Итог полностью

> As instruments of knowledge and communication, 'symbolic structures' can exercise a structuring power only because they themselves are structured. Symbolic power is a power of constructing reality, and one which tends to establish a gnoseological order: the immediate meaning of the world (and in particular of the social world) depends on what Durkheim calls logical conformism, that is. ‘a homogeneous conception of time, space, number and cause, one which makes it possible for different intellects to reach agreement'. ^ Durkheim - and, after him, Radcliffe-Brown, who makes ‘social solidarity’ dependent on the sharing of a symbolic system - has the merit of designating the social function (in the sense of structural-functionalism) of symbolism in an explicit way^it is an authentic political function which cannot be reduced to the structuralists’ function of communication. Symbols are the instruments par excellence of ‘social integration’: as instruments of knowledge and communication (cf. Durkheim’s analysis of the festivity), they make it possible for there to be a consensus on the meaning of the social world, a consensus which contributes fundamentally to the reproduction of the social order. ‘Logical’ integration is the precondition of ‘moral’ integration.³

Symbolic Productions as Instruments of Domination

The Marxist tradition lays great emphasis on the political functions of ‘symbolic systems’, to the detriment of their logical structure and gnoseological function (although Engels talks of ‘systematic express-

ion’ in relation to law). This functionalism (which has nothing in common with the structural-functionalism of Durkheim or Radcliffe-Brown) explains symbolic productions by relating them to the interests of the dominant class. Unlike myth, which is a collective and collectively appropriated product, ideologies serve particular interests which they tend to present as universal interests, shared by the group as a whole. The dominant culture contributes to the real integration of the dominant class (by facilitating the communication between all its members and by distinguishing them from other classes); it also contributes to the fictitious integration of society as a whole, and thus to the apathy (false consciousness) of the dominated classes; and finally, it contributes to the legitimation of the established order by establishing distinctions (hierarchies) and legitimating these distinctions. The dominant culture produces this ideological effect by concealing the function of division beneath the function of communication: the culture which unifies (the medium of communication) is also the culture which separates (the instrument of distinction) and which legitimates distinctions by forcing all other cultures (designated as sub-cultures) to define themselves by their distance from the dominant culture.

Second synthesis

In criticizing all forms of the 'interactionist' error which consists in reducing relations of power to relations of communication, it is not enough to note that relations of communication are always, inseparably, power relations which, in form and content, depend on the material or symbolic power accumulated by the agents (or institutions) involved in these relations and which, like the gift or the potlatch, can enable symbolic power to be accumulated. It is as structured and structuring instruments of communication and knowledge that "symbolic systems' fulfil their political function, as instruments which help to ensure that one class dominates another (symbolic violence) by bringing their own distinctive power to bear on the relations of power which underlie them and thus by contributing. in Weber’s terms, to the "domestication of the dominated’.

The different classes and class fractions are engaged in a symbolic struggle properly speaking, one aimed at imposing the definition of the social world that is best suited to their interests. The field of ideological stances thus reproduces in transfigured form the field of social positions.⁴ These classes can engage in this struggle either directly, in the symbolic conflicts of everyday life, or else by proxy,

via the struggle between the different specialists in symbolic production (full-time producers), a struggle over the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence (cf. Weber), that is, of the power to impose (or even to inculcate) the arbitrary instruments of knowledge and expression (taxonomies) of social reality - but instruments whose arbitrary nature is not realized as such. The field of symbolic production is a microcosm of the symbolic struggle between classes; it is by serving their own interests in the struggle within the field of production (and only to this extent) that producers serve the interests of groups outside the field of production.