WEBER AND DURKHEIM AS ARCHITECHTS OF MODERNITY

WEBER AND DURKHEIM AS ARCHITECHTS OF MODERNITY: OR HOW TO APPLY SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE PRODUCTION OF CYBORGS

written for Classical Sociological Theory seminar led by Leonard Beeghley

This paper presents alternative visions of the meaning of modernity and considers the classical sociologists, Weber and Durkheim, as creators rather than discoverers of modernity through the application of their worldview(s).

CONCLUSION: MODERNITY IN PERSPECTIVE

At the beginning of this paper two conflicting visions of modernity were posed: 1) a totalizing, overarching, amalgamated modernity in which whole societies or even the entire 'modern world' are thought of in terms of modernization and 2) a vision of modernity as a dispersion of discourses and processes of progress which find various kinds of expression in the world but which do not reify it into amalgamated wholes like 'societies' and so forth. The vision I chose to proceed with was the second, and in doing so it became necessary to talk not in terms of modernization as a process of societal progress but in terms of centers of development of modern(izing) techniques along with the processes involved with their distribution and replication within local settings and individuals. If we conceive of progress and development in terms of technologies and techniques that are applied to 'natural' materials/resources, it is not difficult to take the next step toward conceiving of cyborgs as human-machine hybrids, in which the 'raw materials' of the human body are engaged and developed through external and internal disciplinary mechanisms to behave and act in a more 'modern(ized)' fashion.

Although social science often escapes the protagonist status in modernization processes attributed to other sciences, especially natural sciences like chemistry, physics, and biology but also semi-natural sciences such as medicine, agriculture, etc., it makes sense to consider it in the same light. Just as Shapin and Schaffer, described by Latour, looked at Boyle and Hobbes as natural and social scientists, we can look at Weber and Durkheim as agents of science and technology in the service of modernizing humans. However, while Boyle and Hobbes may be popularly associated with the vacuum pump and modern government as technologies of their creation (at least partially), where are we to search for the technological devices invented by Weber and Durkheim? I argue that this question can be answered in reference to cyborgs. On the continuum of science and technology, of discovery and its applications, cyborgs are the entities that are able to translate the findings, theories, and methodologies of sociologists into programs and techniques which they incorporate into their ways of thinking, feeling, and acting

in the social world. Although the technological applications of sociology may not be immediately visible in the same way that the commodified and marketed apparatuses that are the products of other kinds of scientific application are, they are still means of modernizing oneself and one's environment, even when by 'self' we mean 'nervous system' and by 'environment' we mean 'perceived surroundings.'

Applying sociology can mean becoming a disciplined Weberian researcher or living within a Durkheimian structured environment of external and obligatory social facts. Sociological writing, whether in the form of theory, methodology, substantive findings, sub-disciplinary paradigms, or otherwise is not just a tool for sociologists to publish and get jobs, it is also a vector for readers to acquire the language and ontological prescriptions that allow them to apply sociology, replicating it in themselves and within various local contexts. In other words, sociology is not just a science of research and discovery, it is also a set of techniques for application and development - and I don't just mean for the 'applied sociologists' who replicate research techniques outside of academic settings. I am also talking about students and others who merely read and struggle to internalize ideas and facts about the social world, subsequently recognizing them in the social world they inhabit, where they have access to direct observation. It is in this way that the technologies of sociology are spread from one individual consciousness to the next.

The assignment for this paper was to compare how two classical theorists understood and explained the nature of modern societies. I have rejected the precepts implicit in the idea of 'the nature of modern societies' and instead compared two theorists in terms of the modernization of individuals by means of those theorists' technological application. I did not diverge from the goal of the assignment; I just approached it in terms of the individual as the locus of society, her/his/its progress as the progress of modernity par excellence, and the nature of sociological practice/findings as conceived within the respective methodologies of Weber and Durkheim. I contend that the modern world we, sociologists, live in is the one created by Weber, Durkheim, and others, in which value-free science and social facts are major signifiers of modernity, while value-ridden (pseudo-) science and unconstrained social activity denote backwardness. Thus the modern world has not so much been understood and explained by these theorists, as it has been created and defined through their influence on us, individually.