosphere of social euphoria and economic freedom which, obviously, the consumption of alcohol can only enhance, One goes there to laugh and to make others laugh, and everyone must do his best to contribute to the exchange of comments and jokes, or, at the very least, make his contribution Io the fun by underlining the success of others in adding his laughter, and his shouts of approval (*Oh, What a lad!'). The possession of a talent for being ‘the life and soul of the party⁷, capable of incarnating, at the cost of a conscious and constant labour of research and accumulation, the ideal of the 'funny guy’ which crowns an approved form of sociability, is a very precious form of capital. Thus a good pub landlord finds, in the mastery of the expressive conventions suitable for this market (jokes, funny stories, and puns that his central and permanent position allows him to acquire and exhibit), and also in his special knowledge of both the rules of the game and the peculiarities of each of the players (names, nicknames, habits, oddities, specialities and talents from which he can profit), the necessary resources for exciting, sustaining, and also containing, by prodding, reminding and discretely calling them to order, the exchanges capable of producing the effervescent social atmosphere which his clients come

for and to which they must themselves contribute.¹'' The quality of the conversation offered depends on the quality of the participants, which itself depends on the quality of the conversation, therefore on the person who is at the centre of it and who must know how to deny the commercial relation in which he is implicated by asserting his will and ability to enlist as an ordinary participant in the round of exchanges - with ‘the landlord's round’ or games for the regulars -and in this way contribute to the suspension of the economic necessities and social constraints which one expects from the collective worship of the good life.²”

One can understand why the discourse which obtains on this market gives the appearance of total freedom and absolute naturalness only to those who are unaware of its rules or principles. Thus the eloquence which, viewed from the outside, is apprehended as a kind of unbridled zest, is in its way neither more nor less free than the improvisations of academic eloquence; it overlooks neither the search for effect, nor the attention to the public and its reactions, nor the rhetorical strategies aimed at currying favour or gaining its goodwill: it rests on tried and tested schemes of invention and expression which are also capable, however, of giving those who do not possess them the feeling that they are witnessing brilliant manifestations of analytical finesse or of psychological or political lucidity. Through the enormous redundancy tolerated by its rhetoric, through the space it allows for the repetition of the forms and ritual phrases which are the obligatory manifestations of ‘good manners’, through the systematic resort to concrete images of a known world, through the obsessional obstinacy it employs in reasserting - to the point of explicitly renewing them - the fundamental values of the group, this discourse expresses and reinforces a profoundly stable and rigid view of the world. In this system of self-evident truths which are untiringly reasserted and collectively guaranteed, and which assigns an essential identity, and therefore a place and rank, to each class of agents, the representation of the division of labour between the sexes occupies a central position; perhaps this is because the cult of virility, i.e. of harshness, of physical strength and surly coarseness, established as a chosen refusal of effeminate refinement, is one of the most effective ways of struggling against the cultural inferiority which unites all those who feel deprived of cultural capital, whether or not they might be rich in economic capital, like shopkeepers.²¹

At the opposite extreme in the class of free markets, the market for exchanges between friends, and especially between women,

stands out in that the very idea of search and effect is more or less absent from it, so that the discourse which obtains on that market differs in form, as we have noted, from that of public exchanges in cafes, etc.: it is in the logic of privation rather than rejection that this discourse is defined in relation to the legitimate discourse. As for the dominant markets, public and formal or private, they pose such difficult problems for those who are the most economically and culturally deprived that, if one limited oneself to that definition of speech forms based on the social characteristics of speakers which is implicitly adopted by the defenders of 'popular speech', one would have to say that the most frequent form of this speech is silence. In fact, the contradiction that arises from the need to confront dominant markets without capitulating to the pursuit of correctness is resolved, once again, according to the logic of the division of labour between the sexes. Since it is accepted (and above all by women, although they may pretend to deplore it) that a man is defined by the right and the duty to be true to himself, which constitutes his identity (‘that’s the way he is’) and that he can rest content with a silence which enables him to preserve his virile dignity, it is often incumbent upon women, socially defined as pliable and submissive by nature, to make the effort necessary to confront dangerous situations, like meeting the doctor, describing symptoms and discussing the treatment with him. sorting things out with the teacher, or the social security people, etc.²² It therefore follows that the ‘mistakes' which spring from an unfonunate pursuit of correctness or a misguided desire for distinction and which, like all deformed words, especially medical ones, are mercilessly highlighted by the perils bourgeois -and the grammar books of 'popular speech' - arc mostly made by women (who may be mocked by ‘their’ men - which is yet another way of suggesting that women 'by nature’ create fuss and embarrassment).²³

In fact, even in this case, manifestations of docility are never stripped of ambivalence and always threaten to become aggressive ar the slightest snub, the merest sign of irony or haughtiness, which turns them into obligatory homages to statutory dependence. The person who, in entering into a social relationship which is too unequal, adopts too obviously the appropriate speech and manner, is liable to be constrained to think and to experience the respect which ^ls willingly accorded to the other as obligatory submissiveness or self-interested servility. The image of the servant, who must conspicuously display his conformity to the norms of verbal propriety and proper dress, haunts all relations between those who are dominated

and those who are dominant, and notably in the exchanges of services, as is shown by the virtually insoluble problems posed by the matter of ‘remuneration’. That is why the ambivalence towards the dominant and their life-style, so common among men who perform service roles - who hover between the inclination to anxious conformity and the temptation to bring the dominant down a peg by using the familiarities that put them on an equal footing - undoubtedly represents the truth and the limit of the relation which the men most deprived of linguistic capital, and doomed to either coarseness or servility, maintain with the dominant mode of expression.²⁴ Paradoxically, it is only on occasions whose solemnity justifies them, in their eyes, in turning to the most noble register without feeling ridiculous or servile - for example, to express love or show sympathy in bereavement - that they can adopt the most conventional forms of speech, but in their minds the only suitable one for saying serious things: that is, in the very situation when the dominant norms require that one should abandon conventions and ready-made phrases in order to show the force of one's sincerity and feeling.

