Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Fourth Lecture. Universal Corporatism: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World Author(s): Pierre Bourdieu, Gisele Sapiro and Brian McHale Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (Winter, 1991), pp. 655-669 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772708 . Accessed: 10/04/2014 16:34
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FourthLecture.Universal Corporatism: The Roleof Intellectuals in the ModernWorld

Pierre Bourdieu

The lecture I am about to deliver, on the initiative of the Asahi newspaper, falls within the sphere of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution. And I would like to contribute in my own way, which is, no doubt, a little paradoxical or perverse, to these celebrations by recalling, following the lecture I delivered yesterday at Todai University, that the organizers of these ceremonies are none other than, in the France of 1989, the members of this State nobility, the power of which finds its legitimacy in cultural capital, that is, from a naive point of view, in intelligence. One can immediately see that this new form of domination raises a difficult and probably unprecedented problem for intellectuals, who are dominated dominants, that is, the dominated among the dominant. Unlike those whom nineteenth-century writers designated as "bourgeois" or, worse, "shopkeepers," a good many of the modern rulers of great public or private bureaucracies are technocrats or even epistemocrats who pretend to use science-notably, economic science-in order to govern and who have, by virtue of this, more power than ever before to contest the monopoly of intelligence that intellectuals used to readily appropriate to themselves. But I am coming to the subject. At the risk of overstepping the bounds tacitly prescribed for a lecturer, especially when he is also a
This lecture was delivered at the editorial offices of Asahi on October 6, 1989. Poetics Today 12:4 (Winter 1991). Copyright ? 1991 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/91/$2.50.

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foreigner, I shall be acting here in the capacity of an intellectual, in the precise sense of the definition which I shall be trying to give to that term. I shall try to place whatever competence I may have as a sociologist at the service of a symbolic action (of a political type) designed to encourage and promote a reasoned and effective intervention by intellectuals in political life. Whatever novelty my argument may possess lies in the fact that, for reasons which characterize them sociologically, intellectuals are not used to subordinating their action to sociological knowledge, not only of the world in which they claim to act, but of themselves as intellectuals and of the reasons for (or the social determinants of) their actions. I would like to try to define the possible ends and means of collective action by intellectuals of all countries on the basis of an analysis, which seeks to be as realistic as possible, of what an intellectual is and what he could be. The intellectual is a paradoxical being. One can only conceive of him as such on the condition that one calls into question the classical alternative of pure culture and political engagement. He was historically constituted in and by the overstepping of this opposition: French writers, artists, and scientists asserted themselves as intellectuals when, at the moment of the "Affaire Dreyfus," they interfered in political life as intellectuals, that is, with a specific authority grounded on their belonging to the relatively autonomous world of art, science, and literature and on all the values that are associated with this autonomyvirtue, disinterestedness, competence, and so on. The intellectual is a bidimensional being. To be entitled to the name of intellectual, a cultural producer must fulfill two conditions: on the one hand, he must belong to an autonomous intellectual world (a field), that is, independent from religious, political, and economic powers (and so on), and must respect its specific laws; on the other hand, he must invest the competence and authority he has acquired in the intellectual field in a political action, which is in any case carried out outside the intellectual field proper. The Genesis of the Intellectual to In order ground these propositions, which might seem perempand arbitrary, and before stating the broad outlines of a collective tory action by intellectuals, it is necessary to try to allude briefly to the forgotten or repressed history of which intellectuals are the product. This is an extraordinarily repetitive history, since the evolution of the field toward autonomy is attended with a perpetual vacillation in attitudes toward politics, between engagement in the world and retreat into the ivory tower. In the eighteenth century, the "engagement" of the "philosophes," which Voltaire, in 1765-in the article from the Dictionnaire entitled "L'Homme de lettres"-opposes to the scholastic philosophique

