Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’
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The construction of a theory of the social space presupposes a series of breaks with Marxist theory. It presupposes a break with the tendency to emphasize substances - here, real groups whose number, limits, members, etc. one claims to be able to define — at the expense of relations and with the intellectualist illusion which leads one to consider the theoretical class, constructed by the social scientist, as a real class, an effectively mobilized group; a break with economics, which leads one to reduce the social field, a multidimensional space, to the economic field alone, to the relations of economic production, which are thus established as the co-ordinates of social position; and a break, finally, with objectivism, which goes hand in hand with intellectualism, and which leads one to overlook the symbolic struggles that take place in different fields, and where what is at stake is the very representation of the social world, and in particular the hierarchy within each of the fields and between the different fields.
The Social Space
To begin with, sociology presents itself as a social topology. Accordingly, the social world can be represented in the form of a (multi-dimensional) space constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution constituted by the set of properties active in the social universe under consideration, that is, able to confer force or power on their possessor in that universe. Agents and
groups of agents are thus defined by their relative positions in this space. Each of them is confined to a position or a precise class of neighbouring positions (i.e. to a given region of this space), and one cannot in fact occupy - even if one can do so in thought - two opposite regions of the space. In so far as the properties chosen to construct this space are active properties, the space can also be described as a field of forces: in other words, as a set of objective power relations imposed on all those who enter this field, relations which are not reducible to the intentions of individual agents or even to direct interactions between agents.1
The active properties that are chosen as principles of construction of ihe social space arc the different kinds of power or capital that are current in rhe different fields. Capital, which can exist in objectified form - in the form of material properties - or, in the case of cultural capital, in an incorporated form, one which can be legally guaranteed, represents power over a field (at a given moment) and. more precisely, over ihe accumulated product of past labour (and in particular over the set of instruments of production) and thereby over the mechanisms which fend to ensure the production of a particular category of goods and thus over a set of revenues and profits. The kinds of capital, like trumps in a game of cards, are powers which define the chances of profit in a given field (in fact, to every field or sub-field there corresponds a particular kind of capital, which is current, as a power or stake, in that field). For example, the volume of cultural capital (the same would he true, mutafis mutandis. of economic capital) determines the aggregate chances of profit in all games in which cultural capital is effective, thereby helping to determine position in the social space (in so far as Ibis position is determined by success in the cultural field).
The position of a given agent in the social space can thus be defined by the position he occupies in the different fields, that is, in the distribution of the powers that are active in each of them. These are. principally, economic capital (in its different kinds), cultural capital and social capital, as well as symbolic capital, commonly called prestige, reputation, fame, etc . which is the form assumed by these different kinds of capital when they are perceived and recognized as legitimate. One can thus construct a simplified model of the social field as a whole, a model which allows one to plot each agent’s position in all possible spaces of the game (it being understood that, while each field has its own logic and its own hierarchy, rhe hierarchy which is established between the kinds of capital and the statistical relation between different assets mean that the economic field tends to impose its structure on other fields).
The social field can be described as a multi-dimensional space of
positions such that each actual position can be defined in terms of a multi-dimensional system of co-ordinates whose values correspond to the values of the different pertinent variables. Agents are thus distributed, in the first dimension, according to the overall volume of the capital they possess and. in the second dimension, according to the composition of their capital - in other words, according to the relative weight of the different kinds of capital in the total set of their assets.2
The form assumed, at each moment, in each social field, by the set of the distributions of the different kinds of capital (whether incorporated or materialized), as instruments for the appropriation of the objectified product of accumulated social labour, defines the state of the relations of power, institutionalized in durable social statuses that are socially recognized or legally guaranteed, between agents who are objectively defined by their position within these relations; this form determines the actual or potential powers in different fields and the chances of access to the specific profits they procure.5
Knowledge of the position occupied in this space contains information on the intrinsic properties (i.e. condition) and the relational properties (i.e. position) of agents. This is particularly clear in the case of those who occupy intermediate or middle positions - those which, apart from the middle or median values of their properties, owe a certain number of their most typical characteristics to the fact that they are situated between the two poles of the field, in the neutral point of the space, and are balanced between the two extreme positions.
Classes on Paper
On the basis of knowledge of the space of positions, one can carve out classes in the logical sense of the word, i.e. sets of agents who occupy similar positions and who, being placed in similar conditions and submitted to similar types of conditioning, have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing similar practices and adopting similar stances. This ‘class on paper' has the theoretical existence which belongs to all theories: as the product of an explanatory classification, one which is altogether similar to that of zoologists or botanists, it allows one to explain and predict the practices and properties of the things classified - including their propensity to constitute groups. It is not really a class, an actual class, in the sense of being a group, a group mobilized for struggle; at most one could say that it is a probable class, in so far as
it is a set of agents which will place fewer objective obstacles in the way of efforts of mobilization than any other set of agents.
Thus, contrary to the nominalist relativism which cancels out social differences by reducing them to pure theoretical artefacts, we have to affirm the existence of an objective space determining compatibilities and incompatibilities, proximities and distances. Contrary to the realism of the intelligible (or the reification of concepts), we have to affirm that the classes which can be carved out of the social space (for instance, for the purposes of statistical analysis, which is the sole means of demonstrating the structure of the social space) do not exist as real groups, although they explain the probability of individuals constituting themselves as practical groups, families (homogamy), clubs, associations and even trade-union or political ‘movements'. What exists is a space of relations which is just as real as a geographical space, in which movements have to be paid for by labour, by effort and especially by time (to move upwards is to raise oneself, to climb and to bear the traces or the stigmata of that effort). Distances can also be measures in time (the time of ascent or of the reconversion of capital, for example). And the probability of mobilization into organized movements, endowed with an apparatus and a spokesperson, etc. (the very thing which leads us to talk of a ‘class’), will be inversely proportional to distance in this space. While the probability of bringing together, really or nominally, a set of agents - by virtue of the delegate - is greater when they are closer together in the social space and belong to a more restricted and thus more homogeneous constructed class, nevertheless the alliance of the closest agents is never necessary or inevitable (because the effects of immediate competition may get in the way), and the alliance of the agents that are most separated from one another is never impossible. Although there is more chance of mobilizing in the same real group the set of workers than the set of bosses and workers, it is possible, in the context, for example, of an international crisis, to provoke a grouping on the basis of links of national identity. (This is in part because, due to its specific history, each of the national social spaces has its own structure - for instance, as regards hierarchical divergences in the economic field.)
Like ‘being’ according to Aristotle, the social world can be uttered and constructed in different ways: it can be practically perceived, uttered, constructed, in accordance with different principles of vision and division (for instance, ethnic divisions), it being understood that groupings founded in the struggle of the space constructed on the basis of the distribution of capital have a greater chance of
being stable and durable and that other forms of grouping will always be threatened by splits and oppositions linked to distances in the social space. To speak, of a social space means that one cannot group together just anyone with anyone else while ignoring the fundamental differences, particularly economic and cultural differences, between them, But this never completely excludes a possible organization of agents in accordance with other principles of division -ethnic, national, etc. - though it should be remembered that these are generally linked to the fundamental principles, since ethnic groups are themselves at least roughly hierarchized in the social space, for instance, in the USA (by the criterion of how long it has been since one’s family first immigrated - blacks excepted).4
This marks a first break with the Marxist tradition: this tradition either identifies, without further ado, the constructed class with the real class (i.e., as Marx himself reproached Hegel with doing, it confuses the things of logic with the logic of things); or else, when the tradition does draw the distinction, opposing the ‘class-in-itself, defined on the basis of a set of objective conditions, to the *class-for-itself, based on subjective factors, it describes the movement from the one to the other, a movement which is always celebrated as a real ontological advance, in accordance with a logic which is either totally determinisl or on the contrary fully voluntarist. In the former case, the transition appears as a logical, mechanical or organic necessity (the transformation of the proletariat from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself being presented as an inevitable effect of time, of the ‘maturing of the objective conditions'); in the latter case, it is presented as the effect of an ‘awakening of consciousness’, conceived as a ‘taking cognizance’ of the theory which occurs under the enlightened leadership of the party. In both cases nothing is said about the mysterious alchemy by which a ‘group in struggle’, as a personalized collective, a historical agent setting its own aims, arises from the objective economic conditions.
By a sort of sleight of hand, the most essential questions are spirited away: first, the very question of the political, of the specific action of agents who, in the name of a theoretical definition of ‘class’, assign to the members of that class the aims which officially conform most closely to their ‘objective’ (i.e. theoretical) interests, and of the labour through which they succeed in producing, if not the mobilized class, a belief in the existence of the class, which is the basis of the authority of its spokespersons: and second, the question of the relations between the supposedly objective classifications produced by the social scientist, similar in that respect to the
zoologist, and the classifications which agents themselves continually produce in their ordinary existence, and through which they seek to modify their position in the objective classifications or to modify the very principles in accordance with which these classifications are produced.
The Perception of the Social World and Pol itical Struggle
The most resolutely objectivist theory must take account of agents' representation of the social world and, more precisely, of the contribution they make to the construction of the vision of this world, and, thereby to the very construction of this world, via the labour of representation (in all senses of the term) that tliey continually perform in order to impose their own vision of the world or the vision of their own position in this world, that is, their social identity. The perception of the social world is the product of a double social structuring: on the ‘objective’ side, this perception is socially structured because the properties attached to agents or institutions do not make themselves available to perception independently, but in combinations whose probability varies widely (and just as feathered animals have a greater chance of having wings than furry animals, so the possessors of a substantial cultural capital are more likely to be museum visitors than those who lack such capital); on the 'subjective* side, it is structured because the schemes of perception and evaluation susceptible of being brought into operation at a given moment, including all those which are laid down in language, are the product of previous symbolic struggles and express. in a more or less transformed form, the state of symbolic relations of power. The fact remains, none the less, that the objects of the social world can be perceived and expressed in different ways because, like the objects of the natural world, they always include a certain indeterminacy and vagueness - because, for example, the most constant combinations of properties are never founded on anything other than statistical connections between interchangeable features; and also because, as historical objects, they are subject to variations in time and their meaning, in so far as it depends on the future, is itself in suspense, in a pending and deferred state, and is thus relatively indeterminate. This element of risk, of uncertainty, is what provides a basis for the plurality of world views, a plurality which is itself linked to the plurality of points of view, and to all the
symbolic struggles for the production and imposition of the legitimate vision of the world and, more precisely, to all the cognitive strategies of fulfilment which produce the meaning of the objects of the social world by going beyond the directly visible attributes by reference to the future or the past. This reference may be implicit and tacit, through what Husserl calls prutension and retention, practical forms of prospection or retrospection excluding the positioning of past and future as such; or it may be explicit, as in political struggles in which the past, with the retrospective reconstruction of a past adjusted to the needs of the present (‘La Fayette, here we are!’5), and especially the future, with the creative foresight associated with if. are continually invoked, in order to determine, delimit, and define the ever-open meaning of the present.
To point out that perception of the social world implies an act of construction is not in the least to accept an intellectualist theory of knowledge: the essential part of one's experience of the social world and of the labour of construction it implies lakes place in practice, without reaching the level of explicit representation and verbal expression. Closer to a class unconscious than to a ‘class consciousness’ in the Marxist sense, the sense of the position one occupies in the social space (what Goffman calls the ‘sense of one’s place') is the practical mastery of the social structure as a whole which reveals itself through the sense of the position occupied in that structure. Hie categories of perception of the social world are essentially (he product of the incorporation of the objective structures of the social space. Consequently, they incline agents to accept the social world as it is. to take it for granted, rather than to rebel against it, to put forward opposed and even antagonistic possibilities. The sense of one’s place, as the sense of what one can or cannot ‘allow oneself, implies a tacit acceptance of one’s position, a sense of limits (‘that’s not meant for us’) or - what amounts to the same thing - a sense of distances, to be marked and maintained, respected, and expected of others. And this is doubtless all the more true when the conditions of existence are more rigorous and the reality principle is more rigorously imposed. (Hence the profound realism which most often characterizes the world view of the dominated and which, functioning as a sort of socially constituted instinct of conservation, can appear conservative only with reference to an external and thus normative representation of the ‘objective interest’ of those whom it helps to live or to survive.6)
If the objective relations of power lend to reproduce themselves in visions of the social world which contribute to the permanence of
those relations, this is therefore because the structuring principles of the world view are rooted in the objective structures of the social world and because the relations of power are also present in people's minds in the form of the categories of perception of those relations. But the degree of indeterminacy and vagueness characteristic of the objects of the social world is, together with the practical, prereflexive and implicit character of the patterns of perception and evaluation which are applied to them, the Archimedean point which is objectively made available to truly political action. Knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories which make it possible, are the stakes par excellence of the political struggle, a struggle which is inseparably theoretical and practical, over the power of preserving or transforming the social world by preserving or transforming the categories of perception of that world.
The capacity for bringing into existence in an explicit state, of publishing, of making public (i.e. objectified, visible, sayable, and even official) that which, not yet having attained objective and collective existence, remained in a state of individual or serial existence - people’s disquiet, anxiety, expectation, worry - represents a formidable social power, that of bringing into existence groups by establishing the common sense, the explicit consensus, of the whole group. In fact, this labour of categorization, of making things explicit and classifying them, is continually being performed, at every moment of ordinary existence, in the struggles in which agents clash over the meaning of the social world and their position in it, the meaning of their social identity, through all the forms of speaking well or badly of someone or something, of blessing or cursing and of malicious gossip, eulogy, congratulations, praise, compliments, or insults, rebukes, criticism, accusations, slanders, etc.
It is easy to understand why one of the elementary forms of political power should have consisted, in many archaic societies, in the almost magical power of naming and bringing into existence by virtue of naming. Thus in traditional Kabylia, the function of making things explicit and the labour of symbolic production that poets performed, particularly in crisis situations, when the meaning of the world is no longer clear, conferred on them major political functions, those of the war-lord or ambassador.7 But with the growing differentiation of the social world and the constitution of relatively autonomous fields, the labour of the production and imposition of meaning is performed in and through struggles in the field of cultural production (and especially in the political sub-field); it becomes the
particular concern, the specific interest, of the professional producers of objectified representations of the social world, or, more precisely, of the methods of objectification.
If the legitimate mode of perception is such an important stake in different struggles, this is because on the one hand the movement from the implicit to the explicit is in no way automatic, the same experience of the social being recognizable in very different expressions. and on the other hand, the most marked objective differences may be hidden behind more immediately visible differences (such as, for example, those which separate ethnic groups). It is true that perceptual configurations, social Gestalten, exist objectively, and that the proximity of conditions and thus of dispositions tends to be re-translated into durable links and groupings, immediately perceptible social units such as socially distinct regions or districts (with spatial segregation), or sets of agents possessing altogether similar visible properties, such as Weber’s Stdnde. But the fact remains that socially known and recognized differences exist only for a subject capable not only of perceiving the differences, but of recognizing them as significant and interesting, i.e., exists only for a subject endowed with the aptitude and the inclination to establish the differences which are held to be significant in the social world under consideration.
In this way, the social world, particularly through properties and their distribution, attains, in the objective world itself, the status of a symbolic system which, like a system of phonemes, is organized in accordance with the logic of difference, of differential deviation, which is thus constituted as significant distinction. The social space, and the differences that 'spontaneously’ emerge within it, tend to function symbolically as a space of life-styles or as a set of Stdnde, of groups characterized by different life-styles.
Distinction does not necessarily imply, as is often supposed, following Veblen and his theory of conspicuous consumption, a quest for distinction. All consumption and, more generally, all practice, is conspicuous, visible, whether or not it was performed in order to be seen: it is distinctive, whether or not it was inspired by the desire to get oneself noticed, to make oneself conspicuous, to distinguish oneself or to act with distinction. Hence, every practice is bound to function as a distinctive sign and. when the difference is recognized, legitimate and approved, as a sign of distinction (in all senses of the term). The fact remains that social agents, being capable of perceiving as significant distinctions the ‘spontaneous' differences that their categories of perception lead them to consider as pertinent, are also capable of intentionally
underscoring these spontaneous differences in life-style by what Weber calls 'the stylization of life’ (Stilisierung des Lebens). The pursuit of distinction - which may be expressed in ways of speaking or in a refusal to countenance marrying beneath one's station - produces separations which are meant to be perceived or. more precisely, known and recognized as legitimate differences - most frequently as differences of nature (in French we speak of ‘natural distinction’).
