The+Cultural+Logic+of+Collective+Representations

Discussion Notes: Durkheim’s //Cultural Logic of Collective Representations// (1912) (in Lemert 2010) SIS 705: Social Theory Caroline Chumo January 27, 2011 __Summary__: Once ideas become taken for granted, people assume the ideas are an integral part of material (versus social) reality. For example, religion (in Durkheim’s time and perhaps today as well) is considered the source of everything. In fact “all great social institutions are born in religion” (p. 94). But where does religion come from? From society itself, of course. Ideas that are collectively understood become a layer on top of reality—an ideal. Religion is therefore an example of the objectification of collective understanding. Society makes a concept so concrete, tangible, so definable, that it eventually becomes taken as given or pre-existing. Individuals, as well as the collective society, assimilate this ideal: “[The faculty of idealizing] is not a sort of luxury which a man could get along without, but a condition of his very existence. He could not be a social being, that is to say, he could not be a man, if he had not acquired it” (p. 96). The integration of individuals with collective understanding was so great that if one individual experiencing pressure to accept outside concepts shakes the foundations of the entire group to which s/he belongs (p. 97). Through the collective process of making life socially relevant, people began to remove themselves from what they know and began to look for Truth (i.e. Plato et al). The way Durkeim describes this collective effort to conceptualize the world (p. 100), reminded me of the word “ontology.” Society strove to give life ontology, categories, taxonomy. This process was also individualized, and individuals (such as social scientists) developed independent ways to understand the world. A funny contradiction arises from all this. A large concept like religion is taken as a completely subsuming explanation for all other concepts and aspects of life, a universal explanation. Being both //of// and //for// society, such as religion, makes claims to universality difficult. If any “totality,” or “supreme class” (p. 101) is //of// society, that means it was created by a collective of individuals. However, individuals do not have a lock on all aspects of life. Therefore, any collectively understood concept cannot possibly be complete. In other words, if say, 55 people decided to come up with a new concept and decide that the concept is True, their conception cannot possibly be completely True because each individual as well as the group only knows part of reality. A great quote from Durkheim to explain this: “Since the world expressed by the entire system of concepts is the one that society regards, society alone can furnish the most general notions with which it should be presented.” An individual or subgroup won’t cut it. Durkheim relates the contradiction of totality versus individuality to the pursuit of social science. As an individual given my piece of the totality, that which I expect to follow logically from a given event or concept will be different from that which another individual would expect. “But this personal state of expectation could not be confounded with the conception of a universal order of succession which imposes itself upon all minds and all events” (100). Durkheim concludes by saying that he is not sure how much this approach will help us understand social life, but he is willing to hypothesize and test.

__Discussion 1__: What does the first paragraph on page 99 mean? __Discussion 2__: How does the impact of Plato’s realization that we can step back and observe how consciousness works become part of the totality shaping and shaped by us? In other words how does our consciousness of consciousness impact our collective “ideal,” in Durkheim’s terms? __Discussion 3__: Durkheim’s argument here is similar to Marx’s argument in //Labor-Power and Capital// (1867). They both argue that when a society creates a concept, such as religion or money, that concept in turn shapes the way that its creators—society—view the world. Whose argument is more convincing, Durkheim’s or Marx’s and why? __Discussion 4__: In SIS 714 we read Searle’s //Constructing Social Reality// (1995). Do you think that Searle borrowed directly from Durkheim? Where are the overlaps in their arguments? __Discussion 5__: Where is Durkhiem’s tipping point for knowing when you have a critical mass of society that can officially establish a concept as true or not? If attaining this critical mass is impossible (which I am pretty sure it is), what is the point of social science?

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Ela Rossmiller Communities experience moments of effervescence, during which they experience a transformation of themselves and their environment. They project this onto the material world, giving rise to ideas, abstractions, absolutes, ideals, categories of thought, and classification schemes. These form the conceptual infrastructure for knowledge (science, philosophy, logic, morality, law, etc.). These are re-presented to society as objective because they draw upon collectively shared representations. Nonetheless, it should be noted that these conceptual categories concern humans (they are what Searle would call “observer-relative” social facts.) Thus, cultural representations are both derived from society and are about society. One can say that social life is the “ground zero” of human knowledge, and that social life deserves to be studied in its own right. The essential feature of all religions is that they draw a distinction between the sacred and the profane, where the profane is the real world and the sacred is the ideal world. The sacred is “something added to and above the real.” Sacred objects (e.g. totems) and practices (e.g. rituals) are the outer shell, not the inner soul, of religions. They serve to represent (re-present) the collective life to its members. Thus, religion is not the antithesis of scientific thought, since both draw upon cultural representations derived from the collective life. “The fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of religious origin.” Does Durkheim really show that science derives from religion? Couldn’t societies create the cultural representations on which science is based without religion? Is religion a necessary condition of science?
 * Durkheim, “The Cultural Logic of Collective Representations”**
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