ABSTRACT
Culture, the focus of the previous chapters, is unthinkable without language. The one presupposes the other. This is the conventional sociological and anthropological view, to which Bourdieu subscribes in the strongest possible terms. He insists that language cannot be analysed or understood in isolation from its cultural context and the social conditions of its production and reception. So the first thing to note about the papers on language which he wrote during the 1970s and 1980s, a selection of which have recently been published in Language and Symbolic Power, [1] is that they are a critique of pure, formalist linguistics, most obviously the work of Saussure and and Chomsky. In particular, he objects to Saussure’s distinction between langue (language) and parole (speech), and Chomsky’s differentiation between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’. Each depends on the methodological constitution of an abstract domain of languagesimultaneously ‘real’ and ‘ideal’—which is drawn upon in the production of mundane written or spoken language in all of its variety.
