The Live Art of Sociology

Cath Lambert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317393894
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Live Art of Sociology attends to the importance of 'the live' in contemporary social and political life. Taking existing work in live sociology as a starting point, this book considers some of its aspirations through unique empirical investigations. Queer and feminist theory and methods are also employed in exploring the challenges of researching live experiences and temporalities. With case study examples ranging from the work of live body artists to experiments in curating sociological research, Lambert successfully demonstrates the diverse ways in which art can provide the aesthetic and affective conditions for social and political disruption.

By emphasising the political importance of how people, knowledges, materials, emotions and senses are configured and reconfigured, The Live Art of Sociology asserts a creative and vital role for sociology in not only representing but also generating social realities and political possibilities. Putting aesthetics at the heart of contemporary sociology and making a strong case for a renewed sociological aesthetics, this volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as postdoctoral researchers and academics interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Art and Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Leisure Studies. It will also be of interest to creative practitioners.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Political aesthetics, cultural studies, queer and reparative theory and method

Blindfolded, my ears muffled, I relinquish my own capacities of sight and sound and follow the voice coming through my headphones which tells me when to move, how to move, what to ‘look’ for. The light touch of a stranger’s hand guides me as I tentatively bend down, reach out, feel texture beneath my hands, warmth on my skin. Once I am able to trust and let go of the desire to re- orient myself in the ‘real world’ of my own senses, I allow myself to experience an alternative reality, a displacement of space and time (Lundl and Seitl, Symphony of a Missing Room 2011). I have my hair cut, and I pay for it with conversation (The Hair Cut Before the Party 2012). I witness a human being set alight (Cassils, Inextinguishable Fire 2016). I lie supine on a slow- moving track from which I encounter the underbelly of Birmingham’s ‘Spaghetti Junction’ road interchange (Graeme Miller, Track 2012). Seven girls and a female artist take apart a Nissan Sunny car in an oily garage in Digbeth, Birmingham (UK). I watch their slow, absorbed labour, and the ways their bodies navigate around the car and each other (Dina Rončević, Car Deconstructions 2014). I walk slowly along a line of about twenty metres in a car park over the course of two hours, watching, hearing, feeling the city around me race by (Hamish Fulton, Slow Walk 2012). I take a tour of Berlin in the streets of Birmingham (Playgroup, Berlin Love Tour 2012). Sitting in a library facing imminent demolition, I look out over the rooftops of the city I love and listen to Oscar Wilde’s The Unhappy Prince. At the end I shut my eyes to stop the tears, for I feel like a child again (Mette Edvardsen, Time has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine 2012). Squinting at the sun through the leaves of a sycamore, I lie on damp grass with headphones on. I have just died, or my dead body has just been laid out in this peaceful location. In a curiously calming and informative way a voice tells me what is happening to my body as, over the course of time, it rots and decompose (French and Mottershead, Woodland 2017).

These experiences describe a few of my encounters with live art. Live art includes performance, happenings: site- specific, digital and experimental work in which the art is created or happens in space and time and in the presence of the audience.¹ I am drawn to sociology and live art for the same reasons. At their best, they can be provocative and troubling; endlessly curious, they ask so what? questions, seeking answers in different ways. They can both engage the big stuff of life through explorations of the quotidian, wherever it seems to manifest. They are both of life, and yet stand apart, askance. The materials with which they work are individuals, communities, dialogue, situations, dissensus, and relations between people and objects in specific spatial and temporal contexts. Much live art occupies a counter- hegemonic register in relation to dominant forms of politics, economics, and social and personal relations. Radically different forms of knowledge, ways of knowing, and modes of knowledge generation and exchange often characterise live art practices in ways that both resonate with, and offer challenges to, debates within the social sciences. In an essay documenting some of the dominant themes of live art, Adrian Heathfield (2004: 7, original emphasis) notes that there has been ‘a profound impetus in contemporary art and culture towards the immediate, the immersive and the interactive: a shift to the live’. The analysis here seizes upon this shift. It makes connections between the live in art theory and practice with ‘live sociology’ (Back 2007). Live art shares some conceptual, methodological and ethical concerns with live sociology, but a sociological attentiveness to live artistic processes also brings new questions and provocations that, I argue, trouble, enhance and enliven sociological enquiry.