Distinction - in the ordinary sense of the word - is the difference written into the very structure of the social space when it is perceived in accordance with the categories adapted to that structure; and the Weberian Stand, which people so often like to contrast with the Marxist class, is the class adequately constructed when it is perceived through the categories of perception derived from the structure of that space. Symbolic capital - another name for distinction - is nothing other than capital, of whatever kind, when it is perceived by an agent endowed with categories of perception arising from the incorporation of the structure of its distribution, i.e. when it is known and recognized as self-evident. Distinctions, as symbolic transformations of de facto differences, and, more generally, the ranks, orders, grades and all the other symbolic hierarchies, are the product of the application of schemes of construction which - as in the case, for instance, of the pairs of adjectives used to express most social judgements - are the product of the incorporation of the very structures to which they are applied; and recognition of the most absolute legitimacy is nothing other than an apprehension of the everyday social world as taken for granted, an apprehension which results from the almost perfect coincidence of objective structures and incorporated structures.
It follows, among other consequences, that symbolic capital is attracted to symbolic capital and that the - real - autonomy of the field of symbolic production does not prevent this field from remaining dominated, in its functioning, by the constraints which dominate the social field as a whole. It also follows that objective relations of power tend to reproduce themselves in symbolic relations of power, in visions of the social world which contribute to ensuring the permanence of those relations of power. In the struggle for the imposition of the legitimate vision of the social world, in which science itself is inevitably involved, agents wield a power which is proportional to their symbolic capital, that is. to the recognition they receive from a group. The authority which underlies the performative effectiveness of discourse about the social world, the symbolic
force of visions and pre-visions aimed at imposing the principles of vision and division of this world, is a percipi, a being known and recognized (nobilis}, which allows a percipere to be imposed. It is the most visible agents, from the point of view of the prevailing categories of perception, who are the best placed to change the vision by changing the categories of perception. But they are also, with a few exceptions, the least inclined to do so.
The Symbolic Order and the Power of Naming
In the symbolic struggle for the production of common sense or, more precisely, for the monopoly of legitimate naming as the official - i.e. explicit and public - imposition of the legitimate vision of the social world, agents bring into play the symbolic capital that they have acquired in previous struggles, in particular all the power that they possess over the instituted taxonomies, those inscribed in people's minds or in the objective world, such as qualifications. Thus all the symbolic strategies through which agents aim to impose their vision of the divisions of the social world and of their position in that world can be located between two extremes: the insult, that idios logos through which an ordinary individual attempts to impose his point of view by taking the risk that a reciprocal insult may ensue, and the official naming, a symbolic act of imposition which has on its side all the strength of the collective, of the consensus, of common sense, because it is performed by a delegated agent of the state, that is. the holder of the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence. On the one hand, there is the world of particular perspectives, of individual agents who, on the basis of their particular point of view, their particular position, produce namings — of themselves and others - that are particular and self-interested (nicknames, insults, or even accusations, indictments, slanders, etc.), and all the more powerless to gain recognition, and thus to exert a truly symbolic effect, the less their authors are authorized, either personally (auc-toritas) or institutionally (by delegation), and the more directly they are concerned to gain recognition for the point of view that they are seeking to impose / On the other hand, there is the authorized point of view of an agent who is personally authorized, such as a great critic or prestigious preface-writer or established author (Zola's ‘J'accuse'). and above all the legitimate point of view of the authorized spokesperson, the delegate of the state, the official naming, or the title or qualification which, like an educational
qualification, is valid on all markets and which, as an official definition of one’s official identity, saves its bearers from the symbolic struggle of all against all, by establishing the authorized perspective, (he one recognized by all and thus universal, from which social agents are viewed. The state, which produces official classifications, is to some extent the supreme tribunal to which Kafka was referring when he made Block say. speaking of the advocate and his claim to be among the ‘great advocates’: 'any man can call himself "great”, of course, if he pleases, but in this matter the Court tradition must decide/1 The truth is that scientific analysis does not have to choose between perspectivism and what has to be called absolutism: indeed, the truth of the social world is the stake in a struggle between agents who are very unequally equipped to attain absolute, that is. self-verifying, vision and pre-vision.
One could analyse from this point of view' the functioning of an institution such as the French national statistics office. INSEE, a state institute which, by producing the official taxonomies that are invested with a quasi-legal authority, and, particularly in the relations between employers and employees, that of a qualification capable of conferring rights independent of actually performed productive activity, tends to fix hierarchies and thereby to sanction and consecrate a relation of power between agents with respect to the names of professions and occupations. an essential component of social identity?0 The managemen! of names is one of the instruments of the management of material scarcity, and the names of groups, especially of professional groups, record a particular state of struggles and negotiations over the official designations and the material and symbolic advantages associated with them. The professional name granted to agents, the title they are given, is one of the positive or negative retributions (for the same reason as one’s salary), in so far as it is a distinctive mark (emblem or stigma) which takes its value from its position in a hierarchically organized system of titles, and which thereby contributes to the determination of the relative positions between agents and groups- As a consequence of this, agents resort to practical or symbolic strategies aimed at maximizing the symbolic profit of naming: for example, they may give up the economic gratifications assured by a certain job so as to occupy a less well paid position, but one which is endowed with a more prestigious name; or they may orient themselves towards positions whose designations are less precise, and thus escape the effects of symbolic devaluation, In the same way. in the expression of their personal identity, they may give them-selves a name which includes them in a class which is sufficiently broad to include agents occupying positions superior to their own, such as (he *institutcuf or primary-school teacher who calls himself an 'enseignan/
or teacher, without specifying the level at which he teaches. More generally, agents always have a choice between several names and they may play on the uncertainties and the effects of vagueness linked to the plurality of perspectives so as to try to escape the verdict of the official taxonomy.
But the logic of official naming is most clearly demonstrated in the case of the title - whether titles of nobility, educational qualifications or professional titles. This is a symbolic capital that is socially and even legally guaranteed. The nobleman is not only someone who is known, famous, and even renowned for his good qualities, prestigious, in a word, nobilis-. he is also someone who is recognized by an official authority, one that is ‘universal’, i.e. known and recognized by all. The professional or academic title is a sort of legal rule of social perception, a being-perceived that is guaranteed as a right. It is symbolic capital in an institutionalized, legal (and no longer merely legitimate) form. More and more inseparable from the educational qualification, by virtue of the fact that the educational system tends more and more to represent the ultimate and unique guarantor of all professional titles, it has a value in itself and, although we are dealing with a common noun, it functions like a great name (the name of some great family or a proper name), one which procures all sorts of symbolic profit (and goods that one cannot directly acquire with money).11 It is the symbolic scarcity of the title in the space of the names of professions that tends to govern the rewards of the profession (and not the relation between the supply of and demand for a certain form of labour). It follows that the rewards associated with the title tend to become autonomous with regard to the rewards associated with the work. In this way, the same work can receive different remunerations depending on the titles and qualifications of the person doing it (e.g. a permanent, official post-holder as opposed to a part-timer or someone acting in that capacity, etc.). The qualification is in itself an institution (like language) that is more durable than the intrinsic characteristics of the work, and so the rewards associated with the qualification can be maintained despite changes in the work and its relative value: it is not the relative value of the work which determines the value of the name, but the institutionalized value of the title which acts as an instrument serving to defend and maintain the value of the work.1"
This means that one cannot establish a science of classifications without establishing a science of the struggle over classifications and without taking into account the position occupied, in this struggle for
the power of knowledge, for power through knowledge, for the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence, by each of the agents or groups of agents involved tn it, whether they be ordinary individuals, exposed to the vicissitudes of everyday symbolic struggle, or authorized (and full-time) professionals, which includes all those who speak or write about social classes, and who can be distinguished by the extent to which their classifications involve the authority of the state, as holder of the monopoly of official naming, of the right classification, of the right order.
While the structure of the social field is defined at each moment by the structure of the distribution of capital and the profits characteristic of the different particular fields, the fact remains that in each of these arenas, the very definition of the stakes and the trump cards can be called into question, Every field is the site of a more or less openly declared struggle for the definition of the legitimate principles of division of the field. The question of legitimacy arises from the very possibility of this questioning, from this break with the doxa which takes the ordinary order for granted, That being said, the symbolic force of the parties involved in this struggle is never completely independent of their positions in the game, even if the specifically symbolic power of naming constitutes a force which is relatively independent of the other forms of social power. The constraints of the necessity inscribed in the very structure of the different fields still weigh on the symbolic struggles which aim to preserve or transform that structure. The social world is, to a great extent, something which agents make at every moment; but they have no chance of unmaking and remaking it except on the basis of a realistic knowledge of what it is and of what they can do to it by virtue of the position they occupy in it.
In short, scientific work aims to establish an adequate knowledge both of the space of objective relations between the different positions which constitute the field and of the necessary relations that are set up, through the mediation of the habitus of those who occupy them, between these positions and the corresponding stances, i.e, between the points occupied in that space and the points of view on that very space, which play a part in the reality and development of that space. In other words, the objective delimitation of constructed classes, of regions of the constructed space of positions, enables one to understand the source and effectiveness of the classificatory strategies by means of which agents seek to preserve or modify this space, in the forefront of which we must place the constitution of groups organized with a view to defending the interests of their members.
Analysis of the struggle over classifications brings to light the political ambition which haunts the gnoseological ambition to produce the correct classification: an ambition which properly defines the rex, the one who has the task, according to Benveniste, of regere fines and regere sacra, of tracing in speech the frontiers between groups, and also between the sacred and the profane, good and evil, the vulgar and the distinguished. If social science is not to be merely a way of pursuing politics by other means, social scientists must take as their object the intention of assigning others to classes and of thereby telling them what they are and what they have to be (herein lies all the ambiguity of forecasting); they must analyse, in order to repudiate it, the ambition of the creative world vision, that sort of intuitus originarius which would make things exist in conformity with its vision (herein lies all the ambiguity of the Marxist conception of class, which is inseparably both a being and an ought-to-be). They must objectify the ambition of objectifying, of classifying from outside, objectively, agents who are struggling to classify others and themselves. If they do happen to classify - by carving up, for the purposes of statistical analysis, the continuous space of social positions — it is precisely so as to be able to objectify all forms of objectification, from the individual insult to the official naming, without forgetting the claim, characteristic of science in its positivist and bureaucratic definition, to arbitrate in these struggles in the name of ‘axiological neutrality*. The symbolic power of agents, understood as a power of making people see - theorein - and believe, of producing and imposing the legitimate or legal classification, depends, as the case of rex reminds us, on the position they occupy in the space (and in the classifications that are potentially inscribed in it). But to objectify objectification means, above all, objectifying the field of production of the objectified representations of the social world, and in particular of the legislative taxonomies, in short, the field of cultural or ideological production, a game in which the social scientist is himself involved, as are all those who debate the nature of social classes.
The Political Field and the Effect of Homologies
We must examine this field of symbolic struggles, in which the professionals of representation - in every sense of the term -confront one another in their debate over another field of symbolic struggles, if we are to understand, without succumbing to the mythology of the ‘awakening of consciousness’, the shift from the
practical sense of the position occupied, which is itself capable of being made explicit in different ways, to properly political demonstrations, Those who occupy dominated positions in the social space are also situated in dominated positions in the field of symbolic production, and it is not clear whence they could obtain the instruments of symbolic production that are necessary’ in order for them to express their own point of view on the social space, were it not that the specific logic of the field of cultural production, and the specific interests that are generated within it, have the effect of inclining a fraction of the professionals engaged in this field to supply to the dominated, on the basis of a homology of position, the instruments that will enable them to break away from the representations generated in the immediate complicity of social structures and mental structures and which tend to ensure the continued reproduction of the distribution of symbolic capital. The phenomenon designated by the Marxist tradition as that of 'consciousness from outside’, that is, the contribution made by certain intellectuals to the production and diffusion, especially among the dominated, of a vision of the social world that breaks with the dominant vision, cannot be understood sociologically without taking account of the homology between the dominated position of the producers of cultural goods within the field of power (or in the division of the labour of domination) and the position within the social space of the agents who are most completely dispossessed of the economic and cultural means of production. But the construction of the model of the social space which supports this analysis presupposes a definite break with the one-dimensional and one-directional representation of the social world underlying the dualist vision in which the universe of the oppositions constituting the social structure is reduced to the opposition between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labour-power.
The failings of the Marxist theory of class, above all its inability to explain the set of objectively observed differences, result from the fact that, by reducing the social world to the economic field alone, it is condemned to define social position with reference solely to the position within the relations of economic production. It thus ignores the positions occupied in the different fields and sub-fields, particularly in the relations of cultural production, as well as all those oppositions which structure the social field and which are not reducible to the opposition between the owners and non-owners of the means of economic production. Marxism imagines the social world as one-dimensional, as simply organized around the opposi-
tion between two blocs (one of the main questions thus becomes that of the boundary between these two blocs, with all the ensuing questions - which are endlessly debuted - about the 'labour aristocracy’, the “embourgeoisement* of the working-class, etc.). In reality, the social space is a multi-dimensional space, an open set of relatively autonomous fields, fields which are more or less strongly and directly subordinate, in their functioning and their transformations, to the field of economic production. Within each of the sub-spaces, those who occupy dominant positions and those who occupy dominated positions are constantly involved in struggles of different kinds (without necessarily constituting themselves thereby as antagonistic groups).
But the most important fact. from the point of view of the problem of breaking out of the circle of symbolic reproduction, is that, on the basis of homologies between positions within different fields (and because, too, there is an invariant or even universal element in the relation between the dominant and the dominated), alliances can be set up which are more or less durable and which are always based on a more or less conscious misunderstanding. The homology of position between intellectuals and industrial workers - the former occupying within the field of power, that is. vis-a-vis the captains of industry and commerce, positions which are homologous to those occupied by industrial workers in the social space as a whole - is the source of an ambiguous alliance, in which cultural producers, the dominated among the dominant, supply to the dominated, by a sort of embezzlement of accumulated cultural capital, the means of constituting objectively their vision of (he world and the representation of their interests in an explicit theory and in institutionalized instruments of representation - trade-union organizations, political parties, social technologies of mobilization and demonstration, etc.13
But one must be careful not to treat homology of position. a resemblance within difference, as an identity of condition (as happened, for instance, in the ideology of the ‘three Ps’, patron, pere, professeur - ‘boss’, ‘father’, 'teacher' - developed by the ultra-left movement in France in the late 1960s). Doubtless, the same structure - understood as an invariant core of the forms of different distributions - recurs in different fields, and this explains why analogical thinking is so fertile in sociology. But the fact remains that the principle of differentiation is different each time, as are the stakes and the nature of the interest, and thus the economy of practices. It is after all important to establish a proper hierarchization of the principles of hierarchization, i.e. of the kinds of capital. Knowledge of the hierarchy of the principles of division enables
us to define the limits within which the subordinate principles operate, and thus to define the limits of those similarities linked to homology. The relations of the other fields to the field of economic production are both relations of structural homology and relations of causal dependence, the form of causal determinations being defined by structural relations and the force of domination being greater when the relations in which it is exercised are closer to the relations of economic production.
We would have to analyse the specific interests which representatives owe to their position in the political field and in the sub-field of the party or the trade union, and show all the ‘theoretical’ effects that they produce. Numerous academic studies of ‘social classes' -1 have in mind, for instance, the problem of the 'labour aristocracy' or of the 'managerial class' (cadres) - merely elaborate the practical questions which are forced on those who hold political power. Political leaders are continually faced with the (often contradictory) practical imperatives which arise from the logic of the struggle within the political field, such as the need to prove their representativeness or the need to mobilize the greatest possible number of votes while at the same time asserting the irreducibility of their project to those of other leaders. Thus they are condemned to raise the problem of the social world in the typically substantialist logic of the boundaries between groups and the size of the mobilizable group; and they can try to solve the problem which forces itself on every group anxious to know and demonstrate its own strength - and thus its existence - and let other people know it too. by resorting to elastic concepts such as ‘working class’, ‘the people’ or ‘the workers’. Moreover, as a result of the specific interests associated with the position they occupy in the competition to impose their particular visions of the social world, theoreticians and professional spokespersons, in other words, all ‘party officials', are inclined to produce differentiated and distinctive products which, because of the homology between the field of professionals and the field of consumers of opinion, are as it were automatically adjusted to suit the different forms of demand. Demand is defined, in this case more than ever, as a demand for difference, for opposition, which these professionals themselves help to produce by enabling it to find expression. Il is the structure of the political field, that is, the objective relation to the occupants of other positions, and the relation to the competing stances they offer which, just as much as any direct relation to those they represent, determines the stances they take. i.e. the supply of political products. By virtue of the fact that the interests directly involved in the struggle
for the monopoly of the legitimate expression of the truth of the social world tend to be the specific equivalent of the interests of those who occupy homologous positions in the social field, political discourses arc affected by a sort of structural duplicity: while they are in appearance directly aimed at the voters, they are in reality aimed at competitors within the field.
