Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard 9781442680043

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Modernity and the Problem of the Social
Chapter 2: Durkheim’s Manifesto
Chapter 3: Mills’s Promise
Chapter 4: Baudrillard’s Silence
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

SOCIOLOGY AND MASS CULTURE: DURKHEIM, MILLS, AND BAUDRILLARD

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Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard

PATRICIA CORMACK

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2002 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3528-0

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Cormack, Patricia, 1963Sociology and mass culture : Durkheim, Mills and Baudrillard Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3528-0 1. Sociology - Philosophy. 2. Mass society. 3. Durkheim, Emile, 1858-1917. 4. Mills, C. Wright (Charles Wright), 1916-1962. 5. Baudrillard, Jean I. Title. HM447.C67 2001

30l'.0l

C2001-902100-3

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

This book is lovingly dedicated to my husband Robert.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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Chapter 1: Modernity and the Problem of the Social Chapter 2: Durkheim's Manifesto Chapter 3: Mills's Promise

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Chapter 4: Baudrillard's Silence Conclusion Notes

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References 131 Index

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Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the help and support of many people. Thank you to Jinnean Barnard, Alan Blum, Marjorie Cormack and Henry Cormack, Jim Cosgrave, Don Forgay, Kieran Keohane, Carmen Kuhling, Janice Newson, Rod Michalko, Ray Morris, Penni Stewart, Tanya Titchkosky, Matthew Trachman, and Gate Sandilands. My thanks also to Virgil Duff, Anne Laughlin, Siobhan McMenemy, Chris Bucci, and Aviva Troemel at University of Toronto Press for their professional and creative dedication to the production of this book and to the publication of scholarly books in Canada. Chapter 2 is a revised and expanded version of 'The Paradox of Durkheim's Manifesto: Reconsidering The Rules of Sociological Method,' published in Theory and Society 25 (1996):85-104.

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SOCIOLOGY AND MASS CULTURE: DURKHEIM, MILLS, AND BAUDRILLARD

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Introduction

In all social life, in fact, science rests upon opinion. It is undoubtedly true that this opinion can be taken as the object of a study and a science made of it; this is what sociology principally consists in. But the science of opinion does not make opinions; it can only observe them and make them more conscious of themselves. Durkheim (1915:438)

... from the day when the revolutionary tempest had passed, the notion of sociology (la science sociale) was formed as if by magic. Durkheim (1973a:6)

It is a common, if not trite, observation that sociology and the social sciences in general are inextricably bound to the emergence of the modern era. The rise of sociology is typically accounted for both in terms of its apparent capacity to explain the radical social changes characterizing modernity (such as capitalism, industrialization, urban expansion, mass democracy, and cultural diversity) and in terms of its participation in the modern intellectual Zeitgeist (including Enlightenment humanism, empiricism and positivism, Protestant rationalism, and possessive individualism). But as Emile Durkheim emphasizes, while la science sociale comes into being with the abruptness of the new conditions it is meant to explain, it is also 'formed as if by magic.' By invoking a magical belief system to account for the rise of a self-

4 Sociology and Mass Culture described science, Durkheim flags the difficulty of isolating its origin in a wholly scientific way. As he explains, part of what makes this task so daunting is that the new social scientific sensibility is intimately intertwined with nascent mass society, that is, the mass culture and mass public opinion that sociology studies. The new, relatively inclusive, and dynamic culture of post-Revolutionary France authorizes the reflexive study of itself, or making opinions 'more conscious of themselves.' Durkheim implies here that if sociology is to remain attuned to its own practices, it must constantly examine its relationship to the mass society that is both its object of interest, its audience, and its condition. What, then, is the relation between the rise of sociological thought and mass society? Michel Foucault argues that the study of 'man' itself is a uniquely modern interest (1970:xxiii). As such, the social sciences are more than responses to, products of, and explanations for modernity. They also help to shape modernity's collective myths by providing a whole new cosmology of ideas and images from which all of us appropriate items to explain our everyday experiences. These highly complementary ways of thinking, and their concomitant academic disciplines, include images of humankind premised on the idea of the nation, the economy, biological evolution, the psyche, and the social - and they work together to establish a framework from which everyday actors take decisions and generate accounts of their experiences. It is not surprising, then, that to the extent that the social sciences have expanded and entrenched themselves, ordinary actors and mass media have come to make use of their imagery. The most cursory inspection of contemporary news, for example, finds accounts of human experiences couched in terms of conflicting nations and nationalities, measurements of national wealth and employment, the pathological or dysfunctional mind, evolutionary adaptive behaviour, or most broadly, in terms of a society progressing or regressing, ordered or disordered. These explanations and images of human action put aside older explanatory systems that depend on notions like fate, God's will, or an ordered and integrated cosmos in which our own experiences are imbedded. So while sociology is undoubtedly an attempt to explain how

Introduction

5

collectives function (or fail to function), cohere (or fail to cohere), and change (or remain static), is it also a new, organizing collective self-representation within modernity. I will argue here that 'society' is one central organizing component of the modern imaginary and that sociology is the discipline that most directly has the task of studying this concept as it functions in western culture (and diffuses beyond the west). My general argument is that the social is, in Durkheimian language, a modern 'collective representation' (i.e., a discursive artefact) that becomes increasingly over time also a 'social fact' (i.e., a moral ground on which ordinary life is sustained and explained).1 This means that sociological thought, to understand modernity, must address the functioning of social imagery as it moves within common usage. Accordingly, I will consider sociology as a generally discursive mode, and will ask how its own persuasive devices work to influence common sense and opinion as they function within modernity. I will also consider how the rhetorical and representational issues characterizing modern literature and culture appear and are taken up in sociological writing. Simply put, I suggest that selfreflection for sociology becomes increasingly a matter of studying the wider culture sociology helps constitute and of facing the problematic question of representing the 'social' in a culturally relevant way within the rhetorical and literary conventions of its time. This book offers its reader the opportunity to examine the work of three writers - Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, and Jean Baudrillard - who have understood their project to be the exploration of sociology's relationship to its audience and the influence of modern culture on sociology. Their central texts will be examined for their implicit formulations of mass culture, sociology's audience, and sociology's epistemological and methodological grounds. This book does not offer its reader a traditional history of sociology, through which sociology would be understood as a social scientific discipline that unfolds by way of its own internal forces, on either Karl Popper's model of progress (1959) or Thomas Kuhn's model of paradigm shifts (1970). Neither is it a sociology of knowledge account, by which sociological thought

6 Sociology and Mass Culture would be considered a product and a reflection of its social conditions. Nor is it an exhaustive and unbroken story of sociological thought as it proceeds through modernity. It is, instead, a discussion of the dialectical interaction of sociological thought with modern culture, that is, a kind of self-conscious and textually oriented ethnography that holds sociology and mass culture at the centre of its interest. While this approach is somewhat akin to Foucault's 'archaeological' study of the episteme of the human sciences and the discursive conditions under which they functioned (1970), it puts more stress on popular imagery and declines to aspire to the scale of Foucault's discussion. In the following chapters, I will characterize Durkheim's book Rules of Sociological Method as a kind of hopeful sociological manifesto, a literary style in its heyday near the turn of the twentieth century, that reflects a general optimism about the relationship between speech, reason, and social change. Durkheim's manifesto seeks to insert the discursive artefact or idea of the 'social' into modern culture as a way of making apparent that collectives constitute and modify themselves through the use of symbols. According to Durkheim, the social is a discursive turn that replaces fading religious and metaphysical explanations of the human experience and that allows modern culture to become aware of itself as self-generating and dynamic. For Durkheim, the mechanism of change and generation is the collective's capacity to interpret its own symbolic utterances - that is, to understand its own beliefs, knowledge, and values as collectively generated and hence open to evaluation. The second central text under consideration, C. Wright Mills's book The Sociological Imagination, similarly tries to locate sociological utterances in their cultural context, making them a type of relevant and accessible storytelling that lends meaning to the apparently incomprehensible day-to-day experience of the American 'every person.' Mills argues that the best sociological narratives are very close in form and content to popular narratives found in journalistic and fictional writing, and he attempts by this alignment to rescue ordinary life from the levelling influences of mass consumption and production. Mills claims that sociology drives a wedge between the promise of popular utterances and the nihilism of mass culture.

Introduction 7 Finally, Jean Baudrillard places sociological utterances entirely inside the decadence and hopelessness of mass culture. Baudrillard locates no gap between the sociological and the mass and can only demonstrate the cultural destructiveness of both phenomena and their collusive interdependence. In conclusion, we will reflect on how sociology can resist becoming the manifestation of the weakest version of mass society and remain faithful to the Durkheimian and Millsian vision of a culturally relevant and reflexive practice by exploring opportunities for resistance to mass culture as they appear on the cultural horizon. The key to this resistance is suggested in Baudrillard's formulation of mass culture. The 'Social' as Modern Totem and Trope To begin considering the social as a part of the modern collective imaginary, I suggest that we think of the social as both modernity's 'totem' and 'trope,' emphasizing equally its artefactual and figurative qualities. The metaphor of the totem is borrowed from nineteenth-century social science, which privileged the (American, African, Australian) tribal totem as a conceptual model of collective representation. In the simplest of terms, the aboriginal totem is a relational cosmology of sacred animals (or sometimes other natural elements) in which the human moral order is represented, comprehended, and reinforced. Each clan names itself after a particular totemic animal that both protects the clan and sets out its prohibitions, taboos, and sacred practices. The totem embodies the morphemic differentiation through which social order is articulated and reinforced. One reason for the classical social scientific fascination with the tribal totem is, I suggest, that it was a parsimonious, apparently complete, and concrete externalization and deification of the collective imaginary, seemingly standing ready for anthropological inspection. Sigmund Freud's 1913 book Totem and Taboo, for example, took the totem as a representation of the most basic organization of the human psyche, and hence, by analogy Freud argued that it could be used to study the 'primitive' mind of the neurotic: 'A comparison between the psychology of primitive peoples, as it is taught by social anthropology, and the psychology of neurotics, as it has been

8

Sociology and Mass Culture

revealed by psycho-analysis, will be bound to show numerous points of agreement and will throw new light upon familiar facts in both sciences' (1950:1). Durkheim's 1915 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life lent a similar interpretation to the totem, with the exception that for Durkheim it represented the oldest and simplest form of religious thought and the most rudimentary structure of the collective human imagination, rather than the individual psyche. As he put it, by studying the totem one is 'catching at their very birth ... ideas which, while being of religious origin, still remain at the foundation of the human intelligence' (1915:20). The totem provided a point of comparison between traditional and modern social forms and supported Durkheim's foundational claim that all human collectives express, function, and perpetuate themselves by way of their sacred images. Putting aside the question of the politics of nineteenth-century anthropological inquiry and the accuracy of its constructions of the Aboriginal 'other,' I suggest that the idea of totem provides a useful tool for this discussion. Treating contemporary and nineteenth-century western cultural representations as totems means treating them as emotionally compelling images that the members of the collective often take for granted, but that nevertheless provide the imaginary foundation for the functioning of everyday life. As cultural artefact, the social is like the totem which stands available for social scientific investigation and is generated by the beliefs of the group. Nevertheless, this cultural imaginary should not be considered a secondary reflection or epiphenomenon of a social 'reality' that would be the ultimate object of sociological interest: it does not refract, distract, or distort a referent. Rather the social imaginary is, as Cornelius Castoriadis puts it, 'more real than the "real"' (1984:24). There are, nevertheless, limits to this conceptual language. They lie in its somewhat static, structuralist, and synchronic nature, that is, the very thing that makes the totem so efficacious and attractive for the social theorist also tends to underplay the dynamic and open quality of cultural practices. Here the concept of 'trope' nicely complements the totem. A trope is a figurative turn

Introduction

9

in language, a disruption of the external order of language by the speaker who uses it. Hayden White employs the idea of troping in his discussion of the rhetorical nature of academic historiography and says that 'tropes generate figures of speech or thought by their variation from what is "normally" expected ...' (1978:2). Michel de Certeau uses the concept of trope to study the resistance to capitalistic and mass culture made by ordinary people in everyday practice. For him, tropes 'inscribe in ordinary language the ruses, displacement, ellipses, etc. that scientific reason has eliminated from operational discourses in order to constitute "proper" meanings' (1984:24). Clearly, I am not supporting this antipathetic dichotomy between sociology (as oppressive scientific discourse) and popular thought. In fact, I will argue that the turning, the ruses, and the play of social images do not betray a struggle between a totemic moral order and the subversive troping of everyday actors, or between scientist and ordinary speaker, but instead illustrate the mutual influence between them. The idea of trope highlights the potentially self-conscious quality of any cultural image, implying that the action of turning may be noted and diachronically studied by the very culture that produces its movement. It also reminds us that collective representations are always pliant, that is, they inevitably change over time by the very fact that they constitute the language of everyday life and are subject to constant use, wear, and novel employment. Hence, in the following discussion the troping of the social image will be seen to involve figures of metaphor, hyperbole, allegory, and irony as it functions with and within literary and rhetorical forms particular to modern culture (even empirical social scientific measures like the statistic will be inspected for the troping they invite). In simple terms, while trope emphasizes the selfreflective and interpretative aspect of modern culture, totem emphasizes the moral and concrete quality of collective representations. It is important that any cultural inquiry keep these two theoretical objects simultaneously in play so as to avoid both overly deterministic and overly voluntaristic discussions. We will find that Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard take the culture they are studying to be the site of both totemic representations and

10 Sociology and Mass Culture creative tropes. Their attempts to understand and describe their own time and place, and the relevance of sociological speech within their time and place, lead them to engage with the totems and tropes typical of their cultural milieu. Consequently, we will find that Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard become manifesto writer, storyteller, and nihilist, respectively. Sociology, Common Sense, Mass Culture, and Popular Culture In a short essay entitled 'The Influence of Sociological Ideas on American Culture' (1990), Dennis H. Wrong notes that while sociology has defensively presented itself as a stalwart science in the face of challenges to its authority made from academic corners, it has typically held itself up to the broader public as an opposition and challenge to common sense and received opinion. Wrong argues that the problem with this position is that it operates from the fallacious assumption that its audience is pre- or non-sociological. Most negligent in contemporary literature are introductory texts that 'see themselves as addressing an allegedly typical American male frozen in the attitudinal and ideological postures of the late 1930s or early 1940s' (1990:21), a reader who is fiercelyjingoistic, nostalgic for small-town life, sexist, homophobic, and generally lacking in cosmopolitan scope. Another more recent development, Wrong suggests, is the sociology of knowledge self-account which typically reduces sociology to little else than a reflection of its own time. After challenging both of these extremes, and noting superficial sociological influences on the American vernacular, including shops in New York City named 'Charisma' and 'Gemeinschaft,' Wrong observes three general popular uses of sociological themes: (1) 'the loss of community and the wish to recover it'; (2) the conviction that'... society made us, so we should not be blamed'; and (3) 'the social construction of reality, or we made society and can remake it into something different' (1990:25). What is most important for our purposes is Wrong's observation that the apparent contradiction between the determinism of statement (2) and the voluntarism of statement (3) does not undermine them, but allows for the selective and

Introduction

11

somewhat arbitrary use of these explanations in ordinary life. It seems, therefore, that in its popular use sociological explanation is a belief system free from the logical rigours of science (whether contemporary academic sociologists like it or not). Moreover, while sociology does not challenge a common-sense thinker who is innocent of sociological reasoning, sociology does nevertheless address itself to common sense - a common sense that makes use of sociological concepts and arguments. But because the popular use of sociological imagery does not produce a coherent, logical, and consistent picture, it does not lend itself easily to direct investigation. Even a sample of titles from the sociology section of a popular or academic book store collects a confusing array of genres including biography, autobiography, self-help, social history, and even novels and medical guides. Perhaps this explains Wrong's observation that there are few sociological investigations of the influence of sociological thought on American values and beliefs, yet a plethora of studies consider the influence of American culture on sociological thought. Although it has become fashionable in recent years to treat all claims to authoritative knowledge, including sociological claims, as rhetorical practices, typically these account for the discursive rhetorical achievements of texts in isolation from an account of issues of mass and popular culture.2 Both mass and popular culture will be key concepts in the following discussion. Indeed, it is the tension between these two facets of modern culture that engage our three sociological thinkers. The term 'mass' typically connotes cultural levelling, conformity, and ever-expanding consumerism. It has its material roots in the large-scale, industrial production of inexpensive, homogeneous goods. The ideal-typical mass consumer is unrefined in taste and indiscriminating, exercising cultural agency only to the limited extent of choosing to buy one product, service, or lifestyle over another (MacDonald, 1957:59). In short, mass culture signifies one of the most degraded qualities of modernity, that is, a lack of cultural resistance and awareness. On the other hand, the term 'popular,' while sometimes coterminous and interchangeable with 'mass,' has a resonance that suggests its opposite. For theorists like

12 Sociology and Mass Culture John Fiske (1989) and de Certeau (1984) the popular is the site of agency in which local and particular consumption or use of mass cultural products and themes allow their meaning to be appropriated to local needs. This means that the popular offers resistance to the hegemony of mass cultural production. Studies of popular culture can, for example, show how mass cultural artefacts are taken up (or read) by various types of audiences and that the social location of the audience members (e.g., their race, class, or gender) give shape to the meaning of what they encounter. Crudely put, the tension between 'mass' and 'popular' demonstrates the conflict between understanding collective cultural practices as totalitarian and understanding them as potentially liberationist. It is also central to my argument that the distance between everyday cultural practices and those employed by sociologists is not large. In fact, they mutually influence each other. Sociology inserts and legitimizes certain ways of framing and reporting on everyday experiences, while everyday actors (qua consumers, readers, or citizens) perpetuate or resist these versions of reality. It is this play between sociological representations and the totems and tropes located in the broader culture that allows us to seek the best mode of self-reflection for the sociological project. For this reason, popular/mass cultural phenomena will be inspected as totems and tropes of the modern imaginary. These phenomena include manifestos, advertisements, magazine articles, novels, plays, autobiographies, historiographies, television programs, self-help literatures, opinion polls, and statistical representations. These popular/mass practices will be understood as versions of making sense of ordinary life. Each type of practice formulates change, order, and communal values in slightly different ways, and together they generate the grounds on which meanings compete for predominance. But there is more to this consideration of popular and mass cultural life. I will also explore how sociological speech makes use of these types of utterances as the grounds for its own truth claims and how sociology can locate its own cultural relevance by reflecting on this usage. Key to understanding its own relevance is the close consideration of how sociology implicitly formulates its audience and its own mode of influence by way of the rhetorical and literary modes it employs.

Chapter One

Modernity and the Problem of the Social

Distinguishing the Social from the Political This discussion rests on the assumption that not just sociology, but 'society' itself arises from modernity. Or put another way, only with the modern era does the notion of society become essential to the explanation of the human experience. Hannah Arendt suggests that it is an anachronistic error and sloppy thinking of the worst sort to imagine that premoderns understood themselves through the notion of 'society' (1958). She contends, for example, that a long tradition of poorly translating ancient texts has led us to believe that the ancient Greeks employed the word 'society' in its modern sense. The convention of rendering Aristotle's zoon politikon as animal socialis allows us to assume that the Greeks considered the general human condition to be important to the meaning of human existence (1958:23). Arendt explains that for the Greeks the mere fact that humans live collectively could never be an essential interest because animals also depend on the group, and therefore, this does not designate a particularly human, and hence significant, quality. The closest generalized term that could be rendered as 'the social' would stand for the natural, unselfconscious qualities that humans share with animals, distinguished from the uniquely human capacity of political action (i.e., public speech and influence). The public or political realm, as the privileged space of human culture and invention, was clearly set apart from the natural or social realm of the family where the animalis-

14 Sociology and Mass Culture tic necessities of human life were cared for. Holding these two realms apart was necessary to the proper working of the political sphere, a discursive space in which each citizen offered his opinion (doxd)as the common currency of public life. Arendt defines doxa as 'the formulation in speech of what appears to me' (Arendt, 1990:80). Such an utterance of 'what appears' linked all citizens and all types of discussion in the enactment of democratic discourse and was the prerequisite for recognition in the community. Failing to contribute one's opinion would, in effect, render oneself private, which was, for the Greeks, to make oneself less than fully human (as the private was the semi-human realm of women, children, and slaves). It was impossible to be human and to fail to have an opinion; it was also impossible for an opinion to be of no value. Each citizen had the obligation and privilege of holding and showing his opinion and offering it into the welter of competitive, face-to-face agonal discussion. Taking her cue from the Greeks, Arendt uses the term 'society' to refer to both the loss and befuddlement that she sees arising with modernity, first indicated in the conceptual language of political economy and the rise of the nation-state. The Greeks, she argues, would find the idea of a 'political economy' both anathema and oxymoronic as the political (polis) and the economic (oikos or household) signify the very distinction between the human and the bestial. To bring them together conceptually indicates modernity's uniqueness in that the social begins to muddy the sacred sphere of public life by allowing the 'subjective' private world to seep into the 'objective' world. To speak of a 'society' is for Arendt to speak of a culture in which public life and opinion are infected with the subjective (1958:57-8) and where the public becomes increasingly a matter of administration and 'housekeeping' (the economics of the household) (1958:60). Parallel to this collapse of the agonistic public realm (and its silent partner, the private household) is the advent of the social sciences, reflecting and encouraging the 'social' culture they measure. For Arendt the statistical measurement of ourselves is a telling historical development, not because the social sciences arbitrarily and externally imposed a statistical measurement on

Modernity and the Problem of the Social 15 modern life, but because 'society' is a way of living that is profoundly statistical. The social sciences give only secondary expression to the new modern world of mass 'behaviour,' an irrational and sentimental inclination that has escaped from its properly private domain and which levels opinion into the monolithic conformism of the atomistic and lonely individual within mass society (1958:46). As Arendt puts it: 'Statistical uniformity is by no means a harmless scientific ideal; it is the no longer secret political ideal of a society which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence' (1958:43). This 'behaviour' replaces the strong public 'action' of the agora and the deliberate, rational public actor who gains respect through the prowess of his words. While Arendt's position is evidently anti-modern in the extreme, and her privileging of the Greek exclusionary democracy somewhat unpalatable, commentators concur that the 'social' arises from modernity and slowly becomes more and more distinct over time. Moreover, as Arendt aptly points out, the 'social' is not just a new idea, but a new way of life. Her discussion may remind us that the question of social order, could for Greek thinkers, ultimately be only a political rather than sociological one. So, while Plato's dialogues in The Republic are undoubtedly one example of the attempt to reflect on the conditions of the good and just social order, his answers are framed in terms of political concerns and legislative policies. The early modern thinkers offered 'civil society' as the first conceptual attempt to separate the social realm from 'political society.' But, as Alan Swingewood notes, the French Enlightenment thinkers assumed a free, rational, and perfectible individual actor and hence 'Diderot's project, the Encyclopaedia contains no entry for society' (1984:18). Only Rousseau stands apart from his French contemporaries with his famous social contract theory of collective life. Along with Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau heuristically posits a presocial state of nature in which individuals employ their reason to recognize the value of organized collective life and then contract into it. Yet, as Durkheim would later point out, the social contract theorists still deny one obvious reality, that is, that for a

16 Sociology and Mass Culture contract to be made at all, some level of agreement must already have taken place (1982:142). Like Arendt, the contract theorists would like to resist the movement towards conceding distinct and ontological primacy to the social. This concession is just what nineteenth-century sociologists set out to grant, challenging the romantic Enlightenment construction of the sovereign individual, but at the same time concerning themselves with the integration of the individual with the group. Simply put, the notion of society emerges when the modern crisis of social order arises, that is, when the collective no longer holds so much sway as to be taken for granted and put beyond unreflexive representation, inspection, and question. With the humanist realization that we create ourselves and our world, any particular social order becomes open to debate because for the modern mind the order of things could just as well be otherwise, and the status quo holds no divine or necessary status. Modern culture, therefore, begins to know itself by way of a totem of a wholly different kind, that is, an ironic and self-conscious totem of the 'social' that simultaneously disrupts and accommodates the social order it represents. Bruce Mazlish puts it like this: 'Society, itself, the core concept of sociology, was a relatively new notion. It marked an awareness of the individual as intrinsically separate from the group — an awareness and self-consciousness that has come to be identified with the term "individualism." Conceptually, the sociologists tried to construct the idea of society in an almost Crusoe-like way, reintegrating the individual into a group for whose "making" he is also responsible, thus taking society not just as a "given" but as a human creation' (1989:8). For some commentators classical sociology, whether of the political left or right, is an inherently conservative response to the disorder of post-Revolutionary France. Leon Bramson suggests that at this historical juncture the group is made morally and logically prior to the individual as a check on the individualist ideology of the time and as a response to the fear that the isolated individual would become susceptible to the pull of the masses. He notes that the idea of a 'mass' also arises with the European political struggles that immediately precede the Revolution, and

Modernity and the Problem of the Social

17

that after the Revolution the mass becomes an important element of political rhetoric (1961:27). In Bramson's view the idea of the mass, in sociology, is not a rejection of Enlightenment romanticism, but a product of it. Early sociology is 'a celebration of the free individual on the one hand, and of the organic local, national or folk community on the other' (1961:30). This position seems to be borne out in the dichotomous language of nineteenthcentury sociology which conceptually suggests a radical rupture and contrast between traditional collectives and modern mass society: Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (Tonnies), mechanical solidarity/organic solidarity (Durkheim), feudal mode of production / capitalist mode of production (Marx), traditional association / rational-legal association (Weber). Although these paired concepts give the impression of a serious interest in the past, they stand only to establish a pivot for comparison with the real object of interest - modern social life, variously formulated. Max Scheler gives perhaps the starkest account of sociology's object and its cultural significance: '"Society" is not the inclusive concept, designating all the "communities" which are united by blood, traditions, and history. On the contrary, it is only the remnant, the rubbish left by the inner decomposition of communities. Whenever the unity of communal life can no longer prevail, whenever it becomes unable to assimilate the individuals and develop them into its living organs, we get a "society" - a unity based on mere contractual agreement [read as a market contract rather than a Rousseauian social contract]. When the "contract" and its validity ceases to exist, the result is the completely unorganized "mass," unified by nothing more than momentary sensory stimuli and mutual contagion' (emphasis in original, cited in Frisby and Sayer, 1986:30). Whether society is wholly equivalent to mass society, and whether mass society is really the biblical fall that Scheler makes it out to be, is open to debate. It is, nevertheless, true that sociological discourse takes as one of its central concerns the idea of the mass partly because the broader culture makes this concept so important. Or as Arendt might have it, sociology studies a culture that imagines itself a 'society' and as a 'mass.' The representations of

18 Sociology and Mass Culture this mass are located in various sociological images of the urban crowd, the violent mob, proletarian collective action, mass commodity production, mass opinion, consumer culture, and so on. Common to these images - even the Marxian preradical proletarian - is an irrational, and what Arendt would call "subjective" collective orientation. 'Mass* Influence in Attic Greece

To the extent that sociology necessarily functions within and seeks to influence a mass culture, it has to face and formulate the nature of mass opinion and mass persuasion. As we have seen, the Attic Greeks made the use of opinion and the power to persuade the hallmark of all that was uniquely human. Even in their limited and relatively homogeneous democracy, competition between public speakers in the agora produced differing standards of influence and the possibility of the manipulation of 'mass' sentiment. A short discussion of their struggles over public speech will help to foreshadow the issues that are still at the heart of modern concerns. While the Greeks could all agree that opinion was an inherently public and collective practice, their point of contention involved the specific function of opinion in the public realm. They asked how opinion was to be employed there to best serve the community and how inquiry was to take up opinion in public speech to make it a self-conscious practice. This struggle was most dramatically displayed during the Athenian democracy in the conflicts between the rhetoricians (notably, the sophists) and the philosophers (notably, Plato). While all these speakers made opinion their point of departure, they employed it differently, implicitly defending different understandings of both 'opinion' and 'speech.' The sophists made their living as practitioners and teachers of rhetorical technique, claiming that public speech served the community by providing opportunities for entertainment, policy, and judicial decision-making. While nobody disputed the need to produce eloquent public speakers in the new democracy, Plato

