The usurpation which consists in the fact of asserting that one is capable of speaking in the name of is what authorizes a move from the indicative to the imperative. If 1, Pierre Bourdieu, a single and isolated individual, speak only for myself, say ‘you must do this or that, overthrow the government or refuse Pershing missiles', who will follow me? But if I am placed in statutory conditions such that I may appear as speaking ‘in the name of the masses', or, a fortiori, ‘in the name of the masses and of Science, of scientific socialism’, that changes everything. The move from the indicative to the imperative - Durkheim’s followers had sensed this very clearly when they tried to ground a morality on the science of mores - presupposes a move from the individual to the collective, the principle of all recognized or recognizable constraint. The oracle effect, a limiting form of performativity, is what enables the authorized spokesperson to take his authority from the group which authorizes him in order to exercise recognized constraint, symbolic violence, on each of the isolated members of the group. If 1 am an incarnation of the collective, of the group, and if this group is the group to which you belong, which defines you, which gives you an identity, which means you are really a teacher, really a Protestant, really a Catholic, etc., you really have no choice but to obey. The oracle effect is the exploitation of the transcendence of the group in relation to the single individual, a transcendence that comes about through an individual who in effect is to some extent the group, if only because nobody can stand up and say ‘you are not the group’ unless they establish another group and get themselves recognized as delegate of that new group.
This paradox of the monopolization of collective truth is the source of every effect of symbolic imposition: J am the group, in other words, collective constraint, the constraint of the collective over each of its members. I am an incarnation of the collective and, by virtue of that fact, 1 am the one who manipulates the group in the very name of the group. 1 take my authority from the group, and that group authorizes me to impose constraints on the group. (The violence that is part and parcel of the oracle effect can never be felt more strongly than in assembly situations, typically ecclesial situations, in which the normally authorized spokespersons and, in a crisis situation, the professional spokespersons who are authorized, can speak in the name of the entire group assembled. This violence
makes its presence felt in the quasi-physical impossibility of producing a divergent, dissident speech against the enforced unanimity which is produced by the monopoly of speech and the techniques for creating unanimity, such as votes taken by a show of hands or by the acclamation of manipulated motions.)
We would have to carry out a linguistic analysis of that double-dealing (or dealing with the ego and its double) and of the rhetorical strategies through which the structural bad faith of the spokesperson is expressed, which includes, for instance, the permanent shift from / to we. In the symbolic domain, takeovers by force appear as takeovers of form - and it is only when this is realized that one can turn linguistic analysis into an instrument of political critique, and rhetoric into a science of symbolic powers. When an apparatchik wants to make a symbolic takeover by force, he shifts from saying T to saying ‘we'. He does not say: 'I think that you sociologists should study the workers,' he says: ‘We think that you should ...' or ‘the needs of society require that. . . ’ So the *r of the delegate, the particular interest of the delegate, must conceal itself behind the professed interest of the group, and the delegate must ‘universalize his particular interest’, as Marx said, so as to get it passed off as the interests of the group. More generally, the use of an abstract language, of the big abstract words of political rhetoric, the verbalism of abstract virtue which, as Hegel clearly saw. engenders fanaticism and Jacobin terrorism (try reading the dreadful phraseology of Robespierre's correspondence), all of that participates in the logic of double-dealing, of the ego and its double which underlies the subjectively and objectively legitimate usurpation of the delegate.
