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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 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.
- Sales Rank: #1944181 in Books
- Published on: 2014-11-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.90" h x 1.20" w x 6.00" l, .84 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
“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
About the Author
Luc Boltanski is Professor of Sociology at the L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
REALITY FOR BEGINNERS
By DAVID BRYSON
This is an odd book, and not the kind of offering I'm used to under the aegis of the UK Vine. It's an academic book, and although the author hopes that the popular novel-genres of detective stories and spy stories will attract a larger readership, the style is uncompromisingly academic to the point of parody. Try this, for instance `Especially when the causality in question has a social dimension, this trust is based on agencies that guarantee the regular attribution of events to pre-defined entities - among which, in the modern era, legal and governmental agencies play a preponderant role.'
The term `reality' is a sort of motto throughout the book. Boltanski toils away at the notion in the first chapter, it is the second last word of the whole book, so presumably he regards it as central to his argument. However `reality' is a slippery and dangerous expression. Boltanski largely uses it to mean no more than some state of affairs. That is a loose usage, but harmless in general. However he gets into problems with it in the first chapter by postulating different layers of reality. He seems to hint at two very dubious propositions without quite committing himself. One is that fiction can actually create some kind of reality: the other is that one kind of reality may be more real than another kind. In terms of `creating' reality Boltanski quotes Borges as saying `that history should copy literature is inconceivable', but then at the end citing Kafka's The Trial as showing how this piece of literature anticipated post-war communist trials. To me, all that shows is that Kafka could read the tealeaves accurately. If so he was not alone in that: people who never wrote a word could also see what was on the horizon, and neither they nor the novel brought it all about. As regards different levels of reality, p135 notes how this notion was popular with Christianity in its mystical phase. I'm not sure whether we are meant to read this reference back into the notion of different planes of reality within Boltanski's two classes of novels. I hope not, because that idea has enough problems of its own. As far as spy novels go, Boltanski doesn't make the staringly obvious point that they are escapist literature. They are supposed to create a hidden world for our entertainment, whether this world is real or fictitious. Boltanski notes with approval that Graham Greene and LeCarre had a personal background in espionage. If that is a point of commendation, then Kim Philby, a spy and traitor extraordinaire, has left us two books. I'm sure they are not the whole truth, but equally sure that what's there is true all right. And Philby is not even in this book's index.
As for detective stories, I honestly doubt whether the notion of different planes of reality even has any application. Professor Boltanski starts by invoking three sciences - sociology, psychiatry and political science, but he is a professor of sociology, and sociology is what this book is really(!) about. Psychiatry is smuggled on board under the rubric of paranoids and conspiracy theorists, thereby bringing in political science. This, however, is only more of his sociology. His early chapters on Sherlock Holmes and Maigret had tried to make these heroes into some kind of sociologists, but the real (!) sociologist was the good professor himself. One thing that is very noticeable is how much more at home Boltanski seems to be with his French actor. However the material on Holmes and his creator is perceptive, and he is surely right to see both Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie as giving uncritical acceptance to a hierarchical and deferential British society. Now there is of course a very famous essay by a very famous writer of detective stories that mocks the Agatha Christie tradition and postulates a new kind of detective hero who is a walking mass of sceptical social attitudes. However The Simple Art of Murder is not even mentioned, and Chandler, like Philby, is not even in the index.
As the book continues it becomes more and more of a sociology textbook, and the link (always more than a little contrived) to the two varieties of fiction paraded earlier gets more and more tenuous. However reality keeps bobbing up here and there (including in the envoi phrase), although it too seems more and more of an unwanted piece of flotation gear. I wonder whether Professor Boltanski is guilty of the specious reasoning that a `reality' (sc state of affairs) that needs some digging down to be got at is some kind of `deeper reality'. I hope not, because there ain't no such thing as that. `Reality' is just an abstract noun classifying any kind of `real' thing in its appropriate context. To call something `real' denies some kind of opposite. In J L Austin's brilliant and witty example, if someone were to refer to a real parrot, it's not likely that the implied opposite is a mirage; and if the reference were to a real oasis you can be sure that there is no implication that it might be stuffed. From Plato onwards philosophers (and, it seems, sociologists) have hacked away at giving some non-existent solidity to something that is nothing, namely `reality'.
There is no indication that this French author did not write the excellent if academic English of this book himself. I imagine most readers will find it heavy going, and I admit that I selected the book because of the link to two favourite types of fiction. That, I imagine, was the general idea. A 1000-word review can't possibly attempt to deal with the real sociological core of the material, which needs competent peer-reviewing in appropriate academic journals. However it is apparently being pitched at a more general readership, so I have tried to give an idea of what other general readers will find.
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