It is true that the definition of the symbolic relation of power which is constitutive of the market can be the subject of negotiation and that the market can be manipulated, within certain limits, by a metadiscourse concerning the conditions of use of discourse. This includes, for example, the expressions which are used to introduce or excuse speech which is too free or shocking ('with your permission’, ‘if I may say so', ‘if you’ll pardon the expression’, 'with all due respect’, etc.) or those which reinforce, through explicit articulation, the candour enjoyed on a particular market (‘off the record’, ‘strictly between ourselves’, etc.). But it goes without saying that the capacity to manipulate is greater the more capital one possesses, as is shown by the strategies of condescension. It is also true that the unification of the market is never so complete as to prevent dominated individuals from finding, in the space provided by private life, among friends, markets where the laws of price formation which apply to more formal markets are suspended.2 In these private exchanges between homogeneous partners, the ‘illegitimate’ linguistic products are judged according to criteria which, since they are adjusted to their principles of production, free them from the necessarily comparative logic of distinction and of value. Despite this, the formal law, which is thus provisionally suspended rather than truly transgressed.3 remains valid, and it re-imposes itself on dominated individuals once they leave the unregulated areas where they can be outspoken (and where they can spend all their lives), as is shown by the fact that it governs the production of their spokespersons as soon as they are placed in a formal situation. It would be quite mistaken, therefore, to see a ‘true’ popular language in the use of language which obtains in this oasis of freedom, where one has licence (a typical ‘dictionary word’) because one is among friends and not forced to ‘watch oneself. It is also true that popular competence, when confronted with a formal market, like the one constituted by a linguistic survey or investigation (unless specific precautions are taken), is, as it were, annihilated. The reality of linguistic legitimacy consists precisely in the fact that dominated individuals are always under the potential jurisdiction of formal law, even when they spend all their lives, like the thief described by Weber, beyond its reach, so that when placed in a formal situation they are doomed to silence or to the broken discourse which
linguistic investigation also often records.
This means that the productions of the same linguistic habitus vary according to the market and that any linguistic observation records a discourse which is the product of the relationship between a linguistic competence and the particular market constituted by the linguistic investigation. This market has a high degree of tension since the laws of price formation which govern it are related to those of the academic market. All attempts to pin down the variables that could explain the variations thus recorded run the risk of overlooking the effect of the investigative situation itself, a hidden variable which is doubtless the source of the differential weight of different variables. Those who. wishing to break with linguistic abstractions, try to establish statistically the social factors of linguistic competence (measured by this or that phonological, lexical or syntactic index) are only going half-way: they are in fact forgetting that the different factors measured in a particular market situation - that created by the inquiry - could, in a different situation, have very different relative weights, and that what is important therefore is to determine how the explanatory weights of the different factors which determine competence vary according to the market situation (which would require the development of a proper experimental project).
Symbolic Caph-al: A Recognized Power