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obscurantism of decadent universities and academies, found its logical continuation in the participation of these same "hommes de lettres" in the French Revolution. During the postrevolutionary period of the Restoration, the "hommes de lettres" were held responsible not only for the movement of subversive ideas which had led, notably, through newspapers, to the Revolution itself, but also for the excesses of the Terror: they were objects of distrust, and even scorn, for the younger generation of 1820, in particular the Romantic poets. In the first stage of the Romantic movement, these poets impugned the claim of the "philosophes" to interfere in political life and to propose a rational vision of historical development; and they affirmed their own desire for autonomy by reestablishing religious sensibility and feeling against reason and criticism of dogmas. But as soon as the reactionary politics of the Restoration threatened the autonomy of the intellectual field, they did not hesitate to claim liberty for the writer and the scientist (notably, in the case of Michelet and Saint-Simon) and to recover (notably, in the case of Victor Hugo) the prophetic function of the eighteenth-century "philosophes." But, in a new swing of the pendulum, the populist Romanticism that seems to have possessed almost all writers in the period preceding the 1848 revolution did not survive the failure of the progressive movement and the establishment of the Second Empire: the collapse of the illusions of '48 led to this extraordinary disillusion, which is so vigorously evoked by Flaubert in L'Education sentimentale,and which furnished fertile ground for a renewed refusal of engagement. The champions of "art for art's sake," such as Flaubert or Theophile Gautier, opposed "pure" art to both "social art" and "bourgeois art," which was subject, in the realms of art and the art of living alike, to the bourgeois customers' norms. Refusing the servitude of "industrial literature" (except in the interests of paying the rent) and admitting no judgment but their peers', they identified the literary field's selfenclosure with the writer's renunciation of the exercise of symbolic power in any form whatsoever (thereby breaking with the tradition of the poet as vates in the manner of Hugo and that of the scientistprophet in the manner of Michelet). It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, at the moment when the literary field, the artistic field, and the scientific field acceded to a very high degree of autonomy, that the most autonomous agents of these autonomous fields arrived at the idea that autonomy was not to be identified with the renunciation of politics and that they could even intervene as artists, writers, or scientists in the political field. Unlike those cultural producers who turned into politicians (like Guizot or Lamartine), they entered upon the political landscape with an au-

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thority which derived from the autonomy of their own field and which claimed all the values on which its existence was grounded-ethical purity, competence, and so on. Emile Zola's "J'accuse" and the petitions in support of it had an exemplary (paradigmatic) value since properly artistic or scientific authority was affirmed there in political interventions of a new type, which tended to maximize both of the dimensions constitutive of the intellectual's identity, namely, "purity" and "engagement"; they gave birth to a politicsof purity which was the perfect antithesis of the "Raison d'Etat." The Intellectual:An Unstable Synthesis What was the basis of this anti-political politics? It was the existence of social worlds whose fundamental law was the refusal of the legality specific to the economic and political fields, the refusal of ends and values that these fields recognized, such as money, power, honors. With Zola's "position" in the "Affaire Dreyfus," the table of values had been decisively overturned: not content with renouncing mercenary and commercial ends within the limits of their own upside-down world, the intellectuals undertook to affirm their anti-values on the very ground of ordinary social life, in the realm of ethics-notably, in the realm of sex-and also, a graver transgression,at least from the point of view of the champions of social order, in the realm of politics (these ethical or political transgressions became the occasions for trials in the case of Baudelaire and Flaubert as well as in the case of Zola). They affirmed the right to transgressthe most sacred values of the collectivity-those of patriotism and of nationalism-by supporting, in the name of values transcending those of Commerce, Zola's libelous article against the army (or, much later, during the war of Algeria, by calling for support of the enemy in the antitorture petition of the 121). They founded their authority upon the unwritten laws of an ethical and scientific universalism in order to exercise a kind of moral ministry and to launch, on certain occasions, a collective mobilization for the purposes of a struggle designed to disperse throughout the whole social world the values which were current in their own universe. The paradoxical synthesis of the contraries of autonomy and political engagement, which characterizes the intellectual, was not invented all at once and was not established once and for all; it has in it something unstable and unsettled, the consequence of which, as the toand-fro movement observable in history attests, is that the holders of cultural capital can always "regress" toward one or another of the positions designated by the pendulum of history, that is, toward the role of the "pure" writer, artist, scientist, or toward the role of the simple political actor, journalist, politician, and so on. The vacillations between two possible attitudes toward politics can also be explained by