Modernity and the Problem of the Social 19 watched this training with suspicion. For him opinion was certainly the basis of public life, but it was also a dangerous and volatile entity, easily manipulated by powerful speakers. According to Plato, sophistry made itself familiar with the nature of the 'great strong beast,' that is, the 'opinions of the multitude,' to control it by way of its likes and dislikes (Republic, 493). In contrast, philosophy, while employing opinion, did not pander to the audience or the interlocutor.1 But, as Plato knew so well, because philosophy too employed opinion, it necessarily had to live by the vicissitudes of public life. It is important to note, then, that Socrates often began his dialogues by introducing and publicly situating his interlocutor. Typically, he initiated his publicly conducted dialogues by announcing the other's lineage, place of origin, reputation, and status in the Athenian community. Hence, the interlocutor was implicitly invited to show how he lived publicly, that is, how he chose to employ doxa. This helps to explain why the Socratic dialogues were often terminated without clear conclusions about their apparent topics, as the way various speakers engaged with one another was the central interest. The dialogue was primarily an exercise in recalling the proper use of one's opinion. At the beginning of Plato's dialogue Gorgias, for example, Socrates arrives on the scene as Gorgias, a famous sophist, has just finished a performance of display rhetoric, and Socrates asks him 'who he is' (447d). Gorgias answers that he is a rhetorician, which involves 'the power to convince by your words the judges in court, the senators in council, the people in the Assembly, or in any other gathering of a citizen body' (452e). To this Socrates responds that rhetoric intentionally seeks to persuade, but not to persuade in such a way that instructs the listener as to what is right and what is wrong. What is more, rhetoric may be employed towards evil ends, and it may convince listeners on topics about which both speaker and listener know little. It is, for Socrates, simply a matter of technique rather than art. Gorgias counters Socrates by pointing out his logical leap that suggests that because rhetoric can be used towards evil ends by some practitioners, the

20 Sociology and Mass Culture whole enterprise is worthless. For Gorgias, Socrates is arbitrarily throwing the baby out with the bath water, as well as somehow placing himself beyond the use of rhetorical devices. At this point Socrates turns his attention to Polus, one of Gorgias's young and enthusiastic students, in an attempt to display the kind of interlocutor Gorgias is producing by teaching rhetorical technique. While the dialogue pursues the topic of rhetoric, it is more profoundly an opportunity for Socrates to illustrate the methods employed by rhetoricians. As Socrates and Polus argue as to whether it is worse to commit wrong or to suffer it (where Socrates implies that the sophists do the greater evil of committing wrong), Socrates notes how Polus engages in argument. For example, Polus attempts to invoke the authority of historical heros as 'reputable witnesses' to support his argument (47le), as well as employing excessive and grotesque imagery (473d), and laughing at his interlocutor (473e). When Socrates questions the merit of laughter as a form of refutation, Polus appeals to popular consensus as his standard of speech: 'Do you not consider yourself already refuted, Socrates, when you put forward views that nobody would accept? Why, ask anyone present' (473e). For Polus the ultimate measure of the truth of his words lies in the immediate response of his audience, as they are (in modern language) 'polled.' His audience expresses its opinion in a way that will silence the debate rather than enrich it, and the rhetorician turns to them at a point when he can best 'capitalize' on opinion (or use it for private ends). The audience members will judge Socrates' reasoning in terms of its familiarity with what they already believe; if it deviates from what they hold to be common sense, it will be dismissed. For Socrates, on the other hand, common sense and opinion are not synonymous: opinion seeks full consciousness of itself. The sophist's techniques violate the very notion of doxa as accountable and engaged public action. Of course, Polus rightly asserts the practical nature of public speech, that is, it is aimed at making decisions of policy and justice which are always limited by the need for expediency. For him, opinion cannot be employed in a luxurious way, but must be organized and aided by speakers who seek to persuade their

Modernity and the Problem of the Social 21 listeners towards specific decisions. Indeed, any rhetorician or sophist would define the practice in much the same way - public speech seeks to persuade a public body. Socrates' third interlocutor in the Gorgias, Callicles, defends this practicality, while attacking Socrates' apparent passivity: 'You neglect, Socrates, what you most ought to care for, and pervert a naturally noble spirit by putting on a childlike semblance, and you could neither contribute a useful word in the councils of justice nor seize upon what is plausible and convincing, nor offer any brilliant advice on another's behalf (486a). In this speech, Callicles expresses indignation that Socrates does not show himself openly to adopt one side of an argument with the intent to convince others of its merit, that is, he is not immediately 'useful.' Socrates seems simply to draw out the opinions of others to see the implications they have for public life. In other words, Socrates fails to take up the challenge of straightforward, two-sided debate that would display his 'naturally noble spirit.' He would rather explore how these two sides could arise in the first place and inquire into the value of living in a culture that speaks, thinks, and takes decisions publicly by producing sides. It is in this way that Socrates and the sophists share an understanding of opinion as the opportunity for dialectic, that is, the practice of drawing distinctions and locating contradictions in the midst of debate. They would agree that opinion provides the conflict and passion needed to produce clearly articulated sides of an argument. Their difference lies in how they attempt to resolve the sidedness of the dialogue once it has been established. For the sophists, the sides of debate serve public life by providing the audience an opportunity to decide which to choose - it helps them take decisions because it displays all the sides before them. For Socrates, on the other hand, the dialectic of discourse must not orient to its end, as display will alter the nature of the talk itself. Public speech must constantly seek only to make its own divisions and distinctions, self-conscious actions. In other words, speech must keep its own nature in mind, and this nature includes qualities of pleasure, influence, and audience. But as well as being immediately practical, rhetoric is a tech-

22 Sociology and Mass Culture nique that may be taught to others who wish to become powerful public figures. In a word, rhetoric is performance. It is the display of the beauty of powerful speech and the prowess that the public speaker can achieve. In short, before it persuades the other about one side of an argument (its content), rhetoric persuades the other of itself (its form), because it is a direct celebration of itself. In the Protagoras, Socrates jokes to an incredulous friend that listening to Protagoras is even more tempting than pursuing the young and handsome Alcibiades (309b). By drawing this parallel, Socrates suggests that the sophists are alluring in the same way as Alcibiades - they stand intellectually on the threshold between boyhood and manhood and are indeed firm and smooth in form. Unfortunately, their ageless beauty makes them narcissistic and fascinated with their own power to persuade. Protagoras arrogantly asserts that his art openly practises what has always been present, but shamefully hidden, in poetry, prophecy, music, and physical training. He claims that while these others throw up screens to protect themselves from the wrath of officials, sophists display rhetoric proudly and unapologetically (316d). Implicitly then, rhetoric politically defends a public that is the site of performance, exposure, and appearance, in defiance of any official who may try to limit or censure the play of opinion. Yet, rhetoric limits itself without the interference of officials. In teaching its own technique, rhetoric teaches self-satisfaction. Rhetoric, especially display rhetoric, produces satisfied audiences and students of the technique who wish to emulate the speaker. Socrates argues in the Gorgias that the real arts are distinguishable from practices like rhetoric because they always give a rational account of their object. Rhetoric does not theorize its object, pleasure. It does not try to give an account of 'the nature of pleasure or its cause' (501a). To understand the nature of pleasure or its cause would require that the rhetorician consider what is pleasurable about speaking and listening and what is pleasurable about influencing and being influenced. For the rhetorician, speaking is pleasurable because it can convince or entertain by way of the opinions that audiences implicitly offer into the debate. But these opinions are not taken up by the rhetorician as

Modernity and the Problem of the Social 23 offerings (as already public and social elements), but as ahistorical, raw material that can be used by the speaker in the production of certain ends. In other words, the rhetorician defines the audience and speaker concretely and treats opinion as if it stands outside of inquiry. But as the Greeks knew, one cannot persuade someone who is entirely naive, foreign, or uninitiated (in their word, 'barbarian'). Speaker and listener are moments or sides of speech itself that play out the desire to influence and be influenced. Opinions, as much as they differ from one another, are the starting point of the play of influence. Unlike Callicles, who is annoyed that Socrates will not exploit the opportunity for agreement that opinion provides, Socrates uses opinion to get his interlocutor to expose what is common about the opinions that collect around a given topic. So in a way, Socrates is as confident of consensus as any rhetorician, but he treats it as something that is already present and is obscured by apparent differences. For Socrates, opinion is an opportunity to get beyond the mere play of itself (which tends to end either in capitulation or stalemate) to the basis of opinions. Socrates asks after the sociality that opinion allows and encourages, but cannot itself formulate because of its constant and insatiable movement. He would never imagine that philosophy could get beyond opinion as its most basic element because he sees that its sensuous, active, and joyful expression is central to a public life that continuously creates sides for debate. Nevertheless, inquiry is not reducible to the manipulation of opinion. It seeks to, as Durkheim said, 'make [opinions] more conscious of themselves' (1915:438). Mass Influence and Sociology As suggested, this long detour through ancient Athens helps to anticipate the issues that sociology will encounter on a much larger scale, functioning as it does in a mass culture where the democratic franchise continually expands and where influence is technologically mediated. It must work with and within the discourse of public opinion, and yet guard against the sophistic

24 Sociology and Mass Culture appropriation of sociological knowledge and opinion that tends to bury issues of inquiry and pedagogy in a rush towards policydecisions and satisfying explanations. It must constantly formulate and reformulate its own mode of influence if it is to remain a relevant and critical intervention in public dialogue, that is, if it is to 'give a rational account of its object' - mass society. Sociology must also take seriously the sophists' observation that argument is always performative and rhetorical, remaining cognizant of its own such practices. It must learn how to "measure" and influence mass society without succumbing to the most irrational aspects of collective self-representation. It would be amiss to begin by suggesting that sociology has proceeded with absolutely no hint of rhetorical self-consciousness. Inspected closely, an interest in influence and persuasion can be found forming a common (but somewhat 'unconscious') thematic thread running through the discipline. The two most striking examples of this interest are found in social psychology and cultural studies where the mass audience is formulated as subject in various ways to some persuasive image or message. This interest is, I suggest, more than incidental. It obliquely points to a concern, even anxiety, about sociology's own mode of persuasion and its consequences. Moreover, I suggest that its various formulations of influence indicate sociology's own relationship to the problems of acting persuasively. Social psychology (a branch of both psychology and sociology), typically organizes its interest in influence by way of a tension between the individual and the group, or social milieu - a highly concrete formulation of speech and influence. Its explicit interest in preserving the individual from the debasing influence of the group is evidenced in its vocabulary. Social psychology textbooks ask students to become familiar with terms like 'adaptation,' 'authoritarianism,' 'compliance,' 'conformity,' 'deindividuation,' 'diffusion of responsibility,' 'exonerative moral reasoning,' 'learned helplessness,' 'groupthink,' and 'persuasion.' From this dichotomous base, the social psychological paradigm constructs an abstract individual actor who in some way exists prior to, or outside of, collective influence (a sort of contemporary version of the

Modernity and the Problem of the Social 25 'state of nature'). Although this discipline does take the constructed nature of the personal identity seriously, its manufactured and artificial qualities tend to be quickly forgotten. Once established, they are reified into a real, presocial entity - concretely, the 'self - which struggles to hold off the levelling influences of the group. For example, Laurence S. Wrightsman and Kay Deaux, citing Gordon Allport, define social psychology as 'an attempt to understand how the thought, feeling, and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others' (emphasis in original, 1981:6). Examined closely, the individual and the group are discernable, empirical realities assumed by the definition, rather than brought into question by it.1 A similarly dualistic understanding of influence is found in the earliest work in cultural studies, where the conflict between the group and the individual becomes a conflict between the mass culture industry and the consumer of its images and products. Here the interest in influence is formulated more directly as a question of speech, and yet the dialectic between speaker and listener is hardly developed. It is, for the most part, formulated as a one-way flow of information and influence that incrementally erodes the consumer's capacity to resist. This neglects to see the listener or reader of mass images as equally an interpreter who generates meaning from the cultural images and messages he or she encounters. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have argued that no amount of interpretation can undermine the ultimate logic of the mass message: 'The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them' (1969:167). They concede that their analyses of mass culture can in no way be expected to mitigate any of these problems - that is, their own speech is in no way recognizable or useful to the mass about which it speaks. There is no kinship between their own mode of utterance and that of the masses. They form, therefore, an intellectual and cultural elite that can decipher the meaning of mass culture, but in no way participate in, or influence, this cultural sphere. How then, within these versions of influence, can sociological

26 Sociology and Mass Culture speech itself be explained sociologically? In other words, if one cultural influence acting on the individualized 'self or the oversocialized consumer is assumed to include sociological speech, then sociology finds itself in the odd and contradictory position of warning its audience to be defensive and guarded in the face of persuasion, while simultaneously aiming to persuade. Its audience is implicitly formulated as either open to all influence equally (in which case the individual is a cultural dupe and sociology is indistinguishable from all other cynical attempts to manipulate), or able to recognize sociological persuasion as different from other types of influence (which is not itself formulated in these versions). Moreover, with this emphasis on the negative quality of influence, coupled with oversocialized social actors, the audience is ultimately to be convinced of its own passivity, gullibility, and victimhood. It is told that it cannot trust its own cultural practices, nor its own understandings of these practices. To the extent that it becomes culturally 'sociological,' it becomes increasingly convinced of human life as subject to reified social forces beyond control. Yet, this paradox is not particular to sociology. As G.W.F. Hegel explains, all speech inherently runs the risk of obliterating the interlocutor in the simple attempt to convince, because influencing another is only an apparently straightforward action (1977). Successful interpersonal influence, for example, seems to be indicated by the match between what I hoped to impress on someone, and the evidence that this has been achieved. But if influence is considered as a social relation, this definition easily gets tangled in the qualities of the person influenced. What if he or she only simulates an effect? What if he or she is hypnotized? Fearful? Insane? Is it possible in these cases to say that influence has been successful? Even the weakest version of influence (one that measures its effects superficially and innocently) must consider how the other opens him or herself to it. Perhaps the torturer or ideologue would disregard these distinctions, accepting simulation, fear, and insanity as goals equal to a wilful and permanent change of consciousness. But, typically, influence depends on the subject's complicity and enjoyment, and certainly this is true in

Modernity and the Problem of the Social 27 the realm of mass culture where entertainment and spectacle are crucial to persuasion. Hegel characterized the weakest version of influence as an unsophisticated understanding of one's own dependence on others. He argued that the most atavistic social actor seeks to find himself or herself reflected in another without acknowledging this dependence. For Hegel, this is the most basic and primal relationship between humans, where one kills the other to register an effect, or to see influence reflected back to oneself. But while killing or nullifying this other does register a temporary effect (in that the lifeless corpse testifies to one's agency), it is ultimately an empty victory as it simultaneously destroys any possibility of this other continuing to acknowledge and reflect influence.2 Obviously, while force is one mode of influence, it is ultimately frustrated by its own efforts. To the extent that self-conscious life is achieved by the Hegelian actor, it must also finally be granted to the interlocutor (after various grudging and failed attempts chronicled in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which begins with enslavement). Defined positively then, influence requires of the other both surrender and self-possession. But as Hegel explains, this pattern of destruction and resuscitation of the other is not easily overcome. It haunts even the most sophisticated forms of influence, including persuasion and rhetoric. One should be neither surprised nor disturbed to find that sociological discourse continuously risks convincing its audience too well of its own social nature, and hence killing off its interlocutor by way of its own arguments. Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard

I suggest that the strongest sociological thinkers make this Hegelian conundrum a central, but implicit, theme in their texts, as evidenced in their rhetorical and literary strategies. I have used this basic criterion to choose the three authors discussed in the following chapters. Of course, any sociological text could (and should) be inspected for its understanding of sociological persuasion by

28 Sociology and Mass Culture looking at its formulations of its own discursive conditions and of its audience. And indeed, while a broad survey of the literature could trace these themes in all their various appearances across cohorts, schools of sociology, or paradigms, such an investigation would lose in depth what it achieved in breadth. It is necessary, therefore, to select texts from the sociological canon where the aforementioned themes are most strongly and explicitly engaged. My selection is, in part, a generational one, and assumes that each era of institutionalized academic sociology is characterized by particular moral, pedagogical, and political issues that arise vis-avis sociology's influence on and with mass / popular culture. Accordingly, my choices of Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, and Jean Baudrillard are justified by the methodological assumption that their discussions can be treated as representative of recurrent or perennial themes that first arise in particular cultural contexts, but also live far beyond their first appearances. In Hegelian terms, these authors articulate three 'moments' inherent to the sociological project: (1) sociology's birth as an intrinsic aspect of modern cultural consciousness (discussed byway of what I call Durkheim's manifesto rhetoric), (2) sociology as both intrinsic and instructive to mass culture (discussed by way of what I call Mills's narrative promise), and (3) sociology as entirely equivalent to mass culture (discussed by way of what I call Baudrillard's nihilist silence). These three authors make explicit the issue of sociology's proximity to, and relation with, its discursive environment. At times they also find themselves struggling against relativistic and nihilistic logics that reduce their speech to nothing more than reflections of their cultural conditions. Typically, nineteenth-century social theorists — including Durkheim, Marx, and Weber - justified the form and origin of their inquiry under the guise of science, that is, the systematic collection of knowledge that would allow social life to become predictable and controllable. Of these three canonical classical thinkers, only Durkheim overtly adds to this self-justification a formulation of sociology as necessarily participating in the popular cultural conditions of modernity. Durkheim speaks to what is a relatively presociological culture and takes it upon himself to

Modernity and the Problem of the Social 29 render social imagery intelligible to both his academic and lay audience. The same does not hold true for the other two most influential founders, Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx, for instance, understood his prose to disclose a reality that was covered over for the ordinary 'falsely conscious' worker whose mind was distracted and confounded by material conditions. To the extent that these material conditions worsened, the reality of the capitalist economy would be forced into the open and workers would become sociologically aware or class conscious. Marx's own words must then foreshadow the inevitable critique that they encourage, ultimately justifying the creation of a vanguard leadership who speaks on behalf of the working classes until they come into their intellectual own. In this formulation, sociological speech holds a position not available (or at least not initially available) to the layperson. I suggest that to the extent that Marxists have embraced ordinary culture - for example, Antonio Gramsci - they have moved towards a Durkheimian understanding of the sociological project. Weber, too, situated sociological knowledge outside of the broader culture. For him the specialized sociological project participates in the modern fragmentation of knowledge this 'vocation' requires a uniqueness of mind that laypeople find unrecognizable and open to suspicion (Weber, 1946:135). To the extent that sociological knowledge proves practical it is injected into the broader cultural discourse, but it should not seek to address political and moral questions of value. For Weber, sociology always keeps its head about itself and remains soberly cognizant of its distinctiveness from the broader culture. Again, among his cohort of mid-twentieth-century intellectuals who were attempting to understand the significance of mass and consumer culture, C. Wright Mills most clearly posits these questions in terms of the cultural relevance of sociology. Mills begins with this Durkheimian theme and implicitly challenges other dominant versions of sociology (especially that of Talcott Parsons) by way of questioning their readings of Durkheim. The Millsian sensibility to the importance of narrative, for example, is in many ways foundational to the contemporary, culturally based sociologies that gained prominence in North America from the 1960s

30 Sociology and Mass Culture and 1970s onward. Even now, what appears as a struggle between quantitative and qualitative analyses is more accurately described as an epistemological conflict between sociological knowledge as an informing science and sociological knowledge as a selfconscious cultural practice. As will be discussed later, the Millsian 'promise' is that the sense of helplessness experienced in everyday, mass society is remedied through a celebration and promotion of quotidian narrative. Finally, Jean Baudrillard asks sociologists to consider the possible exhaustion of the sociological within the culture in which it functions (a theme that was implicitly set out by Durkheim). It is important to note that Baudrillard does not attack sociology externally, but argues that it has devitalized itself by way of its own logic - a logic that is historically contingent and therefore ephemeral. This is a simple - and quintessentially sociological - hypothesis that treats all social institutions and modes of discourse as exhaustible. Baudrillard points to cultural practices that suggest that a congenital weakness has facilitated this decline into irrelevance, platitude, and tautology, and provides sociologists an opportunity to reflect on the future of the sociological enterprise. Like Durkheim and Mills, Baudrillard understands sociology as embedded in the mass cultural conditions it studies.

Chapter Two

Durkheim's Manifesto

If the search for paradox is the mark of the sophist, to flee from it when the facts demand it is that of a mind that possesses neither courage nor faith in science. Durkheim (1982:31)

Durkheim serves this observation and warning to his reader on the first page of his preface to The Rules of Sociological Method. He is, somewhat surprisingly, at least partially aligning himself with the ancient sophists, suggesting that because they recognize the inevitability of paradoxical findings they make better intellectual company than those who imagine the social world to be straightforward. Indeed, Durkheim tells his reader, before any of the specific rules of method are delineated, to expect paradox: literally, para-doxa, that which is beside or beyond received opinion. Hence, if the object of sociological interest is Durkheim's text itself, one is implicitly invited to ask: What are the facts about Durkheim's work that lead into unavoidable paradox? How can the reader have the 'courage' and 'faith' to face paradox as a part of his rules of method, and understand that apparent contradiction does not necessarily undermine the sociological discipline from its outset? Paradox has indeed been a central theme in the tradition of reading this text. It has, in fact, been one of the most common charges and criticisms of it, with commentators finding a fatal contradiction between Durkheim's avowed project of establishing

32

Sociology and Mass Culture

a rational science of societies, and the hyperbolic and polemical prose that he employs towards this end (Lukes, 1982:107; Thompson, 1982:2). For example, Steven Lukes locates a disjunction between Durkheim's apparent message and his medium: 'Durkheim's style often tends to caricature his thought: he often expressed his ideas in an extreme or figurative manner, which distorted their meaning and concealed their significance' (Lukes, 1973:4). While this simple distinction of textual content from stylistic form is often tenuous at best, it is, nevertheless, the case that a tension exists between the apparent dispassionate project necessitated by science and the persuasive and urgent prose Durkheim employs to discuss the sociological project. One need not assume along with Lukes, however, that this contradiction is a matter of distortion and concealment of Durkheim's message, but rather a clue to the moral and pedagogical nature of the sociological project. Indeed, it is intriguing that Lukes seems to be privy to Durkheim's thoughts independent of their expression in words, such that he can make this criticism at all. Lukes assumes both that Durkheim's thoughts are formed prior to the language used to communicate them and that the reader can see through these misleading signifiers to their prelinguistic 'meaning' and 'significance.' This formulation is hardly sociological, as it ignores the historical and cultural complexities and subtleties of language and betrays a superficial understanding of rhetoric as ornamental and distorting.1 In a similar judgment of Durkheim's prose, Kenneth Thompson goes as far as to say that 'The manifesto-like character of the Rules [of Sociological Method} renders it unsuitable as a basis for evaluating his actual methods of sociological analysis' (1982:107). Lukes, too, identifies this text as a manifesto, and although he does not make an explicit connection between this observation and his judgment of the text, he does concur with Thompson that The Rules of Sociological Method does not provide 'an accurate guide to [Durkheim's] own sociological practice' (1982:23). Thompson recommends that the reader look for Durkheim's methods where he employs them directly, that is, in his study of suicide which examines the statistical relation between rates of suicide and levels of European social integration. In

Durkheim's Manifesto 33 other words, for Lukes and Thompson there is little sociology per se in The Rules of Sociological Method. Certainly, it is not inaccurate to characterize Durkheim's text as exaggerated and polemical, or as a 'manifesto.' In 1895, when Les regies de la methode sociologiquewas first published, sociology existed as hardly more than a name coined by Auguste Comte, under whose auspices broad and unsystematic generalizations about societies were gathered. Although Comte placed sociology at the pinnacle of the social and physical sciences, and had certainly made great strides along with Saint-Simon and Fourier, it was left to Durkheim to imagine its contours and to enunciate clearly the 'reality' and practices of sociology. As will be discussed, this monograph, 'widely read by a new popular audience' (Gane, 1988:76), employed many of the extreme rhetorical devices associated with manifestos. But does calling it a manifesto necessarily disqualify it as a sociological text? Is it that Durkheim's other texts are, for example, free from hyperbole and excess? Do they soberly pursue 'pure' sociological method, while this text defers that responsibility? To take Thompson's directive and to look to Suicide: A Study in Sociology would be to assume that it is concerned with elucidating the phenomena of suicide and social integration more than it is interested in exhibiting and promoting the power of sociological analysis itself (by overtly displaying the social qualities of an occurrence assumed to be essentially psychological). In fact, the strategy employed in Suicide is akin to one used by the ancient Greek rhetoricians, especially the sophists, who (in order to prove their persuasive prowess) intentionally took up the apparently weakest case - a position against which their audience was inherently prejudiced. Michael Overington has argued that Suicide gives every indication of having been produced with a high degree of rhetorical attention to the competing claims being made by other sociological approaches, to the Cartesian and anticlerical mood of bureaucrats in France's Ministry of Education, and to finding a place for sociology in the inflexible French academy without at the same time threatening other established disciplines (1981:450). Overington also points out that Suicide was meant to provide concrete examples of the methodological points set out in The

34 Sociology and Mass Culture Rules of Sociological Method (1981:452). So, in away, Suicide (which announces itself in its subtitle as 'A Study in Sociology') and Durkheim's other major works are also manifestos of the new science of societies, as it was the sociological orientation or imagination itself- not the substantive topics in isolation - that Durkheim sought to promote. In fact, as will be discussed, the social crises of Durkheim's time - which he formulates under the rubric of 'anomie' — are to be resolved not by the administrative application of sociological remedies as much as by the sociological mind becoming popular and common. What then would be the consequences of seriously considering The Rules of Sociological Method, if not the whole Durkheimian corpus, as a manifesto? How can this manifesto characterization be used to formulate the text's sociological practice rather than to dismiss it out of hand as a mistake or shortcoming? In order to investigate the validity of a sociological manifesto, it is first necessary to characterize the manifesto as a particular type of social action. The word 'manifesto' first appeared in English usage in the seventeenth century, approximately concurrent with the European publishing boom which found a mass market by combining the new printing-press technology with written vernaculars (in place of Latin). Indeed, the rhetoric of the manifesto celebrates itself as a document that exists by virtue of mass-media culture. In this sense, the manifesto is the modernist phenomenon par excellence, as it combines technology and mass-communication with Enlightenment visions of liberation and progress. And yet, the graphic and stylistic techniques employed in manifestos also reproduce a connection to the reader that historically precedes the advent of large-scale printing, and which, in fact, the printed word often suppresses, that is, an impression of immediate and personal communication. Graphically this is achieved by way of a liberal use of headings, mixed fonts, capitals, aphorisms, colours, underlining, and exclamation marks (Perloff, 1984:76-7), like those found in posters, flyers, graffiti, newspapers, and magazines. The surrealists, for example, used headlines and fragments of headlines cut from newspapers and then randomly assembled in

Durkheim's Manifesto 35 their Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). Stylistically, the manifesto employs the methods of direct address, accusation, and interrogation. Most famously, Marx and Engels directly address and question the bourgeois apologist in the Communist Manifesto: 'You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population ... And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate?' (Marx and Engels, 1978:486-7). These exaggerated strategies strive to reproduce, in a textual form, the gesticulations and intonations that animate face-to-face conversation and oratory and are in this way similar to the rhetorical techniques of the Greek agora. Hence, the manifesto is both relatively new as a mass-media technology and progress-oriented polemic, while in another way the manifesto is as old as dialogic persuasion itself. To call a text a manifesto undoubtedly puts it in infamous and somewhat suspect company. In its literal sense, 'manifesto' means 'struck by the hand' (Skeat, 1888:351) - it declares, provokes, defames, and challenges, jarring its reader both in form and message. Consequently, it holds a marginal status as a form of public speech, often considered the sophistry of the printed word. This reputation leads us to assume, often erroneously, that manifesto hyperbole and excess serve to undermine its message, even when the message is overtly political. In 1970, in the midst of Canada's October Crisis, External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp justified reading the Manifesto of the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ) over the public airwaves by arguing that its extreme rhetoric would undermine rather than promote the FLQ. Many Quebecois, however, did recognize and support their pronouncements (see Cormack, 1998). The manifesto was a favoured literary spectacle for twentiethcentury avant-garde artists like the futurists, dadaists, surrealists, and situationists, who seemed to relish provocative pronouncements. In the Second Surrealist Manifesto, written in 1929, Andre Breton and the surrealists assert that 'the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and

