The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
cultural relativism:
That which may be relative to the resources and attributes, i.e., cultural capital, of a certain class of society.
The theory of Pedagogic Action produces the concept of Pedagogic Authority in the very operation by which, in identifying the objective truth of Pedagogic Action as violence, it brings out the contradiction between that objective truth and the agents' practice (the Pedagogic Action), which objectively manifests the misrecognition of that truth (whatever the experiences or ideologies accompanying those practices). Thus the question is posed: what are the social conditions for the establishment of a relation of Pedagogic Communication concealing the power relations which make it possible and thereby adding the specific force of its legitimate authority to the force it derives from those relations? The idea of a Pedagogic Action exercised without Pedagogic Authority is a logical contradiction and a sociological impossibility; a Pedagogic Action which aimed to unveil, in its very exercise, its objective reality of violence and thereby to destroy the basis of the agent's Pedagogic Authority, would be self-destructive. The Paradox of Epimenides the liar would appear in a new form: either you believe I'm not lying when I tell you education is violence and my teaching isn't legitimate, so you can't believe me; or you believe I'm lying and my teaching is legitimate, so you still can't believe what I say when I tell you it is violence.
To draw out all the implications of this paradox we only have to think of the vicious circles awaiting anyone who might seek to base his pedagogic practice on the theoretical truth of all pedagogic practice: it is one thing to teach 'cultural relativism', that is, the arbitrary character of all culture, to individuals who have already been educated according to the principles of the cultural arbitrary of a group or class; it would be quite another to claim to be giving a relativistic education, i.e., actually to produce a cultivated man who was the native of all cultures. The problems posed by situations of early bilingualism or biculturalism give only a faint idea of the insurmountable contradictions faced by a Pedagogic Action claiming to take as its practical didactic principle the theoretical affirmation of the arbitrariness of linguistic or cultural codes. This is a proof per absurdum that every Pedagogic Action requires as the condition of its exercise the social misrecognition of the objective truth of Pedagogic Action (that it is, in reality, violence). See also:
American educational credentials
American society stricto censu
cultural arbitrary qualification
cultural arbitrary
cultural capital
educational system transhistory
functional duplicity in academia
habitus
institutional and social conditions permitting a cultural arbitrary
'laissez-faire' habitus in society
legitimation and accreditation of government
linguistic and cultural capital
misrecognition
negative societal parameters
pan-econometric monism
pedagogic action
pedagogical mediations
reality and the misconceptions of sociologists
sociodicy
sociodicy/society
societal maya, as regards academia
symbolic violence
the middle-class predisposition
the negative sociology of 'the general interest'