In order to understand the reasons behind the relatively widespread shift of interest away from the question of domination in much of French sociology over the course of the last three decades, it would be tempting to look only for causes outside the academic domain. The ideological climate, which began to prevail in countries like France from the mid-1980s and which has continued to strengthen ever since, has ended up rejecting any approaches based on the notion of domination (along with those based on class and class struggle), discarding them as representations deemed ideological or associated with a bygone era. Yet a strictly political reading of the state of social sciences would fail to take into account the internal transformations which have rendered the study of the nature of domination often difficult, and sometimes even impossible.
Indeed, the manner in which sociology has to a large extent evolved over the last thirty years is not unconnected to the gradual disappearance of the concept of domination. We are witnessing the epistemological questioning of any break with common sense or with preconceived ideas, sometimes accompanied by criticism of science, of its power and of its claims, deemed unwarranted, to offer truths about society. Furthermore, subjectivist theoretical approaches (and particularly those which are downright antiobjectivist) along with the rejection, explicit in some cases, of any kind of confrontation or comparison between ‘discourse’ and ‘practice’, ‘subjective points of view’ and ‘objective situations’, result in an exclusive concentration on ‘discourse’ and the abandonment of any attempt to throw light on the principal structures of society. Finally, researchers are tending to focus their attention on direct, visible relations between people (interactions). The combination of these choices, more often than not closely linked, has contributed to rendering any analysis of relations of domination more difficult.
The phenomena of domination are largely based on objective mechanisms which are not immediately visible through direct observation of behaviour. Differing material and cultural heritages, accumulated over the course of generations, hierarchical educational systems, large disparities in income levels, unequal levels of prestige between professions where internal hierarchies (between branches, ranks, grades, etc.) are frequent: the hierarchical and unequal character of the structure governing distribution of resources or of life circumstances exists independently from the nature of practical relationships between individuals and independently from the way in which they perceive or ‘experience’ such relationships. This is all the more evident given that society becomes more differentiated as it becomes more complex and that power becomes depersonalized because it is based on objective, institutionalized mechanisms. Even if the master–slave relationship has managed to take the form of direct interaction, it is almost certain that the Chief Executives or major shareholders of multinational companies generally have no direct relationship with the workers in their service. From this perspective, the analysis of social relations of domination between classes as formulated by Karl Marx seems a particularly pertinent model. By exposing the relationship of interdependence, objectively favourable to those who control the means of production and systematically unfavourable to those who merely sell their labour, he enables us to avoid reducing the realities of domination simply to phenomena observable at the level of interpersonal relationships (sometimes non-existent) between individuals.1
If one sought to understand the realities of domination only on the level of interpersonal relationships, one would clearly run the risk of only observing domination in relationships where any request for obedience would be explicitly expressed. Weber’s famous definition of domination already implied this reductive approach:
Power (Macht) is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests. Domination (Herrschaft) is the probability that a command (Befehl) with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons. Discipline (Disziplin) is the probability that by virtue of habituation a command will receive prompt and automatic obedience in stereotyped forms, on the part of a given group of persons.2
And, in a condensed format, Weber confirms that the concept of domination ‘can only mean the probability that a command will be obeyed’.3 With this kind of focus on the relationship based on command-obedience, it is easy to forget that the vast majority of workers do not carry out their tasks as a result of direct and repeated requests from their bosses, but simply because, at the start of work each day, they are in a sense ‘obeying’ orders which have not needed to be formulated by anyone. More often than not they have become workers because they have internalized the horizons of their social origins, because their education has led them in a vocational and short-term direction, because no other route or other choice was ever really offered them, and so on.4 In the same way, over a long period of time, and even still today in many households, men did not need to give specific orders to their wives in order to get them, from force of habit or sometimes from choice (making a virtue out of necessity), to take on domestic chores (cleaning, washing, ironing, cooking, bringing up the children, etc.). The dissymmetrical and unequal relationship (unequal, because such activities are collectively less valued than other activities) can even be experienced as egalitarian and normal by both men and women and absorbed within a loving or emotional relationship. The danger of Weber’s definition of domination therefore is that it takes account only of those interpersonal situations where a gestural or verbal order is effectively given. Yet the objective relation of domination, which means that one individual is objectively in a position of superiority with regard to another, does not necessarily, and perhaps not very frequently, manifest itself in terms of commands and acts of obedience. The existence of a relationship based on domination drives one group (the dominant) as well as the other (the dominated) to act in a certain way without any command ever having been specifically formulated.
This focus on interpersonal relationships and, more specifically, on situations in which an individual, aware of what he or she is doing, deliberately seeks, with the help of strategies of varying degrees of complexity, to guide the behaviour of another and to control them, has continued to haunt the analysis of power and domination. We see this in action notably in the work of Foucault, who defined the power relation as the ‘relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other’5 and who stressed the ‘strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others’.6 This reduces the problem of power to the question of the will and conscious strategy of individuals, whereas much of what determines the social lives of all individuals and of what sometimes governs relationships between individuals, falls largely outside the realm of such considerations. In a great many cases, in order to ‘govern’ the dominated, the dominant need do no more than simply continue in their role of dominators (investing in shares, acquiring assets, setting up companies, choosing the right educational pathways or the right schools for their children, making good marriages, etc.). And the dominated can behave towards them in a respectful or resentful way, without ever being able to do anything other than acknowledge their dominant position.
If, as certain contemporary sociologists have had no hesitation in doing, one adds the requirement whereby any interpretation in terms of relations of domination must cede to the demand for a perception and an explicit expression of domination by the actors themselves,7 we become aware that it quickly shrinks away to almost nothing. For a ‘pragmatic theory of law’, writes Patrick Pharo, ‘it is not indispensable to assume a hidden sense of domination (suppressed, forgotten, denied), each time the situation fails to make that sense obvious to those concerned. One should simply consider that there are moments and situations which, for those concerned, can assume the character of domination, whereas other moments and other situations do not lend themselves to this characterization.’8 To base the analysis of domination on the manner in which the dominated represent situations to themselves is a failure to see to what extent such representations, more often than not, are part of the process of domination and a rejection of the idea that they may be ‘illusory’, given they are partially created within objective relations of domination.9 Ritually demanding how (and by what kind of abuse of power) sociologists can define a situation as a ‘situation of domination’, even though the actors themselves seem not to perceive it as such, simply fails to take account of the process whereby domination is legitimized by the dominant or, more commonly, the simple effect of habituation which multi-secular forms of domination produce on those who are subject to them from their early stages of their social development, and who thus see them as being as ‘natural’ as the landscapes within which they are accustomed to live.
Even if, as we have seen, he focused a little too much on the command-obedience relationship, Weber nevertheless draws attention to this ‘prompt, automatic and schematic obedience’ which manifests itself ‘by virtue of habituation’. The earliest stages of socialization (familial and, increasingly frequently in highly differentiated societies, educational) of both dominators and dominated predispose them to act as such. Thus, Franz Kafka was acutely aware of the effects of the random circumstances of birth and the differing conditions of existence in that men or women can, at any given moment, occupy very different positions to each other and, in particular, can occupy roles of dominator or of dominated: ‘A group of men, masters and servants. Roughhewn faces shining with living colours. The master sits down and the servant brings him food on a tray. Between the two of them there is no greater difference, no difference of another category than, for instance, that between a man who as a result of countless circumstances is an Englishman and lives in London, and another who is a Laplander and at the very same instant is sailing on the sea, alone in his boat during a storm’ (Diary, 4 December 1913). What differentiates one from another is not an effect of the moment. Such differentiation comes from afar and dates back, at least in biographical terms, to the earliest stages of socialization. In the same vein, the writer reflects on the way an individual’s possible horizons are limited due to the fact that this horizon will have been forged within determined cultural conditions. It is the way human beings internalize the normality or the inevitability of their situation that explains their need to live in the way they live and to be what they are: ‘Why don’t the Tchuktchis simply leave their awful country; considering their present life and wants they would be better off anywhere else. But they cannot; all things possible do happen, only what happens is possible’ (Diary, 5 January 1914). The dominated within any given society are often no more likely than the Chukchi to question the inevitability of their lives. They are prepared and accustomed to living as they live and find their objective places in the world (roles or occupations) which correspond to their particular circumstances. What is not accessible becomes no longer desirable, and in such conditions, individuals end up liking only what the objective situation allows them to like. Instead of taking their desires for reality, the reality of what is possible becomes their most personal desire.
The phenomena of heritage continue to play their part in ensuring that each new-born is unequally endowed and immediately caught up in the particularities of his or her socio-familial background. Heir to a fortune, to a business, to a house, to land, to a whole range of assets which may have a very high economic and cultural value, the individual who is born into a richly endowed milieu often has at their immediate disposal the product of numerous generations of acquisition which straightaway set them apart from all those individuals who, at the same moment, find themselves thrust into poverty, insecurity, uncertainty, and the limited social horizon of their family background. Yet the material legacy, whether economic (material possessions or financial wealth) or cultural (symbolic possessions such as books, pictures, sculptures, etc.) always carries with it an immaterial dimension. Indeed, heritage is never merely a process of transmission but is always accompanied by the ‘transmission’ of whatever is needed to fully take advantage of the material heritage in question: tastes, the competence and ability to act, perceive or judge. Without all that, heritage would remain ‘a dead letter’ (a term which takes on its fullest sense when the inheritance comes in the form of books), or in other words, would never encounter the necessary conditions in which it would be put to use and, even more importantly, bear fruit. Inheritances without heirs – as much in terms of capability as of desire – able to take them up and make use of them, inheritances left neglected, squandered or liquidated: the ‘failures’ in intergenerational transmissions are a hollow reminder of the whole process of socialization that must take place in order to allow each new generation in its turn to take up the inheritances of the past and to make this appropriation a ‘personal’ existential matter.
It is because the objective relationships of domination, crystallized, tolerated and upheld by various institutions (Family, School, Church, State, Business, Markets, Media, etc.), guarantee the positions of the dominant (in other words, great landowners or those with capital of any kind) and the objective divide separating them from the dominated, that direct face-to-face relationships (as interactionism would have it) can at times take the form of formally egalitarian relations without any challenge to the unequal, hierarchical order of things. The dominator can be affable, sympathetic, kind, respectful, courteous, gallant or polite with his workers or domestic staff, with his chauffeur or cook, with his wife or the children’s nanny, yet the social relationship which underlies relations between him and them nevertheless remains one of domination.10
In complex and highly differentiated societies and where codifications, whether educational or linguistic, or legal or economic, are central, the relations of domination are only established or kept going in an indirect way, through objective institutional mechanisms rather than through interpersonal relationships:
The more the reproduction of relations of domination are the responsibility of objective mechanisms, which serve the dominators without the dominators needing to make use of them, the more those strategies objectively orientated towards that reproduction are indirect, and, if it can be put thus, impersonal: it is in deciding on the best investment for his money or the best secondary school for his son and not in displaying generosity or being polite or kind to his cleaning lady (or to any other ‘subordinate’) that the holder of economic capital or cultural capital ensures the perpetuation of the relation of domination which objectively links him to his cleaning lady and even to her offspring.
On the contrary:
Until a system of mechanisms automatically ensuing the reproduction of the established order is constituted, the dominant agents cannot be content with letting the system that they dominate follow its own course in order to exercise durable domination; they have to work directly, daily, personally, to produce and reproduce conditions of domination which even then are never entirely certain. Because they cannot be satisfied with appropriating the profits of a social machine which has not yet developed the power of self-perpetuation, they are obliged to resort to the elementary forms of domination, in other words the direct domination of one person over another, the limiting case of which is appropriation of persons, that is, slavery. They cannot appropriate the labour, services, goods, homage and respect of others without ‘winning’ them personally, ‘tying’ them, in short, creating a bond between persons.11
The objective nature of relations of domination in industrialized societies had already been clearly underlined by K. Marx when he defined the ‘capitalist relationship as a relationship of constraint, aimed at extorting additional labour by extending working hours – a relationship of constraint which rests not on relationships of personal domination and dependence, but which results simply from wider economic factors’.12
Sociologies focusing only on interpersonal relations are thus particularly ill adapted when dealing with societies where the essence of domination lies not in the effects caused by direct, person to person, interactions, but instead depends on a range of interdependent actions and of institutionally codified mechanisms. When hierarchies are objectivized, fixed, codified, assured, officialized within and by institutions whether educational, state, legal, economic, cultural, etc., it is possible to ‘lose face’ without losing your ‘place’, or jeopardizing all the social qualities which guarantee the holders entitlement to educational qualifications, property, contracts, nominations and official recognition, status and ranks, etc.
