What Is a People?

POPULAR. Adj. (Populeir, XII^e; lat. popularis). 1: What belongs to the people, emanates from the people. Popular government. “The Greek politics that lived in the popular government” (Montesquieu). See Democratic. Popular democracies. Popular demonstration, insurrection. Popular front: the union of leftist powers (communists, socialists, etc.). The popular masses. 2: Belonging to the people. Popular belief, traditions. Popular good sense.—Ling. What is created and used by the people and rarely used among the bourgeoisie and cultivated classes. Popular word, expression. Popular Latin. Popular expression, locution, turn of phrase. For the use of the people (and emanating from them or not). Popular novel, show. Popular songs. Popular art (See Folklore).—(Individuals) Who address themselves to the people. “You must not be successful as a popular speaker” (Maurois). Who is recruited among the people, what the people frequent. Popular circles, classes. “They found a new formula: to work for a downright popular clientele” (Romains). Popular origins. See Plebeian. Popular balls. Popular soups. 3: (1559) What pleases the people, in the greatest number. Henri IV was a popular king. Popular measure. “Hoffmann is popular in France, more popular than in Germany” (Gautier). 4: Noun (Vx). The popular, the people. ANT. (of 3:) Unpopular.

As slang or “nonconventional French” dictionaries clearly reveal, the so-called popular lexicon is nothing other than the whole of the words that are excluded from the dictionaries of legitimate language or that only appear there accompanied by negative “usage marks”: fam., familiar, “that is to say commonly used in ordinary spoken language and in casual written language”; pop., popular, “that is to say commonly used among the urban popular or working classes but reproved or avoided by the cultivated bourgeoisie.”² In order to define with utmost rigor this “popular” or “nonconventional” language, better referred to as pop. henceforth, lest we forget the social conditions of its production, we must thus specify what is meant by the expression “popular or working classes” and what is to be understood by “commonly used.”

Like the variable geometry concepts of the “popular classes,” the “people,” or the “workers,” which owe their political virtues to the fact that their referents can be expanded as desired—in election periods for example—to include rural populations, managerial staff, and small business owners or, on the contrary, restricted to include just industrial workers or even just steelworkers (and their appointed representatives), the notion of “popular or working classes,” with its indeterminate extension, owes its trickster virtues, in scholarly production, to the fact that anyone can, as in a projective test, unconsciously manipulate that extension to adjust it to one’s own interests, prejudices, or social fantasies. That is why, when it is a matter of designating the speakers of the “popular language,” everyone agrees to consider the “lowlife,” given the idea that the “toughs” play a determinant role in the production and circulation of slang, resolutely excluded from legitimate dictionaries. We must be sure to include as well the indigenous workers of urban stock that the word “popular” almost automatically evokes whereas rural workers will automatically be excluded with little more justification (no doubt because they are known to be destined for the usage mark of region., regional). But the question will not even arise—and this is one of the most precious functions of these catchall notions—if the small business owners must be excluded or not, especially the café owners whom the populist imagination will undoubtedly exclude, whereas, for the culture as for the language, they are indisputably closer to the workers than the middle-level management and employees. And it is certain in any case that the fantasy, nourished more on Marcel Carné films than on observation, that most often directs the folklorist recollection of nostalgic renegades toward the “purest” of the most “authentic” representatives of the “people” excludes without consideration all immigrants, Spanish or Portuguese, Algerian or Moroccan, Malian or Senegalese, whom we know occupy a more important place in the population of industrial workers than the imaginary proletariat.³

It would be sufficient to submit to similar examination the populations that supposedly produce or consume so-called popular culture to find the same confusion in the partial coherence that the implicit definitions almost always conceal: the “lowlife,” which plays a central role in the case of “popular language,” would be excluded here, as well as the lumpenproletariat, while the elimination of rural workers would no longer be a given, even though the coexistence of the inevitable urban working class and the rural populations is not without difficulties. In the case of “popular art,” as an examination of this other objectification of “popular” would clearly show, the “people,” those “muses of the popular arts and traditions” at least until recent times, are reduced to peasants and rural artisans. And what does “popular medicine” or “popular religion” mean? In these cases, we can no more do without the rural populations, men or women, than we can do without the “toughs” in the case of “popular language.”

