illuminating, not least your stress that in looking at the phenomenon of art, we can't go directly to the whole social field, but have to pass through the particular artistic cultural field first. I think that is enormously useful. However, couldn't it be argued that you come out with a notion of the whole of human practice, action and language as a war, in which players will try to increase their stakes, to invest more effectively to the detriment of other players? That is a true description of many fields of our experience, but are there not other forms of discourse, other forms of action, which you couldn't conceptualize so easily in those agonistic terms?

PB You are yourself giving a good example of the fact that such forms exist, through your sympathetic engagement with my ideas! Anyway, that is an important question, and one that I ask myself; I agree that it is a problem. I don't know why I tend to think in those terms -- I feel obliged to by reality. My sense is that the kind of exchange we are now engaged in is unusual. Where this happens, it is the exception based on what Aristotle called ϕιλια ['philia'] -- or friendship, to use a more general expression. Φιλια is, according to Aristotle, an economic exchange or symbolic exchange that you may have within the family, among parents or with friends. I tend to think that the structure of most of the fields, most of the social games, is such that competition -- a struggle for domination -- is quasiinevitable. It is evident in the economic field; but even in the religious field you will find the description is right. In most fields, we may observe what we characterize as competition for accumulation of different forms of capital (religious capital, economic capital, and so on), and things being what they are, the undistorted communication referred to by Habermas is always an exception. We can achieve this undistorted communication only by a special effort when extraordinary conditions are fulfilled.

I would just add a word on the analogy between linguistic exchange and economic exchange, which you referred to just now. This analogy, in my view, is very fruitful in understanding many phenomena that cannot be treated simply as communication, as language production. Some English philosophers, like Austin, made a point of this; they saw the presence of very important things in language -- like giving orders, for example, or making announcements -- which do not conform to the communication model. Many things cannot be understood in terms of pure communication, and so by proposing my economic analogy I try only to generalize and to give to an insight of analytical philosophy a sociological foundation which it lacks. I don't criticize Austin; I say that he does not give a full account of the social

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