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Arditi reviews Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard by Patricia Cormack.

Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard, by Patricia Cormack. Toronto, CAN; Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 144 pp. $40.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8020-3528-0.

This very short book addresses two big issues, the first brilliantly, the second somewhat less successfully. At the most fundamental level, and most effectively, Patricia Cormack's book raises the question of reflexivity in sociology and explores how it instructs the work of three key sociologists: Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, and Jean Baudrillard. Cormack's choice of authors may seem odd, but it is justified by the book's second theme, the ways sociology and mass culture speak to one another: It is a theme nicely woven into the first and, in fact, defining its terms, yet ending in a problematic discussion of "resistance" and the role of sociology within culture in general. It also gives the book its title.

No doubt, the questions raised by the reflexive nature of sociology are among the most crucial yet, at the same time, most vexing in the discipline. When reflexivity is taken to its limits as, for example, Cormack shows Baudrillard does, it runs the risk of dissolving sociology into nothingness. It is no wonder, then, that most sociologists have chosen to ignore reflexivity rather than tackle its inevitability, to their own and, more critically, to the discipline's peril. For their reluctance does not change the fact that sociology is inevitably part of the subject that it studies. Even more, as Cormack shows, sociology helps to construct the subject that it studies, "society," which in turn sets the terms of what sociology is. This, Cormack shows, is as true for Durkheim as it is for Mills and Baudrillard.

Cormack's strategy is to treat sociology as narrative and to identify, in the narrative properties of sociological works, the ways in which the circularity between sociology and society comes into being. The most successful of her analyses, probably because it is bound to be the most controversial, is Durkheim's. Against the grain of most Durkheimian scholarship, Cormack shows that what is usually taken as science is no more than a discursive strategy that constructs or, to use her term, "fabricates" society as social facts, rather than being a representation of social facts-a narrative move, Cormack shows, of which Durkheim was fully aware.

Cormack proposes to see Durkheim's works, and in particular his most programmatic book, The Rules of Sociological Method, as a manifesto, as a sort of intervention rather than an objective reading aimed at shaping the terms of a newly emerging, still largely unformed, "mass" culture. Commack shows, for example, how Durkheim does not simply identify and analyze collective representations, but himself helps generate and mobilize collective representations: the representations by which we understand ourselves and engage in practice as a society at a time of mass culture. In her own words:

[Durkheim's] manifesto is sociology's first clear attempt to understand representation as the fundamental element of social life. As such, sociological images and language are more than new "social facts," they are also "collective representations" themselves that reveal how the collective both imagines itself and interprets its own images. In this last formulation, sociology is highly intertwined in the phenomenon it seeks to explain and becomes increasingly so as it proceeds historically, (pp. 50-51)

Of course, other interpretations of Durkheim can still be sustained, but no interpretation can afford to ignore Cormack's. Her argument is persuasive, and any reading has to address the suggestion that Durkheim has constructed a vision of the social whose empirical support lies in the terms of the vision itself-a point that actually resonates with the one proposition of Kuhn's philosophy of science that has survived the test of time, namely, the mutually reinforcing relationship between theory and observations. And it is here that we understand the resistance of sociologists to deal with the implications of reflexivity, for a proposition that creates a certain disturbance in the physical sciences produces a rather disastrous earthquake in the social sciences.

This comes into full view in Cormack's analysis of Baudrillard, the scholar of society who takes the implications of reflexivity to its limits. In Baudrillard, sociology dissolves into mass culture, and the distinction between the two disappears. Sociology becomes complicit with, if not part of, mass culture, producing the same effects as any mass-marketed cultural commodity. The implication is indeed vastly problematic and obviously unacceptable: The only possible attitude for sociologists is to quiet their voices, to retreat into silence, "actively." To Baudrillard, this is the only way of resisting the production of deadening discourses, including our discipline's.

Cormack's own attempt to identify a possible politics of resistance becomes an oddity in the context of her book, She criticizes Baudrillard for failing to provide the grounds for such a politics, but her own reliance on an argument based on the open-endedness of narratives remains vastly unpersuasive. Whether or not the argument has some value, I cannot say; but what is one to do with a claim that because of the open-ended nature of their narratives, daytime soap operas are sites of resistance? It seems to me that the open-endedness of daytime soap operas leads to a perpetual reproduction of the same in different forms, under different guises, but the same nonetheless-hardly an act of resistance.

This book should be required reading in any course on sociological theory or any advanced seminar on research methods that addresses the epistemological terms of sociological thought. Actually, it should be required reading for any sociologist who ponders the value and significance of his or her work. Both the strengths and weaknesses of this book have the potential to open a much needed debate on the nature of the discipline itself.