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the fact that the claim of autonomy inscribed in the very existence of a field of cultural production must take into account temporal powers which vary from period to period in the history of a single country and from country to country, whether powers exterior to the field, such as those of the Church, the State, or the big industrial and commercial enterprises, or powers internal to it, especially those involving control of specific means of production and diffusion (press, publishing, radio, television, and so on). The variations which are observable from period to period and, in the same period, from country to country in the cultural producers' strategies, notably, in the realm of politics, and which result from the state of relations between the intellectual field and the temporal powers should not be allowed to conceal the invariants that are the grounds for the possible unity of intellectuals of all countries. The same intent towardautonomycan, indeed, be expressed in diametrically opposed "positions" (secular in one case, religious in another, engaged here, "detached" there), depending upon the structure and history of the temporal powers against which this intent toward autonomy must assert itself. Intellectuals of different countries have to be fully aware of this mechanism if they want to avoid letting themselves be divided by circumstantial and phenomenal oppositions stemming from the fact that one and the same will to emancipation encounters different obstacles in different places. I could take the example of the bestknown French and German philosophers and sociologists nowadays, who, since they set the same concern for autonomy in opposition to opposing historical traditions, seem opposed to one another, standing in apparently inverse relations to truth and reason. But I could just as well take the example of a problem such as that of opinion polls, in which certain people in the West see only a means of domination, whereas others, in Eastern European countries, see a conquest of liberty. In order to understand and master the oppositions that risk dividing them, intellectuals of different countries always have to keep in mind the state of the temporal powers in relation to which they have to define themselves; for example, they must be able to recognize, in the arguments of intellectuals coming from traditions different from their own-and especially in what seems perplexing or shocking in these arguments-the effects of their past or present confrontation with experiences of political despotism, such as fascism or Stalinism, or with ambiguous political movements, such as the student revolts of '68, or with policies hostile to cultural activities, or, in the realm of internal powers, the effect of present or past confrontations with the powers of the press, radio, or television, or with overt or disguised censorship of the university or the academy, and so on. (More gener-

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ally, they must be aware that when they speak with aspirations toward the universal, they are always liable to be nothing more than the unconscious spokesmen of an historical unconscious that is linked to the peculiarities of a specific history of the intellectual field.) The Struggle to Defend Autonomy historical perspective allows us to distance ourselves someTaking this of the intellectual field as it appears in most situation from the what We are already familiar with many past exsocieties. contemporary of the refusal of the political, often associated with a return to amples see we such as occurring today in certain Communist counreligion, renunciation of revolutionary utopias, such and disillusioned the tries, as we observe today in France as well as in Japan and a number of other countries-except England, which may now be discovering the intellectual for the first time, thanks to Mrs. Thatcher's profoundly anti-intellectual policies. And the fact of finding oneself in the "endgame" of a game in which every move that could possibly be made has, somewhere or other, already been played can lead to a disenchanted skepticism, especially in countries like France or Japan where intellectuals have passed, in the space of a single generation, through the whole gamut of possible "positions" toward politics; but it can also favor a lucidity that has nothing to do with cynical disenchantment and that, equipped with the knowledge supplied by scientific research (which it favors), could be the starting point for a wholly new form of political action on the part of intellectuals. The double, paradoxical nature of the intellectual, to which I alluded at the beginning, means that all political action designed to reinforce the political efficacy of intellectuals must inevitably appear to send a double message. It is a question, on the one hand, of reinforcing autonomy from the temporal powers, especially by striving to guarantee the economic and social conditions for the autonomy of cultural producers (first of all, in the realm of publication and evaluation of the products of intellectual activity) and by reinforcing the position of the most autonomous producers in each field; on the other hand, a question of freeing the most autonomous cultural producers from the temptation of the ivory tower by creating institutions or mechanisms capable of giving them the means to interfere collectively in politics in the name of their specific authority and to strive, at least, for control of the means of intellectual production and ratification. Thus, the first objective of intellectuals should be to work collectively in defense of their specific interests and of the means necessary for protecting their own autonomy. Through the effect of a kind of guilty conscience, which has often led them to become "fellow travellers," not, as they supposed, of the proletariat, but of second-rate

