The fact that every political field tends to be organized around the opposition between two poles (which, like political parties in the American system, may themselves be constituted by real fields, organized in accordance with analogous distinctions) should not lead us to forget that the recurrent properties of doctrines or groups situated in positions that are polar opposites, ‘the party in favour of change' and the ‘party of law and order’, ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’, ‘left’ and ‘right’, are invariants which can be realized only in and through the relation to a given field. In this way the properties of political parties recorded by realist typologies can be immediately understood if they are related to the relative power of the two poles, to the distance which separates them and which determines the properties of their occupants, parties or politicians (and, in particular, their tendency to diverge towards the extremes or converge on the centre), and which therefore also determines the probability of the central, intermediary position - the neutral zone -being occupied. The field as a whole is defined as a system of deviations on different levels and nothing, either in the institutions or in the agents, the acts or the discourses they produce, has meaning except relationally, by virtue of the interplay of oppositions and distinctions. It is in this way. for instance, that the opposition between the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ can be maintained in a structure transformed at the cost of a partial exchange of roles between those who occupy those positions at two different moments (or in two different places): rationalism and the belief in progress and science which, between the wars, in France as well as in Germany, were a characteristic of the left (whereas the nationalist and conservative right succumbed instead to irrationalism and to the cult of nature), have become today, in these two countries, the heart of the new conservative creed, based on confidence in progress, technical knowledge and technocracy, while the left finds itself falling back on ideological themes or on practices which used to belong to the opposite pole, such as the (ecological) cult of nature, regionalism and a certain nationalism, the denunciation of the myth of absolute progress, the defence of the ‘person’, all of which are steeped in irrationalism.
The acts of theatricalization through which groups exhibit themselves (and, above all. to themselves) in ceremonies, festivals (like the Panathe-naea), processions, parades, etc. constitute the elementary form of
objectification and. at the same time, the conscious realization of the principles of division according to which these groups are objectively organized and through which the perception that they have of themselves is organized,
It is in this respect that representative institutions (parliaments, general assemblies, councils, cortes, etc,) no doubt underlie the most fundamental representations, mental or objective, of the nation and its structure. As a ceremonial which makes visible the ranks and numbers (and which can. for this reason, become a topic of discussion, as was the case with the opening of the General Assembly in France), the spatial projection realized by the two-dimensional schema highlights the hierarchy of the groups represented (expressed by their ranking from the top down, or from right to left) and, in some cases, their numerical weight; and. more importantly, it highlights the very' existence of the groups that are represented and named. (In fact, it seems that the idea of represent-ing the numerical weight of groups - as exemplified by some engravings representing the ‘election table' for the General Assembly, with double representation accorded to the Third Estate, on 27 December 1788 -presupposes that the idea of number and numerical representativeness (cf head counts) has begun to compete with the idea of rank.
