Итог полностью

Without repeating here the analysis of the social conditions constitutive of the social and technical competence demanded by active participation in ‘politics’,³ we must at least remember that the effects created by the morphological obstacles that the size of political units and the number of citizens put in the way of any form of direct government are. so to speak, reinforced by the effects of economic and cultural dispossession: the concentration of political capital in the hands of a small number of people is something that is prevented with greater difficulty - and thus all the more likely to happen - the more completely ordinary individuals are divested of the material and cultural instruments necessary for them to participate actively in politics, that is, above all, leisure time and cultural capital.⁴

Because the products offered by the political field are instruments for perceiving and expressing the social world (or, if you like, principles of di-vision), the distribution of opinions in a given population depends on the state of the instruments of perception and expression available and on the access that different groups have to these instruments. This means that the political field in fact produces an effect of censorship by limiting the universe of political discourse, and thereby the universe of what is politically thinkable, to the finite space of discourses capable of being produced or reproduced within the limits of the political problematic, understood as a space of stances effectively adopted within the field - i.e. stances that are socio-logically possible given the laws that determine entry into the field. The boundary between what is politically sayable or unsayable, thinkable or unthinkable, for a class of non-professionals is determined by the relation between the expressive interests of that class and the capacity to express these interests, a capacity which is secured by its position in the relations of cultural and thus political production. ‘An intention’, observes Wittgenstein, ‘is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If the technique of

the game of chess did not exist, 1 could not intend to play a game of chess. Tn so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question.’⁵ A political intention can be constituted only in one’s relation to a given state of the political game and, more precisely, of the universe of the techniques of action and expression it offers at any given moment. In this and other cases, moving from the implicit to the explicit, from one's subjective impression to objective expression, to public manifestation in the form of a discourse or public act, constitutes in itself an act of institution and thereby represents a form of officialization and legitimation: it is no coincidence that, as Benveniste observes, all the words relating to the law have an etymological root meaning to say. And the institution, understood as that which is already instituted, already made explicit, creates at one and the same time an effect of public care and lawfulness and an effect of closure and dispossession.

Given the fact that, at least outside periods of crisis, the production of politically effective and legitimate forms of perception and expression is the monopoly of professionals, and is thus subjected to the constraints and limitations inherent in the functioning of the political field, it is evident that the effects of the kind of propertybased electoral logic (which in fact controls access to the choice between the political products on offer) are intensified by the effects of the oligopolistic logic which governs the supply of products. This monopoly of production is left in the hands of a body of professionals, in other words, of a small number of units of production, themselves supervised by professionals; these constraints weigh heavily on the choices made by consumers, who are all the more dedicated to an unquestioned loyalty to recognized brands and to an unconditional delegating of power to their representatives the more they lack any social competence for politics and any of their own instruments of production of political discourse or acts. The market of politics is doubtless one of the least free markets that exist.