Mysteries and Conspiracies (eBook)

Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies

Luc Boltanski (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2014
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-0-7456-8344-7 (ISBN)

Infos

The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century.
Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions inherit in it.
The adventures of the conflict between these two realities - superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carré and Graham Greene among others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

Luc Boltanski is Professor of Sociology at the L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

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The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions inherit in it. The adventures of the conflict between these two realities - superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carr and Graham Greene among others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

Foreword

1. REALITY / versus / Reality

2. The Inquiries of a London Detective

3. The Inquiries of a Paris Policeman

4. Identifying Secret Agents

5. The Endless Inquiries of 'Paranoids'

6. Policing Sociological Inquiry

Epilogue

References

Endnotes

Rezensionen

"An ambitious investigation of crime fiction and its
relation to modern society"

Times Higher Education

Most of us take for granted the idea that the social world has a
front stage made of rules and norms and a backstage of
"intrigues," "invisible plots," and
"hidden intentions." When did that sense of a reality
behind the reality of things develop? In this enigmatic book,
Boltanski tracks down this new construction of a paranoid reality
through a highly original reading of detective and spy novels, in
which he detects the emergence of a sense that a sense that the
real reality of things is concealed and malevolent. This book
is both singular and provocative and resembles no other work of
sociology I have read. It is a mixture of sociology of literature,
of meta-sociological theory, sociology of institutions, and,
perhaps mostly, sociology of modernity. It will be a needed
complement to the classic The Social Construction of Reality.

Eva Illouz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Textauszug

PREFACE

This book takes as its subject the thematics of mystery, conspiracy, and inquiry. It seeks to understand the prominent place these thematics have occupied in the representation of reality since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses, first, on works belonging to two literary genres intended for a broad public in which these thematics have been featured: crime novels and spy novels, grasped in the forms they took from their beginnings in the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century (chapters 2, 3, and 4). Then, by developing the thematics of inquiry (which is at the heart of crime fiction) and the thematics of conspiracy (the main subject of espionage fiction), the work veers towards questions that concern not only the representation of reality in popular literature but also the new ways of problematizing reality that have accompanied the development of the human sciences. These sciences have made inquiry their principal instrument. But they have also sought to establish a procedural framework allowing them to distinguish inquiries that can claim ‘scientific’ validity from the many forms of inquiry that have developed in the societies they study. These forms include police investigations and/or their fictional stagings, and even inquiries undertaken occasionally by social actors in order to unveil the causes, which they deem real but hidden, of the ills that affect them.

For this project devoted to the human and social sciences, I have drawn essential material from three fields in particular. First, psychiatry: at the dawn of the twentieth century, psychiatry invented a new nosological entity, paranoia, one of whose chief symptoms is the tendency to undertake interminable inquiries and prolong them to the point of delirium. Second, political science: this discipline has taken up the problematics of paranoia and displaced it from the psychic to the social level, looking on the one hand at conspiracies and on the other at the tendency to explain historical events in terms of ‘conspiracy theories’ (chapter 5). Third, sociology: this discipline pays special attention to the problems it encounters when it seeks to equip itself with specific forms of ‘social’ causality and to identify the individual or collective entities to which it can attribute the events that punctuate the lives of persons and groups or even the course of history.

The articulation among these seemingly disparate objects is established by positing the analytic framework presented in chapter 1, which serves as a general introduction. This framework seeks to pin down the social and political conjuncture in which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the thematics of mystery and conspiracy became tropes destined to play a prominent role both in fiction and in the interpretation of historical events and the workings of society. The thesis proposed here links questions about the representation of reality with changes that affected the way reality itself was instituted during the period in question. The relation between reality and the state is at the heart of the analysis. Mysteries can be constituted as specific objects only by being detached from the background of a stabilized and predictable reality whose fragility is revealed by crimes. Now, it is to the nation-state as it developed in the late nineteenth century that we owe the project of organizing and unifying reality, or, as sociology puts it today, of constructing reality, for a given population on a given territory. But this demiurgic project had to face a number of obstacles, most critically the development of capitalism, which ignored national borders.

