they learn to hide their breasts. When they learn to speak, they don't say 'I know'; they say 'I don't know'. For example, if you ask a woman for directions, she will say 'I don't know'. We have the equivalent process, but it operates in a much more subtle manner -- through language, through the body, through attitudes towards things which are below the level of consciousness. But this is not mechanistic; it does not refer us to unconsciousness. As soon as we think in those terms, it becomes clear that the work of emancipation is very difficult; it is a question of mental gymnastics as much as consciousness-raising. And as intellectuals we are not used to that. I call it a scholastic bias -- a bias to which we are all exposed: we think that the problems can be solved only through consciousness. And that is where I differ from Foucault, and would draw a contrast with his important concept of discipline. Discipline, in French at least, points towards something external. Discipline is enforced by a military strength; you must obey. In a sense it is easy to revolt against discipline because you are conscious of it. In fact, I think that in terms of symbolic domination, resistance is more difficult, since it is something you absorb like air, something you don't feel pressured by; it is everywhere and nowhere, and to escape from that is very difficult. Workers are under this kind of invisible pressure, and so they become much more adapted to their situation than we can believe. To change this is very difficult, especially today. With, the mechanism of symbolic violence, domination tends to take the form of a more effective, and in this sense more brutal, means of oppression. Consider contemporary societies in which the violence has become soft, invisible.

TE I would suggest there is a kind of irony there, because on the one hand you are reacting against what you see as an excessive emphasis on consciousness. I think that is right, but some of the Marxist tradition has registered that too. At the same time that you were developing these theories, the Marxist tradition itself, in the work of Althusser, whatever its limits, was trying to shift the concept of ideology on to a much less conscious, and much more practical, institutional place, which in a way comes closer perhaps to your own position.

I would like to consider the point about political opposition or pessimism from a different perspective, one that informs a vital area of your work now. You talk very boldly and, I think, very imaginatively, about linguistic markets and the price or the value of utterances -- 'price formation' -- and you deliberately transpose a whole Marxist economic language into the cultural or symbolic spheres; and you speak of the field of struggle in which people try to amass an amount of cultural capital, whether in education or the arts or whatever. I think this is very

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