Much of the phenomena that sociologists encounter exceed sociology’s “logic of practice”—as the world changes, so must the frameworks relied upon in making sense of that world. An aesthetic orientation is proposed. The sociologist who works as a ‘social aesthete’ transitions from a research posture that posits an “object of study” to one that sees study as aesthetic practice. In connecting with aesthetic practices that re-distribute what we are able to sense and experience, there exists potential for artistic practice to inform and expand the methods and dispositions of sociologists. The work of the social aesthete is informed by dialogue through which political and methodological orientations other than those based in intentionality and rationality might be imagined.
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Artists are clinicians of society. As they create, they explore cultural, political, and social terrain. Through careful observation and exploration, artists produce not only ‘works’ of art, but develop processes that diagnose symptoms and conditions of deeper social phenomena. The social scientist similarly engages in diagnostic production that is creative. The inventiveness of the social scientist involves the creation of categories, of theories, of populations. These populations might exist as “data”—quantitative, qualitative—or it might be given a face (through ethnography, for example). Just as art opens recognition in a perceptual field, the work of the sociologist creates representations that seek to make things sensible (in both senses of the term). The discussion that follows suggests rethinking methodological process in sociology. The concern with methodology is founded in the idea that our disciplines are not solidified entities, but are constituent of the work we do—how we craft and create, our practice. Knowledge production and operation, when thought in collaborative, transdisciplinary ways, can expand and perforate boundaries of social science practice—whether territorial, epistemological, conceptual, or procedural. This is not a call to abandon current methods and practices in social science research, but a provocation to consider the expansion of current methodological approaches.
The argument is not that sociologists become artists in the sense that they take on the mediums of artists (e.g. painting, sculpting, etc.), but that social scientists take seriously imagination, creativity, and performance as useful methodological dynamics. An aesthetic approach to understanding the world has been widely debated in philosophy and art, but less so in the social sciences. Aesthetics (accordeing to the OED) “pertain[s] to sensuous perception, received by the senses…the science which treats the conditions of sensuous perception” (often posed in contrast to intellectual and rational forms of knowledge). Drawing on the ancient Greek aisthesis, meaning sensation or perception, aesthetics deals with the way in which the senses and perception mediate experience. Aesthetic practice engages sensings of the world with processes that are imaginative, creative, and speculative.
Social science, it can be argued, has always engaged in aesthetic practice. Social constructionism is certainly based in imaginative and creative process. Social scientists regularly create categories and narratives. They use metaphors to illuminate and shape understanding of their discourse, and the testing of hypotheses and theories clearly involves speculation and an engagement with the virtual.
There are very good reasons for thinking that the creative imagination plays a crucial role in the genesis and growth of all knowledge. When, for instance, we run out of knowledge or established belief with which to solve a problem, we are forced to conjecture, to guess, to imagine creatively. Our guesses or imaginings are made to do service, and, if successful, will eventually pass as knowledge. (David Novitz “Epistemology and Aesthetics” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics)
Imagination engages the virtual, the unknown, the emergent. As Marx reminds us “We erect our structure in imagination before we erect it in reality.” Although social relations are linked to a material world, they are not reducible to materiality. Incorporating imagination into the work of social scientists can provide openings on to new mental sets, new categories and new concepts.
Social scientists (already) directly engage in artistic production when they create (usually supplemental, merely adjunct) visual products in the form of photographs, diagrams, charts, and tables. The manner in which data is represented in order to communicate information is not just functional, but is also aesthetic. As social scientists strive for greater interpretive and representational diversity in their work, there is a need to expand methodological repertoires.
In order to study a rapidly changing social climate characterized by altered alliances and new anxieties, aesthetic practice can offer ways of rethinking ethics and subjectivity. The ability of aesthetics to engage with phenomena through the experiential, poses potential for social scientific inquiry. Many theorists (Rancière, Guattari, Taussig, Vattimo, Lyotard, Silverman, Bauman, Bourriaud—to name only a few) see aesthetic experience and creation as a portal through which we can occupy other vantage points and engage with one another differently. It is argued here that through experimenting with processes that reconsider representation and subjectivity (e.g. use of the mimetic faculty, relational aesthetics, redistribution of the sensible, etc.) and cultivating a “gay science,” the social scientist can occupy and enact new ethical dispositions.
