Sociology and Psychoanalysis

The August number of MIH also includes an essay on Marcel Gauchet by Samuel Moyn. It has been my policy, here, to mostly refrain from discussing the work of contemporary historians and in particular those in my field. This is related to my reluctance to write anything here that touches too closely on my dissertation work.

Moyn is an excellent historian. I have read both of his books and several essays. The combined quality and quantity of his output is both inspirational and more than a little disheartening. I am more than willing, therefore, to follow him past 1968, out of areas I have myself studied, and into the later part of the 20^th century. I will say hardly anything, though, about the content of this essay, only that it is an excellent example of the kind of 'contextual philology,' if I remember the phrase correctly, that he's been doing for some time.

In terms of the work I have been doing now, what I want to ask of this essay is a name: Durkheim. He increasingly seems to me to be central to 20^th century French thought. This essay convinces me that, for instance, other things could be said of Durkheim and the ‘self’ than Jerrold Seigel says in his book. Durkheim opened certain terrains that it is not far wrong to say Foucault and others exploited. So, a wishlist: Durkheim and the self, Durkheimian sociology and psychoanalysis, and finally a historically sensitive treatment of Foucault and Durkheim. I wonder if there is less discussion of a legacy of Durkheimian thought than there is of, say, Bergsonian thought, is that many of Durkheim’s immediate students went on to become boring and responsible moderate socialist and progressive liberals? Alternate paths, for instance the underbelly that is the ethnographic-surrealist current, had no interest in being progeny of such a father? What does Bataille say about Durkheim? I’ve no idea. Does Foucault talk about Durkheim anywhere at any length?

But these are my own questions, not Moyn’s. I look forward to the book of which this essay, presumably, will be some part.

Durkheim and analogy

Durkheim begins “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives” by defending the use of analogy as a tool of scientific analysis. Those who attempt to understand society through analogy with biology are not wrong because they employ analogy, but because they employ it badly. Similarly, those sociologists who look first of all to psychology, that is to the individual, are not necessarily wrong to do so. Durkheim says,

La vie collective, comme la vie mentale de l’individu, est faite de représentations; il est donc présumable ue représentations individuelles et représentations sociales sont, en quelque manière, comparables. Nous allons, en effet, essayet de montrer que les unes et les autres soutiennent la même relation avec leur substrat respectif. Mais ce rapprochement, loin de justifier la conception qui réduit la sociologie à n’être qu’un corollaire de la psychologie individuelle, mettre, au contraire, en reflief l’indépendance relative de ces deux mondes et de ces deux sciences (2).

This somewhat enigmatic explanation given, Durkheim turns to discuss the various materialist theories of psychology that attempt to reduce mental activity to a physical substratum—in the words of the period, to reduce the spiritual to the material. There follows a lengthy discussion of the various logical contradictions and metaphysical traps into which a rigorously materialist psychology must fall. Memory, perception, and the possibility of an unconscious mind are all discussed. William James figures prominently in this discussion, although Bergson (whose Matière et mémoire had appeared in 1896) is not explicitly mentioned. Durkheim concludes that it is impossible to reduce mental activity either to a physical substratum or to pure consciousness. This goes on for 30 pages, until one has nearly forgotten the point of the entire exercise.

The point is, of course, that there is an analogy to be made between psychology and sociology. (It should be said that for Durkheim ‘collective psychology’ is simply sociology—or rather the other way around—so ‘psychology’ can be used simply on its own, because it only ever refers to the individual. This leaves aside, I suppose, the whole range of groups that do not constitute ‘societies’ and must fall under ‘social psychology.’) Durkheim says: “Le rapport qui, dans la conception, unit le substrat social à la vie sociale est de tous points analogue à celui qu’on doit admettre entre le substrat physiologique et la vie psychique des individus” (34). That is, as brains are to minds, so individuals are to society. The analogy, then, is not between phenomena, but in the way that each science is delimited. The two ‘classic’ forms of explanation, called here materialist and idealist, are often (for instance, by Ravaisson in his survey) differentiated as, for the first, explaining the complex by the simple, and the second, the simple by the complex. Put otherwise, materialists explain the whole by its parts, and idealists the part by its whole. Debates in this period often organized themselves around physiology and morphology: does the function determine the organ, or the other way around?