The political stances taken at any given moment (electoral results, for example) are thus the product of an encounter between a political supply of objectified political opinions (programmes, party platforms, declarations, etc.) linked to the entire previous history of the field of production, and a political demand, itself linked to the history of the relations between supply and demand. The correlation that can be observed at any given moment between stances on this or that political issue and positions in the social space can be understood completely only if one observes that the classifications which voters implement in order to make their choice (left/right. for instance) are the product of all previous struggles, and that the same is true of the classifications which the analyst implements in order to classify, not only opinions, but the agents who express them. The entire history of the social field is present, in each moment, both in a materialized form - in institutions such as the administrative organization of political parties or trade unions - and in an incorporated form - in the dispositions of agents who run these institutions or fight against them (with the effects of hysteresis linked to questions of loyalty). All forms of recognized collective identity - the ‘working class’ or the CGT trade union, ‘independent craftsmen’, ’managers', ’university graduates', etc. - are the product of a long and slow collective development. Without being completely artificial (if it were, the attempted establishment of these forms would not have succeeded), each of these representative bodies, which give existence to represented bodies endowed with a known and recognized social identity, exists through an entire set of institutions which are just so many historical inventions, a ‘logo’, sigillum authenticum as canon lawyers said, a seal or stamp, an office and a secretariat endowed with a monopoly over the corporate signature and the plena potentia agendi et loquendi. etc. As a product of the struggles which occurred within and outside the political field, especially concerning power over the state, this representation owes its specific characteristics to the particular history of a particular political field and state (which explains, inter alia, the differences between the representations of social divisions, and thus of groups represented, from one country to another). So as to avoid being misled by the
effects of the labour of naturalization which every group tends to produce in order to legitimize itself and fully justify its existence, one must thus in each case reconstruct the historical labour which has produced social divisions and the social vision of these divisions. Social position, adequately defined, is what gives the best prediction of practices and representations; but. to avoid conferring on what was once called one's station, that is, on social identity (these days more and more completely identified with one's professional identity) the place that ‘being’ had in ancient metaphysics, namely, the function of an essence from which would spring all aspects of historical existence - as is expressed by the formula operatio sequttur esse - it must be clearly remembered that this status, like the habitus generated within it. are products of history, subject to being transformed. with more or less difficulty, by history.
Class as Will and Representation
But in order to establish how it is that the power of constituting and instituting held by the authorized spokesperson - party or union boss, for instance - is itself constituted and instituted, it is not enough to explain the specific interests of the theorists or spokespersons and the structural affinities which link them to those whom they represent. One must also analyse the logic of the process of institution, ordinarily perceived and described as a process of delegation, in which the representative receives from the group the power of creating the group. If we transpose their analyses, we can here follow the historians of law (Kantorowicz. Post, etc.) when they describe the mystery of ministry — a play on words dear to canon lawyers, who link mysterium with ministerium. The mystery of the process of transubstantiation. whereby the spokesperson becomes the group he expresses, can only be explained by a historical analysis of the genesis and functioning of representation, through which the representative creates the group which creates him. The spokesperson endowed with full power to speak and act in the name of the group, and first and foremost to act on the group through the magic of the slogan, is the substitute of the group which exists only through this proxy; as the personification of a fictitious person, of a social fiction, he raises those whom he represents out of their existence as separate individuals, enabling them to act and speak through him as a single person. In return, he receives the right to lake himself for the group, to speak and act as if he were the group incarnate in a
single person: 'Status est magistratus', "I Etat, c'est moi', ‘the union thinks that...', etc.
The mystery of ministry is one of those cases of social magic in which a thing or a person becomes something other than what it/he is. a person (minister, bishop, delegate, member of parliament, general secretary, etc.) able to identify and be identified with a set of people (the People, the Workers) or with a social entity (the Nation, the State, the Church, the Party). The mystery of ministry is al its peak when the group can exist only by delegating power to a spokesperson who will bring it into existence by speaking for it. that is. on its behalf and in its place. The circle is then complete: the group is created by the person who speaks in its name, thus appearing as the source of the power that he exerts over those who are its real source. This circular relation is at the root of the charismatic illusion which means that, ultimately, the spokesperson may appear, lo others as well as to himself, as causa sui. Political alienation results from the fact that isolated agents - and this is all the more true the more they are symbolically impoverished - cannot constitute themselves as a group, as a force capable of making itself heard in the political field, unless they dispossess themselves and hand over their power to a political apparatus: they must always risk political dispossession in order to escape from political dispossession. Fetishism, according to Marx, is what happens when ‘the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own’; political fetishism lies precisely in the fact that the value of the hypostatized individual, that product of the human brain, appears as charisma, a mysterious objective property of the person, an elusive charm, an unnameable mystery. The minister - minister of religion or minister of state - is in a metonymic relation with the group; as part of the group, he functions as a sign replacing the group as a whole. It is the minister who. as an entirely real substitute for an entirely symbolic being, encourages one to make a category mistake’, as Ryle would put it. rather similar to the one made by a child who, after having watched a procession of the soldiers composing the regiment, asks where the regiment is. By his mere visible existence, the minister constitutes the pure serial diversity of separate individuals into a moral person, transforms the collectio personarum plurium into a corporatio, a constituted body, and he may even, through mobilization and demonstration, make it appear as a social agent.
Politics is the site par excellence of symbolic effectiveness, an activity which works through signs capable of producing social
entities and, above all, groups. By virtue of the oldest of the metaphysical effects linked to the existence of a certain symbolism -that which enables one to consider as existing everything which can be signified (God or non-being) - political representation produces and reproduces, at every moment, a derivative form of the argument of the bald King of France so dear to logicians: any predicative statement with ‘the working class’ as its subject conceals an existential statement (there is a working class). More generally, all statements which have as their subject a collective - People, Class, University, School. State, etc. - presuppose that the question of the existence of this group has been solved and conceal that sort of ‘metaphysical fallacy’ which has been criticized in the ontological argument. The spokesperson is the person who. speaking about a group, speaking on behalf of a group, surreptitiously posits the existence of the group in question, institutes the group, through that magical operation which is inherent in any act of naming. Thai is why we must proceed to a critique of political reason - a reason which is inclined to commit abuses of language which are abuses of power - if we want to raise the question with which all sociology ought to begin, that of the existence and mode of existence of collectives.
A class exists in so far as - and only in so far as - representatives with the plena potentia agendi may be and feel authorized to speak in its name - in accordance with the equation, 'the Party is the working class’, or ‘the working class is the Party’, an equation which reproduces that of canon lawyers, ‘the Church is the Pope (or the Bishops), the Pope (or the Bishops) is (or are) the Church'. In this way, a class can be given existence as a real force in the political field. The mode of existence of what is these days called, in a great number of societies (with variations, of course), the ‘working class’, is completely paradoxical: what we have is a sort of existence in thought, an existence in the minds of many of those who are designated by the different taxonomies as workers, but also in the minds of those who occupy the positions furthest removed from the workers in the social space. This almost universally recognized existence is itself based on the existence of a working class in representation, that is, on political and trade-union apparatuses and on party officials who have a vital interest in believing that this class exists and in spreading this belief among those who consider themselves part of it as well as those who are excluded from it; who are capable too of giving voice to the ‘working class', and with a single voice to evoke it, as one evokes or summons up spirits, of
invoking it. as one invokes gods or patron saints; who are capable, indeed, of manifesting it symbolically through demonstration, a sort of theatrical deployment of the class-in-representation, with on the one side the body of party officials and the entire symbolic system that constitutes its existence - slogans, emblems, symbols - and on the other side the most convinced fraction of the believers who, by their presence, enable their representatives to give a representation of their representativeness. This working class as ‘will and representation’ (as Schopenhauer’s famous title puts it) has nothing in common with the class as action, a real and really mobilized group, imagined by the Marxist tradition; but it is no less real, with that magical reality which (with Durkheim and Mauss) defines institutions as social fictions. This is a true mystical body, created at the cost of an immense historical labour of theoretical and practical invention, starting with that of Marx himself, and endlessly recreated at the cost of innumerable and constantly renewed efforts and acts of commitment which are necessary in order to produce and reproduce belief and the institution designed to ensure the reproduction of belief. The ‘working class’ exists in and through the body of representatives who give it an audible voice and a visible presence, and in and through the belief in its existence which this body of plenipotentiaries succeeds in imposing, by its mere existence and its representations, on the basts of affinities which objectively unite the members of the same ‘class on paper’ as a probable group.14 The historical success of Marxist theory, the first social theory to claim scientific status that has so completely realized its potential in the social world, thus contributes to ensuring that the theory of the social world which is the least capable of integrating the theory effect-thut it, more than any other, has created - is doubtless, today, the most powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world to which it has, in times gone by. more than any other contributed.
Notes
Editor’s Introduction
1 Born in 1930 in BCarn. a province in southern France, Bourdieu studied philosophy at the Ecole normule superieure in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before moving into anthropological and sociological research. His first studies of Algerian society, where he carried out his initial ethnographic research, were published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The research in Algeria formed Ihe basis of much of his subsequent theoretical writing, most notably Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1977) and The Logic of Practice, tr, R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). In the early 1960s Bourdieu also initiated a series of collaborative research projects on French culture and education, from his institutional base at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris, where he founded the Centre de Sociologie europeenne These projects have resulted in numerous publications, among the most recent of which arc Distinction; A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. U. R. Nice (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press. 1984), Homo AcademL cus. tr P. Collier (Cambridge: Polity Press. 1988). and La noblesse d'etat: grandes ecoles et esprit de corps (Paris: Minuil, 1989).
Bourdieu is currently Professor of Sociology at the College de Erance and Director of the Centre de sociologie europeenne. For a full bibliography of his writings, see Y. Delsaut, "Bibliography of the works of Pierre Bourdieu. 1958-1988\ in P. Bourdieu. In Other Words; Essays toward a Reflexive Sociology, tr. M. Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press. 1990), pp. 199-218.
2 For helpful overviews and sympathetic criticism of Bourdieu's work, sec R. Brubaker. "Rethinking classical social theory: the sociological vision of Pierre Bourdieu’, Theory and Society. 14 (1985). pp. 745-75; P. Dimaggio. Review essay on Pierre Bourdieu'. American Journal of
Sociology, 84 (1979), pp. 1460-74; N. Gamham and R. Williams. ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture: An introduction'. Media, Culture and Society, 2 (1980). pp. 209-23; and A, Honneth, ‘The fragmented world of symbolic forms: reflections on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture', tr. T. Talbot, Theory. Culture and Society. 3/3 (1986). pp. 55-66. See also (he volume of essays edited by C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma and M. Postone. The Social Theory of Pierre Bourdieu (Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming).
3 See P. Bourdieu. CVlibat et condition pavsanne’. Etudes rurales, 5-6 (1962). pp. 32-136; ‘Marriage strategics as strategies of social repro-duction\ tr. E. Forster* in R Forster and O* Ranum (eds)t Family and Society: Selections from the Annales (Baltimore* MD: Johns Hopkins University Press* 1976), pp. 117—H; and The Kabyle house or the world reversed*, tr. R Nice, published as the appendix in The Logic of Practice.
4 See Bourdieus illuminating account of his own intellectual itinerary in the preface to The Logic of Practice.
5 F. de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics, tr. W* Baskin (Glasgow: Collins, 1974). pp* W; N, Chomsky* Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press. 1965), pp* 3ff,
6 There is a growing literature on the development of languages in relation to the formation of modern nation-states and the history of colonialism. See* for instance, M. de Certeau. D. Julia and J. Revel. Une politique de la langue. La revolution franfaise et les patois (Paris: Gallimard. 1975); A. Mazrui, The Political Sociology of rhe English Language: An African Perspective (I he Hague: Mouton, 1975); R, L, Cooper (ed ). Language Spread: Studies in Diffusion and Social Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and J* Stein* berg, ‘The historian and the questtone della lingua', in P. Burke and R. Porter (eds), The Social History of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp* 19 8-209.
7 F. Bru not* Histoire de la langue fran^utse da origines 6 nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin. 1905-53).
8 P Bourdieu. The production and reproduction of legitimate language', ch. 1 in this volume, p. 49.
9 Bourdieu’s argument here is similar to that developed by the sociolinguist Dell Hymes, who maintains that Chomsky's notion of competence is too narrow and must be expanded to lake account of social and circumstantial factors. See D. Hymes, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (London: Tavistock, 1977). pp, 92-7 and passim,
10 Austin’s classic text. How to Do Things with Words (English publication 1962). was not published in French until 1970, and the theory of speech acts was quite extensively discussed by French philosophers and linguists in the 1970s* See. for example, O. Ducrot. Dire er ne pas dire (Paris: Hermann. 1972) and Le dire et le J/f (Paris: Minuit. 1984); and
A. Berrendonner. Elements depragmatique Unguistique (Pans: Minuit, 1981).
11 J. L Austin. How to Do Things with Words, second edition, ed. J, O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Lecture II.
12 See J. Habermas, ‘Toward a theory of communicative competence', in H. P. Dreitzel (ed*). Recent Sociology, no. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 114-48; ‘What is universal pragmatics?’, in Communication and the Evolution of Society, tr. T. McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1979), pp. 1-68; and The Theory of Communicative Action, vol, 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, tr, T. McCarthy (Cam’ bridge: Polity Press, 1984), ch. 3.
13 For a discussion of this and related criticisms, see ‘Symbolic violence: language and power in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu', in J.B. Thompson, Studies in rhe Theory of Ideology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), pp, 42-72.
14 See A. Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, tr. G. Walsh and F, Lehnert (London: Heinemann. 1972), In this context Bourdieu refers most frequently to phenomenology and its development by social philosophers such as Schutz and Sartre. But his argument could be developed mutatis mutandis with regard to the work of sociologists and anthropologists as diverse as Peter Berger, Harold Garfinkel, Aaron Cicoure! and Clifford Geertz,
15 This point is developed at some length in P. Bourdieu, J-C. Cham-boredon and J-C. Passeron, Le metier de sociologue: preables ^pist^mo-logiques (Paris and The Hague: Mouton. 1968) and P. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, ch. L
16 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 69-70.
17 See P. Bourdieu, ‘Quelques proposes des champs’, in his Questions de sociologie (Paris: Minuit, 1980), pp. 113-20.
18 See P. Bourdieu and L. Boltanski. ‘Formal qualifications and occupational hierarchies: the relationship between the production system and the reproduction system', tr. R. Nice, in E. J, King (ed.). Reorganizing Education: Management and Participation for Change (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977), pp. 61-9.
19 Bourdieu. The Logic of Practice, p. 120.
20 Ibid., p. 122.
21 See P. Bourdieu, ‘The field of cultural production, or: the economic world reversed', tr. R. Nice, Poetics, 12 (1983). pp. 311-56.
22 Bourdieu is sharply critical of the kind of rational action theory developed by Jon Elster; see The Logic of Practice, pp. 46ff.
23 See P. Guiraud, Le Francois populaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965).
24 See W. Labov, Sociolingitistic Patterns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972). pp. 301-4. See also R. Lak off, Language and Woman's Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
25 La R^publique des Pyrenees (9 September 1974); relevant parts of the text are reproduced in P. Bourdieu and L. Boltanski, *Le fetichisme de la langue', /Acres de la recherche en sciences sociales, 4 (July 1975), pp, 2-32. The example is also discussed in this volume, pp. 68-9.
26 Bourdieu offers a more extended analysis of Heidegger’s work in his book The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, tr. P. Collier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). The material which forms the basis of this book was originally published in French in 1975 in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, and hence predates by more than a decade the debates triggered off in France and elsewhere by the publication of Victor Farias’s book Heidegger et Ie nazisme (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987). Bourdieu’s approach to Heidegger’s work differs significantly from that of Farias and from the views expressed recently by philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Lacoue-Labarthe.
27 The issues discussed by Bourdieu in this context, such as the opposition between distinguished and vulgar and the symbolic struggles waged by different classes in the social space, are examined in much greater detail in Distinction,
28 These points are brought out well in the work of Paul Willis, to which Bourdieu refers in this context. See P. E. Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1978), and Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Westmead. Farnborough, Hants.: Saxon House, 1977).
29 See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. pp. 183ff; The Logic of Practice, pp. 122ff.
30 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 127,
31 The role of the educational system as an institutional mechanism for creating and sustaining inequality is examined by Bourdieu and his associates in a variety of publications. See especially P. Bourdieu and J-C. Passeron. Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture, tr. R. Nice (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977): P. Bourdieu and LC Passe ron, The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture. tr. R. Nice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and Bourdieu, La noblesse d'etat.
32 See, for example, P Bourdieu ‘Le marche des biens symboliques’. L’ann/e sociologique, 22 (1971), pp. 49-126; Genese et structure du champ religieux\ Revue frangaise de sociologies 12 (19 71), pp. 295-334; and "Legitimation and structured interests in Weber’s sociology of religion’, tr. C. Turner, in S. Whimster and S. Lash (eds), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen & Unwin* 1987), pp. 119-36.
