The Arts and Humanities Culture Section Mini-conference, August 2008 Robin Wagner-Pacifici

Are the arts and humanities our Others? Perhaps it is better to ask what binds us sociologists to the humanities. Is it the intrinsic hermeneutic dimension to all social research? If so, how does this manifest itself? Clearly, we have divergent interests, questions, and methodologies. And these divergences make explicit cross-overs or borrowings somewhat rare and epistemologically problematic. These rare apparent hybrid forms of scholarship reconfigure aspects of our endeavor in significant ways. Do we even recognize them? Thinking about the ways that social science and the humanities both coincide and diverge around apparently similar topics involves thinking about our choice of methods and objects. In the humanities, we find the methods of hermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism, deconstructionism, new historicism and we find objects like paintings, sculptures, monuments, icons, novels, folk-tales, poems, and so forth. There are exceptions, of course. Some humanists use quantitative or network forms of analysis. Some humanists analyze medical or business texts (cfr the work of Mary Poovey on double-entry book-keeping). Sometimes, the methods and objects of social scientific and humanistic analysis appear to be identical. But a fundamental difference seems perduring - sociologists have different resting places, different states of satisfaction that their interests have been addressed, their questions answered. Our questions normally involve examining the relationships between what is going on in the work of art or cultural object and the world that generates and hosts (or resists) that work. Sometimes the differences

between our questions and those in the arts and humanities are very subtle what is foregrounded, what is marginal, what is the main issue, what is parenthetical. Given these differences within apparent similiarity, Ive been wondering if we sociologists need to have a feeling for the text or the image in the same ways that most literary theorists or art historians seem to do? I dont think this is a trivial question nor a trivial difference if it proves to be one. What might it mean to say that a sociologist of culture (in particular) does not need to have a feeling for the cultural object being considered, does not need to know the thing from the inside? How and where do we find paintings or sculptures or novels in sociology writing? This is a different question from that asking how do we find the careers, networks, social milieu of painters, sculptors, writers in sociological studies which we do in the work of Harrison and Cynthia White, Natalie Heinich, Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Diana Crane among others. Some few sociologists actually feature these cultural/artistic objects in their work (as opposed to featuring the worlds around the objects): Robert Witkins article about Manets painting Olympia, Emanuel Schegloffs article about body torque in which he features and briefly analyzes Titians Venus with the Organ Player, Wendy Griswolds cultural methodology article in which she addresses the issue of genre via the Nigerian novel, Luc Boltanskis explorations of the sentimental novel and the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Chandra Mukerjis gorgeous intellectual foray into the gardens of Versailles, Andy Abbotts appreciation of the lyric, Jeff Alexanders appreciation of Giacomettis sculptures in his analysis of icons, my own coming to terms with the tensions in Velazquezs Surrender of Breda.

This paucity of direct contact scholarship is noted by Robert Witkin when he assesses a general desire to distance sociological inquiry from direct contact with art objects themselves. Its too glib to say, simply, that the purpose of sociology is to analyze the production or reception of art objects, and that of the humanities to analyze the objects, and leave it at that. Such practiced indifference to the objects of attention and consumption themselves, objects powerful enough to move people to tears or awe or anger, must be taken a little more seriously. Could there be some unconscious fear of contamination or enthrallment if the sociologist comes too close to the works aura. The word aura evokes the name of Walter Benjamin, of course. Benjamin seemed singularly to be able to walk this line, cf his analysis of Paul Klees painting The Angel of History and his elegy for the disappearance of the storyteller? One current exception to this aesthetic diffidence is represented by Jeff Alexanders recent work on the iconicity of art objects. By addressing their iconic status and powers, Jeff is able to constitute a trading-zone between the domains and distinctions of the social sciences and those of the humanities. Its a zone where the analyst has a hybrid sensibility that matches the resonance of the objects: Esoteric aesthetic objects become iconic by drawing us into the heart of the world. In the course of everyday life, we are drawn into the experience of meaning and emotionality by surface forms. One useful way to get beyond disciplinarily conventional ways of thinking about this social science/humanities fault-line or mutual blind spots is by highlighting analyses that go against their given disciplinary grains. Ive selected two one is that of Franco Moretti, a social-scientific oriented literary theorist, and the other is Andrew Abbott,

who, in some recent work on what he calls lyrical sociology, demonstrates a humanistic orientation to sociology. Among other sociologically inclined works, Moretti completed a study in which he claimed to reveal the deep structure of the social geographies of cities in 19th century novels (statistically calculating where, for example, characters of particular social classes do and do not travel, do and do not encounter characters of other social classes). To do this he needed to encompass literally hundreds of novels (and maps) in his methodology. The idea of iconic novels or a feeling for the text becomes irrelevant, and maybe a distraction in this framework. More recently, Moretti wrote three essays considering different abstract models for literary history graphs, maps, and (genealogical) trees. In this most recent book of essays, the rural space and spatial patterns of villagers going out for walks in British and German village novels map the sociological transformations consequent to 19th century rural class struggles and industrialization where a perceptual system centered in the isolated village is replaced by an abstract network of roads. Moretti asks: What do literary maps do First, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever find its occurrences, place them in spaceor in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them, and construct a new, artificial object. This kind of analysis requires a view from afar, one that seems to preclude a close, hermenueutic approach. Moving in the opposite direction, is Andrew Abbotts recent article, Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology. Abbott appeals to the ability of certain works of sociological writing to recreate an experience of social discovery, an experience that, unlike classical narrative forms of ethnography and other genres, should

not be the telling of a story but rather the use of a single image to communicate a mood, an emotional sense of social reality. The key elements of a lyrical sociology are engagement, personal location (of the observer/analyst), and a moment of time (rather than a process that occurs over time and that has an outcome). While language is the medium for writing lyrical sociology, language seems to give way to images, or congeries of images. Causality and transformation over time gives way to states of being. Among other examples, Abbott refers to Michael Mayerfield Bells book, Childerly, in which the ringing of the church bells in the provincial village Bell details in his book, sociologically resonate in precisely the manner Abbott describes as lyrical. These two writers, Moretti and Abbott, may be said to constitute trading zones between the humanities and the social sciences. Clues to identifying a nature of these trading zones might lie in the preoccupation with fundamental epistemological categories of time and place. Perhaps that is where the social sciences and the humanities can find each other and experience their objects of analysis, both close up and at a distance.