ABSTRACT
The central ground, the field upon which sociality is manifested and substantialized, contested and, however tenuously, achieved, is that of the discursive practices of everyday life within a defined social formation. Such practices, celebrated or derided as ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ understandings of being in the world, are the stuff of the universal and the commonplace: birth and death, sexuality and generation, families, friends and neighbours, accident and coincidence, fate and design, the comic and the tragic. The sharing of a common spoken and written language is the necessary foundation for the creation and maintenance of intersubjectivity and the We-relation which is definitional of community. The ability to inflict symbolic violence on others is limited, in democratic societies, by the recognition of the rights and duties of both individuals and groups within the overall social formation.
