PB I believe that violence takes more sophisticated forms. One example is opinion polls -- at least in France. (I was told that here it is different, but in France opinion polls are a more sophisticated form of grasping opinion than the simple contact between political men and their audience.) Opinion polls are an example of the kind of manipulation we have been discussing -- a new form of symbolic violence for which nobody has full responsibility. I would need two hours to tell you how it works, since the manipulation is so complex. I think that no more than ten people understand what happens -- not even the people who organize the polls. For example, the political men -- those in government -- don't know how the process operates, and it therefore governs them. It is a complex structure with a lot of different agents: journalists, opinion-poll makers, intellectuals who comment on polls, TV intellectuals (who are very important in terms of political effect), political men, and so on. All these persons are in a network of interconnections, and everyone mystifies the others and mystifies himself by mystifying the others. Nobody is conscious of the process, and it works in such a manner that no one could say that France is simply governed by opinion poll. To understand that, you need an instrument much more sophisticated than the methods traditionally used. I say that to all the union leaders. I tell them: you are late; we are three wars on, you are three class wars too late; you fight with instruments suited to the class struggle of the nineteenth century and you have in front of you forms of power that are very sophisticated.

I was very interested to hear the reference to the 'first-generation intellectual', and to the trajectory of such a person. For obvious reasons it is still a fairly rare breed; but since that breed is now itself at the age of breeding, what about the children of such people? Do they become second-generation intellectuals? Do they merge seamlessly into the middle classes or do they form some kind of subculture? I am asking this of both of you, partly because my own experience makes me despair of what seems to happen -- the subsequent generation appears both to lose the strengths of the working-class tradition and somehow never completely goes into the middle-class tradition -- and I would be interested in the comments of such first-generation intellectuals on this.

TE Well, my children wouldn't touch an intellectual with a bargepole! I think they regard education as bourgeois ideology, which is very convenient for them! You are right. There is something in what you say about being neither one thing nor the other, but I don't see why that should necessarily be a source of despair. I think that could be an interesting position to be in, couldn't it? Such a generation, of course, are not working-class any more -- just as their parents aren't any longer working-class -- but they have also seen their parents in action and have a proper suspicion of intellectuals. In other words, they don't think that the answer is to be an intellectual.

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