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intellectuals who have claimed to speak on behalf of the proletariat, intellectuals have often given priority to the defense of great universal causes and refused, as corporatists, to defend their own interests, forgetting that one defends the universal by defending the defenders of the universal. In fact, cultural producers have to commit themselves to the rational defense of the economic and social conditions for the autonomy of the different fields of cultural production, these privileged social universes where the material and intellectual means of what we call science, art, philosophy, law, and so on are produced and reproduced. Examples should be given here of specific actions that intellectuals should carry out with the purpose of defending the republic of artists, writers, and scientists: for example, defense of scientific researchers' control of their means of production and evaluation through resistance to the growing influence of scientific administrators, who, often having left research because of failure, seek to impose on researchers directives based on ignorance of the logic of research; defense of the networks of production and diffusion of avant-garde works in all domains of research, artistic or scientific, against commercial interests; defense of artists, writers, and scientists against the influence of journalism, and the elaboration of an obligatory code (if not an actual law) aiming to protect authors against distorted quotations, misrepresentations, and so on. I could go on with, for instance, the protection of young lecturers or researchers from all forms of discrimination, notably, political discrimination, and so on. With a view to grounding philosophically the realpolitik of Reason that I am defending, let me counter the transcendental illusion of universal structures of Reason inscribed in consciousness or language by reminding you that Reason is a product of history that has to be incessantly re-produced through historical action aimed at guaranteefor thepossibility ing the social conditions of rational thinking.Transposing the Machiavellian vision, according to which virtue is the product of a public order in which the citizens have an interest in virtue, one has to work incessantly-through practical, concrete actions, of a kind usually left to politicians, such as the definition of the contents of educational programs or the defense of an educational and cultural television, or through the struggle against patterns of cultural protectionism which stand in the way of the international circulation of ideas-at establishing a republic of artists and scientists, the members of which would have an interest in reason, in disinterestedness, in truth. Against a universal pragmatics in Habermas's sense, a politics of the universal should be proposed. Transhistorical universals of communication do not exist, but socially established forms of communication favoring the production of universals do exist. Logic is inscribed in

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the social logic of public and regulated communication, the exemplary achievement of which is represented by the generalized exchange of the scientific world: in this case, the every-man-for-himself struggle (or competition) is organized in such a way that no one can win, and thus make the most of himself, except by making the most of arguments, thus serving to advance truth and reason. reasons, demonstrations, But these worlds of pure reason have not descended from heaven; they have not been established by the operation of the Holy Ghost. Those who are surprised, today, at the difficulties encountered by the human sciences, in particular sociology, have forgotten the battles that the natural sciences had to fight in order to affirm their autonomy against the political and religious powers (which, furthermore, are liable to return to the fray whenever important social interests are at stake, as is the case with the theory of evolution and the origin of man). A liberating science can develop only when appropriate social conditions converge to make it possible, which presupposes, for example, abolition of the effects of domination, whether exerted between nations or within a given country, that can simply exclude from scientific competition-through brutal and overt means, such as suppression of scholarships or research grants, or through the more subtle censorship of academic decorum-those who do not accept the tacit assumptions of the established scientific order. The regime of rule-governed dialogue or completely fair competition between perfectly matched opponents is not easy to establish, even in the "purest" of worlds, those of mathematics, music, or poetry. The fields of cultural production have their own monopolies, their own relations of domination, and it is only at the price of perpetual, moment-to-moment struggle that the real exchanges of the scientific community or the artistic world can hope to approach the ideal of autonomy and universality. As one moves along the spectrum from those fields, such as mathematics or pure poetry, in which no directly social "interests" are at stake, and the autonomy of which is protected by the esoteric obscurity of their products, and approaches such fields as the social sciences, where matters of greater social importance are at stake, autonomy becomes increasingly difficult to secure and defend. And if rational dialogue is not easy to establish, this is less because of some peculiar inability of the researchers engaged in these fields to control their passions, impulses, or interests than because the most autonomous are incessantly exposed to unfair competition from those who are more heteronomous and who can always, by resorting to exterior powers, find means of compensating for their own inferiority from the point of view of the rules of the field. Schopenhauer considered the form "par excellence" of rhetorical bad faith to be that of posing an argument which one's opponent cannot refute without his