Whether constituted on the basis of orders, castes or classes, all state-governed societies with any degree of complexity can be characterized by hierarchical structures which control all individuals (and their roles) from the highest to the lowest. These huge matrixes, from which there is effectively no escape (we always occupy a place within this structure and are perceived by others according to this place), are precisely the kind of self-evident facts which I am seeking to throw light on here. These self-evident facts are, to go back to Foucault’s terminology, states of domination, or in other words crystallized forms of historical power relations. Foucault distinguished in effect between power relations and states of domination, or, rather, he thought of the latter as a rigid form of power relations which he saw as being much more reversible, supple and changing. On the one hand, there is the ‘mobile’ power relationship which enables the different ‘partners’ of the relationship to put in place ‘strategies’ with a view to modifying it; and on the other hand, the state of domination which fixes this relationship, determines the scope of what is possible and considerably limits any freedom of action: ‘When an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political, or military means, one is faced with what may be called a state of domination. In such a state, it is certain that practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained and limited.’13 Nevertheless, when it comes to clarifying the type of relations which come under the first category (power relations), he cites ‘a whole range of power relations that may come into play among individuals, within families, in pedagogical relationships, political life’.14 When we examine the relationships between parents and children, husband and wife, teacher and pupil, it is hard to see the mobility, instability and reversibility which, according to Foucault, define power relations. With the exception of power relations which are not based on any institutionalization and which remain fragile (it may well be that the genesis of new forms of these relations will include a period of uncertainty where the positions are neither very clear nor very stable), the realities of domination (or of power) are to a large extent based on a much narrower concept of the way in which individuals can act and interact. For an author such as Foucault, there is a fine line between the desire to study (highly improbable) ‘free’ subjects15 and even to define power relations as ‘strategic games between liberties’16 and between the historical lucidity of someone who is forced to recognize the reality of states of domination:
In a great many cases, power relations are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom. To take what is undoubtedly a very simplified example, one cannot say that it was only men who wielded power in the conventional marital structure of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; women had quite a few options: they could deceive their husbands, pilfer money from them, refuse them sex. Yet they were still in a state of domination insofar as these options were ultimately only stratagems that never succeeded in reversing the situation. In such cases of domination, be they economic, social, institutional, or sexual, the problem is knowing where resistance will develop.17
One of the obstacles to studying the effects of power or of domination lies in the dispersion of the analyses which must necessarily be mobilized in different disciplinary traditions (anthropology, sociology, history, political science, political, linguistic, and even in certain cases, theological economics) as well as in different areas and fields of study (history of religions, anthropology of myths, speech act theory, theory of rites of institution and of legitimacy, political history, sociology and anthropology, sociology of law, the theory of economic value or even sacramental theology). While some study magic in stateless societies, others analyse the performative effects or the illocutionary force of certain acts of language in state societies, the charisma of ‘great men’,18 the fetishism of branded merchandise, mana,19 aura, prestige, the sacred, legitimacy, enchantment, bewitchment, or even symbolic effects and capitals. Each sector of research generally believes they are describing very specific realities which have no direct relationship to what others are observing and everyone remains in more or less total ignorance of the deep affinity which exists between all these phenomena.20
Not only does the banalization of these different notions within the disciplinary sectors or sub-fields of specialized research make it impossible to see their common properties, but it also means they lose their power of estrangement21 and their operational capacity. In this way the use of a term like that of ‘legitimacy’, borrowed from Weber’s theory of domination, has been so banalized in social sciences by so-called theories of legitimacy that the concept has ended up devoid of any substance or meaning. The routinization of the use of the concept has notably led to the loss of any sense of its historical roots and of the intimate link which it maintains with questions relating to religion or magic. If Bourdieu referred to the ‘social magic’22 which pervades institutions (educational, cultural, medical, political, legal, commercial, etc.), with their specific rituals, he did not unfortunately emphasize the historical fact of what I intend to demonstrate here: our market-orientated, state-controlled, educated, industrialized societies which have developed science and technology, are just as magical as were societies without a state, without a writing system or schools, without markets or industry, without science or highly sophisticated technology. The most common interpretation of Bourdieu’s analyses, and the most frequent uses to which these are put, contribute to the belief that it is by simple analogy that we can refer to social magic, rites, worship, the sacred or faith, when referring to contemporary societies perceived as being profoundly areligious and disillusioned. On the contrary, we should leave behind the domain of suggestive metaphor and assert the fundamental and central presence of magic and the sacred, of bewitchment and of faith at the very heart of contemporary social practices and notably within the economy of power relations.23
There is a strong tendency in interpretations made by researchers working within the field of social sciences and focusing on different societies and different groups to use the terms ‘magic’, ‘belief’ or ‘superstition’ to refer to realities which the researchers (their society or their group) do not, or no longer, subscribe to. Magic, belief or superstition always concern the Other or the Distant (the savage, the primitive, the peasant, the people) but never the self or the nearby:
That they have been considered as representations capable or not of enjoying an individual or collective assent (of the type: ‘I believe in it’ or ‘we do not believe in it’) is, in part, an effect of historical interpretation, based on utterances that survive practices that have now disappeared. We thus endow such detached fragments with the value of assertions about beings (supernatural, divine, etc.) or truths that distance enables us to situate under the sign of credibility precisely because we no longer believe in them. In other words, belief becomes an utterance (an affirmation) when it ceases to mesh with some contractual practice. To posit the question: ‘Do I believe it?’ is already to leave the field of belief and take it as an intellectual object independent of the fact that affirms it as a relationship. Belief is no longer anything but a stating when it ceases to be a relational engaging, in other words when it ceases to be a belief. (…) This sundering has given rise, on the one hand, to representations known as ‘beliefs’ precisely because we do not believe them any longer, and they no longer function as social alliances, and, on the other hand, to objective behaviours (medical, commercial, educational, culinary, etc.) that it had brought to the status of techniques and thus treated as a series of gestures related to fabricational activities.24
What is experienced as an underlying assumption is not thought of as belief. Beliefs are the self-evident facts of pasts we no longer believe in ourselves.
We need here to be guided by, and to systematize, Durkheim’s intuition in turning the economic domain, which sees itself, par excellence, as one of rationality, calculation and an absence of magic, into one where belief and social magic are omnipresent:
Only one form of social activity has not yet been expressly attached to religion: that is economic activity. Sometimes processes that are derived from magic have, by that fact alone, an origin that is indirectly religious. Also, economic value is a sort of power or efficacy, and we know the religious origins of the idea of power. Also, richness can confer mana, therefore it has it. Hence it is seen that the ideas of economic value and of religious value are not without connection. But the question of the nature of these connections has not yet been studied.25
Research should therefore fight here against the inertia of the past in the comprehension of the present: unlike the anachronism classically encountered in historical studies which entails projecting the questions or the categories of the present in order to understand the past, the essential problem one encounters is that of mental persistency (as we refer to ‘retinal persistency’), of mental survival or of mental inertia, which involves projecting onto the present ‘fragments’ or ‘structures of perception’ from the past, particularly when the present is ideologically based on the gilded legend of the abandonment of the sacred, religions, myth (rationalization, de-sacralization, rejection of the magical, secularization, etc.). The past therefore doubly imposes itself upon us: in the self-evident facts to which we are all subject and in the minds of the very individuals who try to think in terms of the present. Anachronism: reading the past through the eyes of the present. Mental persistency: reading the present through the eyes of the past.
Many analysts of the sacred subscribe to the myth of leaving behind myth and religion by supporting arguments in favour of secularization or of the abandonment of magic. Thus, Mircea Eliade talks about ‘the gigantic transformation of the world undertaken by the industrial societies, a transformation made possible by the desacralization of the cosmos accomplished by scientific thought and above all by the sensational discoveries of physics and chemistry.’26 We, (‘modern societies’) will henceforth live in a desacralized world where magic has been for the most part abandoned:
It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. It does not devolve upon us to show by what historical processes and as a result of what changes in spiritual attitudes and behaviour modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence. For our purpose it is enough to observe that desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it extremely difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies.27
Observing the social world through the eyes of someone for whom the sacred must of necessity assume the magical form it had in ‘archaic societies’, or the religious form associated with it in State societies, Eliade, like many others after him, fails to see the central place magic and the sacred have in societies in which religions have come to occupy a more relative position. When he does detect the presence of the sacred, it is merely in the form of ‘traces’ or of apparitions which are extremely marginal in comparison with the most fundamental structures of the social world:
To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favour of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behaviour (…) it will appear that even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world (…) There are, for example, privileged places, qualitatively different from all others – a man’s birthplace or the scenes of his first love or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly unreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the ‘holy places’ of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.28
He detects other ‘superstitions’ and ‘taboos’ in the modern world ‘all of them magico-religious’ in structure and origin, ‘a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals’, or even ‘little religions’ or ‘pseudoreligions’ (such as sects, spiritualist movements, nudism, etc.),29 but nothing fundamental or of any substance. Confining the sacred to enduring or renewed forms of religiosity or of spirituality (new age, astrology, parapsychology, esotericism, etc.), means, it seems to me, missing out on an essential strand in the fabric of our societies.
Moreover, as Hocart rightly points out, the radical anticlericalism supported by many intellectuals does not particularly predispose them to see the magic in our most modern institutions, beginning with that of the State itself:
Ritual is not in good odour with our intellectuals. It is associated in their minds with a clerical movement for which most of them nurse an antipathy. They are therefore unwilling to believe that institutions which they approve of, and which seem to them so eminently practical and sensible as modern administration, should have developed out of the hocus-pocus which they deem ritual to be. In their eyes only economic interests can create anything as solid as the state.30
Magic (the magical relationship with the world) has, certainly, been seriously undermined by the demystifying effect of science in relation to the natural and physical world. But in fact this referred to the weakest and most hazardous area of magical practice, the one dealing with realities which effectively had little chance of being affected or modified by some incantation or other, including by the most intense, most vibrant and most widely supported acts of magic. Making it rain or halting an earthquake is not, and never has been, within the bounds of human possibility, at least as long as we confine ourselves to incantatory ritual acts. On the other hand, when dealing with the social world, magic acts on the state of things and on human beings by changing their value, their meaning and, as a result, the way in which they are perceived, the appropriate behaviour to be adopted towards them and even the way they themselves need to behave to suit their new state. If your expectation of holy water is that it will cure a person with a serious illness, you run the risk of seeing your beliefs contradicted by the facts. But if the priest blesses water in preparation for a baptism, he genuinely, and practically, admits the baptised individual into the Christian faith. Changing a frog into a handsome prince is the stuff of fairy tales, but turning what had hitherto been considered as a vulgar daub into the work of an old master, turning a simple piece of metal into a highly valuable coin, transforming an ordinary object into a holy relic, declaring husband and wife a couple or promoting a humble groom into a knight, is not only possible and entirely effective, but the result of such transmutations has real consequences on the social lives of the objects and individuals concerned. From this perspective, magic is by no means in danger of disappearing from the social world given that it is a consubstantial property of hierarchized societies.
The multiplication of terms referring to the effects produced in the context of power relations hides the deep unity of a social mechanism, and even its relative stability through the history of widely differing societies and fields. It is this mechanism, which may concern whole societies, more confined groups or sub-universes within a given society, that we must endeavour to clarify.
Amongst all the available social theories, it is undoubtedly in the work of Pierre Bourdieu that the most serious efforts to consider the symbolic dimension of all forms of domination can be observed. With his notion of ‘symbolic capital’ he attempted, in a manner which may indeed be judged as somewhat clumsy (and which he himself, as we shall see, evidently came to see as such in his later writings), to formulate a property which would be fundamental to all relations of domination. It was, no doubt, with a view to completing his theory of different capitals (cultural, educational, economic, social) that led him to refer to symbolic capital. The problem is that this capital has nothing in common with the other types of capital. Indeed, in the detailed version of his theory of capitals, the latter are always associated with specific fields (political, legal, educational, literary, philosophical, scientific, religious, etc.). Symbolic capital, however, is not linked to a symbolic field but is simply the effect of recognition (and more precisely of a positive recognition) of different forms of capital. In 1986, in a lecture given in San Diego, Bourdieu wrote that ‘Symbolic capital […] is nothing other than economic or cultural capital when it is known and recognized, when it is known through the categories of perception it imposes’.31
This indicates that we are dealing here more with the social effects produced by the recognition of a capital by the members of the group or the society than of a capital in any real sense. It could even be said, since we are dealing with social perception and the effects of recognition, that the capital does not in itself belong to its supposed possessor, but is simply the effect, more or less powerful, that the knowledge and recognition of this capital produces on the members of the group. Unlike cultural capital or economic capital, which imply quantifiable possessions (these are income levels or cultural skills recognized in educational terms to a greater or lesser extent, property ownership or the number of books or pictures owned, share ownership, exposure to books, museums, music, etc.), symbolic capital is not the sum of the material or cultural possessions owned. Instead, it is the name given to the magical power – produced by the objective (measurable by sociology) and subjective (recognized by the actors) gap between the person who dominates and the one who is dominated – which compels those who are dominated, depending on the circumstances, to deference, respect, admiration, envy, attraction, desire, fascination, fear or terror.32 Bourdieu writes:
Symbolic capital which makes one bow before Louis XIV – that makes one court him, that allows him to give orders and have his orders obeyed, that permits him to demean, demote, or consecrate, etc. – only exists in as much as all the small differences, the subtle marks of distinction in etiquette or rank, in practice and in dress, which makes up the life of the court, are perceived by people who know and recognize practically (they have embodied it) a principle of differentiation that permits them to recognize all these differences and to give them value, who are ready, in a word, to die over a quarrel of hats. Symbolic capital is a capital with a cognitive base, which rests on cognition and recognition.33
Specifying that symbolic capital has a cognitive base, the sociologist confuses the issue still further, since the cognitive bases in question are in fact located as much in the socialized bodies of the dominated (who must recognize the importance, the value, the magnitude of the properties by which the dominant mark themselves out) as in that of the dominant (who are supposedly in possession of this symbolic capital).
A few years later, the sociologist added more detail to his definition, along much the same lines:
Symbolic capital is any property (any form of capital whether physical, economic, cultural or social) when it is perceived by social agents endowed with categories of perception which cause them to know it and to recognize it and to give it value. (For example, the concept of honour, in Mediterranean societies is a typical form of symbolic capital, which exists only through repute, that is, through the representation which others have of it to the extent that they share a set of beliefs liable to cause them to perceive and appreciate certain patterns of conduct as honourable or dishonourable.) More precisely, symbolic capital is the form taken by any species of capital whenever it is perceived through categories of perception that are the product of the embodiment of divisions or of oppositions inscribed in the structure of the distribution of this species of capital. […] It follows that the State, which possesses the means of imposition and inculcation of the durable principles of vision and division that conform to its own structures, is the site par excellence of the concentration and exercise of symbolic power.34
Symbolic capital is not, therefore, a capital distinct from others, but one which is mixed with all the other capitals or which superimposes itself on them (an individual could therefore possess, for example, a certain amount of cultural capital and, at the same time, an amount of symbolic capital associated with the recognition of this capital by the members of the group). It is not hard to see the state of confusion and difficulty into which this notion of symbolic capital plunges us. However, a further problem emerges at the end of the citation: by referring to symbolic power, and by linking the notion of symbolic capital to that of symbolic power, Bourdieu suggests the existence of a power with a symbolic nature as distinct from economic, scientific, religious, legal, artistic or other kinds of power. Yet it would seem more appropriate to speak of the symbolic effects of any kind of power relation or of the symbolic dimension of all domination.