36 Sociology and Mass Culture firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd' (Breton, 1969:125). In the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, Filippo Marinetti proclaims that futurists 'wish to glorify war ... militarism, patriotism ... the contempt for women' (reprinted in Rye, 1972:7). Marinetti, leader of the Italian futurists and author of dozens of manifestos, described the manifesto's two most essential literary qualities as 'violence and precision' (Perloff, 1984:65). Marinetti considered himself an expert on manifesto writing because the manifesto was the futurists' most privileged form of political utterance. Sickened by tradition in any form, futurists rejected all comfortable or established modes of action, and hence the life they described in their manifestos was that of incessant spectacle and disruption. They thrived on the noise, speed, and commotion of the modern urban world, seeking only to enjoy and extend it to artistic and literary life. For the futurists there was no political or social goal beyond this action - their project was nothing other than the project of the manifesto itself. In fact, the futurists gave their manifestos a spectacular public life even in their distribution, throwing thousands of copies of the Manifesto against Reactionary Venice into the streets from a clock tower (Carrieri, n.d.:29). It is instructive, therefore, to make use of Marinetti's apparent expertise (at least provisionally) and consider his simple manifesto formula. Manifesto as Violent Strategy Let us first investigate Marinetti's characterization of the manifesto as 'violent.' A manifesto's utterance attacks accepted understandings of the world and promises new possibilities and, often, new social relations. It also violently disrupts polite and orderly speech. As such, its textual form or prose is ultimately analytically indistinguishable from its content because the successful manifesto embodies and promotes the excess it discusses.2 In a word, it is a break with convention. As both an outline of future plans and as a direct disruptive action in itself it can be situated between instrumental, goal-oriented texts (e.g., policy papers, mission statements) and destructive, emotional outbursts (e.g.,

Durkheim's Manifesto 37 demonstrations, riots, terrorism3). This double gesture creates a discursive space where practical actions and radical dreams are possible simultaneously. Take, for example, the futurist pronouncement that makes use of the present tense to describe its own speech and its program: 'We stand upon the summit of the world, and once more we hurl our challenge to the stars!' (reprinted in Rye, 1972:9). But typically this attempt to both describe and perform social change produces an array of contradictions that run through the argument. For example, the reader to whom the text is directed is announced to be equally determined by the past and the selfconscious agent of change in the present. History has, in the logic of this type of rhetoric, necessarily unfolded towards a present that is ripe for fundamental upheaval. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation Programme (the CCF's 'Regina Manifesto' written in 1933) states that 'the time has come for a far-reaching reconstruction of our economic and political institutions' (CCF, 1933:1). This is a typical manifesto formulation of history and time in that the present is posited as fraught with conflict, while the future will be settled and put beyond struggle (presumably beyond 'history'). The 'Regina Manifesto' promises to 'replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated' (CCF, 1933:1). Or in the Manifesto of the Front de liberation du Quebec, the FLQ explains that: 'we want to replace this society of slaves by a free society, functioning by itself and for itself (cited in Fournier, 1984:227). Action now, they promise, will disrupt the historical trajectory so drastically as to force history to 'make sense,' to render human societies what they should have been all along — humane and free. But looking too closely at present and past social conditions would reveal that the simple line leading to this moment of crisis is itself made up of forgotten incendiary gestures not unlike the one being announced in the text. Ironically, then, it is as if being too historically conscious can be detrimental to projects of radical change. As Friedrich Nietzsche explains, 'the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to an indi-

38 Sociology and Mass Culture vidual, a community, and a system of culture' (Nietzsche, 1957:8), because 'forgetfulness is a property of all action' (Nietzsche, 1957:6). Reading Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method with this understanding of the manifesto in mind would imply that his text is primarily strategic. Thus understood, Durkheim wrote this polemic because he saw that in his own time and place sociology could not convince its audience of itself by way of its mere demonstration. He had to ensure that his version of 'the social' would gain ontological and intellectual primacy, and therefore the sociological project had to be proclaimed and somewhat violently inserted into the culture as if it were a historical necessity and inevitability. The manifesto had to attack all conventional, premodern, as well as competing intellectual explanations of the human world. Hence, we find Durkeim's opening sentence of the preface announcing that 'we are so little accustomed to treating social facts scientifically that certain propositions contained in this book may well surprise the reader' (1982:31). The difficulty of his task is attested to in his second, longer preface where Durkheim tries to redress the hostile reception and apparent misreadings that met the initial publication. This indefatigable and relentless defence of his most basic propositions and concepts runs through his later writings, as Durkheim is forced throughout his career to hold off challenges rooted in biological and evolutionary determinism, psychological reductionism, romantic political-economic constructions of the voluntaristic individual, and materialist versions of group consciousness. As such, the practice of sociology would then get under way after this initial intellectual deracination was achieved and after the historical leap into 'reason' was made: 'It therefore seems to us ... that such an undertaking can and should be greeted without apprehension and indeed with sympathy by all those who ... share our faith in the future of reason' (1982:33). In another text Durkheim announces that 'history will have to be transformed and become scientific' (1973a:8). A second violence typically practised by manifestos is the reification of ideas, especially as they relate to history and identity.

Durkheim's Manifesto 39 By announcing that it speaks for (and with) a particular group, the manifesto insists that it liberates an essential and unquestionable identity that need only be recalled and re-established. These identities are often structured around formulations of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or artistic integrity. Against these groups stand the equally essential enemy - the capitalist, the WASP, the man, the straight, and the bourgeois artist. For example, the American feminist 'Redstockings Manifesto' (1970) proclaims: 'We identify with all women,' 'Women are an oppressed class,' and 'We identify the agents of our oppression as men' (reprinted in Morgan, 1970:533-4). Animating the conflict between these two interests is History, or some other external logic that makes this antagonism inevitable, and which will ultimately force the conflict to end in victory for the oppressed, while the corrupt and vice-ridden institutions of the past decay. This allows for the '"Situationists": International Manifesto' (1960) to open with the assertion: 'A new human force, which the existing framework of society will not be able to suppress, is growing day by day along with the irresistible development of technology and the frustration of its potential applications in our meaningless social life' (reprinted in Conrads, 1970:172). Durkheim also apparently reified the idea of the 'social' into a real, almost tangible thing. In his chapter entitled 'Rules for the Observation of Social Facts,' Durkheim slides from the proscription 'the first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things' (emphasis in original, 1982:60) to 'social phenomena are things, and should be treated as such' (1982:69). Morris Ginsberg concludes from passages like this that 'in general "la societe" has an intoxicating effect on [Durkheim's] mind, hindering any further reflection on the nature of the goods of which it is the condition' (1956:51). According to Ginsberg, Durkheim loses his dispassionate relationship to his ideas the minute he attempts to name them. But considered as a strategy, his reified 'sociocentrist' (Lehmann, 1993:119) ideas are simply persuasive devices meant to convince his readers of concepts foundational to his subsequent argument. Of course, one could ask, in that case, if Durkheim takes responsibility for the 'objects' he produces; if he can justify

40 Sociology and Mass Culture rhetorically conjuring images for the sake of his discussion. One could ask if his action lies within the realm of scientific method and is justifiable within the criteria of his own rules of method. In this first and simplest formulation, Durkheim's sociological manifesto is a revolutionary intervention that is distinct from and inessential to the practice of sociology and is quickly overcome as the discipline establishes itself and nascent social scientists break from the presociological past. This view defends a distinction of Durkheim's content from his form, with the content being disqualified as a sociological work by the manifesto form (which ultimately must disappear to allow sociology to exist). But a reading like this, that assumes the text can be thus divided, is one example of non-reflective, conventional thought that Durkheim means to undermine. Durkheim himself has suggested that to approach something sociologically means to bracket one's common sense understanding of it: 'Our reader [the prospective sociological thinker] ... should always be conscious that the modes of thought with which he is most familiar are adverse, rather than favorable, to the scientific study of social phenomena' (1982:31). One should not then imagine, as common sense dictates, that writing produces a content that is discernible from its rhetorical devices. In fact, in criticizing Simmel's formal sociology, Durkheim addresses this very distinction: 'By what right are the container and content of society separated' (1965:46). By extension, I am asking by what right are the so-called container and content of Durkheim's text separated? Perhaps a more subtle and extensive understanding of the manifesto as a textual practice is needed to inform this problem, necessitating a reading given over to the spirit or the internal logic of the manifesto. Manifesto as Morality

Marinetti's formula for manifesto-writing called for 'precision' as well as 'violence.' While a manifesto breaks from convention and tradition, it also seeks to describe its historical condition to the reader, that is, show that its rhetoric is generated out of a considered knowledge of its own time and place. By way of this stance,

Durkheim's Manifesto 41 which demonstrates its understanding of the present, it can then convince its readers of the accuracy and precision of its forecasts for the future. Typically, a manifesto points out an 'indisputable' reality that has, nevertheless, been consistently overlooked by common sense, for the very fact that it is so pervasive and absolute. Take, for example, the famous opening line of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) which proclaims: 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism' (Marx and Engels, 1978:473). In this gambit Marx and Engels claim an awareness of the revolutionary political forces animating their time. But, more significantly, in the midst of pointing out this apparent reality, they are also simultaneously makingit and forcing this ethereal ideological spectre to become corporeal. As a precise description of the historical 'facts' in which it functions, the manifesto shows a commitment to making facts into palpable realities. Of course, this gesture also puts the manifesto's goals at the centre of the facts it brings to light. Durkheim agrees with Marinetti that the first thing to be articulated is a 'precise' definition of 'society' (1982:50) before the sociological enterprise can proceed, and Durkheim does this by making plain 'the facts' of nineteenth-century Europe that are constantly being overlooked. For Durkheim the primary fact of note is the 'social fact,' which is a reality of all societies, but only directly knowable and utterable as such in his own. He characterizes these 'social facts' as independent and historically prior to the individuals who are born into them and enact them: 'Here, then, is a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him ... Thus they constitute a new species and to them must be exclusively assigned the term social' (emphasis in original, 1982:52). Durkheim argues that while all societies produce images and artefacts that attest to a general sense of collective forces greater than the individual, or the simple sum of all individual parts, these are reified and personified as gods and spirits (or 'spectres') rather than grasped and represented directly as 'a reality sui

42 Sociology and Mass Culture generis' (1982:54). Traditionally the collective represents and worships itself without members understanding that they tremble and prostrate before nothing more than the collective. Durkheim's project, in contrast, relies on the possibility of this reality being clearly conceivable as such by his audience. His problem then becomes one of speaking plainly and precisely about something that has never before been directly representable in the history of human collectives. Why indeed would social reality suddenly become so amenable to being represented when previously allusiveness was one of its primary characteristics? Undoubtedly, Durkheim would explain this sea change as resting in the difference between ordinary thought and scientific thought, the latter being capable of extracting social facts from the tissue of sentiments and beliefs. But this still leaves unanswered both the question of how the sociologist renders these representations generally recognizable, and the question of the relationship between sociologist and the object of study. While one way of making the raw social fact visible would be by its constant disruption, Durkheim chooses a gentler and more careful mediation between social reality and his audience. As most clearly articulated in his first major work, The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim's central and ongoing concern is the basis of social cohesion in modernity, especially the civic identification of individuals within the new 'imagined community' (Anderson, 1983) of the nation-state. In his work on pedagogy and public education, Durkheim argues that teachers have the special moral responsibility of mediating between student and society, 'which seeks to shape [the child] in its own image' (1973b:54). His interest extended beyond this simple assertion, however - he saw sociology as a part of the morality being introduced to the student. As a manifesto writer, Durkheim speaks (like a teacher) on behalf of a particular society or morality. He represents the sociological society, or more exactly, he mediates between the factual reality of the 'social' and the reader, who he asks to throw off traditional, disguised, and indirect representations of this reality: 'We must discover those moral forces that men, down to the present time, have conceived of only under the

Durkheim's Manifesto

43

form of religious allegories. We must disengage them from their symbols, present them in their rational nakedness, so to speak, and find a way to make the child feel their reality without recourse to any mythological intermediary' (1973b:ll). So while social forces are representable as naked, rational facts, and should be starkly presented as such even to the children of France's new compulsory public schools, their representation is always, nevertheless, a moral practice (regardless of whether or not this representation is sociological or religious). Moral practices are, according to Durkheim, extra-individual interests that guard the well-being of the collective. Hence, for Durkheim science replaces religion as a primary organizing and sustaining system of beliefs in Europe, a system of thought that 'is only a more perfect form of religious thought' (1915:429). In this way, Durkheim's manifesto is both a political and moral action, as he understands his own culture to be in the midst of making the 'social' itself a part of this morality and sees himself as its messenger. But like Marx and Engels, Durkheim is making this new reality as well as announcing it. He is helping to create the object of study for sociology, a 'subject matter peculiarly its own' (1982:50), as well as creating new sociological 'means of production' around this object (i.e., rules for the 'observation' and 'explanation' of social facts, as well as the 'distinction of the normal from the pathological,' the 'constitution of social types,' and the 'demonstration of sociological proof) (1982:v). His text is, therefore, necessarily hyperbolic and polemical because he is compelled to make the 'social' a real imaginative possibility for his audience. Moreover, his audience cannot, in this formulation, be restricted to prospective social scientists, but must include every citizen franchised into the contemporary world. Ultimately, Durkheim's message must extend universally within his culture because this reality is a societal and moral fact that has the historically unique privilege of being directly representable as such. In other words, if social facts are no longer in France's Third Republic disguised in totems and gods, then the collective as a whole moves towards representing itself under the new trope of the 'social.' As such,

44 Sociology and Mass Culture this trope or image is as morally binding as its previous metaphysical incarnations. As Durkheim argues in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,the French Revolution is for him modernity's most dramatic, while ultimately futile, attempt at becoming directly self-conscious: 'in one determined case we have seen society and its essential ideas become, directly and with no transfiguration of any sort, the object of a veritable cult' (1915:214). The Revolution marks and participates in the movement towards a collective life that makes a new social fact of the 'social' itself. Viewed in this way, Durkheim's manifesto is a historical moment within sociology. Specifically, it is the primary moment in which the performance of sociology is integral to the creation of its object. As such, the manifesto cannot precede sociology because it makes sociology by generating the moral reality that it studies. Once this moral reality has been established it becomes the sociologist's obligation to guide the transition between traditional modes and scientific modes of representing social facts. Nevertheless, once made, sociology can free itself from manifesto rhetoric because the moral force of scientific discourse will have become self-sustaining. Manifesto as Interpretive Sociology However, these characterizations of the manifesto are incomplete, and so, too, is the formulation of Durkheim's manifesto rhetoric. A manifesto is more than Marinetti's prescribed 'violence and precision'; it is also, and perhaps most fundamentally, an action that makes topical the very question of representation itself. This helps explain more fully why the avant-garde artists were so attracted to this rhetoric, and why they produced some of the most compelling and self-conscious manifestos. For them, free expression was a crucial concern, and the space between the future and the present was conflated into a liberationist gesture enacted fully and directlyin their texts. Simply put, their manifestos were a performance or execution of their goal. The most radical gesture for the surrealists, for example, began with 'automatic writing,' or the free flow of unconscious thought onto paper unencumbered by the constraints of rationality and order. Andre Breton explains:

Durkheim's Manifesto 45 'Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be, and this is enough to remove to some slight degree the terrible injunction; enough, too, to allow me to devote myself to it without fear of making a mistake' (Breton, 1969:5). In the dada experiment, perhaps the most extreme example of the artistic liberation of speech, language itself was to be reinvented by its speaker. The word 'dada' was chosen at random by its founders, and although it has a meaning in many languages, it was meant to signify the avoidance of definitive significance. This lack of determined meaning was at the heart of their project, and Tristan Tzara's 'Dada Manifesto 1918' begins with an attack on the earnestly sketched plans of typical manifestos: 'To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC ... to fulminate against 1,2,3, ... to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence' (reprinted in Motherwell, 1951:76). He goes on to explain that his text is nevertheless inescapably a manifesto: 'I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles ... I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense' (reprinted in Motherwell, 1951:76). Tzara finds that the inevitability of declaration and assertion follows closely behind the compulsion to speak, even though Tzara does not want his utterance to place him in a discernible position that might limit the scope of his speech. Tzara outlines the dada project as the rejection of logic, order, reason, and morality in human endeavour. The ultimate result of having taken such a stance was that, for the dadaists, artistic performance became reduced to the incessant utterance of simple nonsensical syllables. Their project most clearly shows that the attempt to perform or embody a Utopia does not bridge the gap between the real and the imagined - on the contrary, it highlights the impossibility of its unification. So while the avant-garde manifestos may be more self-consciously

46 Sociology and Mass Culture performative of radical action than those deferring action into the future (e.g., communist and socialist manifestos),4 they do not overcome the contradiction between being determined (in this case by language as a social fact5) and being free (of choosing to speak in a particular way) any more than the others. Their difference lies in their attempt to embrace this very dilemma and make their desire to embody language into an artistic opportunity.6 In this third formulation, Durkheim's manifesto is primarily an attempt to understand representation as the most basic social action. As a collective or cultural phenomenon representation is the attempt, on the part of the group to show itself, to produce images of its sense of collectivity and to speak about its collective qualities - for example, its structure and organization (in this case it is the attempt to represent sui generis social fact directly in scientific language). However, it is also the attempt to then interpret this fact or to tell the story of the collective's relationship to the condition it makes. This is what Durkheim calls a 'collective representation,' a constellation of concrete practices and images that express 'the way in which the group thinks of itself in its relationships with the objects which affect it' (1982:40). Of course, the 'objects which affect it' are often made by the collective itself; societies are grounded in both the utterance of realities in speech and the narration of the group's dynamic relationship with these realities. Hence, explains Durkheim, the sociologist discovers social facts as ready-made artefacts, or cosmologies, with a narrative structure already in place. This narrative structure is not limited to traditional forms because all societies produce collective representations, be they religious or scientific. He reasons somewhat anachronistically that 'if philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy' (1915:9). Ultimately, the collective representation reveals to the sociological observer an ongoing and circular movement between the human manufacture of social realities and the group's particular responses or relations to these realities. If Durkheim's text is primarily a discussion of representation as a collective phenomenon, his ideas of 'social fact' and 'collective

Durkheim's Manifesto 47 representation' become much more complex. After all, these very concepts are themselves, according to Durkheim's own argument, the new social forces of his time. As discussed, Durkheim's manifesto appeared in a context where the notion of 'society' or the 'social' was becoming more and more a discursive 'social fact.' Partly by way of his efforts, it was becoming an aspect of the moral reality of this increasingly secular culture in which, as he puts it, 'the old gods are growing older or already dead, and others are not yet born' (1915:427). Like any social fact, the attempt to represent its force (even in sociological language) does not overcome the collective's tendency to hypostatize it, even reify, distort, and take it for granted. As I have suggested, Durkheim's own formulation of the 'social fact' risks reifying the concept into a concrete object. Evidently, this problem is not something that could be overcome if Durkheim were to gain control of his hyperbolic prose, as Lukes and Thompson might recommend, because it points to the fundamental quality of speech itself. If anything, it serves to confirm Durkheim's own thesis, and speaks to his first point about paradox: although Durkheim wants society to be directly representable in rational speech, his own formulations of social life show that this is impossible. To the extent that sociological representation is a moral force, its voice is inescapably excessive, yet also incomplete - it tries, but cannot represent its object fully.7 As the dadaists so dramatically discovered, language is never completely mastered by its speakers because language is beyond full representation. Language is, as Durkheim explains, one example of the group thinking itself, that is, generating its own sense of the sui generis, its own ideal. Yet, this inherent frustration to the sociological project is also central to its promise. Because sociology points to the social fact of the 'social' as a reality, and in doing so names it, the 'social' becomes a collective representation in the culture. A collective representation is not just the naming and totemic deification of the group - it is a group's dialogue about its social condition. It is the group's way of examining its own naming practices. Hence, within the concept of collective representation lies the possibility of societal change by way of its own self-reflective and self-inter-

48 Sociology and Mass Culture pretive ideal: 'A society can neither create itself nor recreate itself without at the same time creating an ideal' (1915:422). Durkheim explains that even narrowly conceived as an individual, contemplative action, thought is the creation of social conditions: 'If the object of thought were simply to "reproduce" reality, it would be the slave of things; it would be chained to reality. It would have no role except to "copy" in a servile fashion the reality that it has before it. If thought is to be freed, it must become the creator of its own object; and the only way to attain this goal is to accord it a reality that it has to make or construct itself. Therefore, thought has as its aim not the reproduction of a given reality, but the construction of a future reality' (emphasis in original, 1972:251). Implicitly, Durkheim's text is also 'the construction of a future reality,' or the attempt to formulate sociological representation as an action that reports on, and changes, the collective by introducing a language that clearly invites and encourages this turn. Certainly, sociological language cannot escape that all language, to the degree that it becomes popular and disseminated in culture, is subject to becoming habitual and taken for granted. Sociology can, nevertheless, make this condition a topic for the group itself. The culture can think of itself as a culture, as a social reality, that could become otherwise. After all, manifestos clearly highlight their intentional and overt attempt to persuade their audience, making the historical emergence of sociological language a rhetorical fact rather than just a moral imperative. In a word, collectives have interpretive relations to themselves because collectives are not empirical groups but the self-defined identity and symbolic life of any people. Or, as Durkheim puts it, 'collective life is only made of representations' (1973a:16). Interpretation mediates between ideas as social facts (as external and coercive morality) and ideas as collective representations (artefactual images and stories about living with social facts). And if sociology is itself by Durkheim's time becoming a social fact and a collective representation, it must also be in some way interpretive. From Australian aboriginal totems to European suicide statistics, Durkheim's work involved the interpretation of collective representations. Certainly, in Suicide the statistic is taken by

Durkheim's Manifesto 49 Durkheim somewhat uncritically as an empirical indicator of suicide as it correlates with social categories. It is important to note that he did not collect these numbers himself, as might be expected of a good empiricist. He found them ready-made, like the totem, to be taken up directly by the sociologist. And like the totem, the statistic tells a story of how the collective organizes itself. In this case it tells the story of how European nation-states structure, imagine, and discourse within themselves. The sociologist helps reinforce the taken-for-granted nature of this representation by uncritically imagining that it speaks directly about the phenomenon it measures, rather than about how the collective imagines itself to be statistical (just as the aboriginal apparently imagines that the totem represents the spirits of animals instead of her own social condition and imagination). Surely, the suicide statistic tells more than Durkheim found in it. As well as the social fact of suicide, and the qualities of collective integration of which it speaks, the statistic tells of the nation-state's responsibility for representing the group in terms of this measurement, such that suicide is a public concern revealed in numerical rates.8 While Durkheim's uncritical relation to the statistic could be considered a serious shortfall in his work, it is more importantly an indication that the sociologist is imbedded and implicated in particular, historical, collective images and narratives. The sociologist can never fully represent the collective to itself without producing representations that are socially endowed and that to some extent escape his or her intellectual grasp. It seems, therefore, that Durkheim is correct in his observation that all societies must represent themselves and may even directly dialogue with themselves about their social nature. Nevertheless, he also points out that a collective can never represent itself fully. This is the irony of collective representations: they are direct cosmologies of the collective, but cannot be fully grasped by the collective that generates them. To the extent that social realities become collective images their appearance forecloses full and immediate interpretation. These images are indirect and diffused, somewhat like the unconscious wishes of Freud's dreamer, and although they are represented, their overdetermined imagery

50 Sociology and Mass Culture requires extensive deciphering. Just as it is questionable if any dreamer could fully grasp the unconscious 'message' of the dream, it is equally doubtful that any collective could become so sociological as to see itself completely. Nevertheless, like dreams these images seem to invite or call for interpretation. And although Durkheim assigned science a special role in the interpretation of these images, his ambivalence about full disclosure is evident: 'It is the task of science to correct these illusions, although in the sphere of practice they are inevitable' (1972:150). Of course, all science falls within the 'sphere of practice' to the extent that all knowledge, from religion to science, is a moral reality and a collective dialogue. Durkheim's Social These three readings of Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method as a manifesto find it, respectively, to be epistemologically, pedagogically, and morally embedded in its object of scientific interest. In the first and most limited formulation, Durkheim's text is a violent and strategic preparation for his vision of sociology that lays its grounds, but was ultimately inessential to sociological practice itself. It marks what he hoped was a historical rupture in western thought, after which true sociological reason could get under way. In the second formulation, his text is the creation of a precise sociological object and moral reality. While constituting sociology's first action, the manifesto could then be overcome as this morality could begin to sustain itself. Nevertheless, more than in the first formulation, it actively produced a new 'social fact' in European culture. Finally, in the third formulation, Durkheim's manifesto is an ongoing moment of sociology itself (in the sense of a Hegelian 'moment,' which is fully visible only in its first conflict-ridden appearance, but subsequently constitutes an essential part of the phenomenon's makeup). This manifesto is sociology's first clear attempt to understand representation as the fundamental element of social life. As such, sociological images and language are more than new 'social facts,' they are also 'collective representations' themselves that reveal how the col-

Durkheim's Manifesto 51 lective both imagines itself and interprets its own images. In this last formulation, sociology is highly intertwined in the phenomena it seeks to explain and becomes increasingly so as it proceeds historically. The implications of understanding sociology as a collective representation are manifold. But among the most important is that sociology develops by way of a dialectical relation to its object. It is not surprising to note, therefore, that a century after the appearance of Durkheim's manifesto, popular mass culture is permeated with reified sociological language, while cultural and mass-media studies have become a central interest of contemporary social theory. The most general reified sociological utterances include 'society says,' 'society wants,' and 'society makes us.' The third of these contemporary common-sense observations picks up especially well on a central Durkheimian theme that we are both constituted ('made' human) by social forces and necessarily constrained by them ('made' to act in particular ways). One could speculate as to what Durkheim might say about early twenty-first-century North American or European culture and the place of sociological images therein. Would he, like one might imagine Freud, despair at the popular tropes and metaphors that he helped produce? Would he see only a monster of his own creation? Unlike Freud, who might be able to condemn popular psychoanalytic language as itself an indication of an immature culture looking for therapeutic fathers, Durkheim formulated the inevitability of the reification and deification of sociological language. For example, he explains that his own time was dominated by the language of the French Revolution: 'Society also consecrates things, especially ideas. If a belief is unanimously shared by a people, then ... it is forbidden to touch it, that is to say, to deny it or to contest it. Now the prohibition of criticism is an interdiction like the others and proves the presence of something sacred. Even to-day, howsoever great may be the liberty which we accord to others, a man who should totally deny progress or ridicule the human ideal to which modern societies are attached, would produce the effect of a sacrilege' (1973a:176). He gives 'Fatherland,' 'Liberty,' and 'Reason' as examples of

52 Sociology and Mass Culture the sacred or totemic language inherited from the Revolution. And although he understands that these ideas are historically contingent, he nevertheless defends their value, especially the value of'Reason.' Indeed, Durkheim is not troubled by the knowledge that his own thoughts are shaped by the sacred ideas of his time. Noting the popularity of his own texts in the undergraduate classroom, Durkheim might ask how they function now. He might ask how The Rules of Sociological Method is an academic collective representation. Why is the educated middle class so eager to arm itself with sociological concepts, when a century ago these ideas were hardly known? He might also ask how the word 'society' has come to be used as a moral reality or a social fact. How do speakers gain a moral stronghold on conversation by invoking 'society' as the overarching totem (signifying everything from tradition and order to constraint and oppression)? Durkheim would probably conclude that in its current usage 'society' means many things and is perhaps even reducible to a dada utterance. Society is the punishing god and the forgiving god; it is used to justify both the actions of the judge and the deviant. It is, most generally, the way our culture signals its attempt to formulate itself through images. Still, to avoid concluding that sociology, as it proceeds, ultimately becomes another instance of the object it studies, one must see Durkheim as providing the opportunity within his images and tropes to make them more than religion or ideology. In other words, although social reality has traditionally been represented as the Judaeo-Christian god in western cultures, that does not mean that society will in turn become the new god of the organically solidary collective.9 As Durkheim provided sociology with a basic manifesto orientation (in all three of my formulations of sociology as strategic, moral, and interpretive), he also provided the opportunity for sociology to continually change its object by studying it. While scientists' influence on their object normally constitutes a disastrous error, because the data have been contaminated by the act of observation, Durkheim makes clear that sociology inevitably has this effect (indeed it has this

Durkheim's Manifesto 53 moral obligation and responsibility). Sociology encourages a culture where the openness of human identities and practices is generally known, and where this openness does not lead to anomic despair. This was Durkheim's promise to his time, that is, that looking at ourselves as agents of our own collective condition provides an opportunity to produce totemic objects that are sacred by the very fact that they are patently produced collectively. One could, for example, make a case for the revolutionary 'liberty, equality, fraternity,' as self-consciously sacred objects, which were seen by the French revolutionaries as products of the collective's mass action, while still elevated to the status of the divine. But given the self-destructive nature of the revolution through its leaders' attempts to deify all of its aspects, their irony towards this sacredness seems lacking. While all collectives produce collective representations of themselves, what is peculiar to the sociological imagination is that it is supposed to be able to identify these as such - it is supposed to see its own totem building. This requires a certain ironic orientation to itself, grounded in an insight that the collective could be drastically otherwise, without provoking a crisis of meaning. In this way sociology is a system of beliefs without being an ideology or religion. And of course, within a sociological culture, change does occur. Once these sociological tropes are established, they undergo interpretation and reinterpretation as they are disseminated, circulated, and used in popular discourse. As the dialogue between academic language and popular language continues through time, sociologists are required to imagine sociological interventions that keep these images dynamic rather than ideological. Hence, as sociology contributes to the sacred language used by opinion (or doxa), it is neither reducible to opinion nor fully distinguishable from it. Sociology seeks to influence the way opinion recollects its basis (i.e., social life), and in so doing must change its own language to continue to induce para-doxa. It is possible therefore that the tropes and images introduced by Durkheim have served many rhetorical purposes and need to be reinterpreted by each new generation of sociologists as they consider the particular sociological 'rules of method' of their own

54 Sociology and Mass Culture time. But what is inexhaustible about the Durkheimian legacy is Durkheim's insight that sociology must look for its effects at a general discursive level, remaining cognizant that it is a part of modernity's particular collective representations. Thus formulated, the grounds of sociological thought are necessarily present even in the most specialized of contemporary research, as each topic covertly speaks about collective representational desire. Sociology also meets its own limits (even the possibility of its own death) at the very point where it becomes self-conscious as a cultural practice, that is, its various inevitable 'crises' as to its relevance point to its entanglement in the representational anxieties characteristic of modernity in general.