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refutation "going right over the head" of an incompetent onlooker. Economists and especially sociologists are under the constant threat of such strategies: for instance, journalists, publicists, and bad sociologists can rely on the support of the majority whenever they invoke common sense against the sociologist's constructions, which, as in all science, are only achieved at the expense of common sense. The struggle for autonomy is thus, first of all, a struggle against the institutions and agents which, inside the field, introduce dependence upon external economic, political, or religious powers, whether those who subordinate their production to commercial ends or those, such as publicists who, more subtly, make concessions to the law of success, or those who use their privileged connections with external powers (such as the State or the Party, with all their forms of Zhdanovism) in order to impose their domination inside the field. It is through them that the law (nomos)of another field displaces the specific law of the field of cultural production. This Trojan-horse function, through which heteronomy is introduced into the fields of cultural production, falls to those producers who are least highly appreciated according to internal criteria and who are thus always tempted to draw on external alliances in order to overturn the power relations inside the field; expecting less from the field, they are the most susceptible to the solicitations of temporal power. In fact, if internal ratification is not an absolute guarantee of autonomy, it at least guards against this pursuit of compensatory power for purposes of revenge; and it can also enhance that indifference to the "grandeurs d'etablissement" (as Pascal put it) which belongs to the ideal definition of the intellectual. Up to this point I have only been describing the most general of the mechanisms posing a constant threat to the autonomy of the fields of cultural production. If a conscious and organized mobilization of intellectuals seems to me nowadays indispensable, this is because the autonomy of these fields is very powerfully threatened or, more precisely, because increasingly a wholly new kind of threat has come to hang over it. I shall mention first the threat posed by the State, either through its often excessive care or through its hostility or censorship. In societies where "culture" has become the means and object of policy (as witness, among other things, the existence of ministries and ministers of culture), intellectuals have to learn, under pain of enslavement, how to use the State in order to free themselves from the State, to turn to account the means the State guarantees to them (such as, for academics, the status of civil servants which secures them from economic sanctions) in order to affirm their independence from the State. But there are also and especially threats posed by the increasing interpenetration of the world of art or science, on the one hand, and the world of money, on the other. I am thinking of all the new forms of

