Trans 2+4

Some parts: Jenks, C. (2003) Transgression. London & New York: Routledge. Pp. 15-48, and 82-110

chapter 2

Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity

p. 22

The primary entities that comprise a social world are social facts, they are the ‘absolute simples’, the irreducible elements that, in unique combinations, constitute different societal forms. Social facts are also the primary units of analysis.

Social facts: every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint or again, every way of acting which is general throughout while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestation. (Durkheim 1964b: 13)

p. 23

Three major characteristics of social facts:

• They are external in the sense that they have an existence independent of our thought about them, they are not simply realised or materialised by the individual member and further they predate that member, and as such constitute any world that he enters.
• They constrain in as much as they are coercive when infringed; attempts to act otherwise than normatively transgresses the implicit and explicit rule structure and invokes constraint.
• Their generality derives from their being typical, normal, average, sustaining and not transitory, and morally good in the sense that they maintain the collective life – they are the very fabric of social ‘nature’; that is, they have a sociological facticity (and they enable transgression).

p. 24

Recognition of the social facts remains, however, a problem. Although their existence is sui generic they do not have form. Their reality does not consist in a material or physical presence, they are more experienced than tangible.

p. 24 – 26

normal and pathological: The healthy constitutes the norm par excellence and can consequently be in no way abnormal. (Durkheim 1964b: 58)

Social facts are typical and general (the normal) as opposed to those that are irregular, particular or transitory. The normal facts are those which constitute solidarity and continuity and the pathological are those which manifest individualisation, fragmentation and interruption. In their different ways the two orders of social fact are markers of good and concerted conduct within the collective life.

Durkheim defines the normal in terms of the average (= healthy = good). The pathological are structurally transitory and thus inappropriate for our study; thus instead of using the concept ‘pathological’ to refer to inherent threats within a social structure Durkheim uses it to establish the a-social character of individual manifestations and through this to sanctify the altar of collective purity. Pathological behaviour serves as a negative reinforcement for the collective sentiments.

p. 26

For Durkheim, religion sheds light not only on what people believe but more fundamentally on what and on how they think. The substantive truth value of elements comprising a mechanical order is attested to by Durkheim in the Introduction to the Elementary Forms when he states that there exist in society no institutions that are based upon a lie. Thus all religious practice, whatever form it takes, translates some human need. Religions embody a specific social function which is their recognisable constraint, their governance of human conduct.

p. 27

For Durkheim, society is the fundamental and primary reality; without it there is no humankind – but this is a reciprocal dependency. Society can only become realised, through their capacity to communicate symbolically. Out of this concerted conduct springs the collective representations and sentiments of society and, further, the fundamental categories of thought, for they too are collective representations. So humankind finds expression only in and through the social bond; and, of course, this bond is itself an expression of sociology’s epistemology.

Man as consciousness emerges as an epiphenomenon of society. In the place of a member’s consciousness the Rules substitutes collective responses to constraint. Such positivism sets a strict limit to human understanding and creativity – the limit being not merely the isolated individual’s sense impression, but the sense impressions of the individual as a compelled member of a unified collective consciousness. The collective consciousness is thus the teleological representation of the ultimate and finite reality structure.

p. 28

sacred and profane: Durkheim articulates this sense of diffusion between the collective and the individual representations through his concepts of the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’. ‘The sacred is par excellence that which the profane should not touch, and cannot touch with impunity’ (Durkheim 1971: 40). The sacred may be seen to represent public knowledge and social institutions, and the profane to represent the potential of individual consciousness – it is that which is always threatening to bring down the sacred.

The totem is in itself symbolic of the social group that produced it as a totem. Thus proliferating groups within any social structure ‘objectify themselves’ in material objects as totems; the totem then acts as an emblem which the member identifies with and thus, through identification, remains part of his group.

Questions: what are diffused symbols? How is a totem different from any other ind of sign?

p. 32

. . . the death of God. This lack of an existential guarantee, though hardly regretted, is associated with the demise of the ‘sacred’ (a theme of the Durkheimian school), and leads in Bataille’s thought to a strategy and a method (as opposed to a project) of going to the limits, of thought, notions, beliefs and morals – and then transgressing those very limits in order to delimit their operation. . . . (Pefanis 1991: 45)
The rules are no longer clear and we are freer because of this. Our responsibility, however, is to constitute the social world and to believe in those constitutions, for, as Durkheim says, we can no longer receive the world with a fixed stare, that is, from closed systems of knowledge.

p. 34

Society is, then, a complicated classificatory system. It is a system that is simultaneously cognitive, political and moral. The cognitive element stems from a tradition that the basic categories of things are categories of people. To attempt to alter the classificatory system is to strike at the heart of the social. The experience of social life is as the experience of a series of compartments, each pure on the inside and insulated around the margins. The space between these compartments is dangerous and threatens not just the marginalised individual but the whole system.

