Les modes de domination

In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Volume 2, Issue 2, p. 122-132

Abstract

The modes of domination.
The foundation of all the significant differences between modes of domination resides in the degree of objectification of the accumulated social capital, that is to say, in the existence of relatively autonomous fields : the economie field (self-regulating market), the field of cultural production (educational System), and the political field (legal and governmental apparatus). One may thus distinguish very schematically the two extreme forms between which all the possible modes of domination can arise. On the one hand, there are the social universes in which the relations of domination form, dissolve, and reform in and through interaction among individuals; here the relations can endure only at the price of personal effort and continual upkeep. On the other hand, there are the social formations in which the relations of domination are mediated by objective and institutionalized mechanisms. Among the latter are those which produce and assure the distribution of aristocratie titles, academic degrees, and money; they are independent of the individual's consciousness and beyond his powers to modify.
The study of a precapitalist agrarian society such as the Kabylian allows us to grasp what may be called the "elementary forms of domination", the two ways of keeping someone permanently in a situation where he is directly dominated by another person. These two ways function by means of debts and of gifts,that is to say, by explicitly economic obligations (material violence) or else by moral and emotional obligations created and maintained by exchange (symbolic violence). The author attempts to show that it is not enough to observe, as M.D. Sahlins does, that a precapitalist economy necessarily involves the domination of one person by another. For it is essential to realize, as well, that this domination must be concealed by a screen of magical relationships. In other words, it must be hidden in order to be respected. Gift-giving, generosity, and ostentatious distribution (the limiting case of which is the potlatch) are acts of social alchemy observable whenever the direct and brutal exploitation of one man by another is not possible. Mechanisms of the same order can still be observed in capitalist societies; but there they are restricted to the domain of art and "culture", the place of pure and disinterested consumption, the sacred island lying apart from the universe of production.