The social sciences deal with pre-named, pre-classified realities which bear proper nouns and common nouns, titles, signs and acronyms. Al the risk of unwittingly assuming responsibility for the acts of constitution of whose logic and necessity they are unaware, the social sciences must take as their object of study the social operations of naming and the rites of institution through which they are accomplished. But on a deeper level, they must examine the part played by words in the construction of social reality and the contribution which the struggle over classifications, a dimension of all class struggles, makes to the constitution of classes - classes defined in terms of age, sex or social position, but also clans, tribes, ethnic groups or nations.
So far as the social world is concerned, the neo-Kantian theory, which gives language and, more generally, representations a specifically symbolic efficacy in the construction of reality, is perfectly justified. By structuring the perception which social agents have of the social world, the act of naming helps to establish the structure of this world, and does so all the more significantly the more widely it is recognized, i.e. authorized. There is no social agent who does not aspire, as far as his circumstances permit, to have the power to name and to create the world through naming: gossip, slander, lies, insults, commendations, criticisms, arguments and praises are all daily and petty manifestations of the solemn and collective acts of naming, be they celebrations or condemnations, which are performed by generally recognized authorities. In contrast to common nouns which have a common sense, the consensus or homologein of an entire group, and which, in short, involve the official act of naming or nomination through which a recognized delegate bestows an official title (like an academic qualification), the ‘qualifying nouns’ ('idiot', ‘bastard’) which feature in insult have a very limited symbolic efficacy, as idios iogos, and involve only the person who offers them.1 But what both have in common is what may be called a performative or magical intention. Insults, like naming, belong to a class of more or less socially based acts of institution and destitution through which an individual, acting in his own name or in the name of a group that is more or less important in terms of its size and social significance,
indicates to someone that he possesses such and such property, and indicates to him at the time that he must conduct himself in accordance with the social essence which is thereby assigned to him.
In short, social science must include in its theory of the social world a theory of the theory effect which, by helping to impose a more or less authorized way of seeing the social world, helps to construct the reality of that world. The word or, a fortiori, the dictum, the proverb and all the stereotyped or ritual forms of expression are programmes of perception and different, more or less ritualized strategies for the symbolic struggles of everyday life, just like the great collective rituals of naming or nomination - or, more clearly still, the clashes between the visions and previsions of specifically political struggles - imply a certain claim to symbolic authority as the socially recognized power to impose a certain vision of the social world, i.e. of the divisions of the social world. In the struggle to impose the legitimate vision, in which science itself is inevitably caught up, agents possess power in proportion to their symbolic capital, i.e, in proportion to the recognition they receive from a group. The authority that underlies the performative efficacy of discourse is a percipi, a being-known, which allows a percipere to be imposed, or, more precisely, which allows the consensus concerning the meaning of the social world which grounds common sense to be imposed officially, i.e. in front of everyone and in the name of everyone.
