Godless Intellectuals?

The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented

Alexander Tristan Riley

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845458263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Durkheimians have traditionally been understood as positivist, secular thinkers, fully within the Enlightenment project of limitless reason and progress. In a radical revision of this view, this book persuasively argues that the core members of the Durkheimian circle (Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz) are significantly more complicated than this. Through his extensive analysis of large volumes of correspondence as well as historical and macro-sociological mappings of the intellectual and social worlds in which the Durkheimian project emerged, the author shows the Durkheimian project to have constituted a quasi-religious quest in ways much deeper than most interpreters have thought. Their fascination, both personal and intellectual, with the sacred is the basis on which the author reconstructs some important components of modern French intellectual history, connecting Durkheimian thought to key representatives of French poststructuralism and postmodernism: Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Deleuze.

1

The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred

The central goal of this book is to map the emergence, trajectory, and influence of a very particular kind of intellectual project that I call mystic Durkheimianism, which unites two seemingly very strange bedfellows: Durkheimian sociology and poststructuralism. An understanding of its existence and influence in the French intellectual world will contribute to a better understanding of some otherwise fairly mysterious facts in intellectual history. Moreover, there are to date no treatments of this important piece of the history of French social theory by a sociologist using sociological terms and tools, and I hope to contribute to the work of filling that considerable hole in the scholarly literature.

A second and closely related goal of the book involves the presentation and test-driving of a research method for thinking about intellectual works and identities. How can we understand the relationship between the work an intellectual produces and his or her life in terms that are not simply biographical? What can we know about how and from what sources intellectual projects arise? How can we hope to understand the meanings of intellectual works and trajectories sociologically without completely jettisoning the experiential level of that production? What can we know about how intellectual influence works? When we construct intellectual histories and thereby try to make some sense of who goes where, what are the criteria we should use? What ultimately are the things we need to account for in understanding intellectual production and the meaning of ideas and intellectual work? These are some of the questions I will address, and a serviceable theory of the intellectual habitus, intellectual experience and identity, and intellectual production, empirically derived and tested in this particular site of twentieth-century France, is what I hope to work toward in the pages that follow.

Both Durkheimian sociology and French poststructuralist thought have received considerable attention in the French- and English-speaking academic worlds over the past fifteen to twenty years. Significant literatures now exist on the histories of both, though connections between the two are only infrequently and unsystematically explored. Historical work on the Durkheimian school frequently finds its sources in nineteenth-century French neo-Kantianism and traces its influence through contemporary forms of functionalism and sociological positivism. The work on the possible meanings and usages of poststructuralism has brought with it a concern for establishing the genealogy of this peculiar branch of literary and social theory. Various theses connect it to the broader anti-humanist and structuralist movements that originated in linguistics, to the peculiar French reading of Nietzsche by the literary avant-garde, or to the anti-Marxist left intellectual radicalism associated with the political and cultural upheaval of May 1968.

Notwithstanding the considerable amount of attention paid to these questions, only rarely have sociological tools been brought to bear on them. What were the actual sociological conditions of the intellectual and political worlds in which these thinkers were formed and matured? What intellectual networks did they participate in, and what institutions did they pass through during their educational and scholarly development? In short, what are the precise factors that produced their intellectual selves? Most of the existing efforts content themselves with textual readings of the Durkheimian and poststructural sources, while real intellectual networks and sociologies are largely ignored, and they privilege lines of descent claimed by the poststructuralist authors themselves—a shaky analytical strategy.

I attempt to attend both to the textual level and to a more careful historical and micro-sociology of intellectual influence within which to frame it. The core of my argument is as follows: the work and lives of the key representatives of poststructuralist thought (Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard) constitute an effort to retheorize and reinvigorate the venerable concept of the sacred. This claim raises the question of the sources from which they derive this theoretical concern. I believe the central source can in fact be located in Durkheimianism, an intellectual predecessor that is generally considered something of an antithesis to poststructuralism. While this intellectual connection has been recognized by some other writers, at least in part simply because some of the poststructuralists mention the Durkheimians explicitly in their own work, they have not attempted to demonstrate in empirical terms just how this connection between the purportedly positivist Durkheimian school and the skeptical, anti-positivist poststructuralists was constructed through real intellectual networks and intellectual habitus. Indeed, the problem seems at first glance daunting, if not impossible: How, in an argument about intellectual trajectory and personality, can we possibly get from the ascetic, soi-disant scientist Durkheim to the libidinous transgressor Foucault?