Chapter Three

Mills's Promise

Promising Narrative The sociological imagination is becoming, I believe, the major common denominator of our cultural life and its signal feature. Mills (1959:14)

For C. Wright Mills, sociological ideas are not so much the tools of scientific inquiry as the features of an imaginative orientation characterizing, or potentially characterizing, post-Second World War American culture. As Mills has it, this imagination is emerging as 'the major common denominator' of his time; literally, the collective self-'denomination' or self-'naming,' which helps constitute the collective identity and logic of American popular thought. At this etymological level, Mills's formulation of 'sociological imagination' shows its kinship with Durkheim's 'collective representation,' as both concepts highlight the primacy of naming in the functioning of the group. And while 'imagination' appears to place slightly more emphasis on the agency of imagining or image-making, we should recall that 'collective representation' was also the embodiment of an action: 'the way in which the group thinks of itself(emphasis mine, 1982:40). The most salient difference between Mills's and Durkheim's understandings of collective self-reflection is revealed in the mathematical resonance of the word 'denominator,' In this sense, a

56 Sociology and Mass Culture common denomination is a naming that is primarily pragmatic in that it provides an opportunity for otherwise incomparable values to be related and made to function together. As the common multiple of different discursive denominations this imagination allows representational fragments to be syntagmatically related and added together towards a coherent explanatory and descriptive whole - towards what Mills calls 'lucid summations of what is going on in the world' (1959:5). That these images may have a sui generis, sacred, and totemic quality is left largely unexplored as Mills attempts to show their immediately practical nature. For Durkheim collective representations illustrate the unconscious metaphysical imaginary of the group, yet for Mills the imaginary must directly serve conscious public dialogue.1 Because of this apparent common, accommodating, and practical quality, Mills finds the sociological imagination most strongly exemplified in the work of those outside academic sociology - in the writings of thoughtful journalists and novelists, for example. But this popular quality does not lessen the critical role of the imagination; it must not be mistaken as 'mere fashion' (1959:15). Hence, Mills sees his responsibility as a sociologist as one of both studying and influencing the symbolic life of these common tropes as they function in the denominational, or totemic, practices of his time. (This too stands in distinction from Durkheim's selfappointed task of introducing and making immediately comprehendible sociological imagery.) In The Sociological Imagination Mills simultaneously throws down the gauntlet to his colleagues, challenging them to recognize their relationship to 'cultural life,' and makes a promise of identity tied with experiential lucidity to the broader American public. Certainly, the manifesto moment of sociological speech recurs here, with Mills asserting that these imaginative practices have become fully both sociohistorical facts and collective representations of mid-twentieth-century America: 'It is not merely one quality of mind among the contemporary cultural sensibilities - it is the quality whose wider and more adroit use offers the promise that all such sensibilities - and in fact, human reason, itself - will come to play a greater role in human affairs' (emphasis in original, 1959:15).

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These hopeful assertions notwithstanding, Mills was aware of the dual nature of sociological images, that is, that they both delimit and vivify cultural life. He knew that his project had to begin by directly facing the possible pitfalls of this developing cultural inclination: 'In our time, must we not face the possibility that the human mind as a social fact might be deteriorating in quality and cultural level?' (1959:175). It is instructive to note, in this vein, that ordinary language makes a distinction between a 'common denominator' and 'the lowest common denominator,' the latter being a medium so accommodating and general that it loses all usefulness and even hampers the functions it was meant to facilitate. Indeed, Mills is not the first sociologist to show such an ambivalence. This type of formulation runs through sociological thought, and can be traced back to classic sociological literature, where not only mass culture but modern society in general is far from a sui generis sum greater than its individual parts, but a watering-down or 'levelling' of individual strengths. Georg Simmel, for example, sets this levelling even lower than a mathematical average: Tn reality, the level of a society is very close to that of its lowest components, since it must be possible for all to participate in it with identical valuation and effectiveness' (emphasis in original, 1950:37). It was possible, in other words, that these sociological ways of looking back on ourselves could come to constitute the simplest and most banal elements of a mass society. Mills argues that while this new type of self-consciousness had unmistakably developed, whether it was ultimately to be a detrimental or beneficial mode of collective self-scrutiny was still to be determined: Tn large part, contemporary man's self-conscious view of himself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness' (1959:7). As this quotation indicates, Mills saw himself working within a culture where the 'relative' quality of society was generally grasped, that is, that the particular mode of modern social life could just as well be otherwise. Social life was now understood as subject to the

58 Sociology and Mass Culture contingencies of a mass/popular agency rather than as eternally and divinely sanctioned. And because the trope of the 'social' could, in true modernist literary temperament, still turn towards either nihilism or hope, Mills's project became one of guiding and nurturing this imagination both inside and outside the academy. He feared that the sociological could just as easily serve to increase this estranged and exaggerated self-consciousness as serve to ensure healthy public life. But how does Mills ground his claim that social images do indeed play such a central part in modern American life? His assertion is defended in his construction of the 'American Everyman' (presumably, 'every person'), and the pledge he makes to him2 or her in the now famous opening chapter of The Sociological Imagination entitled 'The Promise.' To make his promise, Mills must first designate his promisee and explain why this promisee is in need of his intellectual and moral guidance. Historically, the 'every man' is the human embodiment of the hopeful/nihilist tension in modern thought and literature. As de Certeau explains, at the dawn of the modern age, in the sixteenth century, the ordinary man appears with the insignia of a general misfortune of which he makes sport. As he appears in an ironical literature proper to the northern countries and already democratic in inspiration, he has 'embarked' in the crowded human ship of fools and mortals, a sort of Noah's Ark, since it leads to madness and loss. In this vessel he is trapped in the common fate. Called Everyman (a name that betrays the absence of a name), this anti-hero is thus also Nobody, Nemo, just as the French Chacun becomes Personne, or the German Jedermann Niemand. He is always the other, without his own responsibilities ('It is not my fault, it's the other: destiny') or particular properties which limit a home (death effaces all differences). Nevertheless, on this humanist stage, he still laughs. In this respect he is wise and mad, lucid and ridiculous, in his destiny which all must undergo and which reduces to nothing the exemption which every man claims. (Emphasis in original, 1984:2)

Mills's Promise 59 The book begins with a story, a kind of biographical sketch, of the tragic and ironic 'every man' whose mind grasps two distinct and discrete levels of social reality that cannot adequately be named or denominated. That is, these levels of reality cannot be understood in such a way that a common useful referent arises around which experiences can be collected, reconciled, and articulated to oneself or to others. Mills expresses this experience by way of two dominant metaphors that run through his text: (1) limited visual perspective and (2) an incomprehensibly large social scale. On the one hand we find 'man's self-conscious view,' 'visions ... limited to close-up scenes,' and actors who 'move vicariously and remain spectators.' On the other hand we find 'continent-wide societies,' 'big ups and downs of the societies in which they live,' and 'big ugly forces.' Mills does not suggest that this distinction of levels is false. In fact, for him it is an accurate, albeit weak and incomplete, sociological representation of the situation. Truth and falsity, validity and invalidity are not the central issues for Mills. What is important is that this everyday experience is the very cultural mode by which the helplessness and 'vague uneasiness' of the time is perpetuated (1959:6). Moreover, it is a distinction of levels that the strongest sociological representations promise to bring together and make intelligible at a single discursive and intellectual point. One might say, therefore, that if Durkheim inhabited a culture where the reality of the social had to be argued, Mills inhabited a culture where its surreality had to be addressed. The 'social' had come to signify an unrepresentable space lying between the personal and the structural and understood as the remainder that is left after personal experiences and political and economic realities have been described. The 'social' is in this time the desire for the meaningful link between these two levels; it is the hope that the image can refer to some reality and not just point to inevitable disjunction and inarticulateness. Indeed in 1959, when The Sociological Imagination was first published, Americans inhabited a world where time and space organizing imaginative categories that Durkheim noted as basic to all human collectives (1915:7) - had been drastically and sud-

60 Sociology and Mass Culture denly altered. In his 1951 book White Collar, Mills describes the new consumer products, technologies, careers, and urban environments that seemed to spring up overnight on a breathtaking scale. Even more astonishing were the number of families that were suddenly able to fill neighbourhoods, schools, jobs, and consumer 'needs.' In parallel, bureaucracy, government, and industry grew larger and more conspicuous than in any previous time in American history, threatening the traditional American fantasy of the rugged individual (who Mills critically and also romantically invokes). These social changes were enough in themselves to induce a kind of moral vertigo or anomie,3 which, as Durkheim noted, is a result of sudden change whether apparently good or bad. But just behind all these ostensibly progressive changes was the dark shadow of the cold war. A short content analysis of the January 1959 issue of Time magazine helps summarize the relations between these two themes of limited vision and incomprehensible scale as they were presented in the popular press. Gracing Time's cover is the 'Man of the Year,' Charles de Gaulle, who overcame stiff competition for this accolade from other nominees, absurdly including the inventor of the hula hoop. Inside, the magazine reviews the previous year, framing its discussion around the desperate American push to wrestle interests from the Soviet Union, involving not only territories on Earth, but in space (where Sputnik had just been launched). Also included is an article on the rise of the white-collar worker over the blue-collar union member, and advertisements ranging from Lockheed's 'missile with 9 lives' to Dale Carnegie courses ('the move-ahead man should be prepared for management responsibilities from the human side'). The rising (mostly white, male-dominated) middle class inhabited this insane and paranoid world of sudden death assured by the Lockheed missile (or the Soviet equivalent) on the one hand, and the new pristine suburban home, visions of upward mobility, and starched white-shirt conformity of the office on the other hand. Indeed, even reading Time magazine meant encountering illustrations of missiles surreally juxtaposed with smiling women retrieving cakes from Moffat ovens. Treated as a collective repre-

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sentation, Time nicely illustrates a self-awareness that ordinary life was now a geopolitical matter - and the attempt to make Betty Crocker as totemically significant as Joseph McCarthy. It is not surprising that these cold warriors began to arm themselves with cultural knowledge that promised to help them face their new conditions. Such expert advice ranged from the techniques of child-rearing (Dr Spock), status-seeking (Norman Vincent Peale), and friend-making (Dale Carnegie) to the citizen's role in national defence. Practices which were once beyond question - parenting, fraternizing, warring - now became matters of expertise by which the child, the friend, and the enemy were defined and described to readers who were no longer confident of their own, common-sense judgments. As Mills explains in White Collar, this is the era of Willy Loman's quiet and pedestrian madness: 'The White-collar man is hero as victim' (1951:xii). Popular narratives from magazine articles and advertisements to self-help literature and plays were rife with these images and themes. It is to this new literate white-collar worker (the first generation of post-industrial labourers who dealt almost exclusively with information, or the mediated production of images) that Mills makes his promise of a strong sociological imaginary, seeing in their apparently historically unique combination of education, alienation, and fear an opportunity to redress this crisis of social scale and individual perspective.4 Among the best of these recipes for life in cold war America were, according to Mills, popular literatures that allowed the gap between the 'private orbits' and the 'other milieux' to be imaginatively bridged. This is a version of sociological influence and persuasion that functions within mass, consumer society, both supported in the general media of popular culture and forced on staid academic practitioners.5 Rose Goldsen aptly characterizes Mills's message as saying: 'We must endeavour to make sociological knowledge as inescapable for men-on-the-street as are the doings of Li'l Abner or the virtues of the latest detergent' (1965:89). This so-called new sociology was to function in some way like a popular cartoon character or a household product - in short, it was akin to a mass commodity. In another such characterization of Mills as popularizer and cartoon-

62 Sociology and Mass Culture 1st, John Eldridge connects his very interest in the modern social scale with his desire to engage and entertain his reader: 'Certainly, Mills was fascinated by bigness. At times his descriptions remind one of Ripley's legendary "Believe it or not" cartoon strip' (1983:49). In short, Mills uses the devices of popular persuasion in his own sociological prose, including caricature, exaggeration, and metaphor, which amount to what could be characterized as a methodologically more playful version of the traditional Weberian ideal-type. These Millsian ideal-types include white-collar workers as 'cheerful robots' (1951), women as 'darling little slaves' (1963), members of the power elite as 'political gargoyles' (1963) and 'warlords' (1956), and the sociologists as the 'higher statisticians' (1963), 'abstracted empiricists,' and 'grand theorists' (1959). And yet, Mills is deeply ambivalent about mass culture, as it is for him one cause of the malaise of social self-awareness, while inescapably the battleground where the popular imaginary was to be won over. It is here that Mills is seen taking back some of the agency that he imputes to individual consciousness in that he clings to an understanding of mass manipulation, elite ideologies, and false consciousness: 'Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban mass ... They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions' (emphasis mine, 1951:333). In the end, sociology's special task was to address the crisis of mass culture by influencing the common denomination, or by wresting denomination from what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno called 'the culture industry' (1969). In an article entitled 'Mass Media and Public Opinion,' Mills draws a distinction between 'primary publics' and 'mass publics.' The former are rooted in the eighteenth-century ideal of rational individuals coming together in face-to-face discussions that then directly link them to broader structures by way of political parties. The 'mass publics' of the twentieth century are based on centralized and monopolized, unilateral media messages that influence public opinion without providing an opportunity for ordinary people to 'answer back' (1963:581) or conversationally and locally form their opinions. Mills concludes

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that American culture is made up of both primary and mass publics and that opinion functions by way of these two forces acting together. He fears, however, that this balance is precarious at best, and at worst threatened by the overwhelming logic of mass influence. The sociological imagination, as a cultural force, must re-invoke proximity and balance by adjusting both the perspectives of social actors and the inhuman scale and hegemony of social institutions (including the media). To investigate just how this promise is to be made good, a short discussion of these classic and often taken-for-granted sociological metaphors of objective social scale and subjective perspective is in order. The ambivalence inherent in sociology's descriptive practice is brought out by returning to these metaphorical choices borrowed from architecture and engineering, usages that run through not only structural-functional accounts, but also Marxist and symbolic-interactionist texts. In fact, these metaphors mutatis mutandis provide one of the most common features of sociological reasoning, appearing in Durkheim as the contrast between the 'mechanical' integration of the tribal community and modern egoistic individual consciousness, in Marx as super-structure/base and false consciousness, and even in Weber as rationality's reified 'iron cage' and theoretical verstehen. We may begin by noting that any object's 'scale' is the relation between the size of the human subject and the object encountered. Buildings, rooms, and facades, for example, are said to have an inhuman scale when they physically overwhelm or diminish an average-sized person. But scale is not an entirely objective phenomenon. While an architect can state the human-to-object scale of a building or room he or she has designed, he or she can also play with perspectival perceptions that make the experiences of scale greater or lesser. Perspective is the ' apparent relation between visible objects as to position, (or) distance' (OED, emphasis mine, 1982), and depends on a human observer who judges the qualities of the objects he or she sees from a particular vantage point. Hence, stepping into a 'false perspective' or inspecting a trompe 1'oeil shatters its illusion. In fact, even watching someone else step into the space dispels the visual impression because the human

64 Sociology and Mass Culture form (assuming it is of average size) establishes the meaning of the space as it relates to its use. There is one further complication, however. Many perspectives (and scales) of buildings exist only as drawings which may never actually be executed. An architectural, perspectival drawing is a representation of a static viewpoint that cannot be put to the test by stepping into it. It promises an experience of perspective and scale that may not exist in the built reality. Moreover, even an architectural drawing or photograph of an existing building relies on the drawer's representational choices that will more or less drastically misrepresent the experience. This explains the somewhat uncanny feeling of encountering a building seen many times in drawings and photographs, in that while it is familiar it is at the same time nothing like what we expect (e.g., a building's surrounding context is typically neglected in its representation and can come as a surprise, especially if that context is markedly ordinary). Indeed, there can be a sense of loss after finally seeing an iconic structure whose reputation is ultimately more spectacular than itself. Charles Dickens cleverly pillories architectural rendering in the following passage from Great Expectations in which Joe, a rural labourer, reports his first impressions of London: '- "Have you seen anything of London, yet?" — "Why, yes, Sir" said Joe, "me and Wopsle went off straight to look at the Blacking Ware'us. But we didn't find that it come up to its likeness in the red bills at the shop doors; what I meantersay," added Joe, in an explanatory manner, "as it is there drawd too architectooralooral"' (Dickens, 1965:244). Similarly, social relations of scale and perspective are influenced by their representation; in fact, they do not precede it. Certainly it is arguable that there is an objective scale to any existing social institution, for example, and that it is measurable in relation to the individuals who are a part of it (or are subject to it) at any given time. But as is the case in architecture, the experience of such institutions is influenced by perspectival positions and their representation. It is impossible, in reality, to return to an innocent position in which representation has not influenced perception and interpretation. Moreover, most understandings of social structures directly rely on broadly sociological representa-

Mills's Promise 65 dons for the very fact that they do not exist in space at all, for example, the 'nation-state,' which is for Mills 'the most inclusive unit of social structure' (1959:135), is not reducible to its political leaders, buildings, expenses, pronouncements, laws, or even the sum of its various such appearances. And, as previously discussed, more than being just the object of sociological representations, the modern state constitutes and maintains itself by way of sociological measurements and representations of its citizens. Sociology's descriptive moment would be completely redundant if social structures were immediately and plainly within view of ordinary people. Sociology is then always a mode of representation and interpretation; indeed, it is ultimately a mode of bringing things into appearance. To the extent that sociological practitioners deny this, they open themselves to the charge that sociology is nothing more than dressed-up common sense rather than a moral, representational, and rhetorical intervention.6 While the idea of imagination does imply that things are being brought into appearance, Mills's argument shows a tension between this understanding and the empirical claim that true representations immediately reflect what they describe. For him the general, cultural malaise prevents ordinary people from finding the true perspectival position from which to test the real relations between objects - 'nowadays men everywhere seek to know where they stand' (1959:166). It is the 'task and promise' of the sociological imagination to help represent these relations in such a way that they may be intelligibly grasped. This requires, for Mills, the ability 'to shift from one perspective to another' and 'to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self- and to see the relations between the two' (1959:7). Ultimately, Mills wants to be able to see panoptically, to grasp the 'big picture' (Eldridge, 1983:44), and allow others to do so as well, an interest that is not only a little naive, but shows a particular Archimedean representational desire, that is, that of bridging the gap between representation and reality. Nevertheless, Mills does formulate the ordinary actor as a producer of images - as an agent who is able, at least in principle, to produce representations of social life and to interpret these

66 Sociology and Mass Culture representations (not just as to their accuracy, but also as to their humanist value). This imaginative production of representations is ultimately linked to the broader totemic images that surround it, meaning that the 'social' signifies both social structures (established institutional patterns) and the collective imaginary. In other words, Mills implies, but neglects to formulate fully, that the first task of sociological thinking is not to change humanto-social structural relations from the outset, but rather to represent them in a way that makes change imaginable.7 And because Mills places academic sociological representations within the broader cultural scene, he sees them, like the more general representations, as in need of adjustment. It is for this reason that Mills designates roughly half of The Sociological Imagination to a discussion of the 'habitual distortions of the promises of sociology.' The first such perspectival distortion Mills takes up is that of the Parsonian 'grand theory.' As the designation implies, this version of sociology employs deductive devices that represent social life on a large scale. Mills suggests that this approach to sociological inquiry is directly related to the writing generated by these theorists. In a series of extended quotations from Talcott Parsons's canonical The Social System, Mills seeks to expose its impenetrable prose and general unintelligibility — what Dickens might characterize as 'soci-al-lo-lo-logical.' He then goes on to offer what he calls a 'translation' of this prose into simple, concrete, scaleddown sentences (1959:27). In fact, Mills implies that Parsons's mode of thought is betrayed in even the monumental length of the text itself: 'In a similar fashion, I suppose, one could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English' (1959:31). Not to be caught out dismantling other theorists' mighty constructions while defending his own, Mills also blithely compresses 'the book in your hand' into a few sentences. This somewhat childish performance betrays Mills's understanding of the sociological imagination as the capacity to move quickly and effortlessly between levels of interpretation (between large scale and minute detail) and to be able to speak in a similar way, that is, to transform the overwhelming tome into a

Mills's Promise 67 friendly sound bite or jingle when necessary. For Mills, Parsonian sociology generates an understanding of social scale and perspective that is both inaccurate and useless towards the extension of a healthy sociological imagination to ordinary people: 'They never, as grand theorists, get down from the higher generalities to problems in their historical and structural contexts' (1959:33). As was the case with the abstracted architectural representation, such a rendering of social institutions and actors, although impressive, neglects to fill in the particular place and time in which they are located. Certainly, as a reader, one begins to wonder if Parsons is interested in describing the 'social system' or textually constructing a version of social functioning where nothing escapes his systematic view and language - where nothing is deferred, incomplete, or left to be 'promised' to the reader. His is a representation that cannot be challenged by those who read it because it demands to be taken as a comprehensive whole or not at all. It does not invite a playful reader, a bricholeuse, who might challenge its metaphors of grand scale or rearrange its conceptual pieces, because it does not take the relation between text and reader to be a version of social relations recommended in its very rhetorical choices. Because it does not take itself as a representation, it cannot bear its reader challenging the apparent scale of represented social realities by stepping into a slightly different perspectival angle that would tell a story about the particulars of space and time. Its prose recommends a sociological imagination and a pattern of social relations that do not reconcile the two levels that ordinary people already grasp, but experience as what Mills calls a 'trap' (1959:3). As Mills implies, this representation is inevitably a representation of the problem, that is, the Parsonian imagination is a part of the malaise of the larger cultural denomination itself. Yet, his charges against Parsons could well be turned back against him, too. Although he sees his utterances as culturally and historically embedded, Mills's desire for the big picture shares with Parsons the proclivity to seeing and articulating everything in a kind of panoptic and cinematic way - to both pan wide and focus sharply.

