'Become what you are': that is the principle behind the performative magic of all acts of institution. The essence assigned through naming and investiture is, literally, a fatum (this is also and especially true of injunctions, sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit, which members of the family group address continually to the young child, varying in intention and intensity according to social class and. within the latter, according to sex and rank within the kinship unit). All social destinies, positive or negative, by consecration or stigma, are equally fatal - by which I mean mortal - because they enclose those whom they characterize within the limits that are assigned to them and that they are made to recognize. The self-respecting heir will behave like an heir and, according to Marx’s expression, will be inherited by the heritage: that is, invested in the things and appropriated by the things which he has himself appropriated. This, of course, is barring accidents. There are exceptions: the unworthy heir, the priest who abandons his calling, the nobleman who demeans himself and the boi rgeois who turns common. Nevertheless, the limit, the sacred boc idary remains clear. Owen Lattimore used to say that the Great W ,1 of China was meant not only to stop foreigners entering China but also to stop Chinese leaving it. That is also the function of all magical boundaries (whether the boundary between masculine and feminine, or between those selected and those rejected by the educational system): to stop those who are inside, on the right side of the line, from leaving, demeaning or down-grading themselves. Pareto used to say that elites are destined to 'waste away’ when they cease to believe in themselves, when they lose their morale and their morality, and begin to cross the line in the wrong direction. This is also one of the functions of the act of institution: to discourage permanently any attempt to cross the line, to transgress, desert, or quit.
All aristocracies must expend considerable energy to convince the elect of the need to accept the sacrifices that are implied by privilege, or by the acquisition of durable dispositions which are a condition for the preservation of privilege. When the party of the dominant is the party of culture, i.e, almost invariably the party of asceticism, of tension and contention, the work of institution must reckon with the temptation presented by nature, or by the counter-culture. (I would like to add in parenthesis that, in speaking of the work of institution and by making the more or less painful inculcation of durable
