Stjepan Mestrovic - Durkheim and Postmodern Culture

COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL ORDER

An Aldine de Gruyter Series of Texts and Monographs

Series Editor

David R. Maines, Wayne State University

Advisory Editors

Bruce Gronbeck Peter K. Manning William K. Rawlins

David L. Altheide and Robert Snow, Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era

Joseph Bensman and Robert Lilienfeld, Craft and Consciousness: Occupational Technique and the Development of World Images (Second Edition)

Valerie Malhotra Bentz, Becoming Mature: Childhood Ghosts and Spirits in Adult Life

Herbert Blumer, Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change: A Critical Analysis(Edited with an Introduction by David R. Maines and Thomas J. Morrione)

Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgley (editors), Life as Theater: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook(Second Edition)

Richard Harvey Brown (editor), Writing the Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse

Norman K. Denzin, Hollywood Shot by Shot: Alcoholism in American Cinema

Irwin Deutscher, Fred P. Pestello, and Frances G. Pestello, Sentiments and Acts

Joo-Hyun Cho, Family Violence in Korea

Bruce E. Gronbeck, Rhetoric and Socioculture

Pasquale Gagliardi (ed), Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape(paperback)

J. T. Hansen, A. Susan Owen, and Michael Patrick Madden, Parallels: The Soldiers Knowledge and the Oral History of Contemporary Warfare

Emmanuel Lazega, The Micropolitics of Knowledge: Communication and Interaction in Work Groups

David R. Maines (editor), Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss

David R. Maines, Time and Social Process: Gender, Life Course, and Social Organization

Peter K. Manning, Organizational Communication

Stjepan G. Metrovi, Durkheim and Postmodernist Culture

R. S. Perinbanayagam, Discursive Acts

William K. Rawlins, Friendship Matters: Communication, Dialectics, and the Life Course

Vladimir Shlapentokh and Dmitry Shlapentokh, Ideological Trends in Soviet Movies

Jim Thomas, Communicating Prison Culture: The Deconstruction of Social Existence

Jacqueline P. Wiseman, The Other Half: Wives of Alcoholics and Their Social-Psychological Situation

Stjepan G. Metrovi

Stjepan G. Metrovi, is a native of Zagreb, Croatia, and is Professor of Sociology at Texas A & University. Widely published in scholarly journals, he is the author of Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology (1988) and The Coming Fin de Sicle (1991).

First published 1992 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Metrovi, Stjepan Gabriel.

Durkheim and postmodern culture / Stjepan G. Metrovi.

p. cm. (Communication and social order)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-202-30439-6. ISBN 0-202-30440-X (pbk.)

1. SociologyPhilosophy. 2. Durkheim, Emile, 1858-1917.

3. PostmodernismSocial aspects. 4. Culture. 5. Romanticism.

I. Title. II. Series.

HM24.M47215 1992

301.01dc20

92-21616

CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30440-3 (pbk)

The present work is an elaboration of my previous efforts in Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology (1988) and The Coming Fin de Sicle (1991) to demonstrate Durkheims neglected relevance to the postmodern discourse. My aims include finding affinities between our fin de sicle and Durkheims fin de sicle, and connecting the contemporary themes of rebellion against Enlightenment narratives found in postmodern culture with similar concerns found in Durkheims sociology as well as in his fin de sicle culture. I hope that these aims will contribute to Durkheimian scholarship as well as to the postmodern discourse.

The distinctive aspects of the present study flow from the focus on culture, communication, and the feminine voice in culture. I approach Durkheim as a fin de sicle student of culture, and apply his insights to our fin de sicle culture. Furthermore, because Durkheim claimed that culture is comprised primarily of collective representations, he was a forerunner of the current, postmodern concerns with communication. Because Durkheim shall be read in the context of his fin de sicle, this book shall lead to the conclusion that Durkheim was a kind of psychoanalyst such that society is the patient, culture comprises the symptoms, and the sociologist must decipher, decode, and even deconstruct collective representations. Yet, the Durkheimian deconstruction I am proposing here is unlike the postmodern deconstructions, which criticize and tear apart a text without substituting a better meaning or interpretation. Some postmodernists claim that such exercises are liberating, while others regard them as nihilistic. Some would deny that anything like a postmodern culture could exist. Consider the anticultural stand in the following claim made by Jean Baudrillard, who is often referred to as the high priest of postmodernism:

I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. (1986:5)

My focus on postmodern culture is made in deliberate contradistinction to Baudrillard and other postmodern writers. On the one hand, such a focus violates the rules of the postmodern rebellion against origins, cultural roots, or any foundations for the circulation of fictions in society (Rosenau 1992:19). On the other, it is commensurate with postmodern claims of offering liberation from oppressive narratives, freedom, and choice (Bauman 1991). At this point, I wish to indicate merely that my focus on postmodern culture is not an accident.

Feminism has emerged as a dominant voice that has accompanied postmodern discourse. I intend to show that Durkheim was always mindful of the left-handed, feminine aspects of society and culture, and that he sought to balance these with the right-handed, masculine aspects that came to dominate modern social arrangements. But again, Durkheims seemingly Jungian approach to culture shall be pursued in order to distinguish it radically from Baudrillards postmodern approach: