The Fatal Flaws of Sociology's Origin
How Émile Durkheim's fragility lead to post-modernism and commercialized magic
I experienced psychosis as the animation of the world as potent with significance and agency, guiding me and others about in formerly subliminal ways. I rejected the pharmacological and contemporary psychiatric reduction of this experience to brain chemistry. After this, my natural recourse may still have been to using anthropological and sociological frameworks to understood my experience.
I rejected these too. First by ignorance, then by well-advised incredulity, and now by studied criticism. On this account of my early intransigence to believing nearly any authority on psychosis, I spent years longer in psychic isolation than I may have otherwise.
Let’s see if the fruits of that gestation in my own liminal space were worth the expense—first by taking account of what I didn’t get myself into.
Anthropology and Sociology
Anthropology, by drawing largely on techniques long in use in classical studies, developed out of philology and archaeology. The West had always demonstrated its strong desire to know itself by a durable interest in Greece and Rome. The Cambridge Ritualists—most prominently Jane Harrison—moved classical studies toward appreciation of the lived patterns of life, away from an abstract exercise in interpretations of myth and symbols by etymology.
By transferring these methods of studying ancient civilization to the modern frontier, anthropology made itself useful as a tool for colonial expansion and settlement. Understanding the new neighbours naturally necessitated theories of magic. In turn, anthropological study of tribes provided a great deal of material not only great deal of artistic and psychoanalytic innovation, but also for appreciating many (supposedly) universal aspects of human psychology and social organization.
Sociology, then, I’ll consider as a more reflexive vein of anthropology. If I may assume that you, reader, consider yourself a member of modern civilization (like it or not), anthropology was for studying an unscientific them and sociology was for studying an industrial and modern us. Consider, then, both anthropology and sociology as the science corresponding to the literary art of Melville and Conrad.
According to Bjørn Thomassen, if Émile Durkheim hadn’t been such a petty dictator over the field he founded, sociology may have had from its outset a theory of magic founded on rites of passage. This is the name given of the 1909 book by Arnold van Gennep, which isolated and examined the ubiquitous ritual mechanic of the metamorphosis of individuals and groups by their crossing over into transitional, liminal spaces.
Instead, Durkheim’s own theory of magic and religion became the norm. On the intuition that you love good smack-down as much as I do, let’s read Thomassen on how Van Gennep publicly reviewed Durkheim’s in 1913 (I’ve bolded the highlights).
Van Gennep states quite bluntly that Durkheim demonstrates a complete lack of critical stance towards the sources, which were collected by traders, police agents and priests, and that he naively accepts their veracity. Durkheim over-states the theoretical potential of single facts and interprets freely from dubious data… Van Gennep, better than anyone else [being more familiar with the Australian literature than Durkheim], was in a position to spot Durkheim’s lack of expertise in ethnography, and Durkheim’s tendency to press ethnography into service of a prefabricated theoretical scheme. Durkheim’s professed insistence upon using ‘facts’ and ‘observable social phenomena’ for theory building was simply not followed up in his own work; Van Gennep pointed this out more clearly than anyone else, and he did so without the privilege of hindsight.
Durkheim, says Van Gennep, claims to have established the ‘foundations of society’ from a single religious institution (totemism), without realising that this was just one very specific type of classification, peculiar to this not-so-simple society. The Australian Aborigines simply cannot be posited as a ‘first’ or ‘elementary’ building block upon which one can erect an entire edifice; these are fantasies of a desk-scholar. The Aborigines (here the Arunta) have complex matrimonial rules and complex totemic beliefs and practices. Even if one wants to defend an evolutionist perspective, these people simply cannot be taken to represent some kind of ursprung [beginning origin from which other things were extracted]. The foundation of Durkheim’s entire argument is thus thoroughly unsound.
Van Gennep also denudes Durkheim by returning to one of the points he raised in 1906 in Mythes et Légendes [by Van Gennep]: when Durkheim lists the various constitutive parts of a religious system (such as the variety of rites), instead of actually understanding them or their ‘function’, he uses them to construct, again and again, a speculative theory about their ‘origins.’ Furthermore, in his insistence to throw in all stakes on the collective level, Durkheim completely and categorically neglects the action of single, existing individuals in the formation of institutions and beliefs. In doing so, the very process and production that lies behind myth-telling and ritual acting is annulled and hidden away. Even in the most ‘primitive’ societies, van Gennep insists, individuals do act. It was this process formation that van Gennep had in fact tried to discuss in Mythes et Légendes – a book that, according to Van Gennep, Durkheim neglected [conscientiously].
