For contemporary Durkheim scholars, the presentation of Durkheimian sociology in introductory textbooks is notoriously flawed. In this article, we examine the presentation of Durkheim’s work in popular English-language Canadian sociology textbooks. We show that textbooks present two distinct “Durkheims.” First, they characterize him as a founder of the discipline and the sociological project of challenging common-sense explanations of social life. Second, Durkheim appears as the father of structural functionalism who advocates a conservative, integrating vision of society. We argue that to understand why these two versions of Durkheim persist in sociology textbooks, we must appreciate the symbolic place of classical authors in the discipline. The two “textbook Durkheims” endure because they operate as symbols for both the coherence and divisions of the discipline. We suggest that integrating contemporary Durkheimian scholarship into textbooks would require revising conventional textbook approaches of sorting classical authors as founders of contending sociological perspectives.
This article examines the 2015 Canadian federal election in which the Liberal Party took office under the leadership of Justin Trudeau. Celebrity was a dominant theme during the campaign, applied by the Conservative Party to discredit Trudeau by playing on his youthful good looks and ‘new masculinity’. The Conservative campaign drew attention to Trudeau and its own aggressive tactics and entered into a spiral of negativity that the Liberals would capitalise on with optimistic and progressive themes. We argue that the effects of celebrity politics on elections must be studied within the context of national–cultural attitudes towards celebrity, media characterisation of candidates and political parties prior to the election campaign, previous campaigns, the duration of the official campaign as well as the existence of the ‘permanent campaign’ on the part of governments, and the dynamics of the celebrity theme as the campaign progresses. In the context of Canada, particular state–culture dynamics are at work that legitimate the celebrity politician.
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication. New Edition. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012, 128 pp. $14.95 paper(9781584350576) It is somewhat unsettling to find oneself writing a retrospective piece on the 25th anniversary reissue of The Ecstasy of Communication. Jean Baudrillard would smell a rat right away. After all, this text was already retrospective in itself, serving as his habilitation thesis meant to review the assumed coherence and trajectory of his published work (and promote him to the lofty status of research director in the academy). As he explains at the beginning of the book, this is an impossible contradiction because it retroactively imposes unity on the texts. He proposes instead to approach his own work as a traveller who stumbles upon the texts and must try to make sense of them. For a generation of graduate students (of which I was a part), stumbling, discovering, and trying to make sense are familiar experiences of encountering Baudrillard, as his translated work first began to make its way into the Canadian classroom. But this encounter was also exhilarating--it meant submitting our most basic sociological assumptions to the assault of his logic. Baudrillard forever disrupted our simple notions of representation built on the false/true image or word, along with sociological totems like stereotype, false consciousness, and manipulation (and their social correlatives--the silently oppressed, mass man, and cultural dupe). In their place came a serious consideration of the world saturated with the play, pleasures, and terrors of images and words--so saturated that the notion of the became threatened by its own overrepresentation. If we ever believed that the real could exist outside of its representation, this fantasy became more and more untenable as media and technology developed through the 20th century. Baudrillard is perhaps a little disingenuous when he claims no coherence to his work preceding Ecstasy. Baudrillard's earliest work grappled with the problem of Marx's exchange/use value distinction, with use value revealed as a construction of human need unmediated by signification and systems of the circulation of meaning. By adding the semiotic levels of symbol and sign to the mix, Baudrillard allowed readers to begin to see the world of contemporary capitalism. The symbol was an object still linked into a system of sacred meaning and irreplaceability (he gives the wedding ring as an example), and a sign was an object that got its meaning only in the unending movement of signification itself and is essentially replaceable (he gives rings as fashionable jewellery as an example). The symbolic realm functions outside of utility and production. Instead it is a wasteful, irrational, and excessive world--that of gift, potlatch, sacrifice. It is for this reason also profoundly social. A quarter of a century after the first publication of Ecstasy, it is time to acknowledge that Baudrillard is not a strange, exotic foreigner--a French theorist, a postmodern, or as the book cover insists, a provocateur. It is no mere coincidence that so much Baudrillard scholarship happens in Canada, as thinkers like McLuhan and Innis are his intellectual ancestors. In Ecstasy we find Baudrillard's McLuhanesque description of the car as total system that monitors itself and the driver, speaks to the driver, informs, advises, controls--and into which we are wired. (Like McLuhan, Baudrillard is often wrongly considered an advocate for the brave new world he so accurately analyzes.) Innis too haunts these pages, with the monumental, durable form of political domination and representation being replaced by the fleeting, incessant, and light world of the hyper-real. Monuments and buildings, Baudrillard explains are no longer testaments to memory and time, but are now machines for advertising, fashion, and the sign system. The dominant trope animating all of Baudrillard's work is that of keeping up with the social phenomena around him. …
This thematic case study explores international, national, and local media coverage of a conflict between Barb Reddick, a rural, working-class, African-Nova Scotian woman, and her nephew over the ownership of a winning ‘Chase the Ace’ lottery ticket. Beginning from general media valuation of lottery winners, and Canadian coverage of the Nova Scotia CTA lottery ‘craze’, we find when Reddick goes off script as loving aunt she is pathologized and degraded in a dramatic reversal from soft to hard news story. Reddick’s habitus and trust in journalists to support her counternarrative became the dramatic content of media spectacle-making – what we call a ‘spectacle of silencing’ – as well as her deviance from Canadian white rurality, and class and gender norms. Rather than mere ‘misrepresentation’ of minorities, we conclude that the dynamics of counternarrative struggle are embedded in reportage itself as spectacle, reproducing the legitimacy and authority of journalistic institutions through a symbolic violence of consensus making.
This article discusses the merits of a sociology informed by humour, linking these merits to sociological issues of representation and the ways in which humour has pedagogical and epistemological relevance for the depiction and construction of the everyday lifeworld. The works of Erving Goffman, C. Wright Mills, and Peter Berger are treated as exemplifying the use of humour in sociological work. Significantly, while having different perspectives on the social world, they all worked within a particular milieu (post-war American sociology) and enjoyed a readership beyond the confines of academic sociology. We argue that humour is an essential element of the everyday lifeworld and that sociology’s task is to highlight the contradictions, paradoxes and ironies in which ordinary social actors live.
In this concise and engaging work, Patricia Cormack investigates the broad cultural significance and relevance of academic sociology by examining its on-going relationship with modernity and mass culture. She bids us, rather than deny sociology's participation in culture, to see the discipline as informing ethical, epistemological and pedagogical questions. Through an examination of the writings of Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills and Jean Baudrillard, Cormack illustrates how their formulations of sociology as a cultural practice is rooted in the very mass culture that it studies. Central to the argument is a discussion of conceptual and rhetorical devices - .totems. and .tropes. - within social theory. In agreement with the three theorist subjects, Cormack posits that the social is a discursive artifact, becoming over time a .social fact., explaining and sustaining ordinary life. Durkheim treats the 19th century birth of sociology (in which he played a large part), as an intrinsic aspect of modern cultural consciousness. Mills advances this view further, treating the .Sociological Imagination. as part of and informing, mass culture. Baudrillard treats sociological reason as now equivalent to and inextricable from commonsense understandings of the culture it seeks to understand - rendering the sociological project essentially mute. Of value to social scientists, and theorists in particular, this is a specialized volume - a sociology of sociology - written at senior undergraduate or graduate level. It is intended as textually oriented ethnography, and thus presents a theoretical rather than empirical investigation of the relationship between sociology and culture.
This case study of Nova Scotia, Canada, inspects the uptake and circulation of provincial government health messaging during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, organized around the motto “stay the blazes home.” Messaging and collective narratives are analyzed by way of Norbert Elias’s “established/outsider” dynamics, especially focusing on his concepts of “group charisma” and “praise and blame gossip.” Economic realities and identity practices helped make this motto recognizable as a proffered collective call to action around themes of self-restraint rather than neoliberal risk calculation. Outsiders in this collective identity formation are understood to bring more than disease to the province but “anomic infection” itself. Furthermore, the mechanisms of reopening the province are also found in a longstanding and related collective ethos toward hospitality. Finally, the problematic post-pandemic dynamics of established group identity formation are examined.
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