All these remarks militate in favour of the abandonment of a vague concept which raises more problems than it solves. What Bourdieu is attempting to describe is not in fact really a capital (comparable to other capitals such as educational, political, scientific, economic, etc.), but instead a form of magical power, the result of bewitchment or enchantment, produced by the tacit recognition of the degree of grandeur of the dominant, which runs through all universes structured by relations of domination. This is indeed what the sociologist himself would suggest in his clearest statement on this issue: ‘Every kind of capital (economic, cultural, social) tends (to different degrees) to function as symbolic capital (so that it might be better to speak, in rigorous terms, of the symbolic effects of capital) when it obtains a specific or practical recognition, that of a habitus structured according to the very structures of the space in which it has been engendered.’35
It would seem that in an egalitarian society social etiquette would vanish, not, as is generally supposed, from want of breeding, but because on the one side would disappear the deference due to a prestige which must be imaginary to be effective, and on the other, and more completely still, the affability that is gracefully and generously dispensed when it is felt to be of infinite price to the recipient, a price which, in a world based on equality, would at once fall to nothing like everything that has only a fiduciary value.
Proust, M., In Search of Lost Time. Vol. III. The Guermantes Way. London: Random House, 2003, p. 603
1. Any hierarchized social order, as a social framework structured by relations of domination, rests on collectively acknowledged and respected ‘values’, in other words on a collective belief in the importance of ‘goods’ (moral, cultural or material) or of ‘practices’ which have value.
2. These collectively established and upheld values (legitimate values) constitute the domain of the sacred and are distinguished from anything relating to that of the profane.
3. The opposition between the profane and the sacred is linked to relations of domination within society: the dominated are relegated to the profane whereas the dominant increasingly associate and connect themselves with the sacred, with the centres of legitimacy.
Scholium 1. Social struggles for the definition of the sacred and the profane, like individual or collective strategies aimed at being counted among the sacred (and getting away from the insignificance of the profane life), or strategies aimed at being the most sacred possible in the order or sub-order of the sacred, show the social importance of justifications to exist as we exist and to have this justification recognized in the eyes of all. This is exactly what Weber was describing when he wrote:
When a man who is happy compares his position with that of one who is unhappy, he is not content with the fact of his happiness but desires something more, namely his right to this happiness, the consciousness that he has earned his good fortune, in contrast to the unfortunate one who must equally have earned his misfortune. Our everyday experience proves that there exists just such a psychological need for reassurance as to the legitimacy or deservedness of one’s happiness, whether this involves political success, superior economic status, bodily health, success in the game of youth, or anything else. What the privileged classes require of religion, if anything at all, is this legitimation.36
The separation of the sacred and the profane, a consequence of the opposition between dominators and dominated, is ultimately designed to give certain individuals a reason to exist (a sense of existence) as dominators, whilst others are relegated to the profane and the insignificant.
Scholium 2. Émile Benveniste, in his work on Indo-European language, identifies a common root to rex (king) and regere (to trace a line), emphasizing the link between the sacred and power. The king holds the authority – collectively awarded to him – to separate, by an act of social magic, the sacred from the profane:
This dual notion is present in the important expression regere fines, a religious act which was a preliminary to building. Regere fines means literally ‘trace out the limits by straight lines’. This is the operation carried out by the high priest before a temple or a town is built and it consists in the delimitation on a given terrain of a sacred plot of ground. The magical character of this operation is evident: what is involved is the delimitation of the interior and exterior, the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane, the national territory and foreign territory. The tracing of these limits is carried out by the person invested with the highest powers, the rex.37
4. States of domination, that is the crystallized product of past power relations and struggles, are perceived as self-evident facts.
Scholium. The objective relations of domination generally assume, in the eyes of members of a society, a character as external and natural as the external physical world. The organization of the world into rich/poor, cultured/ignorant, recognized/unrecognized, etc., is a reality which imposes itself, first and foremost, in the objectivity of the social division of work, of the distribution of wealth and qualifications, of the link between the hierarchy of paper qualifications and that of trades, of the link between the distribution of cultural resources and the unequal access to legitimate cultural institutions or products; in the objectivity, too, of pay scales, of the organizational charts of companies, of hierarchies of paper qualifications, etc. This is why, as Bourdieu points out, ‘The most successful ideological effects are the ones that have no need of words, but only of laissez-faire and complicitous silence’.38
5. The present state of relations of domination communicates with the relations of domination in the past: there is a kind of objective complicity or elective affinity between the dominators of the past and the dominators of the present who draw on the structures and the traces of past power to support their domination.
Scholium 1. The Renaissance draws on Greek and Roman antiquity, bourgeois societies adopt aristocratic manners and codes, and the art which was part of the glory of kings, princes or emperors, now serves that of States, regions, municipalities or companies. In the same way, the history of societies demonstrates that new dominators often draw on the ruins of past domination to establish, conserve or increase their power.
Scholium 2. For example, policies designed to capture the attention and to attract the public which we see today in the capital cities of the great nations, but also in the major cities of many countries, simply continue, in different ways, the royal, imperial, papal, national or municipal policies of the past. The glory of great patrons (and indeed today of major companies), organs of the state, the regions, municipalities, museums, etc., power, whatever form it takes, all seek to appropriate anything which might attract additional recognition, attention and visibility. The fact that, in the present day, municipal authorities can be heavily involved in the purchase for their museum of a picture by a French painter whom Louis XIII nominated ‘First Painter to the king’, is by no means anecdotal.
6. The dominators are as constrained as the dominated by the structures of domination they inherit from the past and which they need to appropriate in order to control relations of dominance; the dominated, for their part, are dominated and crushed by the self-evident facts which impose themselves on them from outside and which they rarely have means to appropriate or control (and therefore to turn to their own advantage).
7. Those who dominate within a hierarchical order – a form of domination which may be relative given that hierarchy rarely involves only two ranks and more often consists of a continuum of levels ranging from high to low – benefit from a particular credit given that they are linked to the sacred.
Scholium 1. In his reflections on power, Paul Valéry noted the link between power and the sacred and the separation created between those associated with the sacred and those associated with the profane: ‘Power has been rightly considered as something noble, a feared and powerful superhuman force; the individual who receives it must feel themselves a sacred being, both victim and pontiff – attired in special robes and ornaments, set apart from other men, trembling and making others tremble.’39 But he was focusing his attention mostly on the major institutional powers of state and church, whereas the sacred character is inherent in any hierarchized order and in all forms of power, whether parental, masculine, educational, artistic, scientific, etc. The mechanism of belief in a sanctified and impressive authority is a relatively unchanging one, which takes on extremely different forms throughout history.
Scholium 2. As soon as a hierarchized society is in any way complex, the separation of the sacred and the profane not only divides objects, places, animals or people into two main categories, but also functions as a system of perception and evaluation which enables different degrees of sacredness to be identified. Honours, titles and positions are assigned within a symbolic hierarchy of legitimacies, from highest to lowest, in the manner of Roman censors.
In the Roman era, ‘censere’ meant ‘to make an estimate’, ‘to give an opinion’ but also ‘to praise’. The censor thus had the mission to establish a social hierarchy by using a regulatory mechanism based on praise and rebuke. For Dumézil, the Indo-European root from which the Latin verb ‘censere’ comes, means ‘to situate (a man, or an action, an opinion, etc.) in the appropriate place within the hierarchy, [with all the practical consequences of this situation], and that through a fair public appraisal, through solemn praise or rebuke.’ In Rome, as Nicolet points out, the census was originally ‘an incantatory operation destined, by a just distribution of rebuke or praise, to assign to everyone their value and real place within the city’. More a matter of equality than justice, it ensured a fair division of honours and of titles.40
8. This appropriation of the sacred by the dominant is an invariant property of all forms of domination. We could speak, in this connection, of a harnessing of collective values by the dominators, of a diversion of the sacred to their advantage.
Scholium. This analysis of domination in terms of harnessing or diversion of shared goods or values on the part of the dominators is present in the work of Nietzsche, but it is seriously limited by his denunciatory intentions. The dominators (more specifically, the representatives of the Christian church) are, for this reason, portrayed as cynical calculators who willingly manipulate collective opinions by turning them to their own advantage. Nietzsche writes:
The priest abuses the name of God: he calls a state of society in which the priest determines the value of things ‘the kingdom of God’; he calls the means by which such a state is achieved or perpetuated ‘the will of God’; with cold-blooded cynicism he assesses nations, epochs, individuals according to whether they were conducive to the rule of priests or whether they resisted it.41
Of course, Nietzsche is quite right to point out the human interests at stake and the social and political function of religion, but he is wrong to make the latter into a simple disguise intended to mask domination, since the priests, who exercise their power in the name of God, as well as monarchs, who can call on divine legitimacy, are structurally and historically compelled to do so. In a certain manner they are themselves dominated by these transcendent forms which they seek to gain control of and which they must appropriate in order to turn them to their own advantage. From this point of view, it could be said that if the dominators were so cynical and manipulative, they were no doubt seeking less mysterious, less complex or less torturous means of domination. When Nietzsche states ‘the concepts “beyond”, “Last Judgment”, “immortality of the soul”, the “soul” itself: they are instruments of torture, these are forms of systematic cruelty by virtue of which the priest has become master, stays master…’,42 he implies that all these conceptions and all these elements of language were invented precisely with a view to domination. However, both dominators and dominated must accommodate cultural constraints for which they are not strictly speaking ‘responsible’, even though these are entirely the historical product of their forms of collective life.
Nevertheless, if we set aside the intentionally calculated dimension of the analysis, it could be said that Nietzsche had perfectly understood the way in which individuals learn to formulate their own interests in the language (in this case religious) of the group. It is for this reason that the philosopher spends so much time translating the elements of a common official language into the language of a small section of the group: ‘the will of God’ becomes the equivalent of ‘the conditions for preserving the power of the priest’43; ‘God forgives him who repents’ becomes ‘[God pardons he] who subjects himself to the priest’44 or ‘By allowing God to judge, they themselves judge; by glorifying God, they glorify themselves; by demanding precisely those virtues of which they themselves are capable – more, which they are in need of to stay on top at all – they present a great appearance of contending for virtue, of struggling for the triumph of virtue.’45
Bourdieu puts Nietzsche’s analysis into sociological terms in the following manner:
What Nietzsche means is that the delegates base universal values on themselves, appropriate values, ‘requisition morality’, and thus monopolize the notions of God, Truth, Wisdom, People, Message, Freedom, etc. They make them synonyms. What of? Of themselves. ‘I am the Truth’. They turn themselves into the sacred, they consecrate themselves and thereby draw a boundary between themselves and ordinary people. They thus become, as Nietzsche says, ‘the measure of all things’.46
The dominant know how to turn the sacred to their own advantage and capture the social energies of members of the group (beliefs, desires).47
9. In addition to existing as a real person, the dominator is also endowed with a symbolic quality, which is usually perceived as perfectly real in the eyes of the members of the group, but is in reality simply what the group projects onto that individual. The dominator is thus in a position which allows them to be seen as possessing an aura, charisma, prestige, magical power or some very particular kind of charm.
Scholium 1. Magical efficiency, and this is a fundamental principle of Marcel Mauss’s theory of magic, is based on the belief shared by those who perform the magical act and by those who witness it or who hope to benefit from it:
Thus, what a magician believes and what the public believes are two sides of the same coin. The former is a reflection of the latter, since the pretences of the magician would not be possible without public credulity. It is this belief which the magician shares with the rest, which means that neither his sleights of hand nor his failures will raise any doubts as to the genuineness of magic itself. And he himself must possess that minimal degree of faith – a belief in the magic of others, when he is a spectator or patient. Generally speaking, while he does not see the causes at work, he does see the effects they produce. Indeed, his faith is sincere in so far as it corresponds to the faith of the whole group. Magic is believed and not perceived. It is a condition of the collective soul, a condition which is confirmed and verified by its results. Yet it remains mysterious even for the magician. Magic as a whole is, therefore, an object a priori of belief, a belief which is unanimous and collective. It is the nature of this belief that permits magicians to cross the gulf which separates facts from their conclusions.48
Scholium 2. The dominator, harnessing the values of the group to his own advantage, is thus credited by the dominated as possessing exceptional capacities such as the ability to heal (as in the case of the miracleworking kings49), to transform ordinary water into holy water, or to turn a humble piece of bread into an incarnation of the body of Christ, to make a reality out of statutes or ‘states’ simply by naming or recognizing them officially (baptisms, marriages, nominations to an order or a public office, attribution of a painting to an artist), etc. He performs magical acts because he is vested by the entire community with an exceptional power. He has, notably, the power to consecrate or to disqualify, to make something exist or to confine it to oblivion. Essentially, all power is thus associated with the sacred and all dominators are placed on the side of the sacred, thereby distinguishing themselves from those placed on the side of the profane.
