Page 103 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

are themselves socially variable: ‘A concept is not my concept;
I hold it in common with other men’ (Durkheim, 1976, p. 433).
The ‘collective consciousness is ...a synthesis sui generis of partic-
ular consciousness …’, he wrote, ‘[and] this synthesis has the
effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas and
images which, once born, obey laws all of their own’ (pp. 423–4).
The 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 that inhabit it.
This understanding of systems of thought as ultimately deter-
mining is quasi-structuralist, though the language in which it was
expressed, that of consciousness, is not. In his more specific
treatment of religious belief, Durkheim introduced a further struc-
turalist trope, that of the binary opposition. The ‘real characteristic
of religious phenomena’, he argued, ‘is that they always suppose
a bipartite division of the whole universe... into two classes
which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each
other’ (p. 40). These two classes were the sacred and the profane.
What mattered, for Durkheim, was not the specific content of
either, but rather the relation between the two. Sacred things were
thus ‘things set apart and forbidden’ (p. 47), whatever they might
be, and defined only in relation to the profane, to things not set
apart and not forbidden.

Saussure on language
Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics was first published in 1916,
only a year after The Elementary Forms. Its central thesis was that
every language is in itself an entirely discrete system, the units
of which can be identified only in terms of their relationships to
each other, and not by reference to any other linguistic or extra-
linguistic system. Saussure distinguished between langue, the
social and systemic rules of language, and parole, the individual
and particular instance of speech, or utterance. Only the former,
he insisted, can properly be the object of scientific study, for
it alone is social rather than individual, essential rather than
accidental. ‘Language is not a function of the speaker’, argued
Saussure: ‘it is a product that is passively assimilated by the

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