Empirical and sociological substantiation of the link between Durkheimian thought and the poststructuralists will require not only a close examination of the poststructuralists, but also (and first) an excavation of the work and lives of the several Durkheimian thinkers who, in their collective intellectual activity, most directly influenced the poststructuralists. These are the members of the small sub-group of contributors to Durkheim's journal L’Année sociologique who were most centrally concerned with the sociology of religion: Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, and Robert Hertz. These thinkers were dedicated to simultaneously examining the role of the intellectual in society and acting in the world themselves as intellectuals, with an emphasis on the necessity of remaking the sacred in the secular modern world, and their particular methods of resolving the tension between theoretical work and engaged lives served as powerful and empirically demonstrable influences on the later generation of poststructuralists. In the reconstruction of their intellectual project, I borrow conceptual tools from Weber's sociology of religion to formulate the notion of mystic Durkheimianism, which is distinguished from ascetic Durkheimianism along a number of axes that demonstrate particular orientations to problematics or dynamics that were central areas of contention for intellectuals at the time (and which remained so, although with substantive thematic shifts, for the poststructuralists as well). These problematics were: 1) the appropriate political role of the intellectual, if any; 2) the parameters and limits of scientific knowledge of human experience and action; and 3) the appropriate moral institutions and theories to replace the institution that had previously provided the moral center for French society, the Roman Catholic Church, and with which to most effectively organize society.

In formulating a specific set of orientations to these key problems and working them out both in their intellectual and personal lives, the mystic Durkheimians prove to be an important historical and theoretical link from early sociological thought to poststructuralism.

The Modern Intellectual and the Sacred in France: Doing Sacredness Otherwise

As I am making a case for a relationship between a certain kind of intellectual (and a certain kind of intellectual project) and the concept of the sacred, one might reasonably expect at least a brief discussion of the general question of precisely what constitutes: 1) an intellectual; and 2) the sacred.

Ron Eyerman is certainly correct when he notes that many works attempting to define intellectuals “begin by stating how difficult the task is” (1994: 1), and this book takes its place in that venerable tradition. The term is used in myriad ways, and, while some writers invoke it in a generic way to refer to all those in all times and places who have lived and worked primarily in the realm of ideas, there are specificities of the French historical and social context that make a tighter definition possible and even necessary. Here, there are some reasonable starting points, but even these call for caution in application. Raymond Aron's distinction of two poles of activity, effectiveness/culture and imitation/creation, permits a location of intellectuals toward the cultural and creative poles, but what of engineers or members of a research team doing normal science, for example? Rémy Rieffel invokes Debray's distinction between a high and low intelligentsia in order to delineate and justify a study of intellectuals that concentrates only on those who have access to a large public (Rieffel 1993: 17).

The very term intellectuel has a distinct social history. It is linked to the appearance of that particular type of social actor that first emerged in fin-de-siècle Paris, in response to the concerted effort by the French military establishment and cultural Right to make Captain Alfred Dreyfus a national scapegoat, and that found archetypal expression in the famed “J’accuse” letter of Émile Zola. This critical historical episode in the emergence of the modern French intellectual is discussed at some length in this book's third chapter, but for now it is perhaps sufficient to note that the definition of the intellectuels, what made them different from earlier historical examples of writers, philosophers, and cultural producers, has much to do with their explicit use of academic and intellectual capital in the service of political and social struggles (Charle 1990). It is arguably here that we see the birth of an idea of the essence of the intellectual that has become almost an issue of common sense acquiescence in much literature on intellectuals—that is, the intellectual as centrally defined by his or her relation to the political sphere. The intellectuel is not merely a man or woman of ideas, but one who endeavors explicitly to put his or her ideas to work in the service of some political or social project, who conceives of him or herself as fundamentally the kind of actor with a privileged capacity to speak authoritatively to compelling political and social issues of the day.

