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Notes on Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, a Study in Sociology (1897)

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Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, a Study in Sociology, from 1897, is both method and study. That is, the book is not only presenting a sociological approach to the study of suicide, but it is also teaches what is the use of sociology. As Durkheim’s first lines to the book put it, “sociology has been in vogue for some time” (35). The discipline is on a stage of development, at the stage of “system-building and philosophical synthesis” (35). What sociology attempts, then, is to provide a study of society of philosophical consequences, one is tempted to say of ontological consequences.

Divided in three books, Suicide traces the way different sciences have approached suicide; it revises what physicians and other sociologists have written before Durkheim (notably these perspectives will be refuted); it also offers statistics and data to chart the number of individuals who have committed suicide. The chore of the argument is that suicide is socially caused. That is, while there is a form of suicide that is manifested by purely “personal” reasons, i.e. suicides that Durkheim’s attributes to an unstable mental health, suicide, in general, is prefigured by social forces. To determine these social forces, Durkheim begins by comparing the suicide rate of different areas in a country. In the states of Germany, for instance, he notes that there are notable differences between the suicide rates of the provinces of Rhenish Palatinate and Bavaria. While the latter has the lowest number of suicides between 1867 and 1875 (19 in total) in the German states, the former has one of the highest number of suicides (157 in total). For Durkheim, the number of suicides in a state is relative to the number of Catholics and Protestants in each state. So, Catholicism socially cancels suicide, while Protestantism propitiates it, to some extent. For Durkheim it is the values of each of these religions what determines the predisposition of people towards the act of suicide. That is, while for the catholic all form of suicide is “abhorrent,” the Protestant is more convinced that each individual is “the author of [their own] faith” (158). Since Protestantism embraces the “spirit of free inquiry” (158), then, when one starts thinking for themselves, one quickly realizes that life does not make sense. It is not that Protestantism “kills,” but that by the fact that individualism becomes crucial for Protestantism, excessive individualism results in egoistic suicide. As Durkheim would put it “the more the believer doubts, that is, the less he feels himself a real participant in the religious faith to which he belongs, and from which he is freeing himself; the more the family and community become freeing to the individual, so much the more does he become a mystery to himself, unable to escape the exasperating and agonizing question: to what purpose?” (212). The individual becomes less integrated and regulated by society because individuals can integrate and regulate themselves on their own, and by extension, they can decide if life is worth living.

It would seem, then, that behind the sociological inquiry, at least as presented by Durkheim in Suicide, there is a defence of traditional values, or more precisely to Catholicism. But, far from it, Durkheim also charts the existence of suicide within traditional values. That is, if egoistic suicide is tied to Protestant values of individualism, altruistic suicide would be tied to the excessive presence of the social group. While egoistic suicide is a matter of decision, altruistic suicide will be a “duty” (219). In other words, whereas egoistic suicide results from an individual decision, altruistic suicide depends on a collective decision. Egoistic suicide is no sacrifice, but a refusal to keep living within a particular social context; altruistic suicide is, above all, a sacrifice for the greater good. The former is an excessive manifestation of the self, the latter does not question if life is worth living, they simply give their life for the good of the socius, society. In a society where individuals are both highly regulated and integrated there is a “joy of sacrifice,” because, even with no particular reason, renunciation [to life] in itself is considered praiseworthy” (223). Durkheim proposes a possible history of this type of suicide, from ancient societies to modern ones. If in ancient societies religion was tied to altruistic suicide, in martyrdom, in modern society, it is the army the institution that embraces altruistic suicide.

Durkheim proposes that there is a third type of suicide: the anomic suicide. This suicide seems to appear only in periods of acute crisis. But Durkheim would argue that this form of suicide, at least at the end of the nineteenth century, has become normal, especially in people in the fields of trade and industry. “For a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation” (254). And with this, religion “has lost most of its power. And government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant” (255). So, if egoistic suicide derives from the maximization of individual doubt and open inquiry, and altruistic suicide is motivated by the duty to sacrifice an individual life for the good of society, anomic suicide combines both individual duty and individual decision. That is, anomic suicide is tied fully to the revolting forces of capitalist accumulation. While Durkheim does never mention the word capitalism, his diagnosis of the late nineteenth century is akin to Marx’s. Since there has been a “liberation of desires” that “has been made worse by the development of industry and the almost infinite extension of the market” (255), anomic suicide is what comes when both egoistic suicide, the informed decision of kill oneself, coexists and antagonizes with altruistic suicide, the self-sacrifice for a bigger good.