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patronage and of the new alliances being forged between certain economic enterprises, often the most modern, and cultural producers; I am thinking also of the increasingly frequent recourse to sponsors on the part of academic research and of the creation of educational programs directly subordinated to business. But the influence or sway of the economy over artistic or scientific research is also exerted inside the field itself through control of the means of cultural production and diffusion, and even of ratification. The producers attached to the great cultural bureaucracies (newspapers, radio, television, and so on) are increasingly constrained to accept and adopt norms (for instance, in the area of rhythms of work) that they come more or less unconsciously to regard as universal measures of intellectual achievement (I am thinking, for instance, of the speed writing and speed reading1which have become the law of journalistic production and criticism). It can be asked whether the division into two markets, which has characterized the fields of cultural production since the middle of the nineteenth century-on the one hand, the restricted field of producers for producers; on the other, the field of large-scale production and "industrial literature"-is not threatened: the logic of commercial production tends increasingly to intrude on avant-garde production (notably, through the constraints of book marketing, in the case of literature). And it could be shown that State patronage, which apparently allows producers to evade the immediate constraints of the market, imposes, through the mechanism of commissions and committees, a real normalization of research, whether scientific or artistic. It is thus necessary to work to raise consciousness about and increase vigilance toward the booby trap that patronage in all its forms can represent. But the most formidable danger lies, no doubt, in the fact that intellectuals are increasingly dispossessed of the power of evaluating themselves according to their own criteria, their production. The specificity of the most autonomous fields of production lies in the fact that they are their own market or, if you like, that here the producers have only their own competitors for consumers (this is the case, for instance, in mathematics, poetry, or avant-garde painting). Journalistic criticism, through which all kinds of economic or political constraints are exerted, tends increasingly to enter into competition with the judgment of peers. And the intellectual field increasingly becomes the scene of the specificputsch-"media events"-such as journalistic investigations designed to produce manipulated classifications, or the countless prize lists that the newspapers publish on the occasion of birthdays, and so on, not to mention true press campaigns designed to
1. Both phrases in English in the original.

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support or discredit authors, works of art, or schools. More generally, the influence of journalism, and of its mundane criteria-legibility, topicality, "novelty," and so on-come increasingly to be imposed on cultural production, notably, through the constraints it brings to bear on publication (the ability to "come across well on TV" having become a criterion of intellectual competence). A French sociologist, Patrick Champagne, has shown that a political demonstration is successful only if it succeeds in being perceptibleby newspapers and especially by television, so that it will receive media coverage and massive dissemination: a symbolic demonstration by fifty medical students who, with the help of publicity advisers, create a "media event" that attracts the attention of media professionals can thus be a more important political event than a trade union gathering of thousands of demonstrators organized according to the traditional, ritual forms of demonstration. Likewise, a growing part of cultural production is dictated, so far as its publication date, topic, title, format, volume, contents, and style are concerned, by the expectations of journalists upon whose coverage it depends for its very existence (that is, when it is not simply the product of people who work in the media themselves and who are signed onto the project for no other reason than that they are sure to have media support). The influence of those who control the means of dissemination-which also confers a form of ratification, for instance, through the best-seller lists that the never been so newspapers publish-has probably widespread and so or the border between work and best-seller so profound, avant-garde confused: one of the characteristics of journalistic judgment is that, for want of the requisite capacities of discernment, it tends systematically to confuse the most autonomous producers with the most heteronomous, that is, the publicists, true "doxosophers" in Plato's sense, masters of the art of disguise who (like the pollster, the journalist, and so on) know how to take on the appearance of scientists. Toward an Internationaleof Intellectuals If the capture or recapture of the means of guaranteeing or defending autonomy seems to me the first objective of any action on the part of intellectuals, the fact remains that this action, which might be called corporatist, cannot be an end in itself. And one should investigate how this action might be extended to political intervention on the part of intellectuals, and how such intervention might be made maximally effective. These questions arise particularly acutely at a moment when artists, writers, and scientists are increasingly being excluded from public debate, even and especially when it comes to matters falling within their competence; and this is paradoxically occurring at a time when more and more people (technocrats, journalists, pollsters,