Of course, thinkers who endeavored to put their ideas into the service of political and social causes or powers existed prior to this relatively late juncture in history. Thomas Molnar accepts in its essentials this definition of the intellectual, but he argues for its point of origin as the early fourteenth rather than the late nineteenth century, since this is the period during which the long-standing intellectual and political unity of the Christian faith was disrupted by the medieval struggle of papacy and empire, and thinkers subsequently began to mobilize themselves and their ideas on behalf of one or the other (Molnar 1961: 9–10).

Whatever the historical point of its emergence, though, this definition of the intellectual as a thinker who puts his or her thought explicitly at the service of some political or social agenda or goal and who understands his or her cultural production as intimately tied or at least amenable to intervention in the sphere of power in society has attained a wide acceptance in sociological circles, and it has lent itself particularly well to the analyses of Marxist and Marxist-inspired writers who see the intellectual's role and activity as fundamentally entwined in the conflict of social classes and political factions. The history of Marxist theorizing about the intellectual is rich and complicated, from Marx's own criticisms of the “philosophers [who] have only interpreted the world” when the task at hand was to change it, to Lenin's formulation of the intellectual as revolutionary vanguard burdened by history with the task of bringing the masses to consciousness and revolution, Gramsci's subtle recasting of this Leninist program with the notion of vanguard “organic intellectuals” themselves drawn from the masses and thus more capable of working out the practical problems of the masses with the tools of critical theory, and Alvin Gouldner's cautious evaluation of the New Class of technicians and professional intellectuals as a “universal class in embryo” (Marx 1972: 145; Lenin 1966: 72–77; Gramsci 1971: 323–77; Gouldner 1979: 85).

In this perspective one also finds privileged what we should recognize as a more or less purely macro-sociology of intellectuals, in which the important factors for consideration concern the place and function in the overall social structure played by intellectuals as a class. The micro-sociology of intellectuals and the study of the intellectual experience of meaning in intellectual production are largely ignored by Marxist thinkers and those centrally inspired by them in their study of intellectuals.

As a sociologist, one can scarcely discount this perspective on the study of the intellectual, as it reveals fundamental aspects of the inevitable implication of ideas in social and political conflict and struggle. Nonetheless, there is significant oversimplification in such definitions, arising from the unjustified privileging, to use Weberian terms, of a certain kind of interests and positions (material) over other (ideal) interests and positions. It is certainly true that concerns about political power, whether as a conservative seeking to maintain order or a radical seeking to subvert it, and strategies for achieving personal success in the intellectual or other worlds are frequently parts of an intellectual's self-positioning, but what becomes, in such a perspective, of “ethical convictions…personal beliefs…[and] passionate reactions” on the part of intellectuals (Rieffel 1993: 14)? Can those be made sense of solely in the framework of political struggle? Arguably, a model for understanding intellectual production that aims more broadly than the Marxist model does would offer an advantage in understanding intellectual production and meaning more fully.

There are clear indications of how we might construct a broader perspective on intellectual orientation present in many of the more complex efforts to define the intellectual. One recent such effort classifies intellectuals as “that social category which performs the task of making conscious and visible the fundamental notions of a society” (Eyerman 1994: 6; emphasis added). Let us think more carefully about what is indicated here. The fundamental notions of a society, in the language of most classical sociological theory, had a profound connection to and reliance on myth and religion. Indeed, in historical terms, the connection between intellectual activity and religious functions is strikingly clear. In archaic societies, sorcerers and shamans were the social location of many of these “fundamental notions,” most importantly those concerning the relationship between the visible and invisible worlds. In the great agrarian empires of antiquity, priests occupied this position. In the Western Middle Ages, the clerics created a new institution, the university, to propagate and expand the intellectual production that was nearly universally recognized as their proper charge. One can see clearly the genealogical relationship between the priestly classes and the modern intellectual in, e.g., the fact that the French still use the term “clerics” to refer to intellectuals, viz., Julien Benda's La Trahison des clercs.