Key to this attentiveness is recognition of the value of aesthetics to sociological enquiry. This value needs to be stated, as within the history of the discipline there is evidence of neglect of, and opposition to, aesthetics (for discussion see Wolff 1993; Bielby and Bielby 2004; Inglis 2005; de la Fuente 2007). One explanation for this rests on divergent definitions of what ‘aesthetics’ refers to. Eduardo de la Fuente (2007: 94) notes that

The sociological suspicion of aesthetics is founded on the following two assumptions: firstly, that aesthetic discourse is historically specific and connected, at least in Western modernity, to the emergence of institutions of high culture; and, secondly, that the discourse of aesthetics conceals a class- specific ‘regime of value’ that prioritizes contemplation over embodied action.

Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984/2010) Distinction exemplifies such a critique. What Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) might refer to as a ‘paranoid reading’ of aesthetics within sociology has minimised alternative readings. Despite this, Georg Simmel coined the term ‘sociological aesthetics’ with an essay of that name in 1968, and it is possible to detect ideas prefiguring live sociology in Simmel’s (1968: 69) insistence that all phenomena be subject to an aesthetic gaze and that sociologists ‘involve ourselves deeply and lovingly with even the most common product’. Recognition of the aestheticisation of economic re/production in post- Fordist capitalism (Lash and Urry 1994) and attention to the aesthetics of ‘everyday life’ by Mike Featherstone (2007) have, amongst other work, kept aesthetics alive as a conceptual tool in sociological debate. With a shift from use- to sign- value of commodities, the critical reach of aesthetics has expanded. Within the social sciences and humanities more generally, there have been real developments recognising the value and centrality of aesthetics in relation to our experience and understanding of contemporary social forms. A move away from understanding aesthetics in terms of ‘beauty’ or high culture in favour of the earlier etymology of the term from the Greek aisthētikos (perception by the senses) has opened up the field of aesthetics. In more recent years the concept has been subjected to rehabilitation and redefinition, not least due to Jacques Rancière (2004) and his work on the politics of aesthetics. For Rancière (2004: 13), aesthetic acts configure experiences and in so doing generate new forms of sense perception and of political subjectivity:

aesthetics can be understood … as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

As I have discussed elsewhere (see Lambert 2012), this operationalisation of aesthetics as political has been taken up across and between disciplinary fields. Although Rancière has much to say about art (see Rancière 2009), he is clear that the arts do not constitute a superior or separate regime:

The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible.

(Rancière 2004: 19)

My attention to live art proceeds in this spirit. I do not suggest that (live) art works with any different materials than are found in any other aspect of social life. However, as I go on to demonstrate, there are interesting and generative possibilities to the kinds of vitality and critical engagement that some live art practices enact. This provides, for the development of live sociology, an enticing resource. I hope by the end of this book to have put aesthetics at the heart of live sociology and in so doing to have made a strong case for a renewed sociological aesthetics.

Although the discussion here represents a serious and critical engagement with the politico- aesthetic resources of live art, I do not seek to undertake a sociological analysis of live art, and the relationship that my research encounters with live art and artists attempt to generate and sustain is additive and collaborative.

Nonetheless, the discussion does, I hope, contribute something to a wider understanding and appreciation of the social and political value of contemporary art (see Silva 2008; Bell 2012, 2014). It remains the case that there has been little in- depth scholarly, let alone sociological, research on contemporary live art and its wider value to society (see Heathfield 2004; Heddon and Klein 2012; Jones and Heathfield 2012; Doyle 2013; Johnson 2015). It is worth considering possible reasons for this neglect. In a blog post for the Cultural Value Network, Patrycja Kaszynska (2014: nd) notes that

explaining the value of art has been a bit of a struggle for sociology … on the one hand, the alleged resistance of art to subject itself to empirical, social scrutiny on pain of losing its aura of mystique; on the other, the inability of sociology to deal with the value of art experiences qua artistic values, without reducing these experiences to a set of social determinants.