Scholium 3. Whether drawing legitimacy from religious sources or from a purely human order, the dominator is always in a position similar to that of a god. Now, one of the qualities which the most diverse societies have attributed to the gods has been the capacity to bring to existence things which did not exist, and notably the ability to ‘do things with words’.50 Benveniste highlights the effectiveness of the word of authority in the context of Indo-European societies: ‘The authority – auctoritas – with which a man must be invested for his utterances to have the force of law, is not, as is often stated, the power of promoting growth (augere), but the force (skt. ojah), divine in principle (cf. augur), of “causing to exist”.’51 And he adds, on the word of authority: ‘He who “speaks” is thus in a position of supreme authority; by declaring what he is, he fixes it; he proclaims solemnly what is imposed, “the truth of fact or duty”.’52
10. Every dominator is in some way a double being, a geminate: he is a normal human being, ordinary and mortal, doubled, or twinned, with a being possessed of a completely exceptional power, accorded to him or her by the group.
Scholium 1. An individual exercising power, in whatever form that may take (emperor, king, employer, father or mother, husband, teacher, doctor, scholar, etc.), never appears quite like an ordinary person in the eyes of those who acknowledge their authority. It is as though that person is surrounded by a halo, an aura or a veil of respectability which prevents them from being seen as they are. The effect of their position of power is superimposed on their ordinary self. And, moreover, it is no doubt to avoid any error in social perception that those in positions of power and representing institutions often use ostentatious signs to indicate their status and, by the same token, their difference. These come in the form of robes and furs for lawyers, white coats for doctors, academic robes for the scholar, cassocks for the priest and mitre for the pope or military and police uniform, etc.
Blaise Pascal, who turns out to have been an excellent observer of the techniques of symbolic manipulation of his own time, noted the use of an entire ceremonial apparatus which ‘lends respect and veneration to people’, but he was mistaken in thinking that all this existed only in order to hide incompetence: ‘If they dispensed true justice, and if doctors knew the true art of healing, they would have no need of their square caps. The majesty of these sciences would be respected enough for its own sake. But being able to resort only to imaginary sciences they have to put on these empty symbols, which strike the imagination to which they must appeal. And in this way do indeed gain respect.’
Carried away by his social critique, he failed to see that those who are competent are not substantially differentiated in this respect from those who are incompetent. For all that, he had perfectly understood the kind of ‘duality’ which occurs when, setting aside any misunderstanding or error, the dominator is recognized as such. When that happens, it is not the ‘naked’ person that is seen, but that person in question doubled with the effects associated with their role and function. ‘The experience of seeing kings accompanied by guards, drums, officers, and all the paraphernalia which make the machine yield to respect and terror means that, when kings are occasionally alone and without the trappings, their appearance imparts respect and terror into their subjects because their persons are not separated in our minds from all that normally accompanies them.’
Pascal takes this argument still further, coming close to what Durkheimian analysis would systemize. He emphasizes that ordinary social perception renders essential what is fundamentally cultural and relational. It projects onto people occupying positions of power the effects of a social relationship of domination: ‘And the world, which knows not that this effect is the result of habit, believes that it arises by a natural force, whence come these words, “the character of Divinity is stamped on his countenance,” etc.’53 As Lucien Scubla points out: ‘A king is not, in himself, a sacred person: it is ritual which has made him so, by turning him into the depository of a spirit or a god, that is to say a double being.’54
Scholium 2. In a 1776 text entitled Résultat d’une conversation sur les égards que l’on doit aux rangs et aux dignités de la société, Diderot suggests a similar kind of doubling:
In society, I find myself placed between citizens distributed into different classes some of whom are elevated above the others, and decorated with different titles which indicate to me the importance of their roles. A man is not just a man, he is rather the minister of a king, an army general, a magistrate, a pontiff; and even though that person may, beneath the most august of these denominations, be the vilest creature of his species, there is a kind of respect that I owe to his place; this respect is even consecrated by laws which deal severely with any insult, not in respect of the offended man but in respect of his state. A knowledge of the consideration attached to different conditions forms an essential part of the propriety and of the usage of the world. Ignorance or neglect of any of these considerations would take us back to the bearskin and the depths of the forest.55
In the same way as we can refer to the two bodies of Christ, at the same time completely human and the son of God, of the two bodies of the Church, historical and universal, or of the two bodies of the king, at once mortal and immortal, fallible and infallible (E. Kantorowicz), we can speak of the two bodies of the person in a position of power (whatever the degree of that power). Any individual in a position to exercise power has a profane body and a sacred body (an aura which emanates from it). In so far as that person is sacred, they deserve attention, respect, distance and admiration, or veneration. We see, therefore, that far from being only relevant in terms of major political (state-related) and religious phenomena, as a too narrow reading of Kantorowicz56 might suggest, this duality applies to any individual occupying, relative to others, a position of power.
Scholium 3. When power is hereditary, the duality takes place virtually at birth simply by virtue of belonging to a particular family and bearing its name. Prestige is then transferred automatically: ‘To be of noble birth is a great advantage. In eighteen years it places a man within the select circle, known and respected, as another would have merited in fifty years.’57
11. Alongside this duality of the dominant is the duality of all sacred objects or places, in other words of objects or places consecrated by those counted amongst the sacred.
Scholium 1. Like dual beings, sacred objects and places possess a strength or a magic which forces the respect or admiration of all those who are prepared, because of their permanent socialization within the symbolic matrix in which the determined relations of domination play out, to recognize them as sacred objects or places. The communion host is flour cooked with water, but it is also the body of Christ; the relic of a particular saint is, at the same time, an ordinary fragment of cloth or some bones from a dead body and the object of universal veneration; the canvas of a famous painter is simultaneously a simple canvas and an admired work with a value (in both economic and aesthetic terms) which is out of all proportion to the physical properties of the object; a Chanel perfume is at once a chemical formula and a luxury French product, etc. Here, too, we can speak of two bodies of the sacred or sanctified object (the totem of a tribe, the national flag of our societies, holy water, the host, the wine, the relic, the work of art, etc.).
Scholium 2. When the group has placed its values in an object, an animal or its representation, it ends up confusing these values with the objects or the signs that represent them. Any attack on the object becomes, as a result, an attack on the values which constitute the group. This is what Durkheim tells us, comparing the national flag in our societies to the totem in stateless societies:
Powerful emotions always tend to focus on whatever it is that causes them, and if this object is not easily represented, on the sign or symbol of it: in this manner; even more, he ends up almost forgetting that the flag is only a symbol; and it is the image of the flag and not the idea of his country that grips his mind most at the moment of sacrifice. In the same way, the totem is the flag of the clan, and it is on to this, rather than the clan itself, that the sentiments brought about by the clan are transferred.58
From the object itself, there seems to emanate, like a perfume, the magic fluid or power which have in fact been conferred on it from outside by the group:
Since religious force is nothing other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan, and since this can be represented in the mind only in the form of the totem, the totemic emblem is like the visible body of the god. Therefore, it is from it that those kindly or dreadful actions seem to emanate, which the cult seeks to provoke or prevent; consequently, it is to it that the cult is addressed. This is the explanation of why it holds the first place in the series of sacred things.59
It is therefore necessary to adopt a critical attitude to all substantialist conceptions which tend to place the power of things in the things themselves, or, in other words, in their intrinsic properties.60
12. Every act of social magic is based on the collective belief in the value of the things or people who are involved in this act. This collective belief is, however, not only subject to historical variation, but also varies within a society, depending on the groups or sub-universes concerned.
Scholium 1. The conditions required for a magic act or rite to be effective obviously depend on the degree of belief shared by the members of the group. We can pay tribute here to the evocative power of Monty Python where the sense of the absurd highlights the arbitrary nature of beliefs and shows that what has meaning and value for some appears utterly ridiculous or incomprehensible for others. In their famous Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), when the members of an anarcho-syndicalist61 commune meet King Arthur and question him on the legitimacy of his power, the comic writers wittily expose various forms of social magic, based on the variety collectively recognized as ‘values’: here democracy, there royalty.
Woman: […] Who does he think he is? Heh?
Arthur: I am your king!
Woman: Well, I didn’t vote for you.
Arthur: You don’t vote for kings.
Woman: Well, how did you become king, then?
Arthur: The lady of the lake, […] her arm clad in the purest shimmer samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying that by Divine Providence I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. This is why I am your king.
Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: Well, but you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Arthur: Shut up!
Dennis: I mean, if I went round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away.
Arthur: Shut up, will you? Shut up!
When the magic fails to work, because the whole system of beliefs which supported it has suddenly disappeared, the legitimate imposter, to paraphrase John Austin, is seen as no more than a crude imposter, who runs the risk of being locked away in an asylum or a prison62: the king is an imposter or a madman, the Lady of the Lake simply a ‘strange woman’, an ‘aquatic ceremony’ or something even worse, and the ritual, for its part, is reduced to a prosaic commercial session involving the distribution of free gifts.
Scholium 2. Within each era and at the heart of each society, there is a difference between the situation of a dominator acknowledged as such by a group or by the members of a given sub-universe (there is no denying that in the world of art historians and Poussin specialists, Blunt, Mahon, Thuillier or Rosenberg are the leading lights), and the situation of a dominator within a much broader universe (pope, king, emperor, president, etc.). In the second case, there is no need for the dominator to do anything very much in order to obtain the immediate effects of domination. In the first case, on the other hand, once outside the group or sub-world they belong to, the dominator can lose their ‘aura’, since few people will immediately recognize it as such. If certain aspects (the way they speak, dress, behave, etc.) are quickly seen by members of the larger society as ‘good’ manners, the effect of domination will still be less forceful than when the dominant individual is immediately recognized as such by those who are susceptible to the differences (member of a particular academy, former director of a major cultural institution, etc.).
13. The relationship between dominated and dominator can take the form of a bewitchment, in other words it can be an enchanted or bewitched relationship. In such a case, the person dominated respects and even admires the dominator: he (or she) is impressed or fascinated by them because of the relative position they occupy vis-à-vis themselves within the framework of a matrix structured by the opposition between the sacred and the profane.
Scholium 1. ‘In general’, writes Weber, ‘it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis of every authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige.’63 The contribution made by all the dominated to domination, whatever form that takes (between boss and employee, master and slave, dominant ethnic category and dominated ethnic category, hierarchical superior and subordinate, highly qualified and less qualified, master and pupil, husband and wife, parents and children, doctor and patient, lawyer and client, etc.), is a central aspect of all domination. The tyrant, as La Boétie points out: ‘has no other power than what they grant him’.64 But the fascination, admiration, veneration or respect that the dominated can continue to feel towards the dominator are in a sense only extorted due to a belief in the importance of wealth, knowledge, culture, etc., and of the difference of position, in all these different aspects, between themselves and the dominator. Without any order or command or any explicit request, the dominator objectively profits from this difference in legitimacy. Roger Caillois refers to ‘the primacy of the relationship that unites the dominated to the dominator’. It is, according to him,
based on the effective interplay of different levels of energy that automatically causes one to submit to the other and immediately gives one influence over the other. The basic privilege of personal prestige already establishes this polarity and sheds light upon its presence and role. It is a relationship between one who is so endowed and exercises it and one who is so deprived and submits to it. The term ‘power’ is astrological in origin. It designates the zodiacal constellation that comes over the horizon at the moment of an individual’s birth.65
Scholium 2. Both in his literary texts and in his personal diary, Kafka uncovers the mechanisms of enchantment or bewitchment which take hold of the dominated, leading them to contribute widely to their own domination. He observes these in action in different circumstances; between a rabbi and the members of his community, between a rich and famous millionaire and ordinary people, between a bourgeois individual and a poor delivery boy on a bike, between a tyrannical and admired father and his crushed, admiring children, between a performer on the stage and the audience, etc. Such incidents of bewitchment are not observable during ritualized moments or official ceremonies, but also take place in the most ordinary scenes of social existence because the people present have all internalized social categories of perception (particularly those relating to education) which are favourable to some and disadvantageous to others.
Thus, on 11 September 1911, Kafka describes in his diary a road accident between a car driver and a young delivery boy on a tricycle, demonstrating an acute sense of social issues and of domination. The young boy makes his way over to the car driver ‘and utters various reproaches which are simultaneously stifled by his respect for the owner of the vehicle and stimulated by the fear his boss inspires in him’. But the driver totally dominates the scene because of the superior status everyone recognizes in him and also thanks to his verbal capacities which allow him to present the facts to his own advantage:
The delivery boy cannot easily stand up to him. Firstly, the driver is a cultivated man and full of passion; secondly, he has remained seated in his car the whole time, he is relaxed and can remain in his car and continue to relax. Thirdly, given his elevated position as a car driver, he is genuinely best placed to have seen exactly what happened. A few people have gathered, not in a circle around him, but as his status demands, rather in front of him […] The driver finds himself surrounded by a little group who are ready to take his side and who he has convinced that he is in the right. The errand boy gradually ceases his monotonous arm waving and gestures. […] The boy, whose position in relation to the driver is more and more that of a subordinate, is quite simply sent off in quest of a policeman, and he leaves his tricycle with the driver. The latter continues to describe the accident, even in the absence of his adversary, but without any ill feeling, since he does not need to gain support to his cause.66
Kafka learned to observe these forms of bewitchment but also to be aware of the gap between the ordinary person of the dominator and the advantageous way they were perceived by those caught up in such a relationship. He first learned to free himself from the spell of the admiration he felt towards his father and instead to focus on all his weaknesses. In particular, he discovered his father’s naïve bedazzlement in the face of people who were socially important only in appearance. This method of resistance was then converted into a recurring scheme of perception, which could be called a ‘scheme to ridicule the powerful’, and which consisted in observing the quirks or the most ridiculous aspects of people holding a position of power. Thus, for example, having encountered Dr Steiner, a famous theosophist, Kafka could not help adopting an ironic attitude towards him, describing a distracted individual with extremely indifferent manners. The same sense of the ridiculous provoked a ‘fit of giggles’ on the part of the writer in front of the president of the insurance company he worked for, a highly important person he compares to the Emperor (‘a normal employee of the institute sees this man in the clouds more than on earth’), but ‘whose position does not really correspond to any personal merit’. Kafka cannot stop himself laughing at the ludicrous attitude of the character and at his speech which he described as ‘utterly absurd and entirely without foundation’ (Letter to Felice Bauer, 8–9 January 1913).67 On numerous occasions, the writer shows his determination to break the charm, shatter the aura or see the naked reality of real people behind the veil of respectability or admiration through which they are idealized.
