Wagner Pacifici

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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, I’ve 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 don’t 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

Witkin’s article about Manet’s painting “Olympia”, Emanuel Schegloff’s article about

body torque in which he features and briefly analyzes Titian’s “Venus with the Organ

Player”, Wendy Griswold’s cultural methodology article in which she addresses the issue

of genre via the Nigerian novel, Luc Boltanski’s explorations of the sentimental novel

and the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Chandra Mukerji’s gorgeous intellectual foray

into the gardens of Versailles, Andy Abbott’s appreciation of the lyric, Jeff Alexander’s

appreciation of Giacometti’s sculptures in his analysis of icons, my own coming to terms

with the tensions in Velazquez’s “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.” It’s 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 work’s 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 Klee’s 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 Alexander’s

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. It’s 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. I’ve 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 space…or 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 Abbott’s 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 Bell’s 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.

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