The censorship effect exercised by any relatively tense market is seen in the fact that the utterances that are exchanged in the public places reserved in practice (al least at certain times) for the adult males of the lower classes, like certain cafes, are highly ritualized and subject to strict rules: one does not go to the pub only to drink, but also to participate actively in a collective pastime capable of giving the participants a feeling of freedom from daily necessities, and of producing an atmosphere of social euphoria and economic freedom which, obviously, the consumption of alcohol can only enhance, One goes there to laugh and to make others laugh, and everyone must do his best to contribute to the exchange of comments and jokes, or, at the very least, make his contribution Io the fun by underlining the success of others in adding his laughter, and his shouts of approval (*Oh, What a lad!'). The possession of a talent for being ‘the life and soul of the party7, capable of incarnating, at the cost of a conscious and constant labour of research and accumulation, the ideal of the 'funny guy’ which crowns an approved form of sociability, is a very precious form of capital. Thus a good pub landlord finds, in the mastery of the expressive conventions suitable for this market (jokes, funny stories, and puns that his central and permanent position allows him to acquire and exhibit), and also in his special knowledge of both the rules of the game and the peculiarities of each of the players (names, nicknames, habits, oddities, specialities and talents from which he can profit), the necessary resources for exciting, sustaining, and also containing, by prodding, reminding and discretely calling them to order, the exchanges capable of producing the effervescent social atmosphere which his clients come
for and to which they must themselves contribute.1'' The quality of the conversation offered depends on the quality of the participants, which itself depends on the quality of the conversation, therefore on the person who is at the centre of it and who must know how to deny the commercial relation in which he is implicated by asserting his will and ability to enlist as an ordinary participant in the round of exchanges - with ‘the landlord's round’ or games for the regulars -and in this way contribute to the suspension of the economic necessities and social constraints which one expects from the collective worship of the good life.2”
One can understand why the discourse which obtains on this market gives the appearance of total freedom and absolute naturalness only to those who are unaware of its rules or principles. Thus the eloquence which, viewed from the outside, is apprehended as a kind of unbridled zest, is in its way neither more nor less free than the improvisations of academic eloquence; it overlooks neither the search for effect, nor the attention to the public and its reactions, nor the rhetorical strategies aimed at currying favour or gaining its goodwill: it rests on tried and tested schemes of invention and expression which are also capable, however, of giving those who do not possess them the feeling that they are witnessing brilliant manifestations of analytical finesse or of psychological or political lucidity. Through the enormous redundancy tolerated by its rhetoric, through the space it allows for the repetition of the forms and ritual phrases which are the obligatory manifestations of ‘good manners’, through the systematic resort to concrete images of a known world, through the obsessional obstinacy it employs in reasserting - to the point of explicitly renewing them - the fundamental values of the group, this discourse expresses and reinforces a profoundly stable and rigid view of the world. In this system of self-evident truths which are untiringly reasserted and collectively guaranteed, and which assigns an essential identity, and therefore a place and rank, to each class of agents, the representation of the division of labour between the sexes occupies a central position; perhaps this is because the cult of virility, i.e. of harshness, of physical strength and surly coarseness, established as a chosen refusal of effeminate refinement, is one of the most effective ways of struggling against the cultural inferiority which unites all those who feel deprived of cultural capital, whether or not they might be rich in economic capital, like shopkeepers.21
At the opposite extreme in the class of free markets, the market for exchanges between friends, and especially between women,