understood (in certain cases it may even fail to be understood without losing its power), and that it exercises its specific effect only when it is recognized as such. This recognition - whether accompanied by understanding or not - is granted, in the manner of something taken for granted, only under certain conditions, namely, those which define legitimate usage: it must be uttered by the person legitimately licensed to do so. the holder of the skeptron, known and recognized as being able and enabled to produce this particular class of discourse: a priest, a teacher, a poet, etc.; it must be uttered in a legitimate situation, that is. in front of legitimate receivers (one cannot read a piece of Dadaist poetry at a Cabinet meeting); finally, it must be enunciated according to the legitimate forms (syntactic, phonetic, etc.). What one might call the liturgical conditions, namely, the set of prescriptions which govern the form of the public manifestation of authority, like ceremonial etiquette, the code of gestures and officially prescribed rites, are clearly only an element, albeit the most visible one, in a system of conditions of which the most important and indispensable are those which produce the disposition towards recognition in the sense of misrecognition and belief, that is, the delegation of authority which confers its authority on authorized discourse. By focusing exclusively on the formal conditions for the effectiveness of ritual, one overlooks the fact that the ritual conditions that must be fulfilled in order for ritual to function and for the sacrament to be both valid and effective are never sufficient as long as the conditions which produce the recognition of this ritual are not met: the language of authority never governs without the collaboration of those it governs, without the help of the social mechanisms capable of producing this complicity, based on misrecognition, which is the basis of all authority. In order to gauge the magnitude of the error in Austin's and all other strictly formafist analyses of symbolic systems, it suffices to show that the language of authority is only the limiting case of the legitimate language, whose authority does not reside, as the racism of social class would have it, in the set of prosodic and articulatory variations which define distinguished pronunciation, or in the complexity of the syntax or the richness of the vocabulary, in other words in the intrinsic properties of discourse itself, but rather in the social conditions of production and reproduction of the distribution between the classes of the knowledge and recognition of the legitimate language.
These analyses find quasi-experimental verification in the concomitant occurrence of the crisis in institutionalized religion and the
'I would therefore add a plea in favour of the sacraments (8J that we relinquish so cheaply (holy water in the church entrance, consecrated branches of box trees on Palm Sundays, which they are beginning to do away with...), devotions to rhe Sacred Heart (more or less killed off), to rhe Holy Virgin, the "graves" on Maundy Thursday, difficult - indeed impossible - to reconcile with rhe evening service; the Gregorian chants, of course, with the many admirable texts of which we are now deprived; even the Rogations of vestervear, etc.' (p. 60).
'Very recently, in a religious house where young people from all over France with a "priestly ambition" were gathered, the priest used neither ornaments nor sacred vessels [8] to celebrate mass. Dressed in civilian clothes [7], he used an ordinary table [2}, ordinary bread and wine (8/, and ordinary utensils [8]' (p. 18.1).
