The inspirational polysemy buoying up this work is the dual meaning of "formal," both "structural" and "official" (formel/le, structural/e, officiel/le). Bourdieu is stirred to fire a salvo onto the beaches of structural linguistics by what he sees as its fear of the social, the relational, and the hegemonic. Specifically, he begins by upbraiding Saussure and Chomsky for their vision in which the system and structure of language, taken abstractly and hermetically with as little reference as possible to anything in the real world, are the proper study of linguists (and while he sees Chomsky as less culpable than Saussure in that for the latter, our systems imbricate us, whereas for the former, the linguistic generative capacity is important, I think if he knew a little more about how splendidly isolated and monumentally arrogant Chomsky's creative brain is, and how for Saussure in contrast the structure of langue is social and the action of parole personal, he would have a bit more sympathy for the former, but only a bit). Basically Bourdieu finds the idea that language is not a social practice nonsensical, and I say good on 'im. Then he more mildly chides the "ordinary language" crew--Searle, Austin, et al.--for the flat reductiveness of their system, where naming a boat or opening a meeting or pronouncing you man and wife are "illocutionary acts" born out of their own asshole--the power of the speech act to do things in the world deriving from other speech acts in an endless deferral, when quite evidently it is the sociological relations out of which the speech emerges that give it its oomph.

So far so good! There are banal aspects to this critique, like the way Bourdieu picks up sociolinguists like Dell Hymes and Labov and presents them as the counterhegemonic rebels waiting for the French theorist from outside the field to champion them, when in fact both were eminent and the nativist/emergentist and universalist/relativist and propositional/interactional lines in linguistics have been long drawn. (There needs to be a special word for this kind of intellectual appropriation.) But mostly it's nice to see B on the side of the angels in fights that aren't really his. And certainly the weird fecundity that comes from bringing one dude's vast knowledge to a new adjacent field can be cool--Condillac comes in for discussion, for example, not someone linguists talk about but a French Enlightenment stalwart with more to do with the emergence of their field than they know, as well as someone who means something to me. But in contrast to my view of C as the first relativist and sociolinguist, Bourdieu zeroes in on his belief in linguistic "perfectibility" as its blossomed brutally in the Revolution with its early attempts at totalitarian verbal hygiene. If language reflects culture, you can say let a thousand flowers bloom or you can look for the "right" culture as evidenced by the "right" language. Thus, weirdly, Bourdieu sees the whole linguistic relativity project--Humboldt, Whorf--as hegemonic, the imposition of official national lifeworlds.

Our man is an Occitanian, after all! And this means that his real ultimate concern isn't peoples and their thoughtworlds, but the way these things are manipulable by the Big State and the ways in which cultural capital is invested in language so as to keep the lexiconned-up aristocracy laughing and the inarticulate brutes down. This is pure bog-standard sociolectology (unlike Labov and Hymes, people like Trudgill do not come in for mention), but rather than do anything empirical Bourdieu just Frenchifies on the matter for a while, coming up with some neat thoughts. Informational efficiency as a ruling principle in language is as imaginary as the rational actor in economics--just as the money game is rotten, linguistic capital is also hoarded and invested in oneself and the status quo. The condescension of the small-town mayor speaking Occitan (or George Bush speaking Texas Cowpoke) consists in their ability to put the language of the common people down and return to the mountain. Nobody's ever impressed with a real regular guy for being a regular guy. Cf. also the hypocorrection of the haute, where at some point you stop having to adhere ever more perfectly to the prestige standard and start being able to greater and greater degrees to depart from it--that's power.

The way that plays out in academia, where saying "there are two classes" is an illocutionary--a power--act like saying "there are two classes," an act of world-creation, simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive. A weirdly out of place defence of Heidegger's academic aristocratism (these essays were not intended to be together originally, and I guess some are more shoehorned in than others), which I guess has relevance in the way B talks about the philosophical discourse, constructed such that nobody can meaningfully disagree with you except by buying into the conditions of your sensemaking--a move from error to (knight-) "errance," wandering at the limits of the system that has an acknowledged master and trying to wrench its terms around to clear a forest and build yourself a new land at the limits.

There is a large chunk of the end of this book where the particularity of language is lost and it becomes a generic argument about social capital and politics with language as an instantiation. The working class needs to tell its own story? Well that's a bit boring. Some stuff about how the party spokesman or leader is his constitutents incarnate, depending on them for his existence as they depend on him and his speaking voice for theirs--the working class only exists if it has a Fürsprecher to illocute it into being. Kind of tired and dated business at times, but the opening burst has burstiness and there are intermittent deee-lites thereafter. ( )

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