The discussion here addresses these concerns, both by subjecting selected examples of live art and its affects to empirical analysis and by finding new ways to articulate art’s vital role in social and political becomings. In addition to the suggested difficulties of researching art, whether down to art’s ‘resistance’ or a sociological fear of researching something so passing, abstract and ‘unrepresentational’, live art can be challenging intellectually and emotionally. Jennifer Doyle (2013: 7) focuses on what she calls ‘difficult’ live art, pointing out that experiencing such work can be harder than engaging with other cultural forms that make similar emotional demands, such as accounts of trauma and suffering in books or films. Despite this, I agree with Dominic Johnson’s (2013: 12) invocation that ‘we should search for the bite, the flinch, and the grimace of one’s confusion in the face of Live Art, and never settle for anything less, despite the consolations that more convivial forms might sometimes offer’.

In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I map out the concerns which underpin this book, tracing where possible their origins; this involves paying some intellectual dues along the way. I begin by highlighting the ‘cultural value’ debates, which embroil cultural practitioners and social scientists in shared endeavours (Crossick and Kaszynska 2014; Warwick Commission 2015). I arrive at these debates by way of cultural studies, hoping to impart some of cultural studies’ generous and creative spirit into the somewhat instrumental concerns characterising cultural value discussions. From there, I turn to sociology, delineating the emergence of live sociological methods. A queer turn follows, establishing some of the theoretical resources that will be deployed in sub- sequent chapters and emphasising the importance of reparative and affective modes of engagement for developing live practices of sociology. A section on method/ology sets the reader up for what follows, and finally I provide an over- view of the whole book.

From cultural studies to cultural value

My intellectual interest in the cultural, and specifically the inseparability of culture and politics, can be traced back to my inculcation in the anti- discipline of cultural studies at the Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University, where I was a postgraduate student in the mid- 1990s. Many of the experiments in research and pedagogy that have become ‘innovative’ and ‘risky’, perhaps even ‘radical’ in the contemporary neoliberal academy, felt routine in cultural studies, for example seminars in nightclubs or public spaces; research co- produced between teachers and students or academics and community groups; activist interventions as research; and a deployment of diverse media and cultural forms (see Hall and Jefferson 1975/2006; Hall et al. 1978; Gray 2003a). I hope some readers will discern the pulse of cultural studies beating at the heart of this project. In particular, I am grateful to the kind of sociological imagination, research ethic and critical attention to the ordinary complexities of human culture that I learnt from my engagement with scholars from CCCS. This includes an approach to research which foregrounds listening to what people have to say, being open to surprise, and being attentive to the sensory and affective aspects of human experiences (see Willis 1980; Gray 2003b; Back 2007). It draws on an assumption that identity is always in state of process and becoming (Hall 1997: 47); that politics and counter- politics occur in the micro- interactions of everyday experiences and encounters (Willis 1977; Williams 1981); that representation does not merely reflect but is constitutive of the world (Hall et al. 2013). Although I didn’t recognise it at the time, I gained an expansive (as well as politicised) concept of pedagogy from cultural studies. The early ‘greats’ of cultural studies – Raymond Williams, Simon Hoggart, Stuart Hall – articulated and realised the significance of public pedagogy, as well as the value of everyday and non- canonical knowledge. The acknowledgement that cultural forms are themselves pedagogical has influenced my openness to the potential of artistic practice as a site for the generation of alternative knowledges. Although this writing predated the ‘affective turn’ (Massumi 2002; Clough and Halley 2007), it espoused an affective sensibility, recognising that for pedagogy and politics to connect with a range of publics involved understanding and enlisting their sensory and emotional engagement.

In contemporary policy and academic discourse around the arts, it is more common to hear talk of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Citation
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: political aesthetics, cultural studies, queer and reparative theory and method
• 2 Politics and praxis of live art
• 3 Live sociology: generative and uncertain methodologies in action
• 4 Fierce pedagogies: producing dissensual knowledges and subjects
• 5 Bodies and embodied encounters in live practice
• 6 The im/possibilities of live time
• 7 Conclusions: towards a hopeful art
• Index