Durkheim held that social facts achieve objective reality only through material representation.

Evidence

The behaviour of the crowd, Durkheim explained, was an indication that society was a thing; something with an ‘objective’ existence. The object consisted of shared ideas or beliefs. In phenomena such as the crowd, he wrote, these collective beliefs ‘acquire a body, a tangible form’; their acquisition of a bodily form demonstrated that shared beliefs ‘constitute a reality in their own right’. The independent reality or objectness of the social, in other words, was a reality constituted by the ability of this ideal object always to present itself in a non-ideal, material body. Another example of such embodiment was the representation of shared ideas in statistics: ‘currents of opinion’, Durkheim wrote, ’… are, in fact, represented with considerable exactness’ in such figures, whose average provides a material representation of ‘a certain state of the group mind’. Besides this example, what gave an objective character to any aspect of the shared social order – legal, moral or cognitive – was its embodiment in a material representation. The entire social realm was known to exist only through representations: ‘Law is embodied in codes; the currents of daily life are recorded in statistical figures and historical monuments; fashions are preserved in costumes; and taste in works of art. By their very nature’, Durkheim concluded, social facts ’… tend toward an independent existence.’ The reality or objectivity of the social resided in its representational nature. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Latour’s actor-network sociology and to the ‘world-as-exhibition’ theme from chapter 1 of this same book — representation as that which constitutes the social.
• DEFINE: Distills Durkheim’s core doctrine that social facts are real only insofar as they take material, representable form.