Durkheim’s point here is that, as he says, to explain “le complex par le complex, les faits sociaux par la société” (41). Elements of one kind, to which one set of rules apply when in isolation, when combined give rise to phenomena that cannot be understood according to these rules. Durkheim says, “à mesure que l’association [for instance, of cells in a living being, or individuals into a society] se constitue, elle donne naissance à des phénomènes qui ne dérivent pas directement de la nature des éléments associés” (41-2). The potentially major problem of constituting these levels or systems of rules will be solved empirically. Suggesting, I suppose, that what will later be called ‘epistemological gaps’ in some sense ‘naturally’ occurring.

I mentioned already Bergson’s absence from this essay. It would be interesting to know more about Durkheim’s opinions of Bergson’s earlier writings—Les données immédiates...(1889) and Matiere et memoire (1896)—specifically in regard to the limits and meaning of materialist psychology. Later on, they come to represent two very different aspects of French philosophical/scientific culture, this is why I’d like to know more about the earlier period. Unexpectedly, this essay gives me yet more of a reason to read Emile Boutroux’s famous 1874 De la contingence des lois de la nature (reprinted 1895) supposedly grounding human freedom in these gaps between epistemological levels of determination. For striking contrast, and in order to have a hyper-modern perspective on these questions of materialist psychology, I would want to go back and look through my notes on Zizek’s Parallax View.

the division of labor

I want to ask, at the end of De la division du travail social, how Durkheim can be so insightful and open minded about some things, and so committed to other obvious falsehoods? Durkheim asserts, for instance, that the individual is not the substratum of society, but is rather the result of the development of society. This is a rather radical thing to say, and I think especially so around 1890. Yet he also has a remarkably blinkered faith—without basis in evidence, as far as I can tell—that everyone has a ‘place’ in society, that it could be possible for each individual to be ‘fitted’ with a task that adequately fits their personal merits and abilities. Now, in fact, it is possible that he believes the second of these opinions is tenable exactly because of the first—that is, since society has such power in molding its organs (for this is what we individuals are), then of course we will all be shaped to fit our purpose, and ultimately no one will be out of place. I find this a little chilling--it makes me think of Ranciere's classifications of denials of the political from Dis-agreement. But first, what is Durkheim’s broad argument?

As groups of individual humans become larger (in his terms, grow in volume and density) the structure of these groups necessarily changes. At first, societies were segmented, built of a certain number of similar units (families, clans...). This kind of society is strongly conscious of itself and is held together by mechanical solidarity, or similitude (people are mostly the same). As societies grow, and become organized, the division of labor becomes increasingly necessary. The different parts of society become less and less like one another—their form is shaped by their function. A modern society is characterized by organic solidarity, which is solidarity born of mutual dependence. Society is less conscious of itself as such, and individuals, since they are more different from one another, are more conscious of themselves.

A great many consequences flow from this basic understanding of the nature of societies and their modernity. In particular, Durkheim has a clear vision for the primacy of the educational establishment and the government in shaping society. Some active directing agent, he believes, must make certain that the division of labor is not distorted in any serious way, and that each individual, newly opened up to the world, knows just enough about it (and not too much) to feel the dignity of their position as an organ—to feel that they are a part, and only a part, of a larger whole on which they depend, but which also depends on them. Indeed, this is the basis of the morality that Durkheim derives from the nature of society. He says,

La morale des sociétés organisées [as opposed to segmented societies] ...ne suspend pas notre activité à des fins qui ne nous touchent pas directement; elle ne fait pas de nous les serviteurs de puissances idéales et d’une tout autre nature que la nôtre, qui suivent leurs voies propres sans se préoccuper des intérêts des hommes. Elle nous demande seulement d’être tendres pour nos semblables et d’être justes, de bien remplir notre tâche, de travailler à ce que chacun soit appelé à fonction qu’il peut le mieux remplir, et reçoive le juste prix de ses efforts. Les règles qui la constituent n’nt pas une force contraignante qui étouffe le libre examen; mais parce qu’elles sont davantage faites pour nous et, dans un certain sens, par nous, nous sommes plus libres vis-à-vis d’elles. (404)