It is not simply that the data is wrong; it is not the flawed methodology; it is not even the circular, redundant theoretical style that is at issue: the problem, says Van Gennep, is that Durkheim lacks a [“sense of life”]. Durkheim’s project did not even belong to the life sciences. It was lifeless and futile at best, theoretically misleading and politically dangerous at worst. The conclusion is that Durkheim, in his eagerness to explain religion, has replaced it with his own prefabricated ‘system’, his own inherently impossible sociological imperative. And it is this entire enterprise that Van Gennep declares useless and void.
For this, Van Gennep was never granted an academic position in France for the rest of his life. And Durkheim’s theory—which Van Gennep said was too abstract, was later more successfully critiqued by Claude Levi-Strauss. Durkheim was backward, said Levi-Strauss, in trying to figure out how symbols came from society. Levi-Strauss inverted Durkheim, then, by positing that society came from symbols, and by interpreting those symbols via semiotics birthed structuralism!
And Van Gennep had complained about the abstractions of Durkheim!?
Everyone’s a Critic when Everything’s an Abstraction
My long-held complaint has been that modern critical theory, after supplanting the New Critics with structuralists (followed by post-structuralists, post-modernists, etc.), has retroactively mischaracterized New Criticism as being as theoretical as itself. But literary criticism was not theoretical in its approach to art or culture or “texts.” New Criticism—the standard until about the ‘60s—was immensely practical and hands on. It was theoretical only in how to teach criticism, in discovering which practical techniques will best give students discernment and taste in the course of their degrees. Arts and culture are real, discrete, individual and tangible things—not material to be shoe-horned into abstraction for handling as common substance.
Critical theory, in contrast, is theoretical in how it even understands culture and art. Theory treats art and culture as a symbolic substance—specifically one amenable to information theory. To anthropology from which theory is drawn, culture is a substance suffusing objects and nature which bound small tribes and families together on the small scale. To such sociology, culture a constantly flowing substance of mediated symbols, this time lubricating and pneumatically driving the mechanisms of modern societies on the larger scale.
First philology and linguistics, then semiotics and information theory, provided the intellectual backbone for these, reifying human thought into a common, relativistic paste of abstractions. Moreover, animated by mechanized arithmetic, it is these very abstractions, into which we are, paradoxically, materially spliced by cybernetic principles.
One improvement critical theory brought over the pedagogical techniques of the New Critics was that students could start pumping out good criticism in their first year. No need waste months and years boring students with lessons on how how to read or appreciate the text—just teach them enough theory to reduce the text’s content into symbols, give them an ideological frame to contextualize those symbols, and see what of Procrustes’ victim remains and what of him gets lopped off!
Van Gennep’s Revenge
So at this point, you’re may think I’m about to say, “thank god for Van Gennep! He really paid attention to the particulars, to the individual. We gotta get that guy back into the fold, and throw out the damn abstractions. Bring it all back to ritual, baby!”
Wish it were that simple.
First of all, Van Gennep has already had his revenge in the domains of anthropology and sociology. Victor Turner resuscitated Van Gennep in time for the Summer of Love, analyzing hippies and Bob Dylan as “liminal” beings who exist in the “interstices” or “gaps” of culture. Since then, liminality has had staying power in both academia and pop-culture, perhaps most recently in the spooky backrooms aesthetic of endlessly drab interior decorating.
And second of all, two-decades before his rebirth in the respectable humanities, Van Gennep’s name appears in a very important footnote early in the beginning of a very influential book. A book which will, in fact, take its very shape by the three parts of Van Gennep’s division of passage rites into a) separation from the group, b) transition in liminality, and c) reintegration into society in a new form. A book which is, itself, designed to be a rite of passage for whomever reads it. A book which spawned countless such mediated rites of passage since its publication.
Yeah. Arnold van Gennep got his, alright.
Well actually, Van Gennep himself got a single, solitary footnote—but his life’s work stepped across every imaginable threshold with the book he is footnoted in.
I’m very sorry to report that that book is The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.
We’ll take a closer look at the form of all these theories of magic, their role in metamorphosis, their own abstract complementarity with developmental psychology, and the specific correctives from McLuhan which spared me from this whole damned mess in upcoming posts, like this one.