It thus appears that the linguistic and cultural productions of dominated individuals vary profoundly according to their inclination and their aptitude to benefit from the regulated liberties offered by free markets or to accept the constraints imposed by dominant markets. This explains why, in the polymorphous reality which one discovers by considering all the speech forms produced for all the markets by all the categories of producers, everyone who believes they have a right or a duty to speak of the ‘people’ can find an objective prop for their interests or fantasies.

Part II

The Social Institution of Symbolic Power

The social sciences deal with pre-named, pre-classified realities which bear proper nouns and common nouns, titles, signs and acronyms. Al the risk of unwittingly assuming responsibility for the acts of constitution of whose logic and necessity they are unaware, the social sciences must take as their object of study the social operations of naming and the rites of institution through which they are accomplished. But on a deeper level, they must examine the part played by words in the construction of social reality and the contribution which the struggle over classifications, a dimension of all class struggles, makes to the constitution of classes - classes defined in terms of age, sex or social position, but also clans, tribes, ethnic groups or nations.

So far as the social world is concerned, the neo-Kantian theory, which gives language and, more generally, representations a specifically symbolic efficacy in the construction of reality, is perfectly justified. By structuring the perception which social agents have of the social world, the act of naming helps to establish the structure of this world, and does so all the more significantly the more widely it is recognized, i.e. authorized. There is no social agent who does not aspire, as far as his circumstances permit, to have the power to name and to create the world through naming: gossip, slander, lies, insults, commendations, criticisms, arguments and praises are all daily and petty manifestations of the solemn and collective acts of naming, be they celebrations or condemnations, which are performed by generally recognized authorities. In contrast to common nouns which have a common sense, the consensus or homologein of an entire group, and which, in short, involve the official act of naming or nomination through which a recognized delegate bestows an official title (like an academic qualification), the ‘qualifying nouns’ ('idiot', ‘bastard’) which feature in insult have a very limited symbolic efficacy, as idios iogos, and involve only the person who offers them.¹ But what both have in common is what may be called a performative or magical intention. Insults, like naming, belong to a class of more or less socially based acts of institution and destitution through which an individual, acting in his own name or in the name of a group that is more or less important in terms of its size and social significance,

indicates to someone that he possesses such and such property, and indicates to him at the time that he must conduct himself in accordance with the social essence which is thereby assigned to him.

In short, social science must include in its theory of the social world a theory of the theory effect which, by helping to impose a more or less authorized way of seeing the social world, helps to construct the reality of that world. The word or, a fortiori, the dictum, the proverb and all the stereotyped or ritual forms of expression are programmes of perception and different, more or less ritualized strategies for the symbolic struggles of everyday life, just like the great collective rituals of naming or nomination - or, more clearly still, the clashes between the visions and previsions of specifically political struggles - imply a certain claim to symbolic authority as the socially recognized power to impose a certain vision of the social world, i.e. of the divisions of the social world. In the struggle to impose the legitimate vision, in which science itself is inevitably caught up, agents possess power in proportion to their symbolic capital, i.e, in proportion to the recognition they receive from a group. The authority that underlies the performative efficacy of discourse is a percipi, a being-known, which allows a percipere to be imposed, or, more precisely, which allows the consensus concerning the meaning of the social world which grounds common sense to be imposed officially, i.e. in front of everyone and in the name of everyone.

The mystery of performative magic is thus resolved in the mystery of ministry (to use a pun close to the heart of medieval canonists), i.e. in the alchemy of representation (in the different senses of the term) through which the representative creates the group which creates him: the spokesperson endowed with the full power to speak and act on behalf of the group, and first of all to act on the group through the magic of the slogan, is the substitute for the group, which exists solely through this procuration. Group made man, he personifies a fictitious person, which he lifts out of the state of a simple aggregate of separate individuals, enabling them to act and speak, through him, ‘like a single person'. Conversely, he receives the right to speak and act in the name of the group, to ’take himself for' the group he incarnates, to identify with the function to which ‘he gives his body and soul’, thus giving a biological body to a constituted body. Status est magistratus; ‘I'Etat. e'est moi’. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the world is my representation.

3 Authorized Language

The Social Conditions for the Effectiveness of Ritual Discourse

Suppose, for example, I see a vessel on the stocks, walk up and smash the bottle hung at the stem, proclaim '1 name this ship the Mr Stalin' and for good measure kick away the chocks: but the trouble is, 1 was not the person chosen to name it. ..

J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words

The naive question of the power of words is logically implicated in the initial suppression of the question of the uses of language, and therefore of the social conditions in which words are employed. As soon as one treats language as an autonomous object, accepting the radical separation which Saussure made between internal and external linguistics, between the science of language and the science of the social uses of language, one is condemned to looking within words for the power of words, that is. looking for it where it is not to be found. In fact, the illocutionary force of expressions cannot be found in the very words, such as 'performatives’, in which that force is indicated or, better, represented - in both senses of this term. It is only in exceptional cases (in the abstract and artificial situations created by experimentation) that symbolic exchanges are reduced to relations of pure communication, and that the informative content of the message exhausts the content of the communication. The power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson, and his speech - that is, the substance of his discourse and, inseparably, his way of speaking - is no more than a testimony, and one among others, of the guarantee of delegation which is vested in him.

This is the essence of the error which is expressed in its most accomplished form by Austin (and after him, Habermas) when he

THE NEW LITURGY OR THE MISFORTUNES OF PERFORMATIVE VIRTUE*

'I must admit that we are utterly dismayed by the encouragement being given to desert the churches in favour of celebrating the Eucharist in small communities /I/, at home 12}, or in chapels [2] where one helps oneself {1} to the communion wafer served on trays by lay people fl}, in order to take communion wherever one finds oneself [2}, etc.' (p. 47).

'You will always be able to say a prayer for your church. But what would be the meaning of such a prayer in a church deprived of the holy sacrament /2}? One might as well recite it at home' (p. 48).

