The dominant class is the site of a struggle over the hierarchy of the principles of hierarchization. Dominant class fractions, whose power rests on economic capital, aim to impose the legitimacy of their domination either through their own symbolic production, or through the intermediary of conservative ideologues, who never really serve the interests of the dominant class except us u side-effect and who always threaten to appropriate for their own benefit the power to define the social world that they hold by delegation. The dominated fraction (clerics or 'intellectuals’ and ‘artists’, depending on the period) always tends to set the specific capital, to which it owes its position, at the top of the hierarchy of the principles of hierarchization.
Sources and Effects of Symbolic Power
As instruments of domination that are structuring because they are structured, the ideological systems that specialists produce in and for the struggle over the monopoly of legitimate ideological production reproduce in a misrecognizable form, through the intermediary of the homology between the field of ideological production and the field of social classes, the structure of the field of social classes.
‘Symbolic systems’ are fundamentally distinguishable according to whether they are produced and thereby appropriated by the group as a whole or. on the contrary, produced by a body of specialists and, more precisely, by a relatively autonomous field of production and circulation. The history of the transformation of myth into religion (ideology) cannot be separated from the history of the constitution of a body of specialized producers of religious rites and discourse, i.e. from the development of the division of religious labour, which is itself a dimension of the development of the division of social labour, and thus of the division into classes. This religious division leads,
among other consequences, to members of the laity being dispossessed of the instruments of symbolic production.5
Ideologies owe their structure and their most specific functions to the social conditions of their production and circulation, that is. first, to the functions they perform for specialists competing for a monopoly over the competence under consideration (religious, artistic, etc); and second, and as a by-product of this, to the functions they perform for non-specialists. We must remember that ideologies are always doubly determined, that they owe their most specific characteristics not only to the interests of the classes or class fractions they express (the function of sociodicy). but also to the specific interests of those who produce them and to the specific logic of the field of production (commonly transfigured into the form of an ideology of ‘creation’ and of the ‘creative artist’). This provides us with a means of avoiding the brutal reduction of ideological products to the interests of the classes which they serve (this ‘short-circuit’ effect is common in Marxist criticism) without succumbing to the idealist illusion which consists in treating ideological productions as self-sufficient, self-created totalities amenable to a pure and purely internal analysis (semiology)?
The properly ideological function of the field of ideological production is performed almost automatically on the basis of the structural homology between the field of ideological production and the field of class struggle. The homology between the two fields means that struggles over the specific objects of the autonomous field automatically produce euphemized forms of the economic and political struggles between classes: it is in the correspondence of structure to structure that the properly ideological function of the dominant discourse is performed. This discourse is a structured and structuring medium tending to impose an apprehension of the established order as natural (orthodoxy) through the disguised (and thus misrecognized) imposition of systems of classification and of mental structures that are objectively adjusted to social structures. The fact that the correspondence can be effected only from system to system conceals, both from the eyes of the producers themselves and from the eyes of non-professionals. the fact that internal systems of classification reproduce overt political taxonomies in misrecogniz-able form, as well as the fact that the specific axiomatics of each specialized field is the transformed form (in conformity with the laws specific to the field) of the fundamental principles of the division of labour. (For example, (he university system of classification, which mobilizes in misrecognizable form the objective divisions of the