p. 37

Talcott Parsons’s Social System establishes a magnificent structure of social organisation integrating the dimensions of action and constraint. Parsons’s value position is that which preserves order and stability above all else. Here transgression could never be an heroic concept.

two guiding metaphors: * ‘organicism’, which speaks of the unspecific, the living and is concerned with content; * a ‘system’, which makes reference to the explicit, the inanimate and is concerned with form. This social system seeks to transform or merge difference into communality. The boundaries within and around the system are extremely firm; they are apparent, and they are consensual.

p. 38

Society becomes the monitor for all order and it further inculcates a set of rules of conduct which are enforced less by individual will and political sovereignty than by society’s own pre-existence. This supraindividual monolith remains the unquestioned origin of all causality and all explanation within an order-based sociological tradition.

p. 39

When Parsons speaks of the production of a general theory of action within the system, he is addressing the persistent translation of universal cultural values into particular social norms and orientations for specific acts. How does the collective consciousness become real in the minds of individual people? The persistent and necessary translation of cultural values into social norms provides the dynamic within the System. Social action conceived of in these terms is what Parsons refers to as ‘instrumental activism’.

In Parsons’s social system the social norms are the source of this identity because they diminish the potential distinction between the self and the collectivity by engendering a coinciding set of interests for both the self and the collectivity. It is through this basic identification that individuals become committed to the social system

p. 40

The social order is maintained by two pervasive system tendencies which Parsons calls ‘functional prerequisites’ and they signify 1) the drive towards self maintenance (refers to the inside: to maintain its own equilibrium and to regulate its internal homeostatic balance) and 2) the drive towards boundary maintenance (refers to the outside: to pronounce its difference from other systems)

p. 41

The fundamental elements of the Parsonian personality theory, which he calls ‘need dispositions’, display two features: a kind of performance or activity and a kind of sanction or satisfaction. Here then are the perfect ingredients for a homeostatic balance between desire and satiation… Desire and constraint clash head-on and the outcome is the greater good of the collectivity.

p. 43 – 44

Transgression is always a step into the unknown and a step that is without precedent

Van Gennep delineated a three-part transmutation within rites de passage both across social space and through social time. The symbolic narrative runs inexorably from ordered world to ordered world, involving a release (separation) and an acceptance (reaggregation) and a site of value-less, nihilistic freefall (margin or limen) where almost anything can happen.

p. 44 –

Victor Turner’s theory of liminality: The status (or rather lack of status) location that he theorises is, in many senses, culturally imperceptible. The individual liminar is marked out by ambiguity – that is, they are not marked out at all. —> connection to Phelan??? They occupy a cultural miasma rather than any identifiable class or fixed position. We must conceive of a domain that is, of course, in time yet timeless. Its atemporality derives from the fact that it is a domain without any of the recognisable (and thus measurable) attributes of the individual’s past status or his status yet to come. The liminar’s outsiderhood derives then from his lack of structural referents within a particular symbolic system, unlike marginals who simply fall short.

p. 47

In a much later work, Civilization and Its Discontents(1930), Freud once again addresses the boundaries between the self and the collectivity and focuses on what he referred to as ‘the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization’. What he establishes here is the spatial sense of a social world, a civilisation, held intact by the dams and constraints built into individual psyches through the work of successful psycho-sexual development.

chapter 4

p. 84

Central to Baudelaire’s conception of the modern and his intellectual reaction to modernity was that he negated and transgressed conventional morality in thought, word and deed.

p. 89

As God is dead then there is no limit to infinity, there is nothing exterior to being, and consequently we are forced to a constant recognition of the interiority of being, to what Bataille calls sovereignty – the supremacy, the rule, the responsibility, and the monocausality of the self. This experience is what Foucault describes as the limitless reign of limit and the emptiness of excess.

p. 90

There exists, then, an absolute contingency between a limit and a transgression, they are unthinkable, futile, and meaningless in isolation. The meaning derives from the moment of intersection between these two elements and from all that follows in the wake of this intersection.

p. 91

characteristics of the poststructuralist ‘differance’ which have been summarised by Mouzelis (1995) as threefold: (1) it is anti-foundationalist, it defies origin accounts and mono-causality, it resists fixed, orienting binaries and explodes them at least into continua if not randomness, it broadens the gap between the signifier and the signified; (2) it de-centres the subject, if not the ‘death of man’ thesis then certainly the sense that self, subjectivity and personhood are not the causal initiations of social action, process or event; and (3) it disposes of the idea of representation or empirical referent.