To some extent, Durkheim is already challenging Max Weber’s explanation of the rise of capitalism. It is not the protestant ethic, as described by Weber, that is behind the expansion of capitalism (the liberation of desires by the infinite expansion of the market), but the conflict between traditional (Catholic) and modern (Protestant) values. If capitalism, as described by Engels and Marx, is characterized by the revolting and revolutionary forces of the bourgeoisie, mixing the old and the new, then, anomic suicide lies in-between the intelligibility of both traditional and modern values, anomic suicide is the grammar of capitalism (since grammar is the unseen infrastructure of enunciation). It makes sense, then, that Durkheim has a hard time typifying anomic suicide. He relates it to both egoistic suicide and altruistic suicide (258), but he insists on the radical difference between them. While both altruistic and egoistic suicide “draw their chief recruits from the same social environments [army men, for the altruistic; intellectual careers for the egoistic] […] the other [anomic suicide draws from] the industrial commercial world” (258). What is the industrial commercial world, at the end of the nineteenth century, if not a combination of both militarism and highly educated elites? The anomic suicide is the suicide of the soldiers of capital: individuals who are the byproduct of the intellectualization (Protestantism) and sacralization (Catholicism) of capitalist relationships, a society both modern and traditional, and in perpetual change.

In the last section of the book, “Practical Consequences,” Durkheim tries to solve the problem of anomic suicide, and of suicide in general. He stresses that since anomic suicide goes against society, or more precisely against the forces that guarantee the cohesion between individuals (integration and regulation), a form of socialization should restrain the centripetal force of anomic suicide. While religion, the family, and politics have been key in restraining anomic suicide, in the late nineteenth century, for Durkheim, none of these institutions can restrain anymore the anomy. With the emergence of capitalist relationships (though capitalism is a concept alien to the book, as mentioned before) where can one find a restrainer for the anomy? “The only way to resolve this antinomy is to set up a cluster of collective forces outside the State, though subject to its action, whose regulative influence can be exerted with greater variety” (380).

Durkheim’s distrust of the state derives from what he sees as an ambivalent transformation of political power since the French Revolution. That is, Durkheim believes that since the state was the only institution that survived the ancient regime, the state’s own survival and perseverance made of it an institution that “tended to absorb all forms of activity which had a social character,” and no other social institution was able to challenge this because the rubble of the ancient regime was but “an unstable flux of individuals” (389). Modern society, then, is a state society, “Individuals are made aware of society and of their dependence upon it only through the State [sic]” (389). As a consequence, “While the State [sic] becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them” (389). If the state cannot make of the individual but “liquid molecules,” what can guarantee grip, solidity, restraint and order in society? Durkheim’s proposal is to provide the restitution of autonomy to local groups, he proposes a “decentralization” of society from the state, a decentralization that would “simultaneously produce a greater concentration of social energies” (389). This decentralization then is meant to not loose “the bonds uniting each apart of society with the State [sic], moral powers must be created with an influence, which the state cannot have, over the multitude of individuals” (390). It would seem, then, that Durkheim is appealing for the emergence of an autonomous multitude of individuals, such multitude is open to building bridges for the sake of taming anomic suicide. Since moral power is the only power that holds people together, for Durkheim, then, it is not by abolishing the state, or the market, or capitalism, that one cancels anomic suicide. If one cannot control the flows of the “luquid molecules,” one can at least try to direct their fluidity, one can bet on hydraulics as sociability. But would this end for good anomic suicide? And more importantly, what would happen if moral power become anomic itself?

