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,
