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3. The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life
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Chapter 3 The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life Out-of-Body Experience? Big theories in social science often treat subjectivities as social realities, assigning them to a group, a social formation, or an epoch. Well-known examples of concepts designating suprapersonal subjectivities are Durkheim 's conscience collective (1964 [1893]), Marx and Engels's versions of "consciousness" and "ideology" (1972 [1845-46]), and Foucault's episteme (1976). Such top-down notions of subjectivity differ significantly in certain respects, but all make a strong claim: that collective or historical macroenvironments embody something like mentalities. Durkheim outlines his position in The Division ofLabor in Society (1964 [1893]): The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it collective or common conscience. No doubt, it has not a specific substratum; it is, by definition , diffuse in every reach of society.... It is, in effect, independent of the particular conditions in which individuals are placed; they pass it on and it remains.... It is, thus, an entirely different thing from particular consciences, though it can only be realized through them. It is the psychical type of a society, a type which has its properties, its conditions of existence, its modes of development , just as individual types, though in a different way. (1964 [1893]: 80-81; emphasis in original) This characterization of human subjectivity is deeply puzzling on many counts. For starters, why should we expect the common conscience to be a diffuse totality and not, in good part, a mess of inconsistencies and contradictions? Why would it just get passed on, without modification or transformation? Don't new ideas constantly appear, and don't they sometimes take hold? Indeed, the holistic, static, and politically heedless aspects of Durk- 64 Chapter3 heim's vision have received significant criticism. Marx and Engels anticipated the critique, now a staple of post-Durkheimian analysis, that ideational structures do not reproduce themselves eternally. Marxists have continually emphasized (and many others, notably those who follow Foucault, have more recently seconded them) that such structures are not necessarily monolithic, and that their fates are historically determined . Ideas fragment along lines of social stress, such as class, race, and gender; they compete for political supremacy; and configurations of ideational struggle change constantly. Such points are well taken. Nevertheless, as I have emphasized, a more fundamental Durkheimian assumption remains unquestioned by most social scientists, including (perhaps above all) those in the Marxist and Foucauldian camps. I refer to the premise, visible in the citation, that mind- and body-like stuff is, or should be treated as, located outside minds and bodies. That superorganic premise is the focus of this chapter. I consider influential claims about mentalities associated with urban and postmodern social formations, forwarded respectively by Georg Simmel and FredricJameson. My wider purpose in evaluating those claims is to challenge theories of subjectivity that rest on strong versions of culturalism or historicism. I Am Being Thought-So Do I Exist? The contemporary strong culturalist position on subjectivity was foreshadowed by Durkheim's intellectual heir Louis Dumont. Dumont is an anthropologist whose most important work, which explores the caste system in India, is rooted in structuralist theory. The trademark ofstructuralism is that it focuses on relations between elements in a presumed whole, extracting from those relations an organizing rational principle. For Dumont, castes are not important as single entities; the key to understanding caste is to see that castes are organized into a system, which is based on the hierarchical complementarity between pure and impure that governs all caste relations. The ideological principle of hierarchical complementarity is, Dumont argues, diametrically opposed to the ideological principle that governs modern Western societies, namely egalitarian individualism. In sum, Dumont posits an extreme, sweeping contrast between Western individualism and Indian holism. His most famous book is provocatively titled Homo Hierarchicus (1980 [1966]), signaling his view that in subjective terms Indians are virtually a separate species from Westerners (Homo aequalis). Defending his taxonomic radicalism, Dumont writes: [54.89.70.161] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:08 GMT) The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life 65 There is indeed a person, an individual and unique experience, but it is in large part made up of the common elements, and there is nothing destructive in recognizing this: tear yourselffrom the social material and you are left with nothing more than the potentiality for personal organization. (1980 [1966]: 6) In an appended footnote Dumont...