Like the character Amalia in The Castle, who is the only woman not to be bewitched by power and who remains ‘face to face with the truth’, Kafka assigned to literature, his own at least, a certain quest for truth: the role of true writers is to break the spell, release from the enchantment or demystify. The book like the ‘axe for the frozen sea inside us’ or like a ‘blow on the skull’ only makes sense if it makes us see that individuals are caught up in their illusions and as though in a state of slumber.
14. The magical phenomena associated with enchantment or bewitchment are not based solely on discourses justifying domination.
Scholium 1. If they are generally accompanied by discourses legitimizing or justifying their actions, present-day dominations, whatever form they may take, rely first and foremost on self-evident facts inherited from the past and crystallized into the natural course of things (in institutions, procedures, modes of organization, evaluation and sanction, laws, tools, technological systems, codes, texts, etc.) in order to continue to exist and produce their magical effects. ‘When you think of “legitimacy”’, says Bourdieu with reference to the State, ‘you think of “discourses of legitimization”. It is not just a propaganda discourse by which the State and those who govern through it justify their existence as dominant but is far more than this. The State structures the social order itself – timetables, budget periods, calendars, our whole life is structured by the State – and, by the same token, so is our thought.’68
Scholium 2. The focus of interest of knowledge concerning the facts of domination on public justifications, ideologies, the work of propaganda, discourses, signs and symbols of power, is essentially explained by the fact that intellectuals find this a favourable terrain for their spontaneously intellectualist vision. These intellectuals, as Weber says, tend to conceive the ‘world’ as a problem of ‘meaning’.69
Scholium 3. If we cannot help agreeing with the same author when he claims that there is no domination without action to encourage a ‘belief in the legitimacy’ of this domination and that ‘every such system [of domination] attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy’,70 we must not, however, conclude that it depends purely on an ideological work of justification. The essence of domination and its effects does not rest on any such justification, and it could even be claimed that a domination which felt the need to justify itself is a domination already in crisis. Studies of ideological justifications or propaganda operations through the use of images or discourses fail to capture the essence of domination: the immediate, practical belief, under the influence of an early, systematic and ongoing socialization and the gradual internalization of one or another category of material or cultural goods, or set of values, by both dominator and dominated. Paul Valéry captured the power of this obedience without order, in other words, this ‘natural’ authority which exerts itself without needing any recourse to force or argument: ‘Authority is the power to be obeyed by injunction only //at a word// physically, or intimately obeyed, in other words believed. Neither force, nor proofs to be shown – that is its condition// as soon as force comes into play, authority ceases, as a body becomes weightless when it falls. // All the more powerful in that the injunction is less pronounced and the obedience deeper and more prompt, – “Instinctive”.’71
Yet it is undoubtedly in Pascal that we find one of the first descriptions of the importance, in social life, of practical belief forged by habituation:
For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without its thinking about the matter. Who has demonstrated that there will be a to-morrow, and that we shall die? And what is more believed? It is, then, custom which persuades us of it; it is custom that makes so many men Christians, custom that makes them Turks, heathens, artisans, soldiers, etc. […] We must get an easier belief, which is that of custom, which, without violence, without art, without argument, makes us believe things, and inclines all our power to this belief, so that our soul falls naturally into it. It is not enough to believe only by force of conviction, when the automaton is inclined to believe the contrary.72
We are guilty of an error each time we explain the perpetuation of the social order by focusing exclusively on the reasons for believing in its legitimacy. For essentially, consent to the established order operates below explicitly inculcated beliefs and legitimizing discourse. We should never neglect the fact that actors are constantly trapped by what they need to do (domestically, professionally, etc.), that they have only extremely poor knowledge of how things really are and that most of the changes they dream about seem to them to be out of their reach. It is not only because what they have absorbed ‘corresponds’ to the objective state of the world that they cling to the world, but because the world seems to them a concept which is immense, overwhelming, unfathomable, etc. Why is it that they do not transgress the norms more than is the case? Why do they obey this social order even when no command has been explicitly formulated? To suggest that it is because they believe in the legitimacy of the social order would be to award too much importance to explicit beliefs and to propaganda efforts. They obey, submit or accept because they ‘go along with it’ and cannot make out any other possible paths open to them.
Following the example of Kafka, who was astonished by the docility of these wounded or mutilated workers who could have reacted violently to their employer or insurance company and who, instead, politely requested help, Erving Goffman pondered the reasons behind the ordinary docility displayed by the dominated. As William Gamson emphasized:
He [Goffman] was at war with hypocrisy and smugness. But the exposure of sham and covert manipulation is inevitably subversive, inviting rebellion against the established order. When President Grayson Kirk entered his office at Colombia University after a student occupation in the late 1960s had left it a shambles, he bewailed ‘My God, how could human beings do a thing like this?’ Goffman’s reaction shows scant sympathy for his plight: ‘The great sociological question, is of course, not how can it be that human beings would do a thing like this, but rather how it is that human beings do this sort of thing so rarely. How come persons in authority have been so overwhelmingly successful in conning those beneath them into keeping the hell out of their offices?’ [E. Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. Abingdon: Routledge, 1971, p. 45.] The contrast between the sentences is enlightening. The first merely observes the problematic nature of social order, but the second turns Kirk’s moral outrage on its head, for it implies that, in the longer view, he is the con and the students, typically, the mark or sucker.73
15. What permits the socialization of the members of any given society, subgroup or sub-universes is to instil in them the desire for certain things and the value of certain moral, cultural or material possessions. This development of a collective desirability for ‘things of value’ is a way of internalizing within individuals the separation between what is primary and what is secondary, between the central and the incidental, between the significant and the insignificant, between the remarkable or the exceptional and the ordinary, between the legitimate and the illegitimate, that is to say between the sacred and the profane.
Scholium. The collective construction of desire is at the heart of a novella by Kafka called Building the Great Wall of China.74 In it, he meticulously takes apart the various mechanisms which contribute to creating and maintaining a collective sentiment favourable to the construction of the wall and, ultimately, to a form of national cohesion around the emperor. The narrator lists all the power strategies deployed by the imperial authorities to maintain their domination. Amongst these and in pride of place, the power places the art of construction at the pinnacle of imperial values, by instilling the importance of such skills even from childhood.
For the work had not been undertaken without thought. Fifty years before the first stone was laid the art of architecture, and especially that of masonry, had been proclaimed as the most important branch of knowledge throughout the whole area of a China that was to be walled round, and all other arts gained recognition only in so far as they had reference to it. I can still remember quite well us standing as small children, scarcely sure on our feet, in our teacher’s garden, and being ordered to build a sort of wall out of pebbles; and then our teacher, girding up his robe ran full tilt against the wall, of course knocking it down, and scolded us so terribly for the shoddiness of our work that we ran weeping in all directions for our parents. A trivial incident, but significant of the spirit of the time.75
By proceeding in this manner, the ruling power forms the future masons who will be heavily involved in the construction. Once they began practising their trade, ‘with the first stone which they sank in the ground they felt themselves a part of the wall.’ The imperial authorities thus create a vocational relationship with the profession, which encourages these masons not only to ‘perform their work in the most thorough manner’, but also to feel ‘impatient to see the wall finished in its complete perfection’. Having succeeded in creating, through education, certain desires and certain expectations, the ruling power tries to harness the social energy of individuals shaped for its profit and strives to maintain that energy in different ways. It awards medals, for example, to workers, congratulating them on work accomplished. All the pride they then feel motivates them with ‘the desire once more to labour on the wall of the nation’, supported by popular fervour, ‘banners and scarfs waving’.
16. When moral, cultural and material assets have been socially constructed and are largely (and sometimes even unanimously) perceived as highly desirable by the members of a group or of a society, differentiations in terms of access to these goods can be interpreted in terms of inequalities. Inequality only exists because of the existence of a powerful desirability which is collectively acknowledged.
Scholium. Any observable difference cannot be interpreted in terms of inequality and does not systematically produce feelings of injustice. As proof of this, it is enough to look at a range of cases and to consider cultural differences in relation to objects, to poorly regarded or even undervalued skills, from the perspective of the most widely shared collective beliefs. For example, as long as the everyday upbringing of children is collectively regarded as a somewhat thankless task, and remains invisible and without any significant material or symbolic profit, it will be impossible to interpret the classic gender division of the roles involved as an appropriation, on the part of women, of the monopoly concerning the upbringing of children and, in correlation, as a social injustice experienced by ‘dispossessed’ men or, in other words, as a sexual inequality when it comes to participating in children’s upbringing. Quite the contrary, in reality, men happily ‘relinquish’ discredited tasks (this ‘dirty work’ to use the expression of Everett Hughes) to take up roles in fields which are professional, public and remunerative, both in economic and symbolic terms. However, as has been the case in Europe over the last few decades, when fathers get together to form an association to demand the right to equal access after divorce and to challenge the ‘glaring inequality’ between mothers and fathers on this point (judges in family courts in many cases simply going along with family traditions which designate the mother as the principal actor in the children’s upbringing, by more often than not granting custody of the child to the mother, except in the light of obvious maternal failings), they contribute, by their actions, to transforming a social difference in terms of gender into an inequality in terms of their right to bring up their children. In order for a difference to become an inequality, everybody (or at least a majority of both ‘privilege’ and ‘aggrieved’) must consider that being deprived of such an activity or such knowledge, or access to some cultural asset or to a specific service constitutes a loss, a handicap or an unacceptable injustice.
It is for this reason that the socially differentiated distribution of technical skills in terms, for example, of precious metal working, of mechanics or of embroidery is not perceived as an injustice or as a social inequality: our cultural and educational institutions as well as our collective beliefs have not declared these specific skill areas as a major asset and the absence of them as a cruel lack or an unbearable ‘sociocultural handicap’. For the same reason, within the French educational system, the historical transition from Latin to maths as the favoured tool of educational selection contributes to making the classic literary culture (‘humanist’) collectively less enviable and socially less desirable than hitherto. And, in a more or less distant future, we may well witness the transformation of an inequality of access to literary and artistic culture into simply an observable social difference, with schools shifting towards more scientific orientations.76
The question of inequality is therefore clearly indissociably linked to the belief in the value and the legitimacy of an asset, an area of learning or a practice; in other words, it cannot be dissociated from that which could be called the degree of collective desirability associated with them. In essence, the difference between social difference and social inequality of access to a whole series of assets, practices, learning, institutions, etc., is indeed the fact that we are dealing, in the second example, with objects which are defined, collectively and fairly widely, as highly desirable.
Researchers working on inequalities must first focus their attention on the development of collective beliefs and on the struggle to establish a social definition of what ‘counts’ and ‘has value’, in other words, of what is and represents ‘capital’ in the eyes of the majority. The metaphor of cultural (or educational) capital, judiciously used by Bourdieu and Passeron clearly indicates that, as early as the 1960s and 1970s, a segment of French sociology had noted that the culture selected by the education system or promoted by the major public or private cultural institutions (museums, music or dance conservatories, opera houses, theatres, libraries, etc.) functions, within highly educated social groups, as a currency which is unequally distributed and which, for this reason, gives access to diverse and varied privileges. But researchers were too preoccupied with the struggles against the fantastical visions of the democratic school or the ideology of talent to question in what way art, culture or knowledge can constitute a capital. They did not investigate the historical conditions which, through the course of the twentieth century, made academic knowledge, art and of culture, into values central to social development which should be universally desired.77
17. The social formation of groups with shared desires explains that the powerful, whether they are the ‘powerful of powerful’ (emperors, kings, presidents, etc.) or the powerful within a sub-universe (employers, scholars, sportsmen or women, artists, etc.) can be desired in so far as they are associated with (or owners of) desirable things.
Scholium. Rarely dealt with directly by researchers within the social sciences,78 the delicate question of the links between the socially desirable and the sexually desirable once more finds its literary expression in Kafka’s work. Power is often seen as sexually attractive, since loving and being loved by a dominator is a way of getting closer to them.79 The writer describes the relationships of seduction between the women of the village and the officials of the Castle, in other words, with those who might be considered to hold power. Power fascinates, attracts and makes the person in question more attractive, more elegant, more refined. The women also become more beautiful as soon as they are associated with power. Pepi, Frieda’s replacement at the Bridge Inn, tells K. that Frieda is ‘an unattractive thin girl not as young as she used to be, with short, sparse hair’ and that ‘although her face and body were undoubtedly a miserable sight, she must at least have had other secrets that no one could know about, perhaps to do with her alleged relationship with Klamm.’ She adds that Frieda ‘is a quick liar’ to the clients of the inn and ‘deceptive so that people don’t have time to look at her more closely’. Thanks to her relationship with Klamm, Frieda ‘considered herself a beauty’.
18. Within universes structured by relations between dominator/dominated and sacred/profane, we see individual or collective strategies for the appropriation of the sacred and for an improved, elevated status: strategies associating the profane with the sacred, or the less legitimate with the more legitimate, and processes intended to link or join objects or people to (more) legitimate categories.
