Page 86 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

DURKHEIM AND SAUSSURE

overwhelmingly francophone affair—it has a much longer history. Indeed,
a perfectly plausible case can be mounted for Auguste Comte (1778–
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1857) as a central precursor of the structuralist tradition. Much less
controversially, however, that title belongs, first, to the French
anthropologist, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), and secondly, to
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the French-speaking Swiss linguist.
Durkheim’s work on “primitive” religion and Saussure’s on language
directly anticipate the subsequent histories of the two academic disciplines
most directly implicated in structuralism: anthropology and semiology.

Durkheim and Saussure:
anthropology and semiology

Durkheim made no strong claim for the special significance of linguistics,
although, interestingly, he did nominate language as an important
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instance of the archetypal “social fact”. But his general social theory
is, nonetheless, quite significantly proto-structuralist. Durkheim’s last
major work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, first published
in 1915, takes as its theoretical objects first knowledge, and secondly
religion. In his treatment of the former, Durkheim explicitly rejects
both the empiricist view that what we know is given by experience,
and the rationalist, or apriorist, that the categories of knowledge are
somehow immanent within the human mind. Rather, he argues, such
categories are constituted by and through systems of thought that are
themselves socially variable: “A concept is not my concept; I hold it
in common with other men [sic]”. The “collective consciousness is…a
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synthesis sui generis of particular consciousness…”, he writes, “this
synthesis has the effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments,
ideas and images which, once born, obey laws all of their own”. The
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collective consciousness is thus absolutely central to social order: it is
only through it that society is able to control, indeed construct, the
individual human personalities which inhabit it.
This understanding of systems of thought as ultimately determining
is very obviously quasi-structuralist, though the language in which it
is expressed, that of consciousness, most certainly is not. In his more
specific treatment of religious belief, Durkheim introduces a further
structuralist trope, or metaphor, that of the binary opposition. The
“real characteristic of religious phenomena”, he argues, “is that they

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