'We no longer celebrate mass in our little church, we say it in somebody's home [2}' (p. 59).

‘We are not lucky in the diocese of B. We are subjected to the extravagant notions of a "quartet of young priests” who last year had the idea - before abolishing it altogether - of holding the solemn first communion in the Sports Centre [2}, even though we have two large and beautiful churches which had plenty of room for everyone' (p. 66).

'My mother was horrified by the chaplain at AC I. who wanted to celebrate mass over the dining room table [2f (p. 90).

* All these quotations (indicated by the page numbers in round brackets) refer to the work by R, P. Lelong. Le dossier noir de la communion solennelle (Paris: Mame, 1972), The figures in square brackets refer to errors in the liturgy noted by the faithful: |l| error of the person presiding; (2] error in place; [3| error in time; [4| error in tempo; [5| error in behaviour; [6| error in language; (7) error in dress; [8| error in sacraments.

thinks that he has found in discourse itself - in the specifically linguistic substance of speech, as it were - the key to the efficacy of speech. By trying to understand the power of linguistic manifestations linguistically, by looking in language for the principle underlying the logic and effectiveness of the language of institution, one forgets that authority comes to language from outside, a fact concretely exemplified by the skeptron that, in Homer, is passed to the orator who is about to speak.* Language at most represents this authority, manifests and symbolizes it. There is a rhetoric which characterizes all discourses of institution, that is to say, the official speech of the authorized spokesperson expressing himself in a solemn situation, with an authority whose limits are identical with the extent of delegation by the institution. The stylistic features which characterize the language of priests, teachers and, more generally, all institutions, like routinization, stereotyping and neutralization, all stem from the position occupied in a competitive field by these persons entrusted with delegated authority.

it is not enough to say, as people sometimes do, in order to avoid the difficulties inherent in a purely internalist approach to language, that the use made of language in a determinate situation by a determinate speaker, with his style, rhetoric and socially marked identity, provides words with ‘connotations’ that are tied to a particular context, introducing into discourse that surplus of meaning which gives it its ’illocutionary force'. In fact, the use of language, the manner as much as the substance of discourse, depends on the social position of the speaker, which governs the access he can have to the language of the institution, that is, to the official, orthodox and legitimate speech. It is the access to the legitimate instruments of expression, and therefore the participation in the authority of the institution, which makes all the difference -irreducible to discourse as such - between the straightforward imposture of masqueraders, who disguise a performative utterance as a descriptive or constalive statement.' and the authorized imposture of those who do the same thing with the authorization and the authority of an institution. The spokesperson is an impostor endowed with the skeptron.

If, as Austin observes, there are utterances whose role is not only to “describe a state of affairs or state some fact’, but also to ‘execute an action', this is because the power of words resides in the fact that they are not pronounced on behalf of the person who is only the 'carrier' of these words: the authorized spokesperson is only able to use words to act on other agents and. through their action, on things

'Tell me also what you think, Father, of a communion which, like in my parish, is performed in the morning (3] and followed by no other ceremony?' [5] 'We'll spend the day around the table, eating and drinking', a distressed mother told me (p. 72).

'In certain parishes near here they no longer do anything. In ours there is the profession of faith in the afternoon [3], which lasts barely an hour [4], without mass or communion [5}, and the children go to mass the following day [3)' (p. 87).

'What is one to make of the attitude of certain priests (all priests in some parishes - it must be contagious) who make no gesture of respect [5J, either by genuflecting or a slight bow, when they are taking or returning the holy sacraments to the tabernacle?' (p. 82).

'In the past one used to say: "Let us not fall into temptation", but now one says [6]: "Submit us not" or "Lead us not into temptation". It's monstrous. I’ve never been able to make myself say it’ (p. 50).

‘It was remarkable to hear, in an ancient Gothic church, the formal version of "Hail Mary" f“Je vous salue Marie’J employed with a much more familiar form of address "Hello, Mary" ("Tie salue Marie”). This familiarity /6/ does not match the spirit of our French language" (p. 86).

‘On returning, after two days of "retreat" [6J, solemn communion was reduced to a profession of faith at five o'clock (3/ one Saturday evening [3}, in everyday dress [7/ (without mass (5] and without communion). "Private" communion is already nothing more than a piece of bread /8J and... no confession [5JP (p. 87).

'Hut I suggest that, with regard to "standing" [5/, you must make a particular reference to those who receive the Eucharist as if they are in a hurry [4), which is t/uile shocking' (p. 49).

themselves, because his speech concentrates within it the accumulated symbolic capital of the group which has delegated him and of which he is the authorized representative. The laws of social physics are only apparently independent of the laws of physics, and the power which certain slogans have to secure efforts from others without expending effort themselves - which is the very aim of magical action¹ - is rooted in the capital which the group has accumulated through its effort and whose effective use is subordinated to a whole set of conditions, those which define the rituals of social magic. Most of the conditions that have to be fulfilled in order for a performative utterance to succeed come down to the question of the appropriateness of the speaker - or, better still, his social function - and of the discourse he utters. A performative utterance is destined to fail each time that it is not pronounced by a person who has the ‘power’ to pronounce it, or, more generally, each time that the ‘particular persons and circumstances in a given case’ are not ‘appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked’;⁴ in short, each lime that the speaker does not have the authority to emit the words that he utters. But perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the success of these operations of social magic - comprised by acts of authority, or, what amounts to the same thing, authorized acts - is dependent on the combination of a systematic set of interdependent conditions which constitute social rituals,

It is clear that all the efforts to find, in the specifically linguistic logic of different forms of argumentation, rhetoric and style, the source of their symbolic efficacy are destined to fail as long as they do not establish the relationship between the properties of discourses, the properties of the person who pronounces them and the properties of the institution which authorizes him to pronounce them. The limits (and the interest) of Austin's attempt to define performative utterances lie in the fact that he does not exactly do what he thinks he is doing, and this prevents him from following it through to the end. Believing that he was contributing to the philosophy of language, he was in fact working out a theory of a particular class of symbolic expressions, of which the discourse of authority is only the paradigmatic form, and whose specific efficacy stems from the fact that they seem to possess in themselves the source of a power which in reality resides in the institutional conditions of their production and reception.