Scholium 1. The structure of relations between dominators and dominated and between the sacred and the profane can be analysed in their own right. But, in the same way that the grammar of a language makes possible an infinite number of speech acts, the symbolic matrix which is based on the opposition between dominant/dominated, sacred/profane, high/low, superior/inferior, sky/earth, noble/common, significant/insignificant, etc., creates a multitude of potential variations within it. We could therefore study the means (strategies and tactics) used within the limits of this grammar to appropriate the sacred. Individuals living within hierarchized social orders of necessity resort to using practices which are structured by this order, devoting a huge part of their energy to deploying individual or collective strategies with a view to achieving a higher or more sacred status.
Scholium 2. Operations of linking or association consist in establishing a relationship between an X (object, place, animal or person) and either the domain of the sacred (transmutation from the profane to the sacred) or a category corresponding to a higher or lower degree of sacredness (promotion or decline in the order of the sacred). The same is true of any operation involving categorization or classification of objects or of people as with all nomination or coronation rituals. For example, the cataloguing or ‘publication’ of a painting as an authentic work, by a leading expert, is a means of legitimately linking an object to the name of a famous artist, rather than to a mere pupil or a talented but unknown individual.
Scholium 3. Amongst the strategies of sanctification (or of legitimation), we also find strategies of association of a profane X to a sacred Y, or of an already sanctified X to a Y placed higher in the ranks of sacred things. We discover here a fundamental property of all social magic, one which Durkheim and Mauss had already pointed out, namely the contagious nature of the sacred.80 This contagion needs to be understood in a double sense:
In this way, an individual will gain legitimacy by associating themselves with another person with greater legitimacy than them, by linking themselves to a highly legitimate object or by coming into close contact, temporarily or enduringly, with a highly legitimate institution. Goffman gives an example of this in the form of the prestigious members of a symposium who represent, for the organizers, the possibility of harnessing some of their legitimacy.81 When a renowned lecturer is invited, the organization which welcomes them is seeking, to a certain degree, to harness his or her prestige by being associated with them. Depending on their degree of legitimacy and that of the organization in question, the lecturers maintain their legitimacy or increase it. The exact direction of the exchange of legitimacy varies in each case: the lecturer ‘does a favour’ to the organization or to the event by lending some of his symbolic power to those who do not have it themselves or who have less of it; or, on the contrary, he or she increases their prestige simply by participating in a prestigious event even though they themselves are not yet symbolically very powerful.
Individuals can also seek legitimacy by associating themselves with legitimate objects. Contrary to the implicit intentions La Fontaine may have had in his fable ‘The donkey and the relics’,82 the ‘delusion’ consisting in appropriating the prestige of the sacred objects to which he is associated is a very common social reality. In fact, actors behave just like ‘The donkey who carried the holy relic’ who ‘thought he was being adored’ because the public bowed down in reverence at the sight of the relics. Not only do the actors appropriate for themselves what is provoked by the objects (like the donkey ‘Accepting with charm the canticles and incense’), but they genuinely benefit from the ‘hosanna’ and the ‘homage’ intended for the objects with which they are associated. It is only the author’s critical point of view as a writer of moral fables that sees as a ‘delusion’ (‘A bystander noted his delusion and said: “Sir Donkey, you let things go to your head”.’) what is usually an extremely efficient strategy of association.
Likewise, an object can be legitimized by being associated with legitimate people, places or institutions. Such procedures or strategies can be observed, for example, when someone seeking to have a controversial painting recognized as authentic succeeds in having it exhibited in a prestigious art venue.
Scholium 4. The strategies of association and the effects of contagion sought by those in quest of legitimacy always have a double meaning. There is no shortage of examples in the world of art: a catalogue raisonné contributes to legitimizing an attribution by confirming it (thus sanctifying a painting), but also to legitimizing the person who compiles the catalogue, associating-attaching their name to a famous painter or painting; those who buy a famous painting seek to appropriate the legitimacy of a legitimate work, but they also contribute to the legitimacy of the work by paying a very high price for it (reinforcing the notion that it is indeed an exceptional work); a State or a major museum gains legitimacy by acquiring legitimate paintings, but can also contribute to legitimizing controversial canvases by the simple fact of acquiring them and putting them on public view; art critics or art historians who write extravagantly eulogistic papers on a painter contribute to legitimizing that painter, but also legitimize themselves as recognized experts, discoverers of art works, brilliant commentators; etc. The legitimate or the sacred are not therefore found in a fixed place or source. Instead, they exist only in the permanent exchanges of credit between those who legitimize and what they legitimize, between those who legitimize and the institutions which legitimize them, etc.
Scholium 5. Many examples of both positive and negative strategies of association can be found in the realist literature of the nineteenth century, with its propensity for descriptions of the social mechanisms linked to power. Thus, for example, Balzac, almost one and a half centuries before any sociological studies on such issues, reveals how social ambitions function in a hierarchized world. In Père Goriot,83 he shows that any differentiated and hierarchized social order produces a hierarchized order of legitimacy: there are things, positions, situations or people which are highly legitimate and which attract attention or interest, incite envy or dreams in those who consider them to be highly desirable; and there are those which are illegitimate, unworthy or insignificant, and from which everybody would wish (to be able) to distinguish themselves or to remain at a distance. Approaching the summit of legitimacy or being associated with it, being linked with it in whatever manner, is to be elevated, to gain in dignity, to be ennobled. Movement in the opposite direction, from the top downwards, cannot, on the other hand, be seen as anything other than a decline, a degradation, a loss of status or a fall.
Conscious of the hierarchized nature of the social order, Balzac is also attentive to the powerful effects of the power of words, signs or gestures. He sees in these effects a magic (the word is used), sustained by the entire social order and by belief in the legitimacy of hierarchies. In the course of his social apprenticeship within the Parisian aristocracy, Eugène de Rastignac finds himself discovering the magical effect of words even though these merely state the connection between an individual and a source of legitimacy. Simply mentioning a great family and establishing a connection between this source of legitimacy and a given individual is enough to attract respect and consideration for that person. To be ‘well regarded’, rather than remaining in a state of social insignificance, simply as a consequence of certain words being pronounced is indeed an example of an act of social magic. Yet magic only works on those who believe in it and only those who know and recognize the order of legitimacies will be susceptible to these words and adjust their behaviour as a result.
Unknown to everyone, freshly arrived from the provinces and not as well-dressed as the young Parisian aristocrats, Eugène de Rastignac is a nobody and in theory attracts no interest and no envy. Yet if someone simply introduces him with the ‘right words’, his view of himself, and likewise the view others have of him, changes instantly. He gains assurance while the others consider him, depending on their circumstances, either as somebody emerging from social insignificance (Count Restaud), or as a dangerous potential rival (Count de Trailles):
– ‘Monsieur de Restaud’, said the countess, introducing her husband to the law student. Eugène bowed politely.
– ‘This gentleman’, she continued, presenting Eugène to her husband, ‘is M. de Rastignac; he is related to Mme. la Vicomtesse de Beauséant through the Marcillacs; I had the pleasure of meeting him at her last ball.’
Related to Mme. la Vicomtesse de Beauséant through the Marcillacs! These words, on which the Countess through ever so slight an emphasis, by reason of the pride that the mistress of a house takes in showing that she only receives people of distinction as visitors in her house, produced a magical effect. The Count’s stiff manner relaxed at once as he returned the student’s bow.
– ‘Delighted to have an opportunity of making your acquaintance’, he said.
Maxime de Trailles himself gave Eugène an uneasy glance, and suddenly dropped his insolent manner. The mighty name had all the power of a fairy’s wand; those closed compartments in the southern brain flew open again; Rastignac’s carefully drilled faculties returned. It was as if a sudden light had pierced the obscurity of this upper world of Paris, and he began to see, though everything was indistinct as yet.84
By uttering these words associating Eugène with nobility, the Countess de Restaud not only indicates to those in her circle that she does not receive just anyone, but provokes social effects in all those present. Titles, like today’s diplomas, ‘are just as much a part of magic as are amulets,’ writes Bourdieu, continuing his discussion of the rituals of institutions as follows:
Social science must take account of the symbolic efficacy of rites of institution, that is, the power they possess to act on reality by acting on its representation. The process of investiture, for example, exercises a symbolic efficacy that is quite real in that it really transforms the person consecrated: first, because it transforms the representations others have of him and above all the behaviour they adopt towards him (the most visible changes being the fact that he is given titles of respect and the respect actually associated with these enunciations); and second, because it simultaneously transforms the representation that the invested person has of himself, and the behaviour he feels obliged to adopt in order to conform to that representation.85
Although the situation narrated by Balzac is not an ‘initiation’ in the strictest sense, it is no less a manifestation of social magic. Moreover, Balzac uses the magic metaphor in order to demonstrate the powerful social effects produced from a few words spoken by a legitimate individual (the Countess de Restaud) in front of legitimate individuals (her husband and the Count de Tailles) who are prepared, through their attachment to the social order of things, to immediately adjust their behaviour according to what they find out about the young Eugène.
Being associated with signs of legitimacy therefore means gaining legitimacy, assurance and consideration. Yet social magic can also work in the opposite sense. Mentioning the name of a person lacking legitimacy, as Eugène does by mentioning ‘Père Goriot’ in front of the Count and Countess de Restaud, is akin to committing a gaffe (a ‘blunder’ or a ‘mess’ as Balzac calls it in the same novel) and produces negative magic effects: ‘Eugène had a second time waved a magic wand when he uttered Goriot’s name, but the effect seemed to be entirely opposite to that produced by the formula “related to Mme. de Beauséant”.’86 The same mechanism explains therefore that certain remarks produce a favourable impression (positive magic) and that certain things better left unsaid can, if uttered, produce negative effects (negative magic).
Scholium 6. Similar magical effects can be found in Kafka’s work, either introduced in his writing or described in his journal or his letters. The legitimacy or lack of it in a particular individual spreads to everything linked or associated with that person. To be associated either objectively (through a genealogical link, for example) or symbolically (purely by association) to a powerful person means benefiting from a share of their legitimacy and, as a result, from a certain symbolic protection. This is why some of the characters in The Castle dream of getting closer to Klamm and of getting to know him, and for this reason too, that the smallest sign or familiarity or of attention on the part of the powerful one is eagerly watched for (the simple fact that Klamm calling Frieda by her first name is interpreted by her as a sign that he loves her). This may indeed be an illusory way of getting closer to power without really possessing it, but when the illusion is collectively shared, it still allows symbolic profits to be harvested and these are by no means negligible.
Kafka shows how legitimacy spreads so that having a family connection with a person of high legitimacy means enjoying their protection and benefiting from the aura associated with them. In Amerika, the Captain explains this link clearly when he speaks to Karl: ‘Don’t you see you’re a very lucky young man […] The man who has presented himself to you as your uncle is the state councillor Edward Jacob. You now have a glittering career ahead of you, which you surely cannot have expected’.87 The people present in the office immediately change their attitude to him as soon as the family connection is proved: ‘He [Karl] […] looked around at all those present, standing in silent respect and astonishment.’ Even the stoker, who saw his own case totally forgotten, shook Karl’s hand and congratulated him on his sudden promotion within the order of legitimacy.
Kafka continues to dissect the magical thought process associated with power through the eyes of K. According to this way of thinking, everything that touches power is sacred and everything which is associated with it becomes untouchable: the villagers end up no longer distinguishing between the most minor representative of the Castle and its highest authorities (the village innkeeper explains to K. that Schwarzer’s father, who is a mere ‘sub-steward, and one of the lowest at that’ is ‘powerful’), those in charge of the offices are as impressive as Count Westwest, their secretaries are respected as though they were part of the same powerful and sacred entity, and both Gardena and Frieda owe a large proportion of the prestige and the respect accorded to them to the fact that they have been associated with Klamm.88 The mechanism is set in place from the very first pages of the novel, when K., regarded with suspicion as a stranger and treated as a ‘common tramp’, just about permitted to spend the night on a straw mattress in the village inn, is suddenly treated with deference. From the moment a telephone call from the Castle appears to recognize the legitimacy of his presence, he is considered ‘a gentleman’, the person who treated him as a tramp ‘timidly’ approaches him with ‘insistent pleas that he move into the landlord’s room’ and he is given the wherewithal to drink and wash, etc. Indeed, all those present at the beginning are afraid of suffering negative consequences because of the poor welcome they gave K.: ‘All rushed to the door, averting their faces so that he wouldn’t recognize them tomorrow.’
Conversely, as the result of negative magic, those who broke off links with government officials or resisted their authority see their lives, and those of their entire families, totally changed by this event. They are forced into a kind of social death (which Olga calls a ‘curse’). The same is true of members of Amalia’s family (her parents, her sister Olga, her brother Barnabas), who are treated by the whole village as outcasts or reprobates (like plague victims whom nobody dares spend time with or even look at), all because Amalia dared to tear up the improper (and even obscene) letter brought to her by a messenger from an official at the Castle (by the name of Sortini).
19. The members of a hierarchized social order who occupy a position of power, even a very relative one, carry out, explicitly (in rituals designed for that purpose, and which are not necessarily of a religious nature) or without realizing it (in ordinary interactions), acts of legitimization-sanctification or, more rarely, of delegitimization-desanctification.
Scholium 1. There are official sanctification rituals, that is to say procedures that sanctify (legitimize) objects, animals, people, places or institutions. In order to enable a human being, an animal, an object or a place to change from one status to another, from the profane to the sacred or from the sacred to the profane, or from one degree of sacredness to another, whether higher or lower, official acts, rites or ceremonies are sometimes required. These consist of a series of appropriate gestures and words, enacted or pronounced in chosen conditions by an authorized individual. In the course of these rituals, which name, enthrone, consecrate, etc., a genuine transmutation of beings takes place. Remaining substantially the same, the individuals or objects in question nevertheless radically change state or status, and this in turn changes the way in which they are regarded by all those who recognize the legitimacy (believe in the efficacy of the actions or rituals taking place), but also changes their own perception of themselves (in the case of human beings) and, in the long term, alters their behaviour. The dubbing of a knight, the rite of passage from boy to man in stateless societies, the enthronement ceremony of an emperor or the awarding of a prize, the transformation from ordinary water to holy water, the attribution of a painting to a great master are all actions which transform the individuals or objects concerned without any verifiable physical transformation taking place. By making a knight out of a groom, or a Poussin out of an ordinary painting, the person or object is projected into a completely different world.