This is, I must admit, a clear articulation of another kind of liberalism. Not only does the individual ultimately depend on society, but the very idea of individual freedom is emergent from its structure. Yet this understanding of society, I think paradoxically because it is so indebted to ‘sociological relativism,’ is deeply committed to the idea, evoked here, of the ‘juste prix.’ I was surprised to see, near the end of this book, Durkheim cite Karl Marx on how the division of labor cuts down on time wasted in production and, as it were, tightens up the pores of the day (388). Without citing Marx, but I think clearly drawing on him, Durkheim also endorses a version of the labor theory of value—each thing has a value determined socially by the amount of useful labor contained within it. For Marx, this is the necessary starting point for the peculiar nature of labor-power as a commodity that is sold for its true value, and yet produces more value than went into it. For Durkheim, the same observation simply serves as a basis for asserting that since there is a correct price (however impossible to actually calculate), there are just contracts.

I have read that Durkheim and Bergson are in a sense the two master thinkers of this period. Certainly, I had the intense feeling reading De la division... that this was the beginning of a conversation I had heard before. For instance, Durkheim discusses law at length in the early parts of the book, as a way of grasping the structure of social consciousness. He argues, essentially, that certain forms of punishment have less to do with the crime and more to do with affirming the reality of the social bond. It is easy to see how one could begin there, and end with the idea—which I, perhaps incorrectly, associated with Bataille and others—that crime is in a sense necessary and constitutive of the psychic reality of society. Crime is produced by society in order that punishment of it may re-enforce collective consciousness.

Given, then, that Durkheim is foundational, I want very much to better understand the form of his relativism. This is his first book, does he retain the heavy, guiding, organic metaphor? I want to know more about his reading of Marx (it is somewhat remarkable that he mentions him at all, is it the German connection to people like Schmoller?)—how, specifically, does he react to the various increasingly assertive worker’s movements of the 1890s? There is something quite radical about attempting to treat the proletariat and ‘white collar’ workers as, essentially, the same, which is what he does. It also creates the potential for a radical under-evaluation of the claims of the industrial laboring population, and blindness to economic forces more generally.

Flipping through the introduction to De la division du travail social, trying to get a sense of the text, I found a reference to an introductory course from 1888, in which Durkheim sets out the ambitions of his sociology. The course is republished in La science sociale et l’action, which I happen to have on my shelf. So, as my introduction to Durkheim, I read this introductory leçon. I’m glad I did.

Durkheim sets out to show what sociologie, or la science sociale, in fact is. He hopes to set down a series of inter-related questions that will constitute the specificity of this young science. The spirit will not be that of a professor simply explaining to his students a received truth, but rather of teaching mixed with research, where the students collaborate in a collective attempt to understand. The point here must be to contrast French with German universities. There are in fact many places in the text at which one can detect a certain national tension; to which we will return.

Most previous attempts to think scientifically about society have foundered at their very outset by assuming that society is a made thing. Durkheim says that Hobbes and Rousseau both, although the first makes it an individual and the second a collective enterprise, none the less see society as the conscious creation of man. I think one might perhaps argue with this characterization. I think the point here was really to attack a certain kind of utopianism that perhaps still hung, like a faintly bad smell, around French sociology. There is the broadly 19th century view of the Enlightenment (Rousseau) as an agent of Revolution, and Durkheim wants to distance himself from this. Then there are later socialists, like Fourier and Saint-Simon, with whom the science of society might be associated. Comte, after all, himself sprung from Saint-Simonianism.

Durkheim credits the economists with being the first to attempt to treat society scientifically: as a naturally occurring phenomenon that must, therefore, be subject to certain laws. This was a great step forward, but for the political economists, society is an abstraction that is not, itself, an object for scientific study. For economists, there are only individuals—and even then, these individuals, Durkheim says, are themselves in fact abstractions, without any concrete existence.