The specificity of the discourse of authority (e.g. a lecture, sermon, etc.) consists in the fact that it is not enough for it to be

' There is no warning, the vicar trots along at any time [3], everything is done all at once, the wafer comes out of a pocket [5/ and off we go! We count ourselves lucky when it isn't some lay person [If who arrives with the holy sacrament in a powder compact [8J or a cheap gilt pill box 18]' (p. 120).

‘He has deliberately adopted the following method of communion: the worshippers stand in a semi-circle behind the altar and the tray containing the holy sacraments is handed around. Then the priest himself offers the chalice (every Sunday - I thought that the Holy Father had made an exception for that). Feeling incapable of helping myself to the sacraments [5] ("God bless those who touch the Saviour's sacred vessels" ... But what about the Saviour himself?. ..), 1 had to negotiate and argue in order to have the eucharist offered up to my lips in the traditional way [5]' (pp. 62-3).

'This winter, recovering from illness and having been deprived of Holy Communion for several weeks, I went to a chapel to celebrate mass. I found myself being refused (5] Holy Communion because I wouldn't help myself to the sacrament [5] and drink from the chalice f5f (p. 91).

‘The grandfather of the girl being confirmed was horrified by the size of the wafers ]8]; each one "could have been a complete snack"' (p. 82).

'I found myself in a church where the priest who was celebrating mass had invited along pop musicians ]l], I don't understand music, I think they were playing very well, but in my humble opinion this kind of music wasn't conducive to prayer' (pp. 58-9).

‘This year our confirmation candidates had neither book nor rosary ]8], but a sheet of paper on which some hymns, which they didn't even know, were written, and which were sung by a group of amateurs {!]' (p. 79).

understood (in certain cases it may even fail to be understood without losing its power), and that it exercises its specific effect only when it is recognized as such. This recognition - whether accompanied by understanding or not - is granted, in the manner of something taken for granted, only under certain conditions, namely, those which define legitimate usage: it must be uttered by the person legitimately licensed to do so. the holder of the skeptron, known and recognized as being able and enabled to produce this particular class of discourse: a priest, a teacher, a poet, etc.; it must be uttered in a legitimate situation, that is. in front of legitimate receivers (one cannot read a piece of Dadaist poetry at a Cabinet meeting); finally, it must be enunciated according to the legitimate forms (syntactic, phonetic, etc.). What one might call the liturgical conditions, namely, the set of prescriptions which govern the form of the public manifestation of authority, like ceremonial etiquette, the code of gestures and officially prescribed rites, are clearly only an element, albeit the most visible one, in a system of conditions of which the most important and indispensable are those which produce the disposition towards recognition in the sense of misrecognition and belief, that is, the delegation of authority which confers its authority on authorized discourse. By focusing exclusively on the formal conditions for the effectiveness of ritual, one overlooks the fact that the ritual conditions that must be fulfilled in order for ritual to function and for the sacrament to be both valid and effective are never sufficient as long as the conditions which produce the recognition of this ritual are not met: the language of authority never governs without the collaboration of those it governs, without the help of the social mechanisms capable of producing this complicity, based on misrecognition, which is the basis of all authority. In order to gauge the magnitude of the error in Austin's and all other strictly formafist analyses of symbolic systems, it suffices to show that the language of authority is only the limiting case of the legitimate language, whose authority does not reside, as the racism of social class would have it, in the set of prosodic and articulatory variations which define distinguished pronunciation, or in the complexity of the syntax or the richness of the vocabulary, in other words in the intrinsic properties of discourse itself, but rather in the social conditions of production and reproduction of the distribution between the classes of the knowledge and recognition of the legitimate language.

These analyses find quasi-experimental verification in the concomitant occurrence of the crisis in institutionalized religion and the

'I would therefore add a plea in favour of the sacraments (8J that we relinquish so cheaply (holy water in the church entrance, consecrated branches of box trees on Palm Sundays, which they are beginning to do away with...), devotions to rhe Sacred Heart (more or less killed off), to rhe Holy Virgin, the "graves" on Maundy Thursday, difficult - indeed impossible - to reconcile with rhe evening service; the Gregorian chants, of course, with the many admirable texts of which we are now deprived; even the Rogations of vestervear, etc.' (p. 60).

'Very recently, in a religious house where young people from all over France with a "priestly ambition" were gathered, the priest used neither ornaments nor sacred vessels [8] to celebrate mass. Dressed in civilian clothes [7], he used an ordinary table [2}, ordinary bread and wine (8/, and ordinary utensils [8]' (p. 18.1).

'We have seen such disconcerting masses on television ,.. verging on sacrilege (little tables used at Lille. Holy (?) Communion offered by women [1/ with baskets [8], jazz f5f etc.) that from now on I will abstain from following these incredible ceremonies!’ (p. 158).

'Women fl] read epistles from the pulpit publicly, there are very few or no children in the choir (If, and women even offer communion fl J, like at Alencon' (p. 44).

