I remember walking through the ethnological museum in Berlin, staring at the ritual masks of the Dogon, and thinking of Durkheim’s insight - how the primitive mind, bound by a conscience collective so thick you could cut it, needed these totems to project its own social force outward onto a sacred object, to make the invisible coercion of the group visible and worshipable, because what else is a god if not society itself, transfigured into a symbol that can be danced around, feared, and internalised until no external policeman is required - keep the order.

In his most notable title, De la division du travail social, or “The division of labour in society”, he described how the social hierarchy was maintained through varied forms of solidarity - both organic and mechanical, and the transition from “primitive” societies to advance the ages of civilisations[1]. Durkheim drew a line as sharp as a flint blade between two modes of human cohesion - mechanical solidarity, the glue of the segmental, clan‑based world where every consciousness mirrors every other, a hive‑mind of shared beliefs and sentiments so total that any deviation is met with repressive law, with punishment that serves not to correct but to outrage the collective conscience itself, to cauterise the wound inflicted on the sacred body of the group by the mere existence of a dissenter; and organic solidarity, the interdependence of specialised organs in a complex society, where the division of labour makes each individual a distinct cell whose survival depends on the functioning of others, a solidarity born not from sameness but from difference, regulated by restitutive law that seeks to put things back in order rather than to exact collective vengeance[2].

He noted that the effect of the collective unconscious has a far more profound effect in a primitive society, where the group at hand must be led by a figure, or worship some Godhead. These societies are bred to adorn figures of wit, intelligence and leadership, rather than those whom hold a far more capitalistic influence, thus making them stronger and more unified as a group, but far more susceptible to outside memetic forces. Durkheim, in his later masterwork Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, dissected this very mechanism: the totem is not a mere emblem, it is the clan itself made palpable, the flag of the group’s own moral density, so that when a member venerates the totem they are really venerating society - the force that transcends them, that existed before them and will outlast them, the very thing that gives them a self by absorbing that self into a collective current[3]. The primitive mind does not distinguish between the symbol and the social reality; the godhead, the chief, the witch-doctor - all are vessels of a shared effervescence, a current of psychic energy that flows through the assembly during ritual, lifting the individual out of their profane individuality and plunging them into the sacred, a state where the group becomes so real to itself that it can only express that reality by projecting it onto an external object.

It was by understanding this very premise, it could be argued, colonial ruling powers maintained their iron grip over other tribes and peoples, by creating ideological societies that would bend to the whim of an ever elusive definition of moral values; subsequently do others who wish to find their sense of belonging for their continued survival will flock to. Not out of love, or belief, but out of necessity. The coloniser, seeing that the totem is the clan itself, simply shattered the totem, replaced it with a foreign flag, a cross, a new moral order that the native could only adopt by abandoning their very social being - a suicide of the collective soul, leaving them adrift in anomie, that state of normlessness where the old gods are dead and the new ones offer no real cohesion, only submission[4]. When the collective conscience is forcibly dismantled, the individual is thrown into a void where no regulating force limits their desires, and the only path to belonging becomes the mimicry of the oppressor’s institutions - churches, schools, legal codes - not because those institutions resonate with any inner truth but because they promise a minimal restoration of the solidarity that was stolen, a counterfeit of the sacred that ties survival to performance.

The modern world, then, is not an escape from the primitive but its inversion, a theatre where the conscience collective has been so stretched by the division of labour that it can no longer dictate every detail of life, and yet it persists as a diffuse, background hum - a cult of the individual, the one belief that remains common to all: that the individual is sacred, that human dignity must be protected, a moral fact that itself is a product of the collective conscience evolving to match the complexity of organic solidarity[5]. We have replaced the tangible gods of the tribe with the abstract god of the self, and we police its sanctity through a restitutive legal system that treats violations of individual rights as a secular sacrilege, all the while unaware that our very worship of the individual is the latest mask worn by society to ensure its own perpetuation, a new totem carved not from wood but from the idea of the person.

Societies of control, in the Deleuzian sense, are only the terminal stage of this Durkheimian logic: when the mechanical solidarity of enclosure gives way entirely to the organic solidarity of modulation, the collective conscience becomes a distributed network, a cybernetic flow of norms that no longer needs a central totem because every screen, every metric, every algorithmic feedback loop acts as a fragmented mirror of the social whole, constantly reflecting back to us the aggregate of our own behaviour and making us adjust to its statistical ghost, a hyper‑reality where anomie is not an exception but the baseline condition, and belonging is a perpetual chase after a moving target that dissolves the moment it is reached[6]. Durkheim gave us the skeleton key to read the entire history of human association as a single, unfolding tragedy of cohesion and fracture, a play in which we are all actors, all priests, all totems, never fully seeing that the director we fear and adore is nothing other than the echo of our own collective voice, amplified through the hollow chambers of the social structure we keep rebuilding in every age, with every tool, until the day the echo becomes so loud it drowns out the original scream.

  1. Durkheim, É. (1893). De la division du travail social. Paris: Félix Alcan. Translated as The Division of Labour in Society by G. Simpson (1933). New York: Macmillan. ↩︎

  2. Durkheim, Division of Labour, trans. Simpson, pp. 70–72, 105–107. On mechanical solidarity: “The social molecules which can be coherent in this way can act together only in the measure that they have no actions of their own, as the molecules of inorganic bodies. That is why we propose to call this type of solidarity mechanical.” (p. 130). ↩︎

  3. Durkheim, É. (1912). Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Paris: Félix Alcan. Translated as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by K. E. Fields (1995). New York: The Free Press, p. 208: “The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem.” ↩︎

  4. On anomie, see Durkheim, É. (1897). Le Suicide. Paris: Félix Alcan. Translated as Suicide by J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (1951). New York: The Free Press, particularly Book III, Chapter 1, where anomic suicide arises from a lack of moral regulation when the collective conscience can no longer set limits to individual passions. ↩︎

  5. Durkheim, Division of Labour, trans. Simpson, pp. 172–173. The “cult of the individual” is the sole collective conscience compatible with organic solidarity, a shared reverence for the human person as sacred, which itself is a product of the advancing division of labour. ↩︎

  6. The phrase “societies of control” is Deleuze’s, but the cybernetic dissolution of the collective conscience can be inferred from Durkheim’s own logic of the progressive abstraction and weakening of the conscience collective under organic solidarity; anomie becomes diffuse when the moral centre is no longer localisable in any single institution but is distributed across networks of surveillance and feedback. See Deleuze, G. (1992). “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. October, 59, pp. 3–7. ↩︎

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