As for the thematics of conspiracy, it is the focal point for suspicions about the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who really holds it? State authorities, who are supposed to take charge of it, or other agencies, acting in the shadows: bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class … ? Here is the scaffolding for political ontologies that count on a distributed reality. A surface reality, apparent but probably illusory even though it has an official status, is countered by a deep, hidden, threatening reality, which is unofficial but much more real. The contingencies of the conflict between these two realities – REALITY vs. reality – constitute the guiding thread of this book. We shall follow the conflict, as it unfolds, from several different angles. For the appearance and very rapid development of crime novels and then spy novels, the identification of paranoia by psychiatry and the development of the social sciences, sociology in particular, were more or less simultaneous processes that also coincided with a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions that inhabit it.

Rather than offer an impossible conclusion to a history that is presumably far from over, the book’s epilogue returns to the terrain of literature by looking at Franz Kafka’s The Trial. That text concentrates – with an intensity whose brilliance has been endlessly praised by the novel’s many commentators – the principal threads that I am seeking to disentangle at least to a limited extent here. The Trial takes up the thematics of mystery, conspiracy and inquiry that are at the heart of crime novels and spy stories. But by inverting their orientation and perverting their mechanisms, Kafka’s text discloses the disturbing reality that these apparently anodyne and diverting narratives conceal.

It is certainly possible to challenge an approach that consists in grasping the question of reality by relying at the outset on a documentary corpus made up of works intentionally presented as fictions. All the more so since, in the narratives at issue, it is conventional to leave a maximum of free play to the imagination for the explicit purpose of entertaining the reader – that is, precisely in order to remove the reader from the pressures and constraints of daily life and thus of reality. Nevertheless, crime novels and spy stories have arguably been the chief means for exposing to a broad public certain concerns that, precisely because they go to the heart of political arrangements and call into question the very contours of modernity, could not easily have been approached head on, outside of limited circles. According to this logic, it is precisely because uncertainties about what may be called the reality of reality are so crucial that they find themselves deflected towards the realm of the imaginary.

It is generally acknowledged today that crime novels and spy novels count among the principal innovations of the twentieth century in the domain of fiction. These genres made a sudden appearance in English and French literature at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, and they spread very broadly with remarkable speed. Initially associated with so-called popular literature, these narrative forms, organized around the thematics of mystery, conspiracy and inquiry, were rapidly extended to more ambitious literature, which took over their predominant themes. But the appearance and very rapid development of these genres are more than interesting phenomena within the history of western literature. Detective stories and tales of espionage, which have been proliferating continually since the early twentieth century, first in written form1 and then through films and television, are the most widespread narrative forms today on a planetary scale. Thus they play an unprecedented role in the representation of reality that is offered henceforth to all human beings, even illiterates, provided that they have access to modern media. In a sense, these narratives constitute objects of predilection for a sociological approach that is turning away from a strictly documentary function and seeking new ways to grasp certain symbolic forms, especially political thematics, that have developed during the twentieth century,2 somewhat the way history and philosophy have been able to make use of the Homeric poems to analyse the symbolic structures of ancient Greece, or the way classical tragedy used those same texts to explore representations of power in seventeenth-century France.

On the conceptual level, this project has given me an opportunity to deal with questions that I had carefully avoided earlier, questions that I not only was unable to answer but that I did not even know how to formulate. The first of these is the question of the state, which is probably the hardest for sociology to address, precisely owing to the foundational ties that link the apparatus of state power with this apparatus of knowledge. I should also mention the question of social causality, one that has been largely abandoned by contemporary sociology; the question of which entities are pertinent for sociological analysis; the question of relations of scale (micro- and macrosociology); and the question, finally, of the place that should be attributed to events in the descriptions proposed by our discipline. Let me reassure the reader: none of these major issues will find a satisfactory solution here. But it has nevertheless been a relief to me to dare to look at them straight on.

This book also gave me an opportunity to use concepts that were better broken in because I had worked with them in earlier studies, for example the concepts of uncertainty, trial, affair, critique and especially reality, constructed reality understood as a network of causalities based...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.10.2014
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeine Soziologie
• Schlagworte: 19th Century English Literature • Cultural Studies • Englische Literatur / 19. Jhd. • Gesellschaftstheorie • Kulturwissenschaften • Literature • Literaturwissenschaft • Social Theory • Sociology • Sociology, fiction, reality, spy novels • Soziologie
• ISBN-10: 0-7456-8344-4 / 0745683444
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8344-7 / 9780745683447