Among the most effective and best concealed censorships are all those which consist in excluding certain agents from communication by excluding them from the groups which speak or the places which allow one to speak with authority. In order to explain what may or may not be said in a group, one has to take into account not only the symbolic relations of power which become established within it and which deprive certain individuals (e.g. women) of the possibility of speaking or which oblige them to conquer that right through force, but also the laws of group formation themselves (e.g. the logic of conscious or unconscious exclusion) which function like a prior censorship.
Symbolic productions therefore owe their most specific properties to the social conditions of their production and, more precisely, to the position of the producer in the field of production, which governs, through various forms of mediation, not only the expressive interest, and the form and the force of the censorship which is imposed on it, but also the competence which allows this interest to be satisfied within the limits of these constraints. The dialectical relation which is established between the expressive interest and censorship prevents us from distinguishing in the opus operatum between form and content, that is, between what is said and the manner of saying it or even the manner of hearing it. By imposing form, the censorship exercised by the structure of the field determines the form - which ail formalist analyses attempt to detach from social determinisms - and, necessarily, the content, which is inseparable from its appropriate expression and therefore literally unthinkable outside of the known forms and recognized norms. Censorship also determines the form of reception: to produce a philosophical discourse of a duly formal nature, that is, bearing the set of agreed signs (a certain use of syntax, vocabulary, references, etc.) by which philosophical discourse is recognized and through which it secures recognition as philosophical,2 is to produce a product which demands to be received with due formality, that is, with due respect for the forms it has adopted or, as we see in literature, for its nature as form. Legitimate works thus exercise a violence which protects them from the violence which would be needed if we were to perceive the expressive interest which they express only in forms which deny it: the histories of art. literature and philosophy testify to the efficacy of strategies of the imposition of form through which consecrated works impose the terms of their own perception: and ‘methods’ like structural or semiological analysis, which purport to study structures independently of functions, are no exception to this rule.
It follows that a work is tied to a particular field no less by its form than by its content: to imagine what Heidegger would have said in another form, such as the form of philosophical discourse employed in Germany in 1890. or the form assumed nowadays by political science articles from Yale or Harvard, or any other form, is to imagine an impossible Heidegger (e.g. a philosophical ‘vagrant1, or an oppositional immigrant in 1933), or a field of production that was no less impossible in Germany at the time when Heidegger was active. The form through which symbolic productions share most directly in the social conditions of their production is also the means by which their most specific social effect is exercised: specifically
symbolic violence can only be exercised by the person who exercises it. and endured by the person who endures it, in a form which results in its misrecognition as such, in other words, which results in its recognition as legitimate.
The Rhetoric of the False Break
