Those who dominate the party, and who have a close interest in the existence and persistence of this institution and in the specific profits it secures for them, find, in the freedom they gain through their monopoly of the production and imposition of instituted political interests, the possibility of imposing their own interests as the interests of those whom they represent. And yet nothing demonstrates unambiguously that the interests of the representatives, thus universalized and ratified by plebiscite, do not coincide with the unexpressed interests of the individuals represented, since the former hold a monopoly of the instruments of production of the political (that is, politically expressed and recognized) interests of the latter - nothing except that form of active abstention that is rooted in revolt against a twofold impotence: an impotence with regard to politics and all the purely serial actions it proposes, and an impotence with regard to the political apparatuses. Apoliticism, which sometimes takes the form of anti-parliamentarianism and which can be channelled into various forms of Bonapartism, Boulangism and Gaullism, is fundamentally a protest against the monopoly of the politicians, and represents the political equivalent of what was in previous periods the religious revolt against the monopoly of the clerics.
Competence, Stakes and Specific Interests
In politics as in art. the dispossession of the majority of the people is a correlate, or even a consequence, of the concentration of the
specifically political means of production in the hands of professionals. who can enter into the distinctive political game with some chance of success only on condition that they possess a specific competence. Indeed, nothing is less natural than the mode of thought and action demanded by participation in the political field: like the religious, artistic or scientific habitus, the habitus of the politician depends on a special training. This includes in the first instance, of course, the entire apprenticeship necessary to acquire the corpus of specific kinds of knowledge (theories, problematics, concepts, historical traditions, economic data, etc.) produced and accumulated by the political work of the professionals of the present or the past, or to acquire the more general skills such as the mastery of a certain kind of language and of a certain political rhetoric - that of the popular orator, indispensable when it comes to cultivating one’s relations with non-professionals, or that of the debater, which is necessary in relations between fellow professionals. But it is also and above all that sort of initiation, with its ordeals and its rites of passage, which tends to inculcate the practical mastery of the immanent logic of the political field and to impose a de facto submission to the values, hierarchies and censorship mechanisms inherent in this field, or in the specific form that the constraints and control mechanisms of the field assume within each political party. Riis means that, to gain a complete understanding of the political discourses that are on offer in the market at a given moment and which, when considered together, define the universe of what can be said and thought politically, as opposed to what is rejected as unsayable and unthinkable, we would have to analyse the entire process of production of the professionals of ideological production, starting with the way they are marked out. according to the frequently implicit definition of the desired competence, which designates them for these functions, then considering the genera! or specific education which prepares them to assume these functions, and finally examining the action of continuous normalization imposed on them, with their own complicity, by the older members of their group, in particular when, newly elected, they gain access to a political organization into which they might bring a certain outspokenness and an independence of manners which might be prejudicial to the rules of the game.
The dispossession that goes together with the concentration of the means of production of the instruments of production of discourse or actions socially recognized as political has continued to increase as the field of ideological production has increased its autonomy with