33 Bourdieu has developed this approach in more detail in other contexts. See especially Bourdieu, Distinction, ch. 8; Bourdieu, La noblesse d'etat, part IV; and P, Bourdieu and L. Boltanski, "La production de Tideologic dominants’. Acres’ de la recherche en sciences sociales. 2-3 (June 1976), pp. 3-73,
34 In recent writings Bourdieu has given more attention to issues concerned with gender and relations of power between the sexes. Sec especially P. Bourdieu, La domination masculine'. 4c/w de la recherche en sciences socidles. 84 (September 1990). pp. 2-3 L
35 See P. Bourdieu. ‘Social space and the genesis of '‘classes’* \ ch. 11 in this volume. See also 'A reply to some objections’, tr. L L D Wacquant and M. Lawson, in Bourdieu. In Other Words^ pp 106-19.
36 For a recent and well known example of this interpretation, see L. Ferry and A. Renaut* La pens^e 68. Essai sur Tanti-humanisme conremporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). ch. 5.
Introduction to Part I
1 I have tnrd elsewhere to analyse the epistemological unconsciousness of structuralism, i.e. the presuppositions which Saussure very lucidly articulated in constructing the specific object of linguistics* but which have been forgotten or repressed by subsequent users of the Saussurian model (see P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 30ff).
2 See G. Mounin, La Communication Po&ique, precede de Avez-vous lu Char? (Pans: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 21-6L
3 The ability to grasp simultaneously the different senses of one word ( which is often measured by so-called intelligence tests) and* a fortiori. the ability to manipulate them practically (for example, by recovering the original sense of ordinary words, as philosophers like to do) are a good measure of the typically scholarly ability to remove oneself from a situation and to disrupt the practical relation which links a word to a practical context, restricting the word to one of its senses, in order to consider the word in itself and (or itself, that is, as the focus for all the possible relations with situations thus treated as so many ’particular instances of the possible*. If this ability to play on different linguistic varieties, successively and especially simultaneously* is without doubt among the most unevenly distributed, if is because the mastery of different linguistic varieties - and especially the relation to language which it presupposes - can only be acquired in certain conditions of existence that are capable of authorizing a detached and free relation io language (see, in P. Bourdieu and J-C. Passeron, Rapport p^dagogiqttc et communication (Paris and The Hague: Mouton* 1965)* the analysis of variations according to social origin of the breadth of linguistic register, i.e. the degree to which different linguistic varieties are mastered).
4 J. Vendry&i, Le langage. Introduction linguistique d THisioire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950). p. 208.
5 The imperatives of production, and even of domination* impose a minimum of communication between classes; hence the access of the
most deprived (immigrants, for example) to a kind of vital minimum of linguistic competence.
1 The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language
1 A. Comte, Svjtfm of Positive Polity, 4 vols (London: Longmans Green and Co,. 1875-77), vol. 2. p. 213.
2 N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), p. 3 (my italics). See also N. Chomsky and M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 3.
3 Chomsky himself makes this identification explicitly, at least in so far as competence is ‘knowledge of grammar* (Chomsky and Halle. The Sound Pattern of English) or ‘generative grammar internalized by someone’ (N. Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (London and fhe Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 10),
4 The fact that Habermas crowns his pure theory of ‘communicative competence* - an essenfiahst analysis of the situation of communication - with a declaration of intentions regarding the degree of repression and the degree of development of the productive forces does not mean that he escapes from the ideological effect of absolutizing the relative which is inscribed in the silences of the Chomskyan theory of competence (J. Habermas, ‘Toward a theory of communicative competence*, in H. P. Dreitzel (ed.), Recent Sociology, no. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp, 114-48). Even if it is purely methodological and provisional, and intended only to ‘make possible* the study of 'the distortions of pure intersubjectivity*, idealization (which is clearly seen in the use of notions such ax ‘mastery of the dialogue-constitutive universals* or ‘speech situation determined by pure subjectivity') has the practical effect of removing from relations of communication the power relations which are implemented within them in a transfigured form. This is confirmed by the uncritical borrowing of concepts such as ‘illocutionary force*, which tends to locate the power of words in words themselves rather than in the institutional conditions of their use,
5 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tn W. Baskin (Glasgow: Collins, 1974), pp. 199-203.
6 L. Bloomfield, Language (London: George Allen, 1958), p. 29. Just as Saussure*s theory of language forgets that a language does not impose itself by its own force but derives its geographical limits from a political act of institution, an arbitrary act misrecognized as such (and misrecognized by the science of language), so Bloomfield's theory of the 'linguistic community* ignores the political and institutional conditions of ‘intercomprehension*.
7 The adjective ‘formal’, which can be used to describe a language that is guarded, polished and tense, as opposed to one that is familiar and relaxed, or a person that is starchy, stiff and formalist, can also mean
the same as the French adjective officiel (as in ka formal dinner’), that is, conducted in full accordance with the rules, in due and proper order, by formal agreement,
8 Only by transposing the representation of the national language is one led to think that regional dialects exist themselves divided into sub-dialects - an idea flatly contradicted by the study of dialectics (see F Brunei, Histoire de /a langue fran^aise des origines a nos jours (Paris: Colin, 1968), pp* 77-8)* And it is no accident that nationalism almost always succumbs to this illusion since, once it triumphs, it inevitably reproduces the process of unification whose effects it denounced,
9 This is seen in the difficulties raised by the translation of decrees during the Revolutionary period in France. Because the practical language was devoid of political vocabulary and divided into dialects, it was necessary to forge an intermediate language. (The advocates of the langurs d'oc do the same thing nowadays, fixing and standardizing orthography and thereby producing a language not readily accessible Io ordinary speakers.)
10 G. Davy, Elements de sociologie (Paris: Vrin, 1950), p. 233.
11 Humboldt's linguistic theory, which was generated from the celebration of the linguistic 'authenticity* of the Basque people and the exaltation of the language-nation couplet, has an intelligible relationship with the conception of the unifying mission of the university which Humboldt deployed in the creation of the University of Berlin.
12 Grammar is endowed with real legal effectiveness via the educational system, which places its power of certification at its disposal. If grammar and spelling are sometimes the object of ministerial decrees (such as that of 1900 on the agreement of the past participle conjugated with avoir), this is because, through examinations and the qualifications which they make it possible to obtain, they govern access to jobs and social positions.
13 Thus, in France, the numbers of schools and of pupils enrolled and, correctively, the volume and spatial dispersion of the teaching profession increased steadily after 1816 - well before the official introduction of compulsory schooling.
14 This would probably explain the apparently paradoxical relationship between the linguistic remoteness of the different regions in the nineteenth century and their contribution to the ranks of the civil service in the twentieth century. The regions which, according to the survey carried out by Victor Duruy in 1864, had the highest proportion of adults who could not speak French, and of 7- to 13-year-olds unable to read or speak it. were providing a particularly high proportion of civil servants in the first half of the twentieth century, a phenomenon which is itself known to be linked to a high rate of secondary schooling.
15 This means that linguistic customs' cannot be changed by decree as the advocates of an interventionist policy of ‘defence of the language* often seem to imagine.
16 The 'disintegrated' language which surveys record when dealing with speakers from the dominated classes is thus a product of the survey relationship.
17 Conversely, when a previously dominated language achieves the status of an official language, it undergoes a revaluation which profoundly changes its users' relationship with it. So-called linguistic conflicts are therefore not so unrealistic and irrational (which does not mean that they are directly inspired by self-interest) as is supposed by those who only consider the (narrowly defined) economic slakes The reversal of the symbolic relations of power and of the hierarchy of the values placed on the competing languages has entirely real economic and political effects, such as the appropriation of positions and economic advantages reserved for holders of the legitimate competence, or the symbolic profits associated with possession of a prestigious, or at least unstigmatized, social identity,
18 Only the optional can give rise to effects of distinction. As Pierre Encreve has shown, in the case of obligatory liaisons — those which are always observed by all speakers, including the lower classes - there is no room for manoeuvre. When the structural constraints of the language are suspended, as with optional liaisons, the leeway reappears, with the associated effects of distinction.
19 There is clearly no reason to lake sides in the debate between the nativists (overt or not), for whom the acquisition of the capacity to speak presupposes the existence of an innate disposition, and the empiricists, who emphasize (he learning process. So long as not everything is inscribed in nature and the acquisition process is something more than a simple maturation, there exist linguistic differences capable of functioning as signs of social distinction.
20 The hypothesis of equal chances of access to the conditions of acquisition of the legitimate linguistic competence is a simple mental experiment designed to bring to light one of the structural effects of inequality.
21 Situations in which linguistic productions are explicitly subjected to evaluation, such as examinations or job interviews, recall the evaluation which takes place in every linguistic exchange. Numerous surveys have shown that linguistic characteristics have a very strong influence on academic success, employment opportunities, career success, the attitude of doctors (who pay more attention to bourgeois patients and their discourse, e.g. giving them less pessimistic diagnoses), and more generally on the recipients* inclination to co-operate with the sender, to assist him or give credence to the information he provides.
22 Rather than rehearse innumerable quotations from writers or grammarians which would only take on their full meaning if accompanied by a thorough historical analysis of the state of the field in which they were produced in each case, I shall refer readers who would like to get a concrete idea of this permanent struggle to B. Quemada, Les diction-
naires du fran^ais moderne, 1539-1863 (Paris: Didier. 1968k pp. 19 3, 204, 207. 210. 216. 226. 228. 229. 230 n. 1.231. 233.237.239. 241,242. and Brunot. Histoire de la langue fran^aise. 11-13 and passim. A similar division of roles and strategies between writers and grammarians emerges from Haugen’s account of the struggle for control over the linguistic planning of Norwegian: see E. Haugen. Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Norwegian (Cambridge. Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1966). esp, pp. 296ft
23 One might contrast a style-in-itself, the objective product of an unconscious or even forced Choice’ (like the objectively aesthetic •choice' of a piece of furniture or a garment, which is imposed by economic necessity), with a ‘style-for-itself, the product of a choice which, even when experienced as free and ‘pure*, is equally determined, but by the specific constraints of the economy of symbolic goods, such as explicit or implicit reference to the forced choices of those who have no choice, luxury itself having no sense except in relation to necessity.
24 Of the errors induced by the use of concepts like ‘apparatus1 or ‘ideology* (whose naive teleology is taken a degree further in the notion of ‘ideological state apparatuses’), one of the most significant is neglect of the economy of the institutions of production of cultural goods. One only has to think, for example, of the cultural industry, oriented towards producing services and instruments of linguistic correction (e.g. manuals, grammars, dictionaries, guides to correspondence and public speaking, children’s books, etc*), and of the thousands of agents in the public and private sectors whose most vital material and symbolic interests are invested in the competitive struggles which lead them to contribute, incidentally and often unwittingly, to the defence and exemplification of the legitimate language,
25 The social conditions of production and reproduction of the legitimate language are responsible for another of its properties: the autonomy with regard to practical functions, or. more precisely, the neutralized and neutralizing relation to the ‘situation’, the object of discourse or the interlocutor, which is implicitly required on all the occasions when solemnity calls for a controlled and lense use of language. The spoken use of ‘written language* is only acquired in conditions in which it is objectively inscribed in the situation, in the form of freedoms, facilities and. above all. leisure, in the sense of the neutralization of practical urgencies; and it presupposes the disposition which is acquired in and through exercises in which language is manipulated without any other necessity than that arbitrarily imposed for pedagogic purposes.
26 It is therefore no accident that, as Troubetzkoy notes, 'casual articulation' is one of the most universally observed ways of marking distinction: see N*S. Troubetzkoy, Principes de Phonologic (Paris: Klinck* sieck, 1957). p. 22* In reality, as Pierre Encreve has pointed out to me, the strategic relaxation of tension only exceptionally extends to the
phonetic level; spuriously denied distinction continues io be marked in pronunciation. And writers such as Raymond Queneau have, of course, been able to derive literary effects from systematic use of similar discrepancies in level between the different aspects of discourse.
2 Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits
I The official centenary celebration of the birth of the Beamais-language poet. Simin Palay. whose entire work - language aside - is dominated in form as well as in content by French literature, created a linguistic situation that was totally unheard-of: not only the accredited guardians of Bearnais but also the administrative authorities themselves transgressed the unwritten rule which makes French de rigueur on all official occasions, especially in the mouths of officials. Whence the following journalistic observation (which is doubtless a faithful reflection of the impression generally received): ‘The most notable speech was. however, made by the Prefect of Pyrcnces-Adantiqucs. Mr Monfraix, who addressed the audience in excellent Bearnais patois ... Mr Labarrerc [the mayor of Pau] replied to Miss Lamazou-Betbeder, head of the school, in good quality Bearnais. The audience was greatly moved by this thoughtful gesture and applauded at length1 {La R^publiqite des Pyrenees, 9 September 1974).
2 This is very clear in rhe case of regional languages whose use is reserved for private occasions - mainly in family life - and, in any case, for exchanges between socially homogeneous speakers (between peasants).
3 In the sphere of language, the only affirmation of authentic counter-legitimacy is slang; but this is a language of ‘bosses’.
4 See P. Bourdieu, ‘Le discours d’importance: quclques reflexions sociologiques sur "Quelqucs remarques critiques a propos de Lire le Capital" \ in Cc que purler veut dire (Paris: Fayard, 1982), pp. 207-26.
5 Cf. B. de Cornulier, La notion d’auto-interpretation*, Etudes de linguistique appliques 19(1975). pp 52-82.
6 F. Recanati, Les enoncts performatifs (Paris: Minuit, 1982), p. 192.
7 Ibid . p. 195.
8 E. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, tr. M. Meek (Coral Gables, Fla: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 236).
9 Of all linguists. Alain Berrcndonner is the one who undoubtedly understands best the link between the performative and the social, or what he calls the ‘institution', i.e. ‘the existence of a normative power which, under threat of sanctions, ensures the mutual subjection of individuals to certain practices1; ‘Substituting saying for doing will therefore only be practicable if there is some additional guarantee that the utterance-marz will have an effect after all’ (A. Berrendonner, Elements de pragmatique Unguistique (Paris: Minuit, 1981), p* 95),
10 O. Ducrot, Jllocutoire et performatiF, Linguistiquc et simiohgie, 4 (1977). pp. 17-54
11 Insults, blessings and curses are all acts of magical naming and. strictly speaking, prophecies which purport to be self-verifying. In so far as it always implies a more or less socially justified claim to perform a magical act of institution which can usher in a new reality, the performative utterance creates a future effect in words used in the present.
12 ‘Acts of authority are first and always utterances made by those to whom the right to utter them belongs’ (Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, p. 236).
13 ‘The two words - ministerium and mysterium - were virtually interchangeable since the time of primitive Christianity and were constantly confused during the middle ages' (E. H. Kantorowicz. ‘Mysteries of state: an absolutist concept and its late mediaeval origins'. Harvard Theological Review, 48/1 (I955L pp. 65-91).
14 ‘Ilie two senses of competence come together if one sees that, according to Percy Ernst Schramm, just as the crown of the medieval king designates both the thing itself and the set of rights which constitute royal dignity (as in the term ‘crown property'), so too linguistic competence is a symbolic attribute of the authority which designates a socially recognized status as a set of rights, beginning with the right to speak and the corresponding technical capacity.
15 This means giving a real meaning to *he notion of acceptability*, which linguists sometimes introduce to avoid the abstraction in the notion of ‘grammaticality' without drawing any of the consequences t
16 This indicates that complete understanding of scholarly discourse (e.g. a literary text) presupposes, first, knowledge of the social conditions of production of the social competence (and not only linguistic competence) of the producers, who employ the totality of their properties (those which define their position in the social structure and also in the structure of the field of specialized production) in each of their productions; and, second, a knowledge of the conditions which govern the implementation of this competence, of the specific laws of the market concerned which, in this particular ease, coincide with the field of production itself (the fundamental characteristic of scholarly production consists in the fact that ns clientele is the set of other producers, i.e. its rivals).
17 Given that the work of representation and of the imposition of form is the sine qua non for ascertaining the existence of the expressive intention, the very idea of grasping some sort of content in its raw state, which would remain invariant through different forms, is meaningless.