To return to Foucault’s account of transgression: the relationship between transgression and limit is both blindingly simple, like the lightning flash, but also overwhelmingly complex, like the spiral which relates the two. The event of their intersection cannot therefore stand within a code, it is essentially outside, it is amoral. Foucault insists that the relationship must therefore remain free on notions of scandal or the subversive, anything negative;

p. 92

Foucault persists; his role is not as apologist for everyday life. For him (and Bataille), transgression is not oppositional, disruptive or transformational: ‘Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world)’ (Foucault 1977: 35). Transgression announces limitation and its obverse. This is the beginning of what Foucault calls the ‘nonpositive affirmation’ of contemporary philosophy; one can detect here the early traces of a post-modern manifesto. This is also heralding what Bataille had called the ‘inner’ or ‘interior experience’, that is, an experience free of disciplinary, professional, moral constraints, which, like his own work, can relentlessly question, aggravate and unsettle all things certain.

p. 93

being is the experience of limits and the foundational experience and prime metaphor for this belief is the knowledge of death. Death is the great finitude, the full stop

The urge to drive through the limit derives from the life force or, to put it another way, the desire to ‘complete’ life – a quest that Hegel would clearly have recognised. The constant inability to ‘complete’ life, however, and the recognition of that inability generates a perpetual state of urgency and anxiety – this is part of the human condition. Existence becomes, what Bataille has referred to as, ‘an exasperated attempt to complete being’ (Bataille 1988: 89).

The erotic, the desire for another, is a constant initiative through which being breaks out into recognition by being affirmed in and through others; otherness always being the predicate of sexual activity. So the communication of the self with the outside is fundamentally stirred through sexuality.

p. 94

Sexuality and eroticism reveal principles of disorder and this is precisely Bataille’s thesis. Bataille sees humankind’s constant and passionate attempts to escape the anxiety of being as leading inevitably to recklessness and even waste.

So the life force is self-destructive, it can destroy what it has created. Because of our innate knowledge of this violent capacity to self-destruct, human societies restrain the damaging potential naturally and spontaneously through the constitution of taboos. Taboos, are then, not external impositions, they are a response to a self-protective inner urge. As we have already heard from Foucault in relation to what he called ‘limit’ (taboo), taboos and transgressions are inseparable. Hence the primitive constitution of taboo simultaneously engendered the urge to transgress and, through the affinity of this coupling, a whole range of surface structural rituals emerged concerning sexual practice

it enables change while at the same time ensuring stability.

p. 97

Bataille, it would appear, also closely associates violence with the articulation and expression of the erotic; he equates a certain model of male, penetrative, emotionless sexuality with a possible (but singularly one-sided) standard for eroticism.

p. 98 – 100

Cruelty and eroticism are conscious intentions in a mind which has resolved to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour.

the radical juxtaposition of sexuality, death and violence; the intensity of joy in line with the foreboding of anguish; the utterly wasteful; an aristocratic excess and disregard – in short, like it or not, the quintessentially erotic.

p. 100-107

through Bataille, we are looking at the selfless expenditure of excess or superfluous resources, clearly a sovereign act. Systems, ecologies, economies routinely generate surpluses, this is Bataille’s belief. When systems are not growing, expanding or evolving their surpluses accumulate as profit which become embalmed in sacred symbolism – wealth/health/happiness/goodness/ morality/virtue. This surplus, this accumulated energy, must, in Bataille’s view, be unloaded, expended, wasted, defecated, squandered, discharged in what can only be a profane manner. Such dépense may be small scale and resplendent and playful, the jouissance (pleasure) of eroticism or religious experience, or large scale and catastrophic like world war.

We may read this again as an affirmation of the very necessity of transgression for the maintenance of the system, but certainly not in functionalist terms.

p. 107-110

‘Sovereignty’: a predisposition to action non-servile and unconstrained

Bataille’s resistance to mere utility in the function of body or mind, and thus creativity, finds its purest symbolic expression in Surrealism.

Although de Sade’s system is beyond good and evil, how could such judgements be made, it is nevertheless avowedly the province of the anti-Christ. Sovereign men do not do good, either by choice or by accident and the real issue here is that they do not act with other in mind. Bataille’s sovereignty is that of a sociologist (albeit a peculiar one) and is thus premised on the very necessity of other and sociality.

the principle of ‘sovereignty’ is supreme. The purpose and the significance which the concept carries for Bataille and all of the other luminaries listed above is as a replacement for and corruption of ‘reason’. That sovereignty makes us look at violence, aggression and eroticism in human thought and action enables us to think outside of that all-persuasive canon of the mild-mannered but wholly calculating rationality that has forged modernity.

Striving for sovereignty ensures a breakdown of hierarchies and a scrambling of the proper, worthy, replicable, true with the dirty, untidy, obscene and peculiar (Gallop 1981).