p.9 uncertainty remains as to the outcome of the interaction as long as the sequence has not been
completed... This uncertainty, which finds its objective basis in the probabilist logic of social laws, is sufficient
to modify not only the experience of practice... but practice itself, in giving an objective foundation to strategies aimed
at avoiding the most probable outcome.
p.12 In game theory, the good player is the one who always supposes his opponent will discern the
best strategy and who directs his own play accordingly
p.15 The skilled strategist can turn a capital of provocations received or conflicts suspended,
with the potential ripostes, vengeances, or conflicts it contains, into an instrument of power, by reserving the capacity
to reopen or cease hostilities in his own good time.
p.36 relationships... are the product of strategies (conscious or unconscious) oriented towards the satisfaction
of material and symbolic interests
p.73 Sartre makes each action a sort of unprecedented confrontation between the subject and the world.
p.96 the objects of knowledge are constructed... the principle of this construction is practical
activity oriented towards practical functions.
p.98 when it is a matter of transmitting all the useful information as quickly as possible, there
is no more efficient and convenient way than a linear narrative, which permits the rapid unfolding of the succession
of "periods" and "moments"
p.106-107 The totalization which the diagram effects by juxtaposing in the simultaneity
of a single space the complete series of the temporal oppositions applied successively by different agents at different times,
which can never all be mobilized together in practice (because the necessities of existence never require this sort
of synoptic apprehension, tending rather to discourage it by their urgency) gives full reign to the theoretical neutralization
which the inquiry relationship itself produces. The establishment of a single series thus creates ex nihilo [JLJ
- out of nothing] a whole host of relations (of simultaneity, succession, or symmetry, for example) between terms and guide-marks
of different levels
p.109 Symbolic systems owe their practical coherence, that is, their regularities,
and also their irregularities and even incoherences (both equally necessary because inscribed in the logic of their
genesis and functioning) to the fact that they are the product of practices which cannot perform their practical functions
except insofar as they bring into play, in their practical state, principles which are not only coherent
- i.e. capable of engendering intrinsically coherent practices compatible with the objective conditions - but also
practical, in the sense of convenient, i.e. immediately mastered and manageable because obeying a "poor" and economical
logic.
One thus has to acknowledge that practice has a logic which is not that of logic
p.118 ritual practice owes its practical coherence (which may be reconstituted in the form of a
objectified diagram of operations) to the fact that it is the product of a single system of conceptual schemes immanent
in practice, organizing not only the perception of objects... but also the production of practices
p.123-124 Every successfully socialized agent thus possesses, in their incorporated state, the instruments
of an ordering of the world, a system of classifying schemes which organizes all practices, and of which the linguistic schemes...
are only one aspect.
p.144 The skilled strategist can turn a capital of provocations received or conflicts suspended,
with the potential ripostes, vengeances, or conflicts it contains, into an instrument of power, by
reserving the capacity to reopen or cease hostilities in his own good time.
p.152 The future is already inscribed in the present in the form of omens. Men must decipher these warnings,
not in order to submit to them as a destiny... but in order to be able, if necessary, to change them
p.184 Economic power lies not in wealth but in the relationship between wealth and a field of economic relations
p.235 Bertrand Russell... "Like energy, power has many forms, such as... influence... No
one of these can be regarded as subordinate to any other, and there is no one form from which the others are derivative. The
successful... will be defective at certain points, unless other forms are taken into account..." (Power: A New
Social Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), pp.12-13). And he goes on to define the programme for this unified science
of social energy: "Power, like energy, must be regarded as continually passing from any one of its
forms into any other, and it should be the business of social science to seek the laws of such transformations" (pp.13-14).
p.237 If acts of communication... always bear within them a potential conflict, it is because
they always contain the possibility of domination. Symbolic violence is that form of domination
which, transcending the opposition usually drawn between sense relations and power relations, communication and domination,
is only exerted through the communication in which it is disguised.