IS One can thus class as euphemisms all the kinds of double meanings, particularly frequent in religious discourse, which enable one to get round censorship by naming the unnamablc in a form which avoids it being named (see ‘Censorship and the imposition of form*, ch. 6 in this
volume), and also all ihc forms of irony which, by denying the statement in the process of stating it, also produces double meaning -and twice the margin for manoeuvre - thereby enabling one to avoid the sanctions of a field. (On the defensive role of irony, see Berendon-ner, Elements de pragmatique hnguistique, esp. pp. 238-9),
19 C. Bally, Le langage et la vie (Geneva: Droz. 1965). p. 21.
20 This anticipation is guided by visible manifestations, like the attitude of the speaker, his expression (whether attentive or indifferent, haughty or engaging) and the encouragement in the voice or manner or the signs of disapproval Different experiments in social psychology have shown that the speed of speech, the quantity of speech, the vocabulary, the complexity of syntax, etc., vary according to rhe attitude of the person conducting the experiment, i.e. according to the strategies of selective reinforcement that he applies.
21 Learning in language occurs through familiarization with persons playing very broad roles, of which the linguistic dimension is but one aspect and never isolated as such, This is probably what confers the power of practical evocation on certain words which, being linked with a whole bodily posture and an emotional atmosphere, resurrect a complete vision of the world, a whole world; no doubt it also produce-the emotional attachment to the 'mother tongue', whose expressions, turns of phrase and words seem to imply a ‘surplus of meaning'.
22 Different experiments in social psychology have shown that the perils bourgeois are more adept than members of the lower classes at picking out social class according to pronunciation.
23 One would need to take these analyses further: on the one hand, by a more complete examination of the properties of the petits bourgeois which are pertinent to understanding linguistic dispositions, like ^heir trajectory (rising or falling) which, by providing them with an expert* ence of different milieux, inclines them - especially when they have to function as intermediaries between classes — to a quasi-sociological form of awareness; and. on the other hand, by examining the variations in these properties according to secondary variables, such as the position in the space occupied by the middle classes and the previous trajectory (cf, P, Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. tr.R Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1984), pt 3, ch. 6). Equally, one would need to distinguish, within the dominant class, between different relations to language.
24 Contrary to what Lakoff argues, the purely grammatical form of attenuation can be replaced by a whole series of substitutes, functioning as elements of a symbolic ritual, Anyone who has conducted an interview knows that the ground has to be laid well in advance for a ‘difficult’ question, and that the surest way of ‘getting away with if is not to surround it with circumlocutions and verbal attenuations which, on the contrary, would draw attention to it, hut to create a climate of collusion and to give the interview an overall tone which has a euphoric
and euphemizing effect, through jokes, smiles and gestures, in short, by creating a symbolic whole in which the purely linguistic form is just an element.
25 G, Lakoff, ’Interview with Herman Parrett’. University of California, mimeo, October 1973. p. 38; W. Laboy, Language in the Inner City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1973). p. 219.
26 It is hardly necessary to recall that the primordial form of censorship, that concerning sexual matters, and bodily ones more generally, is applied with particular rigour to women (or - a fine example of the market effect - in the presence of women).
27 From the point of view of dominant individuals, the same opposition would seem to be apparent, by a simple inversion of the sign, in the logic of difficulty and ease’, 'correctness* and negligence, culture and nature.
28 The intuitively perceived relationship between the ’articulatory style7 and the life-style, which makes ’accent’ such a powerful way of predicting social position, forces unequivocal value judgements from the few analysts who have devoted some space to it. like Pierre Guiraud: ’This carpel-slipper "accent'’, sloppy and limp*; 'the "lout’s” accent is the one which belongs to the guy who spits his words out of the corner of his mouth, between the fag-end and where his lips meet’: 'this vague and soft consistency, in its most degraded forms, is limp and revolting’ (P. Guiraud, Le fran^ais poputaire (Paris: Presses Universi-lairesde France), pp. 111-16) Like all manifestations of the habitus, of the historical as natural, pronunciation, and mote generally the relation to language, as commonly perceived, are revelations of a person in his I rue nature: class racism finds, in incorporated properties, the supreme justification for the propensity to naturalize social differences.
29 It is therefore no accident that a school system which, like the French Ecole republicaine. was conceived during the Revolution and fully established during the Third Republic, tries to shape completely the habitus of the lower classes, and is organized around the inculcation of a certain relation to language (with the abolition of regional languages, etc J, a relation io the body (disciplines of hygiene, consumption -sobriety - etc.) and a relation to time (calculating - economical -saving, etc ).
Appendix to Part I
1 The fact that the costs of scientific objectification are particularly high for an especially low - or negative - profit has not entirely failed to influence the slate of knowledge regarding these matters.
2 Le Petit Robert (Paris: Sodel^ du Nouveau Litt rd. 1979), p xvii.
3 We know the role played by similar (conscious or unconscious) exclusions in the use that the National Socialist movement made of the word volkisch.
4 See H Bauche. Le langage populate, grammaire, syntax? et vocabu-laire du fran^ats tel quon le parte dans le peuple de Paris, avec tous les termes d‘argot usuel (Paris: Payot, 1920); P Guiraud, Le fran^ais populaire (Paris: Presses Universilaires de France, 1965); also along the same lines. H. Frei, La grammaire des fames (Paris and Geneva: 1929; Geneva: Slalkme Reprints, 1971).
5 For examples in French, see J. Cellard and A. Rey. Dictionnaire du fran^ais nun conventionnet (Paris; Hachette, 1980). p. viir
6 For example, in the discourse recorded on the market which is least tense - a conversation between women - slang vocabulary is more or less totally absent. In the case observed, it only appears when one of the female interlocutors quotes the utterances of a man (‘bugger oft right now’), of whom she says immediately: ’that’s the way he talks, he used to know his way round Paris him. looks a bit down on his luck, wears his cap on one side, y know what 1 mean/ A little further on, the same person employs the word ’stash' again just alter having reported the utterances of a pub landlord in which it was used (cf. Y. Ddsaut, ’L'economic du langage populaire*, Acres de la recherche en sciences soaateS' 4 (1975). pp. 33-40). Empirical studies ought to make an effort to determine the feeling speakers have with regard to whether a word is pari of slang or part of the legitimate language (instead of imposing the definition of the observer); among other things, this would allow for an understanding of a number of features described as ’mistakes’, which are Che product of a misplaced sense of distinction.
7 This is why. while appearing to go around in circles or to be spinning in air, like so many circular and tautological definitions of vulgarity and of distinction, the legitimate language so often turns to the advantage of dominant speakers.
8 Given the role played in the preservation or transformation of language by spontaneous sociolinguists, and by the interventions expressly made by the family and the school which are elicited and oriented by it. a sociolinguistic analysis of linguistic change cannot ignore this kind of right or linguistic cusum which governs, most notably, educational practices.
9 While accepting the division which is the basis of the very notion of ‘popular speech*. Henri Bauche observes chat ‘in familiar usage bourgeois talk shares numerous features in common with vulgar language’ {Le langage populaire, p. 9). And further on he adds: ‘The boundaries between slang - the different types of slang * and popular speech are sometimes difficult to determine. Equally vague are the limits, on (he one hand, between popular speech and familiar speech, and. on the other, between specifically popular speech and the speech of vulgar people, i.e. people of modest means, of those who. without being exactly of the people, lack knowledge or education: those whom the “bourgeois” call common* (ibid., p. 26).
10 Although, for complex reasons which would have to be examined, the dominant vision does not give it a central place, the opposition between
masculine and feminine is one of the principles which give rise to the most typical contrasts, showing the 'people* as a ’female’ populace, changeable and hungry for pleasure (according to the antithesis of head and gut).
11 This is what creates the ambiguity in the exaltation of the speech form of those regarded as ’dead straight’: the vision of the world which it expresses and the virile virtues of the "dead tough" find their natural extension in what has been called the ’popular Right' (see Z. Stemhell, La droite revolutionnaire, 1885-1914. Les origines fran^aixes du fascism? (Paris: SeuiL 1978}, a fascistic combination of racism, nationalism and authoritarianism. And this makes it easier to understand the apparent strangeness of Celine's case.
12 Everything seems to suggest that, due to the extension of schooling, the ‘tough guy' character nowadays develops from his earliest schooldays, and against all the forms of submissiveness required by the school.
13 One of the effects of class racism, which, like the failure to distinguish among different yellow or black people, makes no distinction between the different types of ‘poor’* is the unwitting exclusion of even the possibility of difference (in fact, inventiveness, competence, etc.) and the pursuit of difference. The undiscriminating exaltation of the 'popular', which characterizes populism or radical chic, can thus lead to a kind of rapturous (rust in what the natives'judge to be inept* stupid or coarse; or. what amounts to the same thing* it can lead one to retain only what appears out of the ordinary in the ‘common’ and to present it as representative of common speech.
14 By totally rejecting a ‘French' society symbolized by school and also everyday racism* the young ‘tough guys’ who come from immigrant families undoubtedly represent the limit reached by the revolt of adolescents from the most economically and culturally deprived families, a revolt which often arises from educational failures* difficulties and disappointments.
15 P. E. Wilbs, Profane Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), esp. pp. 48-50.
16 As an exemplary manifestation of this principle of classification and of the breadth of its field of application* one only has to quote the case of the mason (a former miner) who, invited Io classify the names of professions (in a test modelled on the techniques employed for the componential analysis of related terms) and to name the classes thus produced, wrote off the higher professions - of which he took the job of television presenter to be paradigmatic - with a wave of I he hand and with the words: "all a bunch of queers' (Enquete Yvette Delsaut, Dcnain, 1978).
17 In a more general way, since the more or less brutal evocation of sexual matters and the flattening projection of sentimental things on the physiological level often act as euphemisms by hyperbole or antiphrasis which* contrary to litotes, say more in order to say less, this vocabulary
changes meaning completely when it changes market, through romantic transcription or lexicological recollection*
18 Previously, the only equivalent situation was found in national military service, which was undoubtedly one of the principal sites for the production and inculcation of slang speech forms.
19 The small shopkeeper, and especially the pub landlord, particularly if he possesses the virtues of sociability which are pan of his professional requisites, suffers no statutory hostility from the workers (contrary to what is usually supposed by intellectuals and the petite bourgeoisie with cultural capital, who arc separated from them by a real cultural barrier). He often enjoys a certain symbolic authority - which may be exercised on the political level, although the subject is tacitly taboo in cafe conversations * because of the ease and self-confidence w hich he owes, among other things, to his comfortable economic circumstances.
20 One would have to check to see whether - apart from cafd owners -shopkeepers, and particularly those hawkers and travelling salesmen at fairs and markets specializing in patter and back chai, but also butchers and, in a different style and with correspondingly different structures of interaction, hairdressers, do not all contribute more than workers, mere occasional producers, to the production of verbal inventions.
21 This representation assigns a social nature to the masculine figure - that of the man ‘who can take it’ and who ‘hangs in there’, who gives nothing away and rejects feeling and sentimentality, who is solid and complete, ‘ail there', faithful and true, who you can count on\ etc. - a nature which the harsh conditions of his existence would impose on him anyway, but which he feels duty bound to choose, because it is defined in opposition to the feminine ’nature1, which is weak, gentle, docile, submissive, fragile, changeable, sensitive, sensual (effeminate and so ‘contrary to nature*). This principle of di-vision operates not only in its specific field of application, he. in the domain of the relations between the sexes, but in a more general way, by imposing on men a strict, rigid and, in a word, esseniialist vision of their identity and, more generally, of other social identities, and thus of the whole social order.
22 It goes without saying that these dealings tend to vary according to the wife's level of education and perhaps particularly according to the disparity in educational attainment between the spouses.
23 One can see that, according to this logic, women are always in the wrong, i.e, in their (misconceived) nature. One could quote examples ad infinitum: in the case of a woman delegated to carry out a task, if she succeeds, it is because it was easy, if she fails, it is because she did not know how to go about it.
24 The intention of inflicting a symbolic stain (for example, through insult, malicious gossip or erotic provocation) on what is perceived as inaccessible implies the most awful admission of the recognition of superiority. Thus, as Jean Starobinski aptly notes, ‘coarse gossip, far from closing the gap between the social ranks, preserves and exacerbates it;
parading as irreverence and freedom, it abounds in the sense of degradation and is the self-confirmation of inferiority*. This refers to the gossip of the servants concerning Mademoiselle de Bred (cf. J. J. Rousseau, Confessions, III, in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade, 1959), pp. 94-6) as analysed by J. Starobinski in La Relation critique (Pans: Galhmard, 1970), pp. 98-154.
Introduction to Part II
I On the linguistic discussion of insults, see N. RuweL Grammaire ties insultcs ct autres etudes (Paris: Seuil, 1982); J.-C Milner, Arguments lingutsuques (Paris: Mame, 1973).
3 Authorized Language: The Social Conditions for the Effectiveness of Ritual Discourse
1 See E. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, tr. Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 323-6.
2 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p 4.
3 The magical act extends to nature the action through words which, under certain conditions, is exercised on people. The equivalent, in the sphere of social action, is the attempt to act through words beyond the limits of delegated authority (speaking in the wilderness, outside one's parish).
4 Austin. How to Do Things with Words, p. 26.
5 R P. Lelong, Le dossier noir de la communion solennelle (Pans: Mame. 1972). p. 183
6 The specifically religious rite is simply a particular case of the social rituals whose magic docs not reside in the discourses and convictions which accompany them (in this case, religious representations and beliefs) bui in the system of social relations which constitute ritual itself, which make it possible and socially operative (among other things, in the representations of the beliefs it implies).
4 Rites of Institution
1 See P. Bourdieu, ‘Epreuvc scolaire el consecration sociale’, Acres de la recherche en sciences sociafes, 39 (September 1981), pp, 3-70.
5 Description and Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political Effectiveness
1 This is why conservatives throughout history, from Napoleon [fl to Petain, have always condemned the ’political’ behaviour which they identify with factional and party struggles (see M. Marcel, Jnventaire des apolitismes en France \ in Association fran^aise de science politique, La dfpolitisation. myth? on reality? (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962). ppJWL
2 The tension between sociological scientism and spontaneist voluntarism which always exists in the writings of Marxist theoreticians is doubtless due to the fact that they emphasize either class as condition or class as will, depending on their position tn the division of labour of cultural production, and depending also on the state in which social classes find themselves.
3 This means that history (and particularly the history of categories of thought) constitutes one of the conditions under which political thought can become aware of itself.
4 G Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), pp. 10-2L
6 Censorship and the Imposition of Form
1 It is only by perceiving the Freudian model as a particular example of a more general model, which makes any expression the product of a transaction between the expressive interest and the structural necessity of a field acting as a form of censorship, that one can return psychoanalytical concepts to the realm of politics, where they are often formed. The social repression that occurs in the domestic context, as the field for a particular type of relation of power (whose structure varies according to the social conditions), is very specific in its form (one of tacit injunction and suggestion) and applies to a very specific class of interests: sexual drives. But the Freudian analysis of the syntax of dreams and of all 'private’ ideologies provides the instruments which are necessary for an understanding of the labour of euphemization and imposition of form which occurs each time a biological or social drive must come to terms with a social censorship.
2 Of course, nothing contributes quite as much to this as the status of ‘philosopher attributed to its author, and the signs and insignia -academic titles, publishing house, or quite simply his name - which identify his position in the philosophical hierarchy. To appreciate this effect we have only to imagine how we would read the page on the hydro-electric plant and the old wooden bridge (see M. Heidegger, ‘The question concerning technology1, in Basic IVnnnp, ed. D. F.
Kreil (London: Rout ledge & Kcgan Paul, 1977), p. 297) which led to the author being hailed as ‘the first theorist of the ecological struggle1 by one of his commentators (R. Scherer, Heidegger (Paris: Sehers, 1973)* p. 5)* if it had borne the signature of a leader of an ecological movement or a minister of the environment or the Ingo of a group of leftist students- (It goes without saying that these different ‘attributions' could not become truly plausible unless accompanied by some modifications in presentation.}
3 ‘At bottom each system knows its own primitive expressions only, and is incapable of discussing anything else’ (J. Nicod* Geometry and Induction* tr. J, Bell and M. Woods (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul* 1969), p. 11). Bachelard notes, along the same lines, that scientific language uses inverted commas to indicate when the words it retains from an ordinary or formerly scientific language are completely re-defined and derive their entire meaning from the system of theoretical relations in which they are integrated (G. Bachelard* Le mut^ ialrsme ranonne! (Paris: Presses Univcrsitaires de France, 1953). pp, 216-17)
4 Language raises particular problems for the social sciences* al least if one accepts that they must be oriented towards the broadest diffusion of results, which is a condition for the Mefetishizing* of soda! relations and the ‘re-appropriation* of the social world The use of the vocabuL ary of ordinary language obviously implies the danger of a regression to the ordinary sense which is correlative with the loss of the sense imposed through integration in the system of scientific relations. The resort to neologisms or to abstract symbols shows, belter (han straightforward inverted commas’, the break with common-sense meaning* but it also risks producing a break in the communication of the scientific vision of the social world.
5 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 348, Heidegger was to go further down this path as, with his growing authority* he felt authorized to engage in the peremptory verbalism to which all discourses of authority ultimately give rise.