68 Sociology and Mass Culture Presumably, however, if Mills can distinguish himself from Parsons, he will offer some version of exemplary perspectival rendering in his textual strategies and rhetorical style. Equally prevalent in the academic sociology of Mills's time is what he calls 'abstracted empiricism,' an inductive research technique that he sees as distorting social scale and perspective, although in the other extreme. Mills notes that the favoured object of such empirical study is 'public opinion' (1959:51), but that neither the meaning of 'the public,' 'opinion,' nor their relation is formulated in this work. In his attack, he mimics their own superficial and tautological definition: 'The word public, as I am going to use it, refers to any sizable aggregate and hence may be statistically sampled' (1959:51). Here Mills concurs with Hannah Arendt that opinion is, in its traditional meaning, already a public thing, in that opinion is a particular orientation to a collective of which one claims to be an articulate member. And although these sociologists appear to measure public opinion, in fact, they really measure and encourage a kind of private sentiment by trying to get at opinion in isolation from the larger question of the type of public life it serves. Mills points out that voting behaviour is often a central concern of the abstracted empiricist, as if the public constituted in a democracy is made plain in the periodic choices individuals make from a list of candidates or as if the nature of public opinion were reducible to the 'citizen' or 'voter.' It is intriguing to ask why these researchers became so interested in public opinion and why they defined it so narrowly. From an ideological position, one could suggest that the moral singularity of their 'man on the street' was just that — the constructed appearance of a homogeneous, middle-class, white, male America that came to represent the public (and a particular mode of opining). But more importantly it can also be seen as an attempt to get hold of the malaise that such opinion implicitly reported, that is, opinion's longing for the public that it might function within. As Mills discusses, such studies were typically a-historical and noncomparative, and although Mills sees this as their most serious shortcoming, it may also indicate that the abstracted empiricists knew at some level that they were studying a public (and a version

Mills's Promise 69 of opinion) that was historically unique, such that temporal and cross-cultural comparisons would not necessarily be appropriate. In Mills's words, the 'publics' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were replaced in the twentieth century by the 'masses' (1959:52). Undoubtedly, the scale of 'mass' public opinion polling speaks to this qualitative difference, that is, opinion has come to live within the realm of mass culture. It is as if the empiricists' interest in public opinion showed a kind of 'unconscious' intuition that this arena was crucial, without fully understanding why. As was the case with Parsons's 'grand theory,' this 'abstracted empiricism' does nothing, according to Mills, to address the problems and possibilities presented by this cultural change, but like its counterpart, it embodies the malaise of the culture without knowing that it does so. Mills suggests that sociological representations often run parallel to opinion or even common sense, serving only to reflect and reinforce its mode of reasoning. Narrative Promise

In the second half of The Sociological Imagination, Mills moves from the 'habitual distortions' of the sociological promise back to the promise itself. Here he recommends that the problem of the sociological rendering of social scale and perspective be met with a particular narrative practice, or more exactly, that two types of narrative be brought together. Thus, his explicit formula for the sociological imagination: 'The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise' (1959:6). Mills sees biography and history as working together in such a way that the individual(ized) self-account is made cogitable with the temporal self-account of the collective. Of course, Mills is not suggesting that history and biography are narratives that need to be invented by sociology; he is arguing that these two particular narrative traditions need be more fully 'grasped' and exploited in his time, and that the place to start is by re-establishing sociology's own hidden or forgotten narrative tradition. Mills seems quite aware that as much as it may protest to the contrary in its own

70 Sociology and Mass Culture official self-account, social scientific inquiry is inseparable from narrative - when it is treated, as de Certeau puts it, as 'one of its parts ("case studies," "life stories," stories of groups, etc.) or as its counterpoint (quoted fragments, interviews, "sayings," etc.)' (1984:78). Narrative is generally agreed to be one of the most basic and universal of human practices (Barthes, 1977; White, 1980), and even 'the central function or instance of the human mind' (emphasis in original, Jameson, 1981:13). Durkheim had proposed that collectives are by definition inherently selfnarrating and cannot pre-exist their telling. As discussed earlier, a Durkheimian analysis finds that not only the 'content,' but the 'form' of particular narrative practices characterizing a group indicate the type of imaginary relations it establishes with its own social order, that is, it shows how the collective makes sense of itself and re-inscribes itself over time. Presumably then biographical and historical narratives tell us something about the collectives that practise them. Mills does not explicitly formulate the idea of narrative either as a literary or social practice (in fact, he treats both biography and history as themselves beyond direct inspection). He does, however, provide a version of sociological knowledge whose validity escapes the criteria of an entirely rationalist life-world, being rooted instead in persuasion and rhetorical influence. In short, sociological accounts must ring true for those who hear them.8 Indeed, the validity of any story lies not necessarily in its correspondence to the real world, but in its internal coherence and recognizability and in its capacity to satisfy and provide meaning, which is one of Mills's primary concerns. Even the coherence of a story is not dependent on it being completed and then judged after the fact of telling. While a narrative is by definition a story with a beginning, middle, and end, the storyteller is not required to have fashioned the end of the story from the outset to begin to speak. He or she needs only to be able, in principle, to bring it to an end. In fact, while closure is part of the structure of narrative, it can be indefinitely deferred or promised (as evidenced in serialized stories, which will be discussed later). The ritual pattern of the telling is itself its most important social function. Ultimately,

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narrative does not seek just to describe or reproduce real or imagined events: 'Its discourse is characterized more by way of exercising itself than by the thing it indicates. And one must grasp a sense other than what is said. It produces effects, not objects' (de Certeau, 1984:79). What then are these narrative effects? How do these effects redress the malaise that Mills discusses? While closure and description are only imperfectly achieved by narrative, narrative does situate human experiences in time and place, if only in the vague form of 'once upon a time there was a people who ...' One could, therefore, think of Mills's narration beginning something like this: 'Once there was a people who named themselves "social. "'This much he will say, but whether this people will thrive or decline under their totem is left to be said (perhaps not by him, but in a continuing tradition of stories about the social). All Mills can promise is to keep the storytelling alive - this much he is sure is essential to the collective life of any people - and to make this narrative desire apparent to itself. It is this goal that distinguishes the sociological promise from the promises made by expert and self-help literatures. Mills resists providing oversimplified and contextually limited advice to his readers. He does not provide them with any one identity or inevitable connection with history, rather he points to the narrative agency of all social actors. Mills's promise also helps explain his own rhetorical choices. Although he relies on empirical (including statistical) data in his investigations, his texts are primarily narrative, detailing the adventures of ordinary individuals coping with the forces that impinge on their daily lives. Presumably, for Mills, the fragmentation and surreality of mass society is both expressed and perpetuated in the statistic, and hence sociological writers are caught in the bind of having to study the mass as mass (i.e., study the selfrepresentations inherently linked to the appearance of the mass), but then intervene strategically to represent the members of this mass audience to themselves as characters of a heroic or antiheroic adventure. Hence, Mills's White Collar, a collection of sketches of various white-collar lives, begins with a review of literary representations of this 'new cast of actors' (1951:ix). As noted earlier in

72 Sociology and Mass Culture my discussion of Durkheim's use of state-generated statistics, the empirical measurement always tacitly tells a story about a group that imagines itself to be thus representable. By Mills's time the ambivalence towards this collective representation is starting to be felt, just as academic sociology fully embraces large-scale, computer-analysed statistical studies commissioned by corporate, governmental, and military agencies. Part of Mills's resistance to this trend is evidenced in his attempt to tell a good story. But, of course, the apparent agelessness and universality of narrative does not ipso facto put it beyond question. Modern narrative practices must be treated to the same scrutiny as statistical representation. Mills is found asserting the value of the popular novelistic and journalistic narratives that work up biographical and historical issues just as narrative is also beginning to be critically inspected and its authority challenged. More recent debates about the cultural value of narrative point to a full-blown epistemological crisis around this most general form of selfknowing and self-naming: 'So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematic only in a culture in which it was absent - absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused' (White, 1980:5). Hayden White goes on to argue that this questioning of narrative is not necessarily a loss on all counts. Our modern narrative practices are historically particular, he argues, and hence as representations are complicit with the promotion of certain versions of reality. Particular narrative traditions (especially intellectual and literary ones) are stubbornly exclusive of certain speakers and prejudiced towards narrow understandings of the narrative subject. Consequently, Mills's recommendation of biographical and historical narrative should be examined with White's caveats in mind. Let us first consider Mills's recommendation towards biographical storytelling. Popularized in the seventeenth century, the modern biography was commissioned or authorized by a public man who sought to monumentalize himself by casting a heroic image

Mills's Promise 73 in a text (Epstein, 1987:71). Whatever private details were authorized emphasized a coherence of desire and reality and of purpose and achievement. Any ambiguity between speaking of oneself and creating one's public image was often covered over for the sake of monumental integrity and strength. Autobiographies, too, even confessional ones, share this Enlightenment understanding of the exemplary and integral life, and depend on certain prejudices towards linearity, closure, historicism, and the autonomous subject. In her review of the critical literature, Candace Lang has collected three romantic elements of life-story that lie behind autobiography: (1) a unified and unique self that precedes society, culture, and language; (2) a distinction of fact and fiction, and of true and false; and (3) a constant human nature that is articulated through the communication that language allows (Lang, 1982). Lang asks that one consider the implications for the practice of self-account when the confident distinction between the precultural subject and language is threatened. She claims that where autobiography begins to fall apart is the place to turn away from this traditional speaking subject and recall the collaborative quality inherent in the notion of the 'I.' For Lang, the autobiographical author does not stand in opposition to her audience - instead the project itself recollects or 'reads' past attempts to speak and act in the world, where one is only able to recollect these attempts by disturbing the subject/other distinction. The T that is forged has always depended on another who is willing to speak about the speaker historically, and allow her or him to speak about the autobiographer historically. Lang does not suggest, however, that unmasking the romantic subject means accepting the postmodern death of the subject, it simply invites a new subtlety and irony to the speaking 'I.' Moreover, theorists of race, class, and gender politics question the loss of the autobiographical subject in a world where privileged and articulate cultural theorists are willing to decree its death, while other decentred groups are struggling to speak from a still centred social stage. It seems merely another version of the same nasty ruse to offer this opportunity for so long and then retract it

74 Sociology and Mass Culture without warning. But, of course, it was this illusion of a static centre that encouraged such silence and oppression by demanding that speakers throw their energies into a necessarily frustrating, if not futile, project that made speech contingent upon race, gender, and class. As Lang puts it: 'While it is undeniable that a traditional concept of autobiography as the self-revelation of a transcendent subject cannot survive the disappearance of that subject, there is no reason to suppose that a radically altered notion of subjectivity cannot engender a radically altered conception of autobiography, disencumbered of even that nostalgia for a pre-cultural self (emphasis in original, Lang, 1982:5). Such a self-account, or account of another, would have to begin to formulate the speaking subject in language rather than a subject of language, that is, it would become more consciously the project of recommending oneself to others as an example of freedom grounded by necessity, language, and society, instead of staking one's authorization on standing outside of such conditions. It is not surprising then that studies of autobiographical accounts produced by those traditionally excluded from this practice (because of illiteracy, inaccessibility of public arenas, or being considered to lack the exemplary life and rational faculties necessary to the task) have been used by theorists to work up stronger versions of autobiographical and biographical narrative (Benstock, 1988; Cormack, 1999; Epstein, 1987; Lang, 1982; Vincent, 1981). These versions illustrate that self-account is not a matter of simply recalling and recounting one's life, but is the task of making intelligible a recollection that is inherently disjointed and contradictory. Those for whom the traditional account remains an impossibility produce self-accounts that describe a lifelong struggle to become articulate and intelligible under discursive conditions that simultaneously demand and deny participation. In other words, these self-accounts most explicitly formulate telling in the midst of doing it, and hence highlight what is true of all storytelling, that is, that the desire for narrative coherence and closure is both inherent to telling yet ultimately deferred by it. Mills understood that the intelligibility he was attempting to produce was not vouchsafed by a return to the romantic subject,

Mills's Promise 75 but instead by linking the individual self-account with the collective self-account (historical narrative), and formulating the conditions of their co-existence. With a markedly postmodern sensibility Mills distances himself from the Enlightenment ideals informing these traditions: 'The liberals and the radicals of The Modern Period have generally been men who believed in the rational making of history and of his own biography by the free individual' (1959:167). Reason, he argues, has held too much ideological sway in all modern collective and individual accounts - including liberalism, socialism, and Freudianism9 - which tend to imagine the resolution of conflict and ambiguity by delivering its subjects into rationality. As the condition for freedom, reason has become increasingly suspect as it has unwaveringly mutated into the rationalized society. Even narrative has been rationalized towards the endless production of stories about individual lives, often created without their subjects being aware of their existence or privy to their content, as in the case of medical and psychiatric records, credit ratings, academic files, and classified government dossiers. Mills concludes that new epistemological models are necessary, as 'our old expectations and images are tied down historically' (1959:166). And among these historically limited images are historical images themselves. Certainly Mills is renowned for having put great value on historical consciousness, condemning all ahistorical and noncomparative sociology. And yet, he sees its narrative traditions as in need of re-evaluation. As the 'organized memory of mankind' history faces the same challenges as biography - that is, it is constrained by its own bad habits, and is 'enormously malleable' (1959:144). But as was the case with biography, Mills's concern is not so much with its scientific validity, with its absolute water-tight argumentation, but with its cultural relevance. Instead of telling about the fantasy of the autonomous individual, history tells about the fantasies of the collective: 'There is no more significant pointer to the character of a society than the kind of history it writes or fails to write' (Carr, 1961:43). Indeed, the autonomous individual finds its counterpart in the great men or 'Bad King John' theory of history (Carr, 1961:45), which is little more than biographical

76 Sociology and Mass Culture heroes acting and reacting to each other in intrigues of conquest, betrayal, and alliance. And like biography, historiography is, at its best, still tightly linked to the nineteenth-century traditions, including at least a cumulative, progressive, causal, and historicist understanding of human temporal life, and at its worst a nostalgia for metaphysical explanation ('Absolute Spirit,' 'Manifest Destiny,' 'The White Man's Burden,' etc.). White finds fault even in the very practice of telling history as a story, arguing that uncritical narration is inappropriate for the portrayal of real events. Pointing out that historical accounts have not always been narrative - they were preceded in the West by chronicles and annals he charges that the desire for completeness, meaning, and plot imposes an order on the past that it does not inherently possess. He goes on to contend that chronicles and annals can be easily defended as equally accurate accounts of real events. In fact, they avoid many of the organizing structures of narrative and its ultimate moralizing conclusion that history tells us something or means something (1980). Although White recommends 'getting out of history' (1982), his critique stops short of condemning all historical narrative. Like Lang's attempt to save biography, White provides the opportunity to inspect the versions of agency and human recollection that the tradition promotes in spite of itself. In parallel with biography theorists, contemporary social historians have turned increasingly to the collective self-recollections of those groups typically left out of, or not consulted in, the standard historical record. Such social historians do more than consult and examine the texts and artefacts of ordinary people; they attempt to formulate the type of collective consciousness that these narratives embody, even if these accounts seem at first glance to attest to little more than coping, getting by, or making do. In short, although autobiography and history are narrative habits that are culturally imposed and delineated by tradition, they indicate a particular imaginative formulation of the individual and collective life and their interrelation. Rather than deciding on their ultimate validity as representations of reality, Lang and White remind us that it is more interesting to ask: What type of social actor imagines herself or himself as autobiographi-

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cal? Or, what type of collective imagines itself by way of historical narrative? In social-historical research, E.P. Thompson sets the tone for this type of inquiry by insisting that before reified notions such as 'class' exist for anyone (social scientists or workers themselves) there is only a series of seemingly unrelated struggles.10Someone must impose a common theme or story that ties struggles together and points to their apparent inevitability, necessity, and resolution in the future (1968).11 Left uncollected, the meaning of earlier action could be lost and the fiction of an unconscious or preconscious working class could be perpetuated. For Thompson, the story of the working class (or more correctly the working class's story or self-'making') is the tale of its always already selfconscious action: 'The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making' (Thompson, 1968:8). To the extent that workers do not yet take themselves as a class, class does not exist; the class that comes into existence is not produced by material conditions, but by workers' actions within these conditions. In such a formulation, narrative now starts to sound more like class-consciousness rather than a conservative and stultifying myth that limits human imagination. Thompson achieves this insight by assuming that narrative is not the description of a reality, but the enactment of an imagination. Similarly, if in autobiographical self-account the life's story cannot be formulated as pre-existing its telling, then autobiography is a mode of individual identity open to sociological investigation. In fact, this understanding of the autobiographical subject appears in sociological literature as early as Weber's classic account of the Protestant mind - the story of a character who is himself an ideal-typical autobiographical subject. As Weber tells it, the Protestant is a kind of hopeful hero who exerts a strange autobiographical agency in the face of the ultimate decrees of a transcendental and unknowable God. This individual articulates, by his actions, the preordained life he is meant to lead. But this is not a life that is simply suffered (like the inevitable cycle of sin and atonement in the Roman Catholic Church, as described by Weber) or that guarantees one's place in the next world; it does no

78 Sociology and Mass Culture more than articulate or reveal all that is already inalterably set out for this world and the next. One is either saved or damned, and every action in this world is only a sign indicating that destiny. For this Protestant, such a life is not like a narrative, it is the narrative embodiment and enactment of God's will for God's pleasure. And the narrative closure that requires a beginning, an end, and a coherent line of action in the middle is authorized by this God as one individual's life-story. The language adopted to explain this experience points to its uniqueness - replacing the universal icon employed by Catholicism is the personal and particular sign of one's salvation. Hence, all action must become a hopeful semiotics for the Protestant because to look for signs of damnation is itself an indication of faithlessness and damnation. And it is specifically in one's life-task or calling that this story is set, moving the exemplary or heroic figure away from that of the saint and towards the everyday, secular life, with all the coherence that characterizes narrative: 'The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined in a unified system (emphasis mine, Weber, 1958:17). The proof of one's state of grace lies in the consistency and regularity of one's work (Weber, 1958:161), a coherence whose aesthetic integrity as a strong narrative attests to 'the divine glory' (Weber, 1958:160). Such a Protestant life is inherently biographical, and presumably autobiographical, in Lang's sense of autobiography as 'the self-revelation of a transcendental subject' (1982:5).12 This economy of signs matches the Protestant's money economy where the sign is never 'cashed in' for a concrete, sensuous object of enjoyment, but is reinvested in production. For this Protestant, breaking the movement of signifiers (in this case, money) would throw him into the position of the condemned who find themselves outside the dynamic system of God's economy. Similarly, the literal autobiographical account of these Protestants (including that of Benjamin Franklin) reveals a personal relationship to God, and to one's task in the world, by way of a text that cannot break out of itself and into the broader community. Weber characterizes this new psychical condition as the 'unprecedented inner loneliness of this single individual' (1958:104). Under such conditions the Protestant becomes the obsessive and insatiable storyteller

Mills's Promise 79 (equalled only in his zeal as investor) because she or he can never sit back and claim to have finally discovered her or his fate, as the pause would itself be a fateful and damning sign. The personal and private life-story is the necessary boundary to the narrative, a limit that Mills would want to reconnect with public discourse. Nevertheless, what is most noteworthy about Weber's thesis is that this anxious and lonely storyteller unwittingly generates his own bourgeois possibilities by creating a cosmology in which capitalistic investment made sense. Certainly Thompson and Weber are both open to the charge that they have got things wrong - that they do not adequately or accurately reproduce the working-class and Protestant experiences. But what is so compelling, and ultimately useful about their formulations is that modern storytelling is studied as a rehearsal of agency in the face of determination (for the working class, the determinations of capital; and for the Protestant, the determinations of God), and that such storytelling works with and within what determines it. It appears then that so often such stories are about suffering not simply because the world is a vale of tears - a point that needs no repetition - but also because such stories are told to set the goal of withstanding rather than perpetuating and internalizing helplessness. In this sense, one may also conceive of traditional stories that recount long-past suffering (e.g., the stories of ancient Jewish slavery), not as victim ideologies as Nietzsche might suggest, but as stories about the collective importance of storytelling itself - stories of how faith and identity were maintained over generations of bondage. Such is the most promising form of a Utopian imaginary, that is, an imagination that acts not because closure and completion are posited in a future beyond human suffering, uncertainty, and contingency, but rather in a future that produces such visions of closure within them, or more precisely by way of them.13 Real and Surreal Narratives

It becomes plain at this point that Mills's promise of a popular sociological narrative is infused by the tension between understanding this practice as a self-conscious, dynamic, and Utopian

80 Sociology and Mass Culture imaginary, and understanding it as a faithful, mimetic representation of the real. This dual tendency is parallelled in the mood of his text as Mills moves from a perhaps overly hopeful beginning (with his formulaic prescription that the two levels of experience, the personal and social structural, could be met by two narratives that would wholly describe them, and his promise that a kind of middle range or averaged figure could be arrived at, that is, the sociological denomination) to a despairing conclusion that virtually gives up recovering a vibrant public sphere where social issues could be addressed with the help of social scientists (1959:190). It is as if he knows, at some level, that description does not exhaust the sociological discursive promise in his era, and that it must provide more than 'lucid summations of what is going on in the world.' But it would be misleading and irresponsible to assign this tension to Mills alone, as if it were his particular and unique limitation, especially given that my discussion is framed by the hypothesis that the literary, ontological, and epistemological issues that haunt modernity can also be located in the sociological project. Accordingly, it is pertinent to recall that high literary realism - defined by Erich Auerbach as 'a serious representation of everyday social reality against the background of a constant historical movement' (1953:518) - first appears with the novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, and has more or less drawn to a close by about 1940. In his classic analysis of the literary representation of reality in western culture, Auerbach explains that realism appeared in France after the Revolution as part of a nascent and general sociological interest in everyday life. Although, in its earliest manifestations, realist literature focused on the details of the new bourgeois class, it quickly 'had to embrace the whole reality of contemporary civilization, in which to be sure the bourgeoisie played a dominant role, but in which the masses were beginning to press threateningly ahead as they became ever more conscious of their own function and power' (1953:497). Auerbach concludes his study by pointing to signs of a realist decline by the beginning of the First World War, arguing that the uncertainty and conflict of this era made the realist narrative

Mills's Promise 81 unsatisfying as a representation of the human condition. Instead 'certain writers (notably, Joyce and Woolf) ... find a method which dissolves reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness' (1953:551). This subjectivism (of the characters, not the authors) indicates for Auerbach a shift in the experience of reality on the part of the culture as a whole and a decline in the faith in the reproducibility of external reality in language. Consequently, he discovers in these novels 'something hostile to the reality which they represent' (1953:551). Other commentators explain the decline of realism in less forgiving terms. Novelist Tom Wolfe notes that realism had given American literature world-class status in the 1930s and charges that it is only laziness and self-absorption on the part of contemporary novelists that prevents the realist genre from re-emerging (1989). Admitting that he fully expected a plethora of American realist novels describing the sweeping social changes of the 1960s, Wolfe wonders why novelists neglected to tell these stories. Wolfe notes that the common explanation and defence provided by novelists for their lack of interest in realism is that reality itself is more absurd, shocking, and implausible than novelists could expect their audiences to accept. Citing the usual fare of American news stories, Wolfe does acknowledge the challenge ('What novelist would dare dream up such crazy stuff and then ask you to suspend your disbelief?'), but then argues that the contemporary world is no less fragmented and chaotic than it was when Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, and John Steinbeck wrote their prize-winning novels. Wolfe concludes that novelists want to avoid the onerous labour of researching and rendering the realist account, leaving this work to journalists who then produce texts of more lasting literary value. Mills's texts also register the increasing difficulty of producing a plausible and realistic account in a world where the power elite rests comfortably in the fact that geopolitical reality is stranger than fiction. Like Wolfe, he takes this problem as evidence of all the more reason to defend realism. For him this challenge is probably most acutely felt in his attempts to sketch the strange and covert world of corporate and military intrigue for his Ameri-

82 Sociology and Mass Culture can audience without appearing as a mad conspiracy theorist or as a subversive. It is not surprising, then, that Mills concludes The Sociological Imagination with an appendix entitled 'On Intellectual Craftsmanship,' where he discloses his own methods of sociological writing, and where his promise is renewed in the exemplary nature of the sociological utterance itself. Mills, the populist and cartoonist, reappears in this appendix, as he lays down his methods for 'stimulating the sociological imagination.' In keeping with his distaste for the conditions of both the white-collar and bluecollar labour of his era, Mills calls for a sociological practice that models itself on premodern artisan handicraft, where refined skill, attention, and patience are all necessary in the production of the crafted object. Here again sociology's hand or 'manus' shows itself — the slap of the manifesto has become the trained and caring touch of dexterous manipulation and traditional manufacture. And these crafted sociological works of prose exemplify a productive practice that they, in turn, recommend to the broader culture as self-conscious labour, as one's mode of reasoning is inherently related to its production. Mills includes in his list of guidelines emptying out and rearranging of one's file contents so that the possibilities of fresh intellectual connections between materials can be made. Such a method of reasoning relies on the random juxtaposition and play with fragmentary elements that are related without a pre-existing reason for their meeting, that is, there is no implicit nomenclature or taxonomy that orders them. Another guideline is 'an attitude of playfulness toward the phrases and words with which various issues are defined' (1959:212), achieved, he says, by way of word association and dictionary exercises. A third on his list is 'deliberately inverting your sense of proportion' (1959:215) by imagining the very large phenomenon to be small and vice versa. In reference to this last recommendation, Mills confesses that he sometimes inhabits 'an imagined world in which I control the scale of everything' (1959:215). But how then do these guidelines encourage realist prose when they seem to move in just the opposite direction? If anything, they appear to encourage dada and surreal montage. Perhaps the surreal and subjective image may be both the problem and the

Mills's Promise 83 solution to the challenges of Mills's time. While the surreality of ordinary life was the primary symptom of its general malaise, in that ordinary objects could not be named and related in a satisfactory way by those who encountered them, the distortion, rearrangement, and playful employment of familiar objects was to create an opening in the popular imagination that the 'mass public' tended to foreclose in the seamless movement of its productive techniques and codes. Mass, mechanized production obscures the human hand that makes its products, including the manus that makes cultural objects like opinion. Hence, its productive logic is not available to those who try to use their opinions in public life. Mass opinion seems to originate from nowhere and to serve nothing, while at the same time instances of its measurement increase. The playful, popular use of ideas and images, on the other hand, allows a kind of caricatured rearrangement of commonsensical reasoning and the representation of opinion to itself. As previously noted, Mills embraces literary licence and the 'fictional' side of the sociological representation in the exaggerated 'ideal-typical' characters, artefacts, and institutions that populate his stories. Think of his wondrous 'descriptions' of white-collar offices, department stores, and buildings. Think of his characters who inhabit these worlds. Indeed, if any sociological writer could convince us that objects, and institutions could stand up and walk, or speak to us directly about themselves, it would be Mills. This is not to argue that Mills fails as a realist writer. It is only to suggest that the descriptive project is not at odds with the Utopian imaginary. As Michel Beaujour has argued, description - especially the description of ordinary and taken-for-granted objects 'defamiliarizes' objects, in that attention is drawn sharply towards them (1981:36). By tracing descriptive devices back to their ancient employment, Beaujour finds description classically bound to influence, persuasion, and emotion in rhetorical speech, and concludes that description, far from being a disinterested and objective enterprise, is visionary and allegorical. As allegory, description brings objects and actors into view to speak indirectly about something else, combining 'a sensual signifier and an ethical meaning' (1981:32). Descriptive sociological accounts under-

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stood as allegory again take on a quality of collective representations that show how the moral order appears in 'sensual' iconography. Description, even the most sober realist description, no better solves the problem of the unmediated representation of social life. Ultimately, it too locates the problematic representational character of the 'social.' Mills's Social Formulated as such, the sociological 'promise' looks quite different from the fully descriptive account. By way of its allegorical and narrative qualities, we have seen that it is itself an investigation of the process of image-making and opinion as they function in midtwentieth-century America. Unfortunately, however, Mills's academic readers often hold him to a different standard of academic speech - one that makes the sociological imagination stand outside of a serious consideration of image-making. As Irving Horowitz (1983) notes in his survey of the literature, The Sociological Imagination received generally good reviews in the popular American press, while in academic journals the text was met with both generous and harsh criticism (the most infamous example of the latter remaining Shils's vicious and somewhat ad hominem attack in Encounter). In the academy, The Sociological Imagination (with its undisguised assaults on colleagues even within Mills's own department at Columbia University) was the signal for what many experienced as a generational war between the old guard and younger scholars. Understanding this text as the icon and rallying point for a generation helps account for the somewhat sentimental rereadings that have emerged more recently. In a thirtieth-anniversary symposium on The Sociological Imagination, Norman Denzin angrily charges that Mills lets down a whole generation of sociologists by producing a text that 'manipulates' its readers. He then bemoans the loss of his generation's canonical 'hero' who apparently should have been above the representational problems of description, narration, and voice: 'The Sociological Imagination is a work of Mills's imagination. In it he thinks and writes vaingloriously and

Mills's Promise 85 constructs images and pictures of society, men and history which are real only in so far as they exist in his text' (Denzin, 1989:278). In this formulation, Mills's images and pictures are seen as distortions of the reality they are meant to reflect, and Mills's imagination equals the production of textual fictions. Presumably, Denzin is not suggesting that sociology works outside of the production of images and pictures, but that these renderings can and should wholly describe social reality. This raises three related and important questions: (1) What would such a fully descriptive sociological account look like? (2) What type of existing sociological accounts do this? and (3) Why would this fully descriptive account, if it exists at all, be of more value than those generated by Mills? Would it be more accurate? More compelling to the reader? More intelligible? More practical? Along similar lines, Denzin characterizes Mills's narrative as 'unethical,' 'totalizing,' and 'totalitarian.' He contends that Mills textually constructs the 'little' people he discusses as a foil to his own privileged voice, never allowing them to speak for themselves. Certainly, Mills's texts are not noted for their ample use of quotations from ordinary speakers. Given Mills's most fundamental claim that ordinary experiences are unintelligible for most of his readers, one can begin to make sense of Mills's refusal to collect and reflect ordinary life. Moreover, ordinary people already know their experiences as unintelligible. Mills offers, instead, his own renderings, or textual interventions in the everyday, in the hope that his exaggerations, metaphors, and allegories will be recognizable and stimulating to his readers. Put another way, he takes up entertaining tropes that caricature everyday experiences. Mills's descriptions are 'totalizing' only in the sense that Mills creates dramatic and hyperbolic images that allow his reader to look at everyday experience from a unique angle. In short, Mills is no more (and no less) than a skilled artisan trying to produce words that will have an effect on his time. Indeed, sociologists might take a cue from the more general reading public on this point. While ordinary readers have never felt it necessary to lionize any sociologist, they have nevertheless occasionally thrown a sociological text onto the bestsellers' list. Presumably Mills's

86 Sociology and Mass Culture wider reading public did not receive his texts as soberly as Denzin, but saw Mills's devices, for example, the 'big' and the 'small' social actor, as metaphors for their own existential positions. For Mills, what is important is not that these actors are small, but that they feel small in their daily lives. Another scholar in this thirtieth-anniversary review situates Mills's texts on a continuum running from the sociological to the popular, suggesting that they were aimed at a popular audience and were less committed to academic sociology (McQuarie, 1989:291). While this case can easily be made, as Mills did seem to aim certain texts at academic practitioners and others at a broader a public, it overlooks Mills's attempt to understand and develop the relation between popular culture and academic culture. As discussed earlier, Mills's most basic historical hypothesis is that discursive influence was working in two directions in his era, as sociological signifiers circulated through journalistic and fictional prose and back into academic prose (or at least some of it). Rather than resisting this historical shift as a threat to the integrity of social scientific work, Mills takes from these genres their commitment to intelligibility and marries this to a scholarly commitment to cultural self-reflection (a challenge that journalists and novelists can take less seriously). One charge against Mills does stick, however. As bravely as he tries to fight the nihilist undertow characterizing his time (by showing the realist and surrealist, the objective and the subjective to work together to resist the cultural malaise of mass culture), it is questionable whether popular culture and public opinion are to be saved by way of this technique. As James Porter (1994) argues in his timely rereading of Mills, The Sociological Imagination was written by a thinker who feels the cultural conditions of postmodernity, but attempts to articulate solutions in the language of modernity, that is, in metaphors of individual mastery, comprehensive view, and rational control. This theoretical imagery serves ultimately only to frustrate his theoretical reach and points to the irony of Mills's project. While he could see (and even represent) the cultural conditions of his time, he was very much subject to the dominant cultural themes in which he worked.

