Regionalist discourse is a performative discourse which aims to impose as legitimate a new definition of the frontiers and to get people to know and recognize the region that is thus delimited in opposition to the dominant definition, which is misrecognized as such and thus recognized and legitimate, and which does not acknowledge that new region. The act of categorization, when it manages to achieve recognition or when it is exercised by a recognized authority, exercises by itself a certain power: ‘ethnic’ or ‘regional' categories, like categories of kinship, institute a reality by using the power of revelation and construction exercised by objectification in discourse. The fact of calling ‘Occitan’5 the language spoken by those who are called ‘Occitans’ because they speak that language (a language that nobody speaks, properly speaking, because it is merely the sum of a very great number of different dialects), and of calling the region (in the sense of physical space) in which this language is spoken ‘Occitanie’. thus claiming to make it exist as a ‘region’ or as a ’nation' (with the historically constituted implications that these notions have at the moment under consideration), is no ineffectual fiction.6 The act of social magic which consists in trying to bring into existence the thing named may succeed if the person who performs it is capable of gaining recognition through his speech for the power which that speech is appropriating for itself by a provisional or definitive usurpation, that of imposing a new vision and a new division of the social world: regere fines, regere sacra, to consecrate a new limit. The effectiveness of the performative discourse which claims to bring about what it asserts in the very act of asserting it is directly proportional to the authority of the person doing the asserting: the formula 'I authorize you to go’ is eo ipso an authonzation only if the person uttering it is authorized to authorize, has the authority to authorize. But the cognition effect brought about by the fact of objectification in discourse does not depend only on the recognition granted to the person who utters that discourse: it also depends on the degree to which the discourse which announces to the group its identity is grounded in the objectivity of the group to which it is addressed, that is. in the recognition and the belief
granted to it by the members of this group, as well as in the economic or cultural properties they share in common, since it is only in accordance with a given principle of pertinence that the relation between these properties can appear. The power over the group that is to be brought into existence as a group is, inseparably, a power of creating the group by imposing on it common principles of vision and division, and thus a unique vision of its identity and an identical vision of its unity.7
The fact that struggles over identity - that being-perceived which exists fundamentally through recognition by other people - concern the imposition of perceptions and categories of perception helps to explain the decisive place which, like the strategy of the manifesto in artistic movements, the dialectic of manifestation or demonstration holds in all regiunalist or nationalist movements? The almost magical power of words comes from the fact that the objectification and de facto officialization brought about by the public act of naming, in front of everyone, has the effect of freeing the particularity (which lies at the source of all sense of identity) from the unlhought. and even unthinkable. (This is what happens when an unnameable ‘patois' is asserted as a language capable of being spoken publicly.) And officialization finds its fulfilment in demon-stration, the typically magical (which does not mean ineffectual) act through which the practical group - virtual, ignored, denied, or repressed - makes itself visible and manifest, for other groups and for itself, and attests to its existence as a group that is known and recognized, laying a claim to institutionalization. The social world is also will and representation, and to exist socially means also to be perceived, and perceived as distinct.