6 This is one of the spontaneous strategies of politeness which can really neutralize the aggressive* arrogant or troublesome content of an order or question only by integrating it in a set of symbolic expressions, verbal or non-verbal, aimed at masking the raw meaning of the element taken on its own.
7 Heidegger. Being and Time, pp 163-4.
8 When writing this 1 could not recall exactly the passage in the essay on the ‘overcoming of metaphysics' (1939-1946) devoted to ’literary dirigism* as an aspect of the reign of ‘technology1: ‘The need for human material underlies the same regulation of preparing for ordered mobilization as the need for entertaining books and poems, for whose production the poet is no more important than the bookbinder’s
apprentice, who helps bind the poems for the printer by* for example, bringing the covers for binding from the storage room/ M. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, tr. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row* 1973), p* 106.
9 M. Heidegger. 4n Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 38. Another symptom of this aristocratism is the way all the adjectives which describe pre-philosophical existence are pcjoral ive ly colon red:' inauthentic1, ‘vulgar'. ‘everyday’, ‘public’, etc.
10 One would have to record systematically the entire system of symbols through which philosophical discourse declares its elevated nature as a dominant discourse*
J1 One thinks, for example, of the developments regarding biologism (cf. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols, esp. 'Nietzsche’s alleged biologism’ in vol* 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, tr. D. R Kreil (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp* 39-47*
12 Heidegger. Being and Time, pp. 83-4 (my emphasis)* These cautionary strategies might have awakened the suspicions of noo-German readers, if the latter had not been subject to conditions of reception which made it very unlikely that they would detect the hidden connotations, which are disowned in advance by Heidegger (all the more so since the translations ‘suppress’ them systematically in the name of the break between the antical and the ontological). Indeed, in addition to the resistance to analysis offered by a work which is the product of such systematic strategies of euphemization, there is also in this case one of the most pernicious effects of the exportation of cultural products, the disappearance of all the subtle signs of social or political origins, of all the marks (often very discreet) of the social importance of discourse and the intellectual position of its author, in short, of all the infinitesimal features to which the native reader is obviously most vulnerable, but which he can apprehend better than others once he is equipped with techniques of objectification. One recalls, for example, all the ‘adminis* trative’ connotations which Adorno discovered behind ‘existential’ terms like ‘encounter* (Begegnung), or in words like ‘concern’ (Anliegen), and ‘commission’ [Auftrag). a pre-eminently ambiguous term, both 'the object of an administrative demand’ and a ‘heartfelt wish\ which was already the object of a deviant usage in Rilke’s poetry (T, W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, tr* K* Tarnowski and F* Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 77-88),
13 We can see that the same logic applies in the use that other variants of priestly prophesying make nowadays of the ‘epistemological break’, a kind of rite of passage, accomplished once and for all, across the boundary laid down permanently between science and ideology*
14 Bachelard, Le matfrudisme rationnel. p. 59*
15 M. Heidegger* The Anaximander Fragment*, in Early Greek Thinking. tr* D* F* Kreil and F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 33.
16 For another, particularly caricatural example of the omnipotence of ‘essential thought1, one could refer to the text of the 1951 lecture 'Building, dwelling, thinking , where the housing crisis is ‘overcome* in favour of the ontological meaning of ‘dwelling* (Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 339).
17 This typically ‘philosophical' effect is predisposed to being reproduced indefinitely, in all the encounters between ‘philosophers’ and ‘laymen', and particularly the specialists in positive disciplines who are inclined to recognize the social hierarchy of legitimacies which confers on the philosopher the position of last appeal, which is both crowning and ‘founding* at the same time This professorial 'coup' is obviously best employed in ‘professional* usage: the philosophical text, the product of a process of esoterization, will be made exoteric at the cost of a process of commentary which its esoteric nature makes indispensable and whose best effects lie in the (artificial) concretizations which lead, in a process neatly reversing that of the (artificial) break, to (he re* activation of the primary sense, initially euphemized to render them esoteric, but with a full accompaniment of cautions (This is only an example') aimed at preserving the ritual distance.
18 Heidegger. Being and Time, p, 158,
19 J. Lacan, Merits, tr, A Sheridan (London: Tavistock. 1977), p. 173.
20 Heidegger, Being and Time, p, 165. Since the Heideggerian ’philosophical’ style is the sum of a small number of effects that are repeated indefinitely, it was preferable to grasp them in the context of a single passage - the analysis of assistance - in which they are all concentrated and which should be re-read in one go in order to see how these effects are articulated in practice in a particular discourse.
21 Thus the innumerable binary oppositions imagined by anthropologists and sociologists to justify the de facto distinction that exists between the societies assigned to anthropology and the societies assigned to sociology - ‘community7‘society\ *folk7‘urban\ ‘Traditional7‘modcrn\ ‘warm societiesV'cold societies', etc, - constitute a prime example of the series of parallel oppositions which is by definition interminable, since each particular opposition seizes on part of the fundamental opposition, essentially multi-faceted and pluri-vocal, between classless societies and societies divided into classes, which it expresses in a way that is compatible with (he properties and conventions which vary from one field to the next, and also from one state to another within the same field, i.e. more or less ad infinitum,
22 It is obvious that language offers other possibilities for ideological games than those exploited by Heidegger. Thus the dominant political jargon exploits principally the potential ambiguity and misunderstanding implied by the multiplicity of class usages or specialized usages (linked to specialist fields).
23 One could counter these analyses by arguing that to a certain extent they only elucidate those properties of the Heideggerian use of language that Heidegger himself expressly claims - at least in his most
recent writings. In fact, as we shall endeavour to show later, these I>ogus confessions are one aspect of the work of Selbstinterpretation and Selbstbehauprung to which the later Heidegger devotes his entire writing effort
24 It is through strategies that are no less paradoxical - even though they take on the appearance of scientilicity - that the ’political science' which identifies scientific objectivity with 'ethical neutrality1 (Le, the neutrality between social classes whose existence it dentes anyway) contributes to the class struggle by providing all the mechanisms which help produce the false consciousness of the social world with the support of a false science.
25 Ultimately, there is no word which is not an untranslatable hitpax lego me non: thus the word ‘metaphysical*, for example, does not have the same sense for Heidegger that it has for Kant, nor for the later Heidegger the sense that it has for the earlier. Heidegger simply pushes an essentia] property of the philosophical use of language to the extreme on this point: philosophical language as a sum of partially intersecting idiolects can only be adequately used by speakers capable of referring each word to the system where it assumes the meaning they intend it to bear (‘in the Kantian sense’).
26 E. Junger, Essai sur Thomme et le temps, vol. 1: Traill du Rebelle (Der Waldgang^ 1951) (Monaco: Rochet. 1957). pp. 47-8. On p. 66 there is a perfectly clear although implicit reference to Heidegger.
27 ‘Authentic Being-one’s-ScIf does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the “they**; ft is rather an existentiell modification of the "(hey’' - of the “they'* as an essential existential (Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 168: cf. also p. 223).
28 Ibid., pp. 341-8 and 352-7.
2 9 Ibid., pp. 3 801, 439M0 and 464-5.
3 (1 F. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961L
31 W. Z. Laqueur. Young Germany: A History of rhe German Youth Movement (London: Routledge, 1962). pp. 178-87.
32 Stefan George’s style was imitated by an entire generation, particularly through the influence of the ‘youth movement* (Jugendbewegung), seduced by his aristocratic idealism and his contempt for ‘arid rationalism’: ’His style was imitated and a few quotations were repeated often enough - phrases about he who once had circled the flame and who forever will follow the flame; about the need for a new' mobility whose warrant no longer derives from crown and escutcheon; about the Fuhrer with his vdlkisch banner who will lead his followers to the future Reich through storm and grisly portents, and so forth* (Laqueur, The Politics of Cultural Despair t p. 135)
33 Heidegger explicitly evokes tradition - more precisely, Plato’s distortion of the word eidos-\n order to justify his ’technical’ use of the word Gestell: ‘According to ordinary usage, the word Gestell [frame] means
some kind of apparatus, e.g. a bookrack. Gestcll is also the name for a skeleton. And the employment of the word Gesrell [enframing] that is now required of us seems equally eerie, not to speak of the arbitrariness with which words of a mature language are so misused. Can anything be more strange? Surely not Yet I his strangeness is an old custom of thought’ (Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology * p. 301). Against the same accusation of imposing ‘randomly arbitrary’ meaning, Heidegger replies, in *A letter to a young student** with an exhortation ’to learn the craft of thinking1 (M. Heidegger, ’The things’, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Colophon. 1975). p. 186).
34 E. Spranger. ’Mein Konflikt mit der nationalsorialistischen Regierung 1933’, Universitas Zeitschrtft fur Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur. 10 (1955), pp. 457-73* cited by F, Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1969), p. 439.
35 J. Habermas. ’Pcnser avec Heidegger centre Heidegger*. Profitsphi/o-sopfuques et politiques (Paris: Gallimard. 1974), p. 90 (my emphasis). Cf. the revised version of this essay in English. Martin Heidegger: the great influence1, in Habermas s Philosophical-Political Profiles, tr. F. F. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1983), pp. 53-60.
36 Ibid., p. 100.
37 Heidegger, 'Building, dwelling, thinking’, p. 339.
38 M. Halbwachs, Classes sociales et morphologic (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 178. Il goes without saying that such a phrase is excluded in advance from any self-respecting philosophical discourse: the sense of the distinction between the 'theoretical' and the empirical' is in fact a fundamental dimension of the philosophical sense of distinction.
39 It would be necessary' - in order to bring out this implicit philosophy of philosophical reading and the philosophy of the history of philosophy which goes with it - to note systematically all the texts (commonly found in Heidegger and his commentators) which express the expectation of a pure and purely formal treatment, which demand internal reading, circumscribed by the text itself or. in other words, which express the irreducibility of the ‘self-engendered* work to any historical determination - apart, obviously, from the internal determinations of the autonomous history of philosophy or. al the must, of the mathematical or physical sciences.
40 It is not the sociologist who imports the language of orthodoxy: ’The addressee of the '’Letter on Humanism” combines a profound insight into Heidegger with an extraordinary gift of language, both together making him beyond any question one of the most authoritative interpreters of Heidegger in France' (W. J. Richardson, sj., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963). p. 684. regarding an article by J. Beaufret): or: ’This sympathetic study [by Albert Dondeyne] orchestrates the theme that the ontological
difference is the single point of reference in Heidegger's entire effort. Not every Heideggerian of strict observance will he happy, perhaps, with the author's formulae concerning Heidegger's relation to "la grande tradition de la philosophia perennis" ’ (ibid.).
41 M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. R. Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1973). p. 8.
42 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. tr. D. F. Kreil (San Francisco. Ca.: Harper & Row, 1984). p. 17. The work. Heidegger says somewhere, ‘escapes biography’ which can only ■give a name to something that belongs to nobody'.
43 It is remarkable, knowing how tenaciously he rejected and refuted all external or reductive readings of his work (see his letters to Jean Wahl. Jean Beaufret. to a student, to Richardson, discussion with a Japanese philosopher, etc.), that Heidegger had no hesitation in using against his rivals (Sartre, in the case in point) the arguments of a ‘clumsy sociologism’. Thus, if necessary, be was prepared to reinvest the topic of ‘the dictatorship of the public realm’ with the strictly social (if not sociological) sense which it undoubtedly had in Being and Time, and what is more, to do so in a passage where he is attempting precisely io establish that the ‘existential’ analysis of the ‘they’ ‘in no way means to furnish an incidental contribution to sociology’ (‘Letter on humanism', in Basic Writings, p. 197). This recycling of Heidegger I by Heidegger U bears witness to the fact (underlined by the emphasis on 'incidental' m the sentence quoted) that, if everything is re-denied, nothing is renounced.
44 J. Beaufret, Introductions aux philosophies de ('existence. De Kierkegaard ti Heidegger (Paris: Dendel-Gonthier. 1971). pp. 111-12.
45 O. Pdggcier. La Pensce de M. Heidegger (Paris: Aubier-Montaignc. 1963). p. 18.
46 From this point of view one might connect a certain interview with Marcel Duchamp (in VH 101, no. 3, Autumn 1970. pp. 55-61) with the ‘Letter on humanism’, with its innumerable refutations or warnings, its calculated interference with interpretation, etc.
47 One might object that this 'claim' is itself denied in the ‘Letter on humanism’ (pp. 215-17). but this does not prevent it from being reaffirmed a little later (pp. 235-6).
48 Richardson, Heidegger', p. 224 n. 29 (my emphasis); see also ibid., p. 410 on the distinction between ‘poesy1 and 'poetry'.
49 H. Marcuse, ‘Beitrage zur Phanomenologie des historischen Mater-ialismus*. in Philosophische Hefte, 1 (1928). pp. 45-68.
50 C. Hobert, Das Dasein in Menschen (Zeulenroda: Sporn, 1937).
51 It is the same logic which has led, more recently, to apparently better grounded ‘combinations' of Marxism and structuralism or Freudianism. while Freud (interpreted by Lacan) provided new support for conceptual puns like Heidegger's.
52 Cf. Heidegger in his ‘Letter on humanism' (p. 212) for the refutation of
an existentialist’ reading of Being and Tone, the refutation of the interpretation of the concepts of Being and Time as a ‘secular’ version of religious concepts; the refutation of an ‘anthropological’ or ’moral’ reading of the opposition between the authentic and the inauthentic (pp. 217-21); and the rather more laboured refutation of ’nationalism' in the analyses of the ‘homeland* (HeimatL etc.
53 Heidegger, ‘Letter on humanism’,
54 K. Axelos, Arguments dune recherche (Paris: MinuiL 1939), pp. 93ff; see also K. Axelos, Einfuhrung in ein kunftiges Denken Uber Marx und Heidegger (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1966).
55 What we see at work here - that is, in its practical truth - is the scheme of (he 'ontological difference’ between Being and beings: can it be a coincidence that it arises naturally when there is a need to emphasize distances and re-establish hierarchies, between philosophy and the social sciences in particular?
56 It is this blind understanding which is designated by the apparently contradictory declaration by Karl Friedrich von Weizsacker (quoted by Habermas, ‘Penser avec Heidegger coni re Heidegger’, p. 106): *1 began to read Being and Time, which had just been published, when I was still a student. Today 1 can state with a good conscience that at the time I understood nothing of it. strictly speaking But 1 could not help feeling that it was there, and there alone, that thought could engage with the problems that I felt must lie behind modern theoretical physics, and today I would still grant it that/
57 The same Sartre who would have smiled or been indignant at Heidegger’s elitist professions of faith if they had come before him in the guise of what Simone de Beauvoir called ‘right-wing thought’ (forgetting, curiously, to include Heidegger), would not have been able to have the insight that he had into the expression which Heidegger’s works gave to his own experience of the social world, expressed at length in the pages of La Nausee, if it had not appeared to him dressed in forms fitting the proprieties and conventions of the philosophical field.
7 On Symbolic Power
I E. Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946). p, 16,
2 I have in mind the etymological sense of kategorein as noted by Heidegger (i.e. ‘to accuse publicly*); and also the terminology of kinship, which is a prime example of social categories (terms of address).
3 The neo-phenomenological tradition (Schutz. Peler Berger) and certain forms of ethnomethodology accept Che same presuppositions merely by omitting the question of the social conditions of possibility of the doxic experience (Husserl) of the world (and in particular of the
social world), that is, of the experience of the social world as being self-evident (‘taken for granted’ in Schutz’s words).
4 The ideological stances adopted by the dominant are strategies of reproduction which tend to reinforce both within and outside the class the belief in the legitimacy of the domination of that class.
5 The existence of a specialized field of production is the precondition for the appearance of a struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, which share the common feature of being distinguished from doxa* that is, from what remains undiscusscd.
6 It also means wc avoid the ethnologism (visible in particular in the analysis of archaic thought) which consists in treating ideologies as myths, that is, as the undifferentiated products of a collective labour, and thus in ignoring all the features they owe to the characteristics of the field of production (e.g. in the Greek tradition, th£ esoteric re-interpretations of mythic traditions),
7 The symbols of power (e g clothes, sceptre) are merely objectified symbolic capital and their efficacy is subject to the same conditions.
8 The destruction of this power of symbolic imposition based dn misrecognition depends on becoming aware of its arbitrary nature ie* the disclosure of the objective truth and the destruction of belief Heterodox discourse - in so far as it destroys the spuriously dear and self-evident notions of orthodoxy, a fictitious restoration of the doxa. and neutralizes its power to immobilize - contains a symbolic power of mobilization and subversion, the power to actualize the potential power of the dominated classes.
8 Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field
1 M. Weber, Economy and Society: /In Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol, 2, ed. G, Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 1395ff., 145Iff.