From Euphoria to Boredom. Why did a teen drama turned into a show about narcos? A review to Euphoria’s third season

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The last season of Sam Levinson’s Euphoria (2019-2026) changed drastically its narrative arc. From being a teen drama or a coming-of-age television show that dealt with addiction, gender issues, and, to some extent, the “American dream,” the show turned into a show about narcos and cartels. And while shows about narcos promise entertainment and high emotions, many of them are simply boring: Euphoria is not the exception.

The third season kick-starts with Rue being a drug mule for Laurie, the emotionless drug dealer who Rue tried to outsmart in the previous season. If during the first two seasons Rue was trapped in the cycles of addiction and the almost death of her social existence (that is, of being detached from her capacity of socializing due to her addictions), now she is trapped in the cycle of exploitation that cancels her social life outside of the cartel she works for. From recovering addict, she became less than lumpen worker. In some way, all the main characters of the show follow Rue’s path. Nate piles up debt with the Armenian mafia because his major investment, the construction and development of a retirement home has been truncated by a protected species of flower that grows where complex would be built; Cassie feels Nate is not delivering his promises, she wants more money and more attention so she opens an only fans account; Maddy is stagnated in her career, she is close to the glamour and wealth of Los Angeles, but she is nothing but smoke and mirrors, she barely makes it to the end of the month, and her boss over exploits her; Jules has found a sugar daddy, and while are their needs are taken care of, and she is free to paint whatever she wants, all her paintings are but the repetition of the same motif, trans-gendered generic bodies. To add to all this, all the characters are caught up in a feud between Alamo Brown, a human trafficker and narco, and Laurie’s cartel, made up by her neo-nazi accomplices.

All of America’s problems lead to the narco. Or rather, all of America’s problems have become a matter of a narco anti-sociability. If the main intention of the genre of the “teen drama” or the coming-of-age television show is to teach audiences about the way society “receives” or “makes” a new member, Euphoria has always been a show concerned on the radical changes that have transformed sociability in the last twenty years. Indeed, for much of the way the show explores on the ambivalence of addiction, as an aesthetic, or as an ontology, the show also explores addiction as the limit of sociability. After all, addicts have been historically ostracized and placed at the margins of society. And while the first two seasons of the show demonstrate that addiction does not cancel sociability, since a precarious sociability is ambivalent, and at times, productive, the third season tosses all sociability away. One can see this clearly expressed in Rue’s transition from addict to drug-mule. While Rue’s addiction was the triggering point for ending the relationship with her mom, and ultimately with Jules, once she is a drug-mule, her relationships are out of bounds: she does not listen to her friends, and her friends do not listen to her. At a point in the season, she is chatting with Lexi, Cassie’s sister, that now works as an assistant in Hollywood. While the two friends are trying to reconnect, they hardly talk. In fact, this interaction is but a mis-encounter: Lexie expresses her concerns about her sister, Cassie, and Rue tells her about a miracle she witnessed. They seem to be having a conversation, but they are not. They are asocially interacting or are together in an anti-social way.

If the addict allowed some sort of precarious sociability, a narco does not. A narco is worse than an addict, seems to be the morale of the show. But for much of the show’s effort in describing what the narco can do, the show delivers a heterogeneous cocktail of canonical tropes of the US: the frontier, the old west, cowboys and Indians, racial issues, mafia, Christianity, and so on. If anything, the show tries to tell us that the narco does not make sense. Rue and Ali, Rue’s sponsor at the AA meetings, have a conversation about the fentanyl crises. Ali wonders why traffickers would sell a product that kills. “Why kill the consumer?” Ali wonders. “It does not make sense,” he concludes. And precisely, the narco does not make sense. If anything, the show would suggest that the narco would be not only the business of killing, a business that mixes human trafficking with sexual enslavement with territorial control, and drug-trafficking, but that the narco, ultimately, is to deliver death at all levels, even at the level of consumption and intoxication.

While for sure the show gives much to think. It is rather boring and dull. And to some extent, it also mimics what it tells us about the narco: it kills its main character and resolves a la Tarantino the tensions between drug lords (Alamo and Laurie). Why kill Rue? With Rue’s death the show shifts from the euphoria of the first season to a boredom that dully gives much to think but little, if not nothing, to enjoy.