In their efforts to treat it as a “language”—that is to say with all the rigor ordinarily reserved for the legitimate language—all those who have tried to describe or to write in the pop., linguists and writers alike, have condemned themselves to producing artifacts bearing almost no relationship to the ordinary speech that the speakers most estranged from the legitimate language use in their internal exchanges.⁴ So it is that, in order to conform to the dominant dictionary model whereby only words attested “with appreciable frequency and over long durations” are included, the authors of non-conventional French dictionaries rely exclusively on texts.⁵ And thus by making a selection within a selection, they subject the speech in question to an essential alteration with regard to the frequencies that make all the difference between the kinds of speech and the more or less strained markets.⁶ They forget, among other things, that to write speech, like that of the working classes, that is without literary intention (and not to transcribe it or record it), it is necessary to be outside of situations and even of the social condition in which it is spoken, and that interest in the “coinages,” or even the very fact of selective recollection, excluding all that is encountered in the standard language as well, overturns the structure of frequencies.

If, despite their incoherences and their uncertainties, and also thanks to them, the notions belonging to the family of the “popular” can prove so useful, and even in scholarly discourse, it is because they are deeply entrenched in the network of confused representations that social subjects engender, for the needs of ordinary knowledge of the social world, and for which the logic is that of mythical reason. The vision of the social world, and above all the perception of others, of their corporal hexis, the form and volume of their bodies, and especially of their faces, and also their voices, their pronunciation and vocabulary, is organized in effect according to interconnected and partially independent oppositions, about which one can get an idea by making an inventory of the expressive resources collected and preserved in the language, especially in the system of adjective pairs that users of the legitimate language employ to classify others and to judge their quality, and in which the term designating the properties attributed to the dominants always represents positive value.⁷

If the social sciences must make a privileged place for the science of ordinary knowledge of the social world, it is not only in critical intention and in view of ridding the thinking about the social world of all the presuppositions that it tends to accept through ordinary words and the objects that they construct (“popular language,” “slang,” “patois,” and so on). It is also that this practical knowledge, against which the science must be constructed—and first of all by endeavoring to objectify it—forms an integral part of the very world that the science aims to know: it contributes to the making of that world by contributing to the vision that agents can have of it and by thus orienting their actions, in particular those that aim at conserving or transforming it. That is why a rigorous science of the spontaneous sociolinguistics that agents put to work to anticipate the reactions of others and to impose the representation that they want to give of themselves would permit, among other things, an understanding of a good part of what, in linguistic practice, is the object or the product of conscious intervention, individual or collective, spontaneous or institutionalized: as for example all the corrections that speakers impose on themselves or that are imposed on them—at home or at school—on the basis of practical knowledge, partially registered in the language itself (accent pointu—“northern accent,” marseillais—“Marseilles accent,” faubourien—“Paris working-class accent,” and so on), of the correspondences between linguistic differences and social differences and beginning with a more or less conscious pinpointing of linguistic traits marked or remarked upon as imperfect or incorrect (notably by the form, “Say…, don’t say…” in all linguistic customaries) or, alternatively, as distinguishing and refined.⁸

The notion of “popular language” is one of the products of the application of the dualist taxonomies that structure the social world according to categories of high and low (“low” language), delicate or coarse (coarse words) or crude (crude jokes), distinguished or vulgar, rare or common, formal or casual, in short, categories of culture and nature (don’t we speak of slang as langue verte—literally “green language” and “raw words”?). These are the mythical categories that introduce a distinct cleavage in the continuum of kinds of speech, ignoring, for example, all the overlapping between the casual speech of the dominant speakers (fam.) and the strained speech of the dominated speakers (that observers like Bauche or Frei list as pop.) and especially the extreme diversity in the kinds of speech that are universally consigned to the negative category of “popular language.”⁹