Mills's Promise 87 Certainly, Mills has served in this discussion as a pivot between two eras for which the representational possibilities are radically different (the so-called modern and postmodern eras). But as has been discussed, through his promise of a culturally pragmatic biographical and historiographical narrative imagination, Mills shows the relevance of representation for sociological thought. More saliently, he also argues for sociological and everyday representations of reality that leave a remainder, that is, that 'fail' to capture experiences and realities in a total, final, and satisfying way. The fuller significance of this act of situating the sociological in narrative will be seen in the following chapter.

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Chapter Four

Baudrillard's Silence

Technology of a Silent Social Let us tenderly recall the unbelievable naivety of social and socialist thinking, for thus having been able to reify as universal and to elevate as ideal of transparency such a totally ambiguous and contradictory worse, such a residual or imaginary - worse, such an already abolished in its very simulation - 'reality': the social. Baudrillard (1983:86)

Considering the above quotation within the context of this discussion, one is at once struck by Jean Baudrillard's apparent insistence, contra Durkheim and Mills, that the 'ambiguous,' 'contradictory,' and 'imaginary' nature of sociology's interest weakens its case rather than constituting its representational condition. For Durkheim the social stood as modernity's unique, incomplete, and necessarily paradoxical form of collective self-representation and self-scrutiny - a tension textually enacted in his internally contradictory manifesto experiment. For Mills the sociological imaginary functioned within popular and even mass discourse to remind us of the essentially Utopian and narrative basis of collective life - registered in his own text as the competing pulls between realist and surrealist prose. In short, ambiguity and contradiction are not simply historical conditions facing these two thinkers. Ambiguity and contradiction are, more saliently, textu-

90 Sociology and Mass Culture ally nurtured by Durkheim and Mills as they understand sociology to call out, display, and explore these (collective) representational possibilities. Yet, this is not what Baudrillard finds in the sociological project. While one might be inclined to conclude from Baudrillard's above complaint that he is promoting a sociology that is unambiguous, non-contradictory, and referential, he clearly argues that it is just the attempt on sociology's part to mirror and faithfully describe an empirical social world that forces its own eventual demise - what Baudrillard calls the 'implosion' of both sociological speech and its referent, the social. For Baudrillard the sociological participates in the technological rather than discursive code of the modern era, a technology that seeks to reflect reality without distortion or remainder. Hence, Baudrillard's ungenerous eulogy to sociological thought only thinly disguises his contempt for a mode of reasoning that, he concludes, absurdly destroys itself by way of both its own entirely innocent representational logic and its commitment to a sterile referent. The social is ultimately a sterile referent because it participates in a cultural logic that perpetuates, yet continually covers, its instrumental and technical conception of the human experience. Hence, Baudrillard's anti-sociological gesture amounts to much more than questioning the relevance or validity of contemporary academic sociological research. It is also a discussion of the culture constituted by way of sociological reason, a discussion that in general defines the sociological more broadly than just the literature found in published scholarly texts or even academic massmedia commentary. Along with Durkheim and Mills, Baudrillard sees the social as the hallmark and ultimate manifestation of modernity's general imaginary. In fact, of the three authors considered in this discussion, Baudrillard is most overtly concerned with treating the sociological as a collective representation, with the investigation of its place within popular and mass cultures, and with its influence on the functioning of public action. Across all of Baudrillard's varied texts, it is this issue of representation that is always paramount - specifically, western historical periods as defined and delineated by their representational logics and the constellation of interrelated concepts that accompany them. Spe-

Baudrillard's Silence 91 cifically, for Baudrillard intellectual language indicates the more general imaginative order and the representational issues of a particular era. What distinguishes Baudrillard from Durkheim and Mills is that while the social is agreed to be entirely imaginary (it does not exist beyond its cultural usage), it is also inevitably and necessarily lost on sociological reasoning itself. The sociological is that which is animated by an earnest faith in the 'reality principle' and naively reifies the social. It is a representational practice that closes down the possibilities for imaginative public culture and significant social change. The ultimate manifestation of sociological reason lies not in prose (manifesto, narrative, or otherwise), but in its more or less apparent technology of nondiscursive representation. Behind all sociological discourse lies the desire to capture and domesticate collective life by way of representing it in absolute, discrete, and decisive ways. In stark opposition to Durkheim, who found the social referent to be, by definition, inherently immune to full representation and therefore continually expanding beyond the simple mimetic reflection of the collective (displaying the modern desire for completion rather than completion itself), for Baudrillard there is no longer a gap between the sociological representation and the object it apparently represents. Late twentieth-century western culture has become thoroughly sociological to the extent of meaninglessness, that is, to the extent that the ongoing Durkheimian ironic and interpretive relation to the social is made impossible because there is no interpretive space between the totemic image and the group. Baudrillard explains that 'we've really gone beyond ... We're living, or soon will be living, the perfection of the social. Everything is here, heaven has come down to earth, the heaven of Utopia' (1990:71). For Baudrillard, this final turn of the sociological trope back on its object means the conflation of the image and referent in non-sense and the failed attempt at modern collective awareness that was promised in Durkheim's vision of group identity and moral integration. Unlike Mills, Baudrillard finds a version a mass sociological representation that fully neglects to enlighten the popular audience it cultivates. While Baudrillard does agree that the everyday

92 Sociology and Mass Culture actor is a spectator towards sociological images, it is not Mills's vicarious, inarticulate, and alienated spectator who more or less improperly fashions sociological representations that fail to nurture narrative desire. For Mills, the sociological spoke to, or with, its already formed mass audience, but for Baudrillard this audience is actually constituted and maintained by the spectacles provided in descriptive, statistically based sociological accounts. This produces an imagery that encourages nothing more than a mute, stupefied audience titillated by its own image, that is, the 'continual voyeurism of the group in relation to itself (1985:580). Compare this phrase with Durkheim's definition of collective representation: 'the way in which the group thinks of itself in its relationships with the objects which affect it' (1982:40). Now this intervening 'object' has been removed because for Baudrillard the sociological does not historically accompany the mass, but rather is part of what makes it. Moreover, as will be discussed, it is this very generation of information about the mass for mass consumption that ultimately leads to the critical impotence of sociological signification. In fact, it participates in the destruction of the local, the popular, the marginal, and the vernacular by promoting rapid-paced, immediate representations of collective sentiment and opinion, thereby encouraging common sense to be satisfied by the quickest and most efficient reflection of itself. To understand how Baudrillard can arrive at this apparently extreme position, one must understand first the reasoning that gradually leads him towards it and the epistemological issues that characterize his intellectual environment. It is important to note that Baudrillard comes to the death of the social and sociological by way of pursuing sociological investigations of what he takes as the central mechanism of late capitalism, that is, mass, consumer culture. Rather than beginning from outside as a critic, he thus finds himself only eventually located by way of his frustrated attempts to speak sociologically about phenomena that constantly slip away from the grasp of his inherited semiotic and Marxist conceptual tools. So, while Baudrillard certainly could be judged to describe the cultural and historical occurrences of sociological representation inaccurately, and undoubtedly journeys towards

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confounding epistemological and authorial locations, one cannot in good conscience dismiss him as either an insincere crank or a hostile stranger to sociological reasoning. Indeed, it can be argued that Baudrillard becomes estranged from the sociological as a result of his intimacy with it. This iconoclastic orientation leads Baudrillard farther and farther from rigorously established methodological statements and finely 'operationalized' concepts. Again, the refusal to locate discrete and reified methods and concepts speaks to epistemological questions he raises for sociology. As would be expected of such a writer, Baudrillard's readers divide roughly into two camps: those who grow frustrated with his extreme, difficult, rambling arguments, and those who grapple with his prose under the assumption that it was generated in good faith and says something about the collective imaginary of our time and the sociological enterprise. The majority of Baudrillard's serious readers (see especially Bogard, 1987; Gane, 1991a, 1991b; Singer, 1991) attempt to make sense of his general thesis (that the sociological becomes entirely equal with that which it seeks to represent) by tracing the trajectory of his published researches, a corpus that shows his relentless attacks on the reality/appearance metaphysic of western thought (an ontological prejudice that Baudrillard finds invested in everything from Marxism and psychoanalysis to semiotics and feminism). Baudrillard's earliest work demonstrates a commitment to the emancipationist projects of Left, critical theories of consumerism, but also an awareness of their theoretical limits (a wariness shared by his general cohort of post-1968 French intellectuals). This allows Baudrillard to criticize Marxism in The Mirror of Production for its metaphysical and binary logic (its 'anthropology of needs and use value' [1975:21]), as well as semiotics in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign for its similarly dualistic and foundationalist assumptions: signifier and signified are 'concepts emblazoned with the seal of signification' (1981:150). Baudrillard reasons that if, indeed, the goods and services of capitalist production were ever characterized by an essential underlying 'use value' (that directly corresponded to real human needs and was

94 Sociology and Mass Culture obscured by market exchange value equivalences) and by a material 'referent' (beyond the autonomous sign system of abstract global finance and mass advertising), then the 'code' of contemporary consumer society certainly ensures their end in the incessant generation and movement of signs. For Baudrillard, capitalism is not primarily a system of the production of material objects that serve needs, but rather a representational order and a system of consumption where the movement of material objects is really the movement of signs. This argument is clearly rooted in Thorstein Veblen's (1994) classic observation that individual consumers choose among 'conspicuous' signs in the attempt to establish identities and differentiate among themselves in terms of taste, status, prestige, and lifestyle. But Baudrillard then pushes this argument further to assert that there exists nothing beyond or beneath this system. The shortcoming of Marxist and semiotic theories is that they unwittingly provide what Baudrillard calls an 'alibi' for capitalism by defending the existence of a utilitarian referent which has, in fact, been killed by the capitalist code, while they also grossly underestimate the insidiousness and resilient nature of capitalism. Here Baudrillard is already beginning to link sociological assumptions about the representation of social reality (epistemology) and its conception of its audience (influence) with the contemporary cultural condition. Reading these early texts with a historicist eye, hints of Baudrillard's eventual position already become discernible. He argues (a la Marshall McLuhan) that the basis of this 'code' is a technology of rapid, informational images derived from an effortless and highly simplified binary structure of question/response, yes/no, 0/1 digitality, that is, the logic behind the statistically analysed survey or questionnaire, laboratory test, and political referendum. For Baudrillard this is becoming, or already is, the form of all collective representation and the basis of a dangerously non-dialogic, sophistic public opinion conditioned to participate in political life along the model of insipid consumerist decision-making (where the question itself has already prestructured the parameters of debate, reducing political action to a matter of choosing among a very limited set of only apparently

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diverse options). As spectacle, this takes on a kind of insatiable autoerotic quality for the culture it apparently represents: 'The people even enjoy day to day, like a home movie, the fluctuations of their own opinions in the daily opinion polls' (1986:37-8). In Durkheimian language, this code functions fully as a totemic, collective representation in the sense of its circular influence on the collective. But this is where the theoretical concurrence ends. While for Durkheim the modern collective representation is an open-ended, expanding possibility for self-reflection, for Baudrillard it is a preceded, closed circuit that inscribes itself more and more deeply as it functions. The dynamic, interpretive, and troping movement is, instead, a nightmarish mode of representation where the sheer volume and speed of information erodes meaning in direct proportion to the extent that it produces measures of social life (or more correctly, to the extent that it produces social measures of life). As such, 'communication has evolved from a complex syntactic structure of language to the probing of a binary signalling system: a perpetual test' (1984:68). In addition to this general consumerist code, Baudrillard identifies statistics as themselves tell-tale collective representations within the capitalist nation-state, and as instruments in the public and private bureaucratic administration of citizens. For him the statistic stands as the most treacherous form of information because it lends itself so well to the production of dense, high-speed media spectacles. And it is as a mass-mediated, informational, and statistical form of measurement that Baudrillard implicates sociology in this code, arguing that sociology, like Marxism and semiotics, inscribes the very code that it aims to criticize and counter. The sociological imaginary, as an encoded order that reinforces itself by testing and measuring its subjects, is for Baudrillard incontrovertibly implicated in the covert control and domestication that replaces traditional, crude, oppressive violence and direct coercion with the indirect, benevolent administration of ordinary life. Taking the 'social' as this representational order, with a corresponding moral order that it defends, he lists medicine, education, social security, and insurance among 'the institutions which have sign-posted the "advance of the social"' (1986:65). Further-

96 Sociology and Mass Culture more, 'the social sciences cap it off. Whence the piquancy of an expression like: "the responsibility of society vis-a-vis its underprivileged members," when we know the "social" is precisely the agency which arises from this dereliction' (1986:74). Described in these terms, this sociological 'gaze' seems to take on the terrifying qualities of a Foucauldian panopticon that defends social order by exerting its capacity to survey and observe without revealing itself to its subject, and ultimately by soliciting the enjoyment of its fully 'socialized' subject, that is, the actor who unconsciously and comfortably functions within the sociological. But, explains Baudrillard, this is the wrong way to understand it. Foucault's panoptic power describes only a much simpler order where the distinction between activity and passivity, between viewer and viewed, still holds true. Now power functions by way of enjoyment: 'No longer is there any imperative to submit to the model, or to the gaze. "YOU are the model!" "YOU are the majority!"' (1983:53). While Baudrillard comes close to suggesting that the sociological representation is ideological, in that it is a unidirectional and imposing discourse, he sees that this argument would fall back on the reality/appearance dichotomy that he sets out to overcome. Baudrillard rejects the concept of ideology because it implies that there is some referent that this representation only distorts or obscures and that effective demystification could lay bare. Instead, he argues far more radically that the sociological representation obscures only the lack of its own referent. The sociological, as the production of this code, participates in the simulation of the real or of a referent - what Baudrillard calls the 'hyperreal.' Unlike Mills's surreal image that distorts its referent, and playfully frustrates the 'realist' moment of sociological representation, the hyperreal simulation exploits realism by creating the semblance of a referent to distract from its disappearance. To illustrate what he means by hyperrealism, Baudrillard offers the example of simulating illness, explaining that to simulate an illness is not the same as feigning an illness because simulation actually produces all the appropriate symptoms (1983:5), making the distinction between real/imaginary and true/false irrelevant: 'As simulacra, images precede the real to the extent that they invert the causal

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and logical order of the real and its reproduction' (1987:13). As was the case with Marxian 'use value' and the semiotic 'referent,' the social may have had a reality at some point in western history, but certainly it no longer does. In fact, Baudrillard actually posits three mutually exclusive hypotheses about the social: (1) that it always existed as simulation (which is now breaking down), (2) that it exists and expands until it is everything, and (3) that it did exist as reality principle, but does not any more (1983:83). It was noted in the previous chapter that when the 'real' begins to outdo its representational possibilities by putting itself beyond credulity, the realist narrative loses favour as a modern artistic and literary convention. But rather than agreeing with Mills that this representational crisis is addressed by the surreal recollection of the real, or with Tom Wolfe that realism can be made to work if only writers become more intrepid researchers and skilled storytellers, Baudrillard argues that the hyperreal, 'sociological' interest historically wins out. Tracing the modern literary stages from realism to surrealism, and finally to hyperrealism, he suggests: 'The old saying, "reality is stranger than fiction," which belonged to the surrealist phase of the estheticization of life, has been surpassed. There is no longer a fiction that life can confront, even in order to surpass it; reality has passed over into the play of reality' (1984:72). Baudrillard argues that this process begins with the fetishized logic of realism itself (of which surrealism was still a part) and escapes its own problem of the inevitable disjunction between imaginary and real with an obsession for the referent, 'the real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself (emphasis in original, 1984:70). As extreme as Baudrillard's hypothesis may appear, the contemporary cultural landscape seems to lend it support. Think of the stories of origin that recur, for example, in apolitical, new-age literatures of health and spiritual well-being, religious cults, bornagain and fundamentalist Christianity, white-supremacy, Iron John masculinity and Real Women femininity, and in clinical and selfhelp therapies that focus almost exclusively on childhood trauma and victims. While these certainly are narratives, they are notable for their simplicity in that they lack the richness and complexity of

98 Sociology and Mass Culture stories that we find in traditional myths and ancient holy texts. Moreover, these narratives reference a simple (usually ahistorical and vaguely anthropological) starting point that the reader is predisposed to find and ultimately deliver herself or himself into. This starting point, and point of deliverance, involves a pure and reified referent like the real race, the real gender, the real spirit, or the real child. When this essence it located, the reader's everyday life will be made intelligible and meaningful. These narrative self-accounts are repeated in the individualized, autobiographical accounts given on talk shows, which have turned away from featuring political figures and celebrities to featuring the 'every person.' Or, as Baudrillard would put it, 'you' are the model and the spectacle simultaneously. These narratives lack the radical political vision of manifestos and the historical contextualization of Millsian narrative. Baudrillard's hypothesis of the hyperreal presentation of the real could also explain the increasing use of instant polling as part of television broadcasts (in which the audience becomes a spectacle to itself) and bits of statistical information ('factoids') to begin or conclude news coverage and social commentary. Perhaps most notable in this context is the explosion of'reality' television broadcasts and Internet websites (where ordinary people's everyday routines become open to twenty-four-hour inspection). All of these media practices - self-help literatures, talk shows, real TV, and factoids - rival older narrative forms like the 'escapist' American soap opera which is famous for its lack of realism (everyone is rich, no one works) and stability (while things happen in the story, characters and actors can remain on a show for forty years thanks to fierce viewer loyalty) (see Anger, 1999). The soap opera, which originated as serialized radio narrative, unfolds in excruciatingly slow and repetitive detail in a world that is preserved from the viewer's everyday experiences. As a practice, it is starkly oldfashioned, offering a comforting circular and repetitive narrative, familiar characters and places, and classic themes of love, friendship, family, trust, and betrayal. Within the contemporary cultural landscape, the soap opera is in pitched battle with the hyperreal spectacles on the generally shifting ground of entertainment and

Baudrillard's Silence 99 self-knowledge. In the case of the soap opera, the content of the narrative differs from ordinary life, the viewer is not reflected, and the unfolding of the narrative is relatively slow. In the case of the hyperreal spectacle, the content of the narrative is ordinary life, the characters are 'us,' and the story moves at the speed of the feedback system that animates it. These manifestations of the hyperreal are not limited, in Baudrillard's view, to television entertainment, individual therapy, or alternative lifestyles. The political realm, in general, also begins to lose out to the corrosive hyperreal. Traditional modern democratic representation, he suggests, relied on the elected member of parliament to represent (in a relatively indirect and mediated way) a constituency of citizens as a whole. This involved generating and sustaining debate over time around various policy issues and finally taking decisions as the result of this discussion as a whole. To say that this version of representation re-presents the opinion of constituents would mean that it introduces the general inclinations of the citizens into parliamentary debate. It introduces the principles and values of its constituents that do not necessarily show themselves by way of particular and highly restricted issues. In contrast, the newer highly sociological representation directly solicits the immediate, raw response of constituents to the question at hand by way of the technologies of polls and referenda. In Canada the spirit of this technology has been embraced and celebrated most extensively by the newer political parties. It has been best exemplified since the 1980s by the populist Reform Party of Canada (now the Canadian Alliance) and its version of'accountable' representation, where deliberate and plodding grass-roots populism is replaced by the instantaneous appearance of opinion in policy and law and for which parliamentary representatives are only mouthpieces. The Reform Party / Canadian Alliance promotes itself as highly democratic on the grounds that it can quickly and directly transform the sentiments of ordinary Canadians into parliamentary action, and it attacks its political foes on the grounds that they interpret or translate sentiments and inevitably misrepresent Canadians: 'We recognize there are issues so important to

100 Sociology and Mass Culture Canadians that direct public input is desirable. Therefore, we will introduce measures that allow citizens to initiate binding referenda. In addition, we will also seek the consensus of all Canadians through judicious use of national referenda, both on issues having significant implications for Canadian society and on proposed changes to the country's Constitution' (www.canadianalliance.ca). Significantly, the issues considered 'so important to Canadians' that 'binding referenda' are necessary are also highly contentious and emotional issues like abortion and capital punishment, usually understood as matters of 'opinion.' The effectiveness of this new political process is to be ensured by the immediate recall of parliamentary representatives who fail to perform their function: Tn order to make the elected representatives more accountable to constituents between elections, we will support recall initiatives permitting voters to petition for a by-election in their riding' (www.canadianalliance.ca). The underlying assumption of this version of popular representation is that political representatives need not be orators, leaders, or visionaries, but only messengers or vessels of opinion who are immediately removed from office when they fail to directly represent opinion. Similarly, the nationalist Parti Quebecois employs referenda questions to establish its mandate towards Quebec's sovereignty as an independent nation from Canada (or, more exactly, the negotiation towards sovereignty). Because the interpretation of the various referenda questions is never closed, the mandate that this government receives (even if the issue of the proportion of the population necessary for a mandate is itself resolved) is never ensured by the technology of the 'oui/non' question. Even if such a referendum is 'binding,' the implications of a 'oui' vote are not clear. Voters debate among themselves as to the meaning of voting 'oui' given the interpretation and negotiation necessary on the part of those charged with overseeing the move towards sovereignty. The referendum of 1995 resulted in a national television spectacle of a blue and red horizontal bar graph (representing the colours of Quebecois and Canadian nationalism, respectively) moving back and forth across its median line for hours. Under-

Baudrillard's Silence 101 stood in terms of Canadian iconography this image amounted to a kind of bizarre statistical hockey game witnessed by Canadians who cheered and booed as the median was taken, lost, and retaken. Both the futility and the absurdity of this process of historymaking was noted by audiences, who nevertheless where compelled to be witness to it. Media critics argue that the technologies of polls and referenda carry over into the broader political arena, obscuring what amounts to the death of the citizen. In Baudrillard's language, the citizen becomes a simulacrum. From this test/response model, voting itself takes on these qualities of choosing among a set list of candidates generated by a small, politically active segment of the population and the media itself. Critic Neil Postman asserts that 'voting ... is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster' (1985:69). Voting becomes an impotence because it is the final gesture of the loop of elicited opinion that is immediately fed back to respondents in the form of news. Opinion becomes a political spectacle to itself, and voting simply formalizes and legitimizes the process. Even contemporary textbooks on polling and survey design show an underlying nervousness about the political effects of their technologies. In Polls and Surveys, authors Norman Bradburn and Seymour Sudman align themselves with the tradition of American democracy by dedicating their book to 'the pioneers of public opinion research ... in particular to two giants George Gallup and Herbert Hyman' (1988:xii), and later quoting Gallup's 1940 book The Pulse of Democracy, that links mass-opinion measurement with the cultivation of informed opinion. On the other hand, Bradburn and Sudman state that the primary methodological stumbling block in poll and survey research is that 'respondents may not have any opinion at all about a topic - especially if they do not know much about it or are not interested in it' (1988:8). While Bradburn and Sudman do concede that polls and surveys are used by various groups arid political interests to shape and persuade opinion, apathy and ignorance themselves are not linked to the technologies of opinion that these researchers promote. Somehow the techniques of opinion measurement escape inspection as

102 Sociology and Mass Culture aspects of the practices of opinion, and shortcomings such as apathy are to be solved with the development of even more sophisticated measurement techniques. Ultimately, argues Baudrillard, this hyperreal stream of images equalizes everything from democratic politics to mass entertainment, conflating their differences in an obscene, collective selffascination that allows the most complex and morally pressing issues to be taken up in the format of polled responses and referenda. So, in the case of opinion, for example, the sociological representation (taken in this broadly cultural sense of the popular sorio-logicaC) does not represent opinion, but does the work of obscuring the lack of opinion in the nostalgic wish that opinion did still exist, that is, that it pre-existed the representational regime that makes it. What is left is only the incessant and frantic generation of a surface of signs, with no depth or perspective between the real and its representation: 'we will never in future be able to separate reality from its statistical, simulative projection in the media' (1985:580). Here we begin to see the striking and most salient differences between Durkheim's, Mills's, and Baudrillard's understandings of the unfolding of the modern collective imaginary and its representational practices. Durkheim and Baudrillard, for instance, both argue that modern cultures represent themselves differently from premodern cultures and that it is this difference that speaks of the social order characterizing each. But for Durkheim all forms of collective solidarity share a common representational mode, that is, the sociological, religious, and philosophical representations all contribute, in their own particular ways, to the functional integration of the collective at different points in western history. In simple terms, even the anomic culture of his time ultimately spoke of and to itself in a salutiferous manner. For Baudrillard, on the other hand, the modern collective may be distinguished from the premodern exactly by its representational peculiarity. In Millsian terms this means that the mass finally wins out over the popular. The sociological 'common denomination' has become fully quantified; it is a denominator in the sense of sheer exchange value (qua entertainment) and digitality. As a

Baudrillard's Silence 103 hyperreal practice, the sociological can no longer be characterized as a reflexive trope operating within the perspective space of a human observer, a space where metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, and allegory have a role. Baudrillard explains, 'tropisms, mimeticism, empathy - the whole ecological Gospel of open systems, with feedback, negative or positive, is on the verge of being swallowed up in this breach' (1984:70). As formulated by Mills and Durkheim, the sociological depends on perspectival space to generate a discursively reflective culture, one that can take itself into account by judging its present and past structures, practices, and beliefs. Such a reflective culture requires the cultivation of narrative and conversational patience. In short, it requires the frustration of immediate satisfaction and an abiding trust in time. The culture of simulation, therefore, makes the social impossible because it delivers technologically induced opinion that requires no deferment, promise, or covenant with the future. It is immediately - and meaninglessly - contextless and abstract. Silent Masses As thus far considered, it seems that Baudrillard formulates the expansion of sociological imagery within mass culture as amounting only to social control and surveillance, mass onanistic selffascination, and the collapse of democracy, all organized under the tyranny of a binary representational code that tightens its grip as it proceeds. Yet, what is most intriguing about Baudrillard's hypothesis is that he also locates the fatal limits of the sociological imaginary in this hegemonic success. He does this by granting a wily and ingenious agency to the everyday mass actor, rejecting both critical theory's rendering of mass culture as comprising only ideological dupes (as he asserts, 'the masses are neither misled nor mystified' [1986:14]), as well as the traditional Marxist version of the masses as proletarian agents of radical historical change. Having jettisoned the conceptual baggage of both 'false' and 'true' consciousness, Baudrillard can allow himself no heroic (failed, frustrated, or incomplete) moment on the part of mass actors. Instead he begins from a position closer to that of Arendt

104 Sociology and Mass Culture (that only a culture that is already deeply behaviourist can lend itself to such structured and simple representations) and finds the ruse of the mass, the 'silent majority,' lying in its very lack of resistance to the code imposed on it, coupled with its narcissistic self-en trancement. According to Baudrillard, the mass strategy is to absorb passively all meaning that is projected onto it, ultimately defeating the sociological desire to locate, view, and measure, by way of a hyper-sociological conformity, that is, by taking on the objectified posture required of it and by accepting and even enjoying sociological representations of itself in the media: 'For every question put to it, it sends back a tautological and circular response' (1986:28). This conformity is simultaneously the fully realized imaginary object of sociological desire and the extinction of that desire: 'The mass realises that paradox of being both an object of simulation (it only exists at the point of convergence of all the media waves which depict it) and a subject of simulation, capable of refracting all the models and of emulating them by hypersimulation (its hyperconformity, an immanent form of humour)' (1986:30). In this truly Hegelian reversal of fortune, the sociological object or referent (the mass) unwittingly both survives and overcomes the logic that creates it by playing along, by comically reproducing the social code until its inherent limits come to fruition. Rather than being subject to the representational violence imposed, the mass learns to thrive on these representations by making them into non-sense, and finally putting itself beyond the order of representation by providing such unlimited compliance that it deprives the sociological of its referent: 'the masses are no longer a referent because they no longer belong to the order of representation. They don't express themselves, they are surveyed' (1986:20). As mass culture shuts down the expression of anything more than the very code or measurement itself, the social comes to mean everything and hence signifies and distinguishes nothing. The sociological locates no more and no less than what it has asked of its object, and is itself brought to its historical limit by the collusion of its representational logic and its object of interest.

