freedom outside the laws of speech, which continue to operate, we know, but we shall take liberties.' They feel free to speak freely. This 'plain talking' is popular speech in the popular situation, when the laws of the market are bracketed off. But it would be a mistake to say that the 'truth' of popular speech is this 'plain talking'.
It is no more 'true' than the other: the full truth of popular competence is also the fact that, when it is confronted with an official market, it breaks down, whereas when it is on its own territory, at home, in a familiar relationship, among its own, it is plain speaking. It is important to know that plain speaking exists but as an island set apart from the laws of the market – a island that people define by licensing themselves to speak out (there are markers to say that one is setting up a special game, that one can speak freely). The effects of the market continue to operate, on workingclass people too; they can always potentially be called to account by the laws of the market. That is what I call legitimacy. The phrase linguistic legitimacy serves to remind us that ignorance of the law of language is no defence. That doesn't mean that workingclass people recognize the beauty of Giscard's style. It means that when they find themselves face to face with someone like Giscard, they are at a loss for words; de facto their speech will be fractured and they will shut up, condemned to silence, the silence that is called respectful. The laws of the market exert a very important effect of censorship on those who can only talk in situations of plain talking (i.e. when they can make it clear that the ordinary demands have to be momentarily suspended) and who are condemned to silence in the formal situations in which major political, social and cultural stakes are involved. (The matrimonial market, for example, is a market on which linguistic capital plays a decisive role: I think it is one of the mediations through which class homogeneity is maintained.) The market effect which censors plain speaking is a particular case of a more general censorship effect which leads to euphemization: each specialized field – religious, literary, philosophical, etc. – has its own laws and tends to censor utterances that do not conform to those laws.
Relations to language seem to me to be closely associated with relations to the body. For example, and to put it schematically, the bourgeois relation to the body or to language is the easy relation of those who are in their element, who have the laws of the market on their side. The experience of ease is a quasidivine experience. To feel oneself comme il faut, exemplary, 'just so', is the experience of absoluteness, the very one which people expect of religions. The sense of being what one ought to be is one of the most absolute profits reaped by dominant groups. By contrast, the petitbourgeois relation to the body and to language is a relation that is described as timidity, tension, hypertension; they always do too much or too little, they are ill at ease with themselves.
Q. What relationship do you establish between ethos and habitus, and other concepts, such as hexis, that you use?
A. I've used the word ethos, after many others, in opposition to ethic, to designate an objectively systematic set of dispositions with an ethical dimension, a set of practical principles (an ethic being an intentionally coherent system of explicit principles). It's a useful distinction, especially for controlling practical errors. For example, if one forgets that we may have principles in the practical state, without having a systematic morality, an ethic, one forgets that simply by asking questions, interrogating, one forces people to move from ethos to ethic; in inviting a judgement on constituted, verbalized norms, one assumes that this shift has been made. Or, in another sense, one forgets that people may prove incapable of responding to ethical problems while being quite capable of responding in practice to situations raising the corresponding questions.
The notion of habitus encompasses the notion of ethos, and that's why I use the latter word less and less. The practical principles of classification which constitute the habitus are inseparably logical and axiological, theoretical and practical. Because practical logic is turned towards practice, it inevitably implements values. That's why I have abandoned the distinction, to which I resorted once or twice, between eidos as a system of logical schemes and ethos as a system of practical, axiological schemes. (All the more so since by compartmentalizing different dimensions of the habitus, one tends to reinforce the realist view which thinks in terms of separate faculties.) Moreover, all the principles of choice are 'embodied', turned into postures, dispositions of the body. Values are postures, gestures, ways of standing, walking, speaking. The strength of the ethos is that it is a morality made flesh.
So you can see how I have come to use almost exclusively the concept of habitus. The idea of habitus has a long tradition behind it. The Scholastics used it to translate Aristotle's hexis. You find it in Durkheim, who, in L'Évolution pédagogique en France, notes that Christian education had to solve the problems raised by the need to mould a Christian habitus with a pagan culture. It's also in Marcel Mauss, in his famous text on the techniques of the body. But neither of those authors gives it a decisive role to play.
Why did I revive that old word? Because with the notion of habitus you can refer to something that is close to what is suggested by the idea of habit, while differing from it in one important respect. The habitus, as the word implies, is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions. So the term constantly reminds us that it refers to something historical, linked to individual history, and that it belongs to a genetic mode of thought, as opposed to essentialist modes of thought (like the notion of competence which is part of the Chomskian lexis). Moreover, by habitus the Scholastics also meant something like a property, a capital. And indeed, the habitus is a capital, but one which, because it is embodied, appears as innate.
But then why not say 'habit'? Habit is spontaneously regarded as repetitive, mechanical, automatic, reproductive rather than productive. I wanted to insist on the idea that the habitus is something powerfully generative. To put it briefly, the habitus is a product of conditionings which tends to reproduce the objective logic of those conditionings while transforming it. It's a kind of transforming machine that leads us to 'reproduce' the social conditions of our own production, but in a relatively unpredictable way, in such a way that one cannot move simply and mechanically from knowledge of the conditions of production to knowledge of the products.
Although this capacity for generating practices or utterances or works is in no way innate and is historically constituted, it is not completely reducible to its conditions of production not least because it functions in a systematic way. One can only speak of a linguistic habitus, for example, so long as it is not forgotten that it is only one dimension of the habitus understood as a system of schemes for generating and perceiving practices, and so long as one does not autonomize the production of speech visàvis production of aesthetic choices, or gestures, or any other possible practice. The habitus is a principle of invention produced by history but relatively detached from history: its dispositions are durable, which leads to all sorts of effects of hysteresis (of timelag, of which the example par excellence is Don Quixote).
It can be understood by analogy with a computer program (though it's a mechanistic and therefore dangerous analogy) – but a selfcorrecting program. It is constituted from a systematic set of simple and partially interchangeable principles, from which an infinity of solutions can be invented, solutions which cannot be directly deduced from its conditions of production.
So the habitus is the principle of a real autonomy with respect to the immediate determinations of the 'situation'. But that does not mean that it is some kind of a
historical essence, of which the existence is merely the development, in short, a destiny defined once and for all. The adjustments that are constantly required by the necessities of adaptation to new and unforeseen situations may bring about durable transformations of the habitus, but these will remain within certain limits, not least because the habitus defines the perception of the situation that determines it.
The 'situation' is, in a sense, the permissive condition of the fulfilment of the habitus. When the objective conditions of fulfilment are not present, the habitus, continuously thwarted by the situation, may be the site of explosive forces (resentment) which may await (and even look for) the opportunity to break out and which express themselves as soon as the objective conditions for this (e.g. the power of an authoritarian foreman) are offered. (The social world is an immense reservoir of accumulated violence, which is revealed when it encounters the conditions for its expression.) In short, in reaction against instantaneist mechanism, one is led to insist on the 'assimilatory' capacities of the habitus; but the habitus is also a power of adaptation, it
constantly performs an adaptation to the external world which only exceptionally takes the form of a radical conversion.