But through a sort of paradoxical reduplication, which is one of the standard effects of symbolic domination, the dominated themselves, or at least certain fractions of them, can apply to their own social universe principles of division (such as strong vs. weak or submissive; intelligent vs. sensitive or sensual; hard vs. soft or flexible; straight or direct vs. crooked, sly, or false; and so on) that reproduce in their order the fundamental structure of the system of dominant oppositions in matters of language.¹⁰ This representation of the social world adopts the essence of the dominant vision through the opposition between virility and docility, strength and weakness, real men (the durs, the mecs) and the other feminine or effeminate beings doomed to submission and contempt.¹¹ Slang, which has been made into the “popular language” par excellence, is the product of this reduplication that brings to bear on “popular language” itself the principles of division of which it is a product. There is a vague feeling that linguistic conformity conceals a form of acknowledgment and submission, enough to call into doubt the virility of those men who conform.¹² Added to that is the active pursuit of a distinctive deviation that constitutes style. And together these lead to refusing to “overdo it,” which leads to rejecting the most strongly marked aspects of the dominant speech, and notably the pronunciations and the most strained syntactical forms, as well as simultaneously pursuing expressiveness, based on the transgression of dominant censures—notably in matters of sexuality—and with the intention of distinguishing oneself from the ordinary forms of expression.¹³ The transgression of official norms, linguistic or otherwise, is directed at least as much against the “ordinary” dominated who submit to them as it is against the dominant or, a fortiori, against the domination as such. Linguistic license is part of the work of representation and of presenting what the “toughs,” especially adolescents, must provide to impose on others and themselves the image of the mec who has seen it all and is ready for anything and who refuses to give in to feelings or submit to the weaknesses of feminine sensitivity. And in fact, even if it can, in divulging itself, encounter the proclivity of all the dominated to return the distinction, that is to say the specific difference, to the common genre, that is to say to the universality of the biological, through irony, sarcasm, or parody, the systematic degradation of emotional, moral, or aesthetic values, where all the analysts have recognized the deep “intention” of the slang lexicon, is first of all an affirmation of aristocratism.

As a distinguished form—even in the eyes of some of the dominants—of “vulgar” language, slang is the product of a search for distinction but dominated and condemned by this fact to produce paradoxical effects, which we cannot understand when we want to contain them within the alternative of resistance or submission that controls ordinary thinking on “popular language” (or “popular culture”). Indeed it is enough to exit the logic of the mythical vision to perceive the counterproductive effects that are inherent to any dominated position: when the pursuit of the dominated for distinction leads them to affirm what distinguishes them, that is to say, whatever it is in the name of which they are dominated and constituted as vulgar, according to a logic analogical to the one that leads stigmatized groups to claim the stigmata as fundamental to their identity, is it necessary to speak of resistance? And when, alternatively, they work to lose what marks them as vulgar, and to appropriate what would allow them to be assimilated, is it necessary to speak of submission?