Baudrillard's Silence 105 This account of the sociological project is indisputably dramatic and engaging. In fact, it is a satire, with a grotesquely exaggerated and monstrous caricature of the sociological subject. But, in a certain sense, Baudrillard's story is a repetition of Durkheim's and Mills's assertions that the sociological is an imaginary collective representation that necessarily influences, and is influenced by, mass society. Certainly, Baudrillard is not the first to note the vicious circularity of sociological reason. Mills had already flagged this tautological gesture in the methodological justifications of the sociological practitioner, that is, in the 'abstracted empiricist's' narrow definition of opinion as that which naturally lends itself to statistical measure - and warned that to examine opinion in this predetermined manner is also to encourage this particular species of opinion. For Mills, this tendency was always an imminent danger, but in a properly conceived sociological project it could be isolated and remedied at the level of individual practitioners and their methods of research and by a self-reflective scholarly community. Baudrillard, on the other hand, takes the abstracted empiricist as only the most visible sign of a congenital condition, a condition that is not to be relieved without the destruction of the organism as a whole: 'if the social is both destroyed by what produces it (the media, information) and reabsorbed by what it produces (the masses), it follows that its definition is empty, and that this term which serves as a universal alibi for every discourse, no longer analyses anything, no longer designates anything' (1986:66). This is not to argue, with some commentators (Best and Kellner, 1991; Mestrovic, 1992), that Baudrillard is a misguided, postmodern, apologist for mass, consumer culture, who celebrates and promotes it as a self-conscious form of cultural life. In fact, he calls the mass obsession with itself a 'vice' and 'perversion' (1986:580). Baudrillard's position is neither that of uncritical acceptance, nor wholesale elitist condemnation. Instead, he suggests that while there is nothing healthy about the current cultural condition, its cure should nevertheless be located within its own unique symptoms (including the movement and form of contemporary, mass opinion). Most important among these is

106 Sociology and Mass Culture that the mass makes itself available (brings itself into appearance) by making para-doxical, self-conscious popular culture impossible. In fact, it satirically turns the social referent into sheer sophistic doxa, or common sense. Moreover, as sociological representations are enjoyed and encouraged, as facilitated by the mass media, this hyperreal sociological practice makes fools of those (like the sociological practitioner) who earnestly continue to treat these representations as if they could mean anything. But, Baudrillard explains, to say that the mass stands beyond this representational order does not mean that the mass does not exist. It is ultimately a negative site where this system of representation is absorbed. And since the sociological is made to equal doxa, para-doxa is reinvoked only by the full exhaustion of the sociological, that is, by making it into an ideology that accounts for everything and that finally accounts for nothing. In Baudrillard's account, the social imaginary ossifies beyond the capacity to be taken up as a trope, a turn, or an imaginative opportunity. It has become a social fact without remaining a reflexive collective representation. Taken on its own, it is not difficult to entertain Baudrillard's hypothesis of the end of the social. After all, he is only treating sociological representations in truest sociological manner, that is, as historically and culturally contingent, as inherently limited and particular. And yet, there is something unsettling about a theorist who can sanguinely formulate mass compliance as a type of backhanded resistance, when typically compliance and conformity are held up as the principal features of the totalitarianism and fascism that have characterized the twentieth century. The idea of a modern, suggestible mass is usually conceptually tied in with more concrete images of the irrational and violent crowd or mob. It brings to mind the Nuremberg rallies, the Cultural Revolution, street riots, and lynch mobs. But these are for Baudrillard early and crude manifestations of modern culture, in which the mass is passionately aroused and directed towards particular beliefs and actions in a world of charisma, propaganda, and identification. But if the late-modern (or postmodern) mass is so sophisticated that it systematically wears out institutionalized discursive practices by their very use, is it really necessary to locate this agency only in an entirely acquiescent posture? Is the mass-mediated,

Baudrillard's Silence 107 sociological representation of mass culture undermined only by the satirical extension of itself? Why not, for example, look for this resistance more directly in the mass consumer's positive uses of these representations? Besides conformist satire, both playful and earnest communication are also evidenced in the 'consumption' of mass representations. Let us return to the example of the opinion poll. Certainly, it has been well documented that opinion polls influence the behaviour of voters during elections and referenda in that the feedback of opinion to itself produces self-fulfilling prophecies such as the bandwagon effect (Noelle-Neumann, 1993). But need these phenomena be interpreted as passive responses that merely display and play out the logic behind them? The Canadian electorate, for example, while manifesting the expected behaviours that indicate conformity to published polls, has also produced strongly rhetorical comments both about and through these measures of public opinion. In federal elections, added to the plethora of professional, scientific opinion polls, are 'informal' polls conducted by fast-food restaurants. These polls predict electoral results by way of playful methods that treat the consumer and the citizen as interchangeable (sometimes by assigning a political party to a particular choice of hamburger or muffin and letting the customer's palate act as the indicator of political leaning). Adding to the comedy of such an absurd conflation of citizen and consumer is the ambiguous question of whether one's appetite determines one's politics or whether one's politics determines one's diet. Or, put more strongly, whether a distinction between politics and immediate appetite still holds any meaning at all. Certainly, there are a variety of ways of interpreting these playful polls. Baudrillard might conclude that because they perpetuate the opinion poll they are legitimizing its use, and therefore are encouraging its proliferation and ultimate collapse. Yet, there remain more direct and parsimonious interpretations. Perhaps these playful polls indicate an acerbic attack on the scientific validity of polls or the place of polls in democratic processes. Perhaps they indicate no more than an attempt to lend levity to otherwise sober political debates. One of the most playful uses of statistical mass representation

108 Sociology and Mass Culture occurs in the long-running American game-show Family Feud. This competition pits two families against each other in an attempt to guess the results of national opinion polls to everyday questions, for example, 'things you find in a bathroom.' What is striking about the show is its portrayal of the American family in its opening segment. Its original version began with a Southern 'hillbilly' musical theme and a shot of a huge picture frame in which the surname of the family is written in petit-point style. This petit-point sign is pulled away to reveal a 'family' (with various kin who represent father, mother, and children, even if these are not their exact relations) frozen in an American gothic pose. Suddenly they all lurch forward through the frame and into the 'present' of the competition. Here they, along with the other 'feuding' family (which was similarly introduced), undertake to imagine how members of the contemporary family (or survey respondents) think and live. In other words, they guess at the statistical portrait that the survey paints. That is, replacing handmade, petit-point and family portraits is the statistical portrait of the American 'every family.' This juxtaposition of the imaginary past and present American family nicely demonstrates how the statistic can be used to create a sense of long-lost solidarity, that is, create the impression that face-to-face relations, intimacy, and proximity are still as common as ever. Or, to take another Canadian example, consider the results of the 1992 Charlotte town Accord constitutional referendum. As is typical, large-scale, professional polls more or less accurately predicted its outcome, implying that opinion was being shaped by its own previous appearance in polls. While this may well have been the case, it is another thing completely to conclude that this is an indicator of a passive electorate. An alternative explanation of the voting strategies of French and English Canadians was that they conducted an ongoing effort to second-guess, out-manoeuvre, and communicate to each other and to politicians, all 'telegraphed' or facilitated by the polls (Makin, 1992:A1, A6). As poll results were published, responses to them and to further polls seemed to have produced a type of faceless conversation between the two groups, based on a circular 'we know that they know that we know

Baudrillard's Silence 109 ... therefore, we say x' Instead of reading this as conformity of the vote with the polls, it may be interpreted as a rhetorical game among those polled. In other words, the polls may have allowed an ongoing conversation whose last word occurred in the actual vote. As such, the polls are as much a part of the process of democratic public dialogue as that which they apparently tap. In fact, within this interpretation the telegraphing polls facilitate an electorate constituted by more than privatized, isolated opinion. They facilitate a dynamic, electronic electorate. The above examples show that, within mass culture, sociological representations (even statistical measures) are taken up and enjoyed as mimetic representations, but that this can be done towards the creation of some effect beyond that of the 'code' itself. While these representations can be said to mirror what they represent, and in their mirroring produce certain effects, it is equally evident that the mimetic mass understands and works within this representational logic to create effects beyond them. As such, mass 'strategy' need not be reduced only to passivity and reproduction. In fact, it is in the very enjoyment of the code (its circularity and non-sense) that dialogue is established around a carnivalesque logic. Suffice it to say that Baudrillard's extreme arguments do have a degree of cogency: sociological reason often has the effect of a code, it can be implicated in the functioning of mass consumer and social-welfare culture, and mass passivity should be understood for it own effects. Nevertheless, Baudrillard's position is limited in as far as it begins from the premise that the sociological is fully equal to a binary code, and therefore tends to ignore or oppose other less absolute explanations of the mass usage of sociological imagery and the functioning of popular culture. Silent Theory Regardless of whether Baudrillard's argument is accepted or rejected, his reader is nonetheless left in a perplexing position vis-a-vis the author. It is unclear exactly what Baudrillard is recommending, and from what position he speaks. Apparently Baudrillard

110 Sociology and Mass Culture does not speak as a sociologist defending the reality of the social (although he does invoke the term, presumably to refer to a representational code in which he is at least partially implicated). In fact, Baudrillard's overall project seems to be entirely negative - that of systematically withdrawing every familiar and intelligible referent that would normally be taken up in a discussion of the contemporary human condition (Gane, 1991a). Moreover, to the extent that a referent is used by social scientists, therapists, bureaucrats, journalists, and lay people alike, that is, to the extent that it is common - it is either critically withdrawn by the author or argued to be culturally absorbed by the mass. Baudrillard inhabits a period in which the mass allegedly infuses everything, but strangely he also posits the largest gap between the rhetorical speech of the sociologist (i.e., himself) and that of mass actors. While he locates mass agency in passivity, in a seductive mimicry of the binary code, his own texts stand in opposition to passivity: they assert, narrate, evaluate, and judge. At this literary level his texts display the same gestures that Durkheim and Mills made intrinsic to sociological reason, but they do so as if they were discursively incidental. Baudrillard's own work defends hyperbole and violence as aspects of theorizing, as he seems to intend to shock and astonish his reader in a Durkheimian fashion. Yet, these gestures are ends in themselves. His corpus is a manifesto without hope, without a plan or promise that would situate and align itself with its audience. His texts also, like those of Mills, tell his reader a story - that of the historical representation and simulation of the social, or of modern epistemological grounds in general. But he does not recommend narrative itself as a mass strategy of resistance. Indeed, his is the story in which the credulous grounds of storytelling are taken away. What distinguishes Baudrillard most clearly from Durkheim and Mills is that he withdraws enjoyment from the social trope. He withdraws what for Durkheim and Mills was the life of the social trope - the collective's capacity to recall the joys of persuasion, storytelling, identity-formation, even argument, and to locate humanity in these practices. In their texts, both Durkheim and Mills rhetorically fashion a

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gap between themselves and their readers (who they intend to persuade, inform, and cajole) and imagine the cultural conditions under which this particular gap would be closed (and presumably another would open in an ongoing sociological conversation). In short, they imagine an audience, a reader, even an interlocutor. Baudrillard, on the other hand, makes himself only the interpreter and translator of mass seductive passivity, leading one to wonder why mass silence requires a mouthpiece if it is itself the quintessential and exemplary strategic posture in late modernity (or postmodernity). Certainly, it can be said that by attacking sociological reasoning Baudrillard is challenging what he argues has become the complacent vernacular of common sense, a practice in keeping with Durkheim's stated vision of the sociological project. But unlike Durkheim, Baudrillard does not clear this ground to make room for a new conceptual language that is to develop into a general cultural mode of collective awareness; he does not speak to a new, renewed, or potential audience. Ultimately, Baudrillard makes himself unanswerable to the question of his influence, as agency has been entirely transferred to mass actors - actors who, because they make use of subversive tactics, overshadow both the sociologist and Baudrillard himself. The mass alone authorizes its own (hyper)-sociological voice. It is presumably this quandary that leads Baudrillard's most sympathetic readers and commentators to make topical the action of reading itself, warning, for example, that he 'is a cruel, theoretical extremist, and must be read accordingly' (Gane, 1991a:7), and that 'he cannot ... be approached naively and read like any other author' (Singer, 1991:139). His project does not have a typical rhetorical aim of persuasion, but rather one of radical disruption. And, of course, the disruption he induces for his reader must also be felt by him. In that he withdraws conceptual language from the scene, and disavows almost all intellectual predecessors, Baudrillard also withdraws these resources from himself, leaving himself in the unenviable position of having to establish his grounds alone as he proceeds. Perhaps the most helpful guideline for reading Baudrillard's texts is offered by Brian Singer (1991), who suggests the work be understood as a

112 Sociology and Mass Culture type of game designed to deviate sharply from standard theoretical practice, where concepts are taken up to help designate and distinguish realities. Baudrillard's texts, argues Singer, move within, reflect, and explore their cultural condition rather than simply describing it, and, as such, work to perpetuate an ever-accelerating movement and generation of signs (without referents). His own texts are meant to embody 'hyperreality' as well as discuss it. By comparing Baudrillard's strategy to a game, Singer implicitly invokes Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'language-game,' a concept rooted in the understanding of language in which meaning is not inherently pre-established, but limited only by the agreement of speakers within contextual circumstances (Wittgenstein, 1958:88). For Baudrillard, sociologists and social theorists are those who are most conscious of this gaming and who intentionally seek to make their agreements fragile, experimental, and transitory. It comes as no surprise then that his texts are filled with incomplete and contradictory reasoning, lists of opposing hypotheses, and unsupported assertions or that his work has been characterized as 'prosepoetry, fiction-theory' (Gane, 1991a:132) and as 'simultaneously declamatory and poetic' (Singer, 1991:143). Baudrillard's Social

These explanations and justifications of Baudrillard's project do not, however, evade the issue of his commitment. Indeed, among both his friendly and hostile readers the most generally agreed upon characterization of Baudrillard's work is that it is ultimately grounded in nihilism, that is, an indifference and silence to questions of value (Bogard, 1987; Kroker and Cook, 1989; Mestrovic, 1992; Singer, 1991). To argue that the privileged voice of the academic theorist or cultural critic is still valid, but at the same time justify one's prose as an embodiment of that cultural condition, amounts to more than the elitist luxury of having it both ways; it also means that all speech is of equal value, that every utterance is equally worthwhile (or worthless). This is not to argue that Baudrillard should be expected to stand outside of his discursive milieu. If one is to entertain the hypothesis that the sociologi-

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cal project (as an element of modernity, more generally) generates nihilism in its promotion of a nihilistic mass (where, e.g., the distinction between high and low culture is effaced and all artistic and intellectual expression becomes a commodity), then Baudrillard could only be left to announce and demonstrate this fact. Like the manifesto and surrealist narrative, the nihilistic voice may well be considered intrinsic to the literary or representational claim that the sociological makes its conditions from within. Yet, it is Baudrillard's formulation of the sociological as that driven by an unironic effort towards the universal and unambiguous that leads him to the conclusion that it is inevitably a nihilistic enterprise. Since his own speech is meant to take on the shape of its condition, it too is drawn into the nihilistic void. In other words, it is his own definition of the sociological project as one that cannot formulate the conditions of its own speech (either historically or philosophically) that leads him into nihilism. He sees a sociology that holds an entirely naive understanding of reason as that which can make its speech complete. Put another way, the sociological is simply doxa in the weakest sense of the word, that is, speech that imagines itself complete in its utterance, speech that is self-satisfied with its achievement. And in a sense, he is correct. As Stanley Rosen explains, nihilism is the eternal risk of humankind because the desire for complete speech is our defining quality. If the sociological is a totemic collective representation within modern culture, it is necessarily also the promise of complete speech. Nevertheless, a consciousness of this desire divides the thinker from the sophist and nihilist: 'there is no complete speech (since it would be the same as, or indistinguishable from, silence), but only speech about complete speech, or speech which articulates, renders intelligible, and is accompanied by desire' (1969:209). For Durkheirn and Mills the modern collective must be kept aware of its desire, that is, the sociological representation arises out of both the need for complete speech and the need to stave off nihilism. The sociological representation is simultaneously incomplete and aware of the necessity of this incompleteness. Of course, Durkheim and Mills are faithful disciples who defend this promise, while Baudrillard sees the real implications of a

114 Sociology and Mass Culture fully sociological culture. Indeed, Durkheim and Mills are in their own particular ways working from unusual positions in the academic, sociological realm itself. Durkheim's work stands at the hopeful beginning of the enterprise (with everything still to be won or lost), while Mills's discussion of the sociological imagination has been described as his 'parting shot' (Horowitz, 1983:87) to an incorrigible discipline. Even if they are taken as typical sociological practitioners, perhaps they lived in eras when a sociological promise could still be made without equivocation. Perhaps now the sociological is fully reducible to the bureaucratic and administrative, to entertainment and narcissism. Yet, to make this argument would be to ignore that the nihilistic and anti-sociological have always coexisted with the sociological, and have touched all three authors. Indeed, even Durkheim had to counter the suggestion that the sociological could equate with common sense (in that the sociological was said to be unnecessary because common sense already covered its territory). In response to Baudrillard, Durkheim would probably suggest that the death of the social is still a collective representation in the vivifying meaning of a discursive turn, and that the most dangerous choice, on the part of an academic speaker, is to bury this fact. As Stjepan Mestrovic explains: 'Durkheim's notion of collective representations sheds new light on the discussion of "hyperreality," because Durkheim denied that any "reality" is "objective" in the positivistic sense; yet he also managed to avoid the extreme relativism that leads some into nihilism. He managed to find a ground and referent for representations, even if the ground is dynamic and in constant flux' (emphasis in original, 1992:10). In other words, Durkheim would never accept that the sociological, hyperreal code that Baudrillard describes could stand outside of interpretation. Similarly, for Mills the sociological lived dangerously close to a common sense that was becoming increasingly organized by the logic of mass society. And again, for Mills this meant meeting the challenge of popular culture on its own grounds by picking up the literary currents of his era to make the most of their rhetorical possibilities. In Mills's judgment this popular culture was still highly informed by reading, even if magazines,

Baudrillard's Silence 115 pulp fiction, and self-help books constituted most of the reader's diet. Where academics and social critics see this reading public turn to television for their news, commentary, and debate, they rightly consider the type of public forum this constitutes and ask how they address a broad audience when contemplative reading and time-consuming debate are pressed out of everyday life. Baudrillard is right, then, to consider the place of sociological reason in modern culture in terms of contemporary technological and discursive particularities. He tends, however, to overlook what remains perennial in these issues and thus treats nihilism as if it could be overcome. Ironically, of the three theorists considered here, Baudrillard is simultaneously the least hopeful and the most Utopian (in the weak sense of imagining that nihilism could be eradicated within some different collective logic). That the sociological raises the possibility of nihilism within itself means that it locates the grounds of collective imagination. Nihilism is, nevertheless, only one possible cultural turn, and even if taken, is never necessarily irredeemable.

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Conclusion

There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families. Margaret Thatcher

What does it mean that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attempted, near the end of the twentieth century, to withdraw the notion of society from our vernacular? Certainly, the most obvious explanation is that her political agenda required that she remove the state from public life, thus freeing capitalistic enterprise from regulation and releasing the government from financial responsibility towards its citizens. 'Society' in this context is simply the state. But Thatcher's words do more than argue for the end of the welfare state. As a political rhetorician, Thatcher was famous for her use of concrete metaphors. The state, for example, was no more complex than a household and could be managed like one. Those who failed to keep state spending and state administration under control had failed above all to grasp this simple reality. Recall that for Hannah Arendt, the modern era was marked by a shift away from the competitive and agonal political realm to the subjective and domestic household. For her, people ceased being real citizens when they became administered by a paternalistic state. Conversely, Thatcher sees the household as always higher than the state, such that the political must be elevated to the concreteness and obviousness of the household, and citizens returned to the independence and responsibility of private life.

118 Sociology and Mass Culture While disagreeing with Thatcher's celebration of the private, Arendt would have to admire her rhetoric. The genius of Thatcher's utterance is its appeal to common sense, that is, to our nagging feeling that anything outside the individual and the family unit is entirely imaginary and therefore even a dangerous fiction. Her words challenged more than the groundwork of the modern welfare state, they challenged the modern moral order (totem) and the creative possibilities (trope) of the social. And, of course, Thatcher was right in her common-sense assertion. The social is imaginary. It is, as I have argued, the collective imaginary of the modern era which replaces older explanations of the human experience and lives intimately with common sense and ordinary opinion. Moreover, the social imaginary is fragile because, unlike religious or metaphysical explanations, it is understood to issue from nothing more than the collective itself. It is highly vulnerable to being removed from our discourse. As we have seen, the three sociological thinkers considered here have struggled with the condition of the social imaginary, especially as it has changed during the twentieth century. Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard all understood the sociological project as the study and influence of common sense and public opinion within the cultural conditions in which they functioned. The differing, and sometimes conflicting, versions of the sociological project as formulated by these thinkers reveal, at least in part, the differing cultural conditions in which they worked and their necessarily differing formulations of their audience and sociological influence. In other words, sociological utterances reflect not so much social realities, but collective representational challenges and anxieties. And because sociological measures and utterances are so embedded in the general representational practices of collective life, sociologists must be highly cognizant of the representational practices they use, and thereby, promote. The most exemplary sociological work does this more or less expressly. In this discussion we have seen what could be called the sociological manus or hand of each writer, as each takes up language in the effort to produce a culturally germane text and, by extension, a culturally germane sociological project. Durkheim, Mills, and

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Baudrillard begin with the everyday cultural tropes they find around them and create texts that are meant to represent and influence this everday discourse, not so much by speaking to it but rather along with it. Their writing can be characterized respectively as violent raara-festo, as artisanal narrative raanw-facture, and as strangely unlocatable (as perhaps an authorial slight of hand that causes the manus regretfully to disappear with the object it handles). But their differences notwithstanding, these authors share with me a mixture of conviction that the sociological project is a moral and political one and the fear that it could be (or become) irrelevant and insignificant by way of its own cultural entrenchment. They also, along with me, locate mass and popular cultures as the critical sites of discursive engagement. They argue that the authority of academic sociology lies in its capacity to introduce relevant and timely images and stories into everyday life that, in turn, encourage collective self-reflection. Academic sociology does not derive its authority from the dispassionate injection of facts and information about the social world that could be taken up towards any ends. In other words, sociology's relevance and authority is not grounded in the same way as the natural sciences, where practical applications of knowledge are evident and questions about the good of technical and instrumental action are left unasked. Rather, sociology always raises the question of the good of particular social practices and habits and invites a highly self-reflective culture. Durkheim recognized the political and discursive essence of sociology from the start, formulating the social as the way modern collectives constitute and show themselves. Durkheim's manifesto, The Rules of Sociological Method, uses heady and optimistic fin de siecle language that promotes reason as the engine of modern selfconsciousness and discovery. He initiated a sociology that aims at a self-reflective culture and implicates sociological practitioners in the fabrication of the social. Sociological practitioners like Durkheim make the reality of the social manifest and tangible. But because the social is both a discursive 'social fact' and a modern 'collective representation' - or, both totem and trope Durkheim's sociological project ultimately describes the gap be-

120 Sociology and Mass Culture tween collective desire and collective conditions. As a manifesto writer, Durkheim articulates the dream of full and complete speech and makes clear the infinite Utopian regress of the social trope. By making language and interpretation the heart of modern collective self-understanding, Durkheim initiated a sociological discipline that made culture its central concern. Mills's approach to sociology is a direct application of this Durkheimian legacy, again issuing from a strong awareness of historical context (in his case, amnesiac and paranoid cold war America). Durkheim's declaration that sociology is a collective representation and social fact in modernity invites Mills's sociology, that is, one that treats narrative as a type of hopeful imaginary rather than a narrowly descriptive account of social conditions. For Mills, sociology must be an intervention in modern imagining that promotes the Utopian agency of the autobiographical and historical narrative, as such narratives both locate us in time and space and allow for social change to be imagined. Again, the sociological is not simply the attempt to represent social facts to its audience (it is not naively realist prose), but rather the attempt to celebrate popular practices, such as narrative, as highly imaginative and liberationist (incorporating the surrealist moment of prose). Playful, exaggerated, and caricatured stories about ordinary social life would act as an antidote to seamless, artless, and deracinating mass cultural representations. In short, Mills tells sociologists that their work is the study and promotion of popular culture. Finally, Baudrillard reminds us that sociology participates in highly rationalized technologies of collective representation that include the statistically analysed survey or poll. I have suggested that mass cultural practices like self-help narratives, political referenda, and interactive 'reality' television and the Internet generate - like the survey and poll - the same species of ahistorical, self-referential information and knowledge criticized by Baudrillard. He suggests that to look for the sociological in its broader cultural appearance is to locate a binary spectacle, an ultimately silent and nihilistic representation that reverses and absorbs the collective production of meaning. Baudrillard cau-

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dons sociologists that mass culture threatens to smother the popular by way of satisfying and authoritarian representations. Sociologists, he says, have the responsibility of locating and encouraging the ruse of the masses, because the masses resist this levelling code by enthusiastically participating in it and thereby forcing its fragmented nonsense back on itself. Baudrillard's formulation of the ruse of the masses is limited to the nihilistic or silent gesture which I have suggested is only one response demonstrated by mass audiences, citizens, and consumers. By inspecting cultural artefacts like manifestos, autobiographies, historiographies, soap opera serials, self-help literatures, opinion polls, referenda, and 'reality' television and the Internet, we have been able to ask about the modern collective social imaginary. Not all techniques and technologies of public opinion and common sense reveal the same grounds of collective agency. Certainly, we have been able to locate a degree of agency in the manifesto, the narrative, and the serial that seems lacking in the realist, statistical, and information-based collective representations. This is because the former cultural practices are inherently incomplete - they are Utopian in the case of the manifesto, surreal (rather than real) in the case of the narrative, or infinite in the case of the serialized story. They all leave a remainder, a future, and above all an interpretive space for conversation and debate. The latter, on the other hand, create spectacle out of the collective, and make the space between the generation of speech and the return of speech so small that it seems to forfeit interpretation. We get instead facts, factoids, statistics, and information. We are told what we 'felt' or 'wanted' a few seconds or days ago with no connection to who we are, what we answer to, or what informs our wants and feelings. The collective responses to these measures are limited to playful lying or compliance. A manifesto or a story requires us to tell about who we are, where we are going, and why. Polls and referenda require only that we make an immediate and instinctive response: we do/don't like abortion, we do/don't like capital punishment, we do/don't like lower taxes, and so on. Nevertheless, as discussed, even in the face of such closed technologies of public life, examples of collective agency appear.

