We can compare political life to a theatre only on the condition that we envisage the relation between party and class, between the struggle of political organizations and class struggle, as a truly symbolic relation between a signifier and a signified, or, better, between representatives providing a representation and the agents, actions and situations that are represented. The congruence between signifier and signified, between the representative and the repre* sented. doubtless results less from the conscious quest to meet the demands of the clientele, or from the mechanical constraint exerted by external pressures, than from the homology between the structure of the political field and the structure of the world represented, between the class struggle and the sublimated form of this struggle which is played out in the political field.15 It is this homology which means that, by pursuing the satisfaction of the specific interests imposed on them by competition within the field, professionals satisfy in addition the interests of those who delegate them: the struggles of the representatives can be described as a political mimesis of the struggles of the groups or classes whose champions they claim to he. But, on the other hand, this homology also means that, in adopting stances that are most in conformity with the interests of those whom they represent, the professionals are still
pursuing - without necessarily admitting it to themselves - the satisfaction of their own interests, as these are assigned to them by the structure of positions and oppositions constitutive of the internal space of the political field.
The obligatory devotion to the interests of those who are represented leads one to forget about the interests of the representatives. In other words, the (apparent) relation between representatives and represented, the latter being imagined as a determining cause (•pressure groups’, etc.) or final cause (‘causes' to be defended, interests to be 'served’, etc.), conceals the relation of competition between the representatives and, thereby, the relation of orchestration (or of pre-established harmony) between the representatives and the represented. Max Weber is doubtless right to note, with a healthy materialist bluntness, that there are two kinds of professional politicians, those who live ‘off politics and those who live ‘for' politics.16 To be compctely rigorous, we would have to say, rather, that one can live off politics only by living for politics. For it is the relation between professionals which defines the particular kind of interest in politics that determines each category of representatives to devote themselves to politics and, thereby, to those they represent. More precisely, the relation that the professional sellers of political services (politicians, political journalists, etc.) maintain with their clients is always mediated, and more or less completely determined, by the relation they maintain with their competitors.17 They serve the interests of their clients in so far (and only in so far) as they also serve themselves while serving others, that is, all the more precisely when their position in the structure of the political field coincides more precisely with the position of those they represent in the structure of the social field. (The closeness of the correspondence between the two spaces doubtless depends to a great extent on the intensity of the competition, that is, first and foremost on the number of parties or tendencies, a number which determines the diversity and renewal of products on offer by forcing, for instance, the different political parties to modify their programmes to win new clienteles.) As a consequence, the political discourses produced by professionals are always doubly determined, and affected by a duplicity which is not in the least intentional since it results from the duality of fields of reference and from the necessity of serving at one and the same time the esoteric aims of internal struggles and the exoteric aims of external struggles.18
A System of Deviations