Durkheim makes his point through an analogy. In the past, ‘society’ was thought to be a machine, like a watch. The various parts and materials had been brought together specially for a purpose (for instance, to secure peace), and were not inherently related to one another except by dint of this bringing-together (the social contract). One might, Durkheim suggests, on the other hand, think of society as an organism. Just like any other naturally occurring phenomenon, then, society has its special laws. One might object that this contrasting analogy is highly politicized. Watches and machines obey natural laws just as much as dogs and other animals; it’s just that in Durkheim’s time no one could take apart a dog and make it again in a different way. The economists at least admit that society is not a made thing, but having taken the watch apart, they are not themselves able to arrive at the idea of society as an organism, having a reality greater than the sum of its parts.

Durkheim brushes aside, here, a perennial philosophical debate: is there such a thing as free-will? He allows that this is an interesting metaphysical question, but insists that it is only an interesting metaphysical question. He speaks of causality rather than determinism. That causality is a basic principle of the world is presented as the single best-established result of scientific investigation. It would perhaps be more honest to say that a firm belief in causality is not so much the result as the premise, and condition of possibility for modern science. Durkheim’s way of thinking about causality and the special laws of the organism remind me strongly of Claude Bernard. Bernard (or perhaps an intervening factor) might well be the source for Durkheim’s brushing-away of the free-will question—just as Bernard rejected the vitalist thesis that would have made it illegitimate to study living things, Durkheim rejects the idealist (spiritualist?) thesis that would say human free-will renders impossible the scientific study of society.

August Comte is the father of sociology. His great contribution was to make just the leap that the political economists failed to make. For him, sociology contained all the other positive sciences, because society itself contained these facts and was therefore more complex than any of them. But Comte, says Durkheim, was unable to distinguish between societies. For him, there was only l’Humanité, radically set apart from the natural world with an internal development all of its own, which, moreover, was always the same. There are three stages of civilization, and all societies go through them in the same way. Thus, in the end, Comte’s sociology reduces, for Durkheim, to a philosophy of history.

Herbert Spencer, who marked the next great step in sociological thinking, in the end succumbs to the same error. He admits that each society is its own individual organism, but then he applies a single rule of evolution to every single society he investigates. His empirical reach is impressive, but in the end he sees the same thing everywhere he looks. He, too, is really only applying a philosophy to society.

Durkheim then turns to something of a panoramic view of contemporary sociology. Alfred Espinas (who plays something of a role in Pierre Rosanvallon’s The demands of liberty) is credited with founding genuinely scientific sociology. That is, he is the first, in fact, to derive rules from empirical observation, rather than apply a philosophical system to selected data. Strong words. It’s good that Espinas gets this position, because without it, the French would look very thin on the sociological ground. Nearly all of the scholars Durkheim singles out in the following pages are German.

An interesting mise en abyme then occurs. Durkheim, discussing the various subdivisions of sociology, and the merit of division in general, says, “une science est, elle aussi, une sorte d’organisme” (101). That is, a science is like a society in that it develops both as a whole and in its constitutive parts by becoming more complex and subdivided.

Durkheim sets out the following non-exhaustive list of the broad fields of application that are, he says, already plainly to be found in sociology. First is social psychology, which on his telling is quite broad, including customs and traditions—we might today say culture. Second is sociology as a science of morals. This is recognized as related to the first, but its specificity is insisted upon. Third is law, which is itself in a sense only an ‘imperious’ application of collective moral sentiments. Lastly, there is economic science. Durkheim says that this is in a sense already close to genuine scientificity, but must first give up its supposed autonomy. I think the same point would be made by saying that Durkheim wants economics to give up its false naturalism and admit that economic behavior is embedded within a complex socio-cultural environment. Durkheim mentions two possible subfields, defined by subject, for sociology that aren’t yet even close to constituting themselves: the army, and diplomacy. I found this striking because the first seems to me a very natural subject for the kind of investigation of collectivity that Durkheim is proposing, while the second seems completely different. What did Durkheim mean by diplomacy?