Scholium 2. Ceremonies and rituals do not change anything in the actual substance of the human beings, objects or places that are at the heart of their actions, yet nothing is, however, quite as it was before. By conveying to a boy, for example, that he is now a man, the rite of passage tacitly urges him to behave accordingly ‘as a result’. Just as the phrase ‘you are no longer a child!’ normally uttered by the parents is generally not simply an observation but instead a performative act which follows on from behaviour judged to be childish. In this way the parents encourage the child to behave in a more adult way (in a more reasonable, responsible, even-tempered and self-controlled manner, etc.). When they concern people, rituals therefore affect the expected behaviour of the individuals themselves and of all those who interact with them. When, on the other hand, they concern objects (or places), the change does not of course affect the object (or place) in question, but rather the way individuals must now interact with them. By changing the classification of an object, by transforming it from a profane to a sacred state, or from one level of sanctity to another, a sign is given to all those who interact with it that they must now behave towards it in accordance with its new status.
20. All acts of naming or of certification and, amongst them, all sanctification rituals, constitute situations in which individuals with the necessary authority declare, in agreed conditions and in an appropriate manner, what the individuals or things which are the object of their pronouncement are, by linking them in this way to pre-existing categories of objects or people.
Scholium 1. In carrying out acts of naming, of certification and of sanctification, the authorized individuals do not, strictly speaking, make things exist which did not previously exist (the person who baptizes does not invent the mechanism of baptism, and even less Christianity itself, just as the person who authenticates a painting does not invent either the process of attribution or art itself), but create states of things or of people which change the social nature of these things and of these people. In this way, the person conducting a baptism allows an individual who was previously not a Christian to enter Christianity, the one blessing ordinary water transforms it into holy water, and the one who attributes a painting found in an obscure attic to an old master causes that painting to move from the category of ordinary objects to that of sacred objects. Rituals around sanctification are designed to sanctify (to transform from profane to sacred) or to further sanctify (to make something or someone move from one level of the sacred to another, superior one) by declaring the (new) state of the individual or object in question.
Scholium 2. Since the sacred is separated from the profane, societies have to resolve two types of problem: (1) maintaining the separation so that the profane cannot profane the sacred; and (2) the regulation of the transformation of the profane to the sacred. These two difficulties bring us back to the two categories of rites described by Durkheim. These are (1) the ‘negative rites’ (the Polynesian term ‘taboo’ is also used by ethnologists), through which the separation is maintained (‘The rites of the negative cult indeed have as their goal to establish or to maintain this state of separation, to prevent these two worlds from encroaching on each other; with the result that the acts decreed by these rites can never be other than prohibitions’,89 and (2) the ‘positive rites’ by means of which the profane can temporarily, or more lastingly, attain the sacred state (‘These rites have as their goal to place the faithful in a relationship with the sacred object, in order to enable it to bring him all the benefits he might expect of it’90). It is worth noting, however, that all positive rites are, in a sense, negative rites without being aware of it, in so far as the accession of some to the sacred at the same time implies the exclusion of others (who do not have the right to it).
Scholium 3. There are certain individuals (ministers of religion, representatives of the state, experts from a specific field, etc.) who are legally entitled or tacitly authorized to carry out acts of linking or association within the context of a given symbolic matrix. It is they who authorize the flow of admissions to the sacred domain.
Scholium 4. Austin’s theory of acts of language and performatives91 should be considered the most central, most fundamental theory in the whole of sociology, in that it analyses the power of naming, as the power to create and transform the status of existing people and things, by means of an enunciation made in appropriate social conditions. This theory, in the guise of a linguistic analysis, unconsciously functions as a theory of power which many researchers whose interests do not lie in linguistic or discursive questions fail to recognize. It is, moreover, no coincidence if the examples of performative acts chosen by Austin are often associated with institutional spheres of law, state administration, the Church, political or economic authorities. Austin’s starting point is a criticism of the philosophical idea according to which language essentially consists of true or false assertions. According to such a conception, speaking would essentially consist in describing or asserting the ‘states of affairs’. The utterance would of necessity be ‘a true or false account of something’.92 This implicit theory tells us, in brief, that those with power (gods, kings, emperors, judges, party leaders, teachers, etc.) have the capacity to do things with words. The theological origins of such a reflection cannot escape even the least attentive reader.93 Like God creating the world by announcing his Creation (‘God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light’ [Genesis]), those speakers who are recognized as legitimate are in a position to create situations, statuses, states and, ultimately, social realities which did not exist prior to the act of utterance. Without really being fully aware of it himself, Austin breaks down this reality of the symbolic power of creation. The same is true of Bourdieu’s theory of legitimacy, which borrows from Austin by emphasizing the role of the institution and of the collective conditions which render these performative acts possible.
Scholium 5. Even within utterances which appear to be constative utterances, Austin detects the presence of performative utterances. He writes: ‘Very commonly, the same sentence is used on different occasions of utterance in both ways, performative and constative.’94 Thus, the utterance: ‘This painting is a Poussin’ can just as well be a constative as a performative. It is even, more precisely, a performative which takes the form of a constative. We say of a constative that it can be ‘true’ or ‘false’, but not a performative. It is precisely the fact that the veracity or falsity of such an affirmation can be subject to doubt and controversy that makes it a performative which, not satisfied merely to describe an existing fact, makes a decision amidst an ocean of doubt.
Scholium 6. The classic question which must be posed, at least since Austin’s work on acts of language or performatives, concerns the force of the discourse or, more precisely, the conditions in which an act of language can succeed. The theoretical opposition is generally presented in the following manner: while certain linguists would tend to place the power of language in the language itself (the weight of words), sociologists would tend to situate it in connection with the institutions which support the discourse or with those producing the discourse who occupy a particular place within these institutions (the weight of the institution or of the spokesperson). But presenting the situation in this way95 is in fact too much of a caricature to be really useful.
For example, a sociologist will particularly insist on the social legitimacy of the spokesperson, on the auctoritas conferred on them not by the discourse itself but by factors external to it, namely, the institution it represents (State, Government, Administration, Church, Party, Union, the Medical profession, Science, University, etc.). He will demonstrate how it is possible to move away from ‘the naïve question of the power of words’96 and the notion which involves ‘looking within words for the power of words, that is, looking for it where it is not to be found’: ‘authority comes to language from outside’ and that there is therefore no point in ‘looking in language for the principle underlying the logic and effectiveness of the language’.97
There is no shortage of examples demonstrating the fact that the same formula, the same discourse pronounced by speakers with differing social status will not produce the same social effects. This is shown by: (1) the neutralization of the discourse (the same utterance); (2) variation in the speakers (speakers with very different social legitimacy). Thus, the famous example Austin gives in How to do things with words is used to demonstrate the extra-linguistic nature of power: ‘Suppose, for example, that I see a vessel on the stocks, walk up and smash the bottle hung at the stem, proclaim “I name this ship the Mr Stalin” and for good measure kick away the chocks: but the trouble is, I was not the person chosen to name it.’98 The correct linguistic formula uttered by the wrong speaker has no social force, the vessel will not be named the Mr Stalin as a result of this act, and the person involved runs the risk of being arrested by the police…. The power of discourse comes indeed from outside the discourse itself and notably from the social standing of the person who utters it. The matter seems clear enough, speech is indeed a very secondary aspect of things in comparison with the authority of the spokesperson: ‘Language at most represents this authority, manifests and symbolizes it.’99
But it is also possible to vary the principle and to produce a converse, but equally problematic argument to the one above. Let us, in our imaginations, neutralize the speaker, and vary the types of discourse. How effective would the speech be if, instead of adopting the conventional (in both senses of the word) discursive mode, the speaker were to use a different one? Imagine General de Gaulle delivering his 18 June Appeal in alexandrine verse or a political figure addressing militants in the language of a mathematical demonstration (‘Take A, a political action and A1, A2, A3, … An, the different constituent moments of this action…’); what weight, what social force, would their discourse have? It would be tempting, on the base of this imaginary variation, to draw a (hasty) conclusion to the effect that the type and style of a speech form the essence of the authority of what is said and that, no matter who actually produces them, speeches are indeed central to the mechanisms of power because only the ‘right phrases’ (the appropriate genres and formulations) have the capacity to act on those who have learned to perceive and recognize them as the appropriate words to be pronounced in a particular context. This second variation has the great merit of highlighting the specificity of discourses which cannot be reduced to simply explaining, symbolizing or representing social or institutional positions, balances of power or relations of domination, themselves silent, but which were already murmuring what the discourse expresses and pronounces with clarity.
Furthermore, if we restrict ourselves to simple formulas (‘I name you’, ‘I declare the session open’, etc.), we could conclude that the expression in itself is not important in that it is easy to envisage any speaker delivering it without problem. But the variation is more difficult to envisage when we turn our attention to the kinds of discourse which are more formally complex and which demand many years of specific training – both academic and beyond – on the part of those who produce them before they are in a position to be able to put them together. The lawyer’s plea will, of course, draw its strength from the fact that it is spoken by a lawyer (and not any old lawyer at that), but also from the fact that it is a particular discursive format, using techniques or procedures of speech designed to convince, persuade, move or disturb within the context of the court room. The same is true of all those scientific texts or experts’ reports which claim to tell the truth about things. Affirming, for example, that a painting can indeed be attributed to a particular old master certainly requires being in the legitimate position to be able to do so. But a simple ‘This is a Poussin’ would not suffice to make the painting in question a Poussin, whatever the degree of legitimacy of the person uttering it. The art historian or the expert seeking to attribute a painting must, of necessity, go through the process of pronouncing a series of arguments and proofs. These two dimensions (a rigorously appropriate discourse and an authorized speaker) are therefore both necessary and power will not come definitively from either ‘outside’ or ‘inside’, but will depend on at least four main elements:
It is rare for empirical studies to succeed in linking these four dimensions, for entirely practical reasons (lack of competence in researchers on specific aspects of the analysis of social reality, genuine lack of time or of ‘data’ to carry out such a theoretical project which can easily seem overwhelming as soon as you get beyond the somewhat frustrating analysis of a single speech, etc.). In order to recapitulate the problems and to expose the narrow link between these four dimensions on which depend what is generally referred to as the ‘power of persuasion’ or the ‘power’ of speeches, the following series of proposals can be formulated:
(1) The most rigorously appropriate speech will be worthless if it is delivered by an imposter, or in other words, by someone who, in reality, does not occupy an appropriate position to deliver it (the casual passer-by who declares a public monument officially open a few hours before the official ceremony, the unknown art enthusiast who publishes a text attributing or de-attributing a painting, etc.). It is worth adding that, where authority or legitimacy are concerned, it is all a question of degree: speakers can occupy positions of varying prestige and, as a result, impart more or less force to their discourse.
(2) The most (socially) powerful of orators is worthless unless he uses the correct forms and the appropriate rhetorical procedures (the politician who attempts to arouse passion in his audience during a meeting by speaking in verse; the art expert content simply to state that a painting is not the work of a certain great master without bringing any evidence to support his statement, etc.). Here, too, it could be added that two orators of similar social power and using appropriate forms could nevertheless differ by the force or the quality (technical, formal) of their own discourse (two plea speeches will never be entirely of equal merit in terms of their definitive quality given that lawyers have varying degrees of skill in terms of the genre of the plea).
(3) The most pertinent speech pronounced by the most powerful or the most legitimate of orators will be of no value if it is not given in the right place and at the right time (the politician coming to cut the ribbon and give his speech a few hours before the official unveiling ceremony of a public monument, the lawyer pronouncing his plea in the corridors of the court building, the political speech falling flat because delivered at an inopportune moment, or the art historian publishing a text attributing a work of art in a women’s magazine).
(4) Whatever the quality or the relevance of the speech, the time and the place where it is delivered and the social force or legitimacy of those who deliver it, the public (readership or audience) has a determinant role: they can fail to pay attention or to be sensitive to what is said or even no longer believe in what is said, weakening or completely destroying the social force of the discourse by their lack of interest (contexts such as a crisis of confidence or of belief or where the audience no longer adhere to the message addressed to them).
The explanation of this multi-faceted production of the social force of a discourse clearly exposes the basic error which consists in thinking it is possible to define the principle of symbolic impact (external or internal, circumstantial or institutional, linked to those giving or receiving) of discourses.
Scholium 7. Austin’s observations, along with those of other sociologists, were preceded by those made by many European theologians of the Middle Ages and of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Pierre Lombard, Guillaume d’Auverge, Richard Fishacre, Pierre de Jean Olieu or Jean Duns Scot. Irène Rosier-Catach has carried out magnificent studies on the thoughts of these authors whose discussions were both extremely theoretical and also very practical (with reference to the sacraments), drawing attention to their astonishing modernity. For these theologians are interested in the same type of elements of language as an author like Austin, namely those which ‘give effect to what they say’ (efficiunt quod dicunt) in the practice of the sacrament101: the ‘effective signs’.
There is no ahistoricism in emphasizing the similarity of reflections so far apart in terms of time, insofar as what constitutes the common ground are the institutions and their rituals (of sanctification, investitures, awarding of knighthoods, ordinations, contracts, etc.), through which the latter say and, by the very act of saying, transform (the sacrament ‘produces its own meaning’, id efficit quod figurat/significat) the status of things or people. The analogy of theoretical reflections (from Augustin to Austin and from the sacramental theology to the theory of acts of language or of legitimacy) rests on analogies in the mechanisms of institutions and, more generally, in the workings of power. These are social mechanisms which are quasi-universal.
