dispositions an essential component of the social action of institution. 1 have merely tried to attribute to the word 'institution’ its full significance. Having stressed, with Poincare, the importance of the choice of words, it may he useful to suggest that one has only to assemble the different senses of instituere and of insritutio to form an idea of an inaugural act of constitution, of foundation, indeed of the invention which, through education, leads to durable dispositions, habits and usages.) The universally adopted strategy for effectively denouncing the temptation to demean oneself is to naturalize difference, to turn it into a second nature through inculcation and incorporation in the form of the habitus. This explains the role given to ascetic practices, even physical suffering, in all the negative rites which are destined, as Durkheim said, to produce people who are out of the ordinary, in a word, distinguished. Il also explains the role of the training which is universally imposed on the future members of the ‘elite’ (the learning of dead languages, the experience of prolonged isolation, etc.). All groups entrust the body, treated like a kind of memory, with their most precious possessions, and the use made of the suffering inflicted on the body by rites of initiation in all societies is understandable if one realizes, as numerous psychological experiments have shown, that people's adherence to an institution is directly proportional to the severity and painfulness of the rites of initiation. The work of inculcation through which the lasting imposition of the arbitrary limit is achieved can seek to naturalize the decisive breaks that constitute an arbitrary cultural limit - those expressed in fundamental oppositions like masculine/feminine. etc. -in the form of a sense of limits, which inclines some people to maintain their rank and distance and others to know their place and be happy with what they are. to be what they have to be. thus depriving them of the very sense of deprivation. It can also tend to inculcate durable dispositions like class tastes which, being the principle behind the 'choice' of outward signs expressing social position, like clothes, but also bodily hexis or language, make all social agents the carriers of distinctive signs, of which the signs of distinction are but a sub-class, capable of uniting and separating people as surely as explicit prohibitions and barriers - I am thinking here of class endogamy. More convincingly than the external signs which adorn the body (like decorations, uniforms, army stripes, insignia, etc.), (he incorporated signs (such as manners, ways of speaking - accents -. ways of walking or standing - gait, posture, bearing-, table manners, etc. and taste) which underlie the production of all practices aimed, intentionally or not. both at signifying
and at signifying social position through the interplay of distinctive differences, arc destined to function as so many calls to order, by virtue of which those who might have forgotten (or forgotten themselves) are reminded of the position assigned to them by the institution.
The power of the categorical judgement of attribution, realized through the institution, is so great that it is capable of resisting all practical refutations. Kantorowicz’s analysis of the king's two bodies is a familiar one: the invested king outlives the biological king, who is mortal, prone to illness, imbecility or death. Similarly, if the student at an elite institution like the Ecole Polytechnique show* that he is useless at mathematics, it will be assumed that he is doing it on purpose or that he has invested his intellectual energies in other, more important things. But what best illustrates the autonomy of ascription in relation to achievement (one can. for once, refer to Talcott Parsons), of social being in relation to doing, is undoubtedly the possibility of resorting to the strategies of condescension which allow one to push the denial of social definition to the limit while still being perceived through it. Strategies of condescension are those symbolic transgressions of limits which provide, at one and the same time, the benefits that result from conformity to a social definition and the benefits that result from transgression. An example would be the aristocrat who patted his coachman on the arse and of whom they would have said. 'He’s a straightforward chap,’ meaning straightforward for an aristocrat, i.e. for a man who is essentially superior, and whose essence did not in principle entail that kind of behaviour.