'... that is when the sacraments aren't given out like lollipops by laymen fl J, in parishes where there is more likely to be a plethora than a penury of vicars' (p. 49),

'When the time came for communion, a woman [IJ emerged from the ranks, took the chalice and offered the communion wine /8/ to the assistants' (p. 182).

crisis in the ritual discourse which it upheld and which upheld it. Austin's analysis of the conditions of validity and efficacy of performative utterances seems very bland and thin, in its purely formal ingenuity, when one compares it with the real analysis and criticism which, occasioned by the crisis in the Church, separates out the components of religious ritual - agents, instruments, moments, places, etc. - which hitherto had been inseparably united in a system as coherent and as uniform as the institution responsible for its production and its reproduction. What emerges from the indignant enumeration of all the infringements of the traditional liturgy is a picture - a kind of photographic negative - of the set of institutional conditions which must be fulfilled in order for ritual discourse to be recognized, i.e. received and accepted as such. For ritual to function and operate it must first of all present itself and be perceived as legitimate, with stereotyped symbols serving precisely to show that the agent does not act in his own name and on his own authority, but in his capacity as a delegate. ‘Two years ago an old lady who was a neighbour of mine lay dying, and asked me to fetch the priest. He arrived but without being able to give communion, and. after administering the last rites, kissed her. If, in my last moments on earth. I ask for a priest, it isn’t so that he can kiss me, but so that he can bring me what I need to make the journey to eternity. That kiss was an act of paternalism and not of the sacred Ministry. ’ Ritual symbolism is not effective on its own. but only in so far as it represents - in the theatrical sense of the term - the delegation. Rigorous observance of the code of the uniform liturgy, which governs the sacramental gestures and words, constitutes both the manifestation and the counterpart of the contract of delegation, which makes the priest the holder of ‘a monopoly in the manipulation of the goods of salvation’. Conversely, the abdication of the symbolic attributes of authority, like the cassock. Latin, and consecrated objects and places, highlights a break with the ancient contract of delegation which united a priest with the faithful through the intermediary of the Church. The indignation of the faithful underlines the fact that the conditions which render ritual effective can be brought together only by an institution which is invested with the power to control its manipulation. What is at stake in the crisis of the liturgy is the whole system of conditions which must be fulfilled in order for the institution to function, i.e. the institution which authorizes and regulates the use of the liturgy and which ensures its uniformity through time and space by ensuring the conformity of those who are delegated to carry it out. The crisis over language thus

points to the crisis tn the mechanisms which ensured the production of legitimate senders and receivers. The outraged faithful are not wrong when they associate the anarchic diversification of ritual with a crisis in the religious institution: Every parish priest has become a little pope or a little bishop, and the faithful are in disarray. Some worshippers, faced with this torrent of changes, no longer believe that the church is solid and that it posseses the truth.’⁵ The diversification of the liturgy, which is the most obvious manifestation of the redefinition of the contract of delegation uniting the priest and the Church and, through it. the priest and the faithful, is experienced in such a dramatic way by a large body of worshippers and priests only because they reveal the transformation of the relations of power within the Church (in particular, between the high and the common clergy), which is linked to a transformation of the social conditions for the reproduction of the priesthood (a crisis of priestly 'calling') and of the lay public ('dcchristianization’).

The crisis over the liturgy points to the crisis in the priesthood (and the whole clerical field), which itself points to a general crisis of religious belief. It reveals, through a kind of quasi-experimcntal dismantling, the 'conditions of felicity’ which allow a set of agents engaged in a rite to accomplish il felicitously; it also shows retrospectively that this objective and subjective felicity is based on a total lack of awareness of these conditions, a lack of awareness which, in so far as it defines the doxic relation to social rituals, constitutes the most indispensable condition for their effective accomplishment. The performative magic of ritual functions fully only as long as the religious official who is responsible for carrying it out in the name of the group acts as a kind of medium between the group and itself: it is the group which, through its intermediary, exercises on itself the magical efficacy contained in the performative utterance.

The symbolic efficacy of words is exercised only in so far as the person subjected to it recognizes the person who exercises it as authorized to do so, or, what amounts to the same thing, only in so far as he fails to realize that, in submitting to it. he himself has contributed, through his recognition, to its establishment. It rests entirely on the belief which is the foundation of the social fiction called ministry, and which goes much deeper than the beliefs and the mysteries which the ministry preaches and guarantees? That is why the crisis of religious language and its performative efficacy is not limited, as is often believed, to the collapse of a world of representations: it is part of the disintegration of an entire universe of social relations of which it was constitutive.

4 Rites of Institution

With the notion of rites of passage. Arnold Van Gennep named. indeed described a social phenomenon of great importance. I do not believe that he did much more and neither did those who, like Victor Turner, have taken up his theory and offered a more explicit and more systematic description of the phases of ritual. In fact, it seems to me that in order to develop the theory of rites of passage any further, one has to ask the questions that this theory does not raise, and in particular those regarding the social function of ritual and the social significance of the boundaries or limits which the ritual allows one to pass over or transgress in a lawful way. One can ask oneself whether, by stressing the temporal transition - e.g. from childhood to adulthood - this theory does not conceal one of the essential effects of rites, namely that of separating those who have undergone it, not from those who have not yet undergone it, but from those who will not undergo it in any sense, and thereby instituting a lasting difference between those to whom the rite pertains and those to whom it does not pertain. That is why. rather than describing them as rites of passage, I would prefer to cal) them rites of consecration, or rites of legitimation, or. quite simply, rites of institution - giving this word the active sense it has. for example, in expressions like 'institution d'un heritier' ('appointing an heir'). Why substitute one word for another in this way? I would quote Poincare, who defined mathematical generalization as ‘the art of giving the same name to different things’, and who insisted on the decisive importance of the choice of words: as he used to say, when the language has been well chosen, then what has been shown with regard to a known object can be applied to all sorts of new objects. The analyses which I shall put forward are produced by generalizing from the results of an analysis

of the ways in which elite schools function.¹ In a somewhat risky exercise. I will endeavour to bring out the invariant properties of social rituals understood as rites of institution.

