those of his mandators. In order to explain this. 1 have to make a detour through a rather more complicated analysis. There is a political space, there is a religious space, etc.: 1 call each of these a field, that is. an autonomous universe, a kind of arena in which people play a game which has certain rules, rules which are different from those of the game that is played in the adjacent space. The people who are involved in the game have, as such, specific interests, interests which are not defined by their mandators. The political space has a left and a right, it has its dominant and its dominated agents: the social space also has its dominant and its dominated, the rich and the poor; and these two spaces correspond. There is a homology between them. This means that, grosso modo. the person who in this game occupies a position on the left. a. is related to the person occupying a position on the right, b, in the same way that the person occupying a position on the left A is related to the person occupying a position on the right B in the other game. When a wants to attack b to settle certain specific scores, he helps himself, but in helping himself he also helps 4. This structural coincidence of the specific interests of the delegates and the interests of the mandators is the basis of the miracle of a sincere and successful ministry. The people who serve the interests of their mandators well are those who serve their own interests well by serving the others; it is to their advantage and it is important that it should be so for the system to work.
If we are obliged to talk of interests, it is because this notion has a radically disruptive function: it destroys the ideology of disinterest, which is the professional ideology of clerics of every kind. People who are in the religious, intellectual or political game have specific interests which, however different they may be from the interests of the managing director who is playing in the economic field, are none the less vital. All these symbolic interests - not losing face, not losing your constituency, shutting up your opponent, triumphing over an adverse trend, being made chairperson, etc. - are such that, by serving them and obeying them, it often happens that agents serve their mandators. (There are. of course, cases of discrepancy, in which the interests of the delegates come into conflict with the interests of the mandators.) In any case, what happens far more frequently than one might expect if everything happened randomly, or in accordance with the logic of the purely statistical aggregation of individual interests, is that, because of homology, agents who are content to carry out the duties imposed by their position in the game serve, eo ipso and in addition, the people they use to serve
themselves and whom they are supposedly serving. The effect of metonymy makes possible a universalization of the particular interests of the apparatchik, the attribution of the interests of the delegate to the mandators he is supposed to be representing. The principal merit of this model is that it explains the fact that the delegates are not cynical (or far less and far less often than one might believe), that they are absorbed in the game and that they really believe in what they are doing.
There are many cases like that, in which the mandators and the delegates, customers and producers, are in a relation of structural homology. It is true of the intellectual field and of the field of journalism: the journalist from the left-wing Nouvel Observateur is to the journalist of the right-wing Figaro what the reader of the Nouvel Observateur is to the reader of the Figaro-, and so when he enjoys settling accounts with the Figaro journalist, he also gives pleasure to the reader of the Nouvel Observateur even without trying to please that reader directly. It is a very simple mechanism, but one which contradicts the ordinary way that we represent ideological action as self-interested service or servility, as self-interested subservience to a function. The Figaro journalist is not a boot-licking hack writer for the bishops or the lapdog of capitalism, etc.: he is first and foremost a journalist who, from time to time, is obsessed by left-wing journals such as the Nouvel Observateur or Liberation.
The Delegates ofthe Apparatus
