conditions of possibility of the process he describes. So, though I may seem very far from this philosophy of language, I am in fact very close.

TE Clearly, you are thinking sociologically as much as semiologically. Running throughout the whole of your work is a sort of steady subtext which is a deep preoccupation with the conditions of your own work itself -- or more generally, with the difficulty of a sociological discourse that seeks, for whatever good, potentially emancipatory, reasons to analyse the common life. That is, there is a very powerful commitment in your work -- not always explicit, but present as a kind of sensibility -to what one might inadequately call 'the common life'. This is one of many ways in which your work parallels that of Raymond Williams in this country. But of course it is difficult for a sociologist involved in a highly specialized discourse to take that common life as an object of analysis or even of contemplation. You, like myself, don't come from an intellectual background; and it seems to me that your work is very interesting because it is marked by the tension between some sense of common value that has nothing to do with intellect in the first place, and the other dimension which is very much to analyse the academic institution -- the social condition of intellectuals and its implications. Do you think this biographical circumstance helps to explain your preoccupations?

PB What you say is very sympathetic and generous. You have expressed my personal feeling exactly. I try to put together the two parts of my life, as many first-generation intellectuals do. Some use different means -- for instance, they find a solution in political action, in some kind of social rationalization. My main problem is to try and understand what happened to me. My trajectory may be described as miraculous, I suppose -- an ascension to a place where I don't belong. And so to be able to live in a world that is not mine I must try to understand both things: what it means to have an academic mind -- how such is created -- and at the same time what was lost in acquiring it. For that reason, even if my work -- my full work -- is a sort of autobiography, it is a work for people who have the same sort of trajectory, and the same need to understand.

TE We have some time for questions or comments. Would anyone like to take up any of the points raised in the discussion?

It has been advanced as an argument against the concept of ideology that Marxism credited people with too much ability to recognize the truth, and that those further down the social scale are less likely to recognize it. Isn't it more the case that people further down that scale don't have the economic power that would enable them to go to discussion groups and escape from the narrow circle of their home life and recognize

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