It is obviously among men and, within that group, among the youngest and—at present and especially potentially—the least integrated into the economic and social order, like the adolescents coming from immigrant families, that we encounter the most marked refusal of the submission and docility that adopting legitimate ways of speaking implies. The moral code of force that finds its fulfillment in the cult of violence and semi-suicidal games, motorcycles, alcohol, or hard drugs, where the relationship to the future for those who have nothing to look forward to in the future is affirmed, is no doubt only one of the ways of making a virtue of necessity. The flaunted stance of realism and cynicism, the rejection of feeling and sensitivity, identified with feminine or effeminate sentimentality, the kind of duty to be tough, for oneself as for others, that leads to the desperate effronteries of the aristocratism of the pariah, are a way of taking one’s part in a dead-end world dominated by poverty and the law of the jungle, discrimination, and violence, where morality and sensitivity are entirely without profit.¹⁴ The moral code that constitutes transgression imposes the duty of displaying one’s resistance to the official norms, linguistic or otherwise, which can only be continually sustained at the cost of extraordinary tension and, especially for adolescents, with the constant reinforcement of the group. Like popular realism, which assumes and produces the adjustment of hopes to chances, it constitutes a mechanism of defense and survival: those compelled to position themselves outside the law to obtain satisfactions that others obtain within the limits of legality know only too well the cost of revolt. As Paul E. Willis has clearly seen, the poses and postures of bravado (toward authority, for example, and above all toward the police) can coexist with a deep conformism to all that concerns hierarchies, and not only between the sexes, and ostentatious toughness that human respect imposes does not in the least exclude nostalgia for solidarity, indeed even for affection, which, simultaneously fulfilled and repressed by the highly censored exchanges of the gang, is expressed or revealed in moments of abandon.¹⁵ Slang—and this, along with the effect of symbolic imposition, is one of the reasons for its diffusion well beyond the limits of the “lowlife” strictly speaking—constitutes one of the exemplary, and if we may say so, ideal, expressions—which political expression proper must be able to reckon with, indeed even employ—of the vision, essentially constructed against feminine (or effeminate) “weakness” or “submission,” that the men most lacking in economic and cultural capital hold of their masculine identity and of a social world entirely situated under the sign of toughness.¹⁶

All the same we must be careful not to ignore the profound transformations in function and meaning undergone by borrowed words or phrases when they pass into the ordinary speech of everyday exchanges. That is why some of the most typical products of the aristocratic cynicism of the “toughs” can, in their common use, function as kinds of neutralized and neutralizing conventions that allow men to express, within the limits of a very strict propriety, affection, love, and friendship, or simply just to name beloved beings, parents, son, or wife (the more or less ironic use of reference terms like “the old lady,” “queen mother,” or “the missus” allowing men to avoid, for example, expressions like “my wife” or the simple first name, felt to be too familiar).¹⁷

At the opposite extreme in the hierarchy of dispositions toward the legitimate language, we would no doubt find the youngest and most schooled among the women who, however tied by occupation or by marriage to the universe of agents weakly endowed with economic or cultural capital, are clearly sensitive to the demands of the dominant market and are able to respond to it, which makes them similar to the petite bourgeoisie. As for the effect of generation, it essentially merges with the effect of changes in the mode of generation, that is to say, access to the school system, which clearly represents the most important differentiation factor between the ages.

All the same, it is not certain that the action of schooling exercises the effect of homogenization of linguistic abilities that it assigns itself and that one would be tempted to attribute to it. First, because the scholastic norms of expression, when they are accepted, can remain circumscribed in their application to school products, oral and especially written; second, because school tends to distribute students in classes as homogeneous as possible with regard to scholastic criteria, and as a correlative, from the perspective of social criteria, in such a way that the peer group tends to exercise effects that, as one descends in the social hierarchy of educational establishments and sections and thus in social origins, are more and more strongly opposed to those that pedagogical action can produce; and finally, because paradoxically, by creating long-lasting, homogeneous groups of adolescents at odds with the school system and, through it, with the social order, and placed in a situation of semi-inactivity and prolonged irresponsibility,¹⁸ the sections to which the children of the most destitute classes are relegated—notably the sons of immigrants, especially North Africans—have undoubtedly contributed to providing the most favorable conditions for the development of a kind of “delinquent culture” that, among other ways, is expressed in speech at odds with the norms of legitimate language.

