everything that enables us to think and speak the world. It also has to point out that positions taken on the social world perhaps owe something to the conditions in which they are produced, the specific logic of political apparatuses and the political 'game', of cooption, the circulation of ideas, and so on.
Q. What worries me is that your assumption of the identity between the political activist and the intellectual prevents one from adequately addressing the question of the relationship between action and theory, consciousness and practice, 'base' and 'summit', especially between activists of workingclass origin and activists of intellectual origin, not to mention the relations between classes – the working class and the intellectual strata.
A. In fact, there are two very different forms of discourse on the social world. That can be seen clearly in relation to prediction: if an ordinary intellectual makes a wrong prediction, it's of no great consequence because he only commits himself, he only leads himself astray. A political leader, on the other hand, is someone who has the power to make what he says come into existence; that's the mark of a 'watchword'. The language of a political leader is an authorized language, which exercises a power, which can bring into existence what it states. In that case, an error can be a blunder. That's probably what explains – without, in my view, ever justifying it – why political language so often indulges in anathemas, excommunications, and so on ('traitor', turncoat', etc.). The 'committed' intellectual who makes a mistake leads into error those who follow him, because his word has power in so far as it is believed. It may happen that something good for those for whom he speaks ('for' being taken in the dual sense of 'in favour of' and 'in place of'), something that could happen, does not happen, or that something that might not happen does happen. His words help to make history, to change history.
There are several competing ways of producing the truth, and they each have their biases and their limits. In the name of his 'political responsibilities', the 'committed' intellectual tends to reduce his thought to activist thought, and it may happen – it often does – that what was a provisional strategy becomes a habitus, a permanent way of being. The 'free' intellectual has a propensity to terrorism: he would gladly bring into the political field the kind of fight to the death that takes place in the battles over truth in the intellectual field ('if I'm right, you're wrong') – but these battles take a totally different form when what is at stake is more than symbolic life and death.
It seems to me essential both for politics and for science that the two competing modes of production of representations of the social world should have an equal right to exist, and that, in any case, the second should not abdicate before the first, adding terrorism to simplism, as has often happened in certain periods in relations between the intellectuals and the
Communist Party. You will tell me that that goes without saying, and in principle no one disagrees, but at the same time I know that sociologically it is not selfevident.
In my jargon, I'll say that it is important that the space in which discourse on the social world is produced continues to function as a field of struggle in which the dominant pole, orthodoxy, does not crush the dominated pole of heresy – because, in that area, so long as there is struggle there is history, and therefore hope.
5—
How Can 'FreeFloating Intellectuals' Be Set Free?
Q. You are sometimes accused of a polemical violence towards intellectuals, verging on antiintellectualism. In your latest book, Le Sens pratique, 1 you reoffend. You call into question the very function of intellectuals, their claim to objective knowledge and their capacity to give a scientific account of practice . . .
A. It's remarkable that people who, day after day, or week after week, quite arbitrarily impose the verdicts of a small mutual admiration society should complain of violence, when the mechanisms of that violence are for once brought out into the open. It's also curious that these profoundly conformist people should thereby give themselves, by an extraordinary reversal, airs of intellectual audacity, and even political courage (one might almost think they risked the Gulag). What the sociologist can't be forgiven for is that he reveals secrets reserved for initiates to every Tom, Dick and Harriet. The efficacy of symbolic violence is proportionate to the misrecognition of the conditions and instruments of its exercise. It's surely no accident that the production of cultural goods has not given rise to cultural consumers' associations. Just think of all the economic and symbolic interests linked to the production of books, paintings, plays, ballets and films that would be threatened if the production of value of cultural products were suddenly completely revealed to all the consumers. I'm thinking, for example, of processes like the circular circulation of flattering reviews among a small number of producers (of works but also of reviews), highlevel academics who accredit and consecrate, journalists who accredit themselves and celebrate. The reactions provoked by unveiling the mechanisms of cultural production are reminiscent of the legal actions some firms have brought against consumers' associations. What is at stake is the whole set of operations that make it possible to pass off a Golden Delicious as an apple, or the products of marketing, rewriting and editorial publicity as intellectual works.
Q. You think that intellectuals – or at least, those of them who have most to lose – are up in arms when someone unmasks their profits and Interview with Didier Eribon, Le Monde Dimanche, 4 May 1980, pp. I and XVII
the more or less admissible means they use to secure them?
A. Absolutely. What makes the charges against me particularly absurd is that I have constantly denounced the tendency of social science to think in terms of the logic of the trial, or the tendency of the readers of works of social science to make them operate in terms of that logic. Where science seeks to state tendential laws, transcending the persons through which they are realized or manifested, resentment, which can take all kinds of masks, not least that of science, sees the denunciation of persons.
These warnings seem to me especially necessary since, in reality, social science, whose vocation is to understand, has sometimes been used to condemn. But there is a certain bad faith in reducing sociology, as the conservative tradition always has done, to its caricature as a policing activity – and especially in exploiting the fact that a rudimentary sociology of intellectuals has been used as a means of repression against intellectuals, in order to denounce the questions that a real sociology of intellectuals puts to intellectuals.