To speak of rites of institution is to suggest that all rites tend to consecrate or legitimate an arbitrary boundary, by fostering a misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of the limit and encouraging a recognition of it as legitimate; or, what amounts to the same thing, they tend to involve a solemn transgression, i.e. one conducted in a lawful and extra-ordinary way, of the limits which constitute the social and mental order which rites are designed to safeguard at all costs - like the division between the sexes with regard to the rituals of marriage. By solemnly marking the passage over a line which establishes a fundamental division in the social order, rites draw the attention of the observer to the passage (whence the expression ‘rites of passage’), whereas the important thing is the line. What, in effect, does this line separate? Obviously, it separates a before and an after: the uncircumcised child and the circumcised child: or even the whole set of uncircumcised children and the set of circumcised adults. In fact, the most important division, and one which passes unnoticed, is the division it creates between all those who are subject to circumcision. boys and men. children or adult, and those who are not subject to it. i.e. girls and women. There is thus a hidden set of individuals in relation to which the instituted group is defined. I’he most important effect of the rite is the one which attracts the least attention: by treating men and women differently, the rite consecrates the difference, institutes it, while at the same time instituting man as man. i.e. circumcised, and woman as woman, i.e. not subject to this ritual operation. An analysis of the Kabyle ritual illustrates this clearly: circumcision separates the young boy not so much from his childhood, or from boys still in childhood, but from women and the feminine world, i.e. from the mother and from everything that is associated with her - humidity, greenness, rawness, spring, milk, blandness, etc. One can see in passing that, as the process of institution consists of assigning properties of a social nature in a way that makes them seem like properties of natural nature, the rite of institution tends logically, as Pierre Centilivres and Luc de Heusch have observed, to integrate specifically social oppositions, such as masculine/feminine, into series of cosmological oppositions - with relations like: man is to women as the sun is to the moon - which represents a very effective way of naturalizing (hem. Thus sexually differentiated riles consecrate the difference between the sexes: they constitute a simple difference of fact as a legitimate distinction, as an institution. The separation accomplished in the ritual (which itself

effects a separation) exercises an effect of consecration.

But do we really know what it means to consecrate, and particularly to consecrate a difference? How is what 1 would call the ‘magical’ consecration of a difference achieved, and what are its technical effects? Does the fact of socially instituting, through am act of constitution, a pre-existing difference - like the one separating the sexes - have only symbolic effects, in the sense that we give to this term when we speak of the symbolic gift, in other words, no effects at all? There is a Latin expression that means 'you're leaching fish to swim’. That is exactly what the ritual of institution does, It says: this man is a man - implying that he is a real man. which is not always immediately obvious. It tends to make the smallest, weakest, in short, the most effeminate man into a truly manly man. separated by a difference in nature and essence from the most masculine woman, the tallest, strongest woman, etc. To institute, in this case, is to consecrate, that is. to sanction and sanctify a particular state of things, an established order, in exactly the same way that a constitution does in the legal and political sense of the term. An investiture (of a knight. Deputy. President of the Republic, etc.) consists of sanctioning and sanctifying a difference (pre-existent or not) by making it known and recognized', it consists of making it exist as a social difference, known and recognized as such by the agent invested and everyone else.

In short, if it wishes to understand the most fundamental social phenomena, which occur as much in pre-capitalist societies as in our own world (degrees are just as much a part of magic as are amulets), social science must take account of the symbolic efficacy of rites of institution, that is, the power they possess to act on reality by acting on its representation. The process of investiture, for example, exercises a symbolic efficacy that is quite real in that it really transforms the person consecrated: first, because it transforms the representations others have of him and above all the behaviour they adopt towards him (the most visible changes being the fact that he is given titles of respect and the respect actually associated with these enunciations); and second, because it simultaneously transforms the representation that the invested person has of himself, and the behaviour he feels obliged to adopt in order to conform to that representation. By the same logic, one can understand the effect of all social titles of credit and credence - of credentials - which, like aristocratic titles and academic qualifications, increase in a durable way the value of their bearer by increasing the extent and the intensity of the belief in their value.

The act of institution is an act of social magic that can create

difference ex nihilo. or else (as is more often the case) by exploiting as it were pre-existing differences, like the biological differences between the sexes or, as in the case of the institution of an heir on the basis of primogeniture, the difference in age. In this sense, as with religion according to Durkheim, it is a 'well-founded delusion', a symbolic imposition but cum fundamento in re. The distinctions that are the most efficacious socially are those which give the appearance of being based on objective differences (I think, for example, of the notion of 'natural boundary’ in geography). None the less, as is very clear in the case of social classes, we are always dealing with continua, with continuous distributions, due to the fact that different principles of differentiation produce different divisions that are never completely congruent. However, social magic always manages to produce discontinuity out of continuity. The paradigmatic example of this, and my starting point, is the competitive academic examination (concours): between the last person to pass and the first person to fail, the competitive examination creates differences of all or nothing that can last a lifetime. The former will graduate from an elite institution like the Ecole Polytechnique and enjoy all the associated advantages and perks, while the latter will become a nobody.

None of the criteria that one can use to justify technically the distinction (understood as legitimate difference) of the nobility fits perfectly. For example, the poorest nobleman-fencer remains noble (even if his image is subsequently tarnished, to a degree that varies according to national traditions and historical periods); conversely, the best commoner-fencer remains common (even if he is able to draw a form of ‘nobility’ from his excellence at a typically noble practice). And the same holds for every criterion defining the nobility at any given moment in time: bearing, elegance and so on. The institution of an identity, which can be a title of nobility or a stigma ('you’re nothing but a . . .’), is the imposition of a name, i.e. of a social essence. To institute, to assign an essence, a competence, is to impose a right to be that is an obligation of being so (or to be so). It is to signify to someone what he is and how he should conduct himself as a consequence. In this case, the indicative is an imperative. The code of honour is only a developed form of the expression that says of a man: ‘he’s a man’s man’. To institute, to give a social definition, an identity, is also to impose boundaries. Thus noblesse oblige might translate Plato’s la heautou pratiein, acting in keeping with one’s essence and nothing else, which, in the case of a nobleman, means acting in keeping with one’s rank and refusing to

demean oneself. It behoves the noble to behave nobly, and the source of nobility is just as clear in a noble act as the source of noble actions is in nobility itself. I read the following this morning in the newspaper: ‘It behoved Mr Kurt Furgler, the President of the Confederation, to express, on Tuesday evening, the condolences of the Federal Council to the Egyptian people after the death of president Anwar Sadat.’ The authorized spokesperson is the one whom it behoves and on whom it is incumbent to speak on behalf of the collectivity. It is both his privilege and his duly, his proper function, in a word, his competence (in the legal sense of the term). Social essence is the set of those social attributes and attributions produced by the act of institution as a solemn act of categorization which tends to produce what it designates.