No one can completely ignore linguistic or cultural law, and every time they enter into an exchange with those who possess legitimate competence, and especially when they find themselves in official situations, the dominated are condemned to a practical, corporal recognition of the laws of price formation most unfavorable to their linguistic productions, which condemns them to a more or less desperate effort toward correction or toward silence. It remains true that the markets they confront can be classified according to their degree of autonomy, from the most completely subject to the dominant norms (like those that are imposed in relationships with the legal, medical, or school systems) to the most completely free of those laws (like those that are constituted in prisons or youth gangs). The affirmation of a linguistic counter-legitimacy and, at the same time, the production of discourse founded on the more or less deliberate ignorance of conventions and proprieties characteristic of the dominant markets are only possible within the limits of the free markets, regulated by the laws of price formation that are exclusive to them, that is to say, in the spaces belonging to the dominated classes, haunts or refuges of the excluded from which the dominant are in fact excluded, at least symbolically, and for the appointed possessors of the social and linguistic competence that is recognized in those markets. The slang of the “lowlife,” as actual transgression of the fundamental principles of cultural legitimacy, constitutes an affirmation consistent with a social and cultural identity not only different but opposed, and the vision of the world expressed by it represents the limit toward which the (masculine) members of the dominated classes tend in linguistic exchanges internal to the class, and most especially in the most controlled and sustained of those exchanges, as those in bars and cafés, which are completely dominated by the values of force and masculinity, one of the only principles of effective resistance, along with politics, against the dominant ways of speaking and acting.

The effect of censorship that any relatively strained market exercises is seen in the fact that the words exchanged in public places reserved in fact (at least during certain hours) to adult men of the working classes, like some bars or cafés, are heavily ritualized and subject to strict rules: one does not go to the bar just to drink but also to participate actively in a collective diversion capable of providing the participants with a feeling of freedom in relationship to the daily necessities, and of producing an atmosphere of social euphoria and economic license to which the consumption of alcohol can clearly only contribute. One is there to laugh and to make others laugh, and each participant must, according to his means, throw into the exchange his jokes and witticisms, or at the very least make his contribution to the festivities by reinforcing others’ successes with his laughter and his approving exclamations (Ah! celui-là!—“Yes! That’s it!”). Possessing a talent for always being good for a laugh, being able to embody, at the cost of the conscious and constant work of pursuit and accumulation, the ideal of the “life of the party” who brings to his accomplishment an approved form of sociability, is a very precious form of capital. That is what the good bar owner finds in the mastery of expressive conventions suitable to this market, jokes, good stories, wordplay, that his permanent and central position allows him to acquire and display, and also in his special knowledge of the rules of the game and distinctive characteristics of each player, first names, last names, odd habits, shortcomings, specialties, and talents that he can turn to good account, the resources necessary for prompting, maintaining, and also containing, through incitements, boasts, or discrete calls to order, the exchanges capable of producing the atmosphere of social effervescence that his clients are seeking and that they themselves must supply.¹⁹ The quality of the conversation provided depends upon the quality of the participants, which itself depends upon the quality of the conversation, and so upon the one who is at the center of it and who must know how to deny the mercenary relationship by affirming his will and his ability to join the circuit of exchanges as an ordinary participant—with a “free round” or a “drink on the house” offered to regulars—and thus to contribute to the suspension of economic necessities and social constraints that is expected from the collective worship of the good life.²⁰

We understand that the discourse that circulates on this market only gives the appearance of total freedom and absolute naturalness to those who are unaware of its rules or principles. That is why its eloquence, which an outside perspective apprehends as a kind of unbridled verve, is neither more nor less free within its genre than the improvisations of academic eloquence. Neither is it unaware of trying for effect, or of the audience’s attention and reactions, or of rhetorical strategies aimed at winning the audience’s favor or indulgence. It relies on proven but appropriate schemas of invention and expression to give those who do not possess them the feeling of witnessing dazzling displays of analytical acuity or political or psychological lucidity. Through the tremendous redundancy tolerated by its rhetoric, through the place it gives to the repetition of ritual forms and formulas that are the required demonstrations of a “good education,” through its systematic recourse to concrete images from the familiar world, through the obsessional obstinacy that it takes to reaffirm, even in their formal renewal, the fundamental values of the group, this discourse expresses and reinforces a profoundly stable and rigid vision of the world. In this system of obvious facts, tirelessly reaffirmed and collectively guaranteed, that assigns to each class of agents its essence, and thus its place and rank, the representation of the division of labor between the sexes occupies a central place, perhaps because the cult of masculinity, that is to say of toughness, physical force, and gruff coarseness, established by elective rejection of effeminate refinement, is one of the most effective ways of struggling against the cultural inferiority in which all those who feel deprived of cultural capital find themselves, whether they are otherwise rich in economic capital, like the merchants, or not.²¹