Representatives of the liberal arts, philosophers of language and of meaning and grammarians living in the same era (during the course of the first two centuries of the first millennium) make little reference to theological debates on the sacraments and, consequently fail to engage with the enormous question of the effectiveness of signs. Inversely, because they are dominated by them, theologians make reference to philosophers and grammarians. Within the sphere of knowledge, the dominated therefore have more chance of advancing knowledge than the most dominant. Obliged to draw on dominant disciplines, they, moreover, ask theological and practical questions which the others loftily ignore: ‘The statutory separation of disciplines and the hierarchization of faculties certainly explains that the movement, in this case, is more one of the arts towards theology rather than the reverse.’102
Medieval thinking is intense. It involves speculation on the sacramental formulae (and on the effects produced by any variations of these), on the quality and the inclinations of the speaker, on the state of mind and the inclinations of the receiver-recipient, etc., and, like Austin, delving into the question of the relative felicity of acts of language, it speculates about the conditions in which the sacrament is correctly and efficiently carried out, what the irregularities and violations of the rules might be, whether great or small, and to what extent they invalidate the acts effected.103
Two schools of thought clash therefore from the middle of the eighteenth century, with, on the one side, the supporters of a conventionalist conception inspired by Saint Augustin, for whom the efficacy of the sacrament lies mainly in the pact passed between God and the different participants of the sacrament, and, on the other side, the supporters on an Aristotelian substantialist conception, for whom the intrinsic properties of signs are central. Yet when considering the sacrament, the central focus of these theological reflections, we find ourselves making parallels with linguistic signs in general, but also with monetary signs or emblems (flags, insignia, heraldic symbols, signs on buildings, etc.).
For the conventionalists, the bread and wine do not, in the course of the Eucharist and transubstantiation, change in terms of their actual substance, but only in terms of their status: from simple (profane) things, they become the ‘signs of the divine Christ’ (body and blood of Christ). For example, Richard Fishacre asserts that the water used in baptism is not substantially different from ordinary water: ‘No virtus which would not hitherto have been present is created in the water, by the words of the prophet; just as the water contains nothing it did not contain previously and nothing any other water would not have contained.’104 Refusing to lend to the words and the gestures involved in the context of the ritual the capacity to change the nature of the water, bread or wine, or to add anything substantial, these writers engage in a subtle reflection on the new status of these substances as soon as they are brought together, in given circumstances, by appointed people, with the given words and gestures. Water, wine, bread are placed into new relationships which in turn give them a new status and new functions and uses. It is the fundamentally relational nature of the linguistic sign as of all other signs which explains the transformations and the efficacy of certain acts.
The comparison with the other types of signs such as the coin, the sign board depicting wine over the entrance of a tavern, the flag of a country, the coat of arms of a branch of nobility, etc., leads theologians to a way of thinking that, in a certain way, is becoming more secularized. For if, in the case of sacraments, the relationship, the commitment or the pact, concern, in their view, God and mankind, in other cases it is purely human matters which are played out. Thus, the metal coin only becomes currency because it forms a relationship with a reality external to it – the State, and more specifically, the monarchy – capable of conferring on it and guaranteeing it a value which is generally agreed. Fishacre also takes the example of the bronze tokens (or ‘méreaux’) distributed by one of the king’s ministers. Guillaume d’Auvergne, for his part, takes the example of the oaths of allegiance, professions of faith, contracts or letters bearing the royal seal ‘which are the signs of a pact between the king, who undertakes to do what is set out, and his subordinates, who in exchange offer their obedience to him’.105 The seal only has real power when it is associated with the king, just as wine only becomes the blood of Christ when it is associated with God, via his ministers, or the ‘méreau’ only allows access to a meal at the royal table when validated by the royal decision.
The only difference, it might be said, lies in the fact that God does not really exist as an active entity (only the ministers of God exist), whereas the king, on the other hand, does indeed exist. But the atheist common sense of such a comment completely misses the central issue. Rather than differentiating between a royal reality and a divine fiction, we should instead be asking whether, just like God, the King is not also a fiction. After all, his power is based on exactly the same mechanisms as those on which divine legitimacy is based. The fact that he exists and is mortal does not alter the fact that he too is, in his own way, a fiction, just as the holy water is both water and something else too (something non-substantial) or the coin is both a piece of metal and a value guaranteed by the State. We are back to the doubling previously referred to (see above, Propositions 9, 10 and 11); the two bodies of the king, the two bodies of Christ, the two bodies of the Church, the two bodies of the water or the two bodies of the coin.
Even magic signs are used as an example and are considered in the same way as the effective signs of the sacraments. In his De legibus (1230), Guillaume d’Auvergne explores the idea that the effectiveness of magic signs is not natural, intrinsic or substantial, but arises from a pact made with the demons ‘which their worshippers, through such signs, are committed to respect’.106 Demons and gods are the sources of meanings which those who use such signs with a view to a certain symbolic efficacy are committed to respect. It is in their name that magicians, sorcerers or priests make use of these signs in situations where a group shares the same beliefs. By using them, they are harnessing collective beliefs. It matters little whether these sources of legitimacy and of meaning are supernatural collective fictions (gods, spirits, demons, etc.) or purely human collective fictions (the State, the Motherland, the Kingdom, the Nation, etc.), since as soon as there is a human group, a community, there are cardinal values, sources of legitimacy, etc., which can potentially be mobilized and manipulated in acts of social magic. Moreover, Guillaume d’Auvergne bases his reasoning on Saint Augustin’s De doctrina christiana (354–430), which is extremely perceptive about the collective nature of magical efficacy. As Rosier-Catach writes:
Augustin criticizes the superstitions and the meanings that omens and other similar signs would embody, in the name of a very conventionalist conception of language and signs: contrary to what charlatans claim in order to justify the interpretation of omens, it is not because the signs have in themselves a particular value which can be revealed by certain men. On the contrary, says Augustin, it is because they have attributed this value to them, and because they have agreed to recognize it in them, that these signs possess such value.107
21. In highly differentiated societies, the domain of the sacred is necessarily differentiated. Given that the sacred is a fundamental property of all hierarchized orders and that opposition between the sacred and the profane is intricately linked to that between dominant and dominated, the multiplicity of orders (and of relations of dominance) entails the multiplicity of forms of the sacred.
Scholium 1. The social differentiation of roles was first of all a sexual division of tasks and a social differentiation of the temporal and the spiritual (if, in certain stateless societies, the chief is also a shaman, in others, the chief and the shaman are different people), then an internal differentiation of both temporal and spiritual functions. This differentiation multiplies the types of the sacred, but each microcosm where power is organized is based on that same opposition between sacred and profane.
Durkheim, who had fully understood that the sacred corresponded to collectively desired and desirable values, was already particularly aware of the multiplication of the forms of the sacred within highly differentiated societies. The sacred has not disappeared (or has not weakened) along with religions, but, on the contrary, is constantly renewed as new issues and new values emerge: ‘We have only to open our eyes to see society continuously creating the sacred. It is enough, for example, for it to become enamoured of someone, for it to raise them up in an apotheosis which in a certain sense deifies him. Likewise, collective beliefs take on a sacred character; challenging them is seen as a veritable sacrilege.’108 Artists, scholars, politicians, patrons, sportsmen and women, etc.: all those active in fields of power, become, in some sense, sacred.
In a meditation which coincides with the preoccupations of the theory of fields, Robert Tessier pursues his study of the sacred by emphasizing the plurality of ‘values’ which are collectively desired and produce differentiated forms of the sacred:
Human activities gravitate around the values centred on themselves, like so many gods locked into their self-referential sphere. Without the capacity to transcend, each of these values becomes an absolute and develops its own rationality: that of art for art’s sake, or of profit for profit’s sake … Each of these spheres with a finality of their own seeks to subordinate the others and to impose its own vision of the world within society. They participate in a game of hierarchical positions in the shared consciousness and in individual consciousness. Each can become the sacred sphere of this pantheon. One after the other, political, economic, aesthetic, erotic spheres… come to the fore without ever managing to link together as long as no single value is acknowledged to transcend the interests of the others. The one whose role has most determined the history of this process of rationalizing human activities is the economic sphere. Profit as a principle for human activities seems to be self-evident.109
Scholium 2. This ‘polytheism of values’ (Weber), this plurality of worlds, of fields or of institutions110 explains that each one, within its own particular order (political, artistic, legal, economic, scientific, etc.), seeks to accumulate signs of legitimacy by associating themselves with those with a higher level of legitimacy. It could almost be said that each one plays their game in their own particular sphere. Thus, in the case we are focusing on here, we shall see how links develop between the most diverse strategies of legitimization (those of museum directors, art historians, experts, gallery owners, auctioneers, lawyers, laboratories, political actors, business leaders, etc.) around an object which is either capable of becoming sacred, or is already sacred, depending on which moment in its trajectory we chose to focus our attention on the painting in question.
22. Any socialization within the context of social sub-universes (economic, political, artistic, etc.) which rests on the opposition between sacred and profane is, objectively, a readiness to think, feel and act within the structures of domination.
Scholium. The relationships historically established by the institutions of the art world between the works and the spectators – a relationship based on admiration, respect or devotion – cannot be separated from the relations of domination which underpin all the sub-universes making up the social structure. Art (like religion) which is based on a separation between the sacred and the profane, is a preparation for relations of domination between human beings. It accustoms the members of a society, both mentally and physically, to act within relationships of domination: admiration, docility, respect, fear, terror in the face of the sublime, enchantment, etc., are responses to a work of art which resemble those adopted by the dominated towards the dominator.111
23. The role of the sociologist consists in dismantling the fictions of power (with their very real effects) and in throwing light on all the conditions in which a power can be exerted, with the more or less active participation of the dominated.
Scholium 1. By undertaking this task (not the most frequent within the academic world), the sociologist potentially prevents domination being exerted in silence and in perfect tranquillity. For, since all domination is based in part on the effects of bewitchment, of enchantment, of beliefs in other words, any explanation of the mysterious workings of power can contribute to rendering its exercise more difficult. As Merleau-Ponty said about Socrates:
He gives reasons for obeying the laws. But it is already too much to have reasons for obeying, since over against all reasons, other reasons can be opposed, and then respect disappears. What one expects of him – this is exactly what he is not able to give – is assent to the thing itself, without restriction. He, on the contrary, comes before the judges but it is to explain to them what the City is. As if they did not know. As if they were not the City.112
Socrates’ position which consists in questioning and understanding what should simply be believed, admired, respected, etc., immediately marks out the fundamentally ambiguous role of ‘intellectuals’ (or of those whose role is to think) in the history of societies: they are both structurally on the side of power and the sacred, since historically they have done all they possibly could to be on this side of the symbolic frontier, and, at the same time, they are also the ones who ‘give the game away’, by explaining the mechanisms which never work quite as well once the victims have been made aware of them. Thus we find in Spinoza the demonstration of this attitude which sets out to undermine the magic and attracts suspicion and anger from other dominators:
Hence it happens that the man who endeavours to find out the true causes of miracles, and who desires as a wise man to understand nature, and not to gape at it like a fool, is generally considered and proclaimed to be a heretic and impious by those whom the vulgar worships as the interpreters both of nature and the gods. For these know that if ignorance be removed, amazed stupidity, the sole ground on which they rely in arguing or in defending their authority, is taken away also.113
Scholium 2. It would, however, be completely unrealistic to think that the sociologist is a sort of potential revolutionary, capable, simply by virtue of his or her analytical studies, even when these are made available to the widest possible audience, of destroying the masks, fictions, beliefs or illusions, and, in the last analysis, instances of domination. For what makes domination possible is as much the crushing weight of objectified history in all the institutions, in all the texts, in all the technical and legislative mechanisms, etc., which sustain domination, as the effects of an explicit belief in the legitimacy of power or the powerful. Even if the dominated were in a position to obtain the findings of the most critical studies in social sciences, they would still need to know how to undo the complex mass of all the combined institutional obligations which mutually support, endorse and reinforce each other to support the structures of domination. Revelations may pave the way for revolutions but they certainly cannot organize them. To emerge from ignorance is, and this needs to be pointed out to all those, including many sociologists, who tend to forget it, a preliminary condition for any kind of emancipation. It is, however, never enough to implement it.
The fatal opposition, amongst researchers, between those who see in the social world only a perfectly accepted domination and those who, in various ways, would like to detect, everywhere and at every moment, subversions, criticisms, tactics, trickery or resistance, prevents us from seeing the permanent mix of registers of behaviour which intersect at the level of individual practice: whole areas taken for granted and unquestioned which actors, to the advantage of some and the detriment of others, are obliged to accept, the rarely voluntary consent to domination (and, where it appears to be so, there is a case for questioning the sociogenesis of that consent), the occasional ruses and the resistance or criticism which is always partial. While they may criticize certain things, actors cannot be critical of everything all the time, and are not always aware of the many things which are for them self-evident. Even if they seek to suffer less as a result of domination by resorting to small practical arrangements, to ruses or tactics, to humour or criticism, thus proving that they are not completely taken in by what is inflicted on them, they are still incapable of really challenging the relations of dominance which are the cause of their suffering. In order to think about domination, we need to abandon both the Machiavellian functionalism, which leads to the conclusion that all emancipation, both individual and collective, contributes to maintaining domination, and the romantic angelism, which attributes to actors extraordinary capacities for subversion and tends to see revolutionary potential in the smallest indication of any signs of distancing (whether ironic or practical) on the part of the dominated in relation to the situation imposed on them.