Durkheim and the Neo-Durkheimians
Emile Durkheim and the Neo-Durkheimians (Cultural Sociology)
Philip Smith, 9-13, 74-96
Politics
Lynn Hunt, The Sacred and the French Revolution
Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, The Discourse of American Civil Society (in reader)
Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
One of sociology’s founding fathers, the “big three,” the other two being Karl Marx and Max Weber. He developed the core of a cultural approach to sociology almost a century before the “cultural turn” in the social sciences.
French academic, unlike Marx he was a professional academic, and as such was deeply engaged in the academic debates of his time. He did as much as anyone to establish sociology as a discipline in
Four most famous books:
The Division of Labor in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Key ideas in Durkheimian sociology, key contributions:
1. The study of “social facts”: a social fact is a real phenomenon that is collective in nature and irreducible to individuals’ actions. e.g. language…no such thing as a “private language”
2. Rigorous scientific methods of study: statistical analysis of survey data, data collected by French bureaucracies
3. Cultural analysis: symbols, categories, rituals, the sacred and the profane
The Elementary Forms, part of which is assigned for this course, was his last great work, and it came very late in his career, and it is where he most fully spells out his ideas about cultural processes. The book is complex, in part because in it Durkheim tries to do two things.
1) understand religion, i.e. provide a sociology of religion (lots of people are still working on this)
2) show how the modern world is still fundamentally “religious.” This is his religious sociology (fewer people see things this way, although I tend to)
1) Durkheim’s sociology of religion
Why do all human societies have religions in the first place? What are the social effects of particular religions? The economic effects? How do power, politics, and money interact with religion? From a purely economic or ecological perspective, religion and particulaly elaborate religious rituals can seem wasteful. From a Marxist perspective, religion is the “opiate of the people.” It disguises power and subtly enslaves people. But this doesn’t really answer the question of why religious beliefs come about.
Here are some answers as of the late nineteenth century:
1) Naturism: religion helps to explain natural phenomena, which are often threatening
Naturism addresses itself to the phenomena of nature, including great “cosmic forces” such winds, stars, rivers, the sky, etc., or else plants, animals, rocks etc.
2) Animism: Religion explains natural phenomena in terms of spirits, souls, divinities, demons, which are animated and conscious and inhabit natural entities. This is a kind of anthropomorphism.
Durkheim finds lots of problems with these two explanations, not the least of which is that they are both deeply condescending, and assume religion to be a matter of illusions and hallucinations totally unrelated to rationality and science.
Durkheim’s answer, based on his reading of the anthropological and sociological literature on Australian Aboriginal and Native American tribes:
First, he defines religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”
This definition includes two elements: the idea of the sacred, and the idea that religion is inherently collective. By nature, i.e. because of the way individual humans are wired to interact with the world, human beings distinguish between the sacred and the profane. We’ll get back to this point later in the course. Second, religion is social. God, or the gods, are in fact society, and belief in God or the gods basically serves the interests of society as a whole.
This isn’t a course in the sociology of religion, however, so what’s most interesting to us here is that Durkheim’s sociology of religion provides the foundation for his religious sociology, you could say his cultural sociology, of the secular world.
2) Durkheim’s religious sociology
Unique for a sociologist, he emphasizes
a. the independent causal importance of symbolic classification
b. the importance of the symbolic division between the sacred and the profane
c. the social significance of ritual behavior
d. interrelations between symbolic classifications, rituals, and the creation of social solidarities
The Elementary Forms is a difficult book, in part because it is exploratory, and in part because Durkheim covers so much ground. His primary empirical case is the Australian Aborigines, whose social organization is, basically, the following:
Tribes (groups of clans)
Phratries
Matrimonial Classes
Clans
The clans each have totems—symbols based on animals and plants, and occasionally meteorological or celestial entities—and relations between totems mirrors social relations between clans as they are incorporated into phratries. In this way, aboriginal society shapes the use of symbols.