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marketing analysts, and so on) are arrogating to themselves "intellectual" authority in order to exercise political power. This exclusion results from a combination of factors. First, since access to the directorships of major public and even private enterprises and to powerful government or administrative positions is increasingly dependent upon the possession of specialized academic qualifications, intellectuals who, though subordinate in the economic domain, had no difficulty in claiming superiority in the cultural domain, have henceforth to face rulers who can claim to rival them even on cultural grounds. These "new mandarins"-in the strict sense of the term, since they exercise their power on the strength of academic qualifications-no longer hesitate to affirm the superiority of their technical or economico-political culture over traditional literary or philosophical culture, which is relegated, in the name of realism, to the realm of the gratuitous, the frivolous, in one word, the feminine. This is how what I call the State nobility, that is, the greater technocracy, uses its authority to encourage (as Ulrich Beck puts it) "generalized irresponsibility," a spirit of permanent holiday on the part of the citizenry. The example par excellence is doubtless that of the heads of the French nuclear industry, members of the governing bodies coming from scientific schools, who have been given by the great majority of the citizens an all but unconditionally free hand, a true "blank check" (the relative weakness of the ecological movement and especially the antinuclear struggle in France is notorious). In order to understand this extraordinary trust, it is not enough to invoke, as has often been done, the capacity of an expert discourse to disarm criticism. As a matter of fact, the basis of the remisede soi from which the so-called nucleocrats and, more generally, all technocrats have benefited, designed to impose across the board the values of productivity, yield and competition, is nothing other than the logic of educational meritocracy, which confers on its chosen a legitimacy without historical precedent. The greater technocracy and all those political staffers, whether on the right or the left, who aspire to reduce politics to management problems to be solved by competence and expertise, immediately find accomplices in the new technocracy of communication that has come increasingly to interfere directly, through journalistic judgments and their economic effects, in the world of cultural production. The professionals of the communication arts, who monopolize access to the means of communication, contribute, without wanting to do so or even knowing that they are doing so, to the enterprise of intellectual and, therefore, political demobilization: having very little to communicate, they open a void at the very heart of the omnipresent communication apparatus; more than the effects of propaganda or clandestine

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persuasion, it is the false problems and the everyday chitchat, not so much false as vacuous, of the daily newspapers that occupy the whole symbolic space, paradoxically evacuating it by filling it with padding. This is how technocrats and their organic intellectuals monopolize the public debate to the prejudice of professional politicians and intellectuals. And this often occurs with the complicity of intellectuals who, because of the correlation between the progress of knowledge and the progress of specialization, increasingly refuse the total "positions" of the total intellectual. Although I fully endorse the renunciation of the prophetic role of the old-style intellectual, I do not think that one need choose between the total intellectual, the role created and embodied by Sartre, who considered it his right and duty to take "positions" on all the problems of his time, with no other warrant than the force of his own intelligence, and the specific intellectual in Foucault's sense, who limits his intervention to a particular domain of knowledge and experience. It will be necessary today to invent forms of organization which would give voice to a great collectiveintellectual, combining the qualifications and talents of all specific intellectuals. Great historical precedents for this can be found (I am thinking, for instance, of the "philosophes" of the Encyclopedie).It is only a question of inventing a model of organizationwhich, by turning to account the modern means of communication, would allow all competent intellectuals to give their symbolic support to public interventions, elaborated in each specific case by those among them most competent to address the given problem. The tension between central planning and spontaneous individual action could be resolved by constructing a true international network whose circumference (to adapt Nicholas de Cusa's formula) would be everywhere and whose center would be nowhere. This network, endowed with its own organs of expression, could mobilize resistance to encroachments on the autonomy of the intellectual world, and espeit could work to establish the cially to all forms of cultural imperialism; grounds of a true cultural internationalism, aiming at the abolition of all patterns of protectionism and particularism, while seeing to it that the specific achievements of each national tradition accede to universality. But there is no overlooking the obstacles to such a collective mobilization. In order to raise intellectuals' consciousness of their common interests, it would be necessary to neutralize the propensity to division and particularism which is inherent in the very logic of the field. Nothing is more difficult than to make intellectuals understand that their struggles, even those for purely corporate ends and aiming only at defending autonomy, have to be collective because so many of the powers to which they are subject (such as that of journalism) succeed as well as they do only because the opposition to them is scattered and divided against itself. Oddly enough, since the logic of competi-