The act of institution is thus an act of communication, but of a particular kind: it signifies to someone what his identity is, but in a way that both expresses it to him and imposes it on him by expressing it in front of everyone {kategoreim meaning originally, to accuse publicly) and thus informing him in an authoritative manner of what he is and what he must be. This is clearly evident in the insult, a kind of curse (sacer also signifies cursed) which attempts to imprison its victim in an accusation which also depicts his destiny. But this is even truer of an investiture or an act of naming, a specifically social judgement of attribution which assigns to the person involved everything that is inscribed in a social definition. It is through the effect of statutory assignation {noblesse oblige) that the ritual of institution produces its most ‘real’ effects: the person instituted feels obliged to comply with his definition, with the status of his function. The designated heir (according to a more or less arbitrary criterion) is recognized and treated as such by the whole group, beginning with his family, and this different and distinctive treatment can only encourage him to fulfil his essence, to live in conformity with his social essence. The sociology of science has shown that the greatest scientific successes are achieved by researchers who come from the most prestigious academic institutions. This is largely explained by the high level of subjective aspirations determined by the collective (i.e. objective) recognition of these aspirations and their assignation to a class of agents (men, students in elite institutions, established writers, etc.) to whom these aspirations are not only accorded and recognized as rights or privileges (in contrast to the pretentious pretensions of pretenders), but assigned, imposed, like duties, through emphasis, encouragement and incessant calls to order. 1 think of the cartoon by Schulz which shows Snoopy perched on the

roof of his kennel saying: 'How can one be modest when one is the best?’ One would have to say simply: when it is common knowledge - which is the effect of ofhcialization — that one is the best, aristas.

'Become what you are': that is the principle behind the performative magic of all acts of institution. The essence assigned through naming and investiture is, literally, a fatum (this is also and especially true of injunctions, sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit, which members of the family group address continually to the young child, varying in intention and intensity according to social class and. within the latter, according to sex and rank within the kinship unit). All social destinies, positive or negative, by consecration or stigma, are equally fatal - by which I mean mortal - because they enclose those whom they characterize within the limits that are assigned to them and that they are made to recognize. The self-respecting heir will behave like an heir and, according to Marx’s expression, will be inherited by the heritage: that is, invested in the things and appropriated by the things which he has himself appropriated. This, of course, is barring accidents. There are exceptions: the unworthy heir, the priest who abandons his calling, the nobleman who demeans himself and the boi rgeois who turns common. Nevertheless, the limit, the sacred boc idary remains clear. Owen Lattimore used to say that the Great W ,1 of China was meant not only to stop foreigners entering China but also to stop Chinese leaving it. That is also the function of all magical boundaries (whether the boundary between masculine and feminine, or between those selected and those rejected by the educational system): to stop those who are inside, on the right side of the line, from leaving, demeaning or down-grading themselves. Pareto used to say that elites are destined to 'waste away’ when they cease to believe in themselves, when they lose their morale and their morality, and begin to cross the line in the wrong direction. This is also one of the functions of the act of institution: to discourage permanently any attempt to cross the line, to transgress, desert, or quit.

All aristocracies must expend considerable energy to convince the elect of the need to accept the sacrifices that are implied by privilege, or by the acquisition of durable dispositions which are a condition for the preservation of privilege. When the party of the dominant is the party of culture, i.e, almost invariably the party of asceticism, of tension and contention, the work of institution must reckon with the temptation presented by nature, or by the counter-culture. (I would like to add in parenthesis that, in speaking of the work of institution and by making the more or less painful inculcation of durable

dispositions an essential component of the social action of institution. 1 have merely tried to attribute to the word 'institution’ its full significance. Having stressed, with Poincare, the importance of the choice of words, it may he useful to suggest that one has only to assemble the different senses of instituere and of insritutio to form an idea of an inaugural act of constitution, of foundation, indeed of the invention which, through education, leads to durable dispositions, habits and usages.) The universally adopted strategy for effectively denouncing the temptation to demean oneself is to naturalize difference, to turn it into a second nature through inculcation and incorporation in the form of the habitus. This explains the role given to ascetic practices, even physical suffering, in all the negative rites which are destined, as Durkheim said, to produce people who are out of the ordinary, in a word, distinguished. Il also explains the role of the training which is universally imposed on the future members of the ‘elite’ (the learning of dead languages, the experience of prolonged isolation, etc.). All groups entrust the body, treated like a kind of memory, with their most precious possessions, and the use made of the suffering inflicted on the body by rites of initiation in all societies is understandable if one realizes, as numerous psychological experiments have shown, that people's adherence to an institution is directly proportional to the severity and painfulness of the rites of initiation. The work of inculcation through which the lasting imposition of the arbitrary limit is achieved can seek to naturalize the decisive breaks that constitute an arbitrary cultural limit - those expressed in fundamental oppositions like masculine/feminine. etc. -in the form of a sense of limits, which inclines some people to maintain their rank and distance and others to know their place and be happy with what they are. to be what they have to be. thus depriving them of the very sense of deprivation. It can also tend to inculcate durable dispositions like class tastes which, being the principle behind the 'choice' of outward signs expressing social position, like clothes, but also bodily hexis or language, make all social agents the carriers of distinctive signs, of which the signs of distinction are but a sub-class, capable of uniting and separating people as surely as explicit prohibitions and barriers - I am thinking here of class endogamy. More convincingly than the external signs which adorn the body (like decorations, uniforms, army stripes, insignia, etc.), (he incorporated signs (such as manners, ways of speaking - accents -. ways of walking or standing - gait, posture, bearing-, table manners, etc. and taste) which underlie the production of all practices aimed, intentionally or not. both at signifying

and at signifying social position through the interplay of distinctive differences, arc destined to function as so many calls to order, by virtue of which those who might have forgotten (or forgotten themselves) are reminded of the position assigned to them by the institution.