Totems are names, but they’re more like coats-of-arms to the clans. But it is more than a collective label in which individuals take pride. It also has great religious significance. It is a “sacred thing.” It keeps the profane at a distance, because of its essential properties: it heals wounds, sickness, it can makes men’s beards grow, it has power over the totemic species, it gives individuals force, courage, and perseverance, and depresses and weakens their enemies (p. 142). It surrounds ordinary objects and happenings with a kind of “religious halo.” Importantly, the idea, the symbol that is the totem has more power than the animal or plant on which it is based.
Totems have not only religious but cognitive significance as well. They shape the way Aborigines and Native Americans categorize the world around them, their own bodies and minds, and even the whole universe (i.e. their religious cosmology). Durkheim gives lots of examples, but the important thing to note is that Aboriginal and Native American categories of thought are very different from modern Western notions, which are typically based on modern science.
Society furnishes these categories to the individuals who comprise it, and in turn, by thinking in terms of the same categories and communicating with the same symbols, society is strengthened. Social solidarity is strengthened.
Finally, and this point is particularly important for us, modern societies and modern science do not reject totemism, the division of the world into sacred and profane, etc. Basically, science and rationality rely on the same universal cultural and religious notions that animate Aboriginal religion. Modern social organization is more individualistic and less tribal and clannish, and scientific rationality is sharper and clearer than aboriginal thought processes and categories, but the elementary forms of thought and group culture that underly both are the same. If we can apprehend these processes at work in the modern world, we can begin to understand the scope and the limits of our rationality.
Durkheim’s scholarly influence
Durkheimian thought permeated the French intellectual scene, and it has influenced research in various disciplines. The influence of Durkheim’s work, and particularly of the Elementary Forms, has been both direct and indirect.
Linguistics: most prominent is Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of the field of “semiotics” (the study of signs) who saw language as a social fact irreducible to anything else that emerged from the conscience collective of a society.
Literary theory: Roland Barthes’s studies in social and literary semiotics. Barthes and his colleagues have explicated the systems of symbolic classifications that regulate a wide array of secular institutions and social processes, including fashion, food production, and civil conflict.
Anthropology: Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, in which he studied societies in terms of their symbolic classifications, which are often patterned as binary oppositions. The opposition between the sacred and the profane is a cardinal one. Geertz’s interpretive studies of expressive cultural practices, such as Balinese cockfighting and American political campaigns, are also broadly Durkheimian, as they emphasize the “religious” and cultural bases of cultural phenomena. Mary Douglas’s research on purity and pollution taboos, which we’ll cover in this course, is directly Durkheimian too.
History: Michel Foucault, who often pointed out the religious and in a sense arbitrary basis of “rational” Western attitudes and practices, from sexual attitudes to such as mass incarceration.
Social Psychology: European “social representations theory” builds directly from Durkheim’s idea of “collective representations.”
Sociology: Amazingly, sociologists have been the slowest to pick up on Durkheim’s ideas. There are a number of reasons for this, but they aren’t too interesting, so we won’t get into them here. Robert Bellah has written on secular nations’ “civil religions,” basically the rituals and symbols modern democracies use. Otherwise, Durkheimian research in sociology, especially American sociology, is fairly new, only really picking up in the late 1980s. We’ll cover some of this work later in the course.
Durkheimian and Politics
Lynn Hunt, The Sacred and the French Revolution
briefly on the modern sociological debate on the F.R.
Why did the F.R. happen? Why do revolutions happen in general? Lots of sociological scholarship on revolutions.
Structural Analysis of the F.R.: Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol
peasant grievances
agricultural production and distribution
taxation
government susceptibility to revolution
centralization of bureaucratic government organizations
government policy consistency
William H. Sewell, Lynn Hunt
symbols and meanings
sovereignty of the crown versus of “the people” (shifting meanings and associations)
ideology
public rituals
symbols of the king versus symbols of the new order (the liberty tree, liberty in female form, the revolutionary calendar…)
Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, The Discourse of American Civil Society (in reader)
Jeffrey Alexander is a “Durkheimian” (or neo-“Durkheimian”) scholar, and in his chapter he applies and revises Durkheimian ideas in order to better understand the public response to the Watergate break-in. But there’s a long intellectual history of studies of this kind, specifically of studies of mass politics, propaganda, and the media. As far back as the 1920s, an awareness was developing that the extension of the vote and the enlarged purchasing power of the “masses” entailed expanded opportunities for both demagogues and well-meaning propagandists to further their respective causes using various symbols, fictions, myths, and utopian appeals. These opportunities have only expanded further with developments in communications technology, most notably the universalization of television.