122 Sociology and Mass Culture What then is the relationship between sociology and mass society? Let me answer this question in manifesto style: Sociology historically accompanies mass culture. Sociology seeks to inform mass culture. Mass culture is characterized by an anti-elite, inclusive - yet highly commercialized and rationalized - version of collective representation and reflection. Collective representations in mass culture therefore involve the representation of mass opinion and common sense (or received opinion). Sociology necessarily shares representational and epistemological conditions with mass culture. Sociology makes representation and epistemology central to understanding itself and mass culture. Sociology is the self-conscious moment of mass culture. Sociology must examine itself in terms of the mass culture in which it functions (without reducing sociology to a mere reflection of its cultural conditions). Sociology's own accounts and descriptions of social life arise from and return to mass culture. Sociology inhabits in the gap between complete description of social phenomena and the interpretive openness that makes complete description impossible. Sociologists must understand the trope of the social to be inherently Utopian, 'imaginary,' and incomplete. Sociologists must understand this incompleteness as a strength of the sociological project. Sociologists must act as cultural caregivers, inspecting and reporting on the changing condition of this Utopian and hopeful social imaginary. Sociologists must point out the implications of particular, collective, representational practices and technologies for civil society. Sociology is rightly a highly self-conscious form of cultural studies.

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Finally, sociologists should not underestimate the capacity of citizens, consumers, and audiences to generate meanings (or tropes) that lie outside the 'code' of dominant collective representational practices. In sum, sociology studies and speaks to ordinary culture - in the sense of speaking to and defending a culture that may be selfconscious at the level of the popular (and even the mass). Hence, the perennial accusation that sociology is nothing more than dressed-up common sense is in one way accurate - the sociological works with and within the popular and vernacular. It proceeds from the Gramscian assumption that 'common sense is a collective noun' (Gramsci, 1971:325), and maintains, on its best days, a friendly relationship to common sense. I have argued that by the logic of the sociological itself, we must treat our cultural practices and artefacts as examples of agency and hunt down the sociological (or critical) as it already resides in ordinary life. But, as Dorothy Smith (1990) reminds us, sociologists have the bad habit of constantly forgetting the grounds of their knowledge and proceeding from a naively 'objectivist' position that ignores and discredits the ordinary ways of knowing that could instruct sociological ways of knowing. We are often unable to articulate the 'standpoint' from which sociological knowing is generated and unable to recognize the assumptions and political alliances underlying our knowing. She points out, along with Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, that data collected about 'populations,' like the unemployed or the deviant, or general rates of birth and death, are linked to bureaucratic and administrative agendas. Smith privileges the narratives of ordinary people because these stories generate accounts of social reality that challenge official or administrative accounts and promote alternative ways of knowing the social world. This way of knowing the world, rather than just the content of ordinary knowing, should inform how sociologists know the world. In a special cultural studies issue of the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Raymond Morrow argues that 'the project

124 Sociology and Mass Culture of cultural studies is not exclusively the production of scholarly texts' (1991:163), but includes the promotion and encouragement of particular cultural objects and habits. If sociological utterances are as highly implicated and intrinsic to modern society as suggested by Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard, then sociologists must remain highly conscious of what they ask of their subjects/audiences. In a sense, they will find no more and no less than they ask and how they ask it. Taking up Smith's and Morrow's calls, I suggest a study of popular and mass phenomena that seeks to activate the engagement in reflective and democratic practices. This begins with the conscious promotion of a popular/ mass culture where imagining the conditions of social change and the social good are cultural habits.

Notes

Introduction

1 Durkheim uses 'collective representation' and 'social fact' almost interchangeably because a collective representation is always also a social fact, and vice versa. There is, nevertheless, a difference in the resonance of these two terms which allows me to argue that a collective representation can become a more compelling social fact over time. This point is developed in the next chapter. 2 Ricca Edmondson (1984) examines rhetorical images typically employed in sociological texts, and argues that sociological writing involves a 'personal communication' between writer and reader that aims not at agreement, but at persuasion. She returns to the pragmatic Aristotelian claim that rhetoric participates in reason and that reason serves the negotiation of practical opinion. In other words, sociology aims at shifting opinion by speaking to the reader in such a way that balances new ideas with familiar ones. For Edmondson, sociology does not arise within the realm of opinion and common sense, but it operates there by pressing its audiences towards its own liberal outlook. Richard Harvey Brown (1983) situates sociological rhetoric on a larger scale than Edmondson, suggesting that social science constructs discursive realities. Like Edmondson, he recalls that ancient Greek alignment of reason with persuasive public dialogue, arguing that the positive sciences severed and repressed this connection in western thought. In our own era, Brown concludes, the sociologist has the special responsibility of guarding against formalist, behaviourist, or micro-level ideologies that overly simplify social life. For both Edmondson and Brown, sociology's recognition of its rhetorical nature helps enhance its liberationist project - which for Edmondson

126 Notes to pages 25-32 occurs concretely at the level of the reader's experience of the text, and for Brown on the broader political level of the struggle over discursive patterns. Unfortunately, neither author provides a satisfactory account of how sociological rhetorics (of whatever kind) interact with the opinions they intend to inform. Edmondson, on the one hand, imagines sociological speech to disrupt the content of opinion without having to challenge certain habits of opining in general. Brown, on the other hand, sees social scientific rhetoric as highly akin to the everyday occurrence of rhetoric he parallels 'the production of accounts in everyday life and the production of social-science accounts' (1983:146). It is puzzling that Brown concluded that social sciences have a special place in fending off oppressive and narrow ideologies, when their particularity has not been clearly established. 1: Modernity and the Problem of the Social 1 George Herbert Mead's formulation of the self, as an ironic gesture towards influence rather than as a defensive status that precedes it, is a much stronger yet often misrepresented rendering. For Mead, the self holds together the T (the subject) and the 'me' (the object) as a reflexive grammatical gesture. It is here that the irony of selfhood becomes plain one is both subject and object, knowing and known, free and determined at once. Subject and object solicit each other in a pattern that allows for a personal repertoire of actions. Mead speaks of this self as a 'process' that has an objective and a subjective 'phase.' As a process, the self is a conversation between the T which asserts novelty, declaration, and presence, and the 'me' which asserts collection, memory, sense, and order (Mead, 1977:229). 2 Hegel puts it like this: 'This trial by death, however, does away with the truth which is supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally... Their act is an abstract negation, not the negation coming from consciousness, which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently survives its own supersession' (Hegel, 1977:114-15). 2: Durkheim's Manifesto

1 In another sense this type of reading is highly sociological in that historically science marginalizes rhetoric as a persuasive technique inessential to the pursuits of truth. Richard Harvey Brown locates this shift in

Notes to pages 32-56 127

2

3 4

5 6

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Durkheim's time: 'In France, for example, just as Durkheimian sociology was being instituted as part of the national curriculum, the French Ministry of Education ended the teaching of rhetoric as the general study of discourse and consigned it instead to the classe de litterature, where it provided an emblem of a classical education and a veneer of cultivation to the upwardly mobile children of the bourgeoisie' (1983:133). In 'The Intelligibility of the Avant-Garde Manifesto' Loren Shumway points out that the avant-garde artists defined and named themselves in term of their literary forms, for example, surrealism, dadaism, symbolism, and futurism. Their manifestos were themselves examples of these literary actions (Shumway, 1980:57). Shumway characterizes the manifestos of the avant-garde artists as 'stylistic terrorism' (Shumway, 1980:57) The futurists also declined to posit an absolute break. For them the future was simply an extension and amplification of the chaos of the modern era, which required only recognizing its value. Durkheim explains that 'the system of signs that I employ ... function [s] independently of the use I make of them' (1982:51). John D. Erickson (1980) argues that because the dadaists posited no future, their texts cannot be considered manifestos: 'the dada manifesto denies all ties with the past as well as any reasons or motives for present or future action. It is in fact misnamed, for it is actually an anti-manifesto.' Erickson's formulation is in line with my first observations that the manifesto is a modernist text in style and rhetoric, but while he sees selfconscious speech as antithetical to this rhetorical mode, I claim that it is a more or less latent quality, which becomes most 'manifest' in the dada texts. Colm Kelly's (1990) excellent deconstructive reading of Durkheim locates a similar tension between his rationalism and his reliance on the idea of the sacred. Michael Overington reads Suicide as 'a sensitive and morally concerned attempt to use changes in suicide rates as indicators of the effects of drastic socia1 change on the fabric of society' (1981:451). Frisby and Sayer flag the danger of logical slippage in this direction: 'For to describe God as society transfigured is also to ascribe to society the traditional attributes of divinity' (1986:35).

3: Mills's Promise 1 In this sense it is somewhat ironic that it is Mills who invokes the term

128 Notes to pages 56-61

2

3

4

5

'imagination' and Durkheim uses the term 'representation,' as it is the former concept that has come to signify both a collective and individual agency that precedes utilitarian concerns. For Castoriadis, for example, the collective is constituted rather than served by its imaginary, making his fundamental question: 'Why does one always find within the imaginary, and in all its expressions, something irreducible to the functional, something akin to an initial investment by society of itself and its world with meaning?' (1984:11). Or for Jacques Lacan, on the psychological terrain the 'imaginary' is the initial and primary 'agency of the ego before its social determination' (1977:2) and must be distinguished from the subsequent confrontation with the 'symbolic' or external order of cultural signifiers: 'What I have called the mirror stage is interesting in that it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject originally identifies himself with the visual Gestalt of his own body: in relation to the still very profound lack of co-ordination of his own motility it represents an ideal unity, a salutary imago (emphases in original, 1977:19) The male normative language used by Mills is more than a conventional device on his part. Women are discussed as particular actors appearing around various specific social problems, while men stand implicitly as the universal actors and interlocutors of the text. Although Mills does not use the term, his addressee is clearly formulated as 'anomic.' The following passage, for example, relies heavily on the idea of anomie: 'Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis' (1959:4). Erving Goffman's equally influential book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Lz/^was also published in 1959, and took up similar themes from a different angle. Instead of arguing that the real or essential qualities of actors or situations could be unmasked, he suggested that social relations had no deeper meaning than their immediate appearance. For Goffman, ordinary life was becoming more and more a matter of managing the impression given to others, as modernity increasingly replaced ascribed statuses with achieved statuses, that is, who one is becomes a matter of who one appears to be. And although his text is characterized by a light mood, Goffman warns of a certain 'bureaucratization of the spirit' as a result of narrow and prescribed roles that leave little room for innovation or spontaneity. In this sense, he describes a similar 'every man' as Mills. The 1950s and early 1960s may well have been sociology's golden era of popular readership, with other authors like William H. White and David Riesman also enjoying a wide audience beyond the academy. Horowitz

Notes to pages 61-78 129

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12

argues that: '[Mills'] brief years coincided with an epoch in social research in which the findings of social science mattered a great deal: both to society as a whole and certainly to its practitioners' (1983:330) Alvin Gouldner expresses this point in an elegant reversal of the obvious account of sociology: 'the very purpose of a new society is, in some part, to create a new sociology' (emphasis in original, 1973:82). To suggest that representation must change before structures change is not necessarily to invoke an idealist philosophy. Even Marx's famous Thesis XI on Feuerbach ('The philsophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it,' emphasis in original) cannot be read as if change does not depend on interpretation. Certainly Capital is an attempt to make capitalism first an intelligible social force so that its history can be influenced by those who experience and understand it. Marx does not mean that the hard work of interpretation can be circumvented by the eager desire for change. Walter R. Fisher argues that narrative is more democratic and encouraging of public dialogue than rationalistic accounts because narrative cannot be judged by external and normative version or truth (Fisher, 1984). This is a reading of Freud that is not widely shared. Freud is one of the first modern thinkers to expose the impossibility of the reasonable actor, along with the impossibility of full and complete mental health, in his formulation of neurosis - a condition that is inextricable from, and appropriate within, modern society. Curing the neurotic is always for Freud a matter of degree. Some contemporary anti-essentialist feminist theorists make a similar point. For example, Gayatri Spivak argues that while 'woman' is an ideological and ontological construction that must be understood as such, the concept is nevertheless politically useful towards feminist ends (see discussion in Judith Butler, 1990:325). It is interesting to note that Thompson characterizes his investigation of the nineteenth-century working class as a 'biography' that studies its 'identity' as it moves 'from its adolescence' to its 'early manhood.' Rather than surrender to the 'ever present temptation to suppose that a class is a thing' (1983:115), Thompson instead risks conflating the group with the (gendered) individual. David Vincent explains that the secular autobiographical text is prefigured by the Puritan and Methodist life-stories based on the personal revelations of God's will (1981:9). Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which is also cited by Weber, indicated the deep affiliation of utility, agency, and revelation, where the self-made man of commerce and the devout Christian are

130 Notes to pages 78-9 inextricable. In fact, the autobiography is one method by which the selfmade man made himself, while holding off Protestant despair. 13 This insight is hardly my own. It has framed the most powerful and enduring social scientific formulations of human action, including most notably those of Freud and Marx who maintained the notion of health as the goal of all protest and upheaval, and all paralysis and hysteria, but who would nevertheless be misread as offering redemptive solutions. Freud's most fundamental claim was that every symptom was an encoded, unconscious statement about their particular pathology. And although the cultural conditions which created these particular types of symptoms may be overcome, Freud held no image of humanity freed from conflict and neurosis because for him civilization and anxiety go hand in glove, if you will. Similarly, in Marx's account of proletarian consciousness, it is in the midst of labouring that the worker cannot help but recall the true social labour still surviving at the heart of capitalistic production, alienated as commodity labour-power. For Marx and Freud labouring and psychic functioning have never been distinguished from their limits (or at least not since the mythical crisis of the rise of private property and the Oedipal murder), and hence their promise is sheltered and nurtured within these limits.

References

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Index

abortion, 100, 121 Absolute Spirit, 76 abstracted empiricism, 62, 68, 69, 105 advertisements, 12, 25, 60, 61, 94 Africa, 7 agora, 14, 15, 18, 34 Alcibiades, 22 America, 6, 7, 10, 11, 39, 55, 56, 58-61, 63, 68, 81, 84, 98, 101, 108, 120 American Everyman, 58 annals, 76 anomie, 34, 58, 60, 102 Arendt, Hannah, 13-18, 68, 103, 117, 118 Aristotle, 13 Auerbach, Erich, 80, 81 Australia, 7, 48 autobiography, 11, 12, 73, 74, 76-8, 98, 120, 121 automatic writing, 44 avant-garde, 34, 44, 45 Balzac, Honore de, 80 Baudrillard, Jean, 5, 7, 9, 10, 28, 30, 89-99, 101-7, 109-15, 118-21, 123,

124; hyperreal, 96-9, 102, 103, 106, 112, 113; Mirror of Production, The, 93; For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 93; simulacra, 96, 100 biography, 11, 59, 69, 70, 72, 74-6, 78,87 blue-collar workers, 60, 82 Breton, Andre, 35, 44, 45 Buck, Pearl, 81 bureaucracy, 60, 95, 110, 113, 123 Callicles, 21, 23 Canada, 99-101, 107,108 Canadian Alliance Party, 99 Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 123 canon, 28 capital punishment, 100, 121 capitalist mode of production, 17 Carnegie, Dale, 60, 61 cartoon, 82 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 8 Catholic Church, 77, 78 CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation), 37 Charlottetown Accord, 108

140

Index

Christianity, 97 chronicles, 76 citizen, 12, 14, 19, 43, 61, 65, 68, 95, 99-101,107, 117, 121,123 code, 83, 90, 94-6, 103, 104, 109, 110, 114,121, 123 cold war, 60, 61, 120 collective representation. See Durkheim, Emile Columbia University, 84 comics, 62 commodity, 18, 61, 113 common denominator, 55-7, 62, 102 common sense, 5, 10, 11, 20, 40, 41, 45, 51, 61, 65, 69, 83, 92,106, 111, 113, 118, 121-3 communism, 11, 41, 46 Communist Manifesto, The, 35, 41 Comte, Auguste, 33 consumerism, 12, 18, 25, 26, 29, 60, 61, 92-5,105, 107,108,121, 123 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation Programme ('Regina Manifesto'), 37 credit ratings, 75 Crocker, Betty, 61 cults, 97 Cultural Revolution, 106 cultural studies, 24, 25, 122, 124 culture industry, 25, 26 Dada Manifesto 1918, 45 dadaism, 45, 52, 82 dadaists, 34, 45, 47 de Certeau, Michel, 9, 12, 58, 70 de Gaulle, Charles, 60 demonstrations, 37 Denzin, Norman, 84—6 Descartes, Rene, 33 Dickens, Charles, 64, 66

Diderot, Denis, 15 Division of Labor in Society, The (Durkheim),42 dossiers, 75 doxa, 14, 19, 20, 53, 106, 113 drawings, 64 Durkheim, Emile, 3-7, 9, 10, 15, 17, 23, 28-34, 38-44, 46-56, 59, 60, 63, 70, 72, 89-92, 95, 102, 103, 105,110,111,113,114,118-20, 124; anomie, 34, 53, 60,102; collective representation, 5, 7,9,46-56, 60,72,84,90,92,94,95,105,106, 113,114,118-22; Division of Labor in Society, The,42; Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The, 8, 44; and French Revolution, 43, 51, 52; mechanical solidarity, 17; organic solidarity, 17, 52; Rules of Sociological Method, The, 6, 31-3, 34, 38,48, 50, 52,119; social facts, 5,38, 39,41,42,44,46, 47,50,52,57,106,119,120; Suicide, 33, 34,48 education, 95 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The (Durkheim), 8, 44 empiricism, 3, 49, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 90 Encounter, 84 Enlightenment, 3, 15-17, 34, 73, 75 epistemes, 6 Europe, 16, 32, 41, 43, 48-51 false consciousness, 29, 62, 63, 103 Family Feud, 108 feudal mode of production, 17 files, 75, 82 First World War, 80 Flaubert, Gustave, 80

Index FLQ (Front de liberation du Quebec) ,35, 37 flyers, 34 For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Baudrillard), 93 Foucault, Michel, 4, 123; epistemes, 6; panopticon, 96 Fourier, Charles, 33 France, 15; Ministry of Education, 33; post-1968, 93; post-Revolutionary, 4, 16, 80; public schools, 43; Revolutionary, 3, 16, 17, 44, 53; Third Republic, 43 Franklin, Benjamin, 78 Freud, Sigmund, 49, 51, 75; psychoanalysis, 8, 51, 93; Totem and Taboo, 7 Futurist Manifesto, The, .36 futurists, 35-7 Gallop, George, 101 Gemeinschaft, 10, 17 Gesellschaft, 17 Gorgias, 19, 20 Gorgias( Plato), 19-22 graffiti, 34 Gramsci, Antonio, 29, 123 Great Expectations (Dickens), 64 Hegel, G.W.F., 26-8, 50, 104; Absolute Spirit, 76; Phenomenology of Spirit, 27 historiography, 9, 12, 76, 87, 121 History, 39 Hobbes, Thomas, 15 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodore Adorno, 25, 62 hyperreal. See Baudrillard, Jean ideal-type. See Weber, Max imagined community, 42

141

insurance, 95 Internet, 98,121 iron cage, 63 Iron John, 97 jazz, 62 jingle, 67 journalism, 6, 56, 72, 81, 86, 110 Joyce, James, 81 Judaism, 79 Kuhn, Thomas, 5 Latin, 34 Lewis, Sinclair, 81 liberalism, 75 Locke, John, 15 Loman, Willy, 61 magazines, 12, 34, 60, 61, 113 Manifest Destiny, 76 Manifesto against Reactionary Venice, 36 Manifesto of the Front de liberation du Quebec, 35, 37 Manifesto of Surrealism, 35 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 35,41 manifestos, 6, 10, 12, 28, 32-48, 50-2, 56, 82, 89, 91, 98, 110, 113, 119-22 Marinetti, Filippo, 36, 40, 41, 44 Marx, Karl, 17, 18, 28, 29, 63; capitalist mode of production, 17; feudal mode of production, 17 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, 35, 41,43 mass, 3, 7, 11, 12, 15-18, 25, 53, 58, 61-3, 71, 89, 91, 92, 94, 107, 109, 110,111,113,123,124

142

Index

mass audience, 24, 71,92,121 mass consumption, 6, 92 mass culture, 4-7,9-12,18, 23, 25, 27-30, 51, 57, 62, 69, 86, 90, 92, 103, 105, 107,109, 119-22, 124 mass market, 34 mass media, 4, 34, 35,51,61-3,90,95, 101,102,104-6 mass opinion. See opinion mass persuasion, 18 mass production, 6, 12, 18, 83 mass publics. See Mills, C. Wright mass society, 4, 7,17, 24, 30, 57, 71, 105,114,122 masses, 16,25,69,102-6,121 McCarthy, Joseph, 61 McLuhan, Marshall, 94 mechanical solidarity, 17 media. See mass media medicine, 95 Mills, C. Wright, 5-7,9,10, 28-30, 55-62,65-72,74,75,79-87, 89-92,96-8,102,103,105,110, 113,114,118,120,124; abstracted empiricism, 62, 68,69,105; American Everyman, 58; mass publics, 62, 63, 69, 83; primary publics, 62, 63; sociological imagination, 34, 53, 55-7, 63, 65-7, 69, 82, 114; Sociological Imagination, 6, 56, 58, 59, 66, 69, 82, 84, 86; White Collar, 60, 61, 71 Mirror of Production, The (Baudrillard),93 mission statements, 36 modern era. See modernity modernism, 58 modernity, 3-7, 11, 13-15, 28, 42, 44, 54, 58, 80, 86, 89, 90, 111, 113, 117, 118,120

movies, 62,95 myths, 4,98 narrative, 6, 28-30, 46, 49, 61, 69-72, 74-80, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 97-9, 103,110, 113,119-21,123 nation-state, 14, 42, 49, 65, 95 nationalism, 100 new age, 97 newspapers, 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 37, 38, 79 nihilism, 6, 10, 28, 58, 86, 112-15, 120, 121 North America, 29, 51 novels, 11,12, 56, 72, 81,86 October Crisis, 35 oikos, 14 opinion, 3-5, 10, 15, 18-24, 31, 53, 62, 63, 68, 69, 83, 84, 86, 92, 99-103, 105, 107-9, 118, 121; opinion polls, 12, 69, 95, 107, 108, 121; mass opinion, 4, 18, 69, 83, 101,105, 122 oratory, 35, 100 organic solidarity, 17, 52 panopticon, 96 paradox, 31, 47 Parsons, Talcott, 29, 66-9; Social System, The, 66 Parti Quebecois, 100 Peale, Norman Vincent, 61 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 27 photographs, 64 Plato, 15, 18, 19; Gorgias, 19-22; Protagoras, 22; Republic, 15, 19 plays, 12, 61 policy papers, 36 polls, 14

Index polling, 20,98,99,101,102,107-9, 120,121. Seealsoopinion polls Polus, 20 Popper, Karl, 5 popular, 6, 9-12, 48, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60-2, 72, 79, 83, 84, 86, 89, 92, 100, 102, 120, 121, 123, 124 popular culture, 11, 12, 28, 51, 61, 86, 90, 106, 109, 114, 119, 120, 124 positivism, 3 posters, 34 postmodern, 73, 75, 86, 87, 105, 106, 111 premodern, 13, 38, 82, 102 primary publics, 62, 63 print, 34, 35 Protagoras, 22 Protagoras (Plato), 22 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 77-9 Protestantism, 3, 77-9 psyche, 4, 7, 8 psychoanalysis, 8, 51, 93 public opinion. &£ opinion publishing, 34 pulp fiction, 62, 115 Quebec, 100 Quebecois, 35 questionnaire, 94 rational-legal association, 17 Real Women, 97 realism, 80, 81-4, 86, 89, 96-8, 120, 121 reality television, 98, 120, 121 records, 75 Redstockings Manifesto, 39 referenda, 94, 99-102, 107, 108, 120, 121

143

Reform Party of Canada, 99 Regina Manifesto, 37 religion, 6,8,43,46,50,52,53,97, 102,118 Republic (Plato), 15, 19 rhetoric, 5, 9, 11, 12, 17-24, 27, 28, 32-5, 37, 40, 44, 48, 53, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 83,107, 109, 110, 111, 114, 117,118 riots, 37 Roman Catholic Church, 77, 78 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15,17 Rules of Sociological Method, The. See Durkheim, Emile sacred, 7, 8,14,51-3, 56 Saint-Simon, Henri, 33 science, 3, 4, 9-11, 15, 28, 30-2, 34, 38, 40, 42-4, 46, 50, 52, 55, 75, 107,119 Second World War, 55 Second Surrealist Manifesto, 35 self, 25,26,65,73,74 self-help, 11,12,61,71,97,98,120, 121 Sharp, Mitchell, 35 Simmel, Georg, 40, 57 simulacra, 96, 100 situationists, 35 'Situationists': International Manifesto, 39 Smith, Dorothy, 123-4 soap opera, 62, 98, 99, 121 social, the, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13-16, 38, 39, 42, 43, 58, 59, 66, 71, 84, 89-92, 95-7, 105,106, 110, 114, 118, 119, 122 social contract, 15, 17 social facts. See Durkheim, Emile social psychology, 24

144 Index social science, 3-5, 7-9,14,15, 33,40, 43,70,77,80,86,96,110 social security, 95 Social System, The (Parsons), 66 socialism, 46, 75, 89 sociological imagination. See Mills, C. Wright Sociological Imagination, The. See Mills, C. Wright Socrates, 19-21, 23 sophists, 18-24, 31, 33, 94, 100, 113 sound bite, 67 Soviet Union, 60 Spock, Benjamin, 61 Sputnik, 60 state of nature, 15, 25 statistics, 9, 12, 14, 15, 32, 48, 49, 68, 71,72,92,94,95,98,101,102, 105,107-9,120 Steinbeck, John, 81 Stendhal, 80 story, 46, 49, 59, 67, 70-2, 75-9, 81, 83,98,99, 105, 110, 119, 121 storytelling, 10, 70-2, 74, 76, 78, 79, 97, 110 suicide, 32,33,48 Suicide (Durkheim), 33,34,48 surrealism, 59, 60, 71, 82, 83, 89, 96, 97,113,120,121 surrealists, 34, 35, 44 survey, 28, 94, 96, 101, 104, 108, 120 talk shows, 98 taxes, 121 technology, 23, 39, 60, 90, 94, 99101,103, 115,120-2 television, 12, 98-100, 115, 120, 121 terrorism, 37

Thatcher, Margaret, 117,118 Thompson, E.P., 77, 79 Time, 60, 61 Tonnies, Ferdinand, 17; Gemeinschaft, 10, 17; Gesellschaft, 17 totem, 7-10, 12, 16, 43, 47, 49, 52, 53, 56, 61, 66, 71, 91, 95,113, 118, 119 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 7 traditional association, 17 trope, 7-10, 12, 43, 44, 51-3, 56, 58, 85, 91, 95, 103,106,110,118-20, 122,123 Tzara, Tristan, 45 Veblen, Thorstein, 94 vernacular, 10, 34, 92, 111, 117, 123 verstehen, 63 voting, 68, 100, 101, 107, 109 Weber, Max, 17, 28, 62, 63, 77-9; ideal-type, 11, 62, 63, 77, 83; iron cage, 63; Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The,77-9; rational-legal association, 17; traditional association, 17; verstehen, 63 White, Hayden, 9, 72, 76 White Collar (Mills), 60, 61, 71 white-collar workers, 60-2, 71, 82, 83 White Man's Burden, 76 white supremacy, 97 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 112 Wolfe, Tom, 81, 97 Woolf, Virginia, 81 Wrong, Dennis, H., 10, 11 Zola, Emile, 80