The power of the categorical judgement of attribution, realized through the institution, is so great that it is capable of resisting all practical refutations. Kantorowicz’s analysis of the king's two bodies is a familiar one: the invested king outlives the biological king, who is mortal, prone to illness, imbecility or death. Similarly, if the student at an elite institution like the Ecole Polytechnique show* that he is useless at mathematics, it will be assumed that he is doing it on purpose or that he has invested his intellectual energies in other, more important things. But what best illustrates the autonomy of ascription in relation to achievement (one can. for once, refer to Talcott Parsons), of social being in relation to doing, is undoubtedly the possibility of resorting to the strategies of condescension which allow one to push the denial of social definition to the limit while still being perceived through it. Strategies of condescension are those symbolic transgressions of limits which provide, at one and the same time, the benefits that result from conformity to a social definition and the benefits that result from transgression. An example would be the aristocrat who patted his coachman on the arse and of whom they would have said. 'He’s a straightforward chap,’ meaning straightforward for an aristocrat, i.e. for a man who is essentially superior, and whose essence did not in principle entail that kind of behaviour.

It is. in fact, not that simple, and one would have to introduce a distinction: in one of his works Schopenhauer spoke of the ’pedantically comical', that is. of the laughter provoked by a character when he produces an action that is not inscribed within the limits of the concept which defines him - in the manner, remarked Schopenhauer, of a stage horse which begins to leave droppings on the stage. And he referred to professors, particularly German professors, like Unrat in The Blue Angel, who are conceived within limits that are so powerfully and narrowly defined that their transgression becomes very obvious. Unlike Professor Unrat who, carried away by passion, loses any sense of the ridiculous or - what amounts to the same thing - any sense of dignity, the condescending and consecrated person chooses deliberately to transgress the boundary; he enjoys the privilege of privileges, that which consists of taking liberties with his privilege. That is why, with regard to speech, the

bourgeois and especially the intellectual can permit themselves forms of hypo-correction, and of the relaxation of tension, that are forbidden to petits-bourgeois individuals, who are condemned to hyper-correction. In short, one of the privileges of consecration consists in the fact that, by conferring an undeniable and indelible essence on the individuals consecrated, it authorizes transgressions that would otherwise be forbidden. The person who is sure of his cultural identity can play with the rules of the cultural game; he can confess that he likes Tchaikovsky or Gershwin, and even have the ‘nerve’ to say that he likes Charles Aznavour or ‘B’ movies.

Acts of social magic as diverse as marriage or circumcision, the attribution of rilles or degrees, the conferring of knighthoods, the appointment to offices, posts or honours, the attribution of a quality label, or the corroboration by a signature or initials, are all acts which can only succeed if the institution - meaning to institute in an active way someone or something endowed with this or that status or property - is guaranteed by the whole group or by a recognized institution. Even when the act is accomplished by a sole agent duly empowered to accomplish it and to do so within the recognized forms (that is, according to the conventions regarded as appropriate concerning time, place, means, etc., the whole set of which constitutes correct, i.e. socially valid and therefore efficient ritual), it rests fundamentally on the belief of an entire group (which may be physically present), that is, on the socially fashioned dispositions to know and recognize the institutional conditions of a valid ritual. (And this implies that the symbolic efficacy of the ritual will vary -simultaneously or successively - according to the degree to which the people for whom the ritual is performed are more or less prepared, or more or less disposed, to receive it.)

This is what is forgotten by linguists who. following Austin, look in words themselves for the 'illocutionary force" which they sometimes possess as performative utterances. In contrast to the impostor who is not what he appears to be. who. in other words, usurps the name, title, rights and honours of another person, in contrast also to the mere ‘stand-in’, the trainee or substitute who plays the part of the teacher or headmaster without having the qualifications, the legitimate representative (c.g. the authorized spokesperson) is an object of guaranteed belief, certified as correct. He lives up in reality to his appearance, he really is what everyone believes him to be because his reality - whether priest, teacher or minister - is based not on his personal conviction or pretension (always liable to be rebuffed and snubbed: What’s his game? Who does he think he is? etc.) but rather

on the collective belief, guaranteed by the institution and made concrete through qualifications and symbols like stripes, uniforms and other attributes. The marks of respect, such as those which consist in addressing people by their titles (Mr President, Your Excellency, etc.), are so many repetitions of the inaugural act of institution carried out by a universally recognized authority and therefore based on the consensus omnium. They are valid as oaths of allegiance, proofs of recognition regarding the particular person to whom they are addressed, but above all regarding the institution which instituted him (that is why the respect for forms and the forms of respect that define politeness are so profoundly political). The belief of everyone, which pre-exists ritual, is the condition for the effectiveness of ritual. One only preaches to the converted. And the miracle of symbolic efficacy disappears if one sees that the magic of words merely releases the 'springs’ - the dispositions - which are wound up beforehand.

I would like to conclude by posing a final question which, ( fear, may seem somewhat metaphysical: could rites of institution, whichever they may be, exercise their power (I think of the most obvious example, what Napoleon used to call 'baubles’, i.e. decorations and other distinctions) if they were not capable of giving at least the appearance of a meaning, a purpose, to those beings without a purpose who constitute humanity, of giving them the feeling of having a role or. quite simply, some importance, and thus tearing them from the clutches of insignificance? The veritable miracle produced by acts of institution lies undoubtedly in the fact that they manage to make consecrated individuals believe that (heir existence is justified, that their existence serves some purpose. But, through a kind of curse, because of the essentially diacritical, differential and distinctive nature of symbolic power, the rise of the distinguished class to Being has. as an inevitable counterpart, the slide of the complementary class into Nothingness or the lowest Being.