Marx and Durkheim

The social is, arguably, the category that has the most to suffer from a Marxist epistemology. It suffers, that is, from a presumption of generalizability, a presumption about its "indifferent" givenness as an epiphenomenon. In reclaiming it, I want to challenge not only the broadly materialist and individualist premises of Marxism but also their implicit claim to adequation, to "philosophical fullness." To-

ward that end, I want to highlight what I see as the necessary blurriness of the social in Marx and contrast it with its sharp clarity in, say, Max Weber, or (perhaps most pertinent here) Emile Durkheim. I have in mind, in particular, the contrasting evidentiary domains—and the contrasting degrees of analytic precision—set forth by Marx and Durkheim to discuss what might look like the same phenomenon, namely, the division of labor.

For Marx, the division of labor was very much an economic phenomenon; it was an industrial arrangement, peculiar to the factory and the assembly line. He was at pains, indeed, to show how the "division of labor in the interior of a society, and that in the interior of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in kind." The former, the social division of labor, being pervasive and seemingly universal, was for that reason also unanalyzable, since it "springs up naturally," a "spontaneous growth," "caused by the differences of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physiological foundation."^[62] True to his logic of corporeal generalizations, society was figured here as a natural body, and social division of labor, being also "physiological," was thus a matter of analytic indifference to Marx.^[63] All his critical energies were directed elsewhere, against the division of labor in the workshop, clearly no work of nature but a man-made horror, involving as it did the carving up of natural individuals into industrial parts. In short, for Marx, the domain of the "social" (to the extent that it was distinguishable from the economic) turned out to be only a secondary order of evidence, subsumable under the category of the "natural." Only the economic, only the primary evidentiary domain, merited the scope as well as the care of his analysis.

There was a hierarchy of evidence in Marx, we might say, a hierarchy seen all the more clearly when it is seen in reverse—when we turn, for example, to Durkheim. What was immaterial to Marx was consequential for that very reason to Durkheim. And so, tersely noting that "the division of labor [is] a fact of a very general nature, which the economists, who first proposed it, never suspected,"^[64] Durkheim went on to discuss the phenomenon not as a feature unique to the workshop but as a feature common to all organized society. As the principal investigatory site, the social also sustained the finest analytic distinctions in Durkheim. Far from being a derived postulate or a collapsible epiphenomenon, it was here a field of primary relations

with an evidentiary domain in its own right, out of whose complex differentiations Durkheim would elaborate an equally complex theory of social integration.

Durkheim's insistence on the social as primary evidence—his sense of its irreducibility to some other explanatory ground—serves as a challenge not only to the evidentiary logic of Marx's economism^[65] but also to the logic of his bodily generalizations, his inferential reasoning from the physical to the nonphysical, from part to whole. The social might be seen, indeed, as a challenge to the very concept of a "whole." This is not, of course, Durkheim's own sense of its possible usage; for him, society is very much a whole, and the "social" very much synonymous with the functionally integral. Still, in rejecting a hierarchy of evidentiary planes, Durkheim himself would seem to be pointing the way toward a non integral conception of society, predicated not on the linear translatability of structural determinism but on the supple permutability of structural interactions.^[66] Especially in the context of justice, the "social" for Durkheim turns out to be the chief antidote to the reign of the commensurate, replacing the lex talionis of primitive society with various forms of mediation, forms increasingly complex in their "volume" and "density."^[67] Seen in this light, the social would seem to open up the possibility of a field incompletely unified, incompletely integrated, a field characterized neither by the fit among its constitutive terms nor by the fit among its evidentiary planes. Justice, in such a world, can no longer be seen as a simple given, an immanent relation among things. In short, theorized as a domain of difference , difference at once irreducible and irreconcilable, the social would seem to turn justice into a vexed concept not only as a matter of implementation but, above all, as a matter of commensurability, a matter of internal adequation.

Using Durkheim against himself, then, I want to invoke the social both to question the notion of a commensurate totality, and—going even further out on a limb—to argue that the very concept of "social justice" might turn out to be itself an oxymoron. My thinking here is guided by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's powerful argument against our usual conception of "society" as a "founding totality of its partial processes."^[68] Taking seriously their suggestion that the social is "unsutured," that there is no seamless rationality, no perfect adequation between part and whole, I want to bring into critical focus various permutations of the incommensurate—relations of uneven-

ness, nonalignment, untranslatability—that challenge the idea of the "whole." And with the disturbance of that concept, I want to disturb as well the concept of justice which invokes it and rests on it, deriving from its supposed totality its own claim to descriptive adequacy and philosophical fullness.