Nietzsche notes the potential of a fusion of science, philosophy, politics, and art. In fact, Nietzsche placed aesthetics above science, rationality, and politics, naming the exploration of the aesthetic experience as a powerful means in understanding modern life. Empirical approaches stress the importance of knowing via the senses—knowledge gained through experience, observation, and experiment. According to John Dewey, to know the meaning of empiricism, we need to understand what experience is conceptually. Dewey advocates bringing aesthetics to fields such as science and sociology and extending aesthetics to the practices of everyday life. Dewey emphasizes the importance of creative and aesthetic activity and claims there is no clear separation between the aesthetic and the intellectual. Aesthetics, he claims constitutes an experience, while science does not—for life is made more intelligible through art when art relies not on conceptualization but on the clarification and intensification of experience. Art is able to express meanings whereas science can only state them, according to Dewey. Reasoning, without engagement with the imagination deadens ideas and eliminates the emotional-charge needed to reach wisdom. Art involves strangeness and discovery—something Dewey favors over the mechanical.
Ethnographic work in the social sciences is clearly based in a concern with experience. Methods such as participant observation are not only based on understanding the experience of others (e.g. interpretivism), but also constitute embodied, sensuous experiences for the researcher. As such, it is no surprise that ethnographers have provided rich, reflexive, and critical discussions of their methods. Sophisticated considerations of the researcher’s own thoughts, feelings, and experiences have become central in ethnographic work. Discussions of reflexivity question our understandings of knowledge, of process, and the role of the senses in social scientific work. Ethnographic endeavors are ultimately aesthetic—the methods involved ask the research to engage their senses and to imagine the experience of another—often on a bodily level. However, much ethnographic work, rather than questioning standardized categories and subjectivities, relies of the notion of solid categories of personhood and ‘findings’ often become narratives that serve to illuminate existing social scientific knowledge.
To be continued…
The Habitat of Ideal Art
I want argue for the fostering of what I will simply term as ‘ideal art’. This ideal art, is a form of art that challenges categories—and the disciplines that manufacture those categories.
One, fundamental aspect of ideal art is that it exists, albeit subversively, within disciplines, that privilege—and produce— utilitarian knowledge. Isn’t it a truism that contemporary society values a very specific form of utility over non-utility? We always ask art such questions as, how much are you worth? Of what use are you—with regard to achieving a hyper-specific end? These questions are built into the very definition of utility. Therefore I would say that the solution is not to incorporate a legitimate form of art (or aesthetic practice) from the outside. The trick is to foster the growth of the ideal art that exists shamefully within disciplines. This ideal art that I am trying to describe is like waste in an intestine. In that it is the excrement of the discipline it resides in. As excrement, it is a part and a product of that discipline yet the discipline denies this reality. Furthermore, the intensity of its power is proportional to the intensity of the illegitimacy projected onto it by the very discipline it inhabits.
If ‘art’ is incorporated into a discipline as a fragment of some legitimate artistic discipline it is not what I am calling ideal art—I would even go so far as to say that it is not art. Incorporated art is dead on arrival. It is simply the transmission of one utilitarian discipline into another. There fore the solution is not the legitimate incorporation of outside art into its ostensible antithesis science—or any discipline. The solution is rather to foster a particular kind of ‘illogical’ and ‘unproductive’ habitation from within.
This would be an inhabitation of the imagination of the discipline one inhabits that is sensually subversive to that discipline. This kind of habitation, that I am proposing, would relentlessly, and cheerfully, antagonize its host like a playful virus. This would be a kind of virus that does not intrude from the outside. Furthermore, this playful virus that I am talking about would not necessarily kill its host, and if it did, it would joyously live on in its host’s excrement. This is because it is itself excrement. I would describe habitation of this kind as the celebration of excremental existence. And I would say that this form of habitation, when practiced, would electrify, and give more room, to the ideal art dancing in the gooey amber of discipline. Bataille tells us that,
“The specific character of faecal matter or of the spectre, as well as unlimited time or space, can only be the object of a series of negations. It must be added that there is no way of placing such elements in the immediate objective human domain, in the sense that the pure and simple objectification of their specific character would lead to their incorporation in a homogenous intellectual system, in other words, to a hypocritical cancellation of excremental character.” -Georges Bataille from Introduction to Encyclopedia Acephalica Atlas Press, 1995: 22-23.
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