Nowadays we take advertising, marketing studies, consumer research, political polling, image consultants, “spin doctors” and the like more or less for granted. But beginning in the 1920s social critics and social scientists began to study these processes carefully, and to rethink fundamental democratic ideals in light of new realities.
The first great writer in this tradition was Walter Lippmann, who was perhaps the most famous journalist and commentator of his day. Two of his books are relevant here: Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).
In Public Opinion he developed what amounts to a social constructionist view of public opinion. It is an ideal of our democratic system, of course, that government represents the “will of the people,” that is the interests, opinions, beliefs, and values of the people. If the people’s will is disregarded, the result is tyranny and ultimately violence. What could be more basic to the American way of life? Yet by the 1920s, this ideal seemed increasingly unrealistic and naïve. Lippmann felt this as strongly as anyone, and set out to explore the fabrication of public opinion. Taking a page from Freud and other psychologists, he saw human beings as guided by “the pictures in their heads,” not necessarily by external realities. The pictures in our heads are “fictions,” which is not to say that they’re untrue, just that they’re subjective. And these fictions are socially constituted, i.e. they are part of culture. Human beings are not directly exposed to reality, but instead adjust themselves to their environments through collective culture, through “simpler models,” because the real environment is too big, too complex, and too fleeting for us to apprehend it directly. Human beings thus live in “pseudo-environments.”
In Public Opinion, and especially in The Phantom Public, Lippmann drew out the implications of this view of human nature for modern political life. “The Public” is not made up of rational individuals judging an objective reality based on their values and interests. Instead, “the public” doesn’t exist, but is for the most part created and manipulated by powerful cultural actors.
Further, for practical purposes, public opinion as such is typically “uninformed, irrelevant, and meddlesome.” Therefore, educated insiders, i.e. experts, should make society’s important political decisions, and public opinion should follow. Public opinion can and should be manipulated in order to further the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Educated experts, who will naturally have society’s best interests in mind, should make decisions and manipulate public opinion for the good of the society.
This was certainly a new democratic ideal, one that remains provocative and for many, disturbing.
One other social thinker I’ll briefly mention here is the political scientist Harold Lasswell, who published a famous book in 1927 analyzing the effectiveness of the various propaganda campaigns waged during World War I. His theoretical approach is similar to Lippmann’s, by the way.
An alternative view of these matters comes from the sociologist Robert Bellah, who is even more Durkheimian than Lippmann or Lasswell. Bellah is well known for his concept of “civil religion,” a concept he illustrates in an American context through studies of Presidential inaugural addresses and other addresses to the nation. The American civil religion is not the fabrication of any one interest group or group of experts. It goes deeper than that, and comprises myths and symbols that guide our national identity and sense of purpose. In
also, Americans continue to escape oppression and tyranny as the Israelites escaped
God has a special mission for
This civil religion is the source of much of our national identity, and Bellah cites as evidence for this the fact that these ideas recur again and again in American political documents, including such diverse sources as abolitionist pamphlets, civil rights speeches, and many Presidential speeches. For Bellah, this indicates that the civil religion is interwoven with the fabric of American politics.
