Итог полностью

social structure and especially the division of labour, in both theory and practice, converts social properties into natural properties.) The truly ideological effect consists precisely in the imposition of political systems of classification beneath the legitimate appearance of philosophical. religious, legal (etc.) taxonomies. Symbolic systems owe their distinctive power to the fact that the relations of power expressed through them are manifested only in the misrecognizable form of relations of meaning (displacement).

) Symbolic power - as a power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world and. thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself, an almost magical power which enables one to obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force (whether physical or economic), by virtue of the specific effect of mobilization - is a power that can be exercised only if it is recognized, that is, misrecognized as arbitrary. This means that symbolic power does not reside in ‘symbolic systems' in the form of an 'illocutionary force’ but that it is defined in and through a given relation between those who exercise power and those who submit to it, i.e. in the very structure of the field in which belief is produced and reproduced.⁷ What creates the power of words and slogans, a pow'er capable of maintaining or subverting the social order, is the belief in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them. And words alone cannot create this belief.

Symbolic power, a subordinate power, is a transformed, i.e. misrecognizable, transfigured and legitimated form of the other forms of power. One can transcend the alternative of energetic models, which describe social relations as relations of force, and cybernetic models, which turn them into relations of communication. only by describing the laws of transformation which govem the transmutation of the different kinds of capital into symbolic capital, and in particular the labour of dissimulation and transfiguration (in a word, of euphemization) which secures a real transubstantiation of the relations of power by rendering recognizable and misrecognizable the violence they objectively contain and thus by transforming them into symbolic power, capable of producing real effects without any apparent expenditure of energy.⁸

Elements for a Theory of the Political Field

To the Memory of Georges Haupt

The silence that weighs on the conditions which force citizens, all the more brutally the more economically and culturally deprived they are, to face the alternative of having to abdicate their rights by abstaining from voting or being dispossessed by the fact that they delegate their power, bears the same relation to ‘political science’ as the silence that weighs on the economic and cultural conditions of ‘rational’ economic behaviour bears to economics. If it is going to avoid naturalizing the social mechanisms which produce and reproduce the gap between politically 'active' agents and politically ‘passive’ agents¹ and setting up as eternal laws historical regularities that are valid within the limits of a given state of the structure of the distribution of capital, and cultural capital in particular, any analysis of the political struggle must be based on the social and economic determinants of the division of political labour.²

The political held, understood both as a field of forces and as a field of struggles aimed at transforming the relation of forces which confers on this field its structure at any given moment, is not an imperium in imperio: the effects of external necessity make their presence felt in it by virtue, above all, of the relation which those who are represented, through their differential distance from the instruments of political production, have with those who represent them, and of the relation that the latter, through their own dispositions, have with their organizations. The unequal distribution of the instruments of production of an explicitly formulated representation of the social world means that political life can be described in terms

of the logic of supply and demand; the political held is the site in which, through the competition between the agents involved in it. political products, issues, programmes, analyses, commentaries, concepts and events are created - products between which ordinary citizens, reduced to the status of 'consumers', have to choose, thereby running a risk of misunderstanding that is all the greater the further they are from the place of production.

The Monopoly of the Professionals