Итог полностью

outside the field. (The entire difference between utopianism and realism is to be found here.) In this way. the tendencies to sectarian splits are continually being counterbalanced by the necessities of competition which mean that, in order to triumph in their internal struggles, professionals have to appeal to forces which are not all, and not totally, internal (unlike the situation in the scientific or artistic field, in which appealing to non-professionals discredits you). Avant-garde splinter groups can bring into the political field the logic characteristic of the intellectual field only because they have no base: they thus have no constraints upon them, but they also have no real power. Functioning as sects that have come into being as breakaway groups, they arc dedicated to scissiparity and founded on a renunciation of any claim to universality; a loss of power and effectiveness is the price they have to pay for being able to affirm the full technical and ethical qualification that defines the ecclesia pura (the Puritans), the universe of the ‘pure’ and the ‘purists’, capable of demonstrating their excellence as political virtuosi in their adherence to the purest and most radical traditions (‘permanent revolution', 'the dictatorship of the proletariat', etc.). However, if the party is to avoid the risk of excluding itself from the political game and from the ambition of participating, if not in power, at least in the power of influencing the way power is distributed, it cannot sacrifice itself to such exclusive virtues; and. just as the Church takes on as its mission the diffusion of its institutional grace to all the faithful, be they just or unjust, and the submission of sinners without distinction to the discipline of God's commands, the party aims at winning over to its cause the greatest number of those who resist it (this is the case when the Communist Party addresses itself, in an electoral period, to 'all progressive republicans’). And the party does not hesitate, so as to broaden its base and attract the clientele of the competing parties, to compromise with the ‘purity’ of its parly line and to play more or less consciously on the ambiguities of its programme. A result of this is that, among the struggles which beset every party, one of the most constant is that between two groups of people: on the one hand, those who denounce the compromises necessary to increase the strength of the party (and thus of those who dominate it), but to the detriment of its originality, in other words, al the cost of abandoning its distinctive and original (in both senses of the word: new and fundamental) positions - those people, that is, who thus advocate a return to basics, to a restoration of the original purity; and. on the other hand, those people who are inclined to seek a strengthening of the party, in other words, a broadening of its clientele, even if this is

at the cost of compromises and concessions or even of a methodical interference with everything that is too ‘exclusive' in the original stances adopted by the party. The former group draws the party towards the logic of the intellectual field which, when pushed to the limit, can deprive it of all temporal power; the latter group has on its side the logic of Realpolitik which is the condition of entry to political reality.²⁷

The political field is thus the site of a competition for power which is carried out by means of a competition for the control of non-prufessionals or, more precisely, for the monopoly of the right to speak and act in the name of some or all of the non-professionals. The spokesperson appropriates not only the words of (he group of non-professionals, that is. most of the time, its silence, but also the very power of that group, which he helps to produce by lending it a voice recognized as legitimate in the political field. The power of the ideas that he proposes is measured not. as in the domain of science, by their truth-value (even if they owe part of their power to his capacity to convince people that he is in possession of the truth), but by the power of mobilization that they contain, in other words, by the power of the group that recognizes them, even if only hy its silence or the absence of any refutation - a power that the group can demonstrate by registering its different voices or assembling them all together in the same space. It is for this reason that the field of politics - in which one would seek in vain for any authority capable of legitimating the chances of legitimacy and any basis of competence other than class interests, properly understood - always swings between two criteria of validation: science and the plebiscite?