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tion which sets them against one another means, in the most radical cases, that producers' best customers are also their fiercest rivals, intellectuals are undoubtedly one of the groups least able to discover the common interests that unite them (and these interests need to be directly threatened, for instance, in England today, for intellectuals to be able to see the forest for the trees, i.e., that their rivals' enemies are their own enemies as well). This is a further reason for turning a corporatism directed toward the defense of a well-understood common interest into an absolute preliminary to a true corporatism of the universal. One of the major obstacles to this "consciousness-raising" is (or has been) the myth of the "organic intellectual," so dear to Gramsci, which, by reducing intellectuals to the role of "fellow travellers" of the proletariat, or rather, as I have remarked, of certain self-appointed spokesmen for the proletariat, prevents them from attending to the defense of their own interests and thus giving themselves the means to fight effectively for universal causes. Having arrived at this point, it remains for me to say what these universal causes might be and to inquire whether intellectuals are in the best position to define and defend them. As a matter of fact, intellectuals themselves have never ceased believing this, and the famous "universal class," whether the Prussian bureaucracy according to Hegel or the proletariat according to Marx, has never been more than a figurehead for the intellectuals who, by nominating the "universal class," nominated themselves to be the ultimate judges of universality. The sociology of intellectuals inclines one to take a more modest view of their mission. It is clear, indeed, that intellectuals have not managed to resist the universal temptation to universalize their particular interests. And a good many of their most generous past actions have their source-and their limits-in their position of the dominated among the dominant or, to be more precise, of the dominated within the field of power, which leads them to make common cause with the dominated tout court-and this without their ceasing to participate in the dominant order, as possessors of one of the major principles of domination, cultural capital. Thus, for instance, while declaring themselves resolutely progressive by their voting and public "positions," professors contribute in many ways to the perpetuation of social order, notably, through their strategies of reproduction or their pedagogical strategies, which unconsciously endorse the dominant values, or through their "esprit de corps" (ranking, discipline, and so on), which has led them, especially since the trauma of 1968, vigorously to resist any attempt whatsoever to change the contents of education or the forms of pedagogical organization. Does this realistic portrait of the ambiguities that intellectuals owe

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the universalization of the privileged conditions of existence which make the

to the way they dangle in social space necessarily lead to radical skepticism about their claims to universality? The answer to this question would in itself deserve a further lecture. ... I shall only say here that among the historical factors which seem, in my opinion, to justify intellectuals' universalist ambitions more than those of any other group is the fact that they have historically been constituted as such precisely in and through their renunciation of particularism; by proclaiming themselves champions of the universal or, as Husserl said with regard to philosophers, "civil servants of humanity," they have somehow bound themselves, through a kind of collective oath, to a model of the universal intellectual implying duties or, at least, the acceptance of sacrifices which, like hypocrisy, are the homage that vice pays to virtue. More precisely, the emergence of worlds such as the intellectual field, where, by tradition, the defense of universal causes (illustrated by petitions) is rewarded, means that one can rely upon the symbolic profits associated with these actions in order to mobilize the intellectuals in favor of the universal. This vision will seem disenchanted, or even cynical, only to those who insist on thinking of intellectuals as a kind of miraculous and exemplary exception to the laws of the social world. There is a final justification for the privilege granted here, entirely relatively, to intellectuals: among the specific products of the fields of cultural production are all the means of knowledge and objectification, including sociology, which, by disclosing the specific interests of this or that intellectual, or of intellectuals as a whole, offers to intellectuals the possibility of achieving self-consciousness and of inquiring into the principles of their own practices, interests, and disinterestedness, not least of all their interest in disinterestedness. These means of knowledge especially guarantee to them the privilege of being able to discover the particular economic and social conditions or, to be perfectly clear, the privileges (such as leisure, skhole) that form the basis of their claims to the universal. Thus, provided that they are able to pursue it to the very end, as I have been trying to do today, this critical reflexivitythat they monopolize can offer them the means of justifying in practice their wildest claims to the collective monopoly of reason, truth, and virtue: by compelling them to discover the privilege on which their claim to the universal rests, it compels them, indeed, to associate the pursuit of the universal with the perpetual struggle for

pursuit of the universal possible.

Translatedby GiseleSapiro; editedby Brian McHale.

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