9 to 5 (1980): liberation, fantasy and women empowerment

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The saying “behind every great man is a great woman” has always been a euphemism of the domination of men over women. In more than one way, the film 9 to 5 (1980) directed by Collin Higgins deconstructs this common saying. The film kickstarts with the busy streets of New York City, as masses of women dart into their jobs. As the lyrics of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” accompany the opening sequence, the film presents one of its main characters, Judy, a recently divorced woman who is about to begin her first ever job. Once Judy finds her way into the right building and the right floor where her new employment waits for her, she is introduced to her direct supervisor, Violet, a widow who runs diligently a crew of secretaries under the supervision of Mr. Hart, the vice-president of the company. As Judy’s first day begins, she soon realizes that her new work environment is far from perfect.

One day, Judy finds out that there is a rumour around the professional relationship between Mr. Hart and her personal assistant Doralee. The rumour has it that Doralee is sleeping with her boss. To make matters worse, the rumour was spread by Mr. Hart himself. And not only that, but gossip around the office is also surveyed and policed by Roz, Mr. Hart’s hardcore loyalist company associate. By extension, women cannot openly confront Doralee, nor they can speculate much about what happens at the office. While it would seem that Mr. Hart has a tight grip over his women employees, and in general all his subordinates (professionally and personally [that is, including his wife]), one day things fall apart. Once Violet’s ideas, yet again, were stolen by Mr. Hart and the long-waited promotion that she was seeking will not come, since a less experienced (and completely absent from the plot) man will be promoted instead of her, Violet explodes in anger and frustration. She threatens Mr. Hart, accuses Doralee of being her lover, and storms out of the office to the closest bar. This triggers a chain reaction in which Doralee and Judy will follow Violet as they both raise their voices and concerns: Doralee confronts Mr. Hart about the rumour he made about her, and Judy speaks up her frustration over the firing of a co-worker.

At the bar, somehow, liberation begins. That is, once the three women are confronted with the fact that their boss is, as the film would say later, a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” and they start talking about it, they start discussing the possibility of changing their conditions of exploitation. Surprisingly, the film suggests that to liberate oneself, one should talk with others, and more importantly, share their dreams about change. After the three women, Doralee, Judy and Violet, decide they would spend the rest of the day drinking and chatting, they smoke a marijuana joint. Later, they share their fantasies of getting rid of Mr. Hart. All their dreams coincide that the boss should be better gone from the office. As the story continues, Mr. Hart is deprived of her putative power to command. After he fails to blackmail Violet, Judy and Doralee, Mr. Hart is abducted and restrained at his house since his wife is away for a month.

Without bosses, the workplace flourishes and things improve, including the productivity at the workplace. In fact, the women quickly realize that the boss is but a signature, a ghostly presence that becomes irrelevant when workers gain agency, freedom, and support. Having a boss at the boss is, then, not only unnecessary but also unproductive. Doralee, Violet, and Judy create a flexible work environment in which workers go to the office whenever it fits better with their own personal schedules, they also encourage workers to decorate their own workspaces (something forbidden when Mr. Hart was around), and they establish a day-care at work. Even more, Violet has found evidence that Mr. Hart has been stealing from the company by keeping a double booking of items sold by the company. In short, all is perfect without the boss.

