Итог полностью

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-