2 Neo-Machiavelhan theories take this division into account only to ascribe it to human nature. Thus Michels speaks of‘incurable incompetence* (R. Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of ^e Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, tr. E. and C. Paul (London; Jarrold and Sons, 1916), p. 421) or of ‘the perrenial incompetence of the masses’ (p. 424) and describes the relation between professionals and non-professionals in the language °f need (the masses* ‘need for leadership* (p, 54), the masses* need f°r an object of veneration (p, 69), etc), or in the language of native (‘The apathy of the masses and their need for guidance has as its counterpart in the leaders a natural greed for power. Thus the development of the democratic oligarchy is accelerated by the general characterises of human nature* (p. 217)).
3 See, in particular, P, Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1984), pp. 397-465,
4 This implies that the division of political labour varies with the overall volume of economic and cultural capital accumulated in a given social formation (its ’level of development') and also with the more or less asymmetrical structure of the distribution of this capital, especially the cultural capital, In this way, the spread of access to secondary education was the source of a set of transformations of the relation between parties and their militants or electors.
5 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations t tr. G. E. N, Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), para, 337, p. 108.
6 The relation between professionals and non-professionals takes very different forms for the dominant: since they are, most of the time, capable of producing their political acts and opinions themselves, it is never without a certain reticence and ambivalence that they resign themselves to delegation (imposed on them by the specific logic of legitimacy which, based as it is on misrecognition, condemns the temptation to celebrate one’s own activities).
7 One can describe as a party association an organization whose almost exclusive object is to prepare for elections, and which derives from this permanent function a permanence which ordinary associations do not possess. Resembling an association by the limited and partial character of its objectives and of the commitment it requires and, (hereby, by (he thoroughly diversified social composition of its clientele (made up of electors and not of militants), it resembles a party by the permanence imposed on it by the recurrence of its specific function, namely, preparing for elections. (It is notable that the ideal party as described by Ostrogorski is precisely an association, in other words, a temporary organization, created ad hoc for the purposes of a given claim or a specific cause.)
8 A. Gramsci. Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926), tr. Q. Hoare (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), pp. 197, 12.
9 R, Luxemburg. Masse et chefs (Paris: Spartacus. 1972), p. 37; trans* lated from the French.
10 A, Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings (1910-1920), tr. J. Andrews (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), pp. 330-9.
11 In this way, for example, the elitist theory of opinion, which is implicit in the elaboration or analysis of opinion polls or in the ritual lamentations over the high level of abstentions, betrays itself, in all innocence, in inquiries into the opinion-makers which, drawing their inspiration from an emanationist philosophy of ‘diffusion* as analogous to the streaming of liquid, aim to follow opinions back along the networks through which they circulate to the source from which they seemingly spring - in other words, to the "elite’ of ‘opinion-makers’, whom nobody ever thinks to ask for a reason for their opinions. (See for example C. Kadushin, Tower, influence and social circles: a new
methodology for studying opinion makers*, American Sociological Review, 33 (1968), pp. 6 85-99 J
12 The fact remains that this evolution could be countered, to some degree, by the general rise in the level of education which, given the all-powerful importance of educational capital in the system of explanatory factors of variations io individuals* relation to politics, is probably of a kind to contradict this tendency and to reinforce, to different degrees depending on the apparatus involved, pressure from the base, which is less inclined to accept unconditional delegation.
13 The televised debate which brings together professionals chosen for their specific competence but also for their sense of political propriety and respectability, in the presence of a public reduced to the status of spectators, thus realizing class struggle in the form of a theatrical and ritualized confrontation between two champions, symbolizes perfectly the end of the process of autonomization of the political game properly speaking, one that is more than ever imprisoned in its techniques, its hierarchies and its internal rules,
14 On the logic of the struggle for the imposition of the principle of di-vision, see P. Bourdieu. ’Identity and representation1, ch, 10 in this volume.
15 As proof of this, one need only cite the differences (which the necessities linked to the history and logic proper to each national political field bnng out) between the different representations that the ‘representative* organizations of social classes placed tn equivalent positions, such as the working classes of different European countries, give of the interests of these classes. This is true despite all the efforts made to achieve a greater homogenization (such as the bolshevizatton' of the communist parties).
16 Weber, Economy and Society vol. 2, p. 1447.
17 'Proletarian unity is blocked by opportunists of every hue. who defend the vested interests of cliques, material interests and especially interests derived from political power over the masses* (Gramsci. Selections from Political Writings (191(1-1920)' p. 178)
18 The paradigmatic form of this structural duplicity is probably represented by what the revolutionary tradition of the USSR calls ‘the language of Aesop1, that is, the secret, coded, indirect language to which revolutionaries resorted to evade the Tsarist censorship and which reappeared in the Bolshevik party, on the occasion of the conflict between the supporters of Stalin and those of Bukharin, that is, when it was a matter of preventing, by ‘party patriotism’, conflicts within the Politburo or the Central Committee from leaking out of the party to the outside world. This language conceals, behind its anodyne appearance, a hidden truth which ’any sufficiently cultivated militant1 can decipher, and it can be read, depending on its addressees, tn two different ways. See S. Cohen, Nicolas Bou khan ne. La vie dun bolchevik (Paris: Maspero, 1979).
19 Hence the failure of all those who, like so many historians of Germany
after Rosenberg, have attempted to define 'conservatism’ absolutely, without seeing that its substantia] content had to change continuously in order to conserve its relational value.
20 Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926), pp. 139-40.
21 Among the factors creating this effect of closure and the very special form of esotericism that it generates, one must include the frequently observed tendency among the party officials of political apparatuses to restrict their sphere of social interaction to other party officials,
22 Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926), p, 191 (my emphasis),
23 Failure to acknowledge what these concepts owe to history debars one from the one real possibility of freeing them from history. As tools of analysis but also of anathematization, instruments of knowledge but also instruments of power, all those concepts ending in '-ism' that the Marxological tradition eternalizes by treating them as pure conceptual constructions, free of any context and detached from any strategic function, are frequently linked to particular circumstances, tainted with premature generalizations, and marked by bitter polemics' and generated 'in divergence, in violent confrontations between the representatives of the various different currents’ (G. Haupt, ‘Les marxistes face a la question nationale: I’histoire du probleme*, in G. Haupt, M. Lowy and C, Weill, Les marxistes et la question nationale, 1848-1914 (Paris: Maspero, 1974). p. 11).
24 It is well known that Bakunin, who imposed absolute submission to the leadership in the movements he constituted (for example the National Fraternity) and who was basically a supporter of the ‘Blanquist* idea of ‘active minorities’, was led, in his polemic with Marx, to denounce authoritarianism and to exalt the spontaneity of the masses and the autonomy of the federations.
25 J, Maitron, Le mouvement anarchist? en France (Paris: Maspero, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 82-3.
26 The position (more or less central and dominant) in the party appar* aius, and the cultural capital possessed, form the source of the different and even opposed visions of revolutionary action, the future of capitalism, relations between the party and the masses, etc., which confront each other within the workers* movement. It is, for instance, certain that economism and the propensity to accentuate the detenuin-ist, objective and scientific side of Marxism is more closely associated with ‘scientists’ and ‘theoreticians* (for example, Tugan-Baranowski or the ‘economists’ in the social-democratic party) than with ‘militants* or ‘agitators*, especially if their theory of economics is self-taught (that is doubtless one of the sources of the opposition between Marx and Bakunin). The opposition between centralism and spontaneism or, to put it another way, between authoritarian socialism and libertarian socialism, seems to vary in an altogether parallel way, the propensity to scientism and economism inclining people to entrust those who possess
knowledge with the right to define, in an authoritative way, the line to be followed (the biography of Marx is traversed by these oppositions which, as he grows older, are decided in favour of the Scientist’).
27 Voting strategies also have to face the alternative between an adequate but powerless representation, on the one hand, and an imperfect but, by virtue of that very fact, powerful representation, on the other. In other words, the very logic which identifies isolation with powerlessness forces one to make compromise choices and confers a decisive advantage on stances already confirmed with regard to the original opinions.
28 h is no coincidence if opinion polls demonstrate the contradiction between two antagonistic principles of legitimacy, namely technocratic science and the democratic will, by alternating questions that appeal either to the judgement of an expert or to the wishes of the militant.
29 The violence of political polemics, and the constant recourse to ethical questioning, whose weapons are most frequently ad hominem arguments, can also be explained by the fact that mobilizing ideas owe part of their credit to the credit of the person who professes them. Furthermore, it is not merely a question of refuting them, by means of a purely logical and scientific argument, but of discrediting them by discrediting their author. By giving a free rein to ways of combating adversaries not only in their ideas but also in their person, the logic of the political field provides a highly favourable terrain for strategies of resentment: in this way, it offers to the first-comer a means of attaining, most often by a rudimentary form of the sociology of knowledge, theories or ideas which he would be incapable of submitting to scientific criticism,
30 E. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, tr, E. Palmer (London: Faber. 1973), pp. 94-100.
31 Ibid., p. 99.
32 Ibid.,p. 143.
33 The extreme caution which defines the accomplished politician, and which can be measured in particular by the high degree of euphemiza-tion of his discourse, can doubtless be explained by the extreme vulnerability of political capital, which means that the politician’s trade is a high-risk profession, especially in periods of crisis when, as can be seen in the case of de Gaulle and Petain, small differences in the dispositions and values involved may be the source of totally incompatible choices, (This is because the essence of extra-ordinary situations is to abolish the possibility of compromises, ambiguities, double-dealing, multiple memberships, etc., authorized by the ordinary recourse to multiple and partly integrated criteria of classification, by imposing a system of classification organized around a single criterion.)
34 One result of this is that the politician is a close associate of the journalist, who holds sway over the mass media and who thus has power over every kind of symbolic capital (the power of 'making or unmaking reputations' which Watergate showed in full measure).
Capable, at least in certain political situations, of controlling a politician’s or movement’s access to the status of a political force really counting for something, the journalist is, like the critic, bound to play the role of someone who points out the qualities of someone or something while being unable to do for himself what he does for others (and the attempts he may make to mobilize in favour of himself or his work the intellectual or political authorities which owe something to his action as a favourable judge are condemned in advance). Thus he is united to those he has helped to make (in proportion to his value as a favourable judge) by a relation of deep ambivalence which leads him to oscillate between admiring or servile submission and treacherous resentment, ready to speak his mind the minute the idol he has helped to produce commits some blunder
35 Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society < p. 324,
36 ‘Instead of leaders they have become bankers of men in a monopoly situation, and the least hint of competition makes them crazy with terror and despair’ (Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1922-1926, pp, 17-18). 'In many respects a union leader represents a social type similar to the banker. An experienced banker, who has a good business head and is able to foresee with some accuracy the movement of stocks and bonds, wins credit for his institution and attracts depositors and investors, A trade-union leader who can foresee the possible outcome as conflicting social forces clash, attracts the masses into his organization and becomes a banker of men' (ibid,, p. 77).
37 The opposition between the two kinds of political capital is the source of one of the fundamental differences between elected representatives in the Communist Parly and those in the Socialist Party: ‘Whereas the great majority of socialist mayors refer to the fact that they are well known public figures, whether this is due to family prestige, professional competence, or services rendered in the course of some activity or another, two thirds of the Communists consider themselves first and foremost as delegates of their party’ (D. Lacome, Les notables rouges (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1980), P 67).
38 The reader will no doubt think of the Gaullist adventure. But one could also find an equivalent in an altogether different region of the social and political space. Thus Denis Lacome observes that elected representatives in the Communist Party who enjoy a personal notoriety almost always owe their status as ‘local personalities’ to some ‘heroic act’ performed during the Second World War (ibid.. p. 69).
39 That being said, a political mission can be distinguished, even in this case, from a mere bureaucratic function by virtue of the fact that it always remains, as we have seen, a personal mission, which involves the whole person.
40 litis is not the only feature which suggests that the workers* movement fulfils for the working class a function homologous to that which the
Church fulfils for peasants and for certain fractions of the pelite bourgeoisie.
41 Here one can quote Michels: ‘The most tenaciously conservative members of the organization are, in fact, those who are most definitely dependent on it* (Michels, Political Parties, p. 124). And further on:4 A party which has a welt-filled treasury is in a position, not only to dispense with the material aid of its comparatively affluent members, and thus to prevent the acquirement by these of a preponderant influence in the party, but also to provide itself with a body of officials who are loyal and devoted because they are entirely dependent on the party for their means of subsistence1 (ibid., p. 129). Or Gramsci: ‘Today, the representatives of established interests * i.e. of the cooperatives, the employment agencies, the shared land-tenancies, the municipalities and the providential societies - although they are in a minority in the party, have the upper hand over the orators, the journalists, the teachers and the lawyers, who pursue unattainable and vacuous ideological projects’ (Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1921-1926, p.M),
42 Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2. p. 1165.
43 These analyses also apply to the case of the Church: as the political capital of the Church is objectified rn institutions and. as is the case in the recent period, in jobs controlled by the Church (in teaching, the press, youth movements, etc. ), the Church’s power tends to rest less and less on instilling doctrine and the ‘cure of souls'; in this way. it can doubtless be better measured by the number of jobs and agents indirectly controlled by the Church than by the numbers of mass-goers’ or *Easter-worshipper<
44 ‘The normal development of the trade union organization produced results that were the complete opposite of those that had been foreseen by trade unionism: the workers who had become trade union leaders completely lost their vocation as workers and their class spirit and acquired all the characteristics of the petty-bourgeois functionary, intellectually lazy, morally perverted or easy to pervert. The broader the trade union movement became, as it embraced great masses of people, the more officialdom took over' (A, Gramsci, Ecrits politiques, vol. Ill (Paris: Gallimard. 1974). pp. 21)6-7; translated from the French).
45 ‘Town halls represent the essential base of the Socialist Party’s means, men and influence ... So long as there are town halls, the party will last, will survive, whatever happens. It is easy to understand why the town halls are the socialists1 mainstay. You might even say they are the only really serious thing. Ideology, declarations of principle, plans for action, programmes, debates, discussions, dialogues, all that is important, of course ... But on the local level, the party is in power, or at least has the illusion that it is. That is why all the playing around has to stop when municipal elections come up. You have to face up to
concrete problems. You defend your territory, without any theoretical prattling, strenuously, right up to the bitter end* (P, Guidoni. Hiuoire du nouveau Parti socialist? (Paris: Tema-AcUon, 1973). p. 12(1).
46 One can observe this in the apparently most unfavourable case, that of the Bolshevik Party: ‘Behind the facade of declared political and organizational unity, known under the name of ‘democratic centralism", there was no such thing as a uniform Bolshevik political philosophy or ideology in 1917 or even several years later. On the contrary, the party included a remarkable variety of points of view: differences extended from semantic points to conflicts over rhe most basic options' (Cohen, Nicolas Boukharine, p. 19).
47 If one remembers the place that the working-class system of values grants to virtues such as integrity (‘being wholehearted', 'being cut and dried*, etc.), keeping your word, being loyal to your own people, being self-consistent (‘that’s just the way I am\ 'I’m not going to have my mind changed for me\ etc.), all of them dispositions which, in other universes, would appear as a form of rigidity or even stupidity, it becomes easy to understand how the effect of loyalty to one’s original choices - a loyalty which tends to make membership of a political party an almost hereditary property, one which is capable of surviving changes in condition within or between generations - is particularly powerful in the case of the working classes and benefits especially the parties of the left,
48 Although it includes invariant characteristics, the opposition between the party officials and ordinary supporters (or, a fortiori occasional voters) can be interpreted in very different ways depending on the parties. The key factor here is the distribution of capital and. above all perhaps, of free time among the classes. (Il is. after all. well known that if direct democracy cannot resist economic and social differentiation, this is because, through the unequal distribution of free time which results from it, administrative responsibilities are concentrated in the hands of those who have at their disposal the time necessary to fulfil these functions for little or no remuneration.) This simple principle could also help to explain the differential participation of the different professions (or even of the different levels of status within a single profession) in political or trade-union life and, more generally, in all semi-political responsibilities. Thus Max Weber notes that directors of great institutes of medicine and the natural sciences are neither particularly inclined nor suitable to occupy the post of rector, and Robert Michels points out that scientists who have taken an active part in political life 'find that their scientific faculties undergo a slow but progressive atrophy* (Michels, Political Parties^ p, 221). If one also notes that the social conditions which favour or authorize people’s refusal to give their time to politics or administration also frequently encourage a certain aristocratic or prophetic disdain for the temporal profits that these activities might promise or procure, it becomes easy
to understand some of the structural invariants of the relation between intellectuals in the different kinds of apparatus (political, administrative or other) and the 'free' intellectuals, between theologians and bishops, or between researchers and deans, rectors and scientific administrators, etc.