While bliss and productivity grow at the office, the wife of Mr. Hart returns early from her trip. And she liberates her husband. Angry and ready to take revenge, Mr. Hart goes back to the office. At gunpoint he forces Violet, Judy and Doralee to renounce to their ambitions. His revenge will be served, and the women will be punished. But then, almost by deux ex machina, the chairman of the company, Mr. Tinsworthy, shows at the New York City office. The chairman is there to congratulate Mr. Hart. After the recent changes implemented in the New York offices, productivity has increased historically. From being revenge driven, Mr. Hart turns to praise receiving. Finally, since the chairman is so impressed by the work of Mr. Hart, he promotes him to be the head of operations at the company’s offices in Brazil. The boss is gone now and forever. The women are free, the changes stay, but the happy ending happens thanks to the will of the “big-male-boss.” One can argue that the film betrays its plea for liberation and women-empowerment by giving the chairman, at the end of the day, the absolute power to get rid of Mr. Hart, women agency is reduced. At the same time, it would be too simplistic to say that women agency, in the film is reduced by the presence and actions of the chairman of the company. And more importantly, the lesson of the film, if there is one, anyway, is that liberation comes from dreaming together and working together, that changes are achievable, and that even if hierarchies are difficult to fight back, it is the productive work of those oppressed that both presupposes and exceeds any form of exploitation: just as the company was productive when Mr. Hart was oppressed and the company was more productive when he was not around, the only constant was the labour of the workers. If productivity depends on the happiness of workers, why then would companies bet on hierarchies and bosses?

Notes about Accumulation(s) I

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The following notes are merely a series of thoughts without any particular order but that later (hopefully) could be part of my dissertation project (a very [till today] basic and naive ideas about accumulation as a general movement of history and specially modernity)

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Accumulation(s) I

In a way, our times could be described as a series of seriated and seriating accumulations. This, of course, not only testifies for capitalism’s endeavour but also for the way the climate catastrophe has heaped in the horizon of history as our further extinction. Yet, to accumulate does not necessarily means to horde valuable items neither to just let catastrophes pile in the horizon of the coming future. In fact, accumulations are closer to disorganized heaps, piles or bodies amassed (and therefore, somewhat to a weird idea of ecology, meaning that even the smallest tossed or dispensed body, would heap somewhere and eventually return to the place where it was thrown away). Etymologically (if this helps to clarify where I’m going), to accumulate is a verb whose first appearance was in the early XIV (1520) century and is composed by two particles, the preposition “ad” (to) and the substantive “cumulus” (a heap). Hence, in the early years of that period commonly called modernity, at the babbling of what centuries later would become a world ordered for capital through capitalism, a direction was forged, and bodies were constantly directed and redirected to it. 

The coincidence between the origins of the word accumulation and the early period (if not the dawn) of modernity signal that history, somehow, could be understood as a way of directing “cumulus” (heaps). It is not only after the works of Ricardo, Adam Smith and later Marx, that accumulation becomes a direction of wealth, for the first and second, and later, for the third, a production of that “ad” that directs the cumulus. When Marx famously described how the whole economic process worked, with the analysis of commodification, fetishization (another word —as accumulation— that was firstly coined in the context of slave trading in the XV-XVI century), capital circulation, value and surplus value, he still found necessary to unveil what started everything. For Marx, it is not that capital is merely understood as a machine, but as something that is triggered, something that needs to be started. Irremediably when understanding the process of accumulation(s) of capital, as Marx puts it, we “turn in a defective circle, out of which we only get by supposing an “original” [primitive]”, an “accumulation that is not the result of capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point”. That starting point, for Marx, “plays in Political Economy the same role that plays the “original sin in theology”. The result of this ironic comparison (and maybe not so ironic) is the famous formulation of the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation: that is the demystifying of an idyllic process of enrichment. From this perspective, the “so-called” primitive accumulation is the systematic repetition of violence, land dispossession, forced migration, law prosecution and bloody legislations necessary to produce an ambivalent subject that both surrenders to the “ad” of accumulation while also seeks for its “cumulation” in a line of flight: the vogelfrei. 

If the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation is needed at every stage of capitalism, where would the “ad” this time be produced when there won’t be no earth to live? Would it be that at best the feverish science fiction fantasies finally have been conquered (as depicted in movies like Ad Astra [after all, another movie about the possibility of starting a new process of accumulation in space)? As much as these questions are necessary, perhaps it should also be thought the possibility of an accumulation without “ad”, or an accumulation without “ad” or “cumulus” but another form of piling. Even more, perhaps that’s the only cynical comfort we have, that of which today accumulation is collapsing, and we are just hoarding history, as new vogelfrei we are tied to our impossibility towards the future and yet with the possibility of take off in a line of flight.