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Re-flecting on Bourdieu's notion of the failed gift-exchange in Outline of a Theory of Practice. I'm not sure, but would it be off the mark to read Bourdieu's intervention there as an attempt to understand mis-interpellation as a matter of academese?
To try to be specific, observe page 5. Contra the notion that an objective truth of gifts is to be found in the model (and not the observer) of gift exchange, Bourdieu rites:
Any really [the trick word] objective [oops, another one] analysis [dang, a third one] of the exchange of gifts, words, challenges, or even women must allow for the fact that each of these inaugural acts may misfire, and that it receives its meaning, in any case, from the response it triggers off, even if the response is a failure to reply that retrospectively removes its intended meaning.
What must be introduced to the problematic, if I read B correctly, is a sense of time, the meaning of temporal displacements of gift and counter-gift.
Ahem... Probably not very helpful, but it made itself written.
In coherence,