“Binary Codes” in modern political discourse, which we imagine to be rational
Discourses have “internal symbolic logics” that can be perceived from outside. This is what cultural analysis should do.
like Sacred/Profane but with local variations
in the American case:
Actors
Democratic Code
active, autonomous, rational, reasonable, calm, controlled, realistic, sane
Counter-democratic code
passive, dependent, irrational, hysterical, excitable, passionate, unrealistic, mad
Social relationships
D: Open, trusting, critical, truthful, straightforward, citizen
C-d: Secret, suspicious, deferential, deceitful, calculating, enemy
Institutions
D: Rule regulate, law, equality, inclusive, impersonal, contractual, groups, office
C-d: Arbitrary, power, hierarchy, exclusive, personal, ascriptive, factions, personality
Alexander and Smith: revises and, more accurately, adds to Durkheimian analysis the following ideas:
“Generalization”
Values (general and elemental aspects of a culture)
Norms (regulatory conventions, customs, and laws)
Goals (mundane play of power, interest)
Social factors involved in crisis and ritual renewal
consensus about deviance/pollution of event
consensus about relevance of event
institutional social controls, including possibly the use of force
mobilization and struggle of autonomous elites and publics**
processes of symbolic representation, ritual and purification
** “incompleteness” of rituals
Organization of symbols by myths
So even modern, secular, democratic politics are discursive and cultural, and in a sense irrational
Cultures of Technology
Technology is a big target for cultural theory, because in modern societies, and in much modern social theory, technology’s relationship to culture and society is a deterministic one. Technology is, in Alexander’s phrase, a “dead hand” pushing social and cultural change.
Technological developmentsà society, social change
e.g. gun powder, steel production colonial conquest
windmill food production
automobile residence patterns
commercial jet airliner travel, business, residence
personal computer work patterns
internet communication patterns, privacy
Technological developmentsà culture
e.g. automobile “car culture”—decorate our cars, value our cars as more than mere transportation, etc.
mass production, industry modern art, modern design
streamlined airplanes art deco design
television cultural degradation, massification
cable television cultural fragmentation
industrial machinery social science theories (e.g. Freudianism, systems theory)
email written and spoken language
Yet social scientists are beginning to recognize that the converse is true as well, and have been paying increasing attention to the ways social organization encourages or impede technological innovation.
societyà technological innovation
Economic approaches—e.g. Robert Merton, Neil Smelser and others have argued that high labor costs encouraged the industrial revolution (they also argued for the importance of Methodist values)
Network theorists—point to the role of interpersonal and interorganizational ties in fostering technological advances (e.g. Powell 1999)
The “cultural turn” in the social sciences has thus far yielded fewer insights on technological innovation. (However, there is a large literature that is critical of the incursion of technology into cultural life, although theoretically, this literature shares the presuppositions of research that celebrates the effects of technology in the modern world, i.e. that technology is the causal agent in cultural change: e.g. Neil Postman 1993; Talbott 1995; Charlene Spretnak 1997; Shelly Turkle 1997; Slouka 1995; Ullman 1997).
Cultural historians have made more progress, and in recent years have begun to rewrite the role of technology in Western culture. Beginning in the late 1960s and ’70s, historians began to reconsider the relationship between technology and religious culture in the West since the Middle Ages.
White, for example, traces contemporary moral approval of technology to a Christian ascetic tradition that, contrary to Weber’s famous argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, preceded the Calvinists and instead goes back throught the monks to Jewish roots.
The Christian embrace of technology, i.e. the equating of technological progress and spiritual virtue, can be traced back through monastic iconography to the ninth century. Since that time, the “medieval affirmation that technological advance is morally benign” has been essentially unanimous, and remains an axiom of the modern West.
Recently, even more ambitious and far-reaching efforts have been made to illuminate the powerful, persistent influence of religion in fostering technological innovation. Noble (1997), echoing White, has carefully documented what he argues is a millennium-old trend in western culture, wherein particular strands of Christian religious faith have inspired and grounded the development of the “useful arts.” From Benedictine monks’ innovations in machine design, metal-casting, glass-making and tinning, to Freemasonry, space exploration, and computer technology, in the West, millenarian and eschatological religious understandings have long inspired technological achievement.