At the opposite extreme in the class of free markets, the market of exchanges among familiars, and especially among women, distinguishes itself in that the very idea of affectation and effect is almost absent there, so that the discourse circulating in it differs in form, as we have seen, from that of the public exchanges in bars and cafés; it is in the logic of deprivation, more than of rejection, that it defines itself in relation to legitimate discourse. As for the dominant markets, public and official or private, to the most economically and culturally deprived, they pose problems so difficult that if we confined ourselves to the definition of speech based on the social characteristics of the speakers, the definition implicitly adopted by the tenants of “popular language,” we would have to say that the most frequent form of this language is silence. In fact, it is again according to the logic of the division of labor between the sexes that the contradiction resulting from the necessity to confront the dominant markets without conforming to the affectation of correction is resolved. Because it is acknowledged (and first of all by women, who can pretend to deplore it) that a man is defined by the right and duty of constancy to himself that is a component of his identity (“he is the way he is”) and that he can confine himself to a silence that allows him to safeguard his masculine pride, it often becomes incumbent upon the woman, socially defined as flexible and submissive by nature, to make the necessary effort to confront perilous situations, to meet with the doctor, to describe symptoms and discuss treatments, to approach the school teacher or Social Security, and so on.²² It follows that the “mistakes” that are based on an unfortunate affectation of correction or a misdirected concern for distinction and that, like all distorted words, especially medical ones, are mercilessly picked out by the petite bourgeoisie—and by “popular language” grammars—are undoubtedly very often owed to women (for which they can be mocked by “their” men—which is again a way of relegating women to their “nature” as fusspots).²³

In fact, even in this case, demonstrations of docility are never without ambivalence, and they always threaten to revert into aggressiveness at the least rebuff, at the least sign of irony or distance, which converts them into the tributes required by statutory dependence. One who, upon entering into too unequal a social relationship, too visibly adopts the appropriated language and manners exposes oneself to being forced to conceive of and experience elective reverence as obligatory submission and self-interested servility. The image of the domestic, which owes its conspicuous conformity to the dominant norms of verbal etiquette and service uniforms, haunts all relationships between the dominated and dominant, and notably the service exchanges, as made evident by the almost insoluble problems that “remuneration” poses. That is why ambivalence toward dominants and their lifestyle, so common among men performing service functions, which wavers between the inclination to nervous conformity and the temptation to allow themselves familiarities and to degrade the dominants by raising themselves to their level, undoubtedly represents the truth and the limit of the relationship that the men most lacking in linguistic capital and vowed to the alternative of coarseness and servility maintain with the dominant mode of expression.²⁴ Paradoxically, it is only when the solemnity of the occasion justifies, in their eyes, situating themselves within a more noble register, without feeling ridiculous or servile, that they can adopt the language that is more conventional but the only one suited to their meaning, to saying serious things; for example, to express their love or display their sympathy in mourning. That is to say, in the very cases when the dominant norms require that one abandon ready-made conventions and formulas for demonstrating the strength and sincerity of one’s feelings.

Thus it appears that the linguistic and cultural productions of the dominated vary profoundly according to their inclination and aptitude for taking advantage of the regulated freedoms that the free market offers or for accepting the restraints that the dominant markets impose. Which explains how, in the polymorphous reality obtained by considering all the kinds of speech produced by all the markets through all the categories of producers, all those who feel they have the right or duty to speak of the “people” can find an objective medium for their interests or their fantasies.