While it is true that the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment enabled some Western intellectuals to take a certain critical distance from the church in redefining their role as leading the struggle against superstition, in doing so they also inevitably engaged in a certain kind of remythification that reaffirmed their ties to the medieval clerics and the archaic sorcerer-priests. This remythification took different forms: e.g., the quasi-deification of reason, Romantic myths of man in nature, and the nationalist myth (Morin 1991: 59–61). A fair amount of classical sociological theory, including the work of Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel, was centered on the dilemma of a modern world in which the old fundamental notions of sacrality and ritual seemed to be giving way, with no clear replacements in sight, and much of this work noted the central importance of the intellectuals in both the existence and the possible resolutions of this critical problem.

Thus can we begin to postulate the complex intertwining of these two notions, the intellectual and the sacred: “[T]he intelligentsia pursues an original role inherited from that of the sorcerers and great priests but which, at the same time, is born of the critique of sorcery and of religious culture” (Morin 1975: 109). Here are historical and sociological clues as to how we might productively think about the intellectual as centrally connected to the sacred, even in a secular modernity in which many intellectuals seem most dutifully engaged in the demystification and destruction of that notion.

Probably the best known attempt by a sociologist to frame the intellectual's identity in such terms of relation to the sacred comes from Edward Shils. In his discussion of the intellectual and his relation to political power, he notes that the bulk of the individuals in any given society orient themselves largely, if not completely, to the “directly gratifying ends of particular actions, the exigencies of situations, considerations of individual and familial advantage, concrete moral maxims, [and] concrete prescriptions and prohibitions”; in short, they have only intermittent or perhaps almost no need for contact with “ultimate values, be they cognitive, moral, or aesthetic” (Shils 1972: 3). Intellectuals, on the other hand, are defined by their uncommon need for “frequent communion with symbols that are more general than the immediate concrete situations of everyday life and remote in their reference in both time and space”; they are internally oriented toward a transcendent realm of value and experience, and they feel compelled to explore this orientation externally “in oral and written discourse, in poetic and plastic expression, in historical reminiscence or writing, in ritual performance and acts of worship” (ibid.).

This realm toward which intellectuals orient themselves Shils calls the sacred, which is broadly consistent with the Durkheimian conception of the sacred as defined centrally by its opposition to the profane, or that which is mundane, quotidian, not separated from the everyday and vulgar by a particular atmosphere of reverence and potency. He is clear though that his argument encompasses apparently secular as well as overtly religious intellectuals, as “science and philosophy (for example, and we might include here the nineteenth-century offspring of these two parents—namely, social science), even when they are not religious in a conventional sense, are as concerned with the sacred as religion itself” (Shils 1972: 16). Similarly, Marxists and other similarly oriented intellectuals who attack the traditional notions of the sacred and orient themselves toward the revolutionary project of the proletariat or some other seemingly secular object or goal can be understood as within the parameters of this definition as well.

Shils's definition is intriguing for a number of reasons. Insofar as it aspires to be a universal description of intellectuals, it attempts to offer some possibility of examining intellectuals cross-culturally and across time periods without completely losing the ability to make comparisons along shared criteria and without hopelessly becoming lost in a radically historicist, relativist dilemma that can make difficult any discussion of the commonalities of different intellectual trajectories. If there is some unifying thread in intellectual activity and orientation, however loose, then one can perhaps escape to a degree from the often paralyzing suspicion evinced by the intellectual historian for any attempt to, for example, speak seriously and rigorously of a comparison of the Sophists of Periclean Athens and the Parisian poststructuralists of the 1960s and 1970s.

It also suggests, by mapping out an evolutionary history of the intellectual's project orientations, the points at which the modern secular intellectual and his or her contemporary, the modern religious intellectual, might be productively examined as descendants from a common lineage. In any event, this much ought to be fairly evident once one takes more than a cursory look at the real, lived histories of some exemplary twentieth-century intellectuals, for example, Heidegger or Wittgenstein, and notices the significant overlap of intellectual and religious interests and motivations, but too often this method of reading the trajectory of intellectuals is discredited out of hand by those convinced before the fact that the intellectual's goal and the religious seeker's goal must have little or nothing in common.

The case for the universality of the definition is ultimately unconvincing for numerous reasons that need not be laid out here. Yet, examination of the particular historical and social space we are interested in demonstrates how Shils's definition might apply at least in some particular circumstances. In the specific context of the world of French intellectuals, as André Bélanger (1997) has pointed out in his intriguing study of the French intellectual tradition and its ...