Итог полностью

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

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

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

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

The Anticipation of Profits

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