In Homer this skeptron is the attribute of the king, of heralds, messengers, judges, and all persons who, whether of their own nature or because of a particular occasion, are invested with authority. The skeptron is passed to the orator before he begins his speech so that he may speak with authority.’3'' The abundance of microphones, cameras, journalists and photographers, is, like the Homericskeptron described by Benveniste. the visible manifestation of the hearing granted to the orator, of his credit, of the social importance of his acts and his words. Photography - which, by recording, eternalizes - has the effect, here as elsewhere, of solemnizing the exemplary acts of the political ritual. It follows that the intervention of this instrument of perception and objectification designates the situations (official openings, laying the first stone, processions, etc. I in which politicians arc being represented, are acting in order to be seen acting, and are representing themselves as good representatives. Thus a number of actions which seem to be an end in themselves and whose voluntarist gratuity might seem out of place on the political terrain (as with so many demonstrations or petitions that have no effect) do not. for all that, lack all function: by demonstrating the demonstrators and, above all, the leaders of the demonstration, the demonstration demonstrates the existence of the group capable of demonstrating its existence and of leaders who can demonstrate its existence - thereby justifying their existence.
The Kinds of Political Capital
'A banker of men in a monopoly system’?6 as Gramsci says of trade union officials, the politician owes his specific authority in the political field - what ordinary language calls his ‘political clout’ - to the power of mobilization that he has at his disposal, either personally or else by delegation, as the representative of an organization (a party or trade union) which itself holds political capital accumulated in the course of previous struggles, first and foremost in the form of jobs - inside or outside the apparatus - and of militants attached to those jobs. ’5The personal capital of ‘fame’ and ‘popularity’ based on the fact of being known and recognized in person (of having a ’name’, ‘renown’, etc.), and also on the possession of a certain number of specific qualifications which are the condition of the acquisition and conservation of a ‘good reputation’, is often the product of the reconversion of the capital of fame accumulated in other domains: in particular, in professions which, like the liberal professions, ensure that you have some free time and which presuppose a certain cultural capital and, in the case of lawyers, a professional mastery of eloquence. While the professional capital of the notable is the product of a slow and continuous accumulation which in general takes a whole life time, the personal capital which can be called heroic or prophetic, and which Max Weber has in mind when he talks of ‘charisma’, is the product of an inaugural action, performed in a crisis situation, in the vacuum and silence left by institutions and apparatuses: the prophetic action of giving meaning, which founds and legitimates itself, retrospectively, by the confirmation that its own success confers on the language of crisis and on the initial accumulation of the power of mobilization which its success has brought about.’8 ^
At the other end of the scale from the personal capital which disappears with the person of its bearer (although it may give rise to quarrels over the inheritance), the delegated capital of political authority is, like that of the priest, the teacher and, more generally, the official the product of a limited and provisional transfer (but one that is renewable, sometimes for life) of a capital held and controlled by the institution and by it alone:39 it is the party which, through the action of its officers and its militants, has, in the course of history, accumulated a symbolic capital of recognition and loyalties and which has given itself, for and through political struggle, a permanent organization of party officials (permanents) capable of mobilizing
