ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with discourse as the principal site and the means of power enactment and power struggle in social life. It combines interactional sociolinguistic and discourse analytic approaches with the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1986, 1991, 1993), Michel Foucault (1978, 1980) and Anthony Giddens (1991) in social theory and Michael Baxandall (1985) in history of art. My discussion of power is illustrated by a case study of the discourses in and around a television art programme (American Visions), in which an art critic (Robert Hughes) claims expert knowledge and uses it to legitimise (or not) artists or works of art and to endow them (or not) with symbolic capital. In other words, I examine here the discursive means deployed by an art critic in order to exert his influence within the field of cultural (artistic) production as the consecrator of artists and their guarantor of symbolic capital.