Noble argues that the Western tradition of religiously inspired technological experimentation has been shrouded by a century and a half of “secularist polemic and ideology” (p. 4). Yet the modernist intellectual tradition running from Marx to Habermas (outlined in Alexander 1992: 299-305) fails to explain popular religious construals of a range of 20th-century technological phenomena, from the atom bomb to artificial intelligence, the possibility of human cloning, and the promise of computer technology (cf. Noble 1997: 115-142).
Alexander on the “Sacred and Profane Information Machine”
Alexander takes on both Weber’s rationalization thesis and Marx’s commodification thesis, and for that matter he is not enthusiastic about any broad, deterministic theory of social change. E.g. McDonalization, rationalization, commodification, modernization, globalization, and so on. Nor is he a fan of rational-choice models of individual behavior, nor Realpolitik models of collective behavior. Why? Because he is a cultural theorist, and wants to show how culture and meaning and nonrational processes are a part of all social processes.
For Alexander, cultures are like languages, loosely structured by binary codes (sacred/profane, good/evil)
Social scientists ought to be able to read cultures like texts, that is to understand, in an empathetic way, cultures as systems of meaning for social groups.
As Durkheim and Weber tried to understand Australian aborigines, Native Americans, and Calvinists, so we should try to understand contemporary, modern cultures.
Alexander critiques neo-Marxists and critical theorists (we will read some of this work later) for being anticultural, for assuming that technology and economics drive social and cultural change, just as Marx argued that control of the means of production (the base) drives changes in the superstructure (schools, religions, values, culture, ideas, politics).
Alexander argues that it is impossible for a society to be dominated by technological rationality, as Weber, Marx and others have long predicted, because the “mental structures” of humankind are, in crucial respects, unchanging. Human rationality never exists in a pure form, but is always tied into irrational systems of psychological defense, systems that are both primordial and cultural.
In a sense, Alexander wants to do for the personal computer, for modern technology, what Freud did for the mind and Weber did for capitalism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: reveal its cultural and irrational dimensions in a rational way.
The personal computer and the internet have had profound effects on modern society. As such, and as Durkheim would have expected, the rhetoric and legitimating myths of the computer age are rife with religious themes. Alexander examined religiously based popular conceptions of technology in the United States—generally a religious, Christian country, but one that has been at the forefront of most modern technology—between the end of the second world war and 1975 (roughly the dawn of the age of the personal computer), and unearthed a Durkheimian pattern. In popular magazines (Time and Newsweek) and lay technology magazines (Popular Science), innovations in computer technology were introduced to the public wrapped up in a “transcendental and mythical discourse...filled with wish-fulfilling rhetoric of salvation and damnation” (p. 308). Alexander finds apocalyptic themes, themes of salvation, and even themes of the computer as the antichrist, the devil. Time and again, the marvels of computer technology were treated as sacred, existing at a remove from the profane world, and computer specialists as lay priests, intermediaries between technological divinity and the laity. Time, for example, wrote in 1965 of the “new breed of specialists [which] has grown up to tend the machines,” who “ have formed themselves into a solemn priesthood of the computer, purposely separated from ordinary laymen [and] speak[ing] an esoteric language that some suspect is just their way of mystifying outsiders” (Time, April 1965; qtd in Alexander 1992: 310). Completing their analogy three years later, Time wrote: “When we want to consult the deity, we go to the computer because it’s the closest thing to God to come along” (Time, March 1968).
“Idea Hamsters” on the “Bleeding Edge”: Profane Metaphors in High Technology Jargon
This was my first published article, and in a sense what I ended up doing was extending Alexander’s argument, which has roots in both Freud and Weber.
1) I argue that sacredness is not a consensual part of modern/postmodern culture the way it perhaps once was, and that the profane is worth thinking about more.
2) I argue that we can use theories of metaphor, and develop methods of analyzing metaphors, that can teach us a lot about culture. We can borrow ideas and methods from linguistics and cognitive psychology.
http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/categories/jargonWatch/
So it turns out that
This profane jargon has increased over time, and there is more of it in
This jargon is structured in a binary way, that is in terms of a binary code, of
sacred/profane = technological progress/backwardness
For theorists of technological rationalization,
