| This dissertation thesis investigates the changing relationship between academic sociology and mass culture. It begins from the observation that sociology arises with the modern era-- i.e., its birth is concurrent with expanding democratic participation, urbanization, and consumerist, mass culture. By examining the literary and rhetorical strategies employed by three sociologists who expressly understood the sociological project as rooted in the exigencies of mass culture--Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, and Jean Baudrillard--it is argued that sociology must be examined as a cultural practice that is implicated in the broader persuasive and representational techniques and debates that characterize modernity. This historical ethnography of sociological texts begins from the hypothesis that the "social" is, in Durkheimian language, a modern "collective representation" (i.e., a discursive artifact) that becomes increasingly over time also a "social fact" (i.e., a moral ground by which ordinary life is sustained and explained).;The choices of Durkheim, Mills, and Baudrillard for examination are justified by the methodological assumption that their discussions can be treated as representative of recurrent or perennial themes that first arise in particular cultural contests, but also live far beyond their first appearances. In Hegelian terms, these authors articulate three "moments" inherent to the sociological project: (1) sociology's birth as an intrinsic aspect of modern cultural consciousness (discussed by way of Durkheim's "manifesto" rhetoric), (2) sociology as both intrinsic and instructive to mass culture (discussed by way of Mills' "narrative promise"), and (3) sociology as wholly equivalent to mass culture (discussed by way of Baudrillard's "silence").;It is concluded that the nihilist stance that is most fully apparent in Baudrillard's work is an inevitable aspect of the sociological project because sociology locates mass culture as the critical site of discursive engagement. This pitfall is avoided not by denying sociology's participation in broader cultural tendencies, but by sociologists seeing their discipline as participating in and informing the utopian formulations of social life that exist in such cultural practices. |
