main factors of achievement at school, the further you go down the social scale the more they believe in natural talent or gifts -- the more they believe that those who are successful are naturally endowed with intellectual capacities. And the more they accept their own exclusion, the more they believe they are stupid, the more they say, 'Yes, I was no good at English, I was no good at French, I was no good at mathematics.' Now that is a fact -- in my view it is an appalling fact -- one that intellectuals don't like to accept, but which they must accept. It doesn't mean that the dominated individuals tolerate everything; but they assent to much more than we believe and much more than they know. It is a formidable mechanism, like the imperial system -- a wonderful instrument of ideology, much bigger and more powerful than television or propaganda. That is the main experience I want to convey. What you say about the capacity for dissent is very important; this indeed exists, but not where we look for it -- it takes another form.

TE Yes, you do talk about what you call 'heterodoxy', which is an oppositional kind of language. What Marxists call pessimism in your work, you yourself would see, presumably, as realism. One may agree with that, but on the other hand I know that you don't want to sound too much like Michel Foucault. You don't wish, by virtue of stressing that material realism, to move into a theory of power which you yourself have criticized, I think quite properly, as too abstract, too metaphysical, too all-pervasive; and you want to leave room for some kind of political opposition. My objection to the idea of doxa is that you seem to be saying that there is internalization of dominant and oppressive beliefs, but there is also, in a second movement, something that can be broken and thereby enable a heterodoxy to emerge. But isn't that too chronological? Maybe I'm caricaturing it, but is doxa not itself a more contradictory affair? That is, can people believe and not believe, or believe at different levels?

PB No. That is related to the programme of the philosophy of man we have, of the philosophy of action, and so on. I would say that as long as you think in terms of consciousness, false consciousness, unconsciousness, and so on, you cannot grasp the main ideological effects, which most of the time are transmitted through the body. The main mechanism of domination operates through the unconscious manipulation of the body. For example, I have just written a paper about the processes of male domination in a so-called primitive society. They are the same as in our society, but a lot more visible. In the former case the dominated persons, the women, acquire domination through bodily education. I could go into detail -- for instance, girls learn to walk in a determinate manner, they learn to move their feet in a particular way,

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