49 Lacome. Les notables rouges* p. 114.
50 Weber. Economy and Society* vol. 2, p. 1149.
51 Robert Michels, who notes the close correspondence between the organization of the ‘democratic party of combat’ and military organization and the numerous respects (particularly in Engels and Bebel) in which socialist terminology is indebted to military jargon, observes that leaders, who. as he remarks, are closely attached to discipline and centralization (Michels. Political Parties* pp. 189, 208), never tail to appeal to the magic of common interest and to ‘military-style arguments’ every time their position is threatened: 'They maintain, for instance, that, if only for tactical reasons, and in order to maintain a necessary cohesion in the face of the enemy, the members of the party must never refuse to repose perfect confidence in the leaders they have freely chosen for themselves’ (ibid., p. 237). But it is doubtless with Stalin that the strategy of militarization - which, as Stephen Cohen notes, is probably Stalins sole original contribution to Bolshevik thought, and thus the principal characteristic of Stalinism - finds its fulfilment: sectors of intervention become ’fronts’ (the grain front, the philosophy front, the literature front, etc.); objectives or problems are ‘fortresses’ that ‘theoretical brigades' have to ‘storm \ etc. This ‘military* thought is evidently Manichean, celebrating a group, a school of thought or a conception set up as an orthodoxy in order the belter to destroy all the others (see Cohen. Nicolas Boukharine* pp. 367-8. 389).
52 Struggles within the communist party against the authoritarianism of the leaders, and against the priority they gram to the interests of the apparatus as opposed to the interests of those they represent, can clearly only reinforce the very tendencies they combat: the leaders need only mention, or even incite, political struggle, in particular against the most immediate competitors, in order to authorize an appeal to discipline - in other words, submission to the leaders - as is imposed in lime of struggle. (In this sense, the denunciation of anti-communism is an absolute weapon in the hands of those who dominate the apparatus, since it disqualifies criticism, even objectification, and imposes unity in face of outside forces,)
53 See Cohen, Nicolas Boukharine* p. 185. An ethnographic study of practices of assembly would provide a thousand illustrations of these procedures of authoritarian imposition based on the practical impossibility of breaking, without impropriety* a unanimously cultivated unanimity (by abstaining in a show-of-hands vote, by crossing a name off a pre-established list, etc.).
9 Delegation and Political Fetishism
1 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B, Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Pen* guin. 1968). p, 227*
2 See L. Jaume, 'La Theorie de la "personne furtive" dans le Leviathan de Hobbes*, Revue frangaise de science politique. 33/6 (December 1983), pp. 1009-35,
3 See G Post, Studies in Medieval Thought. Public Law and the State. 1100-1322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); also O, von Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht [ 1868] (Graz: Akademische Dnick- und Verlagsanstalt, 1954). especially vol, 3 (1881), para* 8. ’Die Korporationsthcurie der Kanonis(en\ pp, 238-77 (1 owe this reference to Johannes-Michael Scholz, whom I would like to thank): and P. Michaud-Quantin, Universitas (Paris: Vrin, 1970).
4 L Kant. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. 2nd edn, tr* T, M, Greene and H H* Hudson (La Salle. Ill*: I960), p* 153.
5 F* W* Nietzsche, The Antichrist, tr. R J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1968), p. 167*
6 Ibid,, p. 132*
7 Ibid*, p. 133.
8 Ibid*, p* 184*
9 Ibid , p 184-5*
10 Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region
I The difficulty of conceptualizing the economy of the symbolic in adequate terms can be seen for instance by the fact that, while managing, exceptionally, to avoid the culturalist idealism that is so much the rule in these matters, and devoting attention to the strategic manipulation of ’ethnic’ characteristics. Patterson reduces the interest he sees as being at the source of these strategies to a strictly economic interest, thus neglecting everything which, in struggles over classification, obeys the tendency to maximize symbolic profit. (See O* Patter* son, ’Context and choice in ethnic allegiance: a theoretical framework and Caribbean case study', in N. Glazer and D. P* Moynihan (eds), Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). pp. 305—4 9)*)
2 E. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, tr. E. Palmer (London: Faber. 1973), pp* 311-12 (and also* on kratnein. as the power to predict, p. 332).
3 Ibid , pp 422-3*
4 Cultural difference is probably the product of a historical dialectic of cumulative differentiation. As Paul Bois has shown for peasants of the
west of France whose political choices defied electoral geography, what makes the region is not space hut time and history (P. Bois. Paysans de COuest, Des structures ^conomiques et sociales aux options politiques depuis l^poque r^volutionnaire (Paris and the Hague: Mouton, 1060), The same thing could he shown with regard to Berber-speaking regions' which, at the end of a different historical evolution, were sufficiently ‘different* from Arab-speaking ‘regions' to give rise, on the part of the colonizer, to treatment that was very different (as in the case of education, for instance), and thus bound to reinforce the differences that had served them as a pretext and to produce new ones (those differences which are linked to emigration to France, for example), and so on Even the landscapes* or 'native soil* so dear to geographers are tn fact inheritances, in other words, historical products of social determinants. (See C* Reboul, ‘Determinants sociaux de la fertility des sols’, Actes de la recherche en sciences societies < 17-18 (November 1977), pp 85-112. Following the same logic, and in opposition to the naively ‘naturalist* usage of the notion of landscape*, one would have to analyse (he contribution of social factors to the processes by which a region is turned into a desert. )
5 The adjective ‘Occitan' and. a fortiori, the noun 'Occitanie* are recent and scientific words (coined by Latinizing the langue d*oc into lingua occitana), designed to designate scientific realities which, for the time being al least, exist only on paper.
6 In fact, this language is itself a social artefact, invented at the cost of a decisive indifference to differences, which reproduces on the level of the ‘region* the arbitrary imposition of a unique norm against which regionalism rebels and which could become the real source of linguistic practices only at the price of a systematic inculcation similar to that which has imposed the generalized use of French or any other 'national* language.
7 The founders of the Republican school system explicity adopted the aim of inculcating, among other things, by the imposition of the ‘national’ language, the common system of categories of perception and evaluation capable of establishing a unified vision of the social world.
8 The link, everywhere attested, between regionalist movements and feminist (and also ecological) movements stems from the fact that, being directed against forms of symbolic domination, they presuppose ethical dispositions and cultural competences (visible in Ihe strategies employed) which tend to be encountered in the intelligentsia and in the new petite bourgeoisie (see P. Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1984), pp. 265-6, 357-63, 365-9).
9 How else can one understand, other than as so many compulsive assertions of the claim to the magical auctoritas ot the censor as described by DumdziL a claim which is part and parcel of (he
sociologist’s ambition: namely, the obligatory recitations of canonical texts on social classes (ritually contrasted with the statistical census) or. at a higher level of ambition and in a less classical style, the prophecies announcing ‘new classes" and 'new struggles* (or the inevitable decline of ‘old classes* and ‘old* struggles), two genres which occupy a large place in so-called sociological production?
10 The reasons for the spontaneous repugnance felt by ‘scientists* for ‘subjective’ criteria would deserve a long analysis: there is the naive realism which leads one to ignore everything that cannot be pointed to or touched; there is the economism which leads to a failure to recognize any determinants of social action other than those that are visibly an integral part of the material conditions of existence; there are the interests attached to the appearances of axiological neutrality* which, in more than one case, constitute all the difference between the ‘scientist* and the militant and which forbid questions and notions contrary to the proprieties from being introduced into 'scientific1 discourse; there is, last and by no means least, the scientific point of honour which leads observers - and this is probably all the more the case the less sure they are of their science and their status - to multiply the signs of a break from the representations of common sense and which condemns them to a reductive objectivism, which is perfectly incapable of including the reality of common representations in the scientific representation of reality*
11 Marxist research into the national or regional question has been blocked, probably right from the start, by the combined effect of international utopianism (supported by a naive evolutionism) and of economism, not to mention the effects of the strategic preoccupations of the moment which have often predetermined the verdicts of a ‘science’ oriented towards practice (and lacking both a true science of science and a science of the relations between practice and science). The effectiveness of these factors taken as a whole can be seen particularly clearly in the typically performative thesis of the primacy -which is so often contradicted by the facts - of class solidarities over ‘ethnic’ or national solidarities* But the inability to historicize this problem (which, to the same degree as the problem of the primacy of spatial relations or social and genealogical relations, is raised and answered in history) and the constantly asserted theorcticist pretention to designate ‘viable nations’ or to produce scientifically validated criteria of national identity (see G. Haupt. M. Lowy and C. Weill, Les marxistes et la question national? (Paris: Maspero, 1974)), seem to depend directly on the degree to which the regal intention to rule and direct serves to orient the royal science of frontiers and limits: it is no coincidence that Stalin is the author of the most dogmatic and most essentialist 'definition* of the nation*
11 Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’
1 One can imagine that one has broken away from substantialism and introduced a relational mode of thought when one is in fact studying real interactions and exchanges. (In fact, practical solidarities, like practical rivalries, linked to direct contact and interaction - proximity -may be an obstacle to the construction of solidarities based on proximity in the theoretical space.)
2 Statistical investigation can grasp this relation of power only in the form of properties, sometimes legally guaranteed by tales of economic property, cultural property (educational qualifications) or social property (titles of nobility). Titis explains the link between empirical research into classes and theories of social structure as a system of stratification described in the language of distance from the instruments of appropriation ('distance from the focus of cultural values’, in Halbwachs's terms), that Marx himself uses when he speaks of the ‘mass deprived of property1,
3 In certain social universes, the principles of division which, like the volume and structure of capital, determine the structure of the social space, are reinforced by principles of division that are relatively independent of economic or cultural properties, such as ethnic or religious affiliation. The distribution of agents appears in this case as the product of the intersection of two spaces which are partly independent of each other, since an ethnic group situated in an inferior position in the space of ethnic groups can occupy positions in all the fields, even the highest, but with rates of representation that are inferior to those of an ethnic group situated in a superior position. Each ethnic group can thus be characterized by the social positions of its members, by the rate of dispersion of these positions and finally by its degree of social integration despite dispersion, (Ethnic solidarity may have the effect of ensuring a form of collective mobility,)
4 The same would be true for the relations between geographical space and social space. These two spaces never coincide completely; however, a number of the differences which are usually associated with the effect of geographical space, for example with the opposition between the centre and the periphery, are the effect of distance in social space, i.e. of the unequal distribution of the different kinds of capital in geographical space.
5 General Pershing’s remark on landing in France in 1917 (tr,).
6 This sense of realities in no way implies a class consciousness in the social-psychological sense, which is the least unreal sense one may give to this word, i.e. an explicit representation of the position occupied in the social structure, and of the collective interests that are correlative with it; even less does it imply a theory of social classes, i.e., not only a system of classification based on explicit and logically coherent princi-
pies but also a rigorous knowledge of the mechanisms responsible for the distributions* In fact* to put an end to the metaphysics of the 'awakening of consciousness* and ‘class consciousness*, a sort of revolutionary cogito of the collective consciousness of a personified entity, we need only examine the social and economic conditions which make it possible for this form of distance from the present moment of practice to exist, a distance presupposed by the conception and formulation of a more or less elaborate representation of a collective future. (This is what I sketched out in my analysis of the relations between temporal consciousness, including the aptitude for rational economic calculation, and political consciousness among Algerian workers; see P. Bourdieu, Algeria I960, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).)
7 In this case, the production of common sense consists, essentially, in the constant re-interpretation of the common stock of sacred discourses (proverbs, sayings, gnomic poems, etc.), in ‘purifying the language of the tribe'. By appropriating the words in which everything recognized by a group is deposited, one gains a considerable advantage in struggles for power. This is clear in struggles for religious authority: the most precious word is the sacred word and. as Gershom Scholem observes, it is because mystical opposition to established religion has to re-appropriate established symbols in order to achieve recognition that it is ‘recuperated* by the tradition- As stakes in different struggles, the words of the political lexicon carry a polemical charge in the form of the polysemy which is the (race of the antagonistic usages I hat different groups have made, or make, of these words. One of the most universal strategies resorted to by the professionals of symbolic power - poets in archaic societies, prophets, politicians - thus consists in putting common sense on your side by appropriating the words that are invested with value by the whole group because they are the repositories of its belief.
8 As Leo Spitzer has clearly shown with regard to Don Quixote, in which the same person is given several names,polyonomaxia - the plurality of names, nicknames and sobriquets attributed to the same agent or the same institution - together with the polysemy of words or expressions designating the fundamental values of different groups, is the visible trace of struggles for the power to name, struggles which occur in all social universes (see L. Spitzer, ’Perspecuvisni in Don Quijote*, in Linguistics and Literary History (New York: Russel and Russel, 1948)).
9 F. Kafka, The Trial (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953). p. 197.
10 The directory of trades and occupations is the realized form of that social neutralism which cancels out the differences constitutive of the social space by treating uniformly all positions as professions, at the cost of a constant shift from (he definitional point of view (titles and qualifications, nature of the activity, etc.). When people in the Anglo-
Saxon world call doctors ‘professionals’,, they are emphasizing the fact that these agents are defined by their profession, which is for them an essential attribute: on the other hand, someone who hitches carriages together is hardly defined at all by this attribute, which designates him only in so far as he performs a certain kind of work. As for the teacher who has passed the agrtgarion exam, he or she is qualified, like the hitcher of carriages, by a task, an activity, but also by a qualification and title, like the doctor
11 Entering a profession with a title is increasingly dependent on the possession of an educational qualification, and there is a close relation between educational qualifications and professional remuneration- The situation is quite different in untitled occupations in which agents performing the same work may have very different educational qualifications.
12 Those who possess the same title tend to constitute themselves as a group and to provide themselves with permanent organizations (the association of doctors, associations of alumni, etc,) aimed at ensuring group cohesion (with periodical reunions, etc,) and at promoting the group's material and symbolic interests,
13 The most perfect illustration of this analysis can be found, thanks to the fine work done by Robert Darnion, in the history of that son of cultural revolution that the dominated figures within the emergent intellectual field - people such as Bnssot, Mercier. Desmoulins. Hebert, Marat, and so many others - carried out within the Revolutionary movement (destruction of the Academies, dispersion of the salons, suppression of pensions, abolition of privileges). This cultural revolution sprang from the status of ‘cultural pariahs* and its first priority was to attack the symbolic foundations of power, contributing, by its ‘politico-pornography* and its deliberately scatological lampoons, to the task of ‘delegitimation* which is doubtless one of the fundamental dimensions of revolutionary radicalism, (See R. Darnton, ‘The high Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-revolutionary France’, Past and Present. 51 (1971), pp. 81-115; on the exemplary case of Marat, who, as people often forget, was also - or initially - a bad physicist, see also C. C. Gillispie. Science and Polity in France ar the End of the Old Regime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 19 80). pp, 2 90-330.)
14 For a similar analysis of the relation between rhe kinship group ‘on paper* and the kinship group in practice as ‘will and representation*, see P. Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and The Logic of Practice, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990),
Index
Note; Page references in italics indicate illustrative material.
absolutism 52,240 accent
and classification 221
and linguistic disposition 17 and social position 18, 264 n.28 acceptability 48,55,76-7,81-2,86 access
toeducation 64,277n.4
to legitimate language 56,97,109, 138 to political action 172-3,177, 197 to political representation 188
acquisition of legitimate language 18,61-2.81-2
action collective 127 field 14-17 and interest 16,127 political 127,171,190-1
adolescents, and resistance to language dominance 51-2,94-7
Adorno, T.W. 271 n. 12 adroitness 80 alienation 156-7, 204-5,219,249 alliances 245 anthropology, and dominance of linguistics 33-4,37
apparatchiks 209,213-14,216,217,219 apparatus
and delegates 216-19
and political field 196-7, 199-202,249 aristocracy 120-2,241
labour 245-6 aristocratism
academic 143-4,151
political 203
art, popular 213-14
asceticism 122-3
ascription, and achievement 124
assimilation, language 57,63-4,95
attentuation 84
attribution 121,124-5,269 n.2
Austin, J. L. 3,8-9. 73-4,107-15,125, 129
authenticity/inauthenticity 143, 149-50, 155
authoritarianism, and revolution 187, 202,285 n.52
authority
delegated 9,106,107-16,115
of discourse 152,155,190-1,223,227, 248
and institution 75-6,109-11
linguistic 1,9,41,57-61,69-71,73-6, 129
and naming 239-41
of politician 190-1, 194, 211-12
religious 290 n.7
symbolic H,106,221-2,266 n. 19
Axelos, Kostas 157
Bachelard, Gaston 146, 269 n.3
Bakhtin, Mikhail 40,88
Bakunin, Mikhail 174, 203, 280 nn.24,26
Bally, C. 79
Barthes, Roland 4
Bauche, Henri 93
Bayet,M. 207-8
Bearnais dialect 19,68-9, 78
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