Each of these subfields, Durkheim says, could be approached in two basic ways. He illustrates this by analogy to a basic division in medical science (also mentioned in Bernard): that of form and function, or morphology and physiology. Durkheim comes down solidly on the side of function. In the organism that is modern society, he says, the actual institutions are generally able to perform various functions, and the function performed by any given institution might change rapidly. It is therefore the functions, rather than the institutions which perform them, that are primary. I have always been made uneasy by what I have understood to be Durkheim’s functionalism, and here it is explained. I am still uneasy. It is possible to speak of the functions of an actual organism, because we are authorized to assume that, qua organism, it has a limited set of non-complex goals: eating, breathing, and so on—which we might themselves reduce, as Claude Bernard does, to sustaining the artificial milieu that the organism itself constitutes. It is to this end that we explain the regulation of various levels of chemicals, or of heat. Is it legitimate to make an analogy to society in this way? (ignoring, for the moment, the problem of delimiting each society, which I suppose needn’t be in principle different from the problem of delimiting different organisms). I do not think that we can, as Spencer does, assume that societies are organisms in the sense that they are born, grow, live, and die. Despite Marx’s attraction, as well, to the image of social metabolism, I do not think that we can say that societies eat and excrete. Perhaps Durkheim elsewhere explains himself differently, and more.

The remainder of the essay is taken up by an overview of the various sorts of students Durkheim feels would benefit from studying his sociology. In the first place, his wants to speak to students of philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline, he says, is already far on the way to dividing itself into two distinct disciplines: psychology and morals. Psychology is turning increasingly toward experimental science—it is Durkheim’s ambition that sociology should constitute a science of morals. A genuinely scientific study of morality is also, he says, the only way to overcome the oft-remarked upon dichotomy between science and morality. We might point out that, in the form of the free-will/determinism conceptual bind, Durkheim has already simply refused to discuss the relation of morals (presumably depended on some conception of human freedom) to science. I wonder if there isn’t a little slight of hand here. At any rate, this division of philosophy into psychology and morals is described as the division of labor in studying facts about individual consciousness and “la conscience de la société,” which is a naturally sociological object of study.

Durkheim next suggests that students of history would benefit greatly from the study of sociology. I think it is fair to say that the battle for disciplinary supremacy within the French academy between historians and sociologists begins here, later t be carried on between the various iterations of the Annales school and Durkheim’s inheritors.

With less imperialist intent, Durkheim also argues that law students should come out of their hermeneutic bubbles and allow sociology to speak to them of the function of law in society, and in particular of the nature of the various major juridical institutions (the family, the state).

Last but not least, sociology has a general pedagogical mission. Here is expressed in a bald form what I take to be Durkheim’s basic worldview and project. I quote at length:

Nous vivons dans un pays qui ne reconnaît d’autre maître que l’opinion. Pour que ce maître ne devienne pas un despote inintelligent, il est nécessaire de l’éclairer, et comment, sinon par la science? Sous l’influence de causes qu’il serait trop long d’analyser ici, l’esprit de collectivité s’est affaibli chez nous. Chacun de nous a de son moi un sentiment tellement exorbitant qu’il n’aperçoit plus les limites qui l’enserrent de toutes parts. Se faisant illusion sur sa propre puissance, il aspire à se suffire à soi-même. C’est pourquoi nous mettons tout notre mérite à nous distinguer le plus possible les uns des autres, et à suivre chacun notre mouvement propre. Il faut réagir et de toutes nos forces contre cette tendance dispersive. Il faut que notre société reprenne conscience de son unité organique; que l’individu sente cette masse sociale qui l’enveloppe et le pénètre, qu’il la sente toujours présente et agissante, et que ce sentiment règle toujours sa conduite; car ce n’est pas assez qu’il ne s’en inspire que de temps en temps dans des circonstances particulièrement critiques (109).

Or, much more succinctly, Durkheim wants to teach the over-inflated modern self that, “il n’est pas un empire au sein d’un autre empire, mais l’organe d’un organisme, et lui montrera tout ce qu’il y a de beau à s’acquitter consciencieusement de son rôle d’organe” (110).

As by temperament a liberal-reformist, I can only approve of Durkheim’s general project. Yet his language makes my collar feel a little tight. The ‘professor’ in Conrad’s Secret Agent would often feel, quite concretely, the massive weight of the people around him, their numbers and the power the numbers gave them over him. This isn’t so structured an appreciation of the social bond as Durkheim wants, but it seems, somehow, a more plausible response to modern society than actively appreciating and taking joy in one's role as a functioning organ within a larger social organism.