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ABSTRACT
This paper offers a new interpretation of Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) as the basis for reconsidering the Tarde–Durkheim debate of 1903 and the distinctions between a theory of social force and a theory of social assemblage. Resisting traditional interpretations of Durkheim's scientism, this essay traces how concepts of force and energy are centrally developed in Elementary Forms to draw new lines between epistemology to ontology for twentieth-century theory. I argue that Durkheim develops an ‘energetic epistemology’ that conceives of the human capacity for shared meaning as a product of invested energy in the form of continually enacted and evolving material practice, thought, and attention. According to Durkheim, when a member of a collective perceives a god or feels belief, he or she actually perceives the accumulated energy of on-going creation and maintenance of objects and ideas by members of a collective. Sacred objects, images, and ideas bear the trace of collective energy the more they are carefully crafted, maintained in spaces that are specially arranged, and written into behavioural codes. This reading of Durkheim allows us to consider him in a lineage of social constructivists and, particularly, in relation to Ludwik Fleck, who has been largely confined to different theoretical discussions when his contributions to sociology have been acknowledged at all. By reconsidering Durkheim, we have occasion to rethink his sociology and understand how he redrew the lines between thought and action, between epistemology and ontology, through the material framework of energy and force.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Lynn Badia is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2015–2017) at the University of Alberta in the Department of English and Film Studies, and, during the fall 2015 term, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Badia's research in the literature, philosophy, and Cultural Studies is focused on questions about scientific knowledge and the natural world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is completing work on her book manuscript, A Universe of Forces: Energy in Early Twentieth-Century Theory and Philosophy.
Notes
1. A more complete list would also include: Schmaus (Citation1994), Durkheim's Philosophy of Science and the Sociology of Knowledge; Meštrović (Citation1992), Durkheim and Postmodern Culture.
2. For a detailed account of Durkheim's influence on the twentieth-century structuralists and post-structuralists (even while many of them claimed to refute Durkheim), see Alexander and Smith, p. 2–14.
3. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, the concepts of ‘force' and ‘energy' were often used interchangeably. For instance, early formulations of thermodynamic theory utilize the vocabulary of force, as in ‘The Law of the Conservation of Force' instead of ‘The Law of the Conservation of Energy'.
4. Cosman's English translation (Citation2008) of Elementary Forms is an abridged version that omits important passages from the original translation by Swain (Citation1915). However, the Cosman version does make improvements in the translation itself. All quotations from Elementary Forms in this essay are taken from the Cosman translation except when cited otherwise to the Swain translation.
5. This explanation resonates with Gustav LeBon's theory of crow behaviour. In his widely read work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Citation1896), Le Bon claims that when people have gathered in a collective or crowd, they take on unique psychological and neurological behaviours/states that cannot be reproduced in any of its members while in isolation. In a crowd, LeBon claims that people begin to act from a more primitive part of their spinal cord, which changes their mental functioning. One consequence is that affect becomes exaggerated and contagious among the members of the group, and, as a result, people become highly responsive to images. However, while LeBon claims crowd behaviour arises by activating particular behavioural modes of neurologic programming, Durkheim claims is it arises from the energetic exchanges among members.
6. The term ‘social forces' itself has contributed to the narrow readings of Durkheim's sociology. Starting with Durkheim, the prolific life of the term ‘social forces' in twentieth-century cultural and literary theory is a study in itself. The journal Social Forces, which began publication in 1925, is just one indication of its saliency. The reading of social forces in Elementary Forms provided here, however, does not assume the nature and stability of an objectified ‘social' influence. While its meaning is much more complex in Elementary Forms, the term ‘social forces' has been largely taken for granted and dramatically oversimplified in twentieth-century theory.
7. In light of this, I would suggest that Durkheim's theory of mimesis and representation be placed in conversation with André Leroi-Gourhan's (Citation1993) Gesture and Speech. In summary, Leroi-Gourhan argues that Prehistoric cave art was not an exercise in mimesis but a means to stabilize behavioural and linguistic interactions performed by a community of participants. These early images were abstractions of narratives performed by the group; the performance, stabilized through reference to images, reinforced unified values and coordinated perception for the group. According to Leroi-Gourhan, art begins to serve a primarily mimetic function only later in history.
8. The explanation of this shift in the human animal is Durkheim's point of departure from his contemporaries such as Tarde and Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), who will explain ‘social force' within human psychology. Both Durkheim and Le Bon argue that in a collective, members demonstrate complex behaviour in which their mental states cannot be reproduced in isolation. Le Bon and Durkheim have very different explanations for the mechanism of how this collective behaviour arises. LeBon's is a cognitive/psychological explanation (see note ii); Durkheim's is a social-epistemological explanation.
9. It is clarifying to distinguish the sense of social cognition as developed by Durkheim from more recent theories of ‘collective cognition' or ‘distributed cognition', as first described by Hutchins (Citation1995) in Cognition in the Wild. Hutchins's foundational theory is focused on understanding cognition as a process that extends beyond the individual mind. By focusing his study on the functioning of a navy ship, he seeks to understand how the tasks of cognition and memory are distributed among members of a society (through various strategies of specialization and memory storage) and are dependent on aspects of material environment, apparatus, and process. In contrast, Durkheim seeks to demonstrate that the human mind can create coordinated meaning and perception because human cognition functions through collective action. The reason humans can create complex statements that are meaningful across individuals is because our cognitive faculties (including perception) function collectively with others.
10. In addition to Comte, Durkheim also distinguishes his explanation of ‘force' from that provided by Herbert Spencer.
According to Spencer, however, there is a grain of truth in the belief in spirits: the idea ‘that power that is manifest in consciousness is another form of power that is manifest outside consciousness’ (‘Ecclesiastical Institutions’, VI, s. 659 in The Principles of Sociology, iii, 169). Spencer means that the notion of force in general is the feeling of the force of our own force extended to the whole universe. (Footnote p. 61)
This distinguishes the internal force (that is only extended by metaphor to the external world) from the collective force felt within (that is, as Durkheim maintains, a real force).
11. For two detailed accounts of Fleck's central importance to science studies and the development of twentieth-century epistemology and ontology more generally, see Smith (Citation2006) (in particular p. 25–